“We’ve got about five minutes,” Shaw said, stepping out onto the empty administration corridor. “Maybe less.”
“What if we don’t make it?” I said, following him toward the front gates, Renata suddenly growing heavier on my shoulder.
“We die,” he said.
Chapter 40
I can’t say exactly when the first shots were fired or who fired them or if the guards began shooting at us before our negotiated twenty minutes were up. Or maybe the entire plan had been bullshit from the very beginning.
But the guards were already shooting at us when we bolted out the front gates. Shooting to kill. As if Shaw had never made a deal with them to begin with. Maybe he hadn’t.
At least half a dozen Mexican guards, all of them down on one knee, combat position, spread out in semicircle formation atop the grassy prison turnaround. Some sporting prison-issue .38s, other’s using black M-16s, all of them firing on cue as soon as they saw the whites of our pretty little eyes.
How they missed us was a miracle.
But as I threw Renata into the back of the Land Rover and hopped into the passenger seat, it dawned on me that no miracle whatsoever had been involved. As soon as Shaw got behind the wheel and calmly turned the engine over, I knew there was no other explanation for it: They missed us on purpose.
Which was why the gunmen set on top of the cliff face hadn’t returned their volleys.
The guards had given Shaw a break after all, held fast to their bargain while pretending to perform their sacred duty. Except for the one bastard who either decided not to play fair or was such a bad shot that he managed to nick the back of my left thigh. Despite the pinprick sensation of the bullet, I didn’t feel the pain right away. Just a prick, like a bee sting, and the telltale wet warmth trickling down the back of my leg.
As soon as we were on the road, I reached into the backseat, pressed the index and middle fingers of my right hand up against Renata’s carotid. Her pulse was still weak but somehow steadier. Like her condition had actually improved during the craziness!
What’s more, she had begun to mumble in her unconscious state. “Charlie,” she said, over and over again, like a chant. “Charlie.”
“Who’s Charlie?” Shaw asked, while I turned to see if we were being tailed.
I turned back around, slipped down into the bucket seat. “Her son,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
He reached across my legs for the glove box and the fifth of tequila he had opened earlier. “She wrote a book about it, am I right?”
“Godchild” I said.
“Yes of course, Godchild,” Shaw said. “I haven’t read it.” He took a swig of the tequila and handed the bottle to me. “She must have loved him very much to have written an entire book about him.”
“You could say that,” I said, bringing the bottle to my mouth.
I closed my eyes against the wind and the sand and took a deep drink. I knew I was bleeding on the seat. But I said nothing about it. The tequila cut through the dry soreness in the back of my throat. Adrenaline was still shooting through my veins. That’s when it hit me like a brick. Only harder. Maybe I hadn’t had the chance to think about it before. Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to think about it. But suddenly, at that very moment, sitting in the Land Rover, I had to wonder just what the hell I was doing there. Just what the hell had transpired in my life since my wedding day that would have led me to the desert, to the breakout of a woman I’d never laid eyes upon until a few moments ago.
While Shaw Hudson sped over the dirt road, it hit me that I had just pulled off the impossible. No, that wasn’t exactly right either. What I meant to say was this: Renata’s rescue came off too easy. Regardless of who died, who got shot along the way. Regardless of the flesh wound in my thigh. As if every move had been choreographed, planned out by someone much more important than Shaw or Tony Angelino or maybe even Richard Barnes.
But, then, I had to wonder. Just who the hell was pulling the strings?
And for what cause?
What was Barnes’s intent? To get his wife back? Simple as that? Because if that’s all he wanted, this was no way to go about it. Unless, of course, he wanted to risk her getting shot in the process.
And just what had been Renata’s cause in the first place? Why would she have risked her life to come down here? Had she been running away from the memory of her drowned child? Just like I had tried to run away from the persistent memory of a murdered wife? But then, what the hell was my cause? Why had I agreed to the job in the first place? Let’s face it, cause had nothing to do with Renata or money or getting my feet back on the solid concrete. It had everything to do with finding the Bald Man. Finding him once and for all. Then killing him. That was my cause. And that was all that mattered to me.
It was while wrapping a torn-away section of my shirttail around the flesh wound on my thigh that Shaw asked me to hand over my Colt. At the same time, I felt the barrel of his six-gun pressed up against my left temple.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
“The Colt please,” he repeated. Eye’s peeled to the road.
I reached for it, handed it to him, butt first.
We rode for about another half mile until we were completely surrounded by empty desert on all sides. Then Shaw suddenly pulled off onto the side of the road and stopped. “Now,” he said, “out of the car, Mr. Marconi.”
I got out.
He then asked me to help him remove Renata from the backseat.
“No,” I said.
“Do it,” he said, the barrel of his pistol in my face.
No choice.
I took her legs. He took her arms. Together we laid her out on the desert floor.
“I assume you would like an explanation,” he said, shifting his aim from my face to Renata’s. “But I am not in the position to give you one.”
Shaw bent at the waist, pressed the barrel of my .45 against Renata’s head, drew back the hammer, averted his face —just slightly—as though to avoid the inevitable spatter.
