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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
HE'S ON THE RUN Happy Doll crosses the Mexican border with a bullet in his shoulder and a cartel out for his blood.HE'S DONE WITH VIOLENCESoon he has a new identity and a peaceful new life on a secluded beach. Maybe he can finally leave his brutal past behind.BUT VIOLENCE ISN'T DONE WITH HIMWhen murder shatters the tranquillity of his sleepy paradise, Happy realizes he has nowhere left to run.The question is, can he remember how to fight?
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Seitenzahl: 358
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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i
PRAISE FOR THE HAPPY DOLL SERIES
‘I loved this book – it’s quirky, edgy, charming, funny and serious, all in one’
lee child
‘A stiff shot of timeless Hollywood noir, spiked with black humour and leaving a warm glow as it goes down’
chrisbrookmyre
‘Motel, money, murder, madness: it has all you need to keep you happy’
the times, thriller of the month
‘Happy Doll is shaping up to be the perfect hardboiled 21st-century hero’
guardian, best crime and thriller novels of the year
‘It’s witty and funny and philosophical too’
richardherring
‘Happy Doll looks set to rank with Marlowe, Lew Archer and Travis McGee as the hero of an endlessly re-readable series of PI novels’
telegraph
‘Doll is a unique addition to the Southern California crime-fiction scene’
wall street journal
‘Exceptional… Assured plotting, superb local colour, and excellent prose’
publishers weekly, starred review
‘Ames is a master of blending humour, pathos, and grit’
alex segura, author of blackout
ii‘So fun and propulsive I didn’t just read it in one sitting, I read it in what felt like a single breath’
lou berney, author of november road
‘I would follow [Ames’] protagonist anywhere he went, no matter how strange the trip’
sarah weinman, the new york times book review
iii
ivFor Jasonvvi
viiThe Buddha emerged from the forest, calm and magnificent. The villagers, drawn to his radiance and equanimity, approached him and asked: “Are you a god?”
“No,” he said, sweetly.
“Are you an angel of god?” they asked.
He smiled. “No, I am not.”
“What are you then?”
“I am awake,” he said, simply.
—Buddhist parable adapted from the Dona Sutta viii
Contents
PART I
1.
The ancient-looking doctor, with half his face in shadow, seemed to be leering at me.
He was also busy drying his hands on his dirty lab coat, which had a smattering of bloodstains, more brown than red. For my part, I was sitting on his examining table, stripped to the waist, my feet dangling like I was a little boy. A little boy with a bullet in his shoulder.
It was two a.m. and very dark outside, and the only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the ceiling, fluttered at by a moth who had mistaken it for the moon and would be dead by morning. Of course, I knew about such things, having flown toward false moons all my life.
Then the doctor stopped drying his hands — at least he had washed them — and said, “You have an interesting face. Almost Jewish.”
“That’s what all the girls tell me,” I said.
That made him smile, and I got a glimpse of old yellow teeth, which went nicely with his jaundiced bald head. Then he extinguished the smile and said, “What caliber is the bullet?”
“Caliber” sounded like “cali-bear” coming out of his mouth, and he spoke English well enough, flawlessly even, but did so with a strange Russo-Mex accent on account of the fact that he was a Russian Jew who had washed up in Mexico City in the early ’80s when the Soviets were getting rid of their Jews, a bit of information he had already imparted to me — he 4was a talkative old man — and I said, “I don’t know the caliber. It was a rifle.”
“Hunting accident?” he asked, knowing full well it wasn’t.
“Yeah, hunting accident,” I said, and he nodded, smiling to himself, and began removing the flimsy gauze bandages I had applied to my shoulder. While he worked, his little pink tongue kept darting out from between his lips, wetting a small blister, which I tried to tell myself was a cut from shaving, but I knew otherwise.
He turned on a surgical lamp to better see what he was doing, and his examining room was a converted bedroom in a private, off-the-books hospital in Rosarito, Mexico, roughly forty miles south of San Diego.
