and-white movies offered rolled sticks of marijuana, dime bags of diluted cocaine. Urchins asked if the gentlemen would care to fuck their sisters. Ortiz and Villada were even afraid to drink the water.
Randolph Biggs—or someone who could have been Randolph Biggs—surfaced that afternoon.
THEY WERE SITTING at a table in an outdoor bar, flashing the green as always, trolling. The white man who took a table adjacent to theirs was tall and broad-shouldered, with a broad neatly trimmed mustache under a nose that sniffed the air disdainfully as he sat and signaled to a harried waiter. He was wearing a neatly pressed tan tropical suit. White linen shirt open at the throat. Tan loafers. No socks. A huge man, the redhead had told them. Randolph Biggs?
Looking bored, he ordered tequila, lime, salt. His dark brown eyes grazed their table. He looked at his watch. Sniffed again, as if he’d just smelled an open toilet, which in all likelihood he had. Looked around as if expecting cockroaches or rats in a place like this, another likelihood. The waiter brought his drink and the props. He thanked him in fluent Spanish, told him to keep the tab running. Villada and Ortiz were impressed.
He squirted lime juice on the back of his hand, sprinkled salt onto it, licked at the solution, drank some tequila. They were further impressed. He signaled to a man selling cigarettes from a tray hanging around his neck. Loose or by the pack? the man asked in Spanish. He bought an unopened package of Marlboros, paid with Mexicanpesoshe peeled from a grubby roll of bills.
The three men, at separate adjacent tables, sat drinking in the gaudy heat of the Mexican afternoon. There were guitars somewhere. There was the liquid laughter of women from alleyways and upstairs rooms. Everything smelled sweaty and smoky. Buses rolled past. Taxicabs honked their horns. This was a busy bustling little city the size of some neighborhood ghettos in North America. Walk into any one of those ghettos, you’d see the same faces you saw here, you’d hear the same language. The man sitting here in his fancy tropical suit and his neatly groomed mustache looked as out of place as Meg Ryan might have.
“Perdoname,”he said.“?Tiene usted un cerillo?”
He was holding one of the Marlboros between the forefinger and middle fingers of his right hand, close to his lips, leaning over toward them now. Ortiz triggered a gold Cartier cigarette lighter into flame. The man inhaled, let out a cloud of smoke, grinned in satisfaction. In Spanish, he said, “I’ve been trying to quit.”
“A bad habit,” Ortiz agreed in Spanish, and snapped the lid of the lighter shut.
Randolph Biggs?
“What brings you to this lovely city?” the man asked, and raised his eyebrows to emphasize the sarcasm.
“Passing through,” Villada said.
“On your way to?”
“Mexico City.”
They were still speaking Spanish. His Spanish was very good.
“And you?” Ortiz asked.
“I live in Eagle Branch,” the man said.
They waited for his name. Nothing came.
“Manuel Arrellano,” Ortiz said, reaching his hand across the tables, giving the name he frequently used during drug transactions, though he did not yet know whether or not this man was at all involved in the trade. “My partner Luis Larios,” he said, giving Villada’snom de guerre.
“Randolph Biggs,” the man said.
Ortiz’s eyes narrowed just the tiniest bit.
The men shook hands all around.
“What business are you in?” Biggs asked. “You said you were partners.”
“We export pottery,” Villada said in Spanish.
“And you?” Ortiz asked in English. Shift to the man’s own tongue, make him feel a little more comfortable about asking if the gentlemen here were in reality selling high-octane shit and not some crockery worth a buck and a half.
“I’m a law enforcement officer,” Biggs said. “Texas Rangers.” He raised the flap of his jacket, reached into his side pocket, took out a thick leather billfold, opened it to show a gold star pinned to the flap. Ortiz and Villada were impressed all over again. But the redheaded pilot had told them all this. A Texas Ranger named Randolph Biggs was the man who’d introduced her to Frank Holt, another bullshit name, who’d arranged for her to fly to Guenerando to pick up the dope. And pay for it with focking fonny money.
“Do you know a woman named Cassandra Jean Ridley?” Villada asked in English.
Stick to English now, he was thinking.
Make this all perfectly clear to Mr. Randolph Biggs here.
The name registered.
Biggs looked across the table to where Ortiz was sitting with a pistol in his lap, pointing at his belly.
“We have a car,” Villada said.
OLLIE’S PIANO TEACHER was a woman named Helen Hobson. She was in her late fifties somewhere, he guessed, he’d never asked, a rail of a woman who always wore a green cardigan sweater over a brown woolen skirt, he wondered if she had any other clothes in her closet. He thought it ironic, the way fate worked. In November, he’d caught a little dead colored girl in an apartment downstairs, turned out Helen had been the one who discovered the body. Now he was taking piano lessons from her and well on the way to becoming an accomplished musician. It was all so strange and wonderful.
It seemed odd to find a grand piano in what was basically a slum apartment, but Helen had crowded one
