Moist

Nine

BOB GENTLY PLACED the arm in the cooler and closed the lid. Just then Morris came back from the lab with several pouches of viscera. Morris looked at the cooler.

“That the arm?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna miss that arm, man.”

Bob looked at Morris.

“Why?”

Morris shrugged.

“It has personality.”

Morris held up the pouches of tissue samples.

“These are ready to go, man.”

Bob took the bits in bags and plopped them into the other cooler.

“What do you want for lunch?”

Morris thought about it.

“Burritos.”

“We had burritos the other day.”

“Burgers.”

Bob nodded. It wasn’t his idea of a healthy lunch but at least it was different. They almost always had burritos.

“See you later.”

Bob took the portable coolers and walked out of the room. Morris smiled. He went immediately to the computer. His thumb stomped down on the space bar, waking the computer from its digital dreams. Morris stretched, cracked his knuckles, and focused. It would take all of his concentration to master the seventh level of Tetris.

Martin continued to talk Esteban’s ear off. Something about building a hotel near Mazatlán. Something about a swimming pool that had no edge so you thought you were in the ocean. Esteban didn’t know what an edgeless swimming pool was and he didn’t really care. His mind kept returning to the blow job administered by Lupe last night. God, could that girl suck. Martin talked about Mazatlán making a comeback. The largest shrimp port in North America was being rediscovered as a tourist mecca by thousands of drunk, topless college kids. Esteban was getting annoyed; he hadn’t come this far to go to Mazatlán and open a fucking resort. Try building something in Mexico? The corruption alone would kill you. Yet Martin yammered on about keeping liquidity overseas, numbered offshore accounts in Barbados, and the relative value of real estate in Costa Rica. It was all about leaving the country. Esteban had killed, literally, to come here, so why the fuck would he want to leave?

He perked up when he saw Bob loading the coolers in the back of the black VW Golf with the United Pathology logo on the side. Esteban noticed another sign, one that said Human Blood in the window of the little car. Also, Driver Carries No Cash on the door. Human blood? What the fuck did they do with that? Martin realized that something was happening.

“That our guy?”

Esteban nodded and started the engine. He watched as Bob climbed into the car and started it up. When Bob turned out of the driveway and drove off down the street, Esteban followed. It was like the old days.

He still knew how to do it. It was easy enough. Esteban remembered when he was first starting out, they’d rear-end a tasty-looking car, usually with a single female inside, then they’d jump out acting all concerned and before anyone knew what hit them, both cars would be gone. A little body work on the stolen car’s bumper, a fresh coat of paint, you’d have a new car. Let the cops scour the countryside for that red BMW with a dent. He had a black Beemer without a scratch for sale. Those stolen cars turned out to be seed money for all kinds of things: marijuana, heroin, prostitutes, cheap weapons from Brazil and Italy. Esteban had built an empire off those early carjackings. And, being a smart businessman, he kept on dealing in stolen cars. Only now they chopped them up for parts, the parts being more valuable than the whole car. It was a good business. His “core profit center” or something. That’s what Martin called it.

Bob turned up the radio. Normally he listened to an alternative-rock station, but today he was feeling a little out of sorts. He switched over to an R&B oldies station and let the Reverend Al Green speak to him. Smooth, soulful, reassuring. Life has its ups and downs. That’s life. Love is sweet and bitter, pain and pleasure in equal parts. That is just the way it is, and at the end of the day, it’s all good. Bob understood the truth that Reverend Green was speaking. Intellectually he could grasp it, deal with it. But his guts were churning. Not with anger or hatred or that nauseating feeling you get when you’ve been betrayed. It was something else. Disappointment.

He was disappointed in Maura. Bob had hoped that she was, for want of a better word, the one. The girl that he would marry and have kids with. He knew it was old-fashioned, but Bob really wanted the domestic life that had eluded him since he was nine years old and his parents bickered, and argued, and fought, and finally divorced. He wanted the picket fence, the two kids, the station wagon, and the dog.