I had crossed the border a few hours before, and it was the kind of hospital — an isolated old hunting lodge in the mountains above Rosarito — where you could pay in cash and not give a real name, and where you went for specific ailments, like gunshot wounds and bad DTs. I happened to be there for both items on the menu: there was the bullet in my left shoulder, and I also had a hideous case of the French fits from too much cocaine.
I could have detoxed off the coke in the States, but no American hospital would have treated me for the bullet wound without calling the cops, which was why I had crossed the border for medical attention. That and other reasons.
The doctor finished removing the bandages, showing a sensitive touch, and placed them on the little metal table next to the operating lamp. Also on the table was a tray of medical instruments and the syringe of morphine he had already shot me up with to calm me down.
From his lab coat, he removed a pair of black glasses that had magnifying lenses on them, and they looked like something I would have liked to order from the back of a comic book when I was a kid, if my father would have let me.
The doctor put the glasses on, and his brown eyes got all big and distorted, and he showed me his yellow teeth again, just to be nice, and then 5he bent over and studied the hideous mound that was protruding from my shoulder and looked ready to burst. It was the size of a grapefruit, and the bruising from the bullet’s impact had painted it red, purple, and green, with some bilious yellow peeking through wanting to join the party. In the center of the colorful mound, where the bullet had entered, there was a black scorched hole, which I had filled hours ago with Krazy Glue to stop the bleeding.
The doctor let out a little whistling sound and took off his comic-book glasses. “There’s a lot of fluid built up,” he said. “Mostly blood and pus, I imagine.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “Let’s get the bullet out.”
He grunted in the affirmative but then pointed a gnarled finger at my face and said, “I can also fix that. Five thousand more.” What he was referring to and pointing at was the four-inch wormlike scar on my cheek, which I had gotten a while back when a meth head had cut me open with a hunting knife.
“That old scar?” I said. “What about the whole face while you’re at it?”
The morphine had me feeling glamorous and glib, and I didn’t expect him to take my question seriously, but he said, “You need a new face? Why? There are people looking for you?”
I didn’t answer him, but there werepeople looking for me. Bad people. Dangerous people. And not all of them were cops. Which was another reason I had crossed the border, and while the doctor waited for me to say something, he went back to leering, which might have been his resting state, and his little pink tongue kept darting out to make sure his blister was still there. Not wanting to divulge anything, which was why I had come to this medico in the first place, I leered back, and it was a standoff.
Then he said, “Okay, don’t tell me. People come to me because I’m supposed to not ask questions. But I do ask. I can’t help it. I’m nosy.”
Then he squeezed my wrist, gently, wanting to show me he was a warm person, a kind person, which he was and wasn’t, and he said, “So for a new face I can give you a good deal. Ten thousand, on top of the five for the scar, 6plus other costs I told you already for the bullet wound and the drug detox.”
“That’s it? Fifteen thousand for a face?”
He shrugged and smiled, a smile of acquiescence, and said, “Okay. Ten thousand. Why haggle?”
He had misread my tone. He had thought I was being ironic and that I was negotiating, which I wasn’t at all. I thought fifteen thousand dollars not to be me anymore was a bargain, a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and not just because a new face might help keep me safe from the people who wanted to kill me. It would be much more than that; it would be a chance to be free of the fool I’d had to look at in the mirror for fifty-one years, the fool who had followed me everywhere, wrecking my life every chance he could.
Of course, what I wanted — liberation from myself — was not something any surgery could ever deliver, but I was high on morphine and sodden with a lifetime of self-hate, and so I made the snap decision to get a new mug. At a discounted price. From an ancient, unlicensed quack with bad eyes and a herpes sore on his lip.
I said, “Sure. Ten thousand for a face. That’s fair.”
I didn’t let him know he had been bidding against himself, and I figured he must have been desperate for the money to have lowered his price so quickly, but it was something else.
“You’ll be pleased with my work,” he said haughtily. “My training was in plastic, and you wouldn’t think it now, seeing me like this, but I did an additional year of studies at the Royal London Hospital, in 1975, learning the latest techniques — I was the only Russian — and after that I was the assistant to the head surgeon for the Bolshoi. You’ve heard of it?”
“The famous ballet company.”
