The Death and Life of Bobby Z Read online

  The trip starts in the garages in the outer compound. Four big canvas-topped Bedfords gassed and ready to go. A humvee in front. Lights on only in the humvee as they pick their way along what has to be a sheep trail. It’s around ten o’clock when they reach the back side of a ridge overlooking the border.

  Johnson stops the trucks and signals the humvee ahead. The four-wheelers scutter up the ridge. The truck driver slips headsets on and scans the radio. He looks at Johnson, shakes his head and gives a thumbs-up. Johnson grabs a handheld radio and a pair of infrared glasses, which he loops around his neck.

  “You wanna go for a walk?” he asks Tim.

  “Sure.”

  Johnson walks to the back of the truck, opens the flaps and says something in rapid Spanish. Tim watches five Cahuilla Indians jump out, all of them armed with rifles and machetes. They trot down the ridge toward the canyon below.

  “C’mon,” Johnson says to Tim.

  They climb the ridge where the humvee sits like one of those idiot guard dogs that used to annoy Tim so much in his B&E days. Lights off now and motor shut down. Tim lies down beside Johnson behind some rocks as the foreman scans the terrain with the night glasses. He hands Tim the binoculars and says, “Have a look.”

  To his right Tim sees Interstate 8 and the lights of the border town of Jacumba. Directly in front of him in the desert plain he sees four packs of people trotting away from the border. He watches as the Cahuillas run to meet them and start to steer them into the canyon.

  Illegals. Coming to El Norte to find work.

  Johnson gets up and crouches his way to the humvee. A window opens and Tim sees another headsetted driver.

  “Anything?” Johnson asks.

  The driver shakes his head.

  Tim figures that they’re monitoring the INS radios and that there’ll be no problem tonight.

  “Get down there,” Johnson says to the driver. “Hurry them up.”

  Tim watches the humvee tear down into the valley and help herd the illegal immigrants into the mouth of a narrow canyon. Johnson grunts an order into his radio and Tim hears the truck motors start up behind him.

  “Let’s go,” Johnson says.

  They hike back to the road. The Cahuillas and the humvee driver are trying to jam the Mexicans into the backs of the trucks. Dozens of illegals stand in clumps, shivering and looking confused as hell. Whole families, it looks like to Tim—men, women, kids and grandparents. The families are trying to get into the same trucks and it’s slowing things down.

  Johnson gets into it, pushing, swearing under his breath, and kicking. The Cahuillas pick up on his anger and start swinging rifle stocks, not into heads, but into backs and buttocks. It takes about ten minutes to get the illegals packed in and the canvas flaps tied down.

  “And make ’em callar,” Johnson says to the truck drivers. Make ’em shut up. He climbs back into the truck.

  “I used to herd cattle,” Johnson says. “Now I herd people.”

  The convoy starts back. Johnson sends the humvee ahead, the Cahuillas riding on its running board. It’s a slow process—the trucks cling to the side of the mountains for switchback after switchback. Tim can lean out the window on the curves and look several hundred feet straight down, and he wants to puke. Especially on the downhill grades, when he can hear the gravel slipping under the wheels.

  Johnson smokes a cigarette and doesn’t seem to mind the drive. He offers Tim a smoke and Tim’s tempted, but he quit in solitary and is trying to stay off.

  The only thing that seems to make Johnson nervous is his watch. He keeps glancing at it and frowning and after an hour says to Tim, “We’re racing the sunrise.”

  It’s such a fucking cowboy thing to say, such a cowboy movie thing to say, that Tim chuckles a little.

  Johnson says, “There was a truck carrying a load of wetbacks through this desert a while back. Converted moving van that couldn’t handle the roads. Sunrise found ’em halfway to nowhere and the INS has choppers. You know what the coyotes did?”

  “No.”

  “Locked up the trucks and left,” Johnson says. “The wetbacks couldn’t get out, sun beat down on that metal roof all day, and they cooked inside there.”