Marvin Gaye came on the radio and did his best to infuse Bob with a little optimism. His spirits lifted. “Sexual healing.” There was an idea. A prescription. A course of therapy that Bob could get behind. Because, despite his disappointment, and despite the utter drag of having to split up possessions and move, this was starting to feel like a step in the right direction. An opportunity. A good thing.

A woman in the street caught Bob’s eye. She had blond hair stuck up in a ponytail, green capri pants, a white shirt, and black sandals with orangey red toenails. She was slim but not skinny, not a creepy stick; she was nicely proportioned. Would Bob miss those huge heaving tits of Maura’s? Yeah. But, hey, man, life goes on. You can’t spend your time pining for someone who doesn’t want you. The woman in the green capri pants was looking pretty fucking sweet. Sweet enough to distract him momentarily from his quest for a voluptuous Latina.

Bob was still musing about the blonde when his car suddenly lurched violently. He’d been hit.

“Fuck!”

Bob looked in the rearview mirror and saw two big Mexican-looking dudes climb out of a new Mercedes sedan.

Bob turned on his hazard blinker thing and got out. One of the Mexicans, a big one with dark eyes and what looked like a toupee, came up to him, concerned.

“Señor? Are you okay?”

Martin didn’t like driving Esteban’s Mercedes. The thought that the touch of a switch, or in the case of an attempted car theft, the nontouch of a switch, could send a sharpened stainless steel shaft right up his ass was just too much. It gave Martin the creeps. It wasn’t just unnerving, it was barbaric and unnecessary. Still, when Esteban told him to get behind the wheel and keep the engine running, Martin didn’t argue. He did what he was told.

Martin watched as Norberto and Esteban approached the poor fucker in the delivery car. The two men feigned concern for about a heatbeat, then… Norberto clobbered the guy. Whacked him upside the head with something hard. The guy hit the ground like a big bag of shit. Esteban and Norberto scooped him up and threw him in the trunk of the delivery car. Norberto hopped in the car, Esteban came quickly around to the passenger side of the Benz, and away they went. The whole thing took about fifteen seconds.

Bob regained consciousness in the trunk of a car. A lump about the size of a Ping-Pong ball was swollen and throbbing just behind his ear. What the fuck had happened? One minute he’s talking to these guys and then… Bob remembered he’d been rear-ended. He’d obviously been hurt; maybe they were taking him to the hospital. Bob considered that, but it seemed far-fetched, weird even. You wouldn’t throw a hurt guy in the trunk. You’d call an ambulance or put him in the backseat or something. No, he probably wasn’t on his way to the hospital.

Norberto drove the Golf. He let Esteban’s Mercedes whip past him and lead the way. A disco beat was softly pumping on the radio. Norberto turned it up. Although normalmente he preferred salsa, he thought the old-school disco was muy curado. Girls liked it and Norberto was savvy enough to appreciate whatever drove girls to get up off their butts and shake their bodies. Norberto liked the song that was playing. I will survive. That’s me, he thought. Not only will I survive, cabrón, but now that I’ve shown Esteban that I am loyal, I will prosper.

Esteban felt a dull pain in his lower back. Carajo. He used to be able to chuck a jodido pendejo like this gringo into the trunk without even breaking a sweat. Now he felt like he’d thrown out his back. And Martin. He wouldn’t shut up.

Esteban wondered how this happened. How did everything turn to gazpacho? Then he remembered, Amado. Fucking Amado fucking up. Well, he wouldn’t be fucking up for much longer, would he? He would miss him. Amado was a good gangster. A gangster’s gangster in some ways. But he’d fucked up. Left his arm at the scene of a crime and endangered the entire family. He had to be dealt with.

Esteban’s plan was simple: kill Bob, kill Amado, and burn the evidence. Hell, maybe burn everyone up in a car. Take it out to the desert or up Angeles Crest, light it up, and push it off a cliff. Let the forensic pathologists sift through the ashes for some evidence.

