Moondogs - Alexander Yates [67]
He pauses to suck his unlit cigar. He adjusts his fake beard and checks his reflection in an oversized pair of aviator sunglasses. “I stand out to me, too,” he says, a little sadly. “I don’t look anything like my wife describes. I don’t see myself the way she does, or the way you do, I’m sure. But that’s my gift. I see bruhos like us for what we really are. I see special talents. I’ve got them, and so have the boys, and so have you. In this way, we’re family.”
Hearing this, Efrem swells. Families are loved, and needed, and to be loved and needed by Reynato Ocampo brings him to a point past joy. Reynato puffs his cigar smokelessly, and Efrem offers him some matches. Reynato accepts them with nodded thanks and tosses them off the roof.
They are silent. He pockets his cigar and checks his watch. To the south, beyond the skyline, heat-lightning blossoms. “Best leave your safety catch off,” Reynato says. He pats Efrem’s shoulder warmly. “You remember what to do?”
“Yes sir.”
“Enough with the sirs, I’m begging you. Now, if you see anything fishy?”
“I’ll call Racha.”
“And if anyone tries anything?”
“They get two in the face.”
“Or one. No need to show off. Just make them stop whatever they’re doing is the point. And remember, I can’t stress this enough, you save me first. Got it?” Reynato speaks slowly. “Me first. Others after.” He stands, lifts his stained shirt, pulls out his pistol and sets it down next to Efrem. “If anything goes wrong, if anything happens to me out there, I want you to have Glock.”
Efrem looks down at it. It isn’t Truth from the movies, but it’s still Renny-O’s one and only piece. He’s almost afraid to touch it.
“If anything … oh my, this is hard to say. If I die, then I want you to take this to my family in Manila. I want you to stand in our living room. I want you to put it in your mouth and pull the trigger because you fucking let something happen to me.” Reynato winks and swings himself over a utility ladder at the back of the building. Just before his head disappears he stops and looks at Efrem. “Me first.”
Efrem tucks in his elbows and crawls to the edge of the warm tar roof. He lines up his custom Tingin, the barrel just coming out over the torn green awning of the butcher’s shop. It’s just like so many mornings of his youth, lying among fallen trees, the Holy Man whispering in his ear, aiming at unwary soldiers wearing the same uniform he’d one day look taller in.
The busy market below is a dense collection of open-air stalls in a wide courtyard, surrounded on all sides by an arcade of permanent shops. The butcher’s is on the south end of the arcade and from his vantage on the roof Efrem can take clean shots at everything. He lays still, pupils dilating to accommodate the sea of details. Women spread tarps to shade their vegetables and sell grain from open burlap sacks. They stack boxes of sugary cereal like bricks and swat children away from buckets of hard and soft candy. Music pours from portable radios and clusters of men read newspapers and roll cigarettes. A single voice emerges above the scattered rhythms, mottled with static—a recorded call to prayer. People roll out mats and bring their foreheads to the earth. Others, rosaries dangling under their loose cotton shirts, stay standing.
Reynato paces back and forth near the north end of the courtyard holding a hard briefcase filled with a few big bills and a whole lot of magazine clippings. The dealers are nowhere to be seen and his impatience is no act. Lorenzo wanders between stalls at the east end of the market. He’s supposed to be keeping an eye out for trouble but has become distracted at a fruit stand, haggling with an ancient woman over a big stinking durian. They reach a price and he counts out coins, producing them one at a time from his deaf ear. Racha is at a shop window in the northwest corner of the arcade, pretending to browse a collection of pirated DVDs. A big black mangy dog pads back and forth, circling Reynato a few times before turning to look up at Efrem’s