South by Southeast (26 page)

The man in the wheelchair was the actor's father.

“Be careful,
abuelo,
” Escobar said in a soothing tone. He tested
a step toward the door.

“
You
be careful, shithead,” the old man said, raising the gun with a too-steady hand. “I just saw you try to kill my son. My warning shot's gonna be right between your eyes.”

Escobar didn't doubt the old man's resolve. The wonder was that he hadn't fired already.

Es un arroz con mango,
as Mami would have said. It was rice with mango, a complicated thing.

His first plan had failed.

On to the next.

I WAS SWEARING
as I ran up the stairs.

Why hadn't Dad stuck to the plan? His job had been to monitor the video feed from the adjoining room and keep a record of Escobar's arrival. We had been in constant communication since Escobar first began his drive toward South Beach, when I was almost sure I'd roused Dad from sleep with my warning call. Dad knew Escobar's every movement, so he had been ready.

But I wasn't. In the hotel lobby, I'd caught bad luck.

I couldn't take Escobar's elevator car with him, and the others were delayed for overnight servicing. I waited for the elevator to return after it reached the tenth floor, but after a brief stop, it kept going up instead of coming back down. The main building only had fifteen floors, so I decided to wait it out. But then the elevator car's light got stuck on the fifteenth floor and seemed to stay forever. Somewhere above me, drunken revelers were deciding my future.

I started swearing.

“He's got a knife!” Dad whispered to me on his phone while I waited. He was so excited he sounded thirty years younger.

I ran for the stairs then. Escobar was already in my room, and
Dad sounded as if he was enjoying himself too much, reliving a stakeout from his youth.

“Just hold on,” I said while I ran. “Wait for me. You hear me?”

But Dad hadn't waited. The next thing I'd heard was the commotion as he surprised Escobar in the hotel room. I braced for the sound of gunfire. My legs felt like jelly, not moving nearly fast enough. My heartbeat pounded my eardrums.

I'd known my luck was plummeting as soon as I got stuck in the lobby, a line of dominoes falling one by one. It would all go to hell somehow. I'd known it as soon as the elevator refused to come back.

Dad had thirty years of police experience before he retired, but he hadn't been in the field for years. He'd seen combat in Vietnam, but he might have forgotten some of the lessons he learned. And Escobar was no ordinary perpetrator—he might as well be an illusionist.

I ran up the stairs two at a time, my mind racing with the dangers. “Don't get too close to him,” I told Dad. “Make him show you his hands. He might have another weapon.”

“Show me your hands.” Dad's voice came from my phone. Talking to Escobar.

I wished I hadn't given Dad the .22 I'd swiped from Raphael. I should have kept it. The gun had made Dad too bold, and now I didn't have one.

Eighth floor. Ninth floor. I panted, flinging myself up the stairs as fast as I could go.

“You'll shoot me in cold blood,
abuelo
?” I heard Escobar say faintly.

“Tell him to shut up!” I shouted to Dad. “Get him on the floor with his hands behind his back. I'm almost there!”

A beat later, I heard Dad repeat my instructions.

Tenth floor. I threw the door open and raced down the carpeted hallway, perspiration stinging my eyes. I pulled my card key out of
my back pocket. One ear bud fell free, but I was close enough to see the room, so I let it go.

In slow motion, I swiped the card to let myself into the room. The light showed red. The door was still locked. Once it was on my trail, bad luck never let me go.

I swiped the card again, and this time the light was green.

I ran into the room, which was dark except for a bright flashlight beam strobing on Escobar's monstrous, distorted face near the doorway.

“Ten, watch out—” Dad said.

I've told the story a hundred times, but I'm still not clear on the sequence. A gunshot first? Then a loud
pop,
the hiss of spray, and fire in my eyes? Or did the fire in my eyes come first and then the gunshot?

I never saw exactly what happened. Even in my dreams, all I see is darkness.

I know now that the fire in my eyes was a six-ounce tear-gas grenade Escobar had hidden in his pocket. Thick, acidic smoke clogged my eyes, nose, and mouth in the confined room, stealing my breath. I was barely aware of the sound of a struggle, but I was calling my father's name when I heard the second gunshot.

I have no confusion about the second gunshot. The sound is crisp and vivid in my memory, just to the left of where I had fallen against the wall to catch my balance, almost close enough to touch. Impossibly loud, rattling my bones. A shot to end the world.

I heard Escobar running toward me for the doorway, and instinct made me try to block him, but he easily dodged me and pushed me out of his way because I couldn't see.

I heard my father groan and cough.
Thank God he's alive,
I thought.

“Dad?” I said.

“I'm . . . okay,” my father said through his coughing.

I stumbled toward where I thought I'd heard my father, and my hand felt his wheelchair's armrest. I pushed the chair, trying to angle it back toward the open doorway and the adjoining room that wasn't shrouded in poisonous smoke. The tear gas followed us, but it wasn't as thick. I saw splashes of light. I closed the door behind me and stumbled toward the glass patio door, where I tugged and tried to flush the room with fresh air. Precious seconds passed while I tried to find the lock. All the while, my eyes screamed. The ocean gusts were a balm on my face.

I thought we were better off in the next room than we would be in the hall. We might be vulnerable to Escobar in the hall, and there was sure to be smoke in the hallway, too. Fresh air was best. I could already breathe better past my burning lungs.