Martin was frustrated. Sometimes these fucking mobsters were so thick. There’s a problem, you kill everyone. What kind of logic was that? Were those corporate guidelines? Was that any way to run a business? Martin didn’t like the idea of murder. It seemed extreme to him. He really didn’t like the idea of being prosecuted as an accessory to murder if they were somehow busted.

He tried to calm himself as he rolled a jumbo. His hands were shaking, making the process more difficult. Why did everything have to be so hard? They didn’t need to waste the delivery guy just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Martin wanted to convince Esteban that they needed the guy in the trunk. They couldn’t just whack him and dump his body, then the cops would know that something was up. They’d know that the evidence had been tampered with and they’d start nosing around until they found something. Esteban’s point was that they wouldn’t have the evidence so… they could go fuck themselves.

Martin got the cigarette paper to stick, and fired up. He held a massive hit in his lungs until they burned and he could feel the air pressure behind his eyes begin to drop. He exhaled a plume of smoke and felt his muscles go lax. Then it came to him.

Martin suddenly realized that what they needed to do was find another arm, switch it with Amado’s, and have the guy make the delivery like he normally would. It was crazy. But it was clean. Nothing would be suspect. They would get away with it. How they could convince the guy to do it was another story.

He pitched the idea to Esteban. Esteban told him he was full of shit. He didn’t trust the delivery guy, and why should he. They’d send the guy in to Parker Center and next thing they know, they’d be in a lineup. Besides, where would they get another arm? Esteban thought Martin’s plan was tonto, and he didn’t have time for that. Esteban always switched to Spanish when he was annoyed with Martin.

Martin considered it; perhaps Esteban was right. Kill the guy, burn the arm, end of story. But what if they could find an arm easily? Then they could figure something out. Maybe pay the fucking guy. Leverage him somehow. He made, what? Not that much. Slide him ten grand, he delivers the new arm, and call it even. Martin realized he was expending a lot of nervous energy trying to keep the delivery guy from getting whacked. He had his reasons. Bad karma being one.

Don came to work as he always did, walking into the Criminal Intelligence Division with his double cappuccino with nonfat soy milk extra foam, a copy of the Los Angeles Times tucked under his arm. Only today there was something different about Don. He always had a spring in his step, but today he had just a little more bounce than usual. He stopped at the little makeshift coffee bar and did something he never did. He took a Krispy Kreme doughnut out of a box. He bit into it and was surprised at how good it tasted. Sweet and yeasty. No wonder they were always lying around the station. Cops love doughnuts and Don loved being a cop.

Don sat down at his desk, licked the sugar glaze off his fingers, and shuffled some papers around. A middle-aged and thick man with dark brown skin and Central American features sat down at the next desk. A plaque indicated that he was Detective Sergeant Flores. Flores noticed the flakes of sugar on Don’s desk.

“I thought you didn’t eat that shit.”

“I eat all kinds of shit.”

“That’s what happens when you start kissin’ ass. You eat all kinds of shit.”

Ah. Wisdom. Don didn’t respond. He could’ve said something about Flores being known as the biggest ass-kisser in the department, or Flores constantly flaunting the fact that he was a Latino, using the race card to get promotions. But Don didn’t want to start a ruckus, he wasn’t going to let office politics ruin his day. So he changed the subject by getting down to business.

“That arm here yet?”

“The loose limb?”

“Yeah.”

Flores looked at some papers as if the answer to Don’s question was printed on them.

“Not yet.”

“Got an ETA?”

Flores shook his head.

“Sometime today.”

Don nodded. That was good. It gave him time to do some paperwork. Don prided himself on his paperwork. He’d seen too many crumbs get off because of some technicality in the way the forms were filled in. Like that fucking mattered. Some guy drives by your house and opens fire with a machine gun. He freely admits that he did it. But then the judge lets him off because some retard fills out the form wrong? It pissed Don off. So he had trained himself to be ferociously anal when doing paperwork. When he took somebody down, they were going down and staying down.

