The question was what form the evil would take this time, and how far would it poke its ugly nose into the light?
Tom and Bonnie Brannon lived about a mile east of Little Tucson, on an asphalt road that curved around on itself through a wide-flung residential area sprawled along the banks of a small creek that ran most of the year but often dried up in the middle of summer. There were half a dozen houses on the road, none of them in sight of the others. The Brannon house was an old, Spanish-style dwelling, with adobe walls, a red tile roof, and a tree-shaded patio in the center of the house. It wasn’t as old as it looked, having been built in the 1940s. The original owners had kept it up well, and ever since Tom and Bonnie had bought the place in the seventies, they had taken good care of it, too. It was a cool little oasis in what was often a sea of sweltering heat. Tom always felt a sense of relief when he came home, as if he were withdrawing from the hectic pace of the real world into a haven of peace and relaxation.
He felt no relief today, though, because when he drove up the first thing he noticed was that Bonnie’s Blazer wasn’t parked in the two-car garage attached to the house.
That didn’t have to mean anything, Tom told himself. She might have stayed longer than he expected at Carla May’s house. Or she could have driven out to SavMart to pick up some groceries.
He parked the pickup in the garage and went inside, pausing in the kitchen to put his fists in the small of his back, press hard, and stretch his spine. It had been a long day and he wasn’t as young as he used to be. Some of his muscles were starting to ache a little from the strain he had subjected them to during the fight with the two gang members. He had a right to expect that, jumping around like Captain America as he had.
He thought about getting the phone book, looking up Carla May’s number, and calling her house to see if Bonnie was still over there. The problem with that idea was that if he did, Bonnie would think he was checking up on her—and rightly so, because that would be exactly what he was doing. Maybe it would be better to wait a while longer, he decided.
Hell with it. He was going to call Carla May’s house and just see if Bonnie was there. If she didn’t like it, tough.
Before he could pick up the phone, though, he heard a noise in the garage, a heavy thump as if something had fallen over. It wasn’t the door of Bonnie’s Blazer, he knew that. He would have heard the engine as the SUV pulled in.
Nobody had any reason to be messing around in there. Tom stood stiff and still for a long moment, listening intently, but he didn’t hear anything else.
The door leading from the kitchen into the garage was close enough for him to reach. He put his hand out and turned the lock button on the doorknob. That wouldn’t keep anybody out who really wanted in, but it might slow them down for a few seconds. Then, moving quietly, he headed for his den.
The gun cabinet in there held two shotguns and three rifles. They were locked up and unloaded, of course. Tom went into the den, took a ring of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the cabinet. There was an unhurried efficiency to his movements as he took down a pump shotgun, unlocked a drawer in his desk, took out a box of shells, and loaded the gun. He dropped a handful of extra shells in the pocket of his shirt. Then he moved back to the kitchen, holding the shotgun level just above his waist.
No one was there. The door appeared to be undisturbed. Tom heard something in the garage, though—the sound of an object scooting along the floor. Somebody was moving things around in there.
Planting a bomb, maybe?, he wondered.
Holding the shotgun with his right hand, he reached out with his left and unlocked the kitchen door again. He grasped the knob and took a deep breath. Then he twisted the knob, flung the door open, and lunged through it into the garage, sweeping the shotgun from side to side as his eyes searched for a target.
He heard a startled yelp and saw movement from the corner of his eye. His finger was already tightening on the trigger as he snapped the barrel in that direction.
He eased off on the pressure just in time to stop the shotgun from blasting as he recognized the muscular, hairy body and bushy tail of his dog Max. The big mutt was part golden retriever and part something else. Tom stared as Max recovered from his surprise and came toward him, tail wagging. Tom’s nerves were still stretched so tight they were jangling.
Next to the wall, a paint can lay on its side. Tom realized that Max had knocked it off a stack of similar cans and had been pushing it along the cement floor of the garage with his nose. There was no telling why the dog had been doing such a thing; to his canine brain, it must have made sense.
