A Funeral for Sonny Pinto

By Michael Tomlinson

Onions builds his reputation as being one of the best. As a hit man for ONI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, hes seen and done enough to make him want to walk away for good. When hes given his last orders, his opportunity to walk away turns deadly.

A politically connected banker is in trouble. Blackmailed by an unknown faction, the banker hires Onions to solve the problem permanently with deadly force. But no sooner do Onions go into action than his life, the life he hoped to have after retiring, is thrown into a tailspin that leads down a dark trail. Thugs try to drown him. His son vanishes, and a woman is murdered in his condo. It is all Onions can do to make sense of it.

Making matters worse, his poker buddies have another request. This time the stakes are higher. Can Onions regain control before there is any more bloodshed?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524588885

Michael Tomlinson

About the Author R. Michael Tomlinson is a resident of Mont-Tremblant, Quebec. He likes the French. Born on October 19, 1946, he lives his life to the full. His father was a master sergeant in the USMC and the family resided in six states. Michael is a retired ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher in Quebec with twenty years experience. An average student in school, Michael won a creative writing prize in the sixth grade. He played football in high school. He has published a short story about homeland security in AIM; his first novel, In Memory of Sonny Pinto (Xlibris 2011); and an article about condominium insurance in Quebec, Revue de lAssurance (1986). This novel, A Funeral for Sonny Pinto, is a sequel to his first book. With unpublished poems and short stories, Michael likes to express himself in words. He wasnt ready for Penn Stare four days after high school. In ROTC, he rose to the rank of corporal and had ranger training. His father was against him going to the war in Vietnam. Michael sliced lots of baloney for the A&P and worked making helicopters for Boeing-Vertol during the summers of his university years. He met Diane at Expo in Montreal in 1969. He worked in insurance for eighteen years, thirteen of them in Montreal. Michael has a BA, Honors English, from Widener, 1969; attended Temple Law School; a diploma in education, McGill, 1991; and an MA in English, 2012. With his creative power, Michael writes for fun. With his exceptional qualifications and years of experience, he has a way with words. He is a great human being.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Church and Cemetery

M EXICAN WIND BLOWS pages from Por Esto , the color photo scandal sheet that drips blood and gore with ripe female flesh, across the sandy roads of Chicxulub, a few kilometers east of Progreso. Prostitutes advertise on the back pages, just after the lists of lottery ticket winners. Some of the front page photos show cops with arrested narcos handcuffed and in leg irons. In front of the Mexican bandits are tables with drugs, guns, and cash. Bundles of US cash, sometimes in plastic laundry bags. The bandits look like their dogs just died. Sad that their good life is over for years. Cops and soldiers do not want their pictures seen. They wear ski masks. Too dangerous for them and their fami lies.

Mailmen pass letters through open windows with bars over them. Grandfathers and grandmothers play with their grandchildren while the fathers work at whatever they can find. Mothers clean houses and hotel rooms. Kids go to school in the mornings and after dark. Too hot to learn in the afternoon, la tarde.

Wind blows newspaper over the low-walled cemetery, next to the small church in Chicxulum. This low wall keeps the stray, and sometimes wild, dogs away from the graves Little Maria and some other women tend every Sunday before mass. The dead have a holiday in November. They are alive. Three squadrons of brownish-red pelicans fly in review on their way to the sea. Blackbirds wait in the alamo trees. Too early for the green and blue parrots.

Black cloth waves like a cat’s paw over the front door of this church. Inside the church, people sit on wooden pews to say goodbye to Sonny Pinto. Most of the Mexicans didn’t know him. Some had seen him sitting in his wheelchair with a blue surgical mask over his face on the porch of the Mayan Hotel. His teeth had been knocked out, and he couldn’t see much with one eye. He was blind in the other. His broken nose healed crooked. His jaw had also been smashed.

Onions sips cognac with the Fat Cop while the bells toll for Sonny Pinto.

Before he died, Sonny Pinto flew to Mexico from Montreal in a wheelchair with a nurse named Nancy Brown. She fed him with a straw. Gave him shots of morphine. He could not talk or see or hear because biker cons beat him senseless with baseball bats in Sainte-Anne prison near Terrebonne, Quebec.

Some of the mourners are off-duty police who are glad to see him dead. This church is full with Mexicans waiting outside during marriages, baptisms, confirmations, funerals, and so on.

He could fight, one off-duty cop says to his brother. He could hit hard with both hands. They smoke outside.

The taller man says, Came from Haiti. His father was a cop for Duvalier, among other things.

His uncle was in the merchant marine with my cousin. He ran off with a teenager and had three more kids. He is happy now. Grandchildren.

Like you. They sip beer and laugh.

Mexico has child support laws that are not enforced. Machismo. Men are still in control.

Commander Onions McGraw, out of uniform and dressed like a tourist on a long stay, sits in the front row with his young-looking girlfriend, Little Maria. Carole Tremblay, his soul mate, recovers from bullet wounds in Saint-Mary’s Hospital in Montreal. He was with her when it happened. In reality, she’s dying.

