Fifty Grand

19 OUR LADY OF MERCY

I am copied in your eye, mother of the golden breeze, lady full of grace, lady of the moon. Between ice and the gilt morning. I am copied in the patterns of your stars.

You don’t get two chances. One they’ll give you. But not two. Not at point-blank range. Not so close that you feel the powder burn. Prayers, you say? Well, again it’s that old dilemma. In Cuba the state religion is unbelief. The high-church religion is Catholicism. The street faith is Santería. Who would I pray to? Who would I pray for?

And yet.

A breath escapes. And every breath a petition.

The muscles in his face as taut as a halyard on a sail.

Smile not, friend.

Lillies grow from your mouth. Think not of drinking blood from my skull. Your corpse is food for trout.

Don’t you see her? She is the image in your eye too.

His face relaxes, transfigured by the mystery.

Death has made him special, given him a secret that I do not possess.

A full second after the bullet strikes I hear the crack.

I roll to the side.

He falls where I have been.

A puff of ice. Another crack.

Preoccupied with Youkilis, Sheriff Briggs belatedly turns to see his deputy lying next to me, the back of his head caved in like a melon that’s fallen off a truck.

Briggs looks at me, sizes up the situation immediately.

“She’s got a fucking accomplice. Everybody hit the deck.”

“What?”

“Hit the fucking deck, assholes!” he yells but only he and Jack fall fast enough to escape the gunman.

A sound like sssssipppp and Deputy Crawford gets one in the leg. Gravity does the rest and he’s down too.

Briggs pulls out a.45 and shoots randomly at the tree line.

I count them off. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. One, two, three.

“What’s happening!” Jack screams.

“You see anything?” Crawford yells.

“I don’t see a goddamn thing,” Briggs replies and turns to his deputy. “How you doing, buddy?”

Crawford grunts. “I’m ok. Fat shot. No arteries or veins.”

“Thank God. Get your gun and look for the muzzle flash,” Briggs says.

“Shouldn’t we kill her?” Crawford wonders.

Briggs slides his body around to look at me. “Yes, we fucking should.”

Another puff of ice, another crack.

Briggs arcs the.45 in my direction. Mierde. I grab the body of Deputy Klein and drag him-it-in front of me, blood pouring from the hole in the skull, coating the ice beneath us in a red film. It pools under me, sticky, warm. The.45 slugs punch into Klein. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. At this range they could easily burn right through Klein and into me, but I get lucky, they snag on bone and muscle and internal organs.

And then somehow Youkilis gets to his feet. Naked, hallucinating.

“Aaaaggghhh,” he screams. Guttural, horrifying. He looks confused, hurt. The noise he made scared even himself. His hands are burning him, his lungs agony.

“Get down, you fucking idiot,” Briggs says.

“Get down, Paul, get down,” Jack says.

But Youkilis isn’t getting down. He wants to escape the water, the ice, the hurt.

He can’t. There’s no way ou-

Cunning flits across his eyes when he spots me. Her. All this pain is something to do with her. “Neaaaahhh,” he says and comes for me, hands out like Mitchum in that Yuma flick with the kids and the money.

He growls, staggers, trips on Jack’s leg.

“Grab him!” Briggs yells at Jack.

But Jack keeps his head down.

That’s my boy.

Youkilis steps around his boss and lurches closer. He’s going to kill me if he can. He’s going to bring me into his world.

“Get down, you fool,” Crawford says and makes a grab for him. “Jack, tell your fucking buddy to get down.”

But a nearby rifle shot sends Crawford diving for the ice.

I hug Klein like a lover and his body protects me from the bullets and his blood protects me from the cold, seeping into my shirt, coating my skin, slithering into my underwear and down my leg, warming, purifying-as intimate as mother’s milk.

“Faaaking bittch!” Youkilis says, staggering to within a few meters of me.

“Go away,” I hiss at him.

He laughs and is gearing up for the final zombie shuffle when a rifle shot buries itself in his back.

He drops to one knee.

“Faarg!” he screams, and he looks at me with savage, cold fury.

