She swallows her fear, trying like hell not to cry or shake or shiver but to just sit there, her back against the wall, like nothing affects her.
But, of course, it does.
When the mustached man appears at the bars, he raises his right hand high in the air.
The buzzer sounds and the gate opens.
The same two soldiers are standing behind him. The one on his left holding an automatic rifle, the black barrel aimed at her head.
The soldier on his right is carrying a tray.
Time for another shot.
She swallows, clears her throat. “You should know by now,” she says, trying to hold back the trembling in her voice, “that I have nothing at all to tell you.”
She breathes.
In and out. Not too fast, not too slow.
The mustached man approaches her. He is smiling now, the bandaging on his right hand changed to something fresh and clean. He no longer appears to be in any kind of pain.
He bends at the knees, brings his face to within inches of her own.
There is liquor on his breath, and cigarette smoke.
“There’s been a change of plans” he says, while the soldier to his left sets the tray on the ground, begins prepping the syringe.
“Please don’t inject me again.”
The soldier depresses the syringe, just a tad, so that a bit of the clear liquid comes spurting out.
“Don’t worry” says the mustached man, running his good hand gently, coldly through her hair. “This will put you to sleep. Peacefully.”
She looks at the soldier. He is smiling, coming toward her with the syringe.
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” she protests. But what she means to say is, I don’t want to die. Not now, not this way.
Suddenly, when death is upon her, she chooses life.
But, then, she has no choice in the matter.
The mustached man is already rolling up the sleeve on her jumper. “And when you wake up,” he says, “you will no longer be with us.”
She feels the sharp prick of the needle.
It’s not that she’s afraid to die.
It’s all too soon.
Chapter 33
Their throats had been sliced from ear to ear, the cuts so deep their yellow-white vertebrae were visible in spots through the blood.
Necks violently snapped back over blood-soaked pillows. Like twigs.
Mouths wide open.
Gaping.
You’d think that a man who’d spent the better part of his life in the department of corrections might be used to blood when it spills so fast and deep it appears more black than red. You might assume that just because I’ve seen men gutted from neck to navel with a piece of glass no bigger than a man’s palm or a skull crushed with a canvas sack filled with five-pound weights, I’d have no trouble stomaching a pair of sliced necks.
Listen: You might think that a man who witnessed his own wife’s decapitation might not be affected by another woman’s blood.
But killing wasn’t anything like that for me.
Killing never would be.
How could any man go from doing the tango with a couple of girls in one breath to standing over their mutilated bodies the next, staring into their wide open eyes as though in death they were somehow more alive than ever—eyes that didn’t stare back at you but through you, until you felt the squeeze of a fist around your heart and your brain, felt your stomach being wrung inside out.
And what made you even sicker is that you couldn’t help but stare at the naked bodies, from head to toe, careful to keep a distance between you and the flies that had already begun to make nests out of the sex parts.
“Who did this?” I asked, my voice hardly more than a whisper.
“Funny,” Shaw said. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”
It took me a few seconds, but after a time I turned, caught Hudson’s eyes with my own. “Go to hell,” I said.
Behind me, Old Leather Vest took a step or two forward, ever at the ready.
Shaw crossed his arms at his chest. “I understand your distress, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “But I think it only appropriate to mention that in all my years of living in Monterrey, I have never had a death to contend with inside my home.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?” I said, ever conscious of the vest man breathing down my neck.
The blood dripping over the silence.
“Did you enjoy your swim with those girls tonight?”
I went for his neck.
But not before vest man jumped on my back, the barrel of his pistol pressed up against the back of my skull.
I pulled back.
“That’s enough, Chico,” Hudson said. “Let Mr. Marconi go.”
It was the first time I heard him say anything to the man in English.
Chico’s breath was sour and hot. It coated my neck like a mist. He removed the pistol and backed up against the far wall. From out the second-floor window, the orange hue of dawn was clearly visible while the sun rose over the Monterrey desert.
Shaw cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, my friend,” he said, his voice reserved, his eyes averted from my own, peering down at the floor like a guilty child.
“Sorry for what?” I said.
“Sorry I had to reveal the bodies to you in quite this manner.” Shaw’s remorse seemed to grow deeper with every word. He seemed suddenly gentle, resigned, sad.
“No one deserves this,” I said, nodding in the direction of the bodies.
“Quite simply, Keeper,” Shaw went on, “I needed to evaluate your reaction.”
“And if you didn’t like my reaction?”
“It’s not a question of liking your reaction. It’s a matter of believing in it.”
“If you didn’t believe in it,” I said. “What then?”
“Then I would have been certain that you were the responsible party.”
“And you expect me to believe that shit?”
“You don’t get as far as I have—no, allow me to rephrase that. You don’t stay alive as long as I have without the talent to recognize guilt when it stares you in the face.”
“But there’s one thing you’re forgetting, Shaw,” I said. “You’re going to be wrong from time to time.”
“You mean what if I thought you were guilty?”
I nodded.
“Then I would have dealt with you in a manner I felt appropriate.”
“And what’s appropriate?”
