LQ was standing in the open gate pointing the .380 at somebody inside and yelling, “Put it down, man, put it down!” A pistolshot sounded from the courtyard and the round ricocheted off the stone wall. LQ crouched beside the closed door and opened fire with the .380, snapping off three or four rounds in a row, the muzzle flashing yellow, then took cover behind the door.
I ran up and gave LQ his hat and the BAR and whipped the shotgun off my shoulder. Somebody inside was crying in pain and praying to the Holy Mother.
“Map’s got it right,” LQ said. “Driveway goes straight to a pool fountain some seventy–eighty yards off and the house is just the other side of it.”
Brando ran up, grinning big. “Woooo.”
There was a lot of shouting in the compound, mostly unintelligible, some of it demanding to know what was going on, some of it informing that Julio had been shot and needed help. Somebody ordering somebody to shut the fucking gate and somebody yelling back for him to shut the fucking gate.
LQ peeked around the open door and jerked his head back quick as several pistols fired and bullets whacked the thick wood.
“There’s a bunch coming from the right,” he said. “Let’s do it if we’re gonna do it.”
I told him to cover us from the gate—we didn’t want them shutting the door and trapping us inside. “Keep behind me, Ray—straight for the house. I’ll go upstairs, you hold the front door. Shoot anything you aint sure of.”
I slapped LQ on the shoulder and said, “Do it.”
He stood up and leaned around the door and fired a long sweeping burst of the BAR, the rifle pumping out rounds in bam-bam-bam fashion, flaring bright and cracking loud. I’d never heard one before and it was pretty impressive.
Brando and I ran up the driveway. It was wide and cobbled and flanked on either side by torchlights and low hedges, stone benches, various statues. The diagram hadn’t mentioned all the trees on the place. The courtyard was straight ahead, a circular stone fountain in the middle of it with some kind of sculpture spouting water in the center of the pool. The house just beyond it was blazing with light. From the shadowy area off to our right voices shouted, “Por allá! Allá están! Por allá!”
I ran in a crouch as gunshots cracked. A bullet struck a statue close to my head and stone fragments pecked my cheek. Rounds hummed through the hedges. Then LQ’s BAR was hammering again and there was screaming and it sounded like LQ shot up an entire magazine before he stopped firing. There were anguished cries, shriekings for help.
The courtyard hedge was higher than the one along the driveway and as I ran around the fountain a man came rushing out of a hedge pathway with a pistol in his hand and seemed astonished to see me. I blasted him in the chest with the ten-gauge and he flew backward into the hedge and hung there in a bloody tangle.
“Right side!” Brando yelled, and I turned and saw two more with rifles coming out of the other hedge. Brando’s shotgun took half the head off one of them. The other fired at me from the hip and I heard the bullet pass me. I gave him a load in the belly and he bounced off the base of a horse statue and left a red mess on the stone.
The BAR was rapping again and there was more screaming—and then Brando cried out. I turned and saw him on the ground, clutching his side and cussing a blue streak.
Two guys came out of the hedge on the other side of the fountain and I fired at them and one spun around and went down and the other ducked behind the fountain. Brando sat up and pulled his revolver and the guy never knew Ray was there until he peeked around that side of the fountain and his hair jumped when Brando shot him in the head.
“Go on, go on!” Brando yelled.
I started for the house and spotted a man looking down from the balcony—a guy with long white hair and a black eyepatch. I raised the shotgun and he darted away just as I blew fragments off the stone rail where he’d been standing. I thought I heard a woman scream up there. Daniela.
The shotgun lever seized and I flung the weapon away and drew the Mexican Colt and ran up the front steps. A man in an apron and gripping a meat cleaver came at me from a side door—brave but stupid. I shot him and he fell down, blood spurting from his neck. I ran into the main parlor and damn near shot a pair of terrified maids hugging tight to each other.
