Fifty Grand

17 FIFTY GRAND

Images from Al Andalus. The dogwood minarets. The ice-lake sajadah. The raven muezzins. A lake in Wyoming. America.

I try to think of a Cuban metaphor but I can’t. There’s nowhere in Cuba like this.

Clean. Cold. Quiet. Safe.

But even America is only an idea for those who don’t live here. Here you see that it’s a place like other places.

My hand under his arm.

Keeping him up.

My fingers turning blue.

He listens to the story.

I came from Cuba to investigate the death of my father. The poor dead Mex. The town ratcatcher. An anonymous wetback with false papers and a fake ID. A nobody. Barely a mention in the paper.

I posed as a maid in your home. I gathered material. I got evidence. I eavesdropped. It wasn’t Mrs. Cooper. It wasn’t Esteban. It wasn’t Toby. It was you. I know it was you. Jack told me. Everyone told me. You hit my father and you left him to die by the side of the road.

Well… Now you know.

What have you got to say?

Nothing.

He can’t speak. He can barely breathe.

The backwater of breath encircling our mouths and merging with the smoke from the cigarettes.

Tell me. Be quick and I will be merciful. For Paco is right, I have no stomach for this. For any of it. Come on. Speak. Let’s get this over with.

Say it. Now. Save yourself. “Tell me.”

Death is mist on the surface of the ice. It collapses his resistance.

“But, but, this is crazy, I didn’t even do it. I wasn’t driving.”

“You would say that, wouldn’t you? Now, for the last time tell me the truth.”

“That is the truth. I wasn’t driving.”

“If it wasn’t you, then who?”

“Jack,” he says with single-syllable finality.

“Of course, bite the hand the feeds, blame the boss. Unfortunately, the boss has an airtight alibi.”

“No alibi. It was h-him,” he insists.

“A lie. Jack was in California. In L.A.”

“No, he wasn’t. Believe me. He definitely was not.”

Jack was in L.A. Ricky did the research. Jack was in L.A at a rehab clinic. It was Jack’s car but Jack was in L.A. Jack confirmed it to me himself. This pathetic attempt is doing nothing but making me angry. Your life is in the balance, Youkilis, you need my goodwill, not my wrath.

“Tell me the truth!”

“That is the truth.”

“Jack already told me you were driving the car.”

“That’s the lie. That’s the lie we made up,” he says.

His eyes close.

Open.

They’re red. Weary. Something about those eyes. This doesn’t look like the ploy of a desperate man. This-this has the smell of verisimilitude.

“Jack was in California,” I attempt again.

“Jack was in F-Fairview.”

“No.”

Teeth chattering. Lips blue. Pupils dilated.

“He’d auditioned for this movie. D-down to him and s-s-someone else. David Press at CAA told him he’d m-m-missed out. They went another d-direction. This was a lead in a major m-m-movie. Jack lost it. Went drinking. Flew to Vail. Came here looking for m-me. I w-was in Denver. He went to a bar, some guys b-bought him drinks, not many. He felt ok to drive up the m-mountain. He m-must have hit him on the way home.”

“No,” I mutter. But it’s only a word. I know truth when I hear it.

Fact is, I’ve known it all along.

Youkilis was easy to hate. Jack was easy to like.

A one-minute cross-examination and he gives me the whole sorry tale: Youkilis gets back from Denver, finds Jack, sees the car, sees blood on the car. Waits for a cop. No cop comes. Maybe a deer, he thinks. Or a dog. Or, at worst, a hit-and-run with no witnesses. He doesn’t panic. His instinct kicks in. He drives Jack to Vail and charters a plane. It lands in L.A in the middle of the night. A limo takes him to the Promises Rehab Center in Malibu. Youkilis leaks a story that Jack’s been in there for two days and is doing well.

I’ve put the wrong guy in the grave.

Maybe I made you detective too soon, Hector said.

Yeah. Maybe you did.

Mind racing. Wait a minute. He’s still guilty of the cover-up. Accessory after the fact.

“You put him in the rehab and that was it?”

“That was it.”

“But you bought off the cops.”

“No. That was later. Somehow Sheriff B-Briggs f-figured it out. He shook us d-down for fifty grand.”

“Fifty thousand dollars?”

“Fifty grand. It was n-nothing. We were relieved it was so l-little. He d-didn’t even take it for him-himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“He p-paid it into the p-police b-benevolent fund.”

Fifty thousand for a dead Mex. Fifty thousand for my father’s whole life.

An insult. Horrible. But… but no reason to kill him.

At least not reason enough.

At least not for me.

“Oh no,” I say to myself. “No, no, no.”

“What are you g-going t-to d-do?” he asks.

“Fuck!” I yell out loud and put down the gun.

Going to have to lift you out, you bastard. Going to have to try and save you.

How? Under the armpits, drag him. “Put your arms out,” I tell him.

But in the last minute hypothermia has started to set in. His eyes are fixed. The cigarette is burning him and he doesn’t even notice.

“Mierde! I’m going to fucking save you.”

I rip the cig from his mouth.

I kneel behind him, shove my hands under his wet, frozen shoulders, and try to heave him out backward.

I can’t get purchase.

I pull again.

Distracted, I don’t notice, behind me on the hill, Jack Tyrone, Deputy Crawford, Deputy Klein, and Sheriff Briggs get out of the black police Cadillac Escalade. I don’t hear Sheriff Briggs talk about the panic button on Youkilis’s house phone or the homing GPS in his BMW. I don’t notice them examining Youkilis’s car or see them as they follow the footsteps that lead down to the lake. I don’t see any of them look up, startled, when they hear me yell.

And what do they see?

POV shift to the main man, Briggs. Furious. Jubilant. A rifle in his hands. Like John Wayne at the end of all those Yuma flicks. Here with the Seventh to save the day.

“Let’s go, boys,” and they run through the trees to the water’s edge.

Briggs sees me trying to pull Youkilis out of the hole, but it can’t be obvious that I’ve changed my mind, that I’m trying to save him. Probably he thinks I’m administering the coup de grâce.

Maybe he doesn’t care what I’m trying to do.

He unslings a high-velocity.270 elk-hunting rifle with a manual sight. The sight is set for a hundred meters and I’m a little closer than that.

Aim a tad high, he thinks.

He’s never shot a woman before. But he doesn’t feel that that’s an issue. He’s calm, focused, professional. Don’t even think of her as a woman. Goddamn wetback bitch. And besides, this is your job. This ain’t nothing. This is taking out soldiers on the Basra road. This is bagging boar in the Rio Grande brush country. This is a duck shoot on the Kansas line.

He fixes my skull in the T of the manual crosshair.

He sniffs the breeze, adjusts for it, and moves the T to the back of my head.

“Yes,” he says, and just like that, the whole of the sensual world goes-