by Blake Banner
“How could I have done that?”
I turned my back on the window and looked down at him where he was sitting in his rocking chair. He still had the mocking look in his eyes.
I said: “Do you work for Mendez?”
He threw back his head and roared with laughter, rocking backward and forward, pounding the arm of his chair with his right fist. Ash fell from the tip of his cigarette and floated to the terracotta floor. He started shaking his head and wagging his finger at me in the negative. Finally, he drew breath and made a high-pitched “hoooo!” noise.
“No, my friend, no. If I worked for Mendez, you would be long dead by now.” He wiped his eyes. “I don’t work for anybody, Verdugo. I work for everybody and nobody. I am free. What you might call a free agent.”
“So why did you stop me killing Mendez?”
“Did I? If I did, I didn’t know it, so I can’t answer your question.”
“Do you know where he is, where he’s taken Sole?”
“And so do you.”
“I have to go and help her. And he has to die.”
“We all have to die.”
“Do you ever let up on being a wiseass?”
“Do you? Don’t go now.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll see you coming for miles, trailing a big old tail of dust. They’ll be ready for you, and even with your skills, I don’t fancy your chances.”
“When, then?”
“Tonight.”
“They have a shipment coming tonight. There will be at least double the men.”
“So much the better. Now, I need to tell you about Sole.”
I frowned. “Sole? Why?”
“She’s Mexican.”
“I know that.”
“She was born in Hermosillo, in a poor neighborhood. In that kind of neighborhood, if you’re a guy, you’re in a gang. If you’re a girl, and you look nice, you either sleep with somebody who’s in a gang, or you’re a whore. The options are not many.” He reached out his hand. “Give me another cigarette.”
I tossed him the pack. He fished out a butt with total concentration, lit it with a match and spoke with smoke trailing from his mouth.
“So her dad was in a gang when he was young, and then, when he married a girl who didn’t look so good, he made a deal with his patron and they let him open up a shoe store. He had to pay protection, obviously, and if ever the gang needed a favor, he had to be available for them. That was the deal. And everything was fine for fifteen, sixteen years.”
He took the bottle, poured two shots and threw me my own pack of Camels.
I sat on the bed again. Fished out a butt and lit it with the Zippo. As I exhaled smoke, I said, “She started to look the way she looks now.”
“Right on the money. She started attracting a lot of attention from the top brass. She is a gorgeous woman; you can imagine that as a teenager, she was a stunner. So her dad, we’ll call him Pepe, the Pater Putitativo, began to look desperately for some way to get her to safety. Her fate was sealed. Either she would become a slave to one of the leaders of the gang, or she would be forced into prostitution. A girl like Sole in a club in Texas, Arizona or California can pull in thousands of dollars a week. The problem was…” He spread his hands, took a slug and a drag. “He didn’t have enough money of his own to send her away. So he needed to do something that would bring him a great deal of money, very fast.”
“So he became a mule for his old boss.”
“No. Pepe had been a hit man for Ramon Mendez. But Ramon Mendez’s gang was not the only one in that region of Sonora. There are many rival gangs at work in that part of Mexico at any given time. So what Pepe did was to strike a deal with Ernesto Peralta, the head of a rival gang that was rising to power and had a reputation for being very violent, and very rich.”
“He would rub out Ramon Mendez?”
He nodded. “In exchange for forty thousand dollars, safe passage to California and guaranteed American naturalization, he killed and beheaded Ramon and his two brothers, Nelson and Dixon. He was good at what he did and left no clue to the killer’s identity. Immediately after the killing, he sent his little girl, aged sixteen, to California, telling her he would follow soon. But he never did. Ramon’s son had no proof, or even evidence, of who had killed his father. But the process of elimination was a simple one. Very few people had direct access to Ramon, fewer still were allowed to be alone with him, and of those, only one had the skills to carry out such a professional job. So in the end, it was his very professionalism that cost him his life.”
