Iron River

32

The darkness gave way to fog, and Hood never got out of first gear. One hour into the journey, Hood saw that Evangelista Limones had been telling the truth. Not a vehicle came their way, no mules or horses, no man, woman, or child. He saw one cow and one coyote and one rabbit, then two hours later, