Lethal for Pluma

Bars Closed

Maribel

The sign says Black Flag Lounge, and the letters are the only thing on this strip that still has all its lights.

I stop at the edge of the gravel. My feet have been bleeding since before dark, and the last of the tape I wrapped them with is gone somewhere behind me on the road.

I hold my bag against my stomach with both arms. It’s the only thing I own that they didn’t take, and I’m not putting it down for anybody.

There are bikes under the roofline. More than I can count from here. A man sits on the front step with a bottle of water and his elbows on his knees. He’s already looking at me.

He’s young and he’s enormous and his cut says PROSPECT on the front.

He stands up without hurrying. “Bar’s closed.”

“I’m looking for someone.”

He waits. I make myself walk the rest of the way across the lot. Gravel gets into the cuts on my feet, and I keep my face still, because the last men I showed pain to enjoyed it.

“Mateo Ortiz,” I say.

He tips his head. “Nobody here by that name.”

I’ve heard that before. I heard it in Hialeah at a counter with a coffee machine behind it, and I heard it at a bike shop with a wall of chrome.

Then I heard a different answer from two men in cuts who said they rode with him and could take me to him.

I got in their truck. Their cuts had skulls with the jaws hanging open.

I know now what that meant. Los Muertos.

I don’t get in trucks anymore.

The men who kept me weren’t careful about what they said in front of me. Black Flag came up more than once, always angry, always with this strip attached to it.

I held onto both words. When I got out, they were the only address I had, and I said them to a man at a gas station until he pointed.

“Ortiz,” I say again, and I let the accent go where it wants. “He rides with Black Flag. This is Black Flag.”

The prospect’s face changes. He looks at my feet, my arms, the side of my head where the hair is stuck down. He looks at the lot behind me and the strip behind that.

Then he looks at my feet.

“Who told you where we are?”

“Nobody told me. I listened.”

“Wait here.” He goes inside and lets the door close.

I stand on the step and don’t sit, because if I sit I’m not sure I’ll get up. The door has a small window in it. Through the glass I see a bar, chairs on tables, and a man wiping down the bar.

The prospect talks to him. The man puts the rag down and walks toward a hallway, and the prospect goes with him.

I count my breaths. Behind me the strip is quiet except for a truck going by slow. I don’t turn around to look at it, and I don’t let myself wonder whose it is.

The door opens.

The man who comes through it is big in a way that has nothing to do with the prospect’s size. He has dark hair and a scar cut through one eyebrow. His cut says PRESIDENT, and he doesn’t need it to.

He fills the doorway and stops there. His eyes do one pass over me, top to bottom, and I watch him add up the feet and the arms and my face. He doesn’t hurry it, and he doesn’t look away from any of it.

A leaner man stands behind him with a wrench in his back pocket, and behind both of them, a third one with glasses and sandy hair is already pulling on gloves.

The president looks at me. “You asked for Ortiz.”

“Mateo Ortiz.”

“Why.”

“That’s between him and me.”

The lean one makes a sound that might be a laugh. The president doesn’t. “You walked here.”

“Yes.”

“From where?”

I don’t answer. He watches me not answer, and then he looks past my shoulder at the strip, at the place the slow truck went by.

“Who put you in that condition?”

The name is in my mouth. I’ve been carrying it there since I got out of that house, so I say it.

“Los Muertos.”

Nobody moves for a second. Then the lean one takes his hand off the doorframe. The one in glasses stops pulling on his glove, and the president’s face doesn’t change at all, which is somehow worse.

“Rook.” He doesn’t turn his head. “Lot. Nobody comes onto this property tonight that I don’t know by name.”

“Yes, Prez.” The prospect goes past me down the steps.

“Doc, she’s yours.”

“No.” I step back. My heel finds the edge of the step and I stop there. “I don’t want a doctor. I want Mateo Ortiz. If he isn’t here, tell me where he is and I’ll go.”

“You’re not going anywhere.” He says it without any heat. He doesn’t need any. “You’re standing on my step. That makes you my problem, and nobody puts a hand on you under this roof unless you say so. Doc included.” He looks at the man in glasses. “Doc.”

“Understood.” Doc stays where he is and puts his hands in his pockets. He looks at my feet. “Those first, when you’re ready. You keep walking on them, they’re going to get a lot worse.”

“I walked here on them.”

“That’s my point.” He nods at me once. “I’ll be inside when you decide.”

The lean one looks at me the way you’d look at a stray that might bite. “He’s not inside. Ortiz. Out on a run. He’s on his way back.”

“You called him.”

“Prez called him before he came out here.”

I look at the president. He looks back. I don’t know what to do with a man who decided I was his problem before I finished asking.

“Sit down before you fall down,” he says.

“I’ll stand.”

“Suit yourself.”

So I stand. The lean one goes inside and comes back with a bottle of water and holds it out, and when I don’t take it he sets it on the step by my foot and leaves it there.

Doc goes back in. The president doesn’t. He leans a shoulder on the doorframe and waits with me. He doesn’t ask me anything else, and that’s the first thing anyone has done for me since I got here that I didn’t have to pay for.

The quiet goes on long enough that I ask a question I didn’t plan to.

“Is he good?”

The president turns his head. “Ortiz?”

“Yes.”

He thinks about it, or he lets me watch him think about it. “He’s the one I send when I need a thing done right and don’t want to hear about it after.” He looks back at the strip. “Make of that what you want.”

I don’t know what to make of it. The Mateo I knew was loud. He argued with everyone on our street and won most of it. The only person he was ever quiet with was me. I pick the bottle up off the step and hold it. I don’t open it.

Out in the lot, the prospect straightens up.

The bike comes off the strip fast.

I hear it before I see it, one engine, and then the headlight swings across the lot and finds the prospect. It also finds me and holds on me a second too long before it cuts out. The man on it puts his boots down. He doesn’t take his helmet off right away.

I know it isn’t him. I’ve known it wasn’t him every time. The boy I’m looking for has skinny arms and a loud laugh. He’s ten years old, and he’s on the other side of the water.

This is a man. He’s tall getting off the bike and wide through the shoulders under the cut. His arms are dark with ink from the sleeve down to the wrist. He walks toward the step and the president moves off the doorframe to let him have it.

He takes the helmet off.

He has the same face.

It’s older, and harder, and somebody broke his nose once and he let it stay that way. But it’s the same face, the one that used to turn around at the corner to make sure I was still behind him.

He stops at the bottom of the step. He looks at me the way the president did, feet, arms, the side of my head, but it’s different, because his hand comes up off his side, closes into a fist and goes back down.

I don’t say anything. I can’t. Everything I walked here to say is gone.

He looks at my face for a long time.

“Pluma.”