The lights were on in the church when I pulled up to the corner of Ninety-second and Houston. I went up the shallow step to the front door to see what was going on. Thursday night Bible study, six-thirty to eight, November topic, the book of Isaiah. It was just after six-thirty now, so the pastor was hard at it.
Directly across the street from the church was a vacant lot where a handful of cars and trucks were parked at skewed angles—including a Dodge with big speakers in the back and a license plate beginning “VBC.” Next to the lot, three decrepit houses propped each other up. Cocodrilo, the bar where Freddy drank, was on their far side. The bar was really just the ground floor of a narrow two-flat, whose clapboard sides were sagging and peeling. The windows were covered with a thick mesh screen that didn’t allow much light to seep out.
I had called Morrell from the car to let him know I would be a little late, just a little. He had sighed, the exaggerated sigh of a lover who is always being stood up, and said if I wasn’t home by eight he and Don would eat without me.
The exchange sent me into Cocodrilo in a bristly mood. I let the door bang shut behind me, like Clint Eastwood, and put on my Clint Eastwood face: I own this bar, don’t mess with me. There were maybe fifteen people inside, but it was a small place, and dark, just a narrow room with a high counter and a couple of rickety tables jammed against the wall, so it was hard to survey the crowd.
The television over the bar was tuned to a soccer match, Mexico versus some small Caribbean island. A few men were watching, but most were talking or arguing in a mixture of Spanish and English.
Cocodrilo seemed to be a young man’s bar, although there were a few older faces—I recognized one of the men from this afternoon’s construction site. And it was definitely a man’s bar: when I walked in, conversation died down as they eyed me. A trio near the door thought they’d try a smart remark, but my expression sent them back to their beer with a surly remark in Spanish—whose meaning I could certainly guess, even though it hadn’t been in my high school text.
I finally spotted Diego, my center Sancia’s boyfriend, in a small knot at the far end of the room. The man next to him had his back to me, which made him easy to recognize—he had the thick, dark hair and camouflage jacket I’d trailed through the warehouse a couple of hours earlier.
I pushed my way past the trio at the door and tapped him on the shoulder. “Freddy! And Diego. What a wonderful coincidence. We’re going to talk, Freddy.”
When he turned, I saw Rose was right: he did have sort of pretty-boy good looks in his high cheekbones and full lips, but she was also right—indolence and drugs were eating away at them.
Freddy looked at me blankly, but Diego said, “The coach, man, she’s the basketball coach.”
Freddy stared at me in dawning alarm, then shoved me hard enough to send me reeling. He barged down the narrow length of the room to the front door, knocking over a bottle of beer as he went.
I righted myself and took off after him. No one tried to stop me, but no one moved out of my way, either, so Freddy was out on the street before I caught up with him. I put on a burst of speed, forgetting my sore thighs, my swollen hands, my shoulder. He was crossing the vacant lot to Diego’s truck when I launched myself at him. I knocked him to the ground and fell heavily on top of him.
I heard applause and looked up to see three of the men from the bar, including the guy from the jobsite, laughing and clapping.
“Hey, missus, you go see Lovie Smith, you play for the Bears!”
“What this chavo done to you? Leave you with baby and no money? He got two babies already and no money for them!”
“She’s not the kind, not the kind, Geraldo, mind your mouth.”
Freddy shoved me aside and scrambled to his feet. I grabbed his right ankle. When he started to kick at me, an audience member moved in and pinned his arms. “Don’t run, Freddy, the lady, she worked so hard to catch you, is very rude to run away.”
The rest of the men trickled out of the bar and stood in a half circle around us, except for Diego, who moved uncertainly halfway between Freddy and the truck.
I got to my feet and pulled on my mittens. “Freddy Pacheco, you and I are long overdue for this talk.”
“You a cop, missus?” the man holding his arms asked.
“Nope. I’m the basketball coach down at Bertha Palmer. Julia was a good student and a good ballplayer until this chavo banda ruined her life.”
A murmur in Spanish rippled through the trio. El coche. Yes, but a detective, too, only private, not police; Celine, his sobrina, she was crazy about el coche. Sobrina, my tired brain fished in my high school Spanish. Niece. Celine, my gangbanger, was this man’s niece; she was crazy about me? Maybe I was misunderstanding him, but the notion cheered me no end.