“Yes, and it wasn’t just torn ankle ligaments. The directors of the ballet — under orders from the Ministry of Culture — wanted the girls, especially the primas, to have the hooded eyes of Anna Pavlova, and the boys were to look like Nureyev, even though he was a defector. It was their 7way of saying, ‘You can all be replaced, even you, Nureyev.’ So, you see, young man, I’m a sculptor. Like Rodin. But with bone and muscle and tissue.”
He said the s’s in “tissue” with the sibilance of a Brit, and he smiled again, showing off his little yellow teeth, and I realized then he didn’t really care about the money. He wantedto give me a new face, wanted the chance to practice his craft — we all like to do what gives us meaning — and he said, “So.Handsome or plain, Mr. Lou?”
I had told the doctor my name was Lou but hadn’t given a last name. Lou, of course, was a phony, and I had chosen it after a good friend of mine, Lou Shelton, who had died in 2019. If I had given the doctor my real name, Happy Doll, he would have thought thatwas the phony. But it was real — my parents hadn’t thought it would be a joke — and it was in all the databases, and, of course, I didn’t want the doctor to know who I was. I didn’t want anybody to know. It was time to disappear for a while. But maybe someday I could go back to my life, the life Happy Doll had in LA.
“Handsome or plain, I don’t care,” I said to the doctor. “We can also stick with ugly. It’s gotten me this far. But what do you suggest? You’re the artist.”
“Handsome,” he said. “I’ll turn you into Gregory Peck. I like old American stars. They were men. Now everyone looks like a boy. Don’t you agree?”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“My point, Mr. Lou, is that Gregory Peck was a man. Anda fine actor. One of the greats. Played a Jew once. And I keep thinking you look Jewish. Tough and big but Jewish. With blue eyes, like Paul Newman. He was Jewish. Most people don’t know that.”
He was hot on the subject, and so I threw him a bone. “I’m half Jewish,” I said.
“I knew it! I know bone structure. I know genetics. I know Jews.What’s the other half?”
“Irish.” 8
“Who was the Jew? Mother or father?”
“Mother. She died when I was born. I was raised Catholic.”
“Still Catholic?”
“No. I study Buddhism. But I’m not very good at it.”
“Doesn’t matter. Your mother was Jewish, so you’re a real Jew. Like me. The chosen people. But they left out a part. Chosen tobehated.So what do you think? Gregory Peck?”
“I did like him in MobyDick,” I said. When I was in the Navy, they had played it several times, over the years, on movie night, and that image of Peck as Ahab, dead and lashed to the whale, his arm waving his men on to destruction, has always stuck with me.
“Yes, Peck was very good in that film,” the doctor said. “One of his best roles. Or what about Tyrone Power? Because you’re dark and still have your hair, I can also make you look like him. His nose went up. No one will ever think you’re a Jew again, which isn’t a bad thing. And Tyrone Power was a big star. Very big. He was Zorro. The Mexicans love him. They play Zorrolate at night on the television.
I know because I never sleep. Not for years.” “Let’s stick with Gregory Peck,” I said, and the doctor, a real cinephile, it turned out, perhaps because of his insomnia, smiled and nodded in agreement, with a twinkle in his eye.
Then he picked up a scalpel off the medical tray, and for no reason at all he poked his thumb with it and a pearl of black-red blood bubbled to the surface. He studied it with interest, then looked at me as if he had woken from a dream, and said, “Sorry, nervous habit.”
2.
I was at the hospital, which was called Casa Feldman, for two weeks, and on the premises, for the convalescing patients, there were ten wood-shingled cabins: small one-room structures with a toilet, a bed, a chair, and a single window. These had been the cabins of the original hunting lodge, and the main house, also wood-shingled, which had a big wraparound porch with rockers, was where Dr. Feldman (first name Boris) lived and performed his surgeries.
He told me that a Tijuana gangster had built the lodge in the 1920s — Tijuana was about ten miles from Rosarito — and ever since it had been owned by those who made their living outside the law. At first it had just been a hangout, a retreat, which made sense: the compound was idyllic — set back in the woods, isolated, no neighbors, and sometimes, when the breeze was right, you could smell the ocean, coming up from the bottom of the mountain.
