Take No Names, page 18
Pain radiates through my torso, and I groan in agony as I try to turn my head and look at my shoulder.
“Huàn ge wèizi,” Sun says—Switch seats with me.
“NOBODY TALKS.” Ken is weaving the cab through Colonia Juárez, the older, denser business district south of La Reforma, at a terrific pace. “NOT A FUCKING WORD FOR TEN MINUTES.”
We bounce up a curb, tear across a parking lot, zoom into another alley. The orange helicopter has ascended higher above us now, and in the window of sky framed by the rooftops, I glimpse a larger blue model—Mexican police. Cruiser sirens squall from the surrounding roads, fading, doubling, and rising again as Ken flies out of the alley, across three lanes of oncoming traffic, and onto the tree-lined pedestrian path along the median of Avenida Insurgentes.
Sweat pours down my face, my damp skin hot and cold all at once, my mouth choking dry. I look at Sun, and he gestures with his hands. I slide into the left seat as he climbs over me. He tumbles against the door as Ken veers left to avoid a skateboarder. The cab clips a flower kiosk, a bucketful of pink camellias scattering across the hood.
Sun rights himself and cuffs Mark on the shoulder. When Mark tears his eyes away from the horror movie playing in the windshield, Sun makes a wrapping motion with his hands. Mark reaches into the foot well and retrieves the black rubber med kit. Sun pops the latches, locates a pair of forceps, and starts cutting away my sleeve.
Mark puts an open water bottle into my hand, catches my frantic eyes with his. “Easy, pal,” he says. “You’ll be okay.”
“I said nobody talks!” Ken hisses through clenched teeth. “I need to hear the sirens. And keep your goddamn faces away from the windows!”
Mark sits forward and raises his hands like, All right already.
Ken takes a hard right and Sun smashes into me, igniting a fresh explosion of pain in my shoulder. The cab careens off the median. Sun shoots a glare in Ken’s direction, then reopens the kit on the seat between us and fingers through its extensive contents. He plucks out a tube the size of a glue stick and holds it in front of me. I have to mop the sweat out of my eyes with the cuff of my sleeve in order to read it: MORPHINE AUTO-INJECTOR.
I nod to him, my breath still pumping shallow and fast. He pops off the red cap, presses the other end into my thigh, and depresses the plunger with his thumb, a pinch like a bee sting.
Then he’s back in the kit, selecting another packet. Tearing it open: a spongy white square. He reaches past me, grabs my seat belt, and buckles it around me. Buckles his own. Pulls a tongue depressor out of the kit, slips it between my teeth.
I bite right through that fat popsicle stick when he presses the square sponge against the ridge of my shoulder blade. I’m still spitting balsa fragments out of my mouth when the fat warmth of the morphine hits my heart and flutters my eyelids.
Sun takes the water bottle out of my hand, pours some into my mouth, some over my head and face. He leans forward, his hand still clamped on my shoulder.
“He will go into shock,” he says to Ken.
“I don’t give a single fuck,” Ken barks. “I said don’t talk!”
We’re fishtailing around Glorieta de los Insurgentes now, filling the air with burnt rubber and fried clutch. He straightens out in time to rocket across the huge traffic circle onto Avenida Chapultepec.
“Drive smooth so I can help him. Or you will pay a price,” Sun says in his matter-of-fact manner.
Ken’s eyes snap to Sun’s face in his rearview for a fraction of a second. Then he leans forward and looks up at the helicopters. The cruiser sirens sound more distant now.
“We’ll lose these birds under the Periférico in five minutes,” he says. “If you can shut the fuck up.”
“Five minutes,” Sun confirms.
Ken slams his foot on the accelerator.
Sun sits back and wraps his right hand around his grab handle, his left hand still squeezing the vortex of pain in my shoulder.
Minutes pass in a patchy fog, blackness ringing my field of vision, my eyelids popping open each time Ken swerves from lane to lane. When I next surface from the warm bath of opiate haze, we’re on the lower level of the Periférico, the ring road that encircles Mexico City. Sun and Mark are watching the orange and blue helicopters through the blur of load-bearing columns. And then they disappear from view as we sink deeper underground.
