style="font-size:15px;"> “I ain’t never killed nobody before, Raymond.”
Raymond sighed as if this was some admitted failing on his brother’s part. He picked up the gun and stuck it in his waistband.
“Okay,” he said. He reached into the safe again and pulled out another pistol, a stubby, ugly automatic. He pulled back the slide and chambered a round before handing the gun to John Lee. “You take this one and back me up. This is your duty, too, little brother. Now let’s go.”
As they walked back out into the deserted bar, Billy Ray called out to Raymond. “Our friend called,” he said. “Our southern friend.”
Raymond stopped. “What’d he say?”
Billy Ray cast a glance at John Lee. “I told him you were at your Daddy’s funeral. He said to give you his sympathy.”
“Yeah, right,” Raymond said. Paco Suarez didn’t get to be the biggest supplier of cocaine on the East Coast by giving himself over to the softer emotions. “He calls again, tell him I’ll get back to him as soon as I take care of some family business,” Raymond said. “C’mon, John Lee.”
They drove for about thirty minutes, with John Lee providing monosyllabic directions. After they got off the main road, the roads grew narrower, but the scenery never changed. They passed field after field of crops growing thick and fat from the dark rich earth where a shallow sea once rolled. Corn, beans, corn, tobacco, tobacco, beans, tobacco. Houses weathered to the same gray as the topsoil stood among the fields, next to metal tobacco curing barns that gleamed and shimmered in the baking sun. Some landowners had given up the precarious living of farming; those fields grew rows of metal house trailers with postage-stamp-sized dirt yards and old tires thrown up on the roof in a forlorn hope of keeping the roof on in a tornado.
They finally pulled into a narrow dirt driveway that ran between a double line of rusting single-wide trailers. About halfway down the line on the left, there was a break in the regular spacing of the trailers. The soil in the gap thus created had been denuded of grass and pounded flat by years of trampling. A group of young Latino men sat playing cards at a picnic table under a spreading live oak in the middle of the common area thus created. They looked up warily as the truck pulled up. One of them stood and walked over to the driver’s side window.
“You know who I am?” Raymond said.
The man nodded. He was short and broad, with a dark-brown pockmarked face and a thin Fu Manchu mustache. He looked to be in his mid-forties, in sharp contrast to the other, younger men. He spoke formally, like a man who had learned his English in school rather than on the street. “We were sorry to hear about your father,” he said in his heavy accent.
Raymond looked the man up and down. His eyes flickered to the other men who were beginning to gather around the truck. Still others were coming out of the trailers.
John Lee cleared his throat. “Hey, Raymond,” he said. “Maybe we better--”
“Shut up,” Raymond replied. He turned back to the man by the truck window. “Y’all know anything about who mighta done it?”
“‘Ey, bitch,” one of the men piped up from the crowd. He stepped forward. He was massively built, with ropes of muscles straining the arms and chest of his t-shirt. His arms were covered with elaborate gang tattoos. “We already talk about all this to th’ cops,” the tattooed man said. “Why we got to answer you?”
“I say anything to you, greaseball?” Raymond snapped. There was an angry murmuring from the crowd around the truck and the circle of men tightened. John Lee tried to slide down in the seat.
Raymond made a sudden movement and the long-barreled pistol was in his hand, pointed at the chest of the man by the window. The man flinched slightly, then straightened and looked Raymond in the eye.
“There is no need for this,” he said. He turned slightly, back towards the man who had spoken, and rattled off a long sentence in Spanish. His eyes never left Raymond’s face. There was a high-pitched angry reply. The man by the window responded sharply, then added something with a sly grin. There was a ripple of nervous laughter from the crowd. The tattooed man’s face grew dark with anger, but he turned away and stomped off.
The older man turned back towards Raymond. “I was the one who found your father’s body,” he said. “The rest of the crew,” he gestured at the men around the truck, “Was with me. We always go in together in my truck. No one here killed him, I am sure of it. We all leave work together the night before, and we all go in together the next day.”
“Somebody knew he had a lot of cash on him,” Raymond said.
“That was our pay,” the mustached man said. “We were going to get that money the next day anyway. If one of us stole it, he would be stealing from the rest of us, and from our families back home. No one here would protect him for stealing that.”
Raymond thought that over for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” he said. “So who else might’ve known about the money?”
The man thought for a moment. “There was a man who came looking for work, “he said finally. “An Anglo.” He smiled thinly at Raymond. “I didn’t like him.”
Raymond ignored the jibe. “You get a name?”
The man shook his head. “No. He talked with your father, not me. I told your father afterwards I didn’t like his looks. He laughed and said he wasn’t hiring anyway. He had a full crew. He took down the man’s name and phone number, but that was just to get rid of him.”
“Anyone else know him?”
There was a moment’s hesitation. “He said he was a friend of Julio’s,” the mustached man said.
Raymond looked around. “Which one’s Julio?”
There was another stirring in the crowd and the men looked at each other. “He’s the one who just left,” someone said. “The one you call greaseball.”
“Go get him,” Raymond said. No one moved. Raymond pulled back the hammer on the big revolver. Someone detached himself from the back of the crowd and hurried off.
In a few minutes, the tattooed man came stalking back, a can of beer in his right hand and a sneer on his face.
“This feller who came looking for a job,” Raymond said. “You know him?”
Julio shrugged. “I don’ know, man,” he said. “I know a lot of people. How come you askin’?”
“Because I think that might be the man that shot my Daddy. And if he is, I mean to kill him for it.”
Julio’s face split in an ugly grin. “Well, shit, vato, whyn’t you say so in the first place? Yeah, I knew him. I met him in the joint. Little guy. Name of Dwayne somethin’.”
“You tell him Daddy carried a lot of cash?” Raymond’s face bore no expression, but there was a dangerous note of tension in his voice.
The grin left Julio’s face. He raised his hands in front of him, as if to push away the trouble he saw coming. “Whoa, man,” he said. “This Dwayne fucker, man, he said he was needing some cash when he got out. I tol’ him I don’t know for sure,