“Damn it, Max, I almost blasted you.” Tom’s voice was shaky. Max nuzzled his left hand as he let the shotgun hang at his side in the right. After a second, though, Max returned to the stack of paint cans. He pawed at it, and another of the cans fell.
Tom frowned. Max was acting like there was something behind those cans. Maybe he ought to take a look.
As he stepped closer, he heard a buzzing sound. It was instantly recognizable, and Tom snapped, “Max! Get away from there!”
Max looked at him and whined but backed off as Tom had told him to do. Tom set the shotgun on the workbench that ran along the wall to his left and took a garden hoe from the hooks where it hung on the wall. He moved closer to the cans and reached out with the hoe to pull a couple of them farther away from the wall.
That gave the big rattlesnake that had crawled behind them enough room to coil up and shake the rattle on the end of his tail that much harder. The snake’s head lifted a little. Its tongue flickered in and out.
Tom felt a chill as he looked at the creature. He hated snakes with a passion. That was one bad thing about living in southern Arizona. A person could almost get used to the heat, but Tom knew he would never get used to the snakes.
“Stay back, Max,” he said. He raised the hoe and brought it down in a swift, accurate stroke. The sharp edge of the blade caught the rattler just behind the head and pinned it to the floor. The long, muscular body whipped around wildly. Tom moved the hoe back and forth until the blade grated on the cement. The snake’s head was completely severed from its body. That didn’t stop the body from coiling and writhing, and the rattler’s mouth opened and closed as instinct made it try to bite something, anything. Max darted forward, and Tom yelled at him, telling him again to stay back. “Just because the damn thing’s dead doesn’t mean it can’t still bite you. The snake doesn’t know it’s dead yet.”
The body’s contortions were lessening, though, and the biting motions slowed down as well. Tom made sure Max stayed away until all signs of life had left the snake. Then he used the hoe to pick up the head and carried it around back to the trash barrel. He would put some trash in there later and burn it. He went back to the body and chopped the rattle off the tail. The rattle had fourteen segments to it. One year for each segment meant the snake was an old son of a bitch. Tom set the rattle on his workbench to let it dry out. When it was dry, he would put it in the glass jar on one of the shelves that held the rattles from all the snakes he had killed over the years. He kept the grisly souvenirs as a reminder to always watch where he was stepping.
You never knew when something venomous might be waiting to bite you.
He picked up the snake’s body, carried it around back, and slung it into the brush along the creek for the scavengers. As he started to turn back toward the house he heard an engine, and by the time he reached the garage, Bonnie was pulling the Blazer inside. Now the relief he normally felt on coming home flooded through Tom.
Bonnie got out of the SUV, looked at the shotgun on the workbench and the hoe in Tom’s hand, and she frowned slightly as she asked, “What’s going on here?”
“Just killing a serpent in the garden of Eden,” he told her.
9
Cipriano and Leobardo Asturias were brothers; that much was obvious to anyone who looked at them. They might have been taken for twins, but Cipriano was really two years older. They were born a
nd raised in a small village near the Mayan ruins of Tikal, on the northern plains of Guatemala. It was an area of great poverty and hardship. People farmed and sometimes harvested chicle from the trees, which was used to make chewing gum for the gringos far to the north in los Estados Unidos. From the time Cipriano and Leobardo were mere children, they had worked, spending long hours each day using machetes to hack at the hard trunks of sapodilla trees, making the cuts from which the sap drained. When the buckets that caught the sap were full, Cipriano and Leobardo and the other workers would carry them to the long, covered huts in the village where the sap would be dried and kneaded into chicle. For this they were paid only a few centavos a day. Or rather, their parents were paid a few centavos for the work that Cipriano and Leobardo did. This money supplemented what their mother earned by selling her body. Most of it went to buy liquor for her and her husband, who had accidentally chopped off half of one foot several years earlier and now lay about growing grossly fat and yelling at his wife because she couldn’t manage to fuck more than ten or twelve men every day. She swilled down mescal and screamed back at him that there weren’t more than ten or twelve men in the village who could get it up well enough to fuck her—and he certainly wasn’t one of them.