Then in the early ’80s, the Tijuana branch of the Sinaloa Cartel took the lodge over and started using it as a place for its soldiers to heal their wounds, and the Russian doc was installed. After twenty years of servitude, he then bought the place from his Sinaloa bosses and still gave preference to their soldiers, but his doors were also open to other underworld miscreants. Like myself. 10
I learned all this because the doc would come to my cabin at night for what he called “intelligent conversation,” though like most people who say that sort of thing, he did all the talking. But I didn’t mind listening to his stories. He was lonely, and I’d had Oedipal complications — “daddy issues” in modern lingo — my whole life, which gave me a soft spot for old-timers, and so the doc would sit on the side of my bed and hold forth on movies and politics, his life in Russia, his life in Mexico, Jewish nature (anxious/creative), Mexican nature (stoic/loving), and so on.
But then one night, after I had been there a week, he suddenly put the focus on me and said, almost out of nowhere, “I’m worried about you, Mr. Lou. Being on the run. You can’t live looking over your shoulder. It’ll kill you faster than the men hunting you.”
“I never told you I was on the run,” I said. “Never said I was being hunted.”
And he smiled at me, knowingly. Why else had he given me a new face?
A face I hadn’t seen yet; the bandages wouldn’t be coming off for another week, till day fourteen. But, of course, the doctor was right: I was on the run, and I knew it was going to be a nightmare. But just how bad a nightmare and how many people would die, that I could not have foreseen. There was also the woman. I didn’t see her coming. I didn’t see any of it.
* * *
The first thirteen days I was at the hospital, no other cabins were occupied — business was slow — and it was in my little cabin that I took my meals, prepared by the doctor’s wife, Esther. She was a short, grandmother-like woman who seemed to be all bosom, and what she served was a mix of Russian and Mexican food — homemade pierogies and borscht one night, gorditas and sautéed cactus the next.
The doctor’s son, Ivan, was also an employee of the hospital, acting as the maintenance man. He was a burly, lumbering fellow, around my age, early fifties, and the doctor told me that his brain had been damaged at 11birth. As a result, he was a mute — “un mudo” — with the intellect of a child, a very strong child, and so along with taking care of the property, Ivan, under the doctor’s supervision, was there to help as muscle if a new patient, coming off the narcotics they had ingested, needed the straitjacket treatment.
In addition to his wife and son, the doctor had two Mexican nurses living full-time in the main lodge. They were older ladies, very kind and gentle, like nuns in a monastery, and one of the best things about Casa Feldman, along with the fair prices and good home-cooked meals, was that I was able to have my dog, George, with me, though I don’t like to say “my dog” if I can help it. It doesn’t seem right to think in terms of ownership when it comes to George — he’s very much his own man — but the point is that Dr. Feldman’s hospital was truly a full-service establishment: bullet wounds, plastic surgery, detox, and dog boarding.
The doctor himself had several dogs, small to midsize mongrels, and at first, George, a white-and-tan Chihuahua-terrier mix, who enters the ring at a lean twenty-four pounds, was a troublemaker: he’s wildly handsome, with an athletic figure and large bedroom eyes, which probably causes a lot of jealousy in the canine set, and his modus operandi with other dogs, no matter their size, is to attack first and become friends later.
Fortunately, this technique worked well enough at Casa Feldman.
One by one, George assaulted the other dogs — quick jabbing bites aimed at the scruff of the neck — and they would fight back, though no blows or bites would actually be landed, and after a few rounds of this, George and his sparring partner, having gained each other’s respect, would then, thoughtfully, and with a lot of decorum and fascination, sniff each other’s rectums, usually followed by some gentle oral sex. Humans can learn a lot from dogs, and certainly the French have.
So, by the end of the first hour on our first full day, George was welcomed into the pack, and he was very happy at Casa Feldman. He delighted in having friends, and it gave me great pleasure, as well, to sit in the doorway of my cabin each day — with my face swaddled in bandages like the 12Invisible Man — and watch him run around the dusty, tree-shrouded property, chasing after and wrestling with his new mates.
