Angel Baby: A Novel (18 page)

“Okay,” the guy says. “Come.”

He trails behind Malone as they walk to the porch. Luz is lying on her back with her eyes closed. The woman is crouched beside her. She reaches out to nudge Luz as if trying to wake someone who’s fallen asleep.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey.”

Malone goes down on one knee next to her.

“What happened?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” the woman says. “She fainted.”

Malone can see that Luz is breathing, her chest expanding and contracting regularly. He lays a hand on her upper arm and gently squeezes it.

“Luz,” he says. “Can you hear me?”

Her eyes flutter, then open. She inhales sharply upon seeing everyone staring down at her, and a sudden spasm of fear curls her into a ball. In the next instant, however, she seems to remember where she is and relaxes a bit.

“You passed out or something,” Malone says. “Are you okay?”

Her reply is a desolate moan.

“They took Isabel,” she says.

Malone looks to the woman for confirmation. She nods curtly, her expression grim.

“Fuck,” Malone blurts, raising a hand to his forehead. He’s at a loss about what to do next. “What’s your name?” he says to the woman. “You’re her aunt, right?” Turning to the man, he says, “Can I take her inside?”

The man and woman exchange looks, and the woman stands and opens the door wider.

“Only for a minute,” she says. “We have children.”

“Can you walk?” Malone asks Luz.

He can’t make out whatever it is she murmurs, so he slips one arm under her knees and one under her shoulders and lifts her from the porch.

Inside the house he lays her on a couch in the living room. She’s shaking all over. The man closes the door and stands in front of it, shotgun pointed at the floor. The woman watches Malone and Luz warily.

“I’m Kevin,” Malone says, trying to put her at ease.

She ignores his outstretched hand. “I’m Carmen. This my husband, Bernardo.”

Bernardo, a short, burly man wearing paint-stained coveralls and work boots, doesn’t acknowledge Malone’s nod in his direction.

A little girl sneaks into the living room and stands against the wall. She’s hoping not to be noticed, but Malone points her out to Carmen, who says, “Back to your room.”

“Where’s Isabel?” the girl asks.

“To your room!
Ahora!
” Bernardo shouts.

Frustrated, the girl stomps off down the hallway. A second later a door slams hard enough to rattle the photos hanging on the wall.

“There’s two more that’ll be home from school soon,” Carmen says to Malone. “You and her have to go now.”

Luz sits up, startling them all. Tears glisten on her face, but there’s a coldness in her eyes that spooks Malone.

“Who took my baby?” she says to Carmen.

“It was two of them,” Carmen says. “The one who did the talking looked like a
narco.
The other was a white man in a uniform. At first they said you were in trouble and that they were here to protect Isabel, but then they admitted they’d been sent by someone. To get you.”

“How long ago?”

“An hour, a little more. I tried to stop them, but they said if I didn’t give them Isabel, they’d kill us all.”

Bernardo shifts uneasily and looks out the peephole in the door. Malone feels the tension too, like all hell could break loose at any second.

“You have to call them, and then they’ll bring Isabel back,” Carmen says. She hands Luz a napkin. “Here’s the number.”

Luz gets up from the couch. “Where’s your phone?” she says to Carmen.

“You’re not calling from here,” Carmen says. “Go somewhere else and deal with this.”

“Fine,” Luz says. Her eyes scan the couch and the floor. “Where are my bags?”

“On the porch,” Carmen says.

Luz heads for the door. Carmen follows her.

“What the hell is wrong with you, dragging us into your shit?” Carmen says. “And Isabel. Your own daughter.”

“I’m sorry,” Luz says.

Bernardo unlocks the door and opens it to let her out. Sunlight floods the darkened room, and Malone loses sight of her until she steps forward and is silhouetted on the threshold.

“Did you really think you could come back and be her mom again?” Carmen says, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the glare. “You abandoned her, remember? Ran away and left her here all alone. What the hell do you even know about being a mom?”

Malone cringes. Val said something similar to him shortly after Annie was killed. He was in the backyard, drunk by the pool, which was where and how he spent his time in those days. More than a month had passed since the funeral, but it was still hard to walk, to breathe, to blink. He hadn’t been back to work, hadn’t even called his dad to discuss it, and was starting to think he never would.

