Chapter 20.
I strained my eyes to a narrow squint, to avoid seeing the graphic details, of Betty’s violated body. Ted threw up in the hand basin, twice. A lot of blood had drained from her body and had trickled into a hungry drain, in the corner of the bathroom. Her face was ashen. I covered her up.
“Shouldn’t you take her jewelry?” Ted asked while still gagging. “You know, if we just drop her off somewhere someone might just come along and steal it.”
I removed her jewelry and house keys. She had worn a charm bracelet the entire time I had known her. I had given her a gold car one year for her birthday and a gold fox another year. She wore a small locket around her neck. In it, was a photograph of her son as a baby. We strained to lift her into the tarpaulin. We wrapped her as quickly as possible.
“So what was all that earlier about Betty not getting off the bus? You’d texted me earlier and said she went for snacks but you tell the Toot Fairy that you were on the bus at all times. What’s going on Ted?”
“She did. I didn’t want to say when Lenny’s girlfriend was here but I think she left the kilo at the bus depot in Nuevo Laredo, he said. When we got to Nuevo Laredo, she had a plastic bag with her and I thought it was something she was dumping. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I figured maybe it was something personal like underwear or something that she didn’t want to leave in the hotel garbage. You know how Betty is?”
I strained to keep my voice low and hissed at Ted through my teeth like I was some demented ventriloquist.
“What the fuck, Ted? Are you kidding me? Why didn’t you just fucking tell them that in the first place? At least they wouldn’t have had to butcher Betty. Fuck, Ted,” I raged.
“That’s just it. I didn’t know until they had cut her open. And then I remember her being really anxious, you know kind of strange before getting on the bus in Nuevo Laredo. Betty is usually so calm and cool. And after we left she seemed to calm down. She told me this morning everything was good.”
“Why didn’t she tell you when you got on the bus, for Chrissakes?”
“I reckon she thought I’d freak out if she bailed and I’d be the only one smuggling drugs. And she’d be right. I would of shit myself. I probably would have clawed that cast off with my bare hands.”
“So where is it?” I asked.
“I’d guess bus depot bathroom somewhere?” he said.
“Bathroom? Are you nuts?”
“She was only gone, like ten, max fifteen minutes,” he said.
I sat on the edge of the bath and tried to process an entire new avenue of reality that had just presented itself to me.
“She never would have dumped it,” I said.
“No she never would have dumped it,” Ted repeated, like a hopeful mantra.
“Maybe in the cistern of a toilet,” I said.
“But wouldn’t that block up the toilet? Janitor might find it,” Ted said.
Teresa poked her head back into the room. She avoided looking at Betty.
“I think you guys need to hurry,” Teresa said. “The car is outside. Hurry.”
“Two minutes. Almost done,” I said.
She disappeared.
“Were there lockers in the depot?” I asked.
“I think so. Maybe no. No wait. ....Yes there were,” he said.
“Yes or no, Ted?”
“Am no. No, wait. Yes, there were lockers. Yes, I’m sure.”
“Look for a key, I’ll finish up wrapping up Betty,” I said.
Ted rummaged through Betty’s bag. He found a vial of clear liquid under the bed. He held it up to the light like it was a precious jewel.
“It must have been knocked over when we tried to resuscitate her”, he said. “Wait a minute, what are we going to do, even if we do find a key?”
“We’re going back down there? It’s all packaged. One of us has to go down there and bring it back,” I said.
Ted rubbed his gut.
“Why not call Lenny?” he asked.
“Fuck that. We bring it back, sell it in New York and give the money to Betty’s family,” I said. “Lenny’s getting forty-five grand. He’s sweet. You and I will split the other forty-five between us. You will take all the money back to New York and leave my share in my apartment. Leave it in the metal bread bin above the refrigerator. If I don’t make it back, give it to Betty’s family.”
I hosed down the coagulated blood on the bathroom floor with the shower head and scrubbed the tile grouting with a worn toilet brush . The blood diluted and feathered across the white floor tiles and drained in to the slimy mouth of the mold infested drain. Ted squeezed Betty’s passport into her hands.
“Who do you know in New York that is gonna buy a kilo of cocaine?” Ted asked.
“There’s only one person I know of, and that’s Gadget. You know him?”
“Gadget? Who the fuck is Gadget?”
“You know that mad Jewish guy with the carrot top? He owns a few clubs in Queens. He’s been running Go-Go bars since tits and ass were invented.”
Ted checked Betty’s wash bag for the key. He looked in every nook in her wallet.
“That’s how he got his name ‘Go-Go-Gadget’, like the inspector. He runs a lot of drugs out of his bars. Sells a lot to college campuses. He’s hooked into the young Jewish rich kid scene in some of these Ivy League places. I know him pretty well. Not a friend but I know him well.”
“You know they haven’t been called ‘Go-Go’ bars since like nineteen-eighty- seven, Harry. Strip Clubs, are what all the kids are calling them these days. But yeah, I know that guy. I did a spot in one of his clubs called, ‘Peaches’. That guy never paid me. Yeah I know that guy. He looks like a Jewish lumberjack.”
“Key?” I asked.
Ted paused for a moment. His face signaled a eureka moment. He pointed at Betty’s jewelry and bunch of house keys. He picked up Betty’s house keys and rattled them holding a bright metallic red key.
“Bingo. Got it. This is a locker key.”
I inspected it. The number ‘1404’ was punched into the key. Ted paused and glared at Betty swaddled in blue tarpaulin.
“I think we should just split to New York. I don’t think I’m up for the sequel. I’m happy to give my share to Betty’s family. Fuck this, all of this has been one big mistake.”
I was very aware when my latest plan of returning to Mexico had been hatched, all of ten minutes earlier, I would be doing it solo.
“That’s cool Ted. I’ll go. I got us into this shit in the first place. But we can not leave that kilo just sitting there. I can split that and double up. Every cent will go to Betty’s kid and mom. That’s a good head start for the kid and a lot of slack for her Mom.”
“Right, and after Betty is shipped back to New York after being opened like a can of sardines you’re just going to amble over to her house with a sack of cash, like Father fucking Christmas,” he said sarcastically.
“No, Betty’s Mom is old, I’ll spin her some yarn that I had bonds and stocks invested for Betty and she asked me to cash them out for her family if anything happened.”
“Jeez Harry, your pretty good at this shit, you’re beginning to scare me.”
“I’m just trying to get us the hell out of this situation, without doing twenty years in some redneck Texan prison, being gang raped by a bunch of aids infected deviants, on a daily basis.”
The bathroom was suspiciously clean – it probably hadn’t been this spotless, since the first day Ernie fired up the vacancy sign, on the front of the Stagecoach Motel.
“Let’s get her into the trunk.”
We lifted her, taking tiny baby steps and regular stops. Ted gingerly opened the door. Teresa sat chain smoking on a garden chair beside her car.
“Come on man, what’s taking you guys so long? I’ve been waiting forever,” she whined.
We heaved Betty’s tarpaulin cocoon to the trunk and laid her inside as respectfully as possible.
“Grab the broken plaster cast from your leg and all the other rubbers and other trash from your room,” I said to Ted.
I ran a quick check through the rooms – it was the first time since I was in boarding school that I’d made a bed. I left each of the keys in their respective doors and I grabbed my bag. Teresa and Ted sat silently in the car silhouetted in the glow of the red brake lights.
“Let’s go.”