Finnegan's week

CHAPTER 22

Abel Durazo didn’t see the ox’s pickup truck in the parking lot at Angel’s Café so he thought Shelby wasn’t there. But then he spotted Shelby’s hog parked directly in front with four other Harleys, and on each bike was a hated helmet, now required by law.

When Abel entered he found the ox watching two truckers playing Pac-Man. Shelby’s costume was designed to give off outlaw-biker death rays: black leather jacket, black jeans, studded boots, and a dirty gray tee with GRATEFUL DEAD in black across the chest. Instead of his usual loose and scraggly style, the ox had his dirty-blond hair tied back in a severe ponytail.

The ox showed his gap-tooth grin to Abel, threw a heavy arm around his partner’s shoulder, and led him to a quiet booth where they ordered burritos and beer.

“Why we meet so early, Buey?” Abel asked, after the waitress was gone.

“I got some un-real news!” Shelby said. “We’re gonna go into partnership with Mister Jules Temple!”

Abel Durazo had often thought that the ox might someday just blow out all the wires in that massive skull, and now he feared it had happened. The Mexican looked around at all the various truckers, bikers, rednecks, and other lowlifes who used Angel’s for various purposes. Several of them looked much more demented than the ox.

“Tell me one more time,” Abel said carefully. “We going to be … partner weeth Meester Temple?”

“Senior partners,” Shelby said, cackling. “Man, my life’s become totally fucking amazing! I am in titty city, dude! I am gonna live in a meadow of meth! I am gonna reside in Harley heaven! ’Cept I ain’t buyin no more Harleys. You ever seen that Honda Shadow eleven hunnerd? It ain’t a fag bike like most a them. I’m thinkin about buyin me one. I’ll buy you one too.”

“Buey, you go crazy!” Abel said, with a sincerely worried look.

“If it wasn’t fer you makin me steal them fuckin shoes, none a this ever woulda happened,” Shelby said. “I am mega-fuckin stoked! Totally!”

“Okay, Buey, okay,” Abel said soothingly, the way you’d talk to someone straddling the railing on the Coronado Bridge.

“Know that manifest? The one from Southbay? We was haulin bad shit, baby! And Jules Temple manifested it as not-so-bad shit, okay to take to L.A. fer ordinary disposal! Kin you see where I’m comin from, dude?”

“No, Buey,” the Mexican said. “No.”

“I didn’t throw it away like you wanted me to. That manifest says we was haulin ordinary waste back to our yard for disposal at the L.A. refinery. But we was haulin big-time poison! And it killed the guy that stole our truck.” Then the ox paused and the gap-tooth smile vanished. “And … and it killed that kid, that kid with the ringworm.”

“We don’ know eef eet was the one weeth the reeng-worms!” Abel said.

“Okay, but it killed a kid. On’y it wasn’t our fault, was it, man?”

“No,” Abel said.

“Anyways, that shit was illegally manifested by that cheesy faggot, Jules Temple. We never woulda let it outta our sight if we knew we had real bad poison, would we?”

“But Buey, we never look at manifest!”

“I know, goddamnit, but that’s what we say to Temple. We say, we only did our thing in Mexico ’cause we thought we had ordinary waste!”

“He going to know we steal from navy.”

“So what? Stealin shoes for guys like us is no biggie. Illegally manifested waste that kills somebody is the end a the fuckin world fer him!”

It was the first time that Shelby had ever seen Abel look scared. Flaco was a ballsy little dude, but for once he looked scared.

“I don’ know, Buey.”

“You don’t know what?”

“Steal shoes, okay. Make report of stolen truck, okay. Tell Meester Temple we partner? I don’ know.”

“You jist lemme handle it, okay? You ’n me, we’re fifty-fifty. I’ll deal with Temple.”

“He ain’t like us, ’mano,” Abel said. “He deeferent people.”

“No, he ain’t like us. That bogus asshole don’t know dick about the real world.”

“Okay,” Abel said, “but I scared.”

“Don’t be scared. Jist concentrate on the cool time we’re gonna have tonight with six very very big ones that we’re gonna collect from Soltero.”

Then Abel broke into a grin. “Tonight, we have berry good time.”

“There you go, Flaco!” said the ox. “Party on!”

“We go to T.J. now?”

“Pretty soon,” Shelby said. “First we gotta stop by Green Earth before the overtime crew locks the fuckin place up.”

“Why we go there?”

