Crooked River

35

Smithback lay on his mattress, staring at the ceiling. Bugs were crawling on it, and he watched their progress without interest.

The first couple of days he’d been locked up in here, he could think of nothing but escape. He’d thought of everything — breaking down the door; trying to reach the ridiculously high, ridiculously small window; yanking at the shotgun that appeared when they tossed in food, in hopes of pulling the thug in with it and overpowering him — yet nothing even remotely likely had suggested itself. But now, after his little “talk” with Bighead, he could do little but lie on the rude bed and hope for sleep. It was as if the hulking bastard and his fearsome threats had beaten all hope out of him.

Once again he cursed his own habit of sudden travel with no notice to his friends or colleagues. What the hell was Kraski doing? Calling the cops? No, the son of a bitch was probably just bitching and moaning about his absence. Maybe he’d sent out a couple of co-reporters to sniff around. Useless bastards, they couldn’t empty piss out of a boot.

At first he thought the gang boss had ruptured his internal organs. But today, his gut felt a hell of a lot better than it had the day before. And his eye, too, was clearly less swollen.

Of course, none of this mattered in the long run. He knew now that it was just a matter of time before they killed him. I’m going to ask around. See if maybe you speak a little truth. Then I’ll come back and break you in. Somehow, instead of motivating him to escape, Bighead’s words had filled him with despair.

There had been no sign of the motherfucker for a day now. Smithback still didn’t know exactly what the hell was going on, but as best he could tell from the talk he heard through the door, it had to do with a shipment of drugs, cocaine, that had gone missing on the Arizona border, somehow involving trucks with their numbers painted out. And Bighead seemed to be on the hook for it. Smithback felt certain that all this was the reason the bastard was away so much of the time — trying to mitigate the damage and figure out what had gone wrong.

On top of that, more people had been coming around and talking to his two jailers. It seemed Bighead had put word out about a reward for information. One of them had been an old rummy, his voice slurred through the closed door. But he only spoke English. He demanded to talk to Bighead and he also had something to say about trucks, ten-wheelers with large drums bolted to the drivers’ fenders, payloads covered in canvas. The guards had told him to come back later, when the boss was around. The rummy apparently thought they were giving him the brush-off, because he talked loudly about these trucks seen going into a place named Tate’s Hole or Tate’s Hall.

Smithback’s unpleasant interview with Bighead had had another unexpected result. For whatever reason, the two goons, Carlos and Flaco, now showed themselves openly. The two seemed far more at ease when Bighead was away. They even came into his cell from time to time or chatted with him through the door. They didn’t replace his vomit-strewn mattress, but they at least turned it over. They started giving him better food and actually emptied his improvised toilet. Not that any of this fooled Smithback, of course. The two were still his jailers, keeping him healthy enough until Bighead’s next — and maybe final — interrogation.

Because he had nothing to do but listen to the conversations on the far side of his door, Smithback had learned a fair amount about his jailers. He was able to put names and personalities to them. Both of them talked tough: despite his rudimentary Spanish, Smithback had picked up boasting about women, hijackings, and shootings. The two seemed especially proud of the murders they’d committed, but Smithback had the impression a lot of their talk was bravado and exaggeration. At other times the two seemed like relatively normal young men. Carlos, the big one, had apparently worked in a moped shop in Guatemala and was fascinated with big bikes — sometimes going into incomprehensible disquisitions on technical aspects of motocicletas. Flaco, the shorter, thinner one — wiry, not scrawny — appeared to be a fan of graphic novels. In Bighead’s absence, the two didn’t even seem particularly brutal: despite the boss’s instructions to kick Smithback’s ass, for example, Carlos had just given him a few perfunctory smacks before turning over the mattress and one-arming him down onto it.

He heard the two of them laughing now in the passage; the slap of a high five. Carlos, it seemed, was going out on some errand. Smithback turned his gaze back to the ceiling. It surprised him, distantly, that he could look upon his captors with relative charity. Maybe it was an indication of how resigned he’d become. If they’d stayed in Guatemala, if they hadn’t fallen victim to bad influences, Carlos would probably still be working in the moped shop, and Flaco — Smithback wasn’t sure about Flaco. The day before, bringing in what passed for his prisoner’s dinner, he’d had a graphic novel jammed into his back pocket, and when Smithback commented on it the guy had hastily dropped the plastic plate on Smithback’s mattress and walked out, pushing the comic book deeper into his pocket. Only then did Smithback realize it was not a book, after all, but a manuscript — the drawings had been Flaco’s own. If he was working on a graphic novel, or even just drawing in his spare time, it probably wasn’t the kind of hobby his compañeros would think highly of.

Carlos had gone; it was late afternoon, and the little shop had grown quiet. Smithback closed his eyes, tried to shut down his thoughts and sleep. But within five minutes, he was interrupted by a scraping sound: his door, opening.