Val came out to the pool deck carrying a drink of her own. She stood over him, her anger stronger than her sorrow that night, a newly kindled fire blazing inside a cold furnace. A drop of condensation fell from her tumbler and hit Malone square in the chest, but he didn’t move, didn’t speak, just kept watching a cloud overhead that was about to swallow the moon.

“Tell me something,” she said. “What made you think you’d be any kind of father?”

Even if he had an answer, she didn’t want to hear it.

“I trusted you,” she continued. “Annie trusted you. You were her daddy. You were supposed to protect her. You were supposed to keep her safe. But you didn’t, and nobody’s going to understand that. Oh, they’ll say this, and they’ll say that, but you’re always going to be the man who let his baby get run over.”

She was right, and he knew it, and that was the moment when he gave up. Gave up, stopped paddling, and sank like a stone. And soon, sooner than you’d think, he found himself among the bottom-feeders—the creeps and cutthroats, the scuttlers and the slime. Settling in with his bottle and his grief, he waited to drown, and it would have been so much easier if he had.

He walks to the door, needs some air, and almost bumps into Luz on the porch. She’s holding out the backpack to Carmen.

“Take this,” she says. “There’s money in it.”

“Money?” Carmen says. “Whose money? Are you
trying
to get us killed?”

Luz sets the pack on the welcome mat, next to the bags containing the doll and the stuffed bear.

“It’s for Isabel,” she says.

Carmen kicks the backpack, knocking it over.

“We don’t want your money,” she says.

Luz turns to Malone. “Can I use the old man’s phone?” she says.

“It’s in the truck.”

She steps off the porch without another word and walks away across the lawn.

“Isabel will always have a home with us,” Carmen calls after her, “but I don’t ever want to see you again.”

Malone picks up the backpack and follows Luz. When she gets to the truck, she yanks open the passenger-side door and climbs in. Malone sets the pack on the seat between them.

“You might need this,” he says, sliding behind the wheel.

“Please get me away from here,” Luz says.

They drive past a group of kids tossing a baseball. It’s late afternoon, and the shadows of the trees have begun to creep toward the houses on the east side of the street. Luz stares straight ahead. Her face is blank, but her mind is working a mile a minute. When they come to a stop sign, Malone asks which way.

“Just park somewhere,” Luz says.

He takes a left and continues until he hits a strip mall containing a Laundromat, a beauty salon, a check-cashing place, and a liquor store. He swings into the parking lot and finds a spot in the shade. They’re looking into the window of the Laundromat, where a tall black man folds a pair of pants in front of a dryer, and a little Mexican boy pushes a little Mexican girl in a laundry cart.

“I should have known,” Luz says, her voice flat, dead.

“Known what?” Malone says.

“He told me he could find me anywhere.”

“Who are we talking about? Your boyfriend? Your husband?”

“The devil,” Luz says. “The fucking devil.”

“I’m trying to help you,” Malone says.

“You can’t help me,” Luz says. “It was my husband who sent those men. He’s a gangster, a
narco.
You know what that is?”

“A
narco?
Sure.”

“You don’t know anything. He…he beat me. He raped me. He threatened to kill me if I ever left him. But I wanted to be with Isabel.” Luz breaks off here, takes a deep breath and turns away. “I stole some money from him and ran off. The maid tried to stop me, and one of my husband’s bodyguards, and I killed them both.”

“Jesus,” Malone says.

“That’s what I’m paying for now,” Luz says. “That’s why they have my baby.”

Malone tugs on the collar of his shirt. His clothes feel like they’re suffocating him.

“What’ll happen to you when you go back?” he says.

Luz smirks at him like he’s dense. “What do you think?”

He’s not going to give her false hope, doesn’t want to insult her that way. He can see in her eyes that she knows what she knows.

“Will you do me one favor?” she continues. “Will you stay with me until I find out where they want to meet and then drive me there?”

“I’ll stay with you as long as you need me,” Malone says.

She reaches over and lays a hand on his thigh.

“You can have the money back,” she says. “And if you want, I’ll…”

Her voice trails off, and the unspoken offer fills Malone with sadness. Putting his hand over hers to keep it from sliding any higher, he says, “Don’t.”

Luz pulls away, her embarrassment coming out as anger.

“Sorry,” she snaps.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Malone says. “It’s just that you don’t have to do that to keep me around.”