Cipriano and Leobardo stood this life for as long as they could. One evening when Cipriano was twelve and Leobardo was ten, they waited until their parents had passed out from drinking, and then, with the skills they had acquired in the sapodilla forest, they used their machetes to chop their parents into small pieces. By morning, they were well on their way to Guatemala City, walking determinedly along the road that led through the mountains toward the sea.
It was in Guatemala City, several months later, that they met Ernesto Luis Montoya, who at seventeen was already a pimp, a drug smuggler, and a freelance assassin. Montoya took the Asturias brothers under his wing, sensing something useful in them. They talked very little and seemed to have no need of conversation between themselves. It was as if they sensed each other’s thoughts. One night, though, Cipriano’s iron control slipped slightly and he told Montoya what he and Leobardo had done to their parents. Then and there, Montoya knew he had made the right decision. With two such able assistants, he would rise quickly in the criminal ranks. With two such segundos, he would go far.
It was a dream that had come true. Montoya was now the unquestioned leader of Mara Salvatrucha, a gang the likes of which had never before been seen. And Cipriano and Leobardo were his avenging angels, the tools of his righteous wrath. None dared stand against them.
Least of all some weak, pathetic gringos. If they knew what was good for them, they would leave the place called Little Tucson. If not, Mara Salvatrucha would scour them from the face of the earth.
Cipriano had passed along Señor Montoya’s orders to a gunner named Humberto Rojas. Rojas was to take as many men with him as he wanted and go north from Nogales to Little Tucson, where he would confront the woman who had caused all the trouble for Porfirio and Enrique. Only Porfirio was still alive, and he was in the Sierrita County jail, having been released from the hospital late that afternoon. M-15 had an informant who worked at the hospital, a nurse with family south of the border. She had proven to be very cooperative once some of the gang had paid a visit to her mamá and chopped off a couple of the old lady’s fingers. She had called a number in Nogales and passed along the information as soon as Porfirio was moved from the hospital to the jail.
It was a shame they had not been able to move more quickly. If a raid on the hospital could have been put together in time, that would have been the simplest solution. Just take Porfirio out of there and bring him back across the border. While Montoya could muster a large enough force to attack the jail itself, that was an extreme measure. It would be better to secure Porfirio’s release through legal means, once all the witnesses had either recanted or disappeared. Mara Salvatrucha had several attorneys on the U.S. side who worked for the gang.
Humberto Rojas was confident in his ability to handle any problem, especially where gringos were concerned. They were all foolish and lacked cojones. He took only two men with him as he crossed the border at Nogales and headed northwest toward Little Tucson.
Doris Stevens had brassy blond hair, a big chest, a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, a whiskey drawl, and four ex-husbands. She’d made plenty of mistakes in her life, God knew that was true, but she had learned a lot, too, and she wasn’t shy about passing along that acquired wisdom to her daughter.
“Didn’t I tell you you could do better?” she said to Carla. “Didn’t I say that Danny Willard was a no-account troublemaker?”
“Yes, Mama,” Carla said with a bored, hostile edge to her voice. She had been listening to this same shit ever since her mother had gotten there.
Doris pointed at her daughter with the two fingers that held her cigarette. “Your problem is you do too much of your thinkin’ with what’s between your legs.”
“Mama!” Carla hissed, jerking her head toward the dining room, where Andy and Emily were finishing up their supper of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Doris had made for them. Carla hoped her mother hadn’t dropped too many cigarette ashes in the peanut butter. “The kids’ll hear.”
Doris waved a hand as she sat in one of the living room chairs, across from where Carla perched on the sofa with her legs drawn up underneath her. “Oh, hell, they don’t know what I’m talkin’ about. That kinda stuff just goes right over their heads. I’m just sayin’, you saw Danny as a big, strappin’, handsome boy and got the urge to lay down on your back. And you just don’t do your best thinkin’ on your back, darlin’.”
