Oziel rolled his hand through the air, suggesting she elaborate.
“It is near San Cristóbal.”
“In what direction does it lie?”
Luz began to speak, but she stopped and changed course. “I need something from you first.”
Again the flicker of amusement. “Enlighten me.”
“Cicatriz took my friend, Felipo. If I get you to the safe house, you have to rescue him and get him home to his village.”
Oziel shrugged. “Done. Tell me where the house is.”
Luz shook her head. “You’re not going to help.”
“Señorita,” Oziel groaned. He spread his arms. “My strategy is unknown, as is the location and layout of Juan Luis’s camp, as is your friend’s status. And so how can I promise that I will shape my plan to accommodate this Felipo, to whom I owe nothing?”
“You would owe me.”
“I do not think you understand how this works.” The gold tooth flashed.
The narcos on the highway—not one of them had moved. Luz felt only exhausted. She couldn’t think of or identify a thing in her future that she would be sorry to lose or to never see again—nothing that might be leveraged against her, not even her own existence. She spoke in English, turning toward Oziel: “You can try. You can try to make me tell you. You can do whatever you want. But I promise I won’t tell you a fucking thing. I will keep my mouth shut and you can hurt me, and I’ll be quiet and then I’ll be dead.”
The man’s eyebrows bumped. A small smile played on his lips. He replied in English. “You are an unusual young woman.”
Luz sighed. “I’m just tired. I’m tired of everything.” She returned to Spanish. “I can’t say which direction from San Cristóbal. North, south, I don’t know. If I was there, I would know. I could take you there. And that’s the only real option.”
Oziel shook his head. Almost gravely. As if something about her proposition saddened him.
“But,” Luz added, “you would have to help me rescue my friend. You would take him home to San Cristóbal, and then you would take me home to Las Monarcas.”
“Do not offer this,” the man said.
Luz was thinking of Felipo. Helping him now was the only thing to do. Any other option felt vacuous—how would she live with herself, after all he’d done for her? “I will only be riding with you to help my friend.”
“No.” Oziel looked at her. “There is no such thing.” He swept his hand toward the vehicles and his crew. “Your choice aligns you with us.”
He withdrew a flat leather case from his chest pocket and lifted out a cigarette. He held it toward Luz and tapped the white foam filter, making sure she saw. Then he lit the smoke, drew deeply, and exhaled. He held the filter toward her again and tapped the yellow-stained foam. “So it is with this kind of decision. Do you see? We will draw the breath of our business through you. There is no undoing it.” He shrugged. “You must be certain. Think more on it if you must.”
Of the men and the woman standing on the highway, most of them weren’t even looking her way. Marta still strained to watch, a pale round face. Farther up the highway, a jalopy crawled to a wary stop and then executed a two-point turn and drove away. Luz looked at Oziel and imagined him tumbling silently from view. “I understand what you say,” she said, “but it is too late for me already.”
He sighed, dropped the butt, ground it out. “Very well.”
Luz started for the vehicles, but Oziel did not immediately follow. He punched a number into a cell phone and put it to his ear. He listened and said, “Good to go, yes,” and hung up. He smiled humorlessly when he noticed that Luz had heard him.
“I have the autonomy I require in the way I run my plaza. But my duties are not without their challenges, and certain things are expected of me. Cicatriz used to work for me, and he lives in my plaza still, and so that makes him my problem.” He gestured for Luz to walk with him. “Please.”
They crossed the hardpan and he gave quick orders, and the crew scattered. Luz followed Oziel and the woman dressed in black to one of the Suburbans. Marta leaped from the Ford Lobo and called out.
“Señor Zegas? You said only a talk.”
Oziel said, “Ask the girl.”
Marta turned to Luz, and Luz answered before the woman uttered a question.
“You,” she told her, “are a coward.” She pointed to the soldier in the back of the truck. “So is he.”
Oziel chuckled quietly as he held the SUV door open for Luz. “Yes,” he whispered, just for her. “They are.”
