The Black Minutes

BOOK THREE THE SPIRAL

1

Joaquín Taboada woke up earlier than usual on the first morning of the month. He had a dream that his predecessor, Chief García, was standing at the foot of his bed. The problem was that Chief García had died twenty years ago.
As soon as he recognized his old boss, Taboada tried to avoid looking at him. He pretended to look somewhere else; he turned over in his bed, but he couldn’t avoid him. The old man, who looked kind of like a Greek oracle, pointed a heavy finger at him.
“Your time is up, it’s over. They’re going to do to you what you did to me.”
As he was calming himself down, Taboada had the impression that part of the anxiety that was tormenting him in the dream was also biting his leg in real life. It was the crafty French poodle who insisted on sleeping in the bed.
As soon as he was able to bring his heartbeat down, he tried to wake Zuleima, the bar girl with the cosmetically enhanced breasts, but she didn’t respond. Zuleima had painted her nails neon green and was sleeping next to a bottle of Valium. The detective lifted up and let go of one of her arms and it dropped like a log. This bitch, he said to himself, she’s popping pills again. There was a cycle to his relationships: it started at the whore-house or with a table dance, then to his bed, where they ended up sleeping, and from there back onto the street. His father was right, he said to himself. In the end prostitutes end up making your life miserable.
Taboada kicked the dog and went to relieve himself in the bathroom. His reflection in the mirror made him even more worried. His cheeks were sagging, he was rapidly losing his hair, and his gut hung out over the waistband of his underwear. I’m f*cked, he thought. Ever since I turned fifty, everything’s gone from bad to worse. He told himself that the best thing to do was to get dressed and eat breakfast. That’s it, he told himself, get something in your stomach. Unfortunately, the only thing in the refrigerator was a bottle of spoiled milk and what was left of a pizza, now hard as cardboard. I have to talk to Zuleima, he said. If it keeps on like this, I’m gonna have to tell her to leave me the f*ck alone.
The sound of a cumbia from the street convinced him it was better to wake up, so he put a cup of water in the microwave to make some instant coffee. As the machine began its downward count, he went over the scraps of his dream in his head. The source of his anxiety wasn’t the chief. No, I’m over that; a guy like me doesn’t worry about that kind of stuff. He can rot in hell. No, it’s not that, it’s something else, but what? For years, he had dreamed about snails, disgusting snails that climbed up the palms of his hands. But eventually the snails disappeared, and then he started making deals with Norris Torres, the governor. Since then, not a thing, he felt like he was immune to it all: a little power changes you a little bit, but complete power corrupts you completely. So, with no remorse about the past, he thought about his dreams. The microwave had started to beep just when he concluded that one of the shadowy figures with the chief was Vicente Rangel.