The Death and Life of Bobby Z Read online

  But jogging just doesn’t make sense carrying this kind of load. Sweat too much, Tim figures. Lose too much body water, and the sun will be up soon. Just like in all those desert movies where they show you the sun, then the guy staggering across the sand, then the sun again and the guy drinking his last water, then the sun again, and the guy dropping. Then the sun with the vultures circling.

  Well shove that, Tim thinks, and fuck your Beau Geste. Make it to this next ridge line before dawn and find a place to lay up. Get off the ground a little into some shade.

  He knows what he’s looking for: a little hole under some rock with some shade and a view.

  See what’s coming after him.

  But he needs the high ground to do that and he’s in a race with the sunrise so he decides to jog for a little bit. The boy wakes briefly but gets used to the new rhythm and falls back to sleep.

  Tim jogs toward the hills just turning chocolate brown in the dim light.

  18.

  Johnson drives his truck about ten miles in the direction of Ocotillo Wells, turns onto an old dirt road and follows it another mile and a half into the brush. Pulls off at a dilapidated adobe shack with a corrugated tin roof about half pulled off.

  Parks the truck and goes in.

  The place is dark. There ain’t no windows and the only light is from one kerosene lamp stinking and sputtering on an old cable spool they’ve been using for a table. The whole bar is furnished with your basic forage material. Chairs pulled out of someone’s garbage heap, the cable spools from when they put the phone lines into Borrego, some old soda-pop cartons from the days they put soda pop in bottles.

  The bar itself is just a bunch of plywood hammered onto some sawhorses, but it doesn’t make a shitload of difference, because the local Indians just go in there to load up on mescal anyway.

  There’s three or four of them asleep in there right now, sleeping off last night’s drunk.

  Place stinks, Johnson thinks. Smells like shit, and he wonders when the last time was anyone dropped some gasoline and a match down the hole in the outhouse just outside the bar.

  Johnson puts a boot into one of the Indians asleep on the floor.

  “Where’s Rojas?” Johnson asks.

  Runty Indian looks up at him and blinks.

  Johnson figures on the scale of things around here these boys are on the lowest order. If the whites are on top, which they sure as hell are, and the Mexicans a distant second and the Cahuillas third, then it is just hard to say where these little brown brothers are.

  They aren’t even Cahuillas. Come from a tribe so small they’ve either forgotten their name or just plain aren’t saying. Just so goddamn miserable a group of people that they all just got lost somewhere. Slipped into a haze of mescal, glue sniffing and snorting on them spray-paint cans, and became worthless for just about anything except tracking.

  They can track better than a coyote, which is why Johnson has made the trip here to find Rojas.

  Rojas’ real name is Lobo Rojas—“Red Wolf”—after that little Mexican wolf they’ve just about succeeded in shooting out in these parts. Fucking little shits were murder on the calves in the spring, so it was a good thing the local ranchers had just about exterminated them before the EPA could come in, rescue the murderous fuckers.

  Anyway, Johnson figures that Rojas has picked himself an apt nickname, because he is as murderous a little fucker as ever walked barely upright.

  “Rojas, where is he?” Johnson demands.

  “In back,” the man croaks. His eyes are crossed and there’s a little ring of gold paint around his mouth. Gold is their favorite color for snorting, for some reason.

  In back.

  Johnson slips his pistol from its holster and kicks the door to the small back room open.

  Rojas rolls off the woman he’s lying on and lands on his feet, his big goddamn knife held back near his ribs where no one can kick it out of his hand.

  His eyes are bloodshot and puffy but still coal-black and burning hot.

  It’s true, Johnson thinks as he looks at the naked runty Indian pointing a knife at him, Rojas wakes up angry.

  Johnson thumbs the hammer back and points the pistol at Rojas’ square forehead.

  “You spit at me, you little cocksucker,” Johnson warns, “I’ll blow your head off.”

  Rojas, he likes to spit when you first wake him up.

  “I’ll cut your balls off and feed them to this whore.”

  “She don’t look like she’s missed a lot of meals to me,” Johnson says. “Are you sure she’s hungry?”

  The woman is still asleep.

  “I have work for you,” Johnson says.

  Rojas shakes his head. “I’m drinking and fucking.”

  “Need you to track someone.”

  Rojas shrugs.

  It’s what they always need him for. Some wetback bolts in the desert and they can’t find him, they get Rojas. Or some coyote gets smartassed, camps himself out in their part of the desert and starts rustling their wetbacks, they send Rojas out.

  Rojas finds the coyote and leaves his head stuck on a mesquite pole.

  Discourages that kind of thing.

  “You want to fuck her, Johnson?” Rojas asks. “You can.”

  “No, I don’t think I could,” Johnson answers. “Come on and get some clothes on before the track gets cold.”

  “Track gets cold for you, Johnson. Not for me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on.”

  “I rather fuck instead.”

  “Me, too,” Johnson says. “But I got an old boy out there’s already killed about three of my Cahuillas.”

  Knowing that would goad Rojas. Not that he’d want to get revenge for the Cahuillas, but because he’d want to show that he could do what they couldn’t.

  Rojas has an ego.

  “I don’t care,” Rojas says. “I’m drunk.”

  “You was born drunk.”

  “My mother, she was drunk.”

  “Elsewise she’d’ve aborted you.”

  And true enough, Rojas is an ugly man. Short, squat, with a flat nose and eyes set too wide apart. Hands and feet like paws.

  But shit, that nose could smell.

  “Am I going to have to shoot you?” Johnson asks.

  “You’re too slow to shoot me,” Rojas says, and Johnson sees him draw that knife back a little like he’s getting ready to come ahead with it.

  And he might be right, Johnson thinks. He might just be able to stick me with that thing before I can put him down.

  “Okay,” Johnson says. He lowers the gun. “I’ll get me somebody else. You go back to that fat woman.”

  Johnson watches as Rojas grabs his mescal bottle off the floor and takes a long defiant pull. Climbs back onto the filthy matress, lays the knife by his hand and slaps the woman awake. Tells her something in Spanish, which Johnson don’t quite know the words to but the meaning of which is clear.

  Johnson lets Rojas get into it a little bit, until Rojas’ ugly face is all screwed up and his eyes are closed, then Johnson whacks him behind the ear with the pistol butt. Once, whack, twice, whack, and watches Rojas’ little body go limp.

  Johnson holsters his gun, hefts Rojas over his shoulder and grabs his clothes with his other hand. Tips his hat to the woman and carries Rojas outside and dumps him onto the bed of the truck.

  There’s already three of Rojas’ buddies sitting like dogs in the truck, waiting. Already figure there was maybe some work, they could make some money and buy some mescal or a case or two of Testor.

  Johnson gets behind the wheel and heads back to the ranch and sighs.

  19.

  Escobar’s funeral is everything Gruzsa expected and more.

  The women are wailing like someone took their welfare checks from them, and the men are standing in their cheap suits looking grim-faced even under the wraparound shades. To make Gruzsa’s afternoon even happier, Escobar’s younger male relatives are decked out in their very best Monday-
Go-to-Funeral gang attire—clean white T-shirts, pressed jeans two sizes too large and Raiders jackets. Raiders jackets, Gruzsa thinks, like any of these glue-sniffing mokes would know Kenny Stabler from a pimple on their asses. And they got the shaved heads, the badass cholo attitude, and they’re giving Gruzsa—the sole Anglo in the congregation—their very best teenage murderous looks.

  And if it wasn’t Jorge’s funeral Gruzsa would like to take one or two of them outside in the alley and wash their mouths out with the barrel of his 9mm Glock, leave their teeth like Chiclets on the pavement and walk away whistling, but it is a funeral and there’s a truce of sorts on.

  Which is also a good thing, Gruzsa muses as the priest babbles on in Spanish, because not only are Escobar’s younger male relatives gang bangers, they bang for at least two different gangs that Gruzsa can recognize. There’s a bunch from Quatro Flats there, and TMC and maybe even East Coast Crips. And all it would take is for one of these mental defectives to start throwing down for them to start blowing each other away.

  Which ordinarily Gruzsa would consider not only entertainment but a real benefit to society, except today would be a real pain in the ass because he has business to do.

  So he sits ignoring the dirty stares and concentrates on the big photo of Escobar staring back at him from an easel by the coffin. Wonders what the beaners did in the days before Kodak, whether they stuck a painting of the deceased up there or what, and after an endless goddamn sermon by the Mexican priest, Gruzsa joins the line to file past the casket and pay his respects.

  Gives his sympathies to Jorge’s weeping mother, a couple of sniffling aunts, two or three cousins, and then Jorge’s brother asks to speak to him outside, which is what Gruzsa’s been counting on.

  Jorge’s brother is serious people. Old-time cholo ETA from the days when the Mexican gangs defended themselves instead of killing each other. Luis Escobar hasn’t been crying, either. Eyes dry as a stone, man, but black with anger. Luis has done long, stand-up stretches in the joint: a murder two and an aggravated assault, and he was an ETA leader in the joint, Gruzsa knows. Those black eyes have stared down the Panthers and the Aryan Brotherhood and the mob and now he’s out and running the old network. And the man is wearing a suit, Gruzsa notes. A real suit, not some baby-gang clown outfit. He’s wearing a good suit and showing his brother some real respect.

  You have to respect Luis Escobar, and Gruzsa isn’t going to give him any shit.

  “How’d this happen?” Luis asks.

  Gruzsa shrugs. “Jorge got fucked, Luis.”

  “By who?

  “Informer he was working with.”

  “Name of?”

  Gruzsa looks up and shakes his head sadly. “Bobby Z, Luis.”

  “Bobby Z killed my brother?” Luis asks. “Bobby Z is not a killer.”

  “I don’t know he pulled the trigger,” Gruzsa warned. “He might have had one of Huertero’s men do that.”

  “Why?”

  “They had some kind of beef, I guess,” Gruzsa says. “You knew Jorge; he could be rough sometimes. Could make people angry. Anyway, don’t worry—we’re going to find him. The agency is leaving no rock unturned until we find Bobby Z and bring him to—”

  “You won’t find him,” Luis says calmly. It’s not a complaint, just a matter of fact. “We’ll find him.”

  Which is what Gruzsa figures. Gruzsa knows most people think that California is more or less part of the United States, but if you see what Tad Gruzsa sees you know it’s really part of Mexico. The beaners go around all but invisible, but they see everything, hear everything, say nothing except to each other.

  Luis Escobar would have an army out there, a few soldiers actively looking but a whole fucking county reporting anything they saw.

  You don’t really see the Mexicans in California, Gruzsa muses as he looks at the stone-cold figure of Luis Escobar, but they see you.

  Good luck, Tim Kearney.

  “Now, Luis,” Gruzsa says, “I have to warn you against taking the law into—”

  “You would come after me?”

  Gruzsa pretends to think about that for a few seconds before he answers. “No, Luis. You do what you do. Jorge was my friend.”

  “Carnal.”

  “Blood of my blood, Luis.”

  Blood of my blood, my ass.

  The blood in my dick.

  20.

  One Way stirs under the park bench and pokes his eyes out from under his poncho hood. The clouds over the ocean are a rosy pink and the beach is deserted.

  He sniffs the air, looks around and sniffs the air again. Then he crawls out from under the bench, straightens his stiff, cold knees and contemplates the ocean.

  Something’s different.

  He smells the air again, scratches his scraggly beard and runs his fingers through his long, dirty hair. He turns his back to the ocean and looks east at where the sun is just beginning to top the Laguna hills. Smells the air to the east.

  Looks back at the ocean again.

  Then jumps in the air and shouts, “He’s back! He’s back!”

  Runs down to the ocean, jumps ankle-deep into the low surf and starts splashing himself with the freezing water. Yelling, “He’s back! He’s back! Bobby Z has returned!”

  This goes on long enough to attract the attention of the Laguna police, who are just so pleased that One Way is washing himself that they let it go on for a while before hauling him to the clinic.

  One Way doesn’t mind. Soaked with seawater, draped in a blanket, he sits handcuffed in the back of the cruiser smiling, laughing and exclaiming the good news to all who will hear.

  Bobby Z has returned.

  “He’s coming from the east,” One Way confides to the nurse.

  21.

  Tim finds what he’s looking for about an hour after dawn. He risked moving in daylight because he figured he had a decent lead, and anyway he’d trade that risk for the right location to lay up.

  The right location is about fifty yards up a canyon in the lower reaches of the hills. It’s a small depression underneath a rock shelf and it’s got a nice big rock in front of it. Peeking out from beside that rock, Tim can see the flats below, and he figures what he can see he can shoot.

  He sets Kit down on the slope and checks the tiny cave for snakes before bringing the boy in. He sets him down, tells him not to be afraid, he’ll be back in a minute, then breaks off a smoke-tree branch and spends a good half-hour cleaning up his tracks and making a new trail deeper in the canyon that comes back into the cave from above.

  Give the bad guys at least a chance of walking past the cave, and anyway it’s always preferable to shoot an enemy in the back if you have that opportunity.

  When he climbs back into the cave Kit says he’s tired of playing Marine.

  “How about Batman and Robin?” Tim asks.

  Kit dismisses this with a polite frown. “How about X-Men?” Kit asks.

  Tim’s not entirely displeased, because he whiled away a shitload of time in Saudi reading X-Men comics while waiting for the A-10s to pound the Iraqis into wet sand. “You like X-Men?”

  Kit nods. “Who do you want to be?” he asks.

  “Wolverine,” Tim says. “Unless you wanna be.”

  “You can be Wolverine,” Kit says. “How about if I’m Cyclops?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  A minute later Tim asks, “Cyclops, are you hungry?”

  “I sure am, Wolverine.”

  Tim unwraps two of the energy bars and hands one to the boy, with a bottle of water. Then he starts to field strip and clean the rifle, an act as automatic and comforting to an ex-Marine as saying the rosary is to a priest.

  The kid devours the energy bar, swallows some water and asks, “How about we’re trapped in the desert? And bad guys are chasing us? And we hide in this cave?”

  “Okay,” says Tim.

  It sounds about right.

  22.

  Monks on his way to get a lat
te and The Economist and to sit outside savoring both when he hears the news of Bobby Z’s return.

  The prophecy comes from One Way, of course, freshly released from the mental health clinic and now striding the sidewalks of the PCH proclaiming the good news to modern man.

  As a longtime Laguna resident, Monk knows One Way only too well and is used to his lunatic rendition of the legend of Bobby Z. This morning he even gives One Way a dollar and is a little unsettled when the wack job crumples the bill and tosses it into the gutter, exclaiming, “Who needs money? Bobby Z has returned! To claim his kingdom!”

  This last bit unsettles Monk some more, mostly for the reason that he has pretty much claimed Bobby’s kingdom since the latter went off the screen about four months ago.

  Off the screen literally, because Monk is the computer wiz who controls Bobby’s interests stateside. On Monk’s hard drives, floppy disks and CD-ROMs are the codes that tell the whereabouts of the wages of sin, the immense fortune built on smoke, lots of it, wafting skyward from the best living rooms, patios and hot tubs of the West Coast.

  Monk know where the treasure be, aye Jim. Knows further who the retailers are, knows further that the Z empire—always on the cutting edge—is on the verge of going completely electric.

  Except, of course, for the hard cash that has been stored away against a rainy day. Which Monk has decided has arrived since Bobby went off the screen somewhere in Southeast Asia. Monk tried for months to raise a signal, tapping away at the keyboard like Come in, Rangoon, but Bobby didn’t come in. So after a while Monk figured that his best friend Bobby had met his fate in the treacherous mountains of Southeast Asia—as had so many other American boys—and now the empire was Monk’s own. As was the stash of cash—Carl Sagan numbers—hidden for posterity.

  So Monk has—to his acknowledged shame—mixed feelings about One Way prophesying Bobby’s return.

  It’s human nature, Monk muses. Original sin, perhaps, but man is just prone to the idea that if you hold someone else’s money long enough, you start to think it’s yours.