Ken merges into the left lane, pulls us into the lee of an eighteen-wheeler. Mark rolls down his window, throws his sombrero out of it, and climbs halfway out of the car with his feet on the seat. I hear him pawing the roof above me, pulling off the decal spray-painted with one set of taxi registration numbers, revealing another. Then he drops back into the car, rolls up his window, and attaches a mesh sunshade to it with a suction cup.
Sun affixes similar shades to the rear windows. I slip back into my drooly reverie. Dad’s voice echoes through my head.
“Zhǐyǒu guòqù de huíyì néng ràng wǒmen tòngkǔ. Zhǐyǒu duì wèilái cúnyí shí wǒmen cái huì hàipà.”
—Pain only exists in our memories of the past. Fear only exists in our doubt of the future.
Car sounds, sharp words, the reverberations of driving underground, the brightness of the day, the city morphing into hills shrouded in cloud. Mark saying, “Supposed to go unnoticed . . . plastered all over the news . . . rest of our pathetic lives in a hole underground”; Ken saying, “Take it up with Pearce . . . cameras in those birds . . . probably burned me, too.”
And I’m laughing a little to myself thinking, Mole people, even worse than raccoons, when—OUCH—pain jolts me awake like a hatchet smacking my right shoulder.
I blink my teary eyes open, unhappy noises leaking out of my mouth. Sun shows me an angled pair of tweezers holding a tiny object: an oblong ball like a lead M&M. My right shoulder is bare now, the sleeve of Lijia’s jumpsuit and my white T-shirt a mess of bloody fabric on the seat.
“One more ball,” he says.
“They shot me,” I murmur. “With a shotgun.”
“Not well,” he says. “Most of the balls missed. Two stopped against your, ah, jiānjiǎgǔ.”
“Scapula.”
“Try to relax.” He sticks another tongue depressor between my teeth, then dives back into my shoulder with his tweezers.
“IT’S NOT THAT BAD,” I scream.
Mark casts an alarmed eye back at me.
“Nǐ gànmá zuò zhème duō”—Why are you doing all this? I wheeze at Sun. —You didn’t have to be here.
He studies me for a moment before saying, “Wǒ xiǎng huánqīng wǒmen zhījiān de zhài”—I want to settle the debt between us.
—You think that’s possible?
—My marriage with Lianying is fake. It’s only for the green card.
He pauses, and my mind goes red hot as I realize what’s coming next.
—But I have feelings for her. I cannot talk about it with her until you and I have reconciled.
And it occurs to me that this must be the moment he’s been waiting for. The moment when the sociopath who murdered my father expects me to say we’re cool.
I shake my head.
—She pities you, I mutter. —Nothing more.
He stares at me without reaction. Then he turns back to the kit, extracts another individually wrapped syringe, and holds it in my face: HEMOSTATIC GRANULES WITH APPLICATOR.
“This is necessary to stop the bleeding,” he says. “It will also hurt.”
He places his left palm on my back, pushing me toward the door, and inserts the applicator into the first of my two wounds. A galaxy of pink stars spools across my vision, and the stars become a flurry of black snow, and then the flurry becomes a sheet.
When I wake again, Sun is tapping my right hand with his left. He catches my eye and shakes his head very slightly. Then he draws a character with his index finger on the back of Mark’s seat. 敬—jìng—respect. And then, beneath it, 言—yán—speech. Respect speech? What? I close my eyes, shake the druggy fog from my head. It’s not two characters, but one: 警—jǐng.
Warn.
I look back to his face, but he’s looking out the window now, his hands folded in his lap. I gingerly push myself upright in my seat. Most of my bare shoulder is covered with a patchwork of gauze and tape, the rest of me prickled to gooseflesh by the powerful AC. The dull ache spikes into razors when I try to move my right arm, so I fish around with my left, find the bottle of water in the pocket of the door. Take a sip, check the time: 12:02.
It’s been an hour since we left the Baoli, and now we’re on some curving dirt road, flanked on either side by a hilly landscape of waist-high shrubs and modest pines.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“State of Mexico,” Ken says. “Out of the range of DF cops. We’ll lie low here until we can make contact with Keystone.”