Max Larga stirred the wire whisk around quickly, attempting to get as much air into the egg whites as possible. They needed to be stiff, but not rigid, to add the right amount of fluff. He needed to keep it simple, something that anyone could do. Simplicity was the key to writing a good cookbook. It was one thing to describe, in excruciating minutiae, a rigorous and demanding sequence of complex tasks, but that kind of writing didn’t sell cookbooks. In fact, that kind of writing was the problem with his last two cookbooks. It scared people away. His editor had jokingly referred to him as the James Joyce of cookbook authors as he dropped Larga’s latest book from the release schedule.

Larga had reacted by decrying his readership as philistines. But the truth, and it just burned him up, was that people preferred Martha Stewart and her quick-and-easy gourmet recipes. Martha called it simple elegance. Larga laughed bitterly at that. What did the average housewife in Connecticut or New Jersey know about elegance? He’d been around the world. Eaten in the finest restaurants in Europe. Sampled every edible concoction known to man. He’d even ordered the weird dish where they press a roast duck through a device more commonly used to juice apples and serve what comes gushing out in a little silver cup. Now, that was elegant.

He checked his notes. He’d gotten this recipe from a friend, a famous chef, because those were the only friends worth having. Friends who would treat you like royalty and suck up to you with expensive wines and fabulous food. Friends who would make you feel special, part of an inner circle of people who were in the know. In return, all Larga had to do was drop a mention of the chef or the restaurant, to illustrate a point, in his weekly column.

Larga checked the mascarpone. It was room temperature, perfect to mix with the egg whites. He worried about whether this ingredient was too exotic. Would this recipe get cut out with a simple “You can’t get that in Kansas City”? He shrugged, knowing he’d burn that bridge when he got to it. Right now he just wanted to see if his simplified version would be edible. That and he had to get ready to see his masturbation coach that afternoon.

Norberto hated the safe house. He avoided staying there for any stretch of time and only came out when he had to. Not that it was uncomfortable. On the contrary, it was a model suburban home furnished with an entire suite of Ethan Allen furniture, everything bought and delivered at once, a kind of instant house. But Norberto didn’t like sitting on the chairs or sleeping in the beds. He was never relaxed in the house because it all seemed so unreal, like a dream house. Every Mexican’s dream of life in El Norte, only fake.

It was in a section of the Valley considered to be nice and safe. But Norberto didn’t feel safe in Encino. He felt that he stuck out too much around all of the upper-middle-class white people in their SUVs, with their two kids and their big dogs. Like he and Amado were a couple of flies on a big dish of vanilla ice cream. But even if he felt uncomfortable, the neighbors were friendly. They stopped by to say hello, always asking what Norberto had been doing, where they’d gone, etc. Was it nosy or normal? Norberto didn’t know. He was always circumspect, sticking to the story Esteban had given him. He and Amado were cousins, they owned a papaya ranch near Guadalajara, they traveled all over the United States trying to convince people that Mexican papayas were superior to Hawaiian.

The last thing Norberto ever wanted to be was some kind of fucking fruit salesman. But that was the cover story and so that’s what he was when he was at the house. Mr. Mexican Papaya. Carajo. He hated it. But Esteban insisted that it was the best place to stash the large amounts of drugs, and then later, the huge amounts of cash that kept them living the life. Sometimes they’d let someone, an affiliate from out of town, stay there, but they’d never kidnapped someone and brought him here. What would the neighbors say if they heard screaming?

Bob felt the car stop, the engine turn off. He heard the door open and close. He braced himself. What the fuck was going on? Then he heard a garage door being closed. Then… nothing. They were just leaving him in the trunk. And man, did he have to pee.

Esteban entered the safe house. He smiled broadly. Clean, ordered, plush. This house was why thousands of hardworking and honest people risked their lives crossing the border to come to America. This was the goal. This was the Alhambra. Esteban had moved on from this slice of suburban heaven, but he still appreciated its power. The American Dream as potent as ever.

He turned to Martin.

“Get me a fucking Tylenol and then tell me again why I shouldn’t kill the driver.”