“I gotta git somethin.”

“What?”

“Somethin I got in my locker. A derringer.”

“Wha’s that?”

“A little gun, dude. I ain’t goin down there to Soltero without an edge. Don’t worry, it’s untraceable.”

Abel said, “We get caught weeth gun in T.J., beeg problem!”

“I ain’t gonna be talked outta this. I’d rather end up in the Tia-juana jail with those sphincter-stretchers stickin a cattle prod up my ass than meet Soltero without a backup.”

“Buey,” Abel said. “I scared now!”

“I know,” Shelby said, “but I’m gonna make you rich and scared.”

While Nell was driving down the Silver Strand from Coronado she couldn’t stop thinking about how hard she’d worked on her hair that morning. First she’d ladled the mousse on her perm the instant she stepped out of the shower, then she’d combed it out ever so carefully, then she’d scrunched it up for twenty minutes until her do cried out: Tousle me with reckless abandon!

And Fin hadn’t even noticed. He couldn’t take his eyes off that kid. But of course that was typical. Why had she thought he’d be different from every other male person who walked the earth? Why was she even remotely concerned with what that three-time loser thought about her freaking hair?

For the first time, Nell Salter considered that it might not be horrible to get old, not if mid-life agony ended then. She hadn’t noticed that tension was causing her to goose the gas pedal.

Not until Bobbie, who was in the back seat, said, “Nell, I’m getting seasick.”

Nell turned toward Bobbie and said, “You’re a sailor, aren’t you?”

From the corner of her eye Nell saw Fin turn toward Bobbie as though to say: Just ignore the old girl. She’s a woman of a certain age.

“Doesn’t the ocean look pretty today?” Bobbie said, to make conversation.

Nell didn’t answer, so Fin said, “Lovely. Don’t you think so, Nell?”

Fin saw Nell move her lower lip slightly and mumble something. He said, “I guess the surfing’s okay down here, huh, Bobbie?”

“Not bad,” Bobbie said. “I know a guy that lives in Coronado Cays. He lets me use his jet ski sometimes.”

“How’d you meet him?” Fin asked.

“He’s a cousin of a girl I did sea duty with,” Bobbie said.

“Bobbie was in the Gulf War,” Fin explained.

“In a very small way,” Bobbie said. “Mostly we serviced the big ships. Nobody shot at us.”

“Your country was proud of all of you,” Fin said.

This isn’t fair! was all Nell could think. First of all, Fin Finnegan wouldn’t win first prize at the county fair. He was just a reasonably attractive person who made her feel … well, she didn’t know how he made her feel. But he’d made her like him somehow. He hadn’t seemed like a goddamn child molester! And that’s all this Bobbie was really, a child. Bobbie had never stared into a magnifying mirror and seen Armageddon. Her cosmetic light didn’t look like it was directed from the Point Loma lighthouse, revealing every goddamn sag and crease! What did she know about being a woman? And why was he sitting there gazing at her so doglike? The face of a goddamn golden retriever on a bag of kibble is what he looked like!

While passing Hogs Wild in Imperial Beach, Bobbie said, “The big porky one, Pate? He invited me for a drink at that place, I think it was.”

Fin said, “Figures. It’s the kinda joint where you can’t decide if the patrons were raised by apes or wolves.”

“What’ll the navy say about you doing police work on your day off?” Nell asked, abruptly.

“I don’t know,” Bobbie said, “but if I bring back the guys that stole the shoes, I think … well, it’s kinda weird to say, but I think they might be proud a me. I think I’d be proud.”

Fin said, “You’d have a right to be proud.”

“For chrissake!” Nell said to the roof of the Audi.

“It’d be a very big arrest for me,” Bobbie said. “Maybe not for you guys.”

“It would be,” Fin said. “Those people murdered that little kid, as far as I’m concerned.”

That made Nell shut up. No matter what she felt about Fin mooing like a calf over this girl, there was still that at the bottom of the whole business. They were trying to bring to justice some people who had directly or indirectly caused the death of a man and a child. She had to keep that in mind.

Abel and Shelby arrived at Green Earth in Abel’s Chevy Nova long before the Saturday overtime crew had punched out. All the workers knew that the only reason they were getting the chance for overtime pay was because the boss had sold the business and had to get everything in order, even if it meant working the crew on Saturdays.