“In Biblical terms, a punishment that fits the deed,” he said, rubbing the stubble on his chin with forefinger and thumb. “I’ll show you.”
He took a step forward, toward the place I occupied at the foot of the king-size bed.
“Chico,” he said, holding out his hand, palm up. “The gun please.”
Chico’s eyes went noticeably wide, the tanned skin on his tight face suddenly pale. He handed the .9-millimeter to his boss, as ordered. Shaw gripped the weapon, pressed the barrel against Chico’s forehead, thumbed back the hammer.
“Pay close attention, Mr. Marconi,” he said.
And then he pulled the trigger.
The explosion blew off the Mexican’s cowboy hat, along with the entire back of his skull.
My body turned to ice in the desert.
The air in the room was thick with blood. The floor was covered in it.
Holy Christ, Shaw! I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t work up enough voice to say it.
“Before you assume I acted wholly inappropriately, Mr. Marconi,” he said, “let me tell you this. From the moment I walked you up here, I harbored a suspicion that my old and trusted employee, Chico, may have been responsible for the murder of those women.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, trying to get my breath back.
“I spotted him coming out of their room about an hour ago,” he explained. “He locked the door behind him.” He paused only long enough to take a breath, the smoking .9-millimeter still in his right
hand. “However, I could not be certain.”
“Until you confronted me.”
“Perhaps consulted is the better word,” he said.
We were silent for moment while the blood drained from the bodies and the new morning sun lit up the room with its colorful rays. I looked down at Chico’s face, the collapsed hollow cheeks, the pale face, the three-day-old stubble, the now-hatless blown-away head.
Now I knew why it had been so easy to get into Shaw’s office undetected. It might not have been the old passed-out Mexican’s job at all to oversee the room, so much as it had been Old Leather Vest’s responsibility.
Shaw tossed the pistol onto Chico’s stomach. “Look, Keeper,” he said, the slightest evidence of a yawn in his voice, “it is already daylight. My digging team left for the prison an hour ago. It will take them some time to set up the equipment and to position the gun emplacements along the cliff top. Why don’t you catch some sleep while you still can. We’ll meet out at the pit for breakfast in exactly one hour.”
Breakfast.
Shaw was thinking of breakfast while the blood of three people flowed all around him. But then, if you can believe it, nabbing an hour’s sleep along with a little something in my stomach did not seem like an insane idea. Maybe all the death was finally settling in. Maybe I was getting used to it after all. Anyhow, it didn’t matter a whole lot how I felt about it. What mattered was getting Renata out of prison.
Then getting the hell away from this bloodbath.
I took my hand away from the bed board, tiptoed around the blood to the head of the bed, reached out with my right hand, brushed it over the faces of both girls, closing their eyelids.
“Please, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “Sleep.”
“I heard you the first time,” I said.
I stepped over Chico’s body on my way out.
Chapter 34
In the dream she is once again back inside her old apartment
Once again walking the center hall.
Slow motion.
The bright white light spills out of the open bathroom door, makes a halo on the wood floor.
There are the pleasant sounds of little hands and feet splashing in the water and the baby giggles that go with it.
Until she makes it to the open door and the light turns into water, spilling out of the bath onto the floor, while the hands of the man who kneels by the tub hold her little baby underwater.
Chapter 35
But how could I sleep over the scrub brushes, over the voices of the old women on their knees wiping away the blood in the bedroom beside my own?
One sleepless hour later found me up and out of bed, fully clothed in jeans, boots, fresh work shirt, and leather jacket. I was drinking a cup of cowboy coffee one of Shaw’s loyal Mexican servants prepared in a huge black pot set over a fire built inside the open pit. To say that breakfast was being served to the crowd of workers and servants would have been putting it mildly.
Four mammoth skillets were set on the black grate beside the coffeepot.
One skillet to fry eggs so fresh they lay steaming from birth inside a straw basket on the picnic table. Another skillet used for cooking whole chunks of bacon (not store-bought strips). In the third and fourth refried beans and a Mexican dish called cholo, made from corn and green and red peppers, sizzled away.
I sat on the edge of a picnic table farthest away from both the fire and the crowd of people. I smelled the fresh breakfast food as it cooked and listened to the morning people laughing and playfully arguing in a language I did not understand.
I had no appetite.
Not only did I have the breakout at Monterrey Prison ahead of me, but my stomach hadn’t had sufficient time to get over the murdered girls or the way Chico’s brains spattered all over the bedroom wall when Shaw shot him.
Stomachs tend to rebel at the sight of wasted brain matter.
Mine was no exception.
Maybe in the end the killings had been used to relay some kind of message to me. A simple warning not to play around with Shaw, now or in the future. Whatever the case, I knew the ugly deed presented one hell of an opportunity for him. An opportunity for demonstrating his supposed powers of reason, his powers of delineating between the guilty and the sinless.
But, then, I wasn’t planning on sticking around long enough to find out just how much power Shaw wielded in Monterrey, or anywhere else in Mexico for that matter. Nor did I plan on sticking around long enough for him to kill more people just to make that power known. In just a few hours time I would have custody of Renata.