Luz can’t look at him while she processes this, stares out her window instead. Eventually she gets herself together and takes the napkin that Carmen gave her from the pocket of her hoodie.

“So can I use the phone?” she says.

Malone passes it to her, and she punches in the number written on the napkin. He gropes under the seat for the vodka, opens it, and has a swig. Inside the Laundromat, mama is mad at the kids playing with the cart. She lifts the girl out and sets her on the ground and swats at the boy, who laughs and runs away. Malone closes his eyes. He can’t watch anymore. He’s done with this world, has been for years. He closes his eyes and listens to the beeping of the phone as Luz calls up her doom.

T
HE SQUAWKING OF THE KID’S CARTOONS IS GIVING
T
HACKER A
headache, but what’s he going to do? If he tells her to shut off the TV and take a nap, she’ll start screaming again, and this is the quietest she’s been since they grabbed her. She’s happy as can be now, sitting cross-legged on the other bed, eating cold French fries and watching a bunch of monkeys or mice or whatever they are kick the shit out of each other.

Jerónimo, on the other hand, is wound tight as a speed freak at the tail end of a three-day run. He’s hunched over the room’s little table and looks like he’s about to get on his knees and beg the phone sitting in front of him to ring. There’s more than money driving him, that’s for sure. He’s got some sort of personal stake in seeing that this girl Luz gets to where she’s wanted, and this worries Thacker, because when it gets personal is when people get stupid, and stupid people do stupid things, like kidnapping children.

He should have said
Fuck it
right then, should have slipped away. But that cash, man, it’s so close now he can smell it, and if the Mex will listen to him, they can still snatch this out of the fire without burning their fingers. Everything will work out fine: Jerónimo will get Luz, he’ll get the money, the kid will be returned to her aunt, and they’ll all go their separate ways with a friendly wave and a hearty “Fuck you.”

That’s
if
he listens. Right now it looks like he’s sitting over there coming up with a whole bunch of bad ideas, Plan B’s and doomsday scenarios. Step one is to get him talking instead of thinking.

“So the phone rings,” Thacker says, adjusting his pillow against the headboard of the bed he’s lying on.

“What?” Jerónimo says.

“The phone rings, and it’s—” he glances at Isabel and lowers his voice—“you know. What are you gonna say?”

Jerónimo hisses derisively and mumbles, “I’m not playing games with you.”

“It can’t hurt to figure out in advance how you’re going to respond,” Thacker says. “Things have already gotten a little out of hand, after all.”

The Mex puffs up and crosses his arms over his chest. It pisses him off to have a gringo point out his mistakes. Too bad.

“Ring, ring,” Thacker says.

“I’m gonna tell her to get her ass over here,” Jerónimo says. “What do you think I’m gonna say?”

“With the money?” Thacker says.

“Yeah, yeah, with the money.”

“But don’t let her come up to the room.”

“I won’t.”

“In fact, don’t even mention the motel. Only tell her the corner.”

Jerónimo gets up and steps over to the window, pulls the curtains aside. The room is on the second floor, off an open-air walkway. A no-name gas station and mini-mart skulk at the edge of an empty lot across the street.

“I’ll meet her down there,” Jerónimo says, pointing at the station. “I’ll tell her to come alone and wait out in the open.”

“That’s good,” Thacker says. “We can watch from up here to see if she tries to sneak in any backup.”

“Right,” Jerónimo says. He closes the curtains and returns to the table. “So relax.”

“I
am
relaxed,” Thacker says. “I just want to get it straight. So she does what you tell her and shows up when she’s supposed to. Then what?”

“I go down and talk to her, and when I’m sure everything’s cool, I signal you, and you put the little one in the truck and come pick us up.”

“She might go nuts when she sees her daughter.”

“I’ll handle that.”

“She might try to grab the kid and make a run for it or causes a commotion.”

Jerónimo pulls his nine from his waistband. “Not with this between her legs,” he says. “This’ll keep her quiet while we drop the kid off and drive back to the border.”

Isabel is watching them now, instead of the TV. She can’t make out what they’re saying, but she’s old enough to know what a gun is, or at least to know that it’s something to be afraid of. Thacker is about to tell Jerónimo to put the damn thing away when the phone on the table flashes and plays a song. Jerónimo snatches it up.