Somehow he gets back to his feet. Fucking unstoppable. Naked, inhuman, a thing from beyond the grave. I’m afraid of him. And then Briggs resumes firing at me. BOOM. BOOM. A bullet rips through Klein’s neck and almost gets me, missing my head by centimeters and zipping across the ice. Briggs changes the clip.

More rifle puffs. Youkilis swatting at the bullets like the monster in Frankenstein trying to catch musical notes. Finally the anonymous marksman makes the kill shot. A hit behind Youkilis’s ear-the expanding lead rifle round ripping through his eyes and forehead. He staggers on for one more beat and falls on top of Klein.

You did it, you got here.

“Fucker!” Briggs yells, and he shoots the reloaded.45. BOOM. BOOM. But now there are two corpses to give me cover.

“We gotta get out of here!” Crawford says.

“The fuck! How? Fucking pinned,” Briggs replies.

“Been watching. It’s one guy, he’s in the trees by the car,” Crawford says.

“Or it’s two guys, taking their time,” I suggest.

“Shut up, bitch, you’ll get yours,” Briggs says.

“If you surrender I’ll make sure they don’t kill you,” I yell.

“Shut the fuck up, you fucking cunt,” Briggs says. “Crawford, can you get an angle on the bitch?”

Crawford tries a shot that plows into Youkilis with a sickening squelch.

“I don’t think so,” Crawford says.

“Maybe we should give ourselves up,” Jack contributes.

“Cut us down like dogs,” Briggs says.

Briggs fires several more at the tree line and his clip runs out again. It holds eight. The bad news seems to be that he’s brought several spares.

A different noise. Thunder. No.

A ripping, tearing, a-

Beneath all of us the ice starting to crack.

“Jesus Christ!” Jack yells, his hands still over his head.

“We’re fucked!” Crawford says.

“We’re not fucked. Keep it together!” Briggs orders.

Another puff of ice. My unknown confederate adding to the mix.

“Fuck it, let’s go!” Crawford says.

Holes appear and water starts gushing up through the ice in frothy freezing bursts. One of the sharpshooter’s bullets skims past my feet. Shit. Was that a mistake? Is he really an ally after all? Is he trying to kill all of us? Esteban, is that you?

Water bubbling underneath me. This is what you get for playing Nemesis.

I scramble away from the blood and the surging water on hands and knees toward a firmer piece of ice a few meters from the bodies.

This looks better. But how would I know? Cuba doesn’t even get frost.

I kneel on the raw plain of ice, completely exposed.

When I was child I used to play a game. If I closed my eyes I could make myself disappear. As long as I couldn’t see me no one else could. Keep ’em closed and you’ll be ok.

The bodies. The blood. The shooting-the rifleman from the parking lot, Briggs and Crawford firing back into the trees.

Don’t look in my direction.

Don’t look.

I’m invisible.

I’m not here.

A grinding, gurgling sound. I open my eyes just as Youkilis slips beneath the surface. Klein follows him into a fissure, his body turning and his cat black eyes staring at me before disappearing into the slime of the lake bottom.

Ice cracks all around me and I get to my feet for balance.

My sweater is dyed red, like a target, like Che storming the barricades, but he had a gun and I’m a sacrificial la-

Wait a minute.

The backpack.

A 9mm and a clip.

My father’s gun.

“Jesus, there she is! Got a shot?” Briggs yells.

“Yeah, I got one, fucking ice breaking, hold on, yeah, try this on for size, ya fucking bitch!” Crawford replies.

BOOM.

Down. Hard. Nose cracking off the surface.

“Missed her!”

“I’ll try!”

Triage. Everything seems-BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. Briggs, a gun in each hand. The right firing at the parking lot, the left shooting at me.

I lie flat on the ice, a tough shot for both men, as long as my friend keeps them pinned and I don’t stand up again.

They’re going to have to get lucky-but they need to be lucky only once and I need to be lucky all the time.

