One Life. David Lida
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tacos on a nearby side street for the past couple of years, since their work on the cleanup crews after the hurricane dried up. Then he adds to Bobby: “Kind of on the skinny side, though.”
“I like them like that,” offers the interpreter. It has been a long time since such a fetching suspect washed ashore in Plaquegoula Parish. She is tall, large-boned but slender, with caramel skin, wide eyes, and enormous lashes. Bobby imagines himself in a savage embrace with her, his fingers clutching the long wavy hair, kissing the wide mouth with its generous lips, now taut with fear. He doesn’t recall ever seeing hands that size on a woman. She could cup a basketball in her palm. And although she’s thin, she’s got a shape. Everything is big about her: the eyes, the teeth, the fingers, even the tatas. Especially the tatas.
Shepherd leans in toward Esperanza once again, inches from her face. “Listen,” he says. “Play ball with me and they’ll feel sorry for you. They’ll give you manslaughter or something. They’ll cut you a deal and you won’t get nothing but fifteen for the baby. You’ll be in and out in eight and a half, maybe less. By that time you’ll be what, thirty? Thirty-five? You’ll still be young enough to have you another one if you wanted it. Hell, you could have two or three.” Bobby more or less translates these words of encouragement for Esperanza. “But if you don’t cooperate, you know what’s going to happen to you? We don’t fuck around in America, baby. Sure as shit we give you the lethal injection.” His patience wearing thin, Shepherd listens to Bobby mumble his words in Spanish. “You know about the lethal injection, don’t you?” Shepherd asks. “We stick that shit in your arm and your insides will broil like a crown roast in a slow oven.” He opens his jacket and removes a needle and syringe from the inside pocket. He holds the apparatus in the palm of his hand while staring Esperanza in the eye.
She is exhausted, having only slept fitfully under the table. Her skin is burning. She looks at Shepherd and then in Bobby’s eyes.
“Tell him to give it to me now,” she spits out in Spanish.
“What?” Bobby asks.
“Tell him to kill me now.” If that is going to be her fate, santísima virgen, then let’s get it over and done with.
“What’s she saying?” asks Shepherd.
“She says she’s ready for that lethal injection right now. She wants you to give it to her.”
“Ah, shit,” says Shepherd. “Fucking refried fruitcake.”
The Blob begins to laugh. “Go on, bro. She got her arm stuck out and everything.”
Shepherd shakes his head. “They must grow them Tootsie Fruits and Brazil nuts in her part of Mexico,” he says.
The Blob stands up and slaps his partner on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “Excuse us for a minute,” he says. “We have something important to discuss.” He pulls Shepherd out the door by the arm. It’s almost one in the afternoon. Outside the police station in the blistering heat, they light up Marlboros.
“What do you want for lunch? You want to go to Subway again?” asks the Blob.
“How about some of those spicy wings at Popeyes?” asks Shepherd. “Or we could go downtown to the Piggly Wiggly and get the stuffed peppers.”
“Whatever,” says the Blob. “One thing’s for sure. I ain’t eating off of no Mexican taco truck. That greasy shit will give you a heart attack. A Mexican’s hungry enough he’ll eat his own donkey. You think they call them burritos for nothing?”
Bobby—gray hair side-parted, round shoulders, a loose shirt and a striped tie fraying at the knot—offers Esperanza a weak smile. He would like to say something consoling. If anyone is going to relieve her, it’s him, especially now that they’re alone. They don’t play good cop, bad cop in Plaquegoula Parish. They play bad cop, worse cop. Dirty Harry would be the compassionate one around here. But what can he say? “Everything is going to be all right?” Nothing is going to be all right for this baby doll. Besides, the minute he opens his maw to say something nice to a woman, he gets in trouble. He’s living in the house of one of his exes, paying her a fat rent, while shelling out three mouths’ worth of child support to the other. If it weren’t for his personal payroll he wouldn’t be working for these creepy cops any longer.
Esperanza shivers. He thinks about getting the jacket out of his locker and putting it over her shoulders. Shepherd and the Blob would never let him live it down.
The Blob opens the door and finds Esperanza and Bobby sitting in silence. He takes his seat in front of her and stares. She sees the perspiration that has formed on his scalp and brow in pear-shaped droplets. She can hear him wheezing.
“You look like a princess,” he says finally, adding, “La bonita.”
He leans toward her with an outstretched arm. She jerks her head away before he caresses her cheek with the back of his hand.
I woke up in what may have been the finest three-hundred-peso hotel room in all of Mexico. There was a firmish mattress and a newish bedspread in a repulsive yellow-brown print. The walls were chartreuse stucco, the light fluorescent and buzzing like a mosquito. The room was equipped with telephone and TV, hot and cold water, a ceiling fan and even air-conditioning. The latter seemed like a good idea in Puroaire, a town situated in an area that extended across three states called Tierra Caliente.
It was given that moniker long ago because of the tropical heat and merciless humidity, but since drug traffickers claimed it as part of their turf a few years ago, the tag had taken on a more sinister connotation. The cooling system turned the room into a meat locker in five minutes. I turned on the fan and lay naked atop the synthetic sheets. After a while I got used to the smell of insecticide fluid, a shield against cockroaches the size of roof rats.
When I got off the bus in towns like Puroaire, I would ask a cabdriver to point me to the best hotel in town. He’d tell me to hop in, drive around for about ten minutes, and drop me off somewhere in the vicinity of where he picked me up. At $100 an hour I could be a sport about such extortion. The “best” lodgings were mostly along the lines of the Hotel Central, where I was spending the night in Puroaire. A doctor in Mexico City wrote me a script for Xanax for nights in places like this. Three tequilas and half a pill usually took care of me for a few hours.
I woke a little before seven and pulled on yesterday’s clothes. The hotel was built around an open-air patio with a gnarly Guadalupe palm in the center. At a desk by the door a heavyset man dozed in an office chair, despite a TV on his desk noisily broadcasting a grisly car crash in Mexico City that morning. He had curly salt-and-pepper hair and slept in his black-framed eyeglasses. An unbuttoned guayabera exposed thatches of swirling body hair. His prolonged snore discharged in a continuous dissonant volley.
Trying not to wake him, I looked around the patio to see if I could find coffee. I was useless before I had caffeine in the morning. Without it, I was on irritated automatic pilot, a day of the living dead.
Suddenly the honking cascade ceased. “Can I help you?” asked the large man, folding his arms across his chest in an attitude of utter officiousness.
“Is there any coffee in the hotel?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
I nodded, waiting for additional enlightenment. None was forthcoming. “Where might it be?” I asked.
“On top of the table over there,” he said. “Monday through Friday. When the girl comes in to make it.” He smiled and shrugged. “Today’s Saturday. Sorry.” He said the last word in English, trilling the double r.
“Is there anywhere open this early where I can find a cup?” I asked.
“The market.”
I enjoyed crossing the plazas of these little towns so early in the morning, before the heat rose. There was no activity in