“How’s Jesus?”
“Sleeping again. Those pills Angel gave him make him very sleepy.”
Or Jim?nez is just being his usual lazy nineteen-year-old self, Delgado thought.
“Where’s Eduardo?”
Quintanilla looked at his wristwatch and said, “Should be back at the house by now, getting the cutting crews going.”
Delgado considered that. It was important to keep the lawn-mowing schedules, if only for the cover the business provided for their other activities. Should anyone ever question them, they’d simply mumble that they were humble yard boys.
Then he reached into his wallet. He removed a driver’s license and handed it to Quintanilla.
Quintanilla looked at it. He recognized it as Delgado’s counterfeit license from Texas, the one with Delgado’s picture but the name Edgar Cisneros.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said.
Delgado nodded toward the mall.
“Go in there to the Western Union counter. There should be a two-thousand-dollar wire transfer waiting for Edgar Cisneros.”
“But this has your picture on it. Why don’t you do it?”
“Because I want you to do it!” El Gato snapped. “That’s why.”
He did not want to tell Quintanilla that he thought there was a slight chance someone could be looking for him in there, waiting for him to show up at the Western Union counter.
And the reason he did not want to tell him was that he didn’t really know why the thought had come to him.
Delgado had had time to think on the plane, and he didn’t want to admit it, but he’d realized that coming so close to getting caught in Dallas had both shaken him up and made him at least a little paranoid.
Which really pissed him off.
All because that idiot Ramos made a stupid mistake.
And now I’m upset to the point I might make a mistake.
So that is why I want you to go in, Omar.
But I’m just not going to tell you that…
“But,” Quintanilla protested, “do you think they’ll let me get the money with this ID’s photo?”
Delgado was about to snap again, then looked at Quintanilla’s dull gaze-Nobody home… why bother? — and decided against it.
He said slowly, “How would you know to come and get the money if you weren’t who you said you were? That is what you tell the teller. Bueno? ”
Quintanilla shrugged, showing absolutely no confidence.
Delgado then added, “And if that does not work”-he pulled a wad of folded bills from his pocket and peeled off one note-“then slip this to the teller under the license.”
Delgado gave him a hundred-dollar bill.
“Nobody says no to Ben Franklin, especially in Philadelphia,” Delgado said with a smile.
Quintanilla took it, then turned, and sauntered toward the front door of the Mall of Mexico.
In the twenty minutes that Quintanilla was in the mall, Delgado sat in the SUV, watching the patrons come and go. Occasionally, he would glance at the picture on the front page of the newspaper, which was on the front passenger seat.