Use your brain, Mercado. Do something smart. Work ’em. Jack is the weak link. Work him while you make your way toward the backpack, six meters to the left, on the edge of a hole in the ice.

“I’m a federal agent! We’ve got you surrounded. Drop your guns and surrender and we’ll all get out of this in one piece,” I yell.

“You’re no fucking cop!” Briggs says.

“I’m an agent. Sheriff, this is crazy. You covered up a vehicular homicide. That’s not a huge crime in the big scheme of things. You’ll lose your job and get probation. You won’t do a day,” I yell, switching from the formal English we learned in school to the Yuma English of the movies and TV.

“If you’re the feds, where’s the SWAT team, where’s the fucking helicopters?” Briggs yells. He’s no dummy.

“They’re on the way, believe me. Now cease firing and let’s all get out of this alive,” I shout.

Briggs takes aim at me and pulls the trigger. The bullet whizzes over my head. Close, but he’s gotta stand to get the kill shot.

Work the others. “Crawford, you’re a veteran, you won’t do a night in prison. Jack, if you plea-bargain you’re looking at thirty days. We don’t need to lose our lives for this. I’m the one that’s fucked anyway.”

“What do you mean you’re fucked?” Crawford asks.

Another puff of ice, another rifle crack.

“I’m fucked because I didn’t have the authority to bring Youkilis up here,” I say. “I screwed this whole operation up.”

I slide slowly toward the backpack; its shoulder strap is in the water, the ice cracking around it. Please don’t fall, please don’t sink.

“You hear what she says, Briggs?” Crawford yells.

“You’ve done nothing wrong, Crawford, not a thing. If you kill me, a federal agent, it’s the death penalty,” I tell him.

“If you’re a fed, tell your buddy to stop shooting,” Briggs demands.

“My radio’s at the bottom of the lake. Just cease fire and drop your weapons,” I yell at him.

“What do you think, Sheriff?” Crawford asks.

“She’s fucking lying!” Briggs says.

Five meters from the backpack. Freezing water. Ice burns all over my fingertips.

“Let me show you my ID. We’ll see who’s fucking lying,” I shout. “Cease fire! That’s an order.”

“Yeah, you’ll all be fucking ok, but I’ll go to jail for manslaughter. My career will be finished,” Jack says.

“You’ll be fine. Vehicular manslaughter ain’t jail time, look at your buddy Matthew Broderick. I say we stop this madness right now,” Crawford says.

But the sheriff isn’t falling for any of this bullshit. He looks at me, smiles, and shakes his head. “She’s no fed. She’s got one friend. Two of them. Take ’em out one at a time. That’s the way we do it.”

“How?” Crawford wonders.

“Get a bead on the trees. Look for the muzzle flash and unload a fucking clip, pin him down. I’ll take her. And when she’s dead we’ll get across to the other side, away from our lone gunman and before all this fucking ice cracks.”

“Don’t listen to him, Crawford! It’s a death sentence!” I yell.

“She’s fucking lying,” Briggs says.

Two meters from the backpack. It’s sitting on top of a seven-centimeter fissure somehow defying gravity. Don’t fall. Don’t fall. I keep it from plunging to the lake bottom by sheer force of will.

“What do you want me to do, Sheriff?” Crawford asks.

“Don’t listen to him, Crawford. You’ve done nothing wrong at this point. I’m the only one in real trouble here! Jack, if they kill me, you’ll be accessory to a murder, you’ll get life in prison for that.”

“We’ve got to do what she says,” Jack yells desperately.

The crack widens, the backpack starts to tilt. I spread my weight and try to touch it.

“Like fuck we do! She’s a lying cunt,” Briggs says.

“We can’t just kill her. We’ll get-”

Closer… closer… closer.

“We’ll get nothing. She’s some dumb Mex on a fucking trip. Never find her. Crawford, you ready?”

I touch the backpack, grab it, start to unzip it.

“I’m ready,” Crawford says.

“Pin the rifleman, I’ll take her,” Briggs says.

Rifle shot. Muzzle flash.

