Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [41]
I was trying to sit up when the door opened and a nurse flanked by two men in uniform came striding purposefully toward me. The men were with the Border Patrol, and I could tell from the expressions on their faces that they hadn’t come to bring me flowers. One of them was close to sixty, with the overstuffed and slightly deformed body of a bus driver. He had small blue eyes that had spent a long time trying to look hard. The other man was too tall for his weight, as though he’d been stretched artificially by machine. He was around thirty, with a mouth full of gum and hair the color of wet hay. His right eye was off center, which made him appear as if he were trying to look behind him. His expression was an imitation of his partner’s, but on him it wasn’t as convincing. He looked as much scared as he did mean.
Both of them had waists encircled by belts heavily laden with the standard tools of law enforcement: the guns, the cuffs, the pepper spray, and the billy clubs. They were ready for anything except a footrace, but it didn’t matter, because all four of my limbs were manacled to the stainless-steel bedposts.
The older agent wore a name tag that said COOPER. He gave me a calculated glare of menace that was supposed to strike fear into the heart of any illegal alien it chanced to fall upon. He shifted his belt on his hips and spread his legs like a man bracing for a bar fight. His partner did the same. I had no doubt who led when they danced the tango together.
“Ask him his name, will you?” the older cop directed the nurse. His partner stood silently behind him with his hand on the butt of his gun, chewing his cud as though it were part of his job.
“I don’t speak Spanish,” the nurse said. She swabbed my arm with alcohol and slipped the needle out.
“Who are you kidding? I heard you speak it before. Your last name is Rodriguez, for crying out loud.”
“Cómo se llama, spic?” the younger cop said.
I decided to be Hispanic until I got the lay of the land, so I told him my name was Juan. The nurse glanced at me and smiled ever so slightly, then looked away again. Then she stuck a thermometer in my mouth, for which I was grateful, because it gave me an excuse not to talk. The younger officer, whose name tag said ELLIS, sat down on the edge of the bed and smacked the side of my leg.
“You get well,” he said. “You go bye-bye.”
They undid my ankle and wrist bracelets and gave me an orange jumpsuit that had been washed so many times that the cloth had faded into a weary paleness. Then they cuffed my hands behind my back and led me down a narrow hallway flanked every few yards by wooden benches spaced out like dashes along the lime-colored walls. We went up a flight of steps that took all my strength to climb and came out into another hallway lined with rows of offices. We made a few turns and stopped in front of a door that had INSPECTOR RUBEN CORTEZ stenciled onto the glass in gold letters with black trim. Cooper opened the door and gave me a short, hard shove in the middle of my back that propelled me into the room.
It was a small office with a desk and a man sitting behind it. He was forty or forty-five, with dark brown hair with a gray fringe along the temples and a mustache that was all gray and needed trimming. His eyes were shiny and black, with a glint of humor in them, as though he had just recalled something vaguely amusing. He leaned back in his swivel chair as I came in.
“Who’s this son of a bitch?” he asked.
“This is the guy the coast guard picked up this morning,” Cooper said.
Ellis shoved me down into a chair across from Cortez. He looked me over for a long moment, then asked me in Spanish if I were Cuban.
“Sí,” I said.
He laughed. “Sí?” he repeated. “Really? Just what part of Cuba are you from?”
“Omaha, Nebraska.”
He nodded