El Güero took out his pocketknife. Elvis bent down and picked up a wooden plank that had been left on the ground; there was no point in trying to do much with the screwdriver. His palms were sweaty. Six against two. The Hawks beat people, but it was usually defenseless students, not trained agents. He wished he had a real weapon.
One of the agents charged toward Elvis, and he swung the plank, hitting him hard and sending him staggering back. But that meant that another two rushed forward and tried to land a punch. Elvis whacked one of them in the face, but the other son of a bitch was like a ninja from a movie, and within two moves he had twisted Elvis’s hand and pulled away the wooden plank.
Elvis fell to his knees and then he tugged forward, pulling the agent down. For a minute he thought he had the upper hand as he punched the fucker in the face, but then the man he’d whacked with the plank decided to get revenge by kicking Elvis in the ribs. Quick as that, the fucking ninja had pinned him down and was choking him into oblivion.
Elvis managed to raise an arm and hit the son of a bitch on top of him with his elbow, stunning him for a second, and coughing and wheezing, he leaned on a pile of crates and pulled himself to his feet.
Meanwhile, for all his strength and his knife, El Güero didn’t seem to be doing too hot either. A man was hitting him in the face with the butt of a gun. “Fuck, leave him alone! What do you want?” Elvis yelled, and the guy beating El Güero turned to Elvis and pointed the gun at him.
“Easy there, don’t shoot them.”
A man who had been leaning against a wall, arms crossed, now stepped forward. He made a motion with his hand, flashing a ring, and the man with the gun put his weapon away. El Güero slumped down. His face was painted crimson, and Elvis was pretty sure he’d lost several teeth. As long as he didn’t swallow them, he’d live. Or so he hoped.
“Hello, hello, how are we doing today?” the man with the ring asked. He sounded chipper.
“Well, our lunch got fucked up,” Elvis said, spitting on the ground, “so not that great.”
“Sorry to hear that. But you deserve it.”
“What the hell you talking about?”
“My name is Mateo Anaya. I’m with the DFS.”
“I know who you are.”
The man ran both hands through his hair and adjusted his cuffs. “Good. Then you know what this is about. You interrogated one of my agents. I want to know what he told you.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I would. Turns out he’s dead.”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Liar.”
“He’s telling the truth,” El Güero said, his voice raspy. “It wasn’t us.”
Anaya cocked his head and frowned, like he was trying to figure out whether they were hiding an ace up their sleeves, but it was plain as day that the beating would have taken the liar out of any man. “It doesn’t matter,” Anaya said finally. “I want to know what he told you.”
Elvis wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “He told us he spied for you.”
“And?”
“Told us about the girl, Leonora, and said he had a way to contact her, through an ad in the paper. But we haven’t seen her, she hasn’t shown her face, so maybe he was lying.”
“That’s it?”
“What the fuck else should he have told us? He said he was a rat.”
“Told you. Carrion peckers. They don’t know shit,” the man with the gun muttered.
A teenage boy holding a pack of cigarettes in one hand opened the back door of the laundry and stared at them in astonishment. Elvis rushed forward, pulling El Güero with him by the arm, and they shoved the boy aside and made their way into the shop.
Many shirts, suits, and dresses hung from the ceiling, wrapped in plastic. It was a veritable labyrinth of clothes, and Elvis yanked some coats away, dragging El Güero until they reached the front of the store and stumbled out. Then it was a mad dash back to the Antelope and the car. When they reached him, the Antelope was happily chewing gum. He stared at them, mouth open.
“Open the fucking door!” Elvis said, and the Antelope fumbled with the locks until Elvis was able to shove El Güero in and jumped into the car. “Drive!”
The Antelope turned the key, turned the wheel, obeying with a quick nod of the head, and they were off. The big man moaned pitifully while Elvis attempted to get a better look at his injuries. El Güero had lost teeth and his nose was a mess, but the thing that worried him was the eye. The right eye was probably busted.
“Antelope, let’s go to Escamilla’s place,” he said. That was the same doctor they’d visited when El Gazpacho was injured, and El Gazpacho maybe died in his fucking office, but Elvis didn’t know any other doctor that could help them.
The doctor lived in La Guerrero, which wasn’t exactly next door but was close enough by car and besides, they didn’t have much choice, whether it took twenty minutes or fifty-five to drive there depending on the fucking traffic.
Escamilla’s ratty office sat atop an ugly, peeling yellow building a few blocks from La Lagunilla and right next to a gym where boxers trained. When they walked in, with El Güero oozing blood from everywhere, the doctor was standing in the reception area, a cup of coffee in his right hand. He looked at them and stirred his coffee with a plastic spoon.
“Hello, gentlemen, come over to the back,” he said, like it was no big deal to have a man without teeth stumble into his office. And maybe it wasn’t, with so many boxers in that neighborhood, plus the assorted unsavory characters who needed bandages.
The doctor told El Güero to lie down on the examination table while he washed his hands in a tiny sink. Then he shone a light in El Güero’s eyes, checked the inside of his mouth. The doctor moved away from the patient, opened a cabinet, and began pulling out gauze, bandages, cotton swabs, and disinfectant with slow, methodical fingers.
“Might be an orbital fracture,” the doctor said, raising his head and looking at Elvis. “You can step out. This’ll take a few minutes.”
Elvis obeyed. A young man in a gray smock had materialized and was mopping the floor, cleaning the blood that had dripped onto the linoleum. He didn’t look at either Elvis or the Antelope. Elvis sat down on a plastic chair, and the Antelope took the other chair. Between them there was a tiny table with a pile of old Reader’s Digests.
“You going to tell me what happened?” the Antelope asked.
“DFS happened,” Elvis said. “They found Sócrates dead and wanted to pin it on us.”