He takes a right onto another dirt road, this one even narrower. The cab’s suspension bounces us around as we climb higher into the hills, deeper into the clouds. A quarter of a mile later, we come to a stop in front of a cattle gate across the road.
Ken cuts the motor, pulls the keys, and hops out.
“Motherfuck,” Mark says. “Is this it? Why’d he park so far?”
I look forward between the front seats. The gate looks twenty feet wide. Ken parked us sixty feet away from it.
Mark pulls the handle of his door just enough to pop the latch. I glance at Sun, see him do the same.
Ken’s arriving at the gate now, glancing back at us, pulling something from his pocket. And despite the drug haze and the pain, the next five seconds play out in my head as clear as crystal.
“Go go go go go,” Mark is saying, and I’m summoning some final reserve of strength to push open my door and run a dozen steps before the pink-and-white Hyundai explodes.
28
The blast launches me airborne.
Gravity slams me back down.
I taste dirt and scream, coil reflexively into a ball. Then I spot an object dropping out of the sky. Roll away an instant before it smashes into the earth beside my head.
A brick of transparent plastic, its cracked surface printed with bold black letters: TAXI.
Ringing in my ears. The crackle of flame. The creak and pop of settling metal. I push the ground away, climb to my knees, and peek through the shrub between me and the car. On the other side of the flaming hull, I see Sun Jianshui on the ground, motionless and prone.
Walking toward him from the gate is Ken, pistol drawn.
I drop flat, hyperventilating fast and shallow. Mark and Sun saw it coming. They saw the holes in Pearce’s polemics and Ken’s bogus plan. I was never expected to make it out of the Baoli. That was why Sun, instead of faking a seizure, got himself escorted to the security center: so that he could help me escape. That was why Mark lent Sun his knife. And they knew Ken would try to eliminate us, so they stayed alert even after we made it out of the city. Mark anticipated the car bomb when he saw how far Ken had parked from the gate.
Really impressive. Right over my head. But not quite enough to stop the same old story from playing out. The bad guys still win, and who writes history?
Fury floods my veins. I steel myself and crawl back to my knees. Ken’s approaching Sun in a crouch, his head on a swivel as he scans both sides of the road. I reach into my pocket for Mark’s balisong.
It’s not there.
And the last hour flashes through my head. The helicopters, the sirens, the med kit. Sun tweezing shotgun pellets out of my shoulder. Further back. Pouring water over my head. Reaching across me to fasten my seat belt.
“Hey, Ken!” Mark steps into view on the other side of the cattle gate, a couple hundred feet down the road, just out of range of pistol fire. His hands raised in surrender. “Let’s talk it over!”
Ken wheels around to aim at him and freezes mid-turn, twisted into an arc, as the balisong handle pops out of his side.
And now I see Sun on his knees, left hand on the ground, right hand extended in the follow-through of his expert throw.
Ken howls, his body contorting. Hops twice to his right as if he could still dodge, his arms held awkwardly at shoulder height, his neck craning down to see what stung him.
And he seems to see the knife and remember the gun in his hands in the same instant, swinging it to aim in Sun’s direction.
Almost in time.
Sun’s first kick, a crescent right like the crack of a whip, catches Ken’s wrist and sends the pistol flying. His second, a roundhouse left, snaps across Ken’s face and sends him staggering back. Sun quicksteps to stay with him. Yanks the knife out of Ken’s side.
Ken manages to lift his hands a few inches, palms open. He’s saying, “I didn’t have a—” when Sun slashes the knife across his throat before the word “NO” can make it from my mind to my mouth.
A moment later, I’m standing over Ken’s burbling, convulsing body as Sun searches the bushes for the pistol.
Mark limps over, takes one look at the car’s shattered windshield, and then abruptly grips his knees and starts puking.
Sun returns from the bushes with the gun in his hand.
“Are you injured?” he asks Mark.
Mark shakes his head, tries to speak, retches again.
“He’s not good with broken glass,” I mutter.
Sun rests a hand on Mark’s back and says, “You did well.” Then he kneels next to Ken and starts going through his clothes. “He planned to leave here without the taxi. There must be another vehicle.” He pulls a ring of keys from a pants pocket. Then he extracts Ken’s wallet and tosses it to me.