“Shaw,” I said. “Don’t do it.”
“Stay out of this,” he said. “This isn’t about you and me.”
“Then what is it about?”
“What the hell does it matter?” he said, grinning. “So long as the money’s right?”
Chapter 41
This time when she opens her eyes, she is in the middle of the desert. She can still see her boy, Charlie. The memory of his little round face is ingrained in her brain. But at the same time, she is remembering the pit.
The mass grave.
All those bloating bodies covered in white powder, stacked up like piled logs, their stench sweet, overwhelming, floating up into her nose like vapor.
She doesn’t want to go back to the pit. She can’t go back to the pit. She’s not ready to die.
She cares now. Suddenly. About life. Her life.
The book. She has to write Charlie’s book first. She has to have the chance to tell the truth.
She hears some men talking. Arguing.
She has no idea who they are. They speak English.
If only she could wake up, get her wits about her.
If only she could move a muscle.
She could run away.
Chapter 42
Once, when I was Captain of the Guard at Coxsackie Prison, I found myself in the middle of a lover’s quarrel that erupted between cell mates. At some point around midnight, one of the inmates—a big, burly, tattooed man who went by the name of Ricky Too-Sweet—had pulled a screwdriver out from under his mattress and slid the sharp end of the foot-long shank just inside the canal of his lover’s ear— a slight, effeminate man known around the iron house only as Skinny.
By the time the guard sergeant had woken me up and called me onto the scene, big Ricky was crying like a baby. “He don’t love me no more,” he groaned between sobs and sniffles, Skinny trembling under the weight of his thick arm and the pressure of the screwdriver against his eardrum.
I stood
directly outside the then-open door of the cell, a gang of five or six corrections officers behind me, standing at the ready, batons in hand. All around us came the sound of inmates who’d been woken out of a sound sleep. “Waste him, Ricky!” they shouted. “Kill the fag!”
“Listen, Ricky,” I said, my two hands raised in the air in a kind of mock surrender, “don’t do anything you’ll regret later on.”
But he looked up at me, with big brown eyes inside a round face made all the rounder by a clean-shaved head. “Regret shit,” he said. “I already doin life.”
He gave the tool just a little nudge.
Skinny yelped like a dog that’s just had his paw stomped on. “Oh Christ, help me,” he said, a small stream of blood running from his ear down his sweat-soaked cheek.
“What is it you want?” I asked Ricky.
He looked at me with those eyes. “You wouldn’t know what I want,” he cried. “You don’t live in here with me. Only he lives in here with me. Only he knows what I want, what I need. And now he wants to take it all away from me…from us.”
He was right. I had no way in hell of knowing how he felt. But the point was to stall him, keep him talking, keep the big man tuned into me while I bought precious time.
“Skinny is going to get parole with or without you,” I said. “He’s going home. You can’t stop it, Ricky.”
“He don’t love me no more,” he said. Just another slight nudge of the screwdriver, another squeal from Skinny, along with five or six separate breaths swallowed by the five or six COs standing behind me.
Ricky’s eyes seemed about to explode out of their sockets. Those wide glassy eyes that told me there’d be no talking him out of what he wanted or what he needed to do with that screwdriver. Words alone would have no effect, since he’d already made up his mind long before I’d come onto the scene.
But that didn’t give me the right to give up. As the Captain of the Guard it was my job to protect society from the likes of Ricky Too-Sweet. But it was also my impossible job to protect them from one another.
I took another step inside the cell, held out my hand. “Give me the shank, Ricky,” I said. But the gesture was useless. I took two more steps forward, but in all reality I might have taken five steps back. A split second later, Ricky plunged that metal shaft through Skinny’s brain just like I knew he would right from the start, right from the second I’d stepped inside the cell. The chrome-plated, foot-long screwdriver plunged in one ear, sticking out the other, the silver shank now coated with blood and brain fluid.
Call it a blessing, call it a curse. But it was a talent I had. An intuition or an instinct I’d developed after years spent inside the walls of an iron house as the other inmate: the corrections officer.
Knowing a man had made up his mind was never evident in his words or in his actions or even in his threats. It was evident in his eyes. If you learned how to read a man’s eyes, you could save yourself a whole lot of time and trouble trying to talk him out of something or attempting to negotiate a settlement. Because there’s no negotiating anything when his eyes get that glazed over, that red, that wide. If he wanted to kill somebody, then you could be damned sure that that somebody was already dead, already buried, already decayed, long before the shank got thrust or the trigger got pulled.
It was no different for Shaw.
When I looked into his blue eyes I had no doubt he intended to kill Renata without hesitation. The eyes were wide, red, glazed.
I had only one option available.
I lunged after him, shoulders square, using my legs as springs, my head as a battering ram. I caught him square in the face, exploding his nose like a water balloon.
We went down together.
Shaw on his back, me on my stomach, clawing for the pistol he still held in his right hand.
His six-shooter.
