“That little shit we saw Saturday?”
“That shit.”
“Pricks. Who do you think killed him?”
Elvis shrugged. For all he knew, Sócrates’s commie friends had wised up and killed the traitor, or maybe it had been that big fucking Russian—after all, he’d followed Elvis to the Habana. Or, hell, maybe it was Leonora, or Maite and that hippie. After all, they’d run out of the building real quick. He definitely didn’t like that hippie.
The doctor wandered into the reception area. His white coat was splattered with crimson, and he was wiping his hands on a rag. “How’s he doin’?” Elvis asked.
“I gave him painkillers and cleaned everything up, but he’s going to lose that eye if he doesn’t have surgery. I can make the arrangements.”
“Can I have a word about that with you, doc?”
“Come on,” the doctor said, and they went into a second examination room. There was a bowl filled with mints in a corner atop a mini refrigerator and one of those charts with all the human bones on the wall.
“I’m not letting you take El Güero anywhere. The last team member I brought here ended up in a ditch, strangled.”
The doctor stared at Elvis. “That’s not my business.”
Elvis grabbed the doctor by the collar of his shirt and slammed him against the wall, his mouth a snarl. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I released that man, and he was supposed to head back to his apartment,” the doctor said, and Elvis had to give it to him, the doctor had balls, because he didn’t flinch and he didn’t yell, speaking instead like he was dictating a prescription.
But Elvis supposed the doctor didn’t have to be afraid. The people he worked for, they must make sure he didn’t get in any trouble.
Elvis released him and stepped back. The doctor rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and glared at Elvis. Elvis went into the examination room where El Güero was sitting. “Let’s go,” Elvis said.
“The doc said he was getting an ambulance.”
“No he ain’t.”
They went down the stairs real quick and got into the car. Elvis wasn’t sure what to do. In the end, he told the Antelope to drive to a Cruz Verde. El Güero wasn’t too happy with that idea. He was still going on about the ambulance.
“Look, things are fucked here left and right,” Elvis said. “Check yourself in and lay low. It’s the best chance you got.”
“I don’t get it.”
“El Gazpacho’s dead and you saw the DFS is out for us. So, stupid fuck, lie low and get your damn eye fixed. Find us in a few days.”
El Güero looked at Elvis suspiciously, but he grunted a “fine, fucker,” and when they reached the hospital, he got out of the car and didn’t ask any more questions.
“Where to?” the Antelope asked.
“Back to our apartment, then to the girl’s place.”
The Antelope took out a stick of gum and unwrapped it. “You weren’t joking about that shit, about El Gazpacho being dead?”
“I’m not sure.”
“We’re not calling in El Mago? About this stuff?”
“Later tonight,” Elvis muttered. “Right now we better go get the fucking gun.”
24
MAITE HADN’T LIED when she told him she thought too much. After a brief nap, she’d woken up to find Rubén snoring next to her, and quickly her mind jumped to everything that had happened to them so far, like unspooling the reel of a film and looking at it frame by frame. And then, of course, she started worrying about the whole situation and wondering about the police and what they might do to them if they connected them to the dead man in the apartment.
Unable to lie still, Maite got up and went to the atelier. She couldn’t play her music for fear of waking Rubén up—he looked like he was enjoying his sleep—so instead she sat down and leafed through old issues of Secret Romance. She’d reached the panel where Jorge Luis kisses the heroine for the first time when he cleared his throat and she looked up to find him by the doorway.
He was still naked, standing there, hair tousled and eyes fogged by sleep. She glanced down at the floor, feeling embarrassed. She’d fucked him, but she hadn’t really looked at him.
“I thought you were gone for a moment,” he said.
“Where would I go?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might still be mad at me. I guess I should say I’m sorry. I shoved you away but I needed you to hang up. I wasn’t thinking right. I don’t want Leonora to wind up dead.”
“She wouldn’t wind up dead by talking to us.”
“She could. We can’t meet with her. She needs to lie low, until they move on to something else. We should lie low too.”
Maite stood up and placed her comic books back on the bookshelf. Then she touched the cuffs of her nightgown and brushed her hair behind her ear and looked at him. The stupid nightgown did her no favors, and she was sure he was comparing her to Leonora. Who wouldn’t? Maybe he was laughing at her dismal performance.
When she’d pictured an encounter with a stranger, it was sexy and intriguing. But if she replayed the scene with Rubén in her mind, it all seemed tawdry. She wondered if he was going to complain about it, but instead he yawned.
“Want to get a bite to eat? I’m starving,” he said, scratching his belly with his left hand. He was slim, his stomach was flat, a bit of muscle there and also in the arms, perhaps from lifting boxes around his job. Or else he played a sport.
“It wouldn’t be…you know, dangerous?” Maite asked.
“It’s probably safer outside,” he said. “It’s harder to kill someone in the middle of a restaurant. I’ll take the gun, just in case.”
“Can you even shoot it?”
“It’s not that hard.”
They headed back to her room, and she quickly picked a blue dress with a paisley print that she thought flattered her. Or at least wasn’t one of her dismal office outfits. He followed her and scooped up his shirt and jeans from the floor.
“Do you?” she asked, as she buttoned her dress, half-hiding behind the dresser’s door. She didn’t want him looking at her as she changed, noticing her imperfections: the annoying curve of her belly, her dry skin, the stretch marks left from puberty crisscrossing her ass. Maite’s mother had varicose veins, and she feared she’d have the same one day, to make it all worse.