Crawford gets up on one knee, bites through the pain of his wound, stands, and starts firing at the trees. But Briggs doesn’t keep his side of the bargain. He’s too chicken. He’s still trying to shoot me lying down. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. All misses. Get up and kill me, asshole. Where’s your huevos? Thought you were a fucking war hero.

“Did you get her?” Crawford asks.

“Angle’s wrong,” Briggs replies. “Don’t worry, I’ll fucking kill the bitch. Keep plugging at that shooter.”

“Rifleman’s reloading,” Crawford says. “We got ten clicks.”

And now Briggs does stand up. All six foot five of him and still somehow wearing his fucking cowboy hat. He flinches, bracing himself for a bullet in the brain.

I rummage through the stuff in the backpack: pepper spray, ski mask, rope, duct tape, finally the loaded 9mm Stechkin APS pistol that hadn’t been cleaned or fired in years.

Briggs walks toward me, striding over the ice fissures, holding his.45 in both hands. Six meters away. Impossible to miss. He beads me, lifts the gun. “No more chances now, whore,” he says. His eyes narrow, focused, concentrating, his grin wide.

“None necessary,” I reply, sliding up my father’s pistol and shooting him in the neck.

Briggs falls to his knees, drops his weapon.

Hands at his throat, blood seeping between his fingers.

Ssssfff! The rifleman in the trees has evidently reloaded. Crawford hits the deck.

“Did you get her?” Crawford says.

The ice cracks beneath me as I walk to Briggs’s.45 and kick it into the water.

“Damn it, man, did you get her?” Crawford says, firing the last of his clip at the marksman in the woods.

The sun breaks over the tree line. New-born photons bisecting the lake into a world of shadow and a world of light. Water seeps into my shoes, I lose my balance, put my arms out, regain it, step over a widening fracture, and come up behind Crawford.

He turns.

“Cocksucker,” he says and slams home a fresh clip but can’t get off a round before I put one in his groin, one in his thorax above his body armor, and one in his mouth.

I wave at the man in the parking lot.

He stands up, waves back.

It’s too skinny to be Esteban. It has to be Paco.

I wave my hands over my head. “Stop! Stop! That’s enough! They’re dead.”

Silence and then a distant voice. “Are you ok?”

“Sí.”

“I’m coming.”

I walk to Jack and kneel beside him.

He’s terrified. He smells bad. He’s defecated himself.

I smile in a kindly way.

“W-who are you?” he asks, his voice quivering.

“I’m María.”

“Why have you done this?”

Well, it ain’t because you’re a lousy tipper.

A groan behind me. Briggs, living yet. That type needs a stake through the heart at a midnight crossroad.

“Wait here,” I say to Jack. “Don’t go anywhere.”

Dodging cracks and fissures, I walk back to Briggs. The ice is cracking all around him. Blood and water, water and blood.

I kneel beside him.

Our eyes meet.

Are you close now? Do you have any answers?

I don’t. Hector says the meaning of life is to be found in the quest for the meaning of life. But that’s Hector.

Briggs looks at me. A croak. “Help me,” he says.

I look at the wound. I suppose if we rushed him to a hospital there’d be an outside chance.

I shake my head.

“Why?” he asks.

Why indeed?

I can’t tell you about the tarot or the Book of Changes or that I am sent by our lady of the moon. But I must tell you something. I must tell you because, before the minute hand on your watch makes another revolution, I will be the instrument of your transfiguration.

For you, I suppose, it was the fifty thousand.

“The fifty grand. The price of a dead Mex.”

He thinks about it, doesn’t get it.

“That my father’s life could be bought so cheap,” I explain.

He nods.

His breath has taken on the sweetness of death. His face is white, his eyes crimson. There are splinters of ice in his hair.

“Is there a deity with whom you confer?” I ask.

“No, no, wait…”he gurgles.

“Make thy peace.”

He grabs my arm with a bloody hand.

I release his grip, step back, raise my father’s gun. This is not retribution. I have no authority for that. Nevertheless, I deliver you from this world of tears.