It bounces off my chest and falls to the ground as Sun walks toward the gate.
Mark spits a final time into the dirt and then joins me beside the body.
“Holy hell,” he says.
“You knew this was going to happen,” I say. “You gave Sun your knife.”
“Would’ve told you. Didn’t think you could keep it together.” He tips his chin toward Sun. “He agreed.”
“How’d you know?”
“Like Longdai has payoff videos floating around on their LAN? Horseshit.” He shakes his head. “Pearce is after something else.”
Ken’s eyes have stopped rolling now, and aside from his twitching hands, his body is still.
“You played along anyway.”
“I felt we had some advantages. They clearly thought we were morons. Anyway, what choice did I have?” He scowls down at Ken, then turns to Sun, who’s walking back from the gate. “Find a ride?”
“Can you drive a motorcycle?”
“You’re kidding me.” Mark’s palms go to his temples.
“No, I am not kidding you.”
“What kind of bike?”
“Honda.” He closes his eyes for a moment. “CBR600RR.”
“There’s no way three of us are going anywhere on a crotch rocket like that.”
“There is yes way.” Sun tips his head at me. “He is light. I am lighter.”
Mark studies the ground for a minute. Then he says, “I’ll ride to the next town, swap it for a car, and come back to get you guys. Should only take an hour.”
Sun shakes his head. “We leave together.”
“You think the three of us will make it a mile? After what we just pulled?”
“They will expect us to be leaving the city, not entering it.”
Mark’s face twists into an incredulous expression. “Let me get this straight. You want to ride threesies on a sport bike back into Mexico City?”
Sun nods. “If we want to hide, we need local help. Our local help is with Juliana. Is that incorrect?”
“No fucking way!” Mark says. “I don’t care about your hard-on for big sis. We’re not going back into the city. That’s my only offer. And you can’t ride without me.”
Sun says, “I can learn,” and turns to start walking back toward the gate.
“Wait a minute!”
Mark reaches for Sun’s right hand, the one holding the keys, and Sun whips around, striking Mark’s forearm downward with his palm. He feints a kick and Mark dodges back, making fists. Sun draws Ken’s pistol from his waistband and pulls the slide to chamber a round.
“HEY!” I step between them and raise my good hand like, Cool it. “Nobody’s shooting anybody! Sun’s right: we need local help. We can’t run with no cash, no clothes, no provisions.”
I give Sun a hard look. After a beat, he lowers the gun. I turn back to Mark.
“If there are roadblocks, we don’t know if we’re inside or outside. We have to hope that we can make it to Art and Jules without being noticed.”
Mark’s face stays mad. I see the freshly broken thing within him: the thin hope that he’d emerge from this ordeal unscathed and paid. Now he’s calculating his odds on the road on his own. How well was he photographed at the Baoli? If he splits now, will he ever see his share of Pearce’s money? He grabs Ken’s wallet off the ground, snatches out the bills, and counts them. Flings them back to the ground and screams a four-letter word. Puts his hands back on his knees and stares at his right foot as he taps it to a rhythm that only he can hear.
Then he bends over and gathers up the bills that haven’t already blown away on the breeze.
“I get the helmet. And no tickling.” He jabs a finger in Sun’s face. “You know how to lean?”
The worst part is next, when I have to ditch the jumpsuit and steal Ken’s jeans. His shirt is ruined with blood, so I end up wearing Sun’s suit jacket over my bare skin. I ride between the two of them, my left hand wrapped around Mark, my right limp at my side, Sun perched behind me on the rear cowl.
The two miles of bumpy dirt road are brutal, the pain in my shoulder jagged and intense. When we hit the paved road again, the relief is exquisite. Adrenaline washes out of my blood, and I slip back into a warm morphine muddle. Mark takes it slow, drafting trucks, keeping toward the center of traffic clumps. It’s hard not to feel conspicuous. But most of our fellow drivers seem determined to avoid looking at us anyway.
At the city’s edge, we hit a straightaway with a roadblock of federales: camouflage jeeps fronted by officers with tactical helmets and M16s, waving cars to the shoulder. But as Sun predicted, they’re only hassling people headed out. Mark guns the bike, and we rocket past the line of traffic.