  One thing Mexico’s always making is more Mexicans, Tim remembers Brian saying.

  “So I’d kind of like to get back well before sunrise,” Johnson says.

  Johnson radios the driver ahead to put the foot down a little and radios the other trucks to keep up. They’re hurtling around these fucking curves, wheels slipping on the gravel, and Johnson suddenly gets talkative.

  “One of the most godforsaken places on earth,” he says, “Anza-Borrego. And it leads right down to the border. A rustler’s dream. Since the government boys clamped down on San Diego the action’s moved east, out here, that’s all. Perfect for us. The coyotes bring the wetbacks across, turn ’em loose in the desert, the wetbacks’re scareder than shit and we pick ’em up and take ’em back to the barn.

  “Easier ’n cattle, really, because cattle don’t always want to come, you know?”

  The convoy makes it down the grade and leaves the road altogether, driving across the packed desert ground to a riverbed where there’s still a trickle of water in the late spring. They rattle up the creek for an hour, and leave it where a shelf of rock leads them back to the desert floor. A few more minutes, they hit another old mining road and make it back through the gate while the sky is safely black.

  Brian waddles up in his white caftan.

  To inspect his property, Tim thinks.

  The drivers open the trucks and start herding the illegals into the camouflaged rectangles at the far end of the compound. Johnson hops out and motions for Tim to follow him.

  They aren’t tennis courts, Tim sees, but the roofs of underground barracks. He steps into one to see the tightly packed rows of bunk beds on the concrete floor. A room in the back has some drop toilets and a couple of shower heads. Some water that smells like sulfur drips from a leaky faucet head in the side of the concrete wall.

  The place stinks of old sweat and Lysol, and the disinfectant just isn’t getting it done. There’s been too many fucking people jammed into an underground bunker with the ventilation of a submarine, Tim thinks.

  And now they’re jamming in a new bunch.

  Pack them in and hide them under the ground and if there’s a smell of misery, Tim’s smelling it. He glances at the eyes of some of these poor bastards and thinks if you can see fear, he’s seeing it.

  Welcome to the Hotel California.

  “It’s not getting them in,” Brian tells Tim as they walk back to the Beau Geste inner compound. “It’s hiding them until you can place them. We have room for five hundred illegals here, and I can move them from here without worrying about checkpoints. North a few miles they pick dates in Indio, a few more miles they clean toilets in Palm Springs. I can truck them to factories in San Diego, L.A., Downey, Riverside …”

  “You’re a sweet guy, Brian.”

  “So,” Brian asks. “You think you can get us some Thais?”

  “You running out of Mexicans?”

  “It’s this fucking NAFTA thing,” Brian says. “Next they’ll legalize drugs.”

  “You high, Brian?”

  “Just skin popping.”

  11.

  When he gets back to his room she’s waiting there for him.

  Sitting on the bed, holding a glass of red wine, she’s wearing a black silk nightgown with a jacket. Her auburn hair is down now, shoulder-length, and she looks like one of those Victoria’s Secret women—three packs of cigs in the joint for a catalog—only better and a lot more real.

  It’s not all he has on his mind, though.

  “The boy’s mine?” he asks. Like Bobby Z has a fucking kid? Like why didn’t Escobar have that in the book along with favorite sports and beer of preference?

  “His name is Kit,” she says. “Olivia thought you’d like that.”

  He decides to take a cha
nce.

  “She never told me,” he says.

  “Well, you’d have had to be around for that,” she scolds. “Look, I don’t blame you. If I were into women, I’d want to do her too. She’s beautiful.”

  “And fucked up,” he says.

  “And fucked up.”

  “Does everyone know?” he asks.

  “Olivia and me,” she answers. “Now you.”

  Which is like, good news, right? Tim thinks.

  “How come you told me?”

  “I thought you should know.”

  He’s thinking about this—hell, his head is fucking spinning—when she says, “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

  “Brian had a lot to show me.”

