They stopped. Someone said, “Let’s see the little bitch,” and the hood was yanked off her head. They were at the end of a dock in the Playa Diamante marina. It was early in the evening, and the lampposts that lined the dock’s edge were already lit, illuminating the men standing there as if on a stage. There were three men beside the two thugs who had hold of her, but only one of them was important. She looked at his face and then quickly looked away, as we do when there is a monstrous occurrence on the street, a jumper landing on the sidewalk. She understood that she had never met anyone like that before.
He was a small man, not much taller than she was, and about the same age as her father. She thought, inanely, of the movies, in which actors contrive to express evil, and she thought it was like the difference between a movie explosion, all orange fireballs, and an actual detonation of high explosives in real life: an enormously more bone-chilling event, with the shock wave of invisible death and the predatory hum of flying debris. The photos she and everyone saw of captured drug lords also had nothing to do with this man’s face. It was the difference between a tiger in the zoo and a tiger in the wild making its leap at you. This guy was free-ranging, a lord of life and death. He was a fossil from deep Mexico, the land of ripping living hearts out on pyramids, of conquistadores roasting Indians alive. She stared at him and he stared back with his inhuman stare, mildly curious perhaps, with a crude, suspicious intelligence; it was like looking into the black reflective eyes of a mantis.
One of her captors handed Melchor Cuello her .22 pistol and told him where they’d found it. He hefted it, worked the action, and then in a quick movement stuck his arm straight out and pointed the muzzle at her forehead. She made herself hold his gaze, and the tableau lasted for what seemed like a long time. Then Cuello snorted, gave the pistol back to the other man, and said, “Give it to Gabriel. Maybe he’ll stick it up her pussy and fire a couple of rounds. He likes that kind of shit, right?”
All the men laughed at this boyish pranksterism, and after a brief conversation that Statch could not hear, the men dragged Statch to the end of the dock and dropped her into a fiberglass skiff with a big outboard on it. They dropped in too and did not bother to replace her hood. It didn’t matter what she saw now, nor was there anyone around to recognize her. She was glad to be able to breathe and see, but she thought that no hood was not a good sign with respect to her possibility of survival. They were delivering her into the hands of El Cochinillo himself.
The boat took off with a roar, and soon its hull was planing over the light chop in the harbor, each jolt causing Statch’s head to bounce painfully against the deck. She used her legs to shift her position, and now she could see above the gunwale and could watch Playa Diamante recede until it was just a whitish line against the green backdrop of the sierra. They were going quite far out to sea, enough so that she could feel the motion of the craft change, from riding chop to breasting actual Pacific rollers. Her two guards stood by the wheel, talking and smoking, and paid her no attention at all until they cut the throttle and came slowly up under the stern of an enormous white yacht.
Statch had spent a good deal of her life around boats but had never been on a private vessel as large as this one, a great white fiberglass monument at least 140 feet long. As they led her up the ladder, she passed a youth in a white uniform of shorts and tunic, mopping the deck. He met her eyes and then looked quickly away. He hadn’t seen anyone.
They led her forward across a broad deck with small round tables and chairs on it, under an awning, then down a set of stairs and through a corridor lined with narrow doors. They went through a hatchway and down another set of stairs and now they were below the waterline, in the working areas of the great yacht. It was hot down here and airless, and she could hear the thud of the diesels.
They opened a door. One of the men grinned at her and pulled the tape off her mouth.
“Scream as much as you want, chica. No one to hear you out here.”
The man grabbed one of her buttocks, shoved her into the room, and closed the door. She heard the click as it locked.
The room was some kind of storeroom, she imagined, but void of any stores, and its fiberglass surfaces were perfectly clean and smelled faintly of Clorox. Light came from an overhead bulb protected by a steel grille. The thought came that if you wanted to torture someone, and could afford it, an offshore yacht would be a great choice. No one would hear the screams, and disposal of the remains would not be a problem. Fighting the panic—for what would this room be but a torture chamber—she dropped to her knees and lowered her head to the floor and shook her upper body violently. Her notebook, her Rotring 600 pen, and her tiny Swiss Army knife dropped to the deck. She shifted position so she was on her back and wiggled around until she grasped the knife. In a minute she’d used the little razor-sharp blade to slice through the plastic cable ties that bound her hands. She stuck the knife and the notebook into her breast pocket again and took the cap off the pen. It was not much of a weapon, but it was made of solid brass and it had a steel tip. She sat herself in a corner with her hands behind her back and waited.
The horror of the blank room, no watch to mark the passing minutes—time itself dissolved, the present moment, which the sages teach us to live in perpetually, was now the essence of horror. But after some moments of hellish desperation, Statch reached back to the memory of the peace she’d experienced while locked in the trunk. She reflected that she was a trained mind in a trained body, she had resources that her captors did not begin to understand, and so she controlled her breathing as she’d learned to do to still the tension of a swim meet, and from there she moved to contemplating the thrill of competition. While not willing, quite, to work to Olympic standards, she was nevertheless a champion; she liked winning, and it now occurred to her that this was a competition too, with the medal being her life, and a fierce joy bloomed in her heart.