In fact, my heart swelled like a bride’s at the altar as I watched him. But I couldn’t help it. I’m one of those broken people who love their dog too much.
3.
Years ago, I had heard about the hospital from a fellow cop back when I was in the LAPD. The cop, whose name was Beifus and who looked like a Beifus, had a bad drug habit and would go to Casa Feldman on his vacations to clean up his act, without having it on his record that he had needed to detox.
I had lost touch with Beifus after I left the force in 2004, but when disaster struck in every way, resulting in my having a bullet lodged in my shoulder, I tracked him down and found out that the hospital was still in operation. Beifus then made the call for me — the doctor only saw people vouched for by former patients — and George and I got in my ’85 Chevy Caprice, crossed the border, and made our way to Rosarito.
This was late January of 2020, and what propelled me to seek refuge with the doctor was, at the time, the worst case I had ever been involved in. I make my living — if you can call it that — billing myself as a security specialist, which is essentially a private detective, and my undoing was a missing persons case, with the missing person being an old love I hadn’t seen in years. Her name was Ines Candle, and after a few days on the job, I managed to find Ines, a heartbreaking junkie, in a homeless camp in Olympia, Washington, but that led, almost immediately and tragically, to her being murdered for a very large inheritance she was due. 14
It turned out, I had been set up by a man named Hoyt Marrow to locate her — to lead a hit man right to her— and this sent me on a seventy-two-hour coke-fueled rampage of vengeance. Normally, I hate cocaine, it turns people into idiots after the first line, but in my defense, I was using the coke medicinally to not sleep and to deal with various injuries, psychic and otherwise, and while hunting down Marrow, who had gone on the lam, I found myself, all coked-up, on a yacht in Marina del Rey with an old friend of Marrow’s, a fat man named Jack Kunian.
Like Marrow, he was a pimp and a sex trafficker, but he also made money as a bagman for the Jalisco Cartel. I had been hoping Kunian would tell me where to find Marrow, but he was resistant to sharing information and things got violent. He had two bodyguards with him, and I hurt all three men very badly. Then, not thinking straight on the coke, I helped myself to sixty thousand dollars cash, Jalisco drug money, which was stashed in the yacht’s safe.
After that, I tracked my prey to Joshua Tree, to a small house in the desert. There, in a shootout with Marrow and his accomplices, I left behind four dead bodies, including Marrow, but I also took a bullet myself: the bullet that led me to Dr. Feldman and his scalpel.
But avoiding the cops in California because of my bullet wound wasn’t my only reason for crossing the border: Kunian and the Jaliscos would also be looking for me, and my coming to Mexico, the homeland of the cartels, was smart in a counterintuitive way. They would be searching for me in LA; they wouldn’t think that I’d be wandering around Mexico, spending their cash at a Sinaloa-backed infirmary.
But that’s where I was, like a flea in the armpit of the beast, and some of that Jalisco money had bought me a new face.
4.
The morning of my unveiling, around eight a.m., someone arrived at the lodge — I heard a car pull up, which woke me. I was in bed with George — he was snuggled under the covers — and the engine of the car was loud. Then I heard a door slam and some excited conversation in Spanish. I got out of bed, went to the window, and caught a glimpse of the doctor ushering what looked like an extremely tall man into one of the other cabins.
Casa Feldman, finally, had a new patient, and I crawled back into bed. I figured that after the doctor got the man situated, he would then come to my cabin and take off my bandages, and I really had no idea, at that point, what to expect. For two weeks, only my eyes and mouth had been visible; the rest of my face was wrapped in white gauze. The nurses had changed my dressings a few times and some sutures had been removed, but they had kept me from a mirror.
Naturally, I was anxious to see what the doctor had done. As I had sobered up and detoxed, the insanity of my decision frightened me. I mean, I had always been wildly self-destructive, but to throw away my face on a sleep-deprived morphine whim was a whole new level of self-disregard.
