Queen of the South - Страница 6

It was the same old story. Winding up like that. How could it be otherwise, even though Teresa Mendoza never imagined that The Situation would smell like sweat, like rutting macho, like the shot glasses of tequila that Gato Fierros had knocked back before coming up those stairs looking for his prey. I wish it was over, she thought in her moments of lucidity. I wish it was just fucking over and done with, and I could rest. She thought that for a second and then she sank again into her void without emotions, without fear. It was too late for fear, because fear was what you felt before things happened, and the consolation when they finally did happen was that it all came to an end. The only true fear was that the end would take too long to come.

But Gato Fierros was not going to be that case. He was pushing violently, with the urgency to finish and empty himself. Quiet, Short. He was pushing cruelly, without looking at her, shoving her little by little to the edge of the bed. Teresa emptied her mind as she suffered his thrusts. She let her arm drop, and it touched the open gym bag on the floor.

The Situation can go two ways, she suddenly discovered. It can be Your Situation or the Other Guy's. She was so surprised to realize this, that if the man holding her down had let her, she would have sat straight up in bed, one finger held up, very serious and reflective, to think it through. Let's see, let's just consider this variant… But she couldn't sit up, because the only part of her that was free was her arm and hand, which, falling accidentally into the gym bag, was now stroking the cold metal of the Colt Double Eagle inside it, among her clothes and the stacks of bills.

This is not happening to me, she thought. Or maybe she never really thought anything, but instead just observed, passively, while that other Teresa Mendoza thought in her place. Whatever-before she became conscious of it, her or the other woman's fingers had closed around the butt of the pistol. The safety was on the left, next to the trigger and the button to release the clip. She touched it with her thumb and felt it slide down, to the vertical, freeing the hammer. There's a bullet in the chamber, she remembered, there's a bullet there because I put it there-she remembered the metallic click-click-although maybe she just thought she'd loaded the chamber, but hadn't, and the bullet wasn't ready. She considered all this with dispassionate calculation: Safety, trigger, hammer. Bullet. That was the right sequence of events-if, that is, that click-click had been real and not the product of her imagination. Because if it hadn't been real, the hammer was going to hit nothing, air, and Gato Fierros would have time to take it badly. Of course, whatever happened, things couldn't be that much worse than they were now. There might be a little more violence, or rage, in the last moments. Nothing that wouldn't be over within a half-hour or so-for her, for that woman watching her, or for both at once. Nothing that wouldn't stop hurting in a little while. And as she thought all this, she stopped looking up at the white ceiling and realized that Gato Fierros had stopped moving, and that he was looking at her. That was when Teresa raised the pistol and shot him in the face.

Up here was an acrid smell, the smell of gunpowder, and the report of the JL gunshot was still echoing off the walls of the room when Teresa pulled the trigger the second time-but the Double Eagle had jumped at the first shot, recoiling so much that the new bullet only took a chunk of plaster out of the wall. By that time, Gato Fierros was lying against the night table, gasping for air, covering his mouth with his hands, while through his fingers gushed streams of blood that also spattered his eyes, which were wide open with surprise. He was stunned by the blast that had singed his hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes, but Teresa couldn't tell whether he was screaming or not, because the noise of the gunshot so close had deafened her.

She'd gotten up on her knees in the bed, her T-shirt bunched up over her breasts, naked from the waist down, holding her right hand with her left so she could aim the third shot more accurately, when she saw Pote Galvez appear in the doorway, stupefied, his mouth agape. She looked at him again, as though in a slow-motion dream, and Pote, whose revolver was still stuck in the waistband of his pants, put both hands up in front of him, as though to protect himself, looking in fear at the Double Eagle that Teresa was now pointing at him. Under the black moustache his mouth opened to pronounce a silent "No," like a plea for mercy-although what may have happened was that Pote Galvez actually said "No" aloud and she simply couldn't hear it because she was still deaf from the gunshots. She finally decided that that must be it, because Pote kept moving his lips, fast, his hands out in front of him, looking at her apologetically, conciliatorily, speaking words she couldn't hear. Even so, Teresa was about to pull the trigger when she remembered the fist through the closet door, the Python pointed at her forehead, the "Guero was one of us, man, no seas cabron" And the "She was Guero's woman, man."

