Bronx Noir

“He’d come after us for sure then.”

“Yes, he would,” she said, then looked him in the eye, her gaze as level and meaningful as that first evening he had touched her in the hall. “If he could.”

All that August, he pretended he didn’t get her meaning. The Yankees kept winning and the fires kept burning, more and more of them. But he knew she was right, that it was all going. Every week, he walked past another store closed on the Grand Concourse, even the bodegas boarded up. The streets were filling with broken glass and old tire treads that nobody bothered to clean up; the fire engines screaming past him, night and day. In the evening, after his job, he would climb the five flights of stairs past the same broken elevator. Making his way down the hallway with its same bags of garbage and its roaches; the dingy hospital-green paint peeling off the walls, a single bare lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. There was nothing more for them there.

But to kill him—

“You really wanna leave him alive, be lookin’ over our shoulders for him the rest of our life?” she asked him, straight out, in the last week of August, during a game where the Yankees were battering Minnesota.

“No.”

“All right then.”

“All right,” he said slowly, and when he said it he had that marvelous falling sensation again.

Yet he still agonized over how to do it. Sometimes late at night he could hear Roberto working down there, even up on the fifth floor. When he wasn’t dealing, he was always doing something vaguely sinister with his saws in a corner of the basement—cutting up something, making something; the shrill sound of metal cutting into metal echoing all the way up to Luis’s sweltering bedroom when he was trying to sleep. It kept the whole building up, but nobody dared to complain.

He knew it wasn’t just talk what they said about Roberto. Luis had seen him chase some junkie who had cheated him clear across the courtyard, tackling him and pummeling his face with his .38 until it was a bloody mess. The junkie had laid down there for half a day, before he was finally able to drag himself away, with nobody so much as daring to call the police.

“Mercedes, I don’ know if this is such a good idea—”

“You said you would do it,” she replied before he could back out any further, a mocking, angry look across her face. Then she held his hand. “Let me take care of everything. All you have to do is be a man.”

He agreed to let her make the plan, thinking just maybe she was smarter than he was. She told him it would have to be done before the end of the season. He didn’t understand why, but she assured him they needed the big crowds.

“We need the noise,” she explained. “To get away. Leave the rest to me. I know where his guns are. I know where his money is.”

She set it for the last weekday afternoon game of the season—so they would do it before his companeros came around, before all the junkies were up and looking for their next fix. The weather had finally broken, and there was the first taste of fall in the air. The day was cool and overcast and he remembered that she looked more beautiful than ever, wearing a short baby-blue rain slicker over her shirt and shorts. It was also the first time that he could remember seeing her nervous—looking up repeatedly at the gray, swirling skies, wondering if the game was going to be called.

They had gone to the upper deck as always, and there, to his amazement, she handed him one of Roberto’s .38s, wrapped in a brown paper bag—the weight of the gun surprisingly, thrillingly heavy in his hand.

“You got this from him?”

“Tha’s right. You know how to use it?” she asked him, her face more serious than he had ever seen it.

“Course I know how to use it!” But he was still worried. “Don’ he got more?”

“Not anymore,” she told him, pulling back the edge of the baby-blue rain slicker, showing him the handle of another pistol shoved into the belt of her shorts there. His stomach nearly convulsed, but the sight of it there both excited and comforted him, knowing that they would be doing this together.

She waited until the Yankees began a rally, got a couple men on. Then she stood up abruptly, motioning for him to hurry.

“C’mon. We don’ know how much time we got.”

He saw that she had already plotted the best, quickest route out of the stadium, past the perpetually broken escalators. They were back on the street within seconds, legging their way rapidly up the hill on 158^th. Luis had felt his knees shaking under him, hoping it wasn’t visible to her—consumed by that falling sensation again.

They reached the building and ducked down the metal steps at the side, walking under a brick archway to the courtyard. She had gone first along the littered path, telling him to wait in case Roberto was watching. But they could already hear the whine of his saw, knew that he was preoccupied with his mysterious work. They could hear another sound as well. The noise of the crowd from the stadium beginning to rise—a short, tense, staccato cry, signaling something good; a hit, a walk, a rally in the offing. She looked back at him and bit her lip, touching the handle of the gun at her side.

“Hurry,” she ordered.

They went in the basement door, Mercedes first, Luis following. The whine of the saws stopped, and now Luis could only hear the noise from the stadium, gathering, growing. He could see Roberto in the far corner of the basement working on something over a pair of sawhorses. He slowly unbent and turned to face them as they came in, scratching at his hairy stomach. He looked as if he had just gotten up, Luis thought, his eyes squinting dully at them through his hideous insect glasses.

“Wait for it,” Mercedes told Luis.

“What? Wait for what? What he want?” Roberto asked, looking back and forth, from one to the other.

Mercedes didn’t answer him, only wandered casually off to one side, pretending to look at something, so that