I rationalized, of course, that the only thing Kunian had on me wasmy face, with its distinctive scar. He didn’t know my name and there was no way he could find that out. I was a rando, a coked-out madman, who had 16shown up on his boat asking for Hoyt Marrow; and the people who could link me to Marrow, which was Kunian’s only clue to who I was, had all died in Joshua Tree, including Marrow himself. But Kunian and his two men had seen me up close, and it was likely that I had been caught on video surveillance, which Kunian could share with his Jalisco compatriots.
So, like I said, all they had was a face. A face I had changed. Which was going to make it a lot harder for them to find me and kill me, maybe even make it impossible.
But that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared as hell to see what the doctor had done, and that morning, as I lay in bed with George, I started thinking that I should just get it over with and take off the bandages myself, but that’s when I heard the screams, an old woman’s screams.
I was slow to react, to register that something bad was happening, but then I got out of bed and ran outside, barefoot, in my T-shirt and boxer shorts, and I saw the doctor come flying out of the cabin he had gone into with the new patient. I watched him bounce once and land on his back, and I ran over to him, and he was unconscious.
Then I turned and looked inside the doorway of the cabin, and I saw the new patient, the tall man I had barely glimpsed, and he looked utterly gigantic, and he was naked, except for black underwear, and the doctor’s wife, Esther, was trying to get away from him, but then he knocked her to the floor. Then he started strangling Reina, one of the old nurses, and I ran in there.
I’m six two, 190, and this fellow made me feel like puberty was just around the corner. He stood at least six nine and probably weighed close to four hundred pounds, with arms as thick as legs and legs as thick as telephone poles. His hairless torso, with big drooping breasts, was a weathered mix of fat and muscle, and he had long, greasy black hair, which went to the middle of his pitted back.
Topping it all off was a furrowed and acne-scarred face that looked like an old pit bull’s, which is an insult to pit bulls, and this giant was obviously crazed on whatever drug he was coming down from, in a state of psychosis, 17and he didn’t notice me when I came into the cabin. He was too busy throttling Reina’s neck, and I looked for a weapon and picked up an old, hard wooden chair, like the one that was in my room, and I slammed him in the back with it.
My left shoulder was still recovering, but I’m right-handed and walloped him good, swinging for the fences, and the chair was sturdy as hell and didn’t break. It annoyed the giant just a little to be hit with it, and he dropped the old nurse, who was still alive, and he turned to look at me with black eyes that had no pupils.
It was then I saw that the doctor’s son, Ivan, was slumped in the corner of the room, and I swung the chair again and the giant grabbed it in mid-air, taking it from me like it was a toy. Then he returned the favor and slammed me with it, right in the chest, sending me through the door and onto my back, next to Dr. Feldman, who was still out cold.
The wind was knocked out of me — I was sucking for air — and the giant followed me out of the cabin, still holding the chair, but then he dropped it, seeing me on the ground, which pleased him, made him smile, and he squatted down and straddled me, planting his knees on both sides of my hips, like he wanted to kill me or make love to me, and it was the former, because he lifted his enormous fist into the air, then brought it down hard and fast onto my bandaged face, delivering a gruesome hammerblow, which caused a red explosion on the inside of my brain, and I heard a woman in labor scream as her baby crowned.
Then I opened my eyes and realized it was me who had screamed, and the giant was raising his fist to smash me again, but then the dog pack, with George in the lead, swarmed the big man, and he swatted some of the dogs away, sending them howling, and George was barking at him and trying to jab in and bite him without being cuffed.
But then the giant man, still straddling me, grabbed George by the scruff of his neck and tossed him away like he was nothing, like his life meant nothing, and I saw George cartwheel through the air, land funny on his head, twitch once, and go still, and a madness went through me, like a 18flame, a surge of murderous strength, and I reached up and grabbed the giant around his thick neck, pulled myself into an embrace with him, and bit off most of his left ear.
He screamed and rolled off me, holding the side of his head, which was spitting blood, and George was paralyzed or dead in the sand, and with the mangled ear still in my mouth, I picked up the heavy chair and brained the man with it, and he fell face-first into the dirt.