3
THE WOMAN IN BLACK DROVE, RESTING HER RIFLE IN THE passenger-side footwell. Her name was Cecilia. She was Oziel’s niece. She had a smooth face, no lines from smiling or worrying. Dark eyes and dark eyebrows and dark hair. She was pretty, but that had not been Luz’s initial observation. When Cecilia acknowledged Luz with a wordless glance, the woman’s eyes were steady, serious, and unsurprised by anything. The way she looked at you made you remember that the ability to breathe was only a temporary condition. She was a killer. This had been Luz’s immediate thought.
Luz sat in the middle with Oziel. He crossed his legs and locked his fingers behind his head. “Your English is very good,” he said. “Where did you learn?”
Luz shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does. I am curious.”
“No.”
He watched her. “You are beautiful and you are a fighter. Descended from old warriors, perhaps.” Luz looked at him. His skin was paler than hers. He looked less Mexican than he did white, European. He tapped his fingers on his knees. “It makes no sense to me that anyone should disregard or attempt to scrub away his own history. It continually asserts itself. It lives on. One should embrace it.”
Luz squeezed her eyes shut. Old warriors. She had always wanted to believe her mother’s stories.
“And ‘Hidalgo,’ of course,” Oziel went on. “There must be royalty somewhere in your ancestry. Disregard any who use your history to insult you, Luz. I believe that you are Mexico yourself, every part of her history—a fighter on every side.” He paused, then added, “And let us not forget Miguel Hidalgo, whose head once adorned the Alhóndiga in Guanajuato and inspired us to independence. Yes, yes.”
In the driver’s seat, Cecilia sighed but said nothing.
“People are useful, each in their own ways,” Oziel said, “at the proper times. Juan Luis was a sicario for me. I gave him a crew in Monterrey. But he had always been shortsighted and a slave to impulse. I should have seen it coming. He is not only an abomination, but a traitor, too. An enemy offered him something sweet and he turned his gun on me.” Oziel touched Luz’s shoulder so she would look at him. “I am telling you this so that you understand what you are doing. Juan Luis turned his gun on me, but I survived. The only regret there can be is that we let him escape with his life.”
Cecilia’s eyes flashed in the rearview.
Luz faced the window. “I’ll help you get to the house, then you take me home.”
“Home.” He hummed. “Of course.”
4
CICATRIZ ALLOWED HIS MEN TO SAMPLE WHAT THEY HAD RIPPED from the storehouse at the farm, and they partied through the night and most of the day after. It seemed that the same bitch had appeared and bested them again, and so they toasted the man who had been a federale. It was a surprise, running into her at the farm. Cicatriz had almost put her out of his mind, but there was no doubt it had been she, for his whelp of a cousin had been with her. Cicatriz sat and thought about the girl, breathing through his mouth because of the impasse of his ruined nose. Men and women slept all over the room. Naked brown bodies, the rise and fall of snores. A connection in the city had driven a van of Saltillo whores to them. But tonight the liquor ran dry, the perico ran thin. He sat awake and alone, naked, buoyed by some last chemical pulsing. Once he pushed the bitch from his mind, dead faces formed in the ether of his thoughts and he wished them gone. He stroked himself and watched the dark snatch
of a sleeping whore, the limp cock of one of his men. He had had lovers in his life, but he had once had a friend, as well—a true friend, he thought, one of the few—and it was the friend he missed the most. He thought of her, his friend, and held on to her face in defense against the others.
5
THE CONVOY OF SUBURBANS LEFT THE BLACKTOP HIGHWAY FOR the dusty track Luz had been walking upon when she met Felipo. The ridge rose up ahead, the anvil-shaped escarpment that loomed over San Cristóbal. The sun fell behind it. The convoy halted on Oziel’s order, spoken through his cell phone walkie-talkie. He pointed and said that San Cristóbal lay ahead, in the mountains. Luz nodded.
Luz instructed them to turn off the road onto a dirt path that ran parallel to the mountains. She had no way of knowing if it was indeed the right turn, but she knew that the house would be in this direction. Dark swallowed dusk.
Their Suburban led the way, crawling, with only the weak glow of the fog lights. The remaining SUVs drove without their lights on. Nothing specific in the landscape spoke to Luz, but it was reminiscent in a formless way. Nebulous shapes of scrub and rock. The black wall of the mountains. Cecilia drove carefully, both hands on the wheel. The vehicle lurched and rocked. Insects whorled in the fog lamps. Luz felt sick, the same way she used to feel in the hour leading up to a track meet.