As Shelby Pate put it to Abel, “That cheesy prick pays overtime about as often as my old lady does my knob, and that bitch ain’t gave me some knobbin since she told me she wants a firm commitment. I’m all faced at the time and I go, ‘You want a commitment? Buy a vibrator, bitch.’ See, the problem is, my old lady don’t do meth. In fact, she don’t do no drugs at all. You’d think she’d understand that a mixed marriage won’t work.”

Abel smiled, but didn’t get it. He said, “We find good restaurant to eat tonight, Buey. We go to reech people’s restaurant.”

“It don’t have to be a joint with ice cubes in the urinal,” Shelby assured him. “Jist so it’s clean and they ain’t feedin us Mexican roadrunners and sayin it’s rabbit.”

“We find good place. I ask Soltero.”

“I’m gonna feel a lot better about meetin up with that dude when I got my little twenny-five-caliber pal in my boot,” Shelby said, and headed for the locker room, leaving Abel outside to chat with the overtime haulers.

After making sure no one was in the room Shelby unlocked the metal locker and reached up to the top shelf for the derringer, formerly owned by a Green Earth employee who’d been murdered by persons unknown in the Los Angeles riot during a visit to his aunt. When it had come time to clean out the dead man’s locker and gather up his belongings, Shelby had taken the opportunity to steal the derringer, which was the only thing the hauler had that was worth stealing.

When Shelby came back out to the yard he whistled for Abel, and while they walked toward Abel’s Chevy, Shelby said, “On’y thing that dead nigger did right was leave his derringer behind. Never yet met one a them North American porch monkeys that didn’t have a hideout gun handy.”

“We go to T.J. now?” Abel asked, hoping the ox had enough meth to last him. He didn’t want to buy drugs in Tijuana.

“We’re outta here, dude,” Shelby Pate said.

“Hold it!” Bobbie said, as Nell was getting ready to pull into the parking lot at Green Earth Hauling and Disposal.

“What is it?” Fin asked.

“That Chevy that pulled out down the block there? Follow that car!” Bobbie said.

Nell said, “Where’d you see that movie? Follow that car?”

“It’s them!” Bobbie said. “Pate and Durazo!”

“How can you tell from here?” Nell asked, but she accelerated and followed the brown Chevrolet.

“You sure?” Fin asked, as the car turned west toward I-5.

“I got twenty-fifteen eyesight,” Bobbie said.

“Trust her,” Fin said to Nell, and his head got jerked backward when Nell floored the Audi.

“Hey!” he said.

“Trust me,” Nell said. “I’m driving.”

After Nell got her temper and the Audi under control, Bobbie said, “Can I make a suggestion? How about we don’t stop them. Let’s see where they go.”

“You’re thinking of the shoes,” Fin said.

“Two thousand pairs. They’re worth a lot to the navy. Those dudes might lead us right to them.”

“They’re probably just going to some beer joint,” Nell said. “Following them is a waste of … oh-oh!”

Abel Durazo’s Chevrolet turned onto the freeway, heading south toward Mexico.

Nell had to hit the brakes when a Lexus cut her off at the on-ramp. “Bastard!” she said, then zoomed up to his bumper.

“You always drive like this?” Fin wanted to know.

The fact was, she didn’t. She was a careful driver, proud of the fact that she’d never been in an accident, not even as a cop. Nell realized how unreasonably steamed she was. She was not going to let this neurotic actor and this child do this to her, so she slowed down.

Abel Durazo’s brown Chevrolet was five minutes from the international border when Nell got close again. “I don’t think this is smart,” Nell said.

“Please, Nell!” Bobbie said. “Let’s tail ’em across. They gotta be going straight to the guy that fenced the shoes.”

Fin said, “This isn’t like in San Diego, Bobbie. It’s not possible to ring up the local constabulary and say come arrest our suspects and confiscate our shoes. That’s another country.”

“This is the point of no return,” Nell warned when she got to the last turnoff on I-5 south.

“Go for it, Nell!” Bobbie pleaded.

“I say that’s a good call,” Fin said, and Nell saw him aim another one of those simpering smiles at Bobbie.

“Good call,” Nell muttered, dropping behind a Toyota Corolla that was in the same lane as Abel Durazo’s Chevy, just as it crossed the international line.

The instant they were on Mexican soil, Shelby reached down inside his left boot and withdrew a bindle of meth. Abel glanced over nervously when the ox unfolded the paper and snorted the meth into both nostrils. Then he licked the paper.