“Rinse your . . . eyes,” my father said.

I stumbled to the bathroom and flipped on the ceiling fan. I could still only see in sparks of light, but I grabbed a hand towel and drowned it in water. I brought the towel to my father and pressed it to his face. “You, too,” I said. “Rinse.”

“Forget about . . . me,” Dad said. “Go get him, Ten.”

I stood over the sink and splashed my face until my clothes were soaked. My shirt stung my skin, so I pulled it off. My first concerns were my father and my blindness. Thoughts of Gustavo Escobar were far away.

The next time I found my way to my father's chair, I smelled blood for the first time. That smell froze my world.

“Dad?” I said. “Were you hit?” Hadn't I asked him before?

“Flesh wound,” Dad said. “Barely. You all right?”

I tugged at his clothing, trying to see his injury with my blurry vision. For a man in my father's condition, there was no such thing as a minor gunshot wound. A round from a .22 could do a lot of damage. “Where? Let me see.”

No blood or entrance wound on his chest or his head. That was good.

“I'm . . . fine, Ten,” Dad said, pushing me with surprising strength. “Go get that SOB.”

“Where were you shot?”

“He's getting away,” Dad said. “Do you want it to be for . . . nothing?” My father still had the gun. The nozzle was warm. He raised it to give it to me, his fevered eyes staring hard into mine. “Eight rounds left.”

“Tell me,” I said. Worry was turning into horror.

Reluctantly, my father took my hand and laid it across his stomach. His shirt was moist with blood. I knew what had happened: Escobar had tried to take the gun away from my father but couldn't. Instead, he'd forced my father to shoot himself in the stomach.

When I was a kid, Dad had told me that a gunshot wound to the stomach was one of the most painful ways to die. On his stakeout nights, I'd felt torn between hoping he would come home soon and praying that he wouldn't come home at all. That was where my father and I had started, before we traveled our mighty long way together.

I exhaled with a wounded sound I did not recognize. The room spun.

I fumbled around the room for a telephone and called the operator to say my father had been shot and needed medical attention. I gave the room number. Beside me, my father's breathing sounded heavier and heavier, each breath a labor. Maybe a part of me always knew.

“They're sending paramedics,” I told him. “Don't worry.”

“I'm all right,” Dad said, his voice unsteady with the lie. “Go get him, Ten. Don't let him . . . get away.”

I took the wet towel I'd given him for his eyes and pressed it to his belly instead.

“Pressure right there,” I said. It was only something to say. Anything to do.

“Go, Ten,” Dad said. “No matter what . . . I'm all right.”

I hung my head, eyes closed tight. I wanted to pretend I couldn't hear him. I wanted to pretend the whole night away. He wasn't just asking me to go catch Esocbar; he was asking me to walk away.

I don't know if it was my life's bravest moment or the most cowardly. I kissed my father's forehead and took the gun from his hand. Still half-blind, I brought myself to my feet, wheezing to breathe past the embers in my lungs.

“I'll get him, Dad,” I said.

I stumbled out into the smoky hallway and ran.

That hallway was empty except for curious residents poking their heads out of their rooms, coughing from tear-gas vapors. I hoped that Escobar had wasted time at the elevator. He might have as much as a ninety-second head start and probably the advantage of full vision. I ran straight for the stairs, flying down so fast that I don't know how I stayed upright.

Distantly, floors below me, I heard quickly tapping footsteps. Escobar could have exited the stairwell at any floor, but instead, he had chosen to run all the way down to the lobby. I ran on the balls of my feet, trying to minimize the sound. If he didn't hear me coming after him, he might slow down.

My first taste of luck. Escobar could have been long gone, but he wasn't.

The smell of my father's blood on my skin made my stomach lurch. Every other step, I wanted to turn back to be with him, but that would have been selfish. My father had never needed hand-holding; he needed something much more important from me that night.

He'll be all right,
I told myself. One day, we would both share a laugh over how he'd called his gut shot a “flesh wound.” The promise of future laughter kept me on my feet.

On the fifth floor, I nearly tripped over a prosthetic arm discarded on the steps. I didn't have the full picture yet, but I knew that the phony arm was part of the reason Escobar had been able to reach his tear gas while Dad held him at gunpoint. I'd thought I was clever to prop my prosthetic head in the bed, but Escobar had prepared for us, too.

We had underestimated him.

“Is that you I hear,
mijo
?” a voice called from below. My teeth locked, but I shoved my emotions away, trying to learn. He sounded as winded as I felt, and he hadn't just sucked in a lungful of tear gas after running up ten flights of stairs.

“I didn't mean for that to happen,” he went on when I didn't answer. He sounded distraught. “He left me no choice, do you understand? Unlike you, he was a good man.”

As long as he was monologuing, he wasn't running as fast as he could. I leaped down six stairs to the next landing, ignoring the hot pain that shot up my leg. I wished I could swoop down on him like Old Testament wrath.

“You can stop this now, Tennyson!” he went on, his voice bouncing against the concrete walls from everywhere. “Tend to your father. Don't force me to destroy you!”

At the next floor, I leaped down eight steps and felt my ankle twinge, nearly giving way. I had to balance myself against the wall before I could keep running. My palm smeared the wall with my father's blood.