“They had him killed.”
Olaf shook his head. “No, they didn’t have him killed. Eulogio Mendez, the man you call simply Mendez, had Pepe brought to his ranch outside Hermosillo, had him tied to a wagon wheel in his big driveway outside the front of the house, and he took five days to kill him. I won’t describe what he did to him, but I will tell you that human imagination cannot go beyond what he did.”
My head throbbed. “I don’t understand. Sole must know who he is, surely. The name alone…”
He drained his glass, smacked his lips and sighed. “Oh, yes, for sure, she knows who he is…”
“But, I have seen them together. I’ve seen her kiss him…”
“But he doesn’t know who she is.”
The room was very quiet. The glare of the sun outside was a terrible stillness. I heard my own voice, disembodied, saying, “Jesus…”
Olaf said, “She is not in danger from him. He is in danger from her, but much, much more than that, she is in mortal danger from herself. If she does to him what is in her mind, if she takes what is in the darkest part of her soul and makes it real, she will never recover. There will be no hope of happiness or freedom for her in this life, or the next.”
“But he has taken her to punish her, for being with me.”
“Yes, she is a very skilled and subtle woman.”
“What about her husband, her children…?”
He sighed, gazing down at the burnt sienna tiles under his feet. “Her husband, the man you worked with…”
“This has been her purpose from the day her father died…”
“From the day she heard about her father’s death, this has been her reason for being, the purpose of her existence.”
“You want me to stop her.”
He shook his head. “I want nothing. All I am saying to you is that if she is successful, she will have lost any hope of ever achieving happiness.”
“Like me.”
He shrugged. “Well,” he said. “That may or may not be so. After all, you have no identity, have you? How can you be happy, depressed, free or doomed, if you don’t exist?”
He got to his feet and moved to the door. There, he stopped and looked back at me along his pale, luminous eyes. “By the way,” he said, “who did lose your identity?”
Fifteen
I drove slowly, letting the night air slap my face. Night falls fast in the desert, and there was no moon. The dark was closing in and the bushes were gnarled, hunched things that lurked in the night and moved and writhed in the beams of the headlamps. I turned onto the 506 at the intersection, where the Cabrito Veloz was strung up like a Christmas tree in the quickening dark, and the soft throb of Creedence wafted from the open door, warning that a bad moon was rising.
I turned onto the blacktop and accelerated toward the highway. After a mile and a half, or thereabouts, I began to see lights up ahead. They were winking red, white and blue, and they were not moving. I thought about turning back, but the alternative route to where I needed to go would take several hours. I had to brazen it out.
After another half mile, I began to make out a couple of trucks that seemed to be parked across the road, forming a block, and thirty seconds later, the trucks began to resolve themselves into Sheriff’s Department pickups and, silhouetted against the glow of the spots and the headlamps, four deputies, one of them flagging me down.
I slowed to a halt and pulled over to th
e side of the road twenty feet from the block and lowered the window. I recognized Hank, the deputy I’d seen in the shop at the gas station. He strolled over with his thumbs in his belt and a look on his face that said he’d be happy if I took my amnesia someplace else. I smiled at him.
“Good evening, Deputy. How can I help you?”
“Can I see some ID, please, sir?”
I sucked my teeth and shook my head. “I’m afraid not, Deputy. I seem to have mislaid my driver’s license. I figure it must be back at the motel.”
“This vehicle registered to you?”
“It does not appear to be registered to anybody.”
“Are you telling me, sir, that you are driving an unregistered vehicle, and that you have no license?”
“That would seem to be the case, Deputy.”
“Either it is the case or it ain’t, son. I am going to have to ask you to step out of the vehicle. Nice and slow now, and turn around and face the car.”
I didn’t have time for this, but I knew I would draw the line at killing innocent people and officers of the law. So I swung out of the cab and stood up against the truck with my legs spread and my hands on the roof.
The other three deputies had closed in around me and Hank was patting me down. He found the Glock 19 and the hunting knife in my boot.
