Where the dead lay

SIXTEEN

Hector Nogero was in the den behind locked doors stacking “peas” and spinner baskets and considering his suerte. The last three months had been brilliant. He was making so much money he’d brought his father up from Chamelecon. With an introduction by letter from his uncle, who was in prison for gang activity in Honduras, Hector had taken title to the house on Traub from a man for close to nothing. Foreclosure proceedings had begun on the property, which was why the man had sold cheap, but Hector had earned more than enough to pay off the note and back taxes before the marshals would return to seize the place in the coming weeks. Four or five “shakes” a day, with a house full of paying customers playing at least one number if not dozens, and his only expenses were a bouncer, a pretty “shake girl” to pull in players and conduct the drawings, and a cut for MS-13 for his permiso to operate. He was like the fucking loteria. Even now he had a living room full of them, chilling, drinking a coffee, a beer, watching a race or a few innings of beisbol, and handing over their whole paychecks hoping to win a three or four number combination that would pay a few thousand. Soon he’d buy the electronic ticket machines and video surveillance cameras. He had his son with him, too-Chaco had come on the plane with his father. Hector looked over at Chaco, playing on the floor with some of the peas, which were actually plastic balls. He’d heard they used to use dried peas with numbers written on them back in the old days, when the game was invented, and that’s why it was called “pea shake.” But now the world was plastic.

When the summer ended he would send Chaco to American preschool. By the time he was four, he’d speak perfect English.

“?Estas bien?” Hector asked Chaco as he unlocked the door and exited the den. Chaco nodded several times. “?Estas cansado?” Hector asked. This time Chaco shook his head, and Hector pulled the door shut behind him. On his way to the front parlor, where the sounds of many voices told him he had a full house of customers, he glanced down the hall toward the back door. His father was headed in that direction.

“?Que haces, viejo?” Hector called out. Then he heard a tapping at the back door.

“?Quien es?” his father said, reaching for the doorknob.

“?No, papa!” Hector called as his father swung the door open and he saw the three men. His father tried to push the door closed, but it blasted open and the first man stepped in. He brought down a black cylinder on top of his father’s head with a crack. The old man crumpled to the ground.

“Austin!” Hector yelled. His bouncer appeared in the living room doorway. He was big, filling the frame, but the man who had dropped his father was almost as big, and harder. The two men behind him-one young and wild looking, the other older and bad-were no joke either. They were all inside now. The first one advanced, his face speckled with the blood of Hector’s father; he could now see that the black cylinder was a metal flashlight, raised to strike. In his last glance back, Hector saw Austin, the fucking maricon American bouncer everyone told him he needed to hire to make a smooth transition into the neighborhood, run back for the living room. And out the door after that, Hector realized with a sinking feeling. Hector turned and lunged at the man who had hit his father, punching him in the jaw. The man’s head turned briefly to the side then back forward, his eyes filled with rage. Hector was only a meter sixty-two, his weight under seventy kilos; how much damage could he have hoped for?

Hector felt himself fly into the wall, and then he felt the pain behind his ear. Somehow he knew this must’ve been backward and that the flashlight hit was first, the throw second. Before Hector could fall to the ground, the man had him by the neck, had twisted his head sideways and encircled it with an arm. It wasn’t exactly a headlock, nor was it a chokehold. He’d have to call it a neck-break half applied. The top of his head was wedged into the man’s trunk, his spine arching. He stood up on his toes and tried desperately to keep his balance. He felt the man’s forearm crushing into his jaw. His rear teeth crumbled against one another as he was dragged into the front room.

“Shake’s over, motherfuckers,” Kenny Schlegel screamed, dinging the person nearest him, a middle-aged black woman smoking a menthol, on her upper back with his length of pipe.

“Oh, lord,” she said, going down; as it was a glancing blow, she then managed to scramble away on all fours.

Knute followed Kenny into the room and used his aluminum bat to obliterate a flat-screen showing a harness race. Then he rang the bat off shins and elbows until a half-dozen would-be pea-shake players were hopping and squirming.