She didn't shoot. That sound of splintering wood kept her finger motionless on the trigger. Her naked belly and legs were beginning to feel cold when, never taking the gun off Pote Galvez, she backed up on the bed and with her left hand threw the clothes, the notebook, and the coke into the gym bag. As she did this, she watched Gato Fierros out of the corner of her eye. He was still slowly writhing on the floor, his bloody hands on his face. For a second she thought of turning the gun on him and finishing the job, but the other killer was still at the door, his hands outstretched and his revolver at his waist, and she knew with absolute certainty that if she stopped pointing the gun at him, the next bullet fired would be for her.

She grabbed the gym bag, and holding the Double Eagle firmly in her right hand, stood up and stepped away from the bed. First Pote, she decided, and then Gato Fierros. That was the right order, and the noise of splintering wood-which she was truly grateful for-was not enough to change that. Just then she saw that the eyes of the man standing before her had read her own. The mouth under the moustache suddenly stopped, interrupted itself in mid-sentence-now it was a confused murmur in Teresa's ears-and by the time she fired a third time, Potemkin Galvez, with an agility surprising in a man as heavy as he was, had leapt to the front door and was clambering downstairs, pulling his gun as he ran.

She shot a fourth and a fifth time, before realizing that it was useless and that if she wasn't smart, she could wind up without ammunition. Nor did she run after him, because she knew that he wouldn't just let this go, that he was going to come back for her, soon, and finish what the two of them had started.

Two stories, she thought. Although it's not any worse than what I've already been through. So she opened the bedroom window, looked down at the back yard, and saw a few stubby trees and some bushes in the darkness. I forgot to finish off that cabron Gato, she thought too late, just as she was jumping. Then the branches and the bushes were scratching her legs, thighs, and face as she fell into them, and she felt a sharp pain in her ankles as she hit the ground. She got up, limping, surprised to be alive, surprised that nothing seemed broken, and she ran, barefoot, and naked from the waist down, through the parked cars and shadows in the lot.

Finally, out of breath, far away, she stopped, squatting next to a half-ruined brick wall. Besides the sting of the scratches and the cuts to her feet from running, she felt an uncomfortable burning in her thighs and sex. The memory of what had just happened to her now hit her, because the other Teresa Mendoza had just abandoned her, left her with nobody to attribute sensations and emotions to. She felt a violent urge to urinate, and she did so just as she was, squatting motionless in the darkness, shivering as though she had a high fever. A car's headlights illuminated her for a second; she clutched the gym bag in one hand and the pistol in the other.

2. They say the law

spotted him, but they got cold feet

I mentioned earlier that I had been in Culiacan, Sinaloa, at the beginning of my research, before I met Teresa Mendoza personally. There, where drug trafficking had come out from underground a long time ago and become an objective social fact, a few well-placed dollars opened doors for me into certain exclusive worlds, places where a curious foreigner without any references might, overnight, turn up floating in the Humaya or the Tamazula with a bullet in his head. I also made a couple of good friends: Julio Bernal, head of the city's office of cultural affairs, and the Sinaloan writer Elmer Mendoza-no relation to Teresa-whose splendid novels A Lonely Murderer and The Lover of Janis Joplin I'd read for background. It was Elmer and Julio who acted as my guides through that underworld and filled me in on all the local eccentricities.

Although neither of my friends had had any personal dealings with Teresa Mendoza in the beginnings of this story-she was nobody back then-they did know Guero Davila and some of the other characters who in one way or another pulled the strings of the plot, and they and their contacts set me on the track to knowing a good deal of what I know now. In Sinaloa everything is a question of trust; in a hard, complex world like that one, the rules are simple and there's no place for mistakes. You're introduced to somebody by a friend somebody trusts, and that somebody trusts you because he trusts the friend who vouched for you. Then, if anything goes wrong, the voucher pays with his life, and you pay with yours. Bang bang. The cemeteries of northwest Mexico are full of graves of people somebody trusted.