“Who do you work for?” he said.
“Fuck you, gringo.”
Milton raised his head a little and slammed it back against the work surface.
“Who do you work for?”
“Fuck you.”
Milton reached across and twisted the dial on the hob, the gas hissing out of the burner. He pushed the button to ignite it, the light from the blue flame guttering around the dark kitchen. He guided the man towards the hob, scraping his forehead across the work surface and then the unused burners, raising him a little over the lit one so that he could feel the heat.
His voice remained steady and even, implacable, as if holding a man’s face above a lit flame was the most normal thing in the world. “Let’s try again. Who do you work for?”
The man whimpered. There was a quiet, yet insistent, crackle as his whiskers started to singe. “I can’t—”
“Who?”
“They’ll — they’ll kill me.”
Milton pushed him a little closer to the flame. His eyebrows began to crisp. “You need to prioritise,” he suggested. “They’re not here. I am. And I will kill you if you don’t tell me.”
He pushed him nearer to the flame.
“El Patrón,” the man said in a panicked garble. “It’s El Patrón. Please. My face.”
“What are you looking for?”
“The girl — the girl.”
“But she’s not here. What else?”
“Contacts.”
“Why?”
“They’ve been writing about La Frontera. El Patrón — he wants to make an example of them.”
Milton turned the man’s head a little so he could see him better. “Where can I find him?”
The man laughed hysterically. “I don’t know! Just look around. He’s everywhere.” He squinted at him. “Why would you even wanna know that?”
“I need to speak to him. He needs to leave the girl alone.”
“And you think he’ll listen?”
“I think he will.”
“Who are you, man?”
“Just a cook.”
The man laughed again, a desperate sound. “No, I tell you what you are — you’re fucked. What you gonna do now? Call the federales? How you think that’s going to go down, eh? You stupid gringo — El Patrón, he owns the cops.”
“I won’t need the cops.”
Milton snaked his right arm around the man’s throat and started to squeeze. The man struggled, got his legs up and kicked off the wall; Milton stumbled backwards and they went to the floor. The man was trying to get his hands inside Milton’s arm but he could not. Milton squeezed, the man’s throat constricted in the nook of his arm. He braced his left arm vertically against his right, his right hand clasped around his left bicep, and he pulled back with that, too, tightening his grip all the time, his face turned away. The man was flailing wildly, his arms windmilling, and he scrabbled sideways over the floor, kicking over the waste bin, treading dusty prints up the kitchen cupboards. His sneakers squeaked against the linoleum floor. He was gurgling, a line of blood trickling from the mouth. He was choking on his own blood. Milton squeezed harder. The man’s legs slowed and then stopped. Milton relaxed his grip. The man lay jerking. Then he stopped moving altogether.
Milton got up and flexed his aching arm. He poured himself a glass of water and drank it, studying the dead man gaping up from the floor. Early twenties, a cruel face, even in death. His eyes bulged and his tongue lolled out of blue-tinged lips. He crouched down next to the body, frisking it quickly: a mobile phone, a wallet with three hundred dollars, a small transparent bag of cocaine. Milton took the money and the phone, discarding the wallet and the cocaine, and then took a dishcloth and a bottle of disinfectant he found under the sink and cleaned down anything that he might have touched. He wiped the glass and put it back in the cupboard. He wiped the tap. He wiped the hob.
Milton took the man’s torch and went into the bedroom. The laptop, covered in stickers and decals — Wikileaks, DuckDuckGo, Megaupload — was under the mattress, where Caterina said it would be. He slipped it into a black rucksack he found in the closet and dropped the Springfield and the ammunition in after it. He climbed down from the balcony and followed the passageway back to the front of the house. The storm had still not passed. Visibility was poor. Milton walked back in the same direction from which he had arrived. He passed the parked SUVs, ignoring the man smoking a cigarette in the open door, his eyes fixed straight ahead. He found the taxi again and got in.
“La Playa Consulado,” he said.
He bought cheeseburgers, fries and Big Gulps from the take-out next to the hotel. He could hear the sound of the television as he approached the door to Caterina’s room. The curtains were drawn but light flickered against the edges. Milton stopped in his room first, taking out the revolver and ammunition and the things that he had taken from the dead man, hiding them under the sheet. He locked the door behind him and knocked for Caterina.
“Who is it?”
“It’s John.”
He heard the bedsprings as she got to her feet and then her footsteps as she crossed the room. The lock turned and the door opened. Milton went inside.
“You were hours.”
“I’m sorry. It took longer than I thought. Was everything alright?”
“The cleaner tried to come in but I sent her away.”
“Nothing else?”
“No. I’ve been watching TV all day.”
She looked tired and, despite the permanent glare of defiance, her red-rimmed eyes said that she had been weeping.
“Here.” Milton put the wrapped meals on the bed. Caterina was hungry and so was he; he realised that he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast this morning. The meat in the cheeseburgers was poor, but they both finished quickly, moving onto the little cardboard sheath of greasy fries. Milton watched the TV as he put the food away; Caterina had tuned it to a channel from El Paso, news about local Little League sports, a fun run to raise money for cancer research, the pieces linked by glossy presenters with white teeth and bright eyes. It was a different world north of the river, he thought. They had no idea what it was like down here.
Milton put the rucksack on the bed and took out the laptop. “Is this what you wanted?”
“Perfect, thank you,” she said. “Did you — did you have any trouble getting it?”
“No trouble at all.”
29
Three more days.
Jesus Plato reminded himself, again and again, as he stared up at the bridge.
It was Wednesday today.
Just three more days and then an end to all this.
It was a fresh morning, a cool wind blowing after the fury of the storm last night. Plato was at the concrete overpass known as Switchback Bridge. The bodies had been called in as dawn broke over the endless desert, ropes knotted beneath their armpits, tied to the guard rail and the dead tossed over the side. They both dangled there, the rope creaking as they swung back and forth in the light breeze, twenty feet above the busy rush of traffic at the intersection. A small crowd of people had gathered to watch as a fire truck was manoeuvred around so that the ladder could get up to them. Former school busses from across the border, now ferrying workers to and from the sweatshops, jammed up against one another and, behind them, a queue of irate drivers leant on their horns. Just another day in Ciudad Juárez. Another morning, another murder. No-one was surprised, or shocked. It was an inconvenience. This was just how it was and that, Plato thought, was the worst of it.
He could see that the bodies had both been decapitated. Hands had been tied behind their backs and their feet flapped in the wind. He hadn’t had a proper breakfast yet, just a Pop Tart as he left the house, and he was glad. The bodies revolved clockwise and then counter-clockwise, bumping up against each other, a grotesque and hideous display. They were suspended between advertising hoardings for Frutti Sauce and Comida Express fast food and the sicarios had left their own message alongside their prey. A bed sheet was tied to the guard rail and, painted on it, was a warning: “FREEDOM OF THE PRESS” and then “ATENCION — LA FRONTERA.” A fireman scaled the ladder and, with help from colleagues on the bridge, the carcasses were untied, lowered to the ground and wrapped in canvas sacks to be taken to the morgue.