Martin walked into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of Tylenol and a glass of water while Esteban gingerly, a sharp pain racing up and down his spine, stretched himself out on the couch. Martin handed the pills and glass to Esteban.

“Because we need him.”

“For what?”

“If the police suspect that the evidence has been tampered with they’ll mount a full-scale fuck-fest on us.”

“But, cabrón, that’s what they’re trying to do now.”

Esteban didn’t understand why the kid didn’t get it. He wasn’t asking the kid to kill the driver, Norberto would be happy to do it, so what was the problem? Why the sudden lack of cojones?

Esteban took the Tylenol and lay back on the couch. It occurred to Esteban that perhaps Martin was right. His plan was weird. Raro. But maybe that’s what they needed. If they could swap arms, make everything seem normal, then the heat would be off. But where would they find another arm? Esteban’s back began to throb.

“Go get the arm, let’s look at it.”

Bob was sweating. It was stuffy and hot in the trunk. Rivulets of perspiration were running off his head, filling his ears, dripping off his neck, soaking his shirt, causing his pants to stick to his legs. Even his fucking toes were wet with perspiration. Bob was sweating the death sweat. Cold fear delivering a weird fever to his body. Adrenal glands pumping overtime, heart pounding, a full-blown pedal-to-the-metal panic attack. Bob was sure that they’d thought he was dead. Killed by the knock to the head. They were going to leave him here to rot until the smell and sheer volume of flies alerted some good Samaritan or the mailman. Then the cops would break into the garage, pop the trunk, and find his withered and rotting carcass.

They might even think it was some bizarre suicide. Distraught over his breakup with Maura he drove to a secluded garage and locked himself in the trunk.

So he was surprised and relieved and scared shitless when he heard the garage door open. Then he heard a voice say, “Dude, we’re going to open the trunk. We have guns. Stay perfectly still or we’ll fucking toast you.”

Bob nodded. Then realized he needed to talk. His voice croaked.

“Okay.”

The trunk popped open quickly. Bob blinked. There they were. The two Mexican-looking guys who’d rear-ended him. Behind them a white guy about his age.

“Get out. Slow.”

Bob decided to reason with them as he climbed gingerly out of the trunk.

“Listen. Guys. It’s not my car. I don’t care about the dent.”

The young Mexican with the ponytail stuck a gun in Bob’s face.

“Don’t talk.”

The older one looked in the trunk at the two coolers. He turned to Bob. Bob couldn’t look in the man’s eyes. They were scary.

“Is the arm in the cooler?”

This caught Bob completely off guard.

“Arm? What arm?”

The older, scary Mexican punched Bob hard in the stomach. Bob doubled over, unable to breathe, feeling like his balls had just been shot out of a cannon.

“The arm you’re delivering to Parker Center.”

Oh.

Bob nodded at one of the coolers. The white guy looked at Bob sympathetically.

“Try to stand up, you’ll get your wind back faster.”

Bob nodded and tried. He was starting to see spots and floaters in his vision. He thought he might black out. But then short, painful spurts of breathing began. First in the top of his lungs, then slowly working their way down until he was almost breathing normally. Bob noticed that the lump on his head was throbbing again.

“Can I get an aspirin?”

The white guy nodded.

“There’s some Tylenol inside.”

The Mexican with the ponytail grabbed Bob’s arm and began to lead him into what looked like his parents’ house.

Maura entered her office and went right to the message machine. She played the messages and was disappointed that Bob hadn’t called. Maybe he was just playing a game with her, messing with her head a little. She knew that sometimes he just said stuff to get a reaction. But he’d seemed different this morning. Resolute. If Bob, the most liquid and malleable of personalities, could ever be called resolute. She smiled a little. Maybe her doing this was forcing Bob to grow up. Perhaps there was hope for him after all. She realized that she was ambivalent about leaving him. She didn’t really find his cock disgusting. She was just tired of him waving it in her face. She wanted him to be more sensitive. To listen to her. Was that asking too much?