“No, wait, we can make a-”

Lead crosses the space between us, rips his skin, passes through muscle and bone, punches a hole in his skull the size of a baby’s fist, and exits through his spinal cord.

He looks at all the blood and lies backward on the ice, dead.

Jack’s hands are above his head.

He’s crying. “Don’t shoot me. Please. I’m so sorry. Oh God, I’m so sorry. Whatever I did, I’m so sorry.” Tears, an anguished look. More tears. “Oh God, please don’t, please.”

“This is your best performance,” I say.

“It’s not a performance, I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

“For whatever it is that you’re so angry about,” he says. Lips quivering. A cackle at the back of his throat. Snot, spittle.

The scent of death all around me, in me, makes me want to throw up. On the edge of the ice lake I see Paco in a black coat and carrying Esteban’s rifle. He waves. I wave back.

He yells something but I can’t hear what it is.

“I can’t hear you!”

“I said, I saved your Cuban ass.”

Gingerly he begins walking across the ice. He’s almost comically slow. I imagine they don’t have many frozen lakes in Nicaragua.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God, you’re going to kill me, I’m going to die,” Jack says.

He bends over and throws up what’s left of the hors d’oeuvres from Tom Cruise’s house.

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“You’re going to kill me. You’re going to murder me like you killed those others. I’m going to be dead. This is the last thing I’m ever going to see. I don’t even know where we are, I don’t even know where we are!”

“Wyoming.”

I sit down next to him on the ice. I turn his face so that he’s looking at me.

“Listen to me, Jack, that’s my friend Paco coming over to us. That kid has a jones for killing. He says he fought with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua when he was only a boy, and he was so good with the rifle that I think I believe him.”

“Wait a minute, I’m not going to-”

“Shut up. This is important. Paco’s going to come over here and he’s going to say: ‘No witnesses. This one too. I don’t care if he’s a big star. All of them in the lake. We gotta protect ourselves.’ ”

“What are you doing?” Paco yells. I look up. He’s not advancing at record speed. The ice is spooking him but we’ve got about five minutes here, tops.

Shit. This is not the way I thought it was going to be. Rushed. Bloody. Incompetent. This isn’t the kangaroo court of my imagination. Me remembering the good times and telling my dad’s killer what I’ve lost because of him, because of his drunken carelessness.

“It was you, Jack, you were driving the car, you were drunk. You knocked my father off the Old Boulder Road. You killed him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not lying. Please don’t kill me,” Jack says, tears running off his eyelashes in his greatest-ever audition tape.

“I’m not going to kill you, Jack. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of all this.”

He’s looking at me with a desperate hope in his eyes. Can she really mean that? His cheeks vermillion. A green stain on his neck. His jeans soaked with piss.

“I want only one thing from you,” I tell him.

“What?”

“I want the truth, Jack. I want you to tell me what happened that night. The night you hit the Mex and Youkilis covered for you and said that you were in Malibu and had been there for days.”

“I wasn’t there, I don’t know-”

“Look, look over there at Paco. He’s coming. Now, I’m not going to kill you, but he’s going to want to and it’s going to be up to me to persuade him otherwise. You understand? You dig?”

“I understand.”

“Youkilis told me everything. Let me hear it in your words. And fast.”

“W-who are you?”

“I’m the daughter of the dead Mex. The anonymous fucking wetback that you killed and that your manager decided was worth fifty thousand dollars. Fifty thousand bucks. How much do you get for a picture?”

“It depends, sometimes I work for scale on a-”

“How much?”

He starts to shake.

“I got two million dollars for the last movie I made. I was third lead.”

“Two million dollars.”

“I didn’t see all of that, of course. Agent’s cut, manager’s cut, taxes. So really, when it all boils down-”

“And my father’s life was worth a measly fifty grand.”

In Havana fifty thousand could buy you out of a murder rap. You could become a general officer in the army for ten thousand. But here that was an insult.

“How many days did you work on that movie?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, I-”

“Out with it.”

“Five-week shoot, I think.”

“So my father’s life was worth roughly one day’s work for you.”