I raced up the wide stairway, taking the steps two at a time, but as I reached the middle landing a large man suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs and shot at me and my right foot kicked out from under me and I fell sideways on the steps. His next bullet gouged a hole in the carpet under my nose. Then we fired at the same time and my cheek burned and he flinched and his gun hand drooped. He started to raise the revolver again and I shot him in the chest and he discharged a round into the wall and dropped the gun and came tumbling down the steps to the landing and lay on his back without moving.
I sat up and checked my foot and saw that the heel of my boot had been shot off. I raised my other foot and whacked the heel with the Colt barrel a half-dozen times before it broke off. I wiped blood from my right cheek, then stood up and looked down at the guy and saw that he was still alive and staring at me. He had a pencil mustache and a bandaged ear.
“Te doy un recuerdo de Felipe Rocha,” I said. He opened his mouth to speak but never got it out before I shot him in the eye.
I reloaded the Colt and went on up to the top landing, moving warily now. I heard the BAR again—and then froze at the sound of a submachine gun, firing rounds faster than LQ’s Browning ever could. It was a long burst.
A tommy gun. Jesus.
The tommy and the Browning fired at the same time, long bursts…and then nothing. I stood waiting, and there came a few pistolshots, and then no more gunfire. Nothing but the muted crying and wailing of wounded men and terrified women.
But Daniela was somewhere up here—and the thing to do right now was find her.
The first room I tried was an empty bedroom. In the next one a young maid was huddled in a corner and crying.
“Donde está Daniela Zarate?”
Gone, she said. The patrón took her—just a few minutes ago. There was a private stairway in his chambers.
I grabbed her and shoved her into the hall and told her to show me the way to Calveras’ room. She looked down the hall and her eyes went large and I stepped out into the hall and pointed the Colt at a guy dressed like some dandy from another age. He wore a sharp little beard in the old gachupín style and his hair was tied back in a ponytail. He’d been about to descend the staircase but now put his hands up slightly and said he wished me no harm and was surrendering without conditions. He lowered his hands to his side and turned the palms outward in a show of capitulation and asked how he could be of service. I asked where the patrón’s chambers were. He pointed past me and even as I turned to look I sensed my mistake and I whirled back around to see him raising a pocket revolver and we both fired. I hit him in the heart and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
I felt a burning in the muscle between my neck and shoulder and found that he’d nicked me through it. It burned but the blood flow wasn’t too bad. I stuffed a handkerchief against it up under my shirt and coat. The maid was pressed back against the wall with her hands at her mouth.
“Enséñame la escalera,” I said, and she led me to the patrón’s chambers and showed me the secret stairway. It was a narrow winding thing, tight as a corkscrew. I followed it down to a little door that opened into a patio at the rear corner of the house, next to a narrow driveway that curved around from the courtyard.
There was only one way out of the compound—so if LQ was still holding the gate, Calveras was still inside the walls. I hustled back around to the driveway in front of the house, the Colt in my hand. The wailing was louder out here. LQ had done plenty of damage with the Browning. A group of house servants caught sight of me and ran back into the casa grande. The courtyard was deserted, the bodies already removed except for the dead guy in the hedge. Brando was gone too, but the torchlight was sufficient to show the
dark bloodstains where he’d fallen.
As I hurried down the drive, others saw me coming and fled into the darkness to either side of the hedges. They did the smart thing. I was ready to shoot anybody who even looked at me wrong. The moaning and crying was scattered in the darkness to my left, but much of it was concentrated over where a cast of light showed above the trees. According to the hacienda map the bunkhouse was over there, and I supposed that was where the wounded had been taken, the dead too, probably. I wondered if Brando was among them—and figured I’d know soon enough.
I could see the gate up ahead. Somebody was sitting there with his back against the open door. If it wasn’t LQ I hoped it was somebody dead or too shot-up to shoot me.
The west side of the compound, where the worker quarters were, was all dark. As soon as the shooting started, the peons had probably shut their doors and blown out their lamps. They didn’t need to know what was going on to know it was no business of theirs.