“Wanna try some cringe?” Shelby asked.

“No, I don’ wan’ that stuff. Leetle marijuana good for you. No’ that speed. Bad, ‘mano.”

“Thing it does for me is, it makes me harder than a tax return. I could do the Sisters of Mary or the whole Mustang Ranch when I got some go-fast in me. So you better find us some babes tonight.”

“I try,” Abel said.

“It’s my old lady’s fault,” Shelby said. “That bitch could douche with battery acid and never feel it. Cold. She’s cold, man. She says she wants a baby! I says to her, ‘You’d end up with a frozen fetus.’ A womb or a tomb, in her case it’s all the same thing. She’s cold.”

Abel Durazo looked at his watch and said, “We going to park down by Frontón where they play the jai alai. We going to walk for leetle while. We going to be late.”

“Why?”

“I wan’ Soltero to wait. Let heem wait teel seex o’clock. We eemportant peoples too.”

Shelby was feeling the methamphetamine rush. He grinned and said, “You may end up bein glad I brought my little chrome-plated pal along.”

“Be careful, Buey. We een Mexico.”

“You don’t hafta remind me,” said the ox.

He looked with trepidation at the lanes of cars crawling along beside them, all heading into the center, some for a Saturday night on the town. Many of the Mexican cars had religious medals or good-luck amulets or rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirrors. This troubled Shelby. He didn’t want to admit it to Abel, but all those dangling charms and trinkets and religious symbols bothered him.

“Voodoo,” he finally said.

“Huh?”

“All that fuckin shit hangin from the mirrors. Like voodoo, dude. My bitch is a Catholic and she wears a medal and talks about Holy Ghosts and all that voodoo shit.”

In that Abel didn’t understand the ox most of the time, he just shrugged and smiled.

“This is the first time in my life I’ve driven to T.J. without buying Mexican car insurance,” Nell said.

“Most U.S. policies cover you twenty-five miles from the border,” Fin said.

“If something happens to this car …”

“It sure is a nice car,” Bobbie said. “For a while there everybody thought Audis were like Christine in the Stephen King movie. The car from hell that took off when you stepped on the brake.”

After Nell drove across the Tijuana River, Fin said, “They’re turning down Avenida Revolución.”

“Predictable,” Nell said with disgust. “They’re not going to see their fence. They’re going to a skin joint for a cheap night out.”

“We’ve come this far,” Bobbie said. “We can’t give up.”

Abel drove down Avenida Revolución and parked by the Palacio Frontón, the Tijuana landmark where jai alai players from Spain and Cuba join the Mexicans in the art of hurling hard rubber balls from wicker baskets lashed to their wrists. The Palacio was huge, with Moorish arches and a fountain in front near a statue of a jai alai player leaping in the air.

Abel had once tried explaining the game to the ox, but Shelby was a lot less interested in hearing about a goat-skin sphere that travels 180 m.p.h., than he was in knowing that he could wager on the men, like they were horses or greyhounds.

Abel was directed to a parking place by a kid in a Dodgers baseball cap, and after Abel parked, Shelby gave the boy five dollars, telling him to watch the car.

“We geev the boy too much,” Abel said.

“So what? We’re gonna be rich,” Shelby reminded him.

The Mexican kid then ran toward a Cadillac driven by an elderly American and waved the guy toward a parking space near Abel’s car.

Shelby Pate wondered if under that Dodgers cap the kid had ringworm.

Momentarily losing the Chevy in the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Avenida Revolución, Nell wheeled into the Frontón parking lot just to turn around. She practically ran over Abel Durazo, who had to jump out of her way!

“Kee-rist!” Fin said, turning his face away while Bobbie ducked down in the back seat.

“He didn’t recognize us!” Nell said, speeding toward the rear of the parking lot, ignoring the man who was trying to direct her.

The guy yelled something in Spanish, but after Nell parked, Fin jumped out and handed him ten dollars. The guy nodded and said, “Okay, okay,” and allowed the Audi to stay where it was.

The three investigators followed Abel and Shelby at a distance of half a block while the truckers strolled through the weekend throngs. The sun had begun its quick autumn descent, after which the city would come to life in all its vibrance.

Shelby stopped at one of the leather shops at the corner of Calle 5, to check the prices on bomber jackets.

“I make you good deal,” the shopkeeper said.

The shopkeeper was about Shelby’s age, with a barrel of a torso. He wore a fake Rolex and fake diamond rings on both hands, and had the thickest black hair Shelby had ever seen.

Shelby said to the guy, “I saw one back there in that other joint for fifty bucks less.”

“That ees no good leather. No good,” the shopkeeper said. “You like thees one? I sell to you, fifty dollar off the price. Okay?”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Shelby said, but the man followed him toward the sidewalk.

All the shops were wide open to the masses on the avenue, and when they were disappearing into the crowd, the man yelled, “Seventy-five dollar off the price!”

“Damn!” Shelby said to Abel. “That’s a good deal, ain’t it?”

Abel shook his head and said, “After we get money we go to good place for jacket. Don’ worry, Buey.”

“Kin we stop fer a tequila?” Shelby asked, looking at Abel’s wristwatch. “I’m goin shithouse waitin fer the fuckin little hand to get on the six.”

“Okay,” Abel said. “We got time.”

A man walked out of a saloon that had a glass-covered collection of photos on the door, pictures of curvy bikini-clad women dancing on a stage.

“Come!” he said, taking Shelby’s arm. “Good show here, amigo!”

Shelby turned to Abel and said, “Whaddaya think, dude?”

“Okay,” Abel said. “But lousy dancer. No good. Lousy.”

There was a large elevated stage in the center of the barroom, with twenty tables surrounding it. Booths lined two walls, and the third wall was taken up by a long bar. It was dark, dank, seedy and wet.

Shelby said, “Gud-damn, the fuckin floor’s covered with water jist like that street up there where Soltero’s momma lives. Ain’t there no plumbers in this fuckin town?”

The floor was so uneven that the puddles only settled on one side of the saloon, so Abel led Shelby through the darkness to the far side where exhausted-looking women in frumpy dresses tried to smile at passing male customers.

One of them looked at Shelby and patted the plastic bench next to her.

Shelby said to Abel, “These babes’re thrashed. I’d rather get cranked and jack off. That way I can have anyone I want instead a these bowsers, right?”

Abel said, “We go to good bar later.”

They took a seat at one of the tables next to the stage, where Abel had to shoo away two blowsy women. Shelby was busy looking at the redheaded “dancer” on the stage and didn’t pay attention when Abel ordered two double tequilas and two beers.

She wore hip-hugging black shorts, white cowboy boots, and a red tube top. Shelby figured she was forty, but Abel said she was no more than thirty. She was already forming serious cellulite, and up close, Shelby saw a surgical scar across her abdomen. It looked like someone had hand-troweled the pancake makeup onto her face.

Three times during the performance, she lifted the tube and showed Shelby her sagging tits. He stuck a dollar bill inside the waistband of her shorts every time she did it, and went “Wooooo!” ending in a giggling, high-pitched snuffle.

Her number consisted of sliding each foot six inches back and forth out of time to taped soft-rock music that Shelby couldn’t identify. After a thirty-minute set she shuffled off the stage and disappeared into a closet-sized dressing room.

Shelby slipped another bindle out of his boot and dropped his head below the stage level. When he came back up he downed a tequila and sucked the juice from a Mexican yellow lime protruding from his beer bottle.

Then he grinned and said, “My old lady got better hooters, but I bet that dancer’s a nicer person. Right now, I’ll settle fer anything wet and warm with a pulse.”

Abel looked at his watch, drank his tequila, and said, “We go now, Buey.”

Fin Finnegan got up from his stool at the opposite end of the long bar, put three dollars next to his glass, and followed the truckers out into the vanishing twilight.

Nell and Bobbie spotted the truckers and quickly turned their backs, examining a sidewalk display of black-velvet paintings: Madonna, Elvis and Batman. Nell picked up Batman and turned it toward the light inside the shop.

Abel and Shelby walked directly behind her, and she heard Shelby Pate say, “Know what, dude? This town ain’t half as grimy as L.A., and it’s gotta be a lot safer, right?”

Fin trotted up to Bobbie a few seconds later, saying, “Let’s give it no more than an hour. Okay?”

“Then what?” Bobbie asked, as Fin went scurrying after the truckers.

“Then we go home and we bust them Monday morning like responsible mature investigators,” Nell informed her.

Nell and Bobbie had to trot to keep up with Fin, who was threading his way through the early Saturday evening mob of U.S. teens and young adults who descend on Tijuana to get drunk, slam-dance in nightclubs, fight, bleed, vomit, and in general, have a wonderful time.