I am not his wife, Little Maria says to another woman while they are having breakfast at Celine’s on the Quinta in Playa del Carmen. Playa del Carmen is less than a half hour ride from Cancun airport. Buses take tourists there directly from the airport. The bus station is on the Quinta across from McDonald’s.

The other woman answers, You’ll get fat if you eat here every day.

Little Maria sticks out her tongue and gives her the finger.

At Celine’s, they eat almond croissants with café au lait. Onions invited Little Maria to the beach, and she accepted. Fatima Chaing Lee is the other woman. Her father ran the Pacific Cartel. She detests him for making so many bones. He never told her his story.

In the church in Chicxulub for the funeral, the Fat Cop, Sergeant Garcia, sits beside Onions. Little Maria is there with Captain John Smith of the merchant marine, the magician without his parrot but with his flamingo dancer, a private guard named Homer, an ex-con named Caesar, and a panhandler from Montreal named Toothpick Charley. Peaches sits behind them with Linda Colorado, an ex-con named Dom Frederico, Chantal, and Fatima Chaing Lee.

Chantal L’Anglais looks stoned. Linda Colorado sips rum from a bottle in her purse. Who is taking care of her twin girls? Not Little Maria. She is here. Maybe her sister Patricia?

A statute of St. Anthony, Onions’s favorite saint, guards the side door of the small church. Homer left his shotgun at his boarding house. He had his shotgun when Onions told him to come to the Mayan Hotel a few days ago. He usually puts his shotgun behind the statue of St. Anthony when he comes to Sunday mass. Homer and Onions put money in the poor box, so does Little Maria.

Father Corona waddles through the aisles, hugging children, kissing young mothers, and making bets with some of the men about the next football game. Father, I have ten pesos for the poor and five pesos for our team. They will win. My nephew is good. You wait and see.

Father, I have four pesos for the poor and five pesos for our team on the next game.

Father Corona makes the sign of the cross for the money he gets for the poor, not the football betting. He says funeral masses for the dead narcos and police from the neighboring states of Campeche and Quintana Roo. He has no fear of Por Esto photographers. Yucatan stays peaceful with sun for sale. A place for snowbirds.

Tomorrow Father Corona will say a funeral mass for a lawyer named Guzman. The Old Man made the arrangements. General Chaing Lee shot Guzman for betraying him. Onions reserved Father Corona for Sonny Pinto’s funeral today. Has Fatima asked Father Corona to say mass for her father, General Chaing Lee? They are Catholic.

Father Corona buys food for his Mexicans with the money he earns from narco funerals. He sends money to his bishop in Merida. But not too much. He also helps coach the local junior football team. In Mexico, soccer is football.

Outside in the sun, Lisa and her musicians practice Summer Time for the reception at Two Barrels after the funeral mass. A widow from Toronto owns the restaurant. Mexicans steal from her. She makes enough money to pay expenses. That is what she wants. It keeps her busy. She closes during the summer. Too hot. Then, the lady goes back to Toronto. The local government leaves her alone.

The Mexican musicians know what Lisa expects. She looks mature and healthy. A young forty with the long fingers of a piano player. Little Maria is about the same age. Lisa wears green like her musicians. Green sombreros with silver trim match the pattern of their silver and green sashes. Green cowboy boots with silver trim protect their feet when they kick the floor to keep time and dance with their own music.

Onions tries not to think. He needs a rest. He is still in shock from the killings around the swimming pool of the Mayan Hotel. His hands shake. Cognac helps. Quantico trained him to deal with the shock of killing. He wants to stop. The adrenaline rush keeps him in ONI. Like a fighter pilot during a mission. Onions can leave ONI when he is dead. He hears some of the orders Lisa gives to her musicians.

Don’t play hotel music.

Onions remembers the green of Lisa’s eyes. Silver rim glasses hang from a handmade silver chain bought on the Quinta in Playa del Carmen. When she snaps her fingers for the beat, Onions remembers her singing Summer Time in the small bar she owns in Playa Aventura, about an hour south of Cancun, in Quintana Roo. She rents a unit in the orange condos that surround the dock. She wants to be near her horse.

Onions remembers swimming with her in the small blue pool between her unit and the dock. Skinny-dipping after a supper of shrimp and white Spanish wine, Pomino. Lisa starts with a white sari over a white Brazilian bikini. They finish in her bedroom all wrapped up in each other. Gus, her overweight cat, is shut out of her bedroom.

You’re already married, she says before they make love again. Then they sleep.

A huge catamaran lies in the water on the other side of the pool. Is it still there? How many times has it been stolen? How much does the owner pay the cops to get it back?

High school girls are Lisa’s musicians. All of them sing. Not like Little Maria, but they do all right. One plays a tenor sax, another a trumpet, and the other two guitars. The bass guitar player is one of Little Maria’s cousins. She limps from a motorcycle accident that killed her boyfriend. Lisa thinks music will help her go on to the next part of her life. Lisa hugs Claudia every time she sees her. So does Little Maria.

