23
MONDAY AT EIGHTa.m. Elvis and the Antelope parked their car in front of Sócrates’s building. Elvis had slept little, in fits and bursts. First he’d told himself that Justo was lying, that El Gazpacho was alive. But sometime near dawn he’d admitted the truth. El Gazpacho must be dead. Whether El Mago had a hand in it, he couldn’t tell. He also couldn’t phone El Mago and ask if he’d murdered a man.
The Antelope chewed bubble gum and took a nap. Elvis looked at the crossword resting on his lap and couldn’t fill in the missing letters. He hadn’t picked a word of the day. In one pocket of his jacket he had his screwdriver and in the other he carried a pack of cigarettes, but he’d forgotten his lighter.
Around one-thirty p.m. the Antelope nudged him. “Isn’t that the woman we’ve been tailing?” he asked.
It was Maite, walking together with her friend, that same man he’d previously seen her with. They made a mismatched pair. He looked like a student, his hair too long, and she was prim and proper in a suit. Elvis wondered who the man was and what they were doing there. They went in, but came out rushing like the devil was after them.
“Follow them,” Elvis said.
“I thought we were watching this building.”
“Change of plans; when someone runs like that, you follow.”
However, rather than leading them to an interesting location, the couple simply returned to Maite’s apartment building. Elvis parked the car, and they found El Güero, who had been keeping watch all this time alone and rolled his eyes when he saw them.
“Finally! Ready to relieve me?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Elvis said. “Anything happening here?”
“It’s dead. The woman just came back home.”
“Yeah, we bumped into them at the other location.”
“So what now?” the Antelope asked. “Do we stay here?”
Elvis wasn’t sure, but he didn’t want to say that because then they’d think him indecisive, weak. El Güero solved his problem by speaking up. “I’m starving, man. Let’s get a decent meal and come back.”
“Fine. Antelope, stay here in the car and wait. We’ll be back in twenty minutes,” he said. Now that El Güero mentioned it, Elvis needed to grab a bite. He had a damn headache. Maybe he could stop at the pharmacy too.
A couple of blocks from the apartment building there was a park and around its perimeter a little tianguis, where office workers and low-tier government functionaries clustered around food stalls, drinking soft drinks and eating tacos. Everyone preferred a comida corrida and the comfort of a chair and a beer, but sometimes it was hard to make ends meet, and tacos de canasta served as well as anything else.
Elvis and El Güero stopped at a stall selling barbacoa, where a woman deposited two bowls filled with meat in front of them. Elvis salted his food and ate slowly, sitting on an overturned bucket that served as a chair while a little radio played “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and for a moment he didn’t mind sitting there, squeezed between El Güero and a stranger, with a scrawny dog circling around them, waiting for scraps.
For a moment the music smoothed the edges of everything away and he felt like in those movies, when the lens is blurry and a halation—that’s a word he’d learned from his handy dictionary—distorts the light.
Then some prick changed the station, and they were playing “Surfin’ Bird.” Elvis frowned and took a sip of his soda. That’s when he noticed the four men standing on the other side of the food stall. They were wearing suits and ties, but those were no bank tellers or office workers—he could recognize trouble when he saw it.
He nudged El Güero, asking him for a light. El Güero took out his lighter, and Elvis lowered his head and pressed his cigarette against the flame, eyes down on his bowl of barbacoa. “Four fuckers right across.”
El Güero put away his lighter and pressed a napkin against his face. “I’ve seen that fucker on the right, he’s been watching the building. These assholes must be DFS.”
“Figures.”
“What the fuck do they want?”
“Guess they’re marking their territory, like dogs pissin’ on the sidewalk.”
“You got the gun? Take it out.”
Elvis shook his head. “Don’t have it. What you got?”
“Pocketknife.”
“Let’s get the fuck outta here. Follow me.”
They stood up slowly and began walking between the stalls. The men matched their pace. When they reached the edge of the park, Elvis made a sharp right, and they dashed across the street. It was a performance worthy of marathon runners but it did them no good; they couldn’t shake those motherfuckers off. Elvis veered into an alley behind a laundry; the smell of detergent was strong, spilling out of an exhaust pipe. He eyed the door to the laundry, wondering if he could pry it open quickly. But the men were right on their heels. Four at one end of the alley and two on the other end, blocking their way.