Then without preamble her mental theater lit up with an unnaturally vivid scene. She must have been fourteen or so, she was on a lake in the Berkshires with her father, at a cottage they’d rented for the summer, and they were exhausted and laughing, having just swum to the other side and back. She’d been able to beat him over long distances for several years and had just then done it again, and he was complaining about being an old man; she recalled exactly the moment when she focused on the scars on his back, seeing them as if for the first time, the livid mark above his left hip and the other, like an inverted question mark, over his right shoulder blade. She asked him how he got the scars and he answered that they were old war wounds, as he always did; he said a typewriter had fallen on him, the usual joke; but she was at the age when children acquire a passionate interest in the truth and the evasions that adults have used previously can no longer stand. No, really.
He always said he’d had an office job in air force intelligence, but now she pressed him. Intelligence? Was he a spy, did he go on secret missions, was that how he got the scars? And, after some fencing, which she furiously rejected, he told her the story, in bold strokes. You killed people? Yes, he’d killed people; he’d killed a boy not much older than she was. How did you feel, she asked, and she could see him considering the facile, comfortable lie, and then he said, I felt elated. There’s a joy in combat, partly because he’s dead and you’re not, and partly because we’re ferocious creatures, we humans. She had not known then about his escape with Skelly, or about the angelic voices.
Would it have changed her life? It didn’t matter, but she now recalled what they had talked about, about the war and about Skelly, how he was an extreme example, how he was terrified and exultant at the same time, a born soldier. She wondered why this passage had popped so vividly into her mind, and she decided that it was related to her situation now and what she planned to do with her pathetic weapon. It was chemicals, she guessed, flooding her system—competition, combat, the desire to live and prevail, sports and war, really the same thing. And she recalled another thing her father had said th
at afternoon, when she’d asked if women could feel like that. He said, Oh, yeah, but in spades. Your mother, for example, is much, much fiercer than I am. You are too. That’s the real reason why they don’t let women into combat. They’d take over the world.
* * *
She heard the key turn in the lock. The door opened and Gabriel Cuello walked in, dressed in a maroon velour bathrobe and canvas slippers. He had her pistol in his hand. He nudged the door shut with his foot and walked into the center of the room.
“Little gringa bitch, I knew I would see you again,” he said.
She pushed herself into a corner of the room, as if retreating, holding her hands behind her back. He came closer. She got up into a squat, with her back against the angle where two bulkheads joined.
He waggled the pistol. “Were you going to shoot me with this little thing?”
“If I had the opportunity,” she said.
He didn’t like her tone; frowning, he came a step closer, until he stood over her. She could smell his cologne.
“You know, chiquita, I can tell you have no fucking idea what is going to happen to you. I can tell you think that because you’re a gringa, your daddy or the marines are going to save you. You are going to show me some respect now, understand? You are going to do everything I tell you and you are going to smile, because—”
“I thought you only liked to fuck dead girls,” she said, “which is fine with me, because, frankly, I’d rather be dead than do anything with an ugly little pervert like you.”
He smiled and nodded. “Uh huh. Keep it up, chiquita. We’ll see how smart you talk when I’m shittin’ in your mouth. You’ll be begging me to shit in your mouth, you’ll see. You can start by sucking on this.”
He dropped the pistol into his bathrobe pocket, opened the robe, and leaned forward, his right hand reaching for her hair.
She exploded out of her crouch with all the force of her powerful leg muscles, ramming the crown of her head into his nose. He staggered back, but she followed him, her left hand grasping the collar of his robe. Her right hand drove the steel pen tip into his throat. She felt it penetrate deep into his trachea.
He tore himself away now, his eyes bulging, hands clutching at his throat. He grasped the pen, tore it out. Blood gushed from the wound in a spray. He was coughing; she could hear the blood gurgling in his trachea as he struggled to breathe against the blood that dripped down from the wound into his bronchial tubes. She took careful aim, set herself, and kicked him as hard as she could, driving her foot into his naked genitals. His knees sagged, he doubled over, his face was going purple. She backed up and took a short run, hitting him low, and knocking him off his feet. The pistol flew from the pocket of his robe and skittered, spinning, across the floor. She picked it up. It was still cocked. She shot once into his head. He collapsed and lay still.
She waited, gun in hand, facing the door. Silence. Perhaps the crew thought he had killed her and was now enjoying a session of necrophilia. She opened the door and looked both ways down the corridor, which proved to be deserted. She ran, reversing the direction she had come, up the two flights of stairs and then to the door that led to the deck. She looked through the glass set into the door and saw two men sitting at one of the tables with drinks, smoking, their backs to her, looking out to sea. She opened the door as quietly as she could, took a careful two-handed firing position, and shot one of the men in the back of the head. The other one spun around, leaped to his feet. He was reaching to his beltline when she put three hollow-point bullets into the middle of his chest. The man looked surprised, pulled his own gun, sat down, and died. Then, still holding her grandfather’s Colt .22, she went over the rail into the sea.