“You got a permit for a concealed carry?”
“I don’t know, Deputy. I am suffering from acute amnesia.”
“Amnesia, huh? What’s your name?”
I sighed. “Well, I don’t know, Deputy, because I have amnesia.”
“Well, that’s mighty convenient, ain’t it?”
I was going to tell him that in fact it wasn’t when I heard the crackle of a police radio and the deputy’s voice saying, “Yeah, put me through to Major Mitch Hunter…”
There was silence for two or three minutes, broken only by the scuff of the occasional boot on the dusty asphalt. Then there was the crackle of the radio and Mitch Hunter’s voice speaking, though the words were indistinguishable.
Hank listened in silence, then said, “OK, we’ll hold him here till your boys arrive. Don’t worry, he ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
I waited for the major while leaning on the hood of the Jeep, smoking and watching the stars wheel slowly across the sky. Usually, when you don’t understand a situation, it’s because you’re having trouble finding the connections between the parts. But what was happening here was exactly the opposite. There were too many links, too many connections to too many parts, but however you put them together, they made no sense. And to complicate matters more, there was Olaf, the Viking-Mexican shaman. I didn’t know how he did what he did, but he was using smoke and mirrors with a skill that made David Blaine look like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
I figure, when people start using smoke and mirrors, the last things you want to look at are the smoke and the mirrors. They’re there to draw your attention away from what you really need to be looking at. And as I leaned, smoking and looking at the stars, I slowly turned my mental eye away from those foggy reflections, and things started to slot into place. Things were not connected through some mysterious, Jungian synchronicity or weird quantum entanglement, but quite simply because they were actually connected. They were linked. Physically. They had the same causal root. And when I accepted that, most of the rest started to make sense. All I needed now was that cause, and I thought I knew what it was. I smiled at the stars.
It was as I smiled at the stars that a light glowed brightly by the highway, then slowly resolved, splitting into two headlamps and then four, speeding toward us. A couple of minutes later, a military Jeep followed by a Range Rover pulled up beyond the barrier, spitting gravel, and was enveloped in a cloud of dust which traveled in its wake.
As the dust settled, the doors opened and Major Hunter and Lt. Lovejoy swung down from the cab. They pushed through the two vehicles that formed the roadblock and Hunter stood staring at me. He had the kind of tension in his face that only comes from real rage. I smoked back at him until he finally said, “You are in a world of trouble, pal. That stunt you pulled…”
I let him trail off. “Yeah? I noticed how you were able to call in the Feds, the NSA and the Secret Service to assist in your national security situation.”
His upper lip curled. “Being a smartass ain’t your best option right now. You want to play nice.”
“Do I? Where are you going to take me now? I figure the United States Air Force aren’t so keen to play host to you anymore. So what will it be, a barn on a remote farm? An abandoned warehouse?”
He looked me over and there was real contempt in his face. He shook his head and said, “No, you are under arrest. Get in the Jeep.”
I sighed, dropped my cigarette and crushed it with my boot. It was a show of boredom, but I was curious to know where he was going to take me. If I was right about their operation, and I had no doubt that I was, the colonel’s death would have been an embarrassment to the Air Force and they would have demanded the group’s immediate departure, and they would have had to find a replacement for their base of operations, at short notice. And I had a hunch I knew where they had been transferred to.
We drove quickly through the night, back to the highway and then south, toward El Paso and the Mexican border. But after ten miles, we came to a post office on the left, and then, through the dark glass of the windows, I became aware of scattered houses among the mesquite trees. This, I figured, was Orogrande. Big gold.
We slowed and pretty soon, on the right, we came to a field with a handful of RVs in it, a large, asphalt parking lot and a couple of ramshackle buildings that had no lights in the windows and looked like they’d last been inhabited during the Civil War.
