Moondogs - Alexander Yates [48]
Ignacio’s wife takes the wallet and inspects it carefully, leafing through the contents with her fingertips as though turning the pages of an old book. “No money,” she says. There is nothing accusatory in her tone. She’s just voicing an observation.
“Of course there’s money.” Ignacio snatches the wallet back and upends it on the floor. But she’s right—nothing in there but faded paper and some generic-brand condoms. “He’s got to have money. He was going to the Shangri-La. And he promised to pay me meter plus a hundred.”
“Maybe he was going to rob you,” she says, smiling a smile that makes her look old. Then her smile fades. “I don’t see why you had to hurt him that badly. He can’t have run away.”
“Someone like him doesn’t have to run.” Ignacio leans over the unconscious American—over Howard—to search him. With Littleboy’s help he tips him over to get at his back pockets, finding a key-card for the hotel as well as another wallet. This second one is new and cheap, containing nothing but two crisp hundred-peso notes. Junk change considering the risk Ignacio has taken, but it’s promising—obviously a decoy for pickpockets. Which means there must be a real stash somewhere else.
They find it in his socks and shoes. Twenty-thousand pesos, rumpled and stinking and wet from the rain. Not bad at all. Ignacio keeps searching while his wife and Littleboy lay the notes out to dry them. He unzips Howard’s pants, hoping for one of those gut-hugging money-belts popular with tourists. But all he finds is a naked abdomen rubbed bare of body hair and rutted with stretch marks like the weathered slope of a mud hill. He zips Howard’s fly back up and buttons his pants. Of all the things he’s done tonight this is the only one that makes him squirm, just a little, with self-reproach.
“Do you want to bring him somewhere?” his wife asks. “We could leave him close to a hospital.”
Ignacio shakes his head. He doesn’t know what he wants to do, but he knows he isn’t done with Howard yet. “You were right,” he says. “We should put him in Littleboy’s room.”
“I’ll make the bed,” she says, nodding. Littleboy stands to help.
“Don’t,” Ignacio says. “Move it. The bed … everything. Let’s get it all out of there.”
And so they do. Still sore from dragging Howard inside, the three of them empty Littleboy’s bedroom, moving the well-kept secondhand bed frame, the rattan hutch and electric fan like roomies helping a departing friend. They even take his Ocampo Justice posters off the walls, hanging them instead in the living room beside Ignacio’s extensive collection—relics from his short-lived video rental place. Charlie Fuentes looks right at home beside Tim Roth and Kiefer Sutherland. Now that Littleboy’s room is totally bare it becomes Howard’s room. They drag him inside and close the door. Then they mill about, quietly. What do you do with your morning when you’ve already done this?
“I’m going to bed,” Ignacio says. Then, to his wife: “You coming?”
“No,” she says. “You know how it is.”
He does know how it is. He pulled her out of a crash, and now that she’s awake it’ll be a few hours before she gets that urge to tweak again. She’ll have some early breakfast, maybe watch some television. Ignacio, for his part, is ready for a crash of his own. He’s ready for the clear head that he knows will follow sleep, and holy shit, he feels like he could sleep for hours, if not days. He goes into the master bedroom and curls into the still warm hollow his wife left in the mattress. Out in the living room she and Littleboy turn on the televison, filling their home with the booming lullaby of international news. Ignacio is out in seconds.
And he dreams. A wonderful dream wherein he, Charlie Fuentes, Roth and Sutherland rob a bank. They shoot up the place. They torture the safe combination out of the manager’s throat. And they get away with millions.
TWO DAYS LATER, a Monday, Ignacio and Littleboy head to the Shangri-La hotel. Ignacio’s plans at this point are still murky.