Some dark feature of the landscape passed. Luz spied, burning down in the valley, a small cluster of orange light. She pointed. “That’s got to be it.”
“Well done,” Oziel said.
Luz hardly heard him. Be okay, Felipo.
The house lay not on their particular road but farther away from the mountains. Cecilia eased the Suburban off the dirt path toward the house. The others followed. The SUV bounced and pitched, even though she kept it under five kilometers per hour. Oziel ordered a halt perhaps four hundred meters from the house, and Cecilia killed the engine. There were vehicles next to the house, within the orange globe of light. The Jeep and the pickup, but also a large passenger van. There was the shed behind the house—Luz could see it. A voice in the dark, fingers on her skin. The tile hitting him in the face, the crunch through her wrists.
The narcos gathered around Oziel, boots and sneakers grinding in the earth. There was no moon, a darker night than when Luz had escaped. No sound trickled out from the house in the distance. Cecilia and the men held their rifles and waited for Oziel to speak. One of the narcos donned a black knit ski mask, red grinning lips embroidered around the mouth. Oziel whispered—Luz, standing off away from them, couldn’t make out his words. And then they all let their weapons hang from their shoulder straps and joined hands and bowed their heads, and Luz, creeping closer, heard Oziel pray to God and to San Miguel el arcángel. Renewal through blood, amen.
They broke their huddle and five of them set off, walking briskly behind Cecilia. The figures of the narcos faded into the dark, and they reappeared as thin silhouettes against the lights of the house and then vanished again as they dipped into some low spot.
Luz watched them go and wondered whether Cicatriz might be holding Felipo in that shed as well. If Felipo was alive. Please.
Oziel and the remaining narco, a boy with a rifle, stepped behind the SUVs, putting the vehicles between themselves and the house and the gunmen. They sat on the ground, and he whispered for Luz to join them. She peeked around the fender, watching the shadows of the narcos diverge into two groups.
“Stay hidden,” Oziel said. “Be careful.”
Luz nodded, extended one leg, and brought the instep of her other foot to her knee in a hurdler’s stretch. She held it and straightened, and the men watched her with mild confusion. She switched legs and bent again at the waist.
“What are you doing?” Oziel said.
Four hundred meters. She had once run that distance in just shy of sixty seconds.
“Luz,” Oziel said, but gunfire unseamed the night.
Luz jerked, a reflex, but she forced herself to look around the edge of the Suburban. Muzzles flashed. It was difficult to tell, but it seemed that the groups of narcos were firing into the house at different angles, all facing away from her location.
When the firing paused she heard Oziel shouting, jumbled words. A hand—the young narco’s—landed on her shoulder, and she shrugged it off, leaping to her feet and breaking into her sprint.
The stretch of desert. The adobe structure that now seemed darker. Already the smell of cordite. The sound of her breath and the impact of her footfalls and the cold presence of the ghost runner on her hip—she hadn’t left him behind after all. She heard no shout from Oziel, and the ghost runner pressed in on her, as did the fear that the narco might simply rise and shoot her in the back. She pushed, drew a step ahead.
She could see the shadowed forms of the narcos joining up in front of the house. They would go inside, and there would be more shooting. Luz knew that even her best time for this distance was still a very long time to be so exposed when the bullets began to fly. She focused on swinging her arms faster, forcing her legs to catch up.
The windows in the house flashed, staccato and arrhythmic. The reports were louder. Luz was face-first in the dirt, holding on to the earth. She wasn’t sure how she’d gotten there. She was petrified, something icy pinning her down. She didn’t think she’d been shot—she was trapped inside a body that wouldn’t respond. In a lull someone screamed, so quiet. Come on, Luz thought. “Come on,” she said. And now she was screaming, getting up, willing her limbs to motion. Screaming and running again, sprinting toward the house. She flinched with the next burst and waited to be shot, but she kept her legs going. A cramp squeezed beneath her belly button. There was no ghost runner on her hip, but she wasn’t outrunning anything, she realized—she was running into it.