  The smile, the smirk, and “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  He has a hard-on that’s threatening to tear his jeans open and he’s hoping she doesn’t notice.

  But she looks right at his crotch and answers, “You know what I mean.”

  She gets up from the bed, uncoiling slowly, the way she did from the chaise, and pulls down his jeans. She cups his balls in her right hand and with her left hand grabs his dick and puts it in her mouth. She strokes him, and sucks, and rubs his balls as he looks down at her auburn hair and her beautiful face and reaches his hand down the top of her nightgown. She takes her hand from his balls and slaps his hand away, then she looks up at him as she runs her tongue up his dick and licks the tip.

  “It’s been a long time,” Tim says hoarsely.

  “Do you want to come in my mouth, baby?”

  “No.”

  But she goes back to sucking until his balls throb and he doesn’t think he can stop himself. She seems to sense it, stands up and strips off the nightgown.

  He almost pops off looking at her. Her breasts are bigger than he thought, her stomach flat and her long legs shiny. She pushes him down on the bed and says, “I want to do it our old way.”

  Old way?! Tim thinks. Our old way?! She knows me? Or Bobby, anyway. They tell me no one here has even seen this dude since like 1983 or something and this babe’s been sleeping with him?! So now I have to walk like him, talk like him and fuck like him?!

  And figures if he has any brains he’d throw her out, or make some sort of excuse like he’s got an STD or something, but right at this moment Tim isn’t exactly thinking with his brain.

  So he lies down. She turns her back on him, squats over him, then looks over her shoulder and smiles as she eases herself onto him. She laughs and points to the mirror and he realizes now that he can see everything. Her neck and hair and back and beautiful small ass as it rises and falls on him, and in the mirror her face and breasts and pussy as it slides up and down his dick.

  She sees him watching, laughs again and spreads herself for him. Then she takes her long fingers and starts to stroke herself as she slides up and down. He grabs her shoulders to set the pace and force her down hard on him and they fuck this way until he says, “I can’t last much longer.”

  She groans for his pleasure then gasps, “Tell me when you’re about to come.”

  He figures this is so she can pull him out, but when he tells her he’s coming she presses down harder and asks, “Is it good? Is it good?”

  He answers, “It’s so good,” and that seems to set her off and she arches her muscular back and asks again and he answers and she goes, “Oh, oh, oh, oh!” and holds herself on the tip of him and they can both see his dick throb as he comes.

  Later they’re just lying there talking about old times, about the suite at the Ritz, and lazy days on the beach and hot nights at his mobile home at El Morro beach, just north of Laguna, which is where she says she fell in love with him, and that she walked down there a few months ago and it doesn’t look like it’s changed, and does he still own it? And he bullshits for a while with stuff Escobar made him learn, and then they’re talking about their lives and she’s telling him how things have been since he split and left her hanging out in Laguna.

  How she had a semester at UCLA but was too lazy to cut it and it seemed easier to find rich boyfriends and the rich boyfriends she found were rich because they were dealing dope so she gets back into that circle. Which is a hard orbit to leave, especially when you’re lazy and what you do really well is fuck. And she prefers courtesan to whore. Anyway, that’s how she ends up at Rancho Cervier with the drug-dealing, people-trading nouveau-riche Eurotrash.

  “And the Monk helps out from time to time,” she says.

  Which gets Tim’s attention.

  If the Monk is Bobby’s main man, maybe the Monk can help him get the hell out of the country before Gruzsa can nail him. So Tim’s kind of pretty interested in hearing about the Monk.

  “You been in touch with the Monk?” he asks.

  “Every once in a while,” she says. “I need a little hand, I call him. Sometimes he needs an errand run, he calls me.”

  “Which number do you use?” Tim asks.

  “The backdoor number,” she says like it’s obvious.

  He laughs. “Which back door number?”

  She tells him 555-6665 like real casual and goes on with filling him in about her life, like she just left a guy and the guy is like stalking her so she’s staying with Brian for a while, which works out okay because she can help keep an eye on Kit.