“Well, you see, that’s what I was saying before-”

I click the hammer back on the 9mm to shut him up.

Let the silence hold you. I want you to sit with those details for a moment. A man’s life for a few hours’ work on a movie set.

Paco waves. “This thing is a fucking death trap,” he yells in Spanish.

“Yeah.”

“It’s cracking. Do you see it’s cracking?” he says.

“I see.”

Back to Jack. “Ok now. Tell me what happened that night.”

He closes his eyes, shakes his head. Sweat pouring from him.

“Speak.”

“I can’t,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I think if I tell you, you’ll kill me. You say you won’t kill me but I think you will.”

“Open your eyes. Look at me. Look at me!”

He opens his eyes, finds mine. I rid them of the red mist, the crazy, dark stuff from Santiago de Cuba, from New Mexico, from everywhere. I make them reveal what I am feeling right now. The calmness. The exhaustion.

“Can you see what I’m thinking? You gotta fucking trust me, I’m not going to kill you. Not now, not ever.”

“Ok,” he says. He fakes a grin, falters, blinks.

“Now speak, quick, before Paco comes.”

“It hadn’t been a good year. I was up for a Spirit Award, I didn’t get it. I’d never been nominated for anything major in my whole life, I never won anything in my life. But I got odds on that I would win that night. And they gave it to that bastard Jeremy Piven, who’s won everything. And then after that I lost a couple of big roles and then I was up for this movie Gunmetal and they said I had it in the bag and then those fuckers at Universal gave it to someone else.”

“The accident.”

“I lost the movie. But I didn’t go apeshit, not like in my twenties. Cool head. Paul was here. I flew to Vail on a charter. I went into town. Just for one drink. But they know me here and a couple of guys bought me drinks. I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t buy a drink the whole day. Nothing.”

“How many drinks?”

“I don’t know. Couple of beers. I wasn’t drunk drunk. I used to go to AA. I used to have a problem. This wasn’t a bender. This was just a few beers. And I don’t know, maybe it was the altitude or whatever, I’d been in L.A. all week.”

“What happened?”

“I’m driving home and I think I’m doing ok and I get to the hill and then there’s this dude alongside the car and clunk, you know, and I think I might have hit him but I’m not sure and I look in the rearview mirror and there’s nobody there, so I don’t know what to think. I stop and look back and there’s nobody there. I’m tired, and with the altitude and the beers and everything, I think I might have just hallucinated him or something.”

“Is everything ok?” Paco yells from barely twenty meters away.

“Interrogating,” I tell him.

I look at Jack. “Go on, fast,” I whisper.

“Ok, so I get home and just fucking go to bed. Next day, I don’t remember anything, just the car. So I dump the car at the garage and later that day they find the Me-the, uhm, your father, I mean, and I tell Paul and he just takes over. Private charter to L.A. Gets me into Promises and leaks it that I’ve been there for three days, in other words I never left L.A. Would never hold up if anybody really looked, but I’m not a big enough star for anybody to really look. Just another B-lister going into rehab. Nobody cared.”

Unattractive self-pity in those azure eyes, but not yet guilt, contrition, understanding.

“And then what happened?”

“Well, then nothing. I stayed at Promises for a couple of weeks and went back to Fairview to read scripts. Someone dropped out of Gunmetal and they offered it to me again and I took it. It was all good until that son of a bitch came snooping around.”

“What son of a bitch?”

“Briggs. Fucking Briggs. But again Paul took care of it. We paid him off. Fifty thousand to some cop charity, a couple of photo ops. Paul promised to use his boys as fucking extras in the next movie. Christ, it was all so pathetic. So fucking small change.”

I grimaced.

I’d like to think that that might have been the first of many payments. Briggs was smarter than that.

“How did you find us up here tonight?” I ask.

“Paul hit the panic button and Briggs traced the GPS in his car. Woke me up, got his deputies. He could have APB’d it, but he knew it was something to do with this. We had to keep it quiet.”