Then I spit out the ear, and one of the smaller dogs, Pablo, grabbed it and dashed off with it, like a prize, and I ran to George, screaming in my mind, No,no,no,and I knelt beside him, and he was still and dead, but then feeling my hands on him, he opened his eyes slowly and seemed dizzy, but maybe all right, not paralyzed, and I held him to me and started rocking like a disturbed child, a regressed reaction, which was a mixture of relief that George was alive, but also horror that I had killed again: the back of the giant’s head was caved in, and the dogs had gathered around him and were licking the blood in his matted hair.
When my rocking passed, I put George down, and he really seemed all right. He had just been stunned by his awkward landing, and so I went over to the doctor, who was starting to rouse, as were his wife, Esther, and Reina, the old nurse, both of whom staggered out of the cabin, followed by Ivan, whose left eye was completely shut and already quite swollen.
I helped the doctor stand, and then he saw the big man on the ground, the dogs vying for the back of his head like it was a bowl of food, and the doctor’s eyes widened in horror, and he shooed the dogs away, cursing at them in Spanish and Russian.
Then he knelt, unsteadily, beside the giant and saw that the man’s skull was bashed in and that an ear was missing, and the doctor shook his head, like that part didn’t make sense, and he put his fingers into the man’s neck and held them there, maybe just to make the effort, but, of course, he felt nothing. No distant thrum of life.
He said, “You killed him, Mr. Lou?”
“Yes. But I shouldn’t have. I could have subdued him.” 19
“No, he was insane on amphetamines. He would have wiped us all out.”
Then the doctor was looking at me funny and I realized he was staring at my mouth, and without thinking, I darted my tongue out and my lips were wet with the dead man’s sweet-tasting blood.
The doctor, alarmed by the thought growing in his mind, then inspected the side of the giant’s head, tilting the skull ever so slightly in his hands.
“Did the dogs do this?”
“No.”
“Then what happened to his ear?”
“He hurt George,” I said by way of explanation.
5.
The doctor just stared at me — this business with the ear was too strange to take in, and so he dismissed it and said, “Never mind, let’s get him inside, in case anyone drives up,” and he gave Ivan an order in Spanish.
In response, Ivan grunted and came over to the body and stood next to me. He couldn’t speak, but he could understand, and his left eye was shut grotesquely and already purple, though it didn’t seem to bother him, and in the one brown eye, which glanced at me shyly, I saw a childlike sweetness.
Then, together, he and I grabbed the giant under the armpits, which were moist and disgusting, and as we labored to drag him inside — nothing is quite as heavy as a dead body — the doctor said, “This man you killed is a famous luchador, a wrestler known as El Diablo, and he’s been here many times to detox. A terrible drug addict.”
We crossed through the doorway and deposited the corpse on the floor of the cabin.
I said, “His name is El Diablo? Are you joking?”
“No, I’m not joking. He’s a legend in lucha libre and they all have names like that. But he’s not just a wrestler. He’s also a contract killer for the Sinaloa. Diablo’s killed many men. And women. He killed two wives and both times got away with it. He’s untouchable. Let’s get him dressed.” 21He barked orders at his wife and the nurse in Spanish, and they started gathering the giant’s clothes, which were on the bed.
“Why dress him?”
“Because he’s going to die in a car accident. He was never here. But we have to move quickly. And then you have to go. We may not survive this.” Then he squinted at me. “Are you injured? You have seepage.”
I realized then that my forehead and the bridge of my nose, where the giant had smashed me, were throbbing painfully, but I had been so adrenalized that I had felt nothing. I touched my bandages, and they were damp with blood. “I’m all right,” I said.
“I’ll take a look at you after we get rid of this,” he said, motioning to the body, and Esther and Reina were struggling to put on the giant’s pants, an enormous pair of black jeans, and so I squatted down and helped them, and when we got the jeans to mid-thigh, the doctor stopped us and pulled down the giant’s black underwear.
Esther shook her head with disgust and said something scolding to the doctor in Russian, but, undaunted, he pointed at the dead man’s shriveled genitalia and said to me, “See? This is why he’s homicidal. Destroyed his manhood with steroids. It’s why he killed his wives. Out of frustration. A great big man but not really a man. Most of the world’s problems are phallic.”