I reached out for it. But that was when he thrust the heel of his palm up against my forehead. The blow tossed me onto my back. But the collision caused him to lose the pistol.
We both went after it.
At the same time.
The crowns of our heads collided, the sun going down on me for just a split second, the sound of breathing replaced with a loud, interior buzz.
The quick flash of blackness.
Shaw laid out on the sand, eyes rolled up into the back of his head. But somehow still with it, still holding on to consciousness. The two of us crawling on our hands and knees toward the pistol laid out just three or four feet in front of us in the sand, like a bad dream.
“Who wants her dead, Shaw?” I shouted, voice dry and raw. “Is it Barnes?”
Shaw said nothing. He just turned to me, looked me in the eye, spit a mouthful of blood into my face.
I woke up then.
The dizziness drained from my head while his blood dribbled down my lips and chin. I got up on my knees and let him have it where it hurt: in his broken nose. He fell back, the pistol still barely out of reach. I knew if I lunged for it, I could get to it before he did.
Which is exactly what I did.
I cocked the hammer on the revolver, pressed the barrel against his forehead.
“Who ordered the kill?” I said.
He smiled and rolled over onto his hands and knees, eyes glazed and wide but somehow happy. “Go to hell, Mr. Marconi,” he said.
I fired a round over his head, cocked the hammer again.
“Maybe, Mr. Marconi,” Shaw said, as calmly as he had spoken to me in his office the night before, “I just want to kill her for the fun of it.”
I could see it in his eyes.
The look that told me he would rather die than give away any information at all, meaning I could either shoot him dead or simply let him go.
While Shaw vomited his breakfast onto the desert floor, I opened the chamber on the six-gun, spun the cylinder, spilled out one round at a time—one by blessed one—onto the sand. Then I tossed the piece as far away as I could.
I limped my way over to Renata.
She was rolling around on the ground now, still mumbling something about Charlie when I picked her up, cradled her in my arms, laid her out once more in the backseat of the Land Rover. As for Shaw, he was finished heaving his guts. He had turned onto his left side, propped himself up on his left elbow during the time it took me to hobble back into the driver’s seat and fire up the engine.
“Hey, Marconi,” I heard him say above the engine noise. “You’re not going to just leave me alone in the desert like this?”
“You got feet,” I said, pulling my piece out from under the driver’s seat, setting it on the empty seat beside me.
“How can you be sure I’ll make it, amigo?” he said, the creases of his face filled with blood both wet and dry. “You’ve inflicted one hell of a beating on me.” He smiled.
“Walk,” I said, pushing on the clutch with my left foot. But not before seeing him reach down toward his right ankle.
“Now, that’s heartless,” he said, ripping the derringer out of his ankle holster, firing off a shot that made a nickel-size hole in the windshield.
It was then that Renata sat up straight. It was then, just as Shaw got set to let off that second round, that she blew two holes into his chest with my .45.
Shaw rolled onto his back, mouth and eyes wide open as if his soul had taken off for hell before his body knew it was dead.
“Miracle of miracles,” I exhaled.
Without a word Renata handed me the piece, grip first, then fell back onto the seat.
This time I slipped the pistol into my holster and threw Shaw’s Land Rover into gear. I felt a throbbing in my left thigh when I depressed the clutch. The first time I noticed the pain coming from the flesh wound.
“Not bad for a dead woman,” I said, looking at Renata by way of the rearview.
I saw her run both hands through her short hair while lying flat on her back. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’m going to pass out now.”
She did.
PART THREE
NO INTACT BODIES FOUND AT SITE AS FORENSICS EXPERTS CONTINUE SEARCH
MONTERREY, Mexico (AP)-The FBI has established a command post in downtown Monterrey, where it is expected to begin analysis of over 196 remains recently uncovered in just one of what are suspected to be at least a half dozen as-yet-undiscovered mass graves located along the vast Mexican border.
Nearly all the missing have disappeared after having been detained by Mexican Federal Police and Monterrey Prison officials. Evidence compiled by the association suggests that in some cases the victims were arrested and later tortured and/or killed by Mexican police or soldiers hired by drug traffickers to eliminate a rival or punish a debtor. In other cases, the victims appear to have vanished when they were detained for questioning by Mexican narcotics agents.
Chapter 43
i]She closes her eyes at the very moment she feels the liftoff inside her stomach.
She wakes up then, in a bucket seat.
Her ears pop. The cabin of the plane is warm. There is a blanket covering her lap. The man beside her is asleep. His jeans are dirty. There is a spot of blood on his left thigh. She can hear his snores. She wants so badly to say something to him. This man who came for her in the desert. She wants to wake him. But she can’t. She’s so exhausted she can’t move, can’t speak. She can only sleep. And yet she can still feel the weight of that pistol in her hand, feel the solid buck of the shot.
But first, one last look out the window onto the heavenly blue sky.
“I’m flying,” she whispers.
But no one hears her. And that’s okay with her.
Chapter 44
I was on my back on a double bed inside the same second-floor room I’d rented at the Coco Motor Inn before my excursion to Mexico little more than forty-eight hours ago.
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