The conversation is a quick one and entirely in Spanish, but Thacker gets the gist. Luz asks Jerónimo who he is, and he tells her it’s none of her business, just be at the gas station in an hour, her and the money. She wants to know how the kid is doing, and Jerónimo says, “Fine, as long as you follow orders.” Then she says something like “Prove it,” because after a lot of
no
’s, Jerónimo gets up from the table and walks over to Isabel.

“Say hello,” he tells her, and holds out the phone.

“Hello?” Isabel warbles, close to tears. After listening to Luz for a few seconds, she says in English, “I want to go home.”

Jerónimo pulls the phone away, makes a quiet threat, and ends the call.

“She get the message?” Thacker says.

“She got it,” Jerónimo says.

“Good. Good deal.”

Thacker settles back onto the bed and stares up at the stucco ceiling, acting like everything is cool even though it’s not. Worry coils around his backbone like a jungle vine. He’s always known he’s not what you’d call a good man and admitted it to himself readily enough, but this, the kind of bad he’s knee-deep in now, is way more serious than fucking with wetbacks and stealing pussy from whores. This shit is hard-core.

The air conditioner is roaring, but he can still feel the heat from outside pressing against the windows, the walls, the roof. Jerónimo peeks out between the curtains like Luz might already be waiting across the street, then turns to Isabel, who’s lying on the bed, crying softly, her face buried in a pillow.

“What’s the matter,
mija?
” he asks her.

“I want my aunt,” comes the muffled response.

“You’ll be back there soon,” he says. “Right in time for dinner.”

The room is closing in on Thacker. He gets up from the bed and grabs a Styrofoam cup off the table. When he goes to step outside, however, Jerónimo stops him with a hand on his arm.

“What’s up?” the Mex says.

Thacker shows him his tin of Skoal. “Having a dip,” he says. “Want one?”

Jerónimo takes his hand off him but says, “Leave the door open.”

Out on the walkway, Thacker steps to the rail and tucks a bit of tobacco between his cheek and gum. A car exits the gas station across the street and speeds off, leaving behind a cloud of black smoke that hangs in the air for some time afterward. A man comes out of the market with a broom and a long-handled dustpan and begins sweeping up. Jerónimo’s right; they’ll have a clear view from here when Luz arrives—the parking lot, the surrounding streets. That’s one thing in their favor.

But Thacker is still uneasy. The kid changes everything. With her around the possibility for disaster is huge. She gets hurt or, God forbid, killed, and the shit storm that will rain down on them will be fatal, as in Special Circumstances, as in Death or Life-Plus-One. He spits into the cup and scratches a new mole he discovered on his neck last week.
What the hell did you get into?
he asks himself.

Luz closes the phone and sets it on the dashboard. One hour, the man said. Don’t be early, don’t be late. He won’t be the one to kill her, Luz is pretty sure of that. He’ll take her back to Tijuana and let Rolando have his fun. She’s also pretty sure he’s not going to listen to any pleas for mercy. Rolando wouldn’t have trusted this job to someone who could be swayed.

Perhaps a small request. Five minutes with Isabel. If she’s going to believe that this guy will release the little girl when she turns herself over to him, she might as well also believe that he’ll grant her five minutes to hold her and tell her how much she loves her. It’s something to look forward to at least, something to keep her going.

The resignation she feels now is a relief after the agony that overwhelmed her when she learned they’d taken Isabel from Carmen. At first, she was so ashamed of putting her daughter in danger that all she wanted to do was die. But then it hit her that she was the only person who could save the girl, and that gave her the strength to finish this. Her escape attempt was a failure, but at least she’ll have a chance to clean up the mess she made before she pays for crossing Rolando.

Malone is trying to pretend he’s not watching her out of the corner of his eye. He looks sadder than she does. The man had a shotgun pulled on him and still hasn’t cut and run. God sure picked a crazy one.

“He wants me to come to Central and Walnut in an hour,” Luz says. “A gas station there.”

“Do you know where that is?” Malone asks her.

“Right off the freeway, I think,” she says.

“All right,” he says and takes a swallow of vodka.

His face ripples like the surface of a pond disturbed. He’s not done yet, Luz can tell. He’s got more to say. He caps the bottle and slides it under the seat, straightens his shirt and brushes back his hair.

“I know the cops are out of the question,” he begins.

“Stop,” Luz says.

“It’s just, there has to be—”

He needs to leave it alone. Now.