We turned in, slowed again to a crawl, and bumped and rolled across the field, dotted with scattered RVs, which were all dark too, to a large Winnebago Adventurer that was standing alone at the far left. We came to a halt outside the cab and the major killed the engine. I didn’t need to ask if this was lot thirty-two.
Hunter and Lovejoy climbed out and Lovejoy kept me covered as I got out after them. The side door of the Winnebago opened and a triangle of amber light split the darkness for a second before a distorted silhouette warped into the light and a disembodied voice said, “Bring him up.”
Lt. Lovejoy shoved me in the back. I turned to face him, without hurry, and looked deep into his eyes. He’d been bullied at school, you could read it there; now he was a coward who wanted to feel like a bully.
“If you do that again, ever, I’ll tear off your fingers and shove them down your throat.”
He drew breath to answer me, three times, but he could see death in my eyes. More than that, he could see that I had already decided to kill him.
Hunter’s voice cut through the dark. “Come on, tough guy. Do your talking inside.”
I offered Lt. Lovejoy the kind of thin smile nightmares are made of. He didn’t want it, so I took it up into the RV with me.
The RV was luxurious, with real leather couches, dark mahogany walls, a drinks cabinet and original paintings on the walls. Mendez was sitting in a leather armchair with a martini in his hand and one gray silk leg crossed over the other.
“You are the Verdugo, who has been causing so much trouble lately.”
“Am I?” I thought of Olaf, answering my questions with questions of his own.
Mendez sighed and shouted in Spanish. The door was still open and I heard feet running across the dirt outside. Two guys in suits came clambering in. They were both gorillas, but one had thick black hair and a Mexican mustache, and the other looked Native American, with high cheekbones and really short hair. They closed the door and took positions beside it. Hunter and Lovejoy sat on the sofa and smiled at me.
When everyone was settled, Mendez spoke again. “Let’s establish this one, simple fact before we proceed any further. You are the Verdugo.”
I gave him the same smile I’d given Lovejoy. “I won’t a
rgue with you.”
He stood and came over to stand in front of me. Hunter and Lovejoy got to their feet and came behind me. Mendez was fast. The backhand came out of nowhere and caught me square. If I’d weighed twenty pounds less, it would have knocked me off my feet. I tasted the blood in my mouth and enjoyed the adrenaline that was smoldering in my belly. I met his eye.
He said, “Did you kill Ivan Ivanovich?”
“I can’t remember.”
He hit me again, harder, and I took a step back. I tasted the blood again and swallowed it. I looked up at him and, as I spoke, I knew I was going to kill him. I said, really softly, “Take it easy, Mendez. Sole and I had a row, she sent me packing and I went on a bender.”
“A bender?”
“Yeah, I got drunk, and after that, I got drunk some more. Then, to round it off, I got drunk some more again. A bender.”
It was kind of true, so he kind of believed me. Also, it was kind of good for his ego. “A row? About what?”
I sighed and made a show of looking embarrassed. “I came on to her, OK?”
He frowned, confused.
I said, “I tried to kiss her. She didn’t like it. She told me she was in a committed relationship and to get the hell out of her house. I was drunk. So I refused and crashed in one of the kids’ rooms. Next morning, all hell broke loose, so I went on the lam and started getting drunk.”
He looked hard at me for a moment, then smiled. Then he laughed. “Good try, gringo. But I am not stupid. You arrive in Tularosa, and after a couple of days, people start dying here, there, every-fockin’-where. And crazy coincidence! They all workin’ with me in traffickin’ dope. And all the time, the stupid story, ‘Hey! I jost a drifter, I’m a vet from Afghanistan, I don’t know nothin’…” He pointed at me. “Bot you know somethin’. You got skills. You got training. You a fockin’ dangerous man.”
He closed his eyes and waved his hand in the air in front of his face, like he was mad at some imaginary flies. “Bot I had enough of your bullshit! You ain’t got amnesia and you ain’t no fockin’ drifter! You got information I need, and you gonna give it to me, tonight.”