He pushed up on his elbows, wincing a bit. It was Flaco. For some reason, instead of exuding his usual cocky air, he looked nervous. He glanced up and down the passage, then — after making sure Smithback hadn’t moved — he stepped in, closed the door, and approached the pallet of tamarind soda. It was still where Bighead had dragged it over twenty-four hours before.

He sat down. “You,” he said in English. “You writer. Periodista. ¿Sí?” Flaco dug into one pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He unfolded it and held it in front of Smithback. The reporter, one eye better than the other, peered at it in the dim light. With surprise, he saw that it was his first article for the Herald on the feet that had washed up on Captiva. Flaco pointed at the byline. “Smithback,” he said. “That you, right?”

Smithback nodded. Flaco spoke better English than he had initially let on.

“You work with... with a publisher?” Flaco asked. “Newspaper publisher?”

He wondered where Flaco had gotten a copy of that article. It was blurry, like a screenshot that had been printed. All of a sudden, Smithback realized what all this would look like from the perspective of a person like Flaco. He didn’t know much about the young man’s background, but he almost certainly came from a small Guatemalan town where the outside world rarely intruded. To a guy like that, a reporter for a big newspaper might be seen as someone important. Smithback recalled Flaco bragging about his initiation into the Panteras. He’d been told to kill two people: a rata, informer, and his wife. He could kill the man any way he wanted to. But first, he had to kill the woman. He had to cut her throat — in front of the rat. That, anyway, had been the gist of the story. But the way he told it, the bragging and unlikely details, made Smithback think the whole thing was made up, or at least highly embellished.

Flaco was looking at him, question still hanging in the air. Smithback thought quickly, pushing these speculations aside. A reporter, his name on the front page of a big city newspaper... to someone like Flaco, his lifestyle must seem so unimaginably distant that he might as well be from another planet.

“Yes,” he said, sitting up. “Yes, I work with lots of publishers. Important publishers.” A spark of hope that had died sometime during the previous night now flared to life again. He’d been like a drowning man, and all of a sudden, he’d caught sight of a life preserver. Distant, but visible nonetheless. There might, after all, be a way out of here.

“What kind of publishers?”

“All kinds. Newspapers. Magazines. Books.”

As he spoke, a light gleamed briefly in Flaco’s eyes. “Magazine?”

“Sure. My best friend, mejor amigo, he used to do cartoons for my newspaper. Now, he has his own publishing house. Right here in Fort Myers.” This was a lie: Smithback hadn’t known anyone in the comics section of the paper, and he personally hadn’t read a comic since the Peanuts and Zap Comix of his youth.

“What kind of publish, this amigo?”

“He publishes...” Shit, what should he say? He gestured. “Graphic novels. Manga. ¿Sí?”

Flaco became animated. “Graphic novels? Sí. Sí. And you say this friend, he live here? In Fort Myers?”

“Yeah. Downtown.” His mind ran wild, trying to fill in the story. “He’s also getting into movies. Hollywood. But this...” He made a sweeping motion that, he hoped, indicated a lateral professional move. “He helps make graphic novels get made into movies.”

“You... you read graphic novels?”

“Sure. I love them. Big fan!”

Flaco, encouraged, patted one pocket of the cargo shorts he wore. “I... draw novels.”

“Really? You draw graphic novels? Come on, really?” Smithback tried to inject the right mixture of admiration and incredulity — one that would flatter rather than insult.

“Sí. Since I was little, all I want to do... is dibujar.” The young gangster mimicked sketching on a pad. “My father, he beat me when he find I drawing, not working. No me importa.”

“Wow. Amazing.” And it was amazing, in a way. Smithback always liked to find creativity in unexpected places. Bighead wouldn’t be happy if he thought Flaco’s ambitions ran in some direction other than dealing drugs and wiping out competition. The man was obviously starved for some sort of recognition.

“Um, can I see?”

Flaco, after a hesitation, reached into the oversize pocket of his shorts and pulled out a wad of battered pages. “You read. Tell me this good?” He held the pages out to Smithback, with an oddly tender gesture, as if they were flower petals he didn’t want to damage. “You read?”

“Sí. Con mucho gusto.”

“Carlos, he gone one hour. You finish before then, tell me it’s good.”

Tell me it’s good. Not if it’s good. Smithback nodded, taking the pages gently.

Suddenly, Flaco drew a switchblade and held it at Smithback’s throat. His eyes gleamed again, but with an entirely different kind of light. “You no tell Carlos. No tell Bighead.”

Smithback shook his head. “No, no.”

“Or I say I cut you, trying to escape. I make it hurt.”

Smithback had no doubt that he would. He shook his head as vigorously as the knife would allow. “I won’t tell anyone. It’s our secret. Nuestro secreto.”

Flaco remained motionless for a moment. Then, with a slow grin, he withdrew the knife. “Nuestro secreto. Sí.”

Secrets, Smithback reflected, rubbing his throat as the door whispered shut, were something Flaco appreciated.