Then, done philosophizing and grandstanding, he waved his hand for us to continue, and we got the pants the rest of the way on. Then we put on Diablo’s shirt — button-down, red silk — and squeezed his shoes on him — size 18 white espadrilles, no socks — and I had never seen such large feet up close before: the knuckly toes, with their thickened yellow nails, were as long as fingers.
The dead man also had a black baseball hat, with red stitched-in cursive writing across the front that said ElDiablo,and I lifted his pulpy head from the floor and put his hat on, like dressing a doll. And I stared at the dead man, cupping his head in my hands, like a midwife but in reverse, and 22he stared back at me with the forlorn eyes of the newly dead, eyes that always seem to say, Notyet,and I pitied the monster.
Then I lowered his head down gently and my hands were all bloody, and the doctor fished car keys out of Diablo’s pockets.
“These three can’t drive,” he said. “Come with me.”
I stood up and wiped my hands on my boxer shorts, and we left the cabin and walked to the side of the lodge where there was a dirt parking area that held the doctor’s old Ford pickup truck and Diablo’s dusty gold-colored Cadillac Escalade. Mycar was down in Rosarito; I had taken a taxi to Casa Feldman, not wanting anyone at the lodge to know my license plate or VIN number.
The doctor handed me Diablo’s keys, which had a Cadillac insignia, and said, “Near the top of the mountain, about ten kilometers from here, there’s a spot where we can send him over the cliff. You take him in his car, and I’ll follow in the truck and drive you back.”
“Sounds like you’ve had this plan ready for such a moment.”
“Not really. I used to think of killing myself up there,” he said, without feeling, and I empathized but said nothing. The doctor continued. “They’ll find cocaine and amphetamines in his blood, which will explain his accident, and every ten years, some drunk Mexican drives off that cliff, which means we’re due, and the police won’t think about it twice, and I hope he’ll be so mangled, they won’t notice that the back of his head is caved in … orthat he’s missing an ear.”
He leered at me when he said that last bit, then got into his truck and drove over to the cabin. I followed in the dead man’s car, and in the middle console was Diablo’s phone, but it was turned off, which I took as a good sign. Regardless, there was little to no cell reception on the mountain, so it was unlikely that he had texted or called anyone, letting them know he had arrived at the lodge. We had to assume that people knew he was headed there, but not that he made it.
After I parked the Caddy, Ivan and I dragged the giant man out of the 23cabin and got him onto the front passenger seat. It was hard work, and I was sweating profusely.
Then I quickly went to my cabin to put on some clothing and shoes, and George was on the bed, on my pillow, as if nothing had happened. I thought of hugging and kissing him, but then I remembered my bloody lips, and before I got dressed, I went into the bathroom to wash my mouth and hands.
I could have taken off the bandages then, but I wasn’t ready, and, also, the doctor was in a hurry to get rid of the body. But washing up went slower than I expected. Disturbingly, the blood around my mouth had seeped into the skin, rouging my upper lip, like I had been kissing a woman wearing lipstick, and it was hard to scrub off, but, finally, the blood came out.
Then I got dressed, which gave me an idea, and I went back out to the cars.
Ivan was in the truck, sitting on the passenger side, and the doctor was waiting for me by the Caddy. I said to him, “We better take off Diablo’s shirt and hat. I’ll wear them. And we’ll lower him in the front seat, so that he can’t be seen. This way if I pass someone on the mountain, they’ll think it was Diablo who was driving. Alone.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said the doctor.
I then got the giant out of his silk shirt, took mine off, and swapped it for his, which draped around me like a red tent, and I put on his hat, which was a little damp with blood from the back of his head. Then I said to the doctor, “You know, we’ve been rushing. Maybe we should wait till dark when there’s less chance of being seen.”
“No. His friends will know that he was due here now, this morning. The longer we wait, the more risk we take.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. If the Sinaloa find out that the great El Diablo died under my care, they’ll kill all of us. Esther, the nurses, my son. You. It has to be that El Diablo never made it here.” 24
“All right,” I said. “Let’s just hope no one sees us.”
“I think we’ll be fine. There are only a few cabins near the top, so there shouldn’t be many cars.”