She slid on her knees into the rear wheel of the pickup truck as a round bit into another tire and the truck sank toward the earth. The window overhead exploded into hail. Her numb eardrums pulsed. Shouting surfaced. The quick belch of a three-round burst. The cramp sliced from her belly to her oblique, a raw and red fault line. She’d been holding her breath and it started over again all at once, ragged.
Her hands were cold and unsteady. Her quadriceps quivered. She got to her feet and ran leadenly around the vehicles. The windows of the house lay broken in the yard. What light there was collected, glimmering, in the shards. Dust coughed from the adobe wall and a round bored through the air a few feet ahead of her, all in less time than a single step, and she hadn’t heard the report.
The shed door was chained, padlocked. She grabbed the chain and yanked futilely. She banged on the tin door and shouted for Felipo. No response.
The rear door of the house flew open.
A naked, potbellied man leaped into the yard, running. His splayed toes reached for purchase, his torso awash in black blood. He was even with the shed when Cecilia stepped into the open doorway and raised her rifle.
The naked body went slack in midstride. Blood and tissue roped from his chest. The corpse tumbled into the woodpile at the back of the yard. The long-handled ax fell across his hip, the handle like an exposed, polished bone. Cecilia aimed and fired once more into the man, and the body briefly animated.
Luz’s stomach convulsed. Cecilia pivoted toward her and then lowered the rifle. The sicaria cocked her head, disappeared back into the house.
Luz exhaled, dashed across the yard, and grabbed the ax handle. Her knuckles brushed the damp skin of the corpse’s hip, and she could smell him, smell the odor of his body and the metal in his blood. She hefted the ax.
The noises were distinct now. A laugh. A spoken line. The single pop of a gunshot. Don’t look into the house, she told herself. Don’t look. She ran to the shed.
The ax head glanced off the chain, and the ineffective clang vibrated up through her fingers. She was trying for the padlock, but she missed again. On her third attempt the blade deflected and punctured the tin door. She remembered: the walls of the shed were supported by two-by-fours, but the doo
r was of a single piece.
She put her face to the cut in the door and shouted, “If you’re in there, get away from the door!”
She reset her feet and swung the ax like a baseball bat and buried the blade in the tin. She jerked it free and swung again, fighting through the cramp that stiffened her trunk with each hack. She had opened a dark cleft a foot long. She peered into the space and called Felipo’s name. A four-fingered hand rose and fell through the beam of light. “Oh, God,” Luz said. “Hang on, Felipo. Hang on.”
A narco appeared in the open door of the house, black ski mask scrunched up onto his dome. He watched her. His rifle hung at his side. He gestured at her and said something to somebody over his shoulder. Luz ignored him and hacked with the ax, widening the cut.
She chopped vertically at it and then hammered the edges of the opening with the flat of the ax blade. Her shoulders burned and her forearms were shaking. She squatted and managed to slide sideways through the gap.
Felipo sat slouched against the back wall. He didn’t speak, and Luz had to help him up. His face, passing briefly through the light, was a pulp of purple flesh.
“I’m sorry,” Luz said as he leaned on her. “I’m sorry.”
At the rift in the tin he tottered and ducked into the opening, sliding through and collapsing in the dirt. Luz followed him out and with her hands in his armpits got him to his feet again. One of his eyes was completely shut. “Luz,” he rasped.
“It’s okay now,” she said. “It’s okay.”
6
THEY CAME AROUND THE HOUSE. OZIEL AND THE OTHER YOUNG narco had driven two of the Suburbans down and parked them in the path. Four naked corpses were lined up—two men and two women, dirt plastered to wet spots. There were another five people, also naked, sitting with their legs crossed and their hands bound behind them. Two were women and three were men. Oziel’s crew stood over them with casually aimed rifles. Oziel watched Luz and Felipo approach. He smiled slightly and shook his head. As they passed, Oziel bent and seized the hair of one of his captives and jerked the man’s head back. The rolling eyes found Luz and narrowed. A sneer split the white furrow through his lips. He wore a blood-soaked splint taped over his nose.
The Infinite Page 17
