Hunter's Run(48)

"I missed you," she said, looking up at him through her eyelashes. Ramón felt a twinge of pain in his groin and stepped back.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "They only took that thing out of my cock a few days ago, woman. I'm not healed up down there yet."

"Yeah?" she said. "That hurts? What about this?"

She did something very pleasant, and it did hurt, only not enough to tell her to stop.

The next few days were better than Ramón had expected them to be. Elena was away at work most of the day, leaving him to sleep and catch the news. At night, they screwed and listened to music and watched the half-assed telenovelas they made down in Nuevo Janeiro. He made himself walk as long as he could, never straying too far from the apartment, in case the weakness came on quickly.

His strength came back faster than he expected. His weight was still down; he looked like a fucking twig. But he was coming back. He was getting better. He told Elena the story-the one he'd made up-over and over. It wasn't long before he half believed it himself. He remembered the roar of the stone as it came down, the shuddering of the van. He remembered racing out into the cool northern night and watching his ride washed into the river. If it hadn't happened, so what? The past was what you made it.

The only thing that marred the time was the small voice in his head reminding him of what had really happened, and what he had heard and thought. In the early hours of the morning, when Elena was still fast asleep, Ramón found himself waking and unable to fall back into slumber. His mind returned to the realization that his twin could have done better with Elena, that even that sad sack of shit he'd dropped into the river had been a better man than he made himself out to be. He had meant to break things off with her when he came back, but here he was. Drinking her beer, smoking her cigarettes, spreading her legs.

When things got bad again, he told himself. No point ending things when they were still good.

And, like a ghost, there was Lianna. He remembered the way his twin had told the story-all bravado and bluster, none of the real pain. The loss. He was coming to understand better now why it came out the way it had. It hadn't only been to avoid the appearance of weakness before another man. He needed to tell it to himself that way too. And that was harder for Ramón to do now that he had seen all that he'd seen. He kept meaning to go see Griego, but he never quite got around to it.

Almost a week after Ramón had left the hospital, he woke before dawn, haunted by dreams he couldn't remember. He slipped out of bed, pulled on a robe, and, as quietly as he could, took Elena's good whiskey from its hiding place behind the kitchen cabinet. It took him three drinks and almost an hour to get the courage to open a link to the city directory and search for her. But there she was. Lianna Delgado. Still a cook, but at a new place now. Her address was down by the river. He'd probably walked past it a hundred times, stumbling back from the bars. He wondered if she'd ever seen him, and if she had, what she'd thought. Elena mumbled something and shifted in her sleep. Ramón killed the link, but the idea that had taken root out there in the wilderness was growing again in the city.

He had wanted to be someone new, had been ready to be someone new. Start again. So why not now? All the things he had done and suffered could pass away from him just as easily now with his old name and face and self as they might have had his twin lived. It only meant doing the things that needed to be done: leave Elena, find a new place for himself, a new van to work with, some other way of being himself. Himself like he'd always been, only better. And then, when he was cleaned up and solid, when he had something in the bank and didn't have to beg off a woman just to keep from sleeping in the pinche park, Lianna was in the directory. He could call her or, if he had the balls, go to her house like a schoolboy singing at his lover's window. He was Ramón Espejo, after all. He was a tough sonofabitch. The worst that would happen was that Lianna would turn him away, and if it broke his heart, so what? He was strong enough to make a new one. A better one.

In the next room, Elena yawned and stretched. Ramón took one last clandestine pull at the whiskey bottle and silently returned it to its place, rinsing the glass out before slipping into the bathroom to brush the scent from his breath. If Elena found out he'd been breaking into the good stuff without her, there'd be hell to pay.

"Hey, baby," he said as she shambled into the kitchen. Her hair was in disarray and her jaw set a little forward.

"You couldn't make some fucking coffee?" she replied. "I feel like shit."

"You should stay home," he said. "Take a day off."

"It's Sunday, asshole."

"Sit," Ramón said, gesturing to the cheap plastic-and-chitin chair at her kitchen table. "I'll make you some food, eh?"

She managed a smile at that, her black mood thinning a little. Ramón surveyed the contents of her pantry carefully, consulting the freshness readouts on the sides of the cans and boxes and having a little trouble with them. He might have had a little too much of the whiskey. He just needed to seem sober long enough for a little of the alcohol to burn off.

He got a can of black beans, a couple of tortillas, some eggs from the back of the refrigerator, and a hunk of cheese. A little green chili, and it would be huevos rancheros. It was a good meal because with a little practice it could be made in a single pan. Ramón had enough practice cooking it in his van that he could probably do it even a little drunk.

"So you gonna get a job in town now?" Elena asked.

"No," Ramón said. The beans dropped from their can to one side of the heating skillet, hissing and popping as the juice started to boil. He reached for the eggs. "I figure I'll go talk to Griego about renting a van. I figure if I promise him a part of the cut, it'll only take me three or four good runs to pay the thing off."

"Three or four good runs," Elena said, as if he'd said shit gold and piss rosewater. "When was the last time you had three or four good runs in a row? Did you ever?"

"I got some ideas," Ramón said, realizing as he did so that it was true. There was the struggling precursor of a plan at the back of his head. Maybe it had been there since the first time he'd had the dream of the Enye and understood what Maneck and its people were fleeing. He smiled to himself.

He knew what he was going to do.

"You should get a real job," Elena said. "Something steady."

"I don't need that. I'm a good prospector."

Elena raised her hand like a schoolgirl asking to speak. "Last time you went out, you came back three-quarters dead without any of your shit."

"It was bad luck. It won't happen again."

"Oh. You control luck now, eh?"

"It's the European," Ramón said, flipping the eggs. "He was after my ass. It was like a curse. It's gonna be fine next time."

"Sounds like you found God out there," Elena said, and then paused. When she spoke again, her voice was less surly. "Did you find God, mi hijo?"

"No," Ramón said. He crumbled a handful of cheese over the beans, then slid the tortillas onto plates. Coffee. He needed to heat up some water. He knew he'd forgotten something. "I figured some other stuff out though."

"Like what?" Elena asked.

Ramón was silent as he served up the eggs, spooned the beans and cheese over the top, got the coffee brewing. He could feel her gaze on him, neither accusing nor sympathetic. He wondered what was going on behind her eyes; what the world meant to her. She was more predictable, more familiar, but in some ways she'd always been as alien to him as Maneck. He didn't trust her because he wasn't stupid, and yet there was something, some other impulse, that prompted him to speak.

"Like why I killed the European in the first place," he said.

He explained to her as best he could, his memory still a thing of shadows and dream, something he remembered knowing more than something he had participated in firsthand. A reconstruction.

They'd been drunk, yes. Things got out of hand, yes. But it had happened for a reason. Ramón walked through it all again. He could explain what the cop had said; the woman, the laughter. He could guess from what his twin had and hadn't said, from what he knew about himself, about the sense of the whole bar turning against the European, and Ramón himself on the top of the swell.

He could tell with certainty what it had been like when, in the alleyway, they had all pulled back, all the people who'd been shouting him on. The sense of loss and betrayal. He'd been what they wanted him to be, and then they'd dropped him for it.

The European, the girl, the laughter. It hadn't really been about them at all. Ramón hadn't killed the man because the fucker needed to die or because the woman was one of their own and the man an outsider, or to protect her from getting mauled. Ramón had done it so that the other people in the bar would think well of him. He'd killed out of a need to be part of something.

Ramón shook his head, smiling. Elena hadn't touched her food. The coffee was warm, the beans cold as the table. Her eyes were locked on his, her expression unreadable. Ramón shrugged, waiting for her to speak.