Diving below the surface, she swam under the stern of the boat, where she bobbed up under the overhang of the dive platform, grasping one of its supports, invisible from the deck. The yacht was moving slowly in a southerly direction. The tender that had brought her here still towed along on its line. For a moment she considered stealing it but instantly dismissed the thought. The yacht could travel much faster than the tender, and they would have the weapons on board to kill her from a distance. Instead, she floated silently, taking deep slow breaths. She heard shouts, commotion, the tread of many feet. Perhaps they had already discovered the dead piglet; perhaps they were arguing about what to do and who was in charge. No one would be in a hurry to tell El Jabalí that his son and heir had been killed by a girl. They would really like to have her head in a box when they brought that news.
Someone turned on a spotlight and swept it over the sea. After a while, that person might think to look under the dive platform. She had to leave. She placed the pistol butt-down in the capacious breast pocket of her shirt and secured the button around the jutting barrel. Taking one deep breath, she dived and started to swim underwater, east toward the land. She had swum more than a hundred meters underwater before this, and now she was going for a personal best. The water was blood-warm; she swam easily, breaststroking and frog-kicking, streamlining her body after every kick to maximize the glide. When she finally surfaced and looked back, the yacht was at a gratifying distance, and the traverse of the searchlight’s bright disk stopped twenty meters short of where she floated. She waited, dog-paddling until a roller could lift her up so she could spot the lights of the shore.
But there were no lights. She was in the middle of a dark bowl, lit by a crescent moon and speckled with stars, the sea interrupted only by her head and the increasingly distant yacht. The yacht had been moving during the hours she’d been confined and she had no idea of how far it had traveled. If it had been heading directly out to sea, she might be thirty miles from land. But why would it head out to sea? So that the pieces of a chopped-up woman would not wash up onshore? At least she knew in which direction to swim, for an imaginary line dropped from the points of the moon’s crescent would touch the southern horizon. She floated on her back and strained her eyes. Was that a faint glow in the east? She convinced herself that it was and started swimming toward it. The pistol dragged at her with every stroke, but she was not about to let it fall to the bottom of the sea.
* * *
Before he went to bed that night, Marder had a brief conversation with Bartolomeo Ortiz. They were at the long table under Skelly’s big map, alone; the other men had been sent away. Marder looked at the soiled piece of notebook paper on which Ortiz had written, in a schoolboy scrawl, the ammunition inventory of his little army. It was pathetically meager but not as meager as it had been, for in the hours of darkness a crew of picked men had opened up the wrecked narco-tank and extracted thirty-two AR-15 assault rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition from among the shattered corpses of their enemies.
“What do you think? Can we hold the existing perimeter with the weapons at our disposal?”
Ortiz looked uncomfortable. His eyes wandered and his huge scarred hands twisted around each other, as if trying to wring a solution from the space between them.
“Well? You’re the commander, Ortiz. This is a command decision.”
“Don Ricardo, I know how to shape iron. I can tell men what to do and usually they do it or, you know, I use this.” He held up a massive fist. “And I was in the army, and this is why Don Eskelly chose me to lead a platoon. But I was only a motor-pool corporal. I welded, I cut and fitted and pounded metal. I did not dispose of troops, you understand?”
“Yes, I do, because I was a book editor. And Hidalgo was a priest, Zapata was a peon, and Villa was a bandit, but they all led armies much larger than ours. We do what we can and what’s given to us to do. Now, can we hold the perimeter?”
The big man lowered his head for a moment and then raised it and looked Marder in the eye. “No, Señor, we cannot. Even with the new weapons and ammunition, we have only seventy-one effectives, not counting women. I mean with rifles. None of our machine guns has much more than two hundred rounds. We have a total of three hundred rounds for all of the big machine guns together.”
“Of course, Señor.”
“Put a couple of good men on the north cliff. And pull the 12.7 out from the bunker overlooking the beach and re-emplace it—here, outside the village, facing the track through the golf course.” Marder made a cross on the map.
Ortiz knotted his brow and his mouth twisted in a doubtful grimace. “But why? No one can come up those cliffs, and there’s no beach to land on.”
“There is a small beach and there is a path up the cliffside. If a force should appear there, they would take us by surprise; there are no defenses at all on the northern flank.”
“But who would know about that? And before they came by the big beach and the causeway.”
“Yes, and we stopped them there. I’m sure they’ll try the causeway again, but they won’t come through the beach or the marina. As to how they might find out—it would take only one strong swimmer to swim to the mainland and tell them. Mexican revolutions are always betrayed, as you well know. So let’s be careful. And how are the mines?”
“We have ten filled and enough diesel for two more. They are being buried where you said.”
“Good. Have one brought into the house.”
“The house?”
“Yes. We may lose, but they won’t get the house. I will bring it down on their heads if I have to.”
“Like Samson in the Bible?” asked Ortiz, with an awestruck look on his face.
The Return: A Novel Page 41