Carla wondered briefly just how much psychological damage it would do to her children if they saw her choke the living hell out of their grandmother. Then she shoved the idea aside and said meekly, “You’re right, Mama.” Sometimes if she just agreed with everything her mother said, eventually Doris would shut up.
Doris puffed on her cigarette for a minute and then said, “What you should’ve done was marry Brian Brannon. Hell, he was a lot nicer, and his daddy owns his own business.” A confidential tone came into Doris’s voice, as if they were girlfriends or something equally ludicrous. “You know, between the times when I was married to your daddy and your Uncle Buster, I thought I might just set my cap for Tom Brannon. Now there is one hell of a good-lookin’ man. I swear, he’s a dead ringer for Jeff Chandler.”
“Who?”
Doris stared at her. “Jeff Chandler? The movie star?”
Carla just shook her head.
“Lord,” Doris said with an exasperated sigh. “Your generation’s the most ignorant one I ever saw.”
“Wasn’t Mr. Brannon already married by the time you and Daddy were divorced?”
“Well, yeah . . . but I figured I could take him away from that wife of his if I really wanted to. Skinny little thing like her, with hardly any tits at all. Not like these bazooms, I tell you.” Doris used both hands to cup her massive breasts.
Carla closed her eyes and rested her head on the sofa cushion. What in the world had she been thinking when she called her mother? Didn’t the old bat care the least little bit about the ordeal her daughter had gone through less than twelve hours earlier?
On the other hand, maybe being driven crazy was a good thing. It was a distraction, anyway.
The thump of car doors outside made Carla jerk her head up. Her eyes flew open. “Somebody’s here!” she said, hysteria creeping into her voice.
“Don’t get in an uproar,” Doris scolded her. “Probably just some folks comin’ to see you. Maybe Tom Brannon.” Her hand went to her hair and patted the stiffly hairsprayed curls. She got up as the doorbell rang and said, “I’ll get it.”
“Mama, be careful—” Carla started to say.
“Now, don’t go lettin’ one bad thing get you all skittish,” Doris said over her shoulder as she reached for the doorknob. She turned it and opened the door without even looking through the peephole first.
/> Carla saw the two men standing there on the other side of the screen door, and her hand went to her mouth in horror. They were both stocky and Hispanic, and for a second she had the wild idea that one of them was the man who had raped her. Then she realized that he was a stranger, but it didn’t matter. He grabbed the handle of the screen door and yanked it open. Carla screamed as she bolted up from the sofa. “Andy!” she cried. “Get Emily and run! Out the back!”
Andy knew the backyards of this neighborhood. He could slip away in the darkness with Emily, and at least her children would survive, no matter what happened to her.
“Goddamn it!” Doris bleated, but she didn’t have time to get anything else out before the man in the lead planted a hand right in the middle of her bosom and shoved. She flew backward, tripped over a coffee table, and went down hard on the floor.
Carla brought up the pistol she had pulled from behind the sofa cushion. She’d kept it close at hand ever since Deputy Henderson and Bonnie Brannon left. It was only a little .32 that had belonged to Danny. He had left it behind when he abandoned his family, probably because it was a Saturday night special and a piece of crap. But it was the only gun Carla had, and she intended to empty every bullet in it before she let these bastards put their hands on her.
She was too slow, though. The man who had pushed her mother down was suddenly right in front of her. His hand flashed up, closed over the pistol’s cylinder, and wrenched the gun out of her grip. Carla cried out in fear and anger as she lost her last line of protection.
The man backhanded her, knocking her onto the sofa. He dropped to one knee and pressed a forearm like a bar of iron across her throat, pinning her there. Carla gasped for breath as she saw the other man haul her mother to her feet, then draw back a fist and slam a punch to her mouth. Blood flew from Doris’s pulped lips. She was stunned, and when the man let go of her she crumpled limply to the floor.
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