  “My life’s been pretty fucked since you dumped me,” she says casually. “But it’s my own fault. I don’t see it changing.”

  He does. He figures he’s pulled this off pretty good so far, why not stretch it out. Take her with him. Get his hands on some of Z’s money, announce his retirement and move up to Eugene.

  So he says, real gallant like, “Why don’t you come with me?”

  She laughs, “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “I’m not?”

  She’s smirking and he thinks she’s running some game with him.

  “No,” she says.

  “No?”

  He reaches for her pussy and starts to stroke her. Feels her moisten. Loves looking at her green eyes as she gets wet.

  “Because when Don Huertero gets here?” she says, with that California-girl upward inflection. She closes her eyes because she’s digging what he’s doing with his fingers.

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s going to kill you,” she says.

  Of course.

  “Which would be a shame,” Elizabeth murmurs.

  “I think so, too.”

  She grabs his dick and repeats, “A shame.”

  Before he knows what’s happening, she’s moving under him—like it’s no work at all—like his dick is on remote control or something, she’s doing ripply things up and down the length of it and he doesn’t care Don Huertero wants him dead.

  He just wants to fuck.

  Which he guesses is what the prison social worker meant by “lack of impulse control” and “inability to delay gratification.”

  “They say I can’t delay gratification,” he tells her.

  “Did they say you don’t finish what you start?”

  “They didn’t say that.”

  “Good.”

  As to the delayed gratification, he does okay.

  That done, he asks, “Huertero wants to kill me?” Good job, Agent Gruzsa. Nice going. How come you know everything there is to know about Bobby except that little detail? Call me a dumb moke.

  Elizabeth says, “Brian’s just holding you for him until he can get here.”

  “I thought they were planning a barbecue,” Tim says.

  “They are.”

  Of fucking course.

  “How do you know all this?”

  “You know Brian,” she says casually. “He can’t keep his mouth shut. I hear things.”

  The situation is not, like, good. They have him trapped in this movie fort and they got something in mind worse than what the Angels do. All of a sudden Pelican Bay is looking pretty good to him.

  “Why?” he asks.
<
br />   “Why what?”

  Why fucking what?!

  “Why does Don Huertero want to kill me?” he asks.

  She shrugs her beautiful shoulders. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Yeah, I’m just fucking around, he thinks. But he’s afraid to push it because probably Bobby is supposed to know what the beef is with Don Huertero. Also Tim thinks that if he ups and tells them he isn’t Bobby Z, only bad things can happen. They either don’t believe him, in which case they kill him. Or they believe him, in which case they kill him.

  So it’s probably better to be Bobby Z and have some stroke—and maybe some bargaining power somewhere—than to be three-time loser and career fuck-up Tim Kearney.

  With no stroke and less than zero bargaining power.

  He’s thinking about all this when she says, “So don’t you think you’d better get going?”

  “Yeah.”

  He does think that, now that he’s basically fucked out and worried about staying alive again. And he’s pissed off and scared, and it’s a situation not all that different from the joint except this time the choice is die or die.

  So he figures like, fuck you all, because he’s getting pissed off.

  So pissed off he feels the old impulse control slipping.

  Like that night in the Gulf when the Rack tanks started shooting the shit out of them and Tim just got pissed off, that’s all, and the old impulse control just went right out the old window.

  He’s feeling like that now.

  It feels great.

  12.

  Tad Gruzsa isn’t exactly the happiest camper in the greater Southern California coastal region.

  Gruzsa’s sitting in a shitty bar in Downey, knocking down his second bourbon with branch water, trying to drink enough nerve to hit the barrio for Escobar’s calling hours.

  The beaners love those open caskets, too, Gruzsa’s thinking, and there was so little left of Jorge’s face that Gruzsa had to lay three dimes on the undertaker so that Escobar would at least vaguely resemble a human being as he lay smiling up from the casket.