Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty Read Free Book Online

Land Rover.
    “Now what?” Pedro asked, his face ashen, his eyes exhausted.
    “We continue on like nothing happened,” I said.
    “How can we just go on?” Francisco muttered.
    He was cold, trembling. I put my arm around him. Poor kid. He’d lost about seven years. Thirteen again. Now I wasn’t the next privileged chiquita in line for his attentions, now I was his way-too-young mother comforting him on the dirt floor of some Managuan shanty.
    “It’s going to be ok,” I said.
    He nodded and tried to believe it. And then he turned and looked at me. “What about you, are you ok?” he asked.
    I hadn’t thought about it.
    I wanted to fall down, I wanted to scald my body, turn it inside out. He had touched my hair, between my breasts, my legs.
    “I don’t know. . . . I think so.”
    “Did, did they?”
    “No.”
    He nodded and stared at the yellow sand spiraling around his shoes. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “It’s ok. We’re alive and in one piece,” I said.
    It was one of Hector’s lines. We’re alive and in one piece and we’re not in a DGI dungeon.
    Francisco frowned, said nothing. He was a bit fucked up, but really it didn’t matter if Francisco was fucked or not. Pedro was the one we needed. He knew the way.
    I walked to him. He had stopped throwing up. He was trying to light another cigarette. I cupped the match and helped him.
    He inhaled, coughed, inhaled again.
    “Ok, Pedro, tell me the story, what were you supposed to do? What was the original plan?”
    But he was too shaken and couldn’t yet manage an answer.
    With the patience of Saint Che I gave him two minutes to drain the cigarette and then repeated the question.
    “I-I’m supposed to drive you up through New Mexico. We meet the 25 and then we stop at a motel we use in Trinidad, Colorado.”
    “How long will that take?”
    “I don’t know, ten hours.”
    Could I keep my breakdown away for ten hours? I’d have to. I took the keys from his hand, lit him another cigarette, opened the driver’s-side door of the Land Rover, reached across the seat, and turned the ignition.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “Ten hours,
hermano
. We’d better get moving.”

CHAPTER 3

HABANA VIEJA

     
     
     
    T
ears. Tears at the rise of the moon. Tears under a starless sky. Tears down my pale cheeks while Death busses tables in the restaurant.
    I sip the mojito, stare at the busboy, and shake my head.
    That’s a guilty man if ever I saw one. Hector’s right. The baby’s dead.
    I dab my face with a cocktail napkin and shake the glass. The ice melts a little.
    It is, as my mother would say, a close night. Every night for her is close. Way back her family is supposed to be from Galicia, which means, she says, that she is a martyr to the heat.
    “What are you doing over there?” Hector asks in my earpiece. His voice is mock serious, sonorous, gruff. He talks like someone from the provinces who has tried hard to lose the accent, which, of course, he has. “Come on, Mercado, we don’t have all night,” he adds. You can hear the twang of Santiago in some of his vowels, but the way he enunciates is more Castilian Spanish than anything else. I know he watches a lot of illegal U.S. and European DVDs; maybe he’s picked that up from them.
    I raise the Chinese cell phone, which I’ve switched to walkie-talkie mode.
    “Take it easy, Hector, I’m having a drink,” I tell him.
    “Did you make the arrest?”
    “What does it look like?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Father my babies, Hector. They’ll be ugly sons of bitches, but with that big brain of yours I’m sure they’ll go far,” I say into the mouthpiece.
    He doesn’t respond.
    A kid comes to the rail. Normally you don’t see beggars in the Vieja because the CDR goons will chase them away with baseball bats. Whores aplenty but not beggars, because pimps have dollars to kick back. The CDR is something between a police auxiliary and a neighborhood watch. Real cops hate them because