The torchlights were bright on me, but even as I got closer to the gate I still couldn’t make out who was sitting there in the shadows. And now I noticed that the open gate-door was slightly askew, its lower hinge twisted almost free of the wall. Then LQ’s voice said, “Who goes there, friend or foe?”—and he chuckled.
“How you doing, man?”
“Could be worse. Where’s Ray?”
“I don’t know. I saw him get hit but I don’t know how bad. I thought he might’ve come back here.”
“Nah he aint,” he said. “Think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think we done for of all of them who wanted to make a fight of it. I’d say the rest are just waiting for us to go away.”
He had the BAR across his lap. The .380 and an extra magazine for it were on the ground beside him. He was hatless and coatless and both his shirtsleeves had been ripped off and I could see he’d used them to bandage his left arm.
I squatted beside him and lit a cigarette and handed it to him. “How bad?”
“I got the bleeding pretty well stopped. Armbone’s busted.” His voice was tight with pain. “You find her?”
“No. But I saw him, and a maid said he’s got her. As long as we’re on the gate, he’s not taking her anywhere. Soon as it’s light I’ll start looking.”
“Ah hell, Jimmy, he’s gone, man. I can’t say if she was with him, but if you didn’t find her she mighta been with—”
I grabbed his good arm. “What the hell you talking about, he’s gone…if she was with him?…When?”
“Hey, man.” He jerked his arm and I let go of it.
“Fucken Cadillac. Who else it gonna be but him? It come tearing out of that hedge. I give it a burst, but this gorilla leans out the window and opens up on me with a goddamn Thompson. I about shit. I hunkered down outside the wall and wham, they clip the door and go skidding by with a fender peeled back and the bastard gave me some more of the tommy gun and nailed me in the arm. But I sureshit nailed him better. The Caddy had to cut a sharp turn on account of we blocked the road and the shooter come tumbling out. That’s him yonder. I put a coupla .380s in his head to be sure he wasn’t just resting up.”
He was pointing at a big man lying a dozen yards beyond the gate, faceup, his arms flung out, his legs in an awkward twist. The tommy gun lay close by.
“I couldn’t see in the car all that good,” LQ said, “but I guess she mighta been in there.”
She was—I knew she was. She would’ve told him I was coming. She would’ve kicked at him and said James Rudolph Youngblood was coming. As soon as he heard the shooting he would’ve known who it was and he would’ve taken her with him. I stood up, telling myself to stay cool, to think.
“We blocked the only road. Where’d he go?”
“Thataway, around the corner.” He waved toward the east end of the compound wall.
The moon was high and bright as a gaslamp. My wound burned and I checked it with my fingertips. It was swollen but the bloodflow had slowed to nothing and was already clotting. I went over to the dead guy. He had a big droopy mustache and there was enough moonlight to show the white scar at the edge of his eye. More good news for Rocha.
Then I remembered the river. The map showed a river running past the hacienda a couple of miles east of it, running all the way out to the ciénaga. I picked up the Thompson and went back to LQ.
“I’m betting there’s a road that goes over to the river. From there he’ll try to make it to the Monclova road.”
“Shitfire,” LQ said. “There’s nothing between here and there but desert, all rocky ground for…what’d we figure, forty miles? He aint making it to that road, not without a pair of wings.”
I detached the tommy gun’s magazine and checked the load, then snapped it back in place and handed LQ the weapon and he tested a one-hand grip on it, bracing the butt against his hip and swinging the muzzle from side to side. He grinned and cradled the gun under his arm.
“I’m gonna go get her.”
“That’s why we come,” he said.
“Got enough smokes?”
“Yep. Could do with some handy water.”
I went over to the Hudson and had to duck under the dash and hot-wire the ignition, since Brando had the keys. I cranked up the engine and backed the car around and drove up beside the gate. I took the water can out of the back and filled a couple of empty beer bottles for myself and jammed them between the backseat and the door so they wouldn’t spill, then set the rest of the can next to LQ, together with a tin cup.
“Be back soon as I can,” I said.