Back outside the small church, Lisa says, Put your soul into it. The musicians are about as tall as most Mexicans. Black hair and paper bag skin. Change their clothes and they could be Chinese. People think Fatima Chaing Lee is Mexican. They speak to her in Spanish.

Down and dirty. Lisa snaps her fingers again.

Onions hears the musicians. He says to the Fat Cop beside him, Sonny Pinto’s favorite song was ‘Summer Time.’ He also liked ‘Besame Mucho.’

Father Corona shakes hands with men in back of his church. He has plenty of food and cold beer for his Mexicans at Two Barrels. Narcos in his church give him envelopes. After collecting all the envelopes, he bows to the dead Sonny Pinto and makes the sign of the cross. A red and Blue Haitian flag protects the casket. Sonny Pinto wanted it that way. Rumor has it Duvalier is after him dead or alive.

Two men in the back talk after giving envelopes to Father Corona. The priest does not listen. He does not want to know.

Duvalier wants him dead. Something about the Republic.

I heard he collected debts for Trujillo. Merciless. Beat a few men to death. In front of their wives and kids. He didn’t know when to stop.

Can’t get money out of a dead man. Too bad about the wife and kids. Makes a sour taste in my mouth.

That’s what happens. People make the wrong choices.

So why Duvalier?

Duvalier was the competition. And Duvalier paid him to throw a fight. Sonny Piinto agreed. Then, for some reason, changed his mind. Happens.

Was Major Magloire the fixer?

Him and another man.

Father Corona gives the cash envelopes to Little Maria. She lifts a trap door behind the altar. She hears them fall into a basket where the church cat sleeps. She will count the cash later. She sits beside Father Corona. Woolly Mendoza is on the other side of him in the red bishop’s chair. The priest says nothing.

Sonny Pinto lived in violence and died in misery. Not much is known about his family in Haiti. In Mexico, he started boxing in the cattle pens of Tampico. Friday nights after payday. Someone taught him to hot wire cars. At sixteen, he took orders for cars. At seventeen, he taught high school girls to steal cars. At eighteen, he killed a man who beat up one of his girls. A drug debt. Father Corona heard his confession.

Go in peace.

Sonny Pinto drove these cars to Sinaloa and Durango. He obeyed the speed limit. When the cops stopped him, he paid. Mordidas. Bribes. Sometimes he took Father Corona to see his family. He gave Father Corona money for widows and orphans.

Other cops caught Sonny Pinto and beat him. He started taking morphine for pain. A cartel gang beat him. More morphine. At nineteen, while in a private hospital, he fathered his first child. He supported the child and her mother. He had more children and did the same. He loaned people money for marriages. He knew they were so poor they could never pay him back.

"Senor Pinto, gracias, muchas gracias."

"De nada."

Some people at this funeral are there to pray for his soul. They believe in hell.

At twenty-one, Sonny Pinto went to prison for stealing cars and selling the parts to body shops. Six months. He met people in prison. When he got out, he went to Miami. There he made friends in Little Havana. Poor people told him their troubles. He convinced some of them to sell one of their kidneys. He found fresh corpses of undocumented immigrants to sell kidneys to physicians with high-paying clients.

Other people wanted Sonny Pinto dead. Now, there was a price on him. Fifty thousand dollars from Duvalier, among others. Cops had other problems with competing drug cartels in Sinaloa and other places in Mexico. Shorty got interested.

After delivering a car in northern Mexico, Sonny Pinto took the ADO bus back to Merida. Police seldom stopped buses to look for guns and drugs. Almost anyone can buy a gun in Florida. The guns came from the States. Corruption rules both sides of the border. Raoul met Sonny Pinto at the bus stop in Merida and drove him to the Fiesta Americana. He found crap games on the fifth floor.

Sonny Pinto got worse after he met Bones, a Quebec biker gang member, full patch, in Playa del Carmen. Bones rested there between hits in Montreal and Toronto. He liked sitting in front of a coffee shop on the Quinta and watching tourists. Playa del Carmen is where Onions had taken Little Maria and Fatima Chaing Lee for swimming and breakfast at Celine’s. Bones took Sonny Pinto to places. He started stealing yachts. He had learned how to fish.

A drug deal went wrong in Montreal. This happened in Carre Saint-Louis. Johnny Verdun and St. Regis went down. Blood in the snow. Bones shot at Onions twice and missed. Bones sold out Sonny Pinto in a plea bargain with the crown. Something about the death of a young Latina girl about seventeen Bones killed while running from Onions. Bones walked. The judge gave Sonny Pinto twenty-five years for murder and gangsterism. Provincial cops took Sonny Pinto to Sainte-Anne prison near Terrebonne. There, he met a lawyer named Guzman.

Sonny Pinto was murdered by Nancy Brown in his room in the Mayan Hotel. A mercy killing in Progreso? The police report, written by the Fat Cop, confirms that Nancy Brown administered the fatal dose of morphine. There is no police report about Onions drowning General Chaing Lee in the hotel pool. Broke his neck. There