Elvis rushed forward and caught him before he tripped and fell. A minute later El Güero and the Antelope rounded the corner.
“What the fuck happened?” Elvis asked.
“No idea,” the Antelope said. “Maybe one of those students, maybe—”
“We gotta drive him to the doctor.”
“Fuck no,” El Güero said, shaking his head. “You know the rules: we wait until one of the cars swings by and then we load him into that. No driving him ourselves. We still have work to do. There’s a cameraman from NBC hiding in a taco shop, and we’ve got to grab that prick.”
El Gazpacho was gurgling like a baby, spitting more blood. Elvis tried to prop him up and glared at his teammates. “Fuck that, help me get him to the car.”
“The car’s too far. Wait for an ambulance or one of the vans to swing by.”
Yeah, yeah. But the problem was Elvis didn’t see no ambulance or no van swinging by right then and everyone was busy as fuck. It could take nothing for El Gazpacho to be rolled into a vehicle, or it could take a while.
“Motherfucker, it’ll be five minutes, and then you can go figure out what’s up with the cameraman.”
El Güero and the Antelope didn’t look very convinced, and Elvis couldn’t hold poor Gazpacho forever and he couldn’t carry him nowhere. He wasn’t that strong; he was quick and wily and could kick and punch courtesy of the personal defense lessons El Mago had given them. The strong one, that was El Güero, a fucking Samson who could probably lift an elephant in his arms.
“El Mago ain’t going to be happy if his right-hand man bites the dust,” Elvis said, and at last that seemed to rattle the Antelope enough, because the Antelope was deadly afraid of El Mago, and El Güero was a subservient snake when El Mago was around, sliding on his belly for crumbs, so some preservation instinct must have activated inside his dull brain.
“Let’s get him to the car,” El Güero said, and he lifted El Gazpacho, who was no small man, as though he were a baby, and they ran the few blocks necessary to reach the alleyway to find that someone had torched their car.
“Who the fuck!” yelled Elvis, and he spun around, furious. He couldn’t believe it! Those little fuckers! It must have been one of the protesters who’d singled out the vehicle due to its lack of plates.
“Well, your plan’s fucked now,” El Güero told him, and the sadistic motherfucker looked a bit giddy. Elvis didn’t know if it was because things weren’t going well for Elvis or because he hated El Gazpacho.
Elvis looked around at the lonely alleyway strewn with garbage. The smoke made his eyes water, and the scent of gunpowder clogged his nostrils. He pointed to the other end of the alleyway.
“Come on,” he said.
“I’m heading back. We got work to do,” El Güero said, and he was putting El Gazpacho down. Just dumping him down on the ground like a sack of flour, leaving him there atop a damn pile of rotten lettuce. “We gotta get that cameraman.”
“Don’t you fucking dare, you son of a bitch,” Elvis said. “El Mago, he’ll have your balls if you don’t help us.”
“Up your ass. He’ll be pissed we were a bunch of pussies and didn’t finish the job. If you want to play nurse, do it alone.”
That was that. El Güero was walking away. The Antelope didn’t seem to have made up his mind about what to do. Elvis couldn’t believe this crap. He wasn’t no softie, but you didn’t leave one of your teammates to bleed out in a stinking alleyway like that. It wasn’t right. And this was El Gazpacho! Elvis would rather have a foot amputated than leave El Gazpacho behind.
“Come on, help me here. What? You lost your dick?” Elvis asked the Antelope.
“What the fuck’s my dick—”
“Only a limp, dickless shit would be standing there rubbing his hands. Grab him by the shoulders.”
The Antelope grunted and complained, but he obeyed. The three of them made it to the end of the alleyway and down the street. There was a blue Datsun parked there, and Elvis shattered the glass of the passenger’s window with a bottle he found on the ground. He slid into the car.
“What you gonna do?” the Antelope asked.
“What’s it look like?” Elvis replied as he frantically looked inside his backpack until he fished out the screwdriver. Handy thing, that. It was an old habit of his to carry it from back in the day when he’d been a juvenile delinquent. The cops would give you a massive beating if they found you carrying a knife and then arrest you for having a concealed weapon, but a screwdriver was no knife. The other thing he liked to carry were two little pieces of metal that he used to pick locks when he didn’t have his full kit.
“You can’t hotwire it like that,” the Antelope said, but the Antelope liked to complain about everything.
Elvis jammed the screwdriver in place, but it wouldn’t go. He bit his lip, trying to calm the fuck down. You can’t pick a lock if you’re shivering; same with starting a car. Gladius.
“Man, can’t you hurry it?”
Gladius, gladius, gladius. Finally! He got the motor running and motioned for the Antelope to get in the car. The Antelope started protesting.
“The mission still needs to be completed, and what about El Güero and the others and that cameraman from the American network?” he asked, sounding a little breathless.
“Jump in,” Elvis ordered. He couldn’t afford to have a panicked operative, and he kept his voice level.
“We can’t take off.”
“He’s gonna bleed to death if you don’t press against his wound,” Elvis continued in that same level tone he’d learned from El Mago. “You gotta get in the car and press hard.”
The Antelope relented and pushed El Gazpacho into the car and climbed in next to him. Elvis took off his denim jacket and handed it to the Antelope. “Use that.”
“I think he’s gonna die anyway,” the Antelope said, but he did press the jacket against El Gazpacho’s chest as instructed.
Elvis’s hands were slick with El Gazpacho’s blood as he took the steering wheel. The gunshots had started again.
2
THE STREET SMELLED of fritangas and oil, a far cry from the scent of frangipani and roses and island paradises, which she’d tried to conjure the previous evening, spraying cheap perfume around her apartment and playing “Strangers in the Night.” The conjuring had failed. Instead, she hadn’t slept well and had a headache.
Maite attempted to pick up the pace. The alarm clock hadn’t gone off, and she was going to be late, but she had to stop at the newsstand. Would Jorge Luis’s surgery go according to plan? The question had gnawed at her mind for days now.