Alive. Or so I could only hope.
Shaw joined me at the picnic table.
He asked me if I’d slept well.
I told him that I hadn’t slept at all.
“Stupid question,” he said, a smile planted on his ruddy face. “Even for me.”
He laid out the maps of Monterrey Prison’s basement along with our arsenal du jour, which included my Colt .45 with three extra ammo clips stuffed inside the interior pockets of my leather bomber. As far as I could see, Shaw had strapped on his favorite six-shooter for the occasion. But then he placed the heel of his work boot up on the bench of the picnic table. He lifted the cuff on his khaki pants up above his knee in order to adjust the small leg-mounted Velcro holster that supported a two-shot derringer.
There wasn’t a whole lot to view on the four reduced pages Tony had faxed from Albany. But what they did reveal was this: If the sublevels of Monterrey were similar to Attica’s, then we could easily reach the basement cells of A Block by following a narrow plumbing chase that connected directly to the basement of the administration building. If we could get into the prison hospital. If the warden took the bribe. So far, there were an awful lot of “ifs” hanging over our heads.
But the plan —if you could call it that—was simple.
Acquire access to the hospital by faking an injury. From there, gain access to the tunnel and then the basement of A Block. Uncomplicated, safe, and, according to the ever-confident Shaw, effective.
But when I asked what he planned on doing if we got down to the basement only to find that Renata wasn’t there, he just raised his hands in the air and smiled.
“In that case, we’re S.O.L.,” he said.
Eight o’clock on a bright Wednesday morning.
Shaw at the wheel of his Land Rover, driving us over a bumpy dirt road that cut through the desert. Past the cactus and thorn bushes, past pecan trees and cotton fields manned by raggedy peasants and small children.
Besides our pistols, Shaw had locked and loaded his twelve-gauge Savage pump and set it in the thick plastic clips mounted to the dash. Placed in the open space between the two all-weather bucket seats was an additional box of ammo.
Two-shot magnum loads.
Shaw asked me if I was nervous.
“Wouldn’t you be?” I said, nodding.
“Most of the danger is imagined,” he commented. “I believe we have sufficiently covered our tracks with each individual bribe.” Patting his breast pocket with the palm of his right hand. “And I’ve also taken the precaution of bringing along a few additional cash prizes just in case.”
“What if your bribed guards decide to double-cross and shoot on sight?” I said.
“We won’t give them a reason to shoot,” he said. “There’s nothing suspicious about an injured man who requires immediate medical attention.”
He was right and he knew it. Hell, I knew it. But I still couldn’t find a way to squash the suspicion gnawing at my gut. As if my best instincts were raising their separate red flags. I wasn’t scared of breaking into Monterrey Prison. I wasn’t scared of breaking out Renata or stealing her out of the country. In a word I was scared of Shaw, scared of his secret agenda. And after all, I could still smell the stench of those two women in the upstairs bedroom. Chico or no Chico, I had no real clue as to who truly ran that blade across their necks.
We said nothing for quite a while, until Shaw reached over wit
h his right hand, opened the glove box, and pulled out a fifth of tequila. He broke the tab on the bottle while managing to maneuver the Land Rover by steering with his elbows. He titled his head back, took a long swig, capped the bottle loosely and, without looking, handed it to me.
“ETA just five minutes,” he said.
I took a hold of the bottle, drank a shot, felt the cool, hot booze cut the dust in my throat. I took a second hit off the bottle and handed it back to Shaw.
He took another longer drink and returned the bottle back to the glove box.
Not ten seconds later the massive concrete and razor-wire-topped walls of Monterrey Prison came into view on the horizon.
Chapter 36
The digging crew was already busy at work tearing up a portion of the desert by the time Shaw and I passed by the powerhouse. We pulled into the prison turnaround just outside Guard Tower Number One and crossed over into a near-empty parking lot set between the concrete walls and the cliff faces to the west.
The excavation crew consisted of a handful of men armed with pickaxes and spades, while the trench digger mined a narrow swath out of the desert floor.
Shaw hopped out of the Land Rover and approached the dig site.
The ever-concerned boss.
I followed close behind.
He spoke to a man who was operating a transit—a thin, wiry old man in a canvas coat whom I immediately took as the foreman for the phony digging project. In the meantime, I tried my best to eye the three gun emplacements Shaw had supposedly set up on the cliff top.
It was impossible to make out a single gunner. But, then, if I could see them, the guards inside Monterrey Prison manning the towers could see them too.
For a while I eyed Shaw and the foreman as they spoke, each of them raising their hands in the air while surveying the surrounding desert, really putting on a show for the guards in the towers. I tried my best to catch what they were saying. But the engine on the trench digger was drowning out their incomprehensible Spanish.
At one point, Shaw walked up to the machine operator and told him to cut the engine, an order he gave by running his right hand across his throat. The engine was cut, but the mechanical noise lingered, echoing across the valley, reverberating off the cliff faces. Shaw went down on his knees at the edge of the trench. He reached inside with his right hand, pulled out what looked to be a plain everyday rock but what to he and his foreman appeared to be something else entirely.
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