I nod, smile. “Ok. Good. You’ve been very good, Jack. Now, listen carefully. Paco is going to want to kill you. He thinks you’ll go to the police about this, but we have to convince him you won’t go to the police.”

“I won’t go to the police.”

Tears, trembling, hands together in prayer.

“I know you won’t go to the police, because if you do, I’ll make sure the press finds out that you killed my father and you and your manager conspired with the local police to cover it up. That’s manslaughter and conspiracy. You might not get a lot of time in jail, but you will go to jail and your career will be finished.”

“I’m not going to go to the police. I’m not,” he says desperately.

“My friend Paco is old-school. He’s from the jungle. They take an eye for an eye literally down there. We can’t let him know that you were the one driving the car. Understand? So don’t say anything, I’ll do the talking. Ok?”

“Ok.”

He looks at me with gratitude and fear. “Why are you doing this? You have every right to kill me. I killed your father.”

“Killing you won’t bring me one gram of comfort, I see that now. It’ll only make things worse. Much worse.”

Relief. More fucking tears. Probably real.

Paco almost beside us. My voice descends to whisper: “I’m going to stop him from killing you, but I want you to do something for me.”

“Anything. I owe you.”

“I want you to stop drinking. I want you to stop the bullshit. I want you to live an exemplary life. I want you to become engaged with the world. I want you to give a sizable portion of your income to charity. I want you to go to Africa. To India. I want you to improve the lot of Mexicans who work in your town. The invisibles. You can still act, that’s what you do, you can still make movies, but I want you to be a force for good.”

He nods. Really bawling now. “Of course. I will. I’m lucky. I’m lucky that you were the one, that it was you. I, I’ll never be able to bring back your dad, I can’t do that, but, but, I’ll do what you say.”

“I don’t need to threaten you. You know what will happen if I discover you’re caught with cocaine or DUI-”

“It will never happen. I promise.”

“Good. Ok. Now, here’s how we handle Paco-we’re going to pin this on Youkilis. We’re going to tell him that he was driving you from the bar and he hit my father and covered it up. Paco’s sharp. He can spot a lie so I’m going to have to hide the truth. I’m going to tell him that Youkilis wouldn’t confess to it, but I’m sure it was him.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say nothing. Nothing at all until I tell you to talk. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, shut up, here he is.”

Paco. Grinning, rifle slung. Knight in fucking shining. My hero. I hug him and burst into tears.

“You saved me,” I whisper in his ear.

“Damn right.”

“I told you to stay out of it.”

“Man, I haven’t seen this much action since I was eleven.”

“Christ, you saved me.” I kiss him on the mouth. Hungry for him. This kid.

“What about this one?” he says, pointing the rifle at Jack.

“Nothing to do with it.”

His eyes narrow. “Who killed your father, María?”

“Youkilis. I think.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“It was Youkilis.”

“You’re not lying to me, are you?”

Jesus, Paco, I was lying to you from the very beginning. My name’s not even María… But, nevertheless, I want you to believe me. I want this to end.

“It’s over, Paco. Youkilis is dead and Briggs is dead. It’s finished.”

“You’ve come all this way to find the person who killed your father and you’re going to leave it like this?”

“I’m tired and I have to get back. If I don’t a lot of people I care about will be in trouble.”

Paco takes a step away from me and sights the rifle at Jack. Jack puts up his hands, cowers, whimpers. Oh, Jack, please, act the man for once in your life.

“It was him, wasn’t it? Youkilis covered it up to protect him. He was in Fairview that night. He was drunk.”

I shake my head and look hard at Jack: “Tell him. Tell him what you told me.”

“I was after this part and then I was at a bar and Paul, well, Paul,” Jack begins hesitantly.

“Just tell him about the drinking and the drive home,” I interrupt.

“I’d had a few beers. I was too hammered to get back up the mountain. I called Paul and he came and picked me up. He didn’t even know I was in town. He thought I was in L.A. He’d had a few too, but not many. He wasn’t drunk. We were going up the mountain and I’m in the backseat and Paul’s turning around to talk to me, you know, and we hear this sort of clumping noise. Paul looks forward and doesn’t see anything. We stop the car but we don’t see anything. So we drive on. Day after that we read about the dead guy by the side of the road. We put two and two together. Course, by then we’d left the car at the shop. That’s how Briggs tracked us down.”