“What the fuck?” said a skinny blonde, in a miniskirt and heavy makeup-the “shake hostess”-as she emerged from the kitchen, holding a cup of coffee.

“Shut up, skank,” Charlie said, pointing to the wall where most of the patrons huddled. “Get over there with them.”

“Why should I? Who the fuck are you?” she screeched. Kenny approached her, pointing the end of his pipe in her face.

“Shut up and get over there before I kick you in the cunt,” he bellowed.

“Fuck off, tough guy-,” she started. Kenny swung his rear leg forward in a vicious up-kick that caught her where her legs met under her brief miniskirt. “Oof,” she said, going down, rolling and writhing, coffee spilling all over her.

“What the fuck did I tell you?” Kenny loomed over her.

“Oahhh, oahhhh,” she went on and on, curled into a ball.

Knute and Charlie exchanged a look, wondering if the kid, his blood up, was going to cave in her skull with the pipe.

“Take… the… money,” Hector grunted, barely able to move his mouth. He held up a thick, dirty wad of bills from his pants pocket.

“Shut up,” Charlie said, taking it, stuffing it in his own pocket, and racking him in the head with the flashlight. Then he turned to the assembled players, perhaps thirty people, frozen in front of him.

“Who said you could pea shake here?” Charlie asked them. He punctuated his words with raps to the face and head of the smallish man he held. “Who said you could shake with this little dirt-bag spic?” Charlie strutted around feeling like a WWE wrestler, and he considered whether he should bash the man’s head into something, or if that was too flashy. “Well?” he asked. There was a bulky, tough-looking Latino with ink creeping up out of his shirt collar standing near the door who wasn’t cowering properly. Knute caught it at the same time.

“Door,” Knute said.

“Got it. What the fuck are you thinking, bro?” Charlie screamed, advancing toward the bulky Latino, whacking his captive again and lifting his shirt to reveal the butt of his pistol. “See that door, motherfucker? Use it. And none of you ever use it again once you’re gone. This place is not authorized. You fucking get it?”

There was a moment’s pause as the gamblers wondered if their release was the truth or some horrible joke.

Kenny flicked open a Zippo with a metallic clink and waved the flame at them. “It’s that or we lock it and burn this shit hole to the ground.”

The bulky Latino acted first, hurtling out through the door and into the night. The rest followed, keeping wary eyes on their attackers but receiving boots in the asses and backs and shots across the shoulders all the same. Even the pea-shake girl, dragging herself along like a car-hit dog, made it out. Soon the room was empty and quiet save for the sound of engines starting and tires screeching.

Charlie straightened Hector up by the head and spoke directly into his face. “I don’t want to fucking see you here again, comprende?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Charlie nodded to Kenny, who swung the pipe across Hector’s stomach like he was lashing a double into the gap. Charlie let the man collapse.

Charlie, Kenny, and Knute sauntered down the hall the way they had come. They stepped over the body of the wiry old man, who hadn’t moved an inch. They went out to the car. Charlie hit the auto-lock button on his extra key and they got in.

“Let’s go to the bar,” Charlie said.

Inside, on the floor, Hector heard the car drive away. After a while he rolled over onto his back and felt around his ribs and organs. Nothing seemed broken. Eventually he got up on all fours, spat out blood and a gritty dust that was his molars, then made it to his feet. One advantage of being his size and growing up in the streets was that he’d gotten used to taking a lot of punishment over the years. He went down the hall and shook his head at the sight of his father lying there in a pool of blood. He couldn’t call 911. They’d all be arrested and deported if he did.

“Vamonos, Chaco,” he called out, opening the door to the den. “?Rapido!” Chaco emerged from a low cabinet along the floor where he’d been hiding. The boy’s eyes were huge, but he didn’t say a word, and he followed as Hector lifted his father and carried him out to the car.

Mierda, Hector thought, now I have to get a gun.