“I stole from him and killed his people,” Luz says. “I made him look stupid. He’s not American, okay, he’s Mexican, and for a woman to do that, he’s not gonna quit until he gets back at me.”

“What about someone above him?” Malone says. “He has a boss, and that’s the guy you need to talk to. You go to him with the money and make your case, tell him how this asshole treated you and why you did what you did.”

“They’ve got my baby,” Luz says. “I’m going to do whatever they want.”

Malone strokes the stubble on his chin and turns away from her.

“I wish I was smarter,” he says. “Smart enough to come up with something else.”

Luz wishes she was smarter too. She starts going over things she might have done differently when it came to planning her escape, and in seconds her mind is revving toward panic. She concentrates on her surroundings—a woman unloading a washing machine in the Laundromat, a stray dog trotting past, the little girl who tries to pet it and the old man who warns her not to, the way the reflection of the parking lot in the window of the liquor store pulses every time the door opens and closes—but it doesn’t help.

She tries to think of somewhere quiet nearby where they might wait out the hour left to her. The answer is like a kick in the stomach when it comes, and she rouses Malone and tells him there’s one more place she’d like to see before he drops her off.

They get onto Greenleaf and go west. The sun is low enough now that it’s shining right into their eyes. Even with her visor down, Luz has to squint through her lashes to see the road ahead. They drive past the entrance to the cemetery the first time and end up circling the block to get back to the gate.

SACRED GROUND, 15 MPH
a sign orders. Malone cruises slowly past the graves while Luz tries to find the spot she’s looking for. She remembers a tree and a fountain. It’s been almost four years, though, and a whole lot of life since she was last here. The best she can do is get them what she thinks is close.

“Do you want me to wait in here?” Malone asks when she opens her door.

“It’s okay,” she says. “You can come if you want.”

He gets out of the truck, too, and follows her up a hill toward a sickly pine with downcast needles. The ground is covered with more weeds than grass, but at least they keep the place mowed. The markers in this section are all identical granite rectangles that lie flat on the ground, row after row of them. There’s enough room on each for the name and dates and maybe a brief tribute or a small etching of a cross or a lily.

Luz moves from stone to stone, searching for Alejandro’s. She passes a baby’s marker decorated with a drawing of Minnie Mouse—
Camilla Washington, May 19, 2006–January 5, 2007.
A wilted bouquet sits on Daniel Martinez’s grave, and someone has left a New Testament for Donita Hughes,
Beloved Mother, Sister, and Friend.
Luz is jealous of them all. Nobody will remember her when she’s gone, and there’ll be no grave to visit.

She comes to the end of one row and moves on to the next. Malone trudges along behind her, head down. He’s thinking about his little girl, Luz knows. After being with him less than a day, she already recognizes the face he gets when the memories come blacking. Three ravens circle overhead, their ugly croaks like curses. Luz almost trips, glaring up them, and then there it is, right at her feet.

Alejandro Delgado Gonzalez, May 19, 1991–October 5, 2009.
His nickname’s on it too: Smiley. Luz is sad to see it again, but the sadness is different now, after so much time, mellower but truer. For a month after he died she came here every couple of days, her and baby Isabel. She’d bring a boom box to play her and Alejandro’s favorite CDs—Morrissey, Selena, RBD—and sit on the grass beside the stone and weep until her eyes burned and her chest ached. Her grief was real back then, but she realizes she was crying mostly for herself, for her loss. The tears that sting her eyes today are for a sweet, big-eared boy with a silver tooth and the softest lips in the world.

Malone is standing beside her. “Who is it?” he asks.

“Isabel’s daddy,” she replies.

“So young.”

“Something was wrong with his heart.”

It’s true. One day he just fell down dead. He was the first and last boy Luz ever loved, the embodiment of so many words that have lost their meaning for her since then: good, kind, honest. He lived on the same street as Carmen and her family, but Luz barely noticed him during her first hectic years in L.A. Thinking about it later, she wondered if that’s how it was when it was real. You didn’t crash into each other and hang on for dear life the first time you met. Instead, you came together slowly, a long succession of revelations and reassessments gradually closing the gap.

How clearly she remembers some of the things that made her love him. There was the time she watched him comfort his little sister after she’d fallen off her bicycle, rocking and tickling her until she laughed away her tears. There was his voice when he tried to sing a song he knew Luz liked, even though they were still months away from holding hands.