I’m staring at Paco.

Don’t hit him, please, he’ll crack like the first huevo of the day. Let him be.

Paco looks at me. “This is good enough for you?”

“We’re done here. Finished.”

“But this one, he will go to the police,” Paco says.

“We’ve talked that over. He covered up a crime. He’s an accessory to vehicular manslaughter. He’ll get jail and it’ll destroy his career.”

Paco closes his eyes. Thinks. I take his hand, squeeze it. “No more death,” I whisper.

Two in New Mexico, two here. Four men I’ve killed. Four too many.

“You’re bleeding,” he says.

“Yeah. I got shot.”

“You got lucky.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go,” Paco says.

Two bodies under the ice.

A third and fourth faceup, staring at us.

“What about them?”

“Sink them.”

“They’ll come up,” I say.

“Their vests will drag them down.”

“Three cops go missing. Bound to be an inquiry.”

He points at Briggs. “Does this one have a phone?”

“I don’t know.”

Paco hands me the rifle, searches Briggs. He removes a silver cell phone and a wallet. He skims the wallet. About a thousand dollars in scratch, which he puts in his pocket. He takes out his own cell and smiles.

“Find Briggs’s number,” he says. “It’ll be on his menu.”

I flip Briggs’s cell, find the number, and tell Paco.

Paco dials it. Briggs’s phone rings and Paco waits for the voice mail. He grins at me and affects a chingla Mexican accent. “Briggs, man, where are you? We got the fucking stuff but we don’t see you. We went through a lot to get here. If you don’t show, or you try to pull something, man, you gonna be sorry.”

He hangs up. Grins.

“They won’t buy that,” I tell him.

“It’ll give them something to think about. We’ll sink the bodies, put Briggs’s phone in his car, leave the car where someone will find it. Ok, let’s go. Can you guys help?”

Paco stares at Jack and me. We’re both exhausted.

“Hell with ya, I’ll do it,” he mutters in Spanish.

He walks to Briggs, slides him into the nearest ice fissure. Briggs rolls over, floats for a second, and then sinks in a froth of bubbles. Paco does the same to Crawford, who joins his buddies at the bottom of the lake.

Carefully Paco picks up all the shells and puts them in his pocket. He points at Jack. “Ok, we go back. You first, and you better not run and you better not fall in the fucking water.”

Jack begins walking to the shore. Paco puts his arm around me.

“I think we’d better kill him,” Paco whispers.

“No,” I insist.

“Are you sure it wasn’t him?”

“It wasn’t him. Just an unlucky guy. A passenger. Wrong place, wrong time.”

Paco nods. “What’s that you’ve got?” he asks, looking at my father’s gun.

“You can have it,” I tell him. I’m done with guns.

We get to the shore. Paco starts telling Jack about the cars. We’ll drive one each. Jack will take Paul’s BMW. I’ll take Esteban’s Range Rover, which of course Paco drove here since Esteban isn’t expected back until tonight-a white lie of his that nearly got me killed. Paco will drive Briggs’s Escalade. We’ll dump the Escalade at a truck stop on I-25 and Paco will drive Jack back in the Beemer.

The plan seems sound.

I change my sweater, smoke a cigarette, take a last look at the lake.

Cracks already freezing over.

It reminds me of a poem by Basho: An old pond / a jumping frog / ripples.

This was not the way I wanted it to be. I don’t really know what I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t this.

Blood, gore, corpses under the water.

Hector’s niece is a nurse who works in a hospice for terminally ill babies. Babies who won’t live out a year. She feeds them, and cleans them, and loves them, and every night she whispers over them, “Grow, little baby, grow.”

That’s what a hero does.

Not this.

I shiver.

Paco puts his hand on my back. “Ok,” he says. “Let’s go.”