“Good Lord willing, I expect I’ll be here.”
I drove to the northeast rim of the bluff behind the compound and got out of the car. From there I could scan the country to the north for miles—a pale wasteland under the blazing white moon. To the northeast I could also see the lower portion of the river, extending into the distance like a wrinkled silver ribbon and ending at a dark patch of ground that had to be the ciénaga.
And then I saw something else—a small and barely visible cloud of dust moving slowly north alongside the river. It was them. He had his lights off. Me too. We didn’t need headlights anyway, not under that moon.
I hopped back into the car and wheeled it around and eased it along the dense growth of brush and mesquites at the edge of the open ground, gunning the engine, searching for the road to the river. And then I found it. It wasn’t a road so much as a rocky trail rutted by cartwheels. It went winding through the scrub and was so narrow that mesquite branches scraped both sides of the car. I had to take it easy over the rough ground—but even as slow as I was going, the Hudson swayed and bobbed like a boat on choppy waters.
Finally the scrub thinned out and shortened and the river came into view again, much closer now and shining bright under the moon. It was shallow and packed with sandbars. A few yards from the bank the trail turned north, and it was still rough going. Even at fifteen miles an hour the car bounced and swayed and the steering wheel jerked every which way. Now I was raising some dust too, and I wondered if he’d seen it.
I’d gone downriver about three miles when a front tire blew like a pistolshot. The Hudson pulled hard to the right but I wrenched it straight and kept going, the tire flopping. The river narrowed steadily. Then the ground gradually began to smooth out under the Hudson and the terrain began to darken and get grassy. I’d arrived at the end of the river, at the south end of the muddy ciénaga.
I stopped the car and got out to look things over. A cool north breeze had picked up and it pushed the stink of the mudpit into my face. The ground was slick under my heel-less boots. If I’d driven any farther north I would’ve bogged down in the muck.
He couldn’t have crossed the river anywhere along the way. To get past the ciénaga he had to go around it to the west. There were no tracks on the smooth ground around me, so he must’ve angled over in that direction before coming this close to the mud. I got back in the car and followed the edge of the mudpit
to westward.
In less than a quarter mile I came on the Caddy’s tracks where they came up from the south and I could tell from the shape of them that he’d blown at least one tire on each side. The moon eased around to my right from behind me as I followed the tracks along the curving rim of the ciénaga to northward. Then the Caddy’s tracks angled away from the mudpit and I knew we were past it. The ground was hard and rough again. The Hudson jolted and pitched.
I drove on, the Hudson’s shadow slowly contracting against the left side of the car.
And then there the Cadillac was, not a half mile ahead. In the distance it looked like a bug on a dirty tablecloth. It took a moment for me to realize that it wasn’t moving. I drew the Mexican Colt from my pants and set it beside me.
I closed in very slowly, then stopped about thirty yards from the Caddy. I didn’t know how he was armed. If he had a rifle he probably would’ve used it before letting me get that close. Then again, maybe he was trying to get me in so close that he couldn’t miss. If he wanted to bargain I was willing: give her to me and we’d be quits. I was pretty sure I’d mean it.
I eased the Hudson forward, ready to wheel it sideways and take cover behind it if he opened fire. Twenty yards from the Caddy I stopped again. It was slumped forward on two front flats. I pulled up to within ten yards. Then closer. And then I was idling right behind it. The interior of the Caddy was too dark for me to see anything in there.
I put the Hudson in neutral and opened my door wide and waited a minute. Nothing from the Caddy. I had the Colt cocked in my hand. Then I switched on my headlights—if he’d been looking back at me, he’d have been blinded in that moment—and I slid out of the Hudson and ran in a crouch up beside the driver’s door and jumped up and stuck the Colt in the window, all set to blow his brains out.
He wasn’t there.
But she was—slumped against the passenger door—and in the same moment that I saw her I realized what a clear target I made in the shine of my headlights. I dropped down and scurried back to the Hudson and reached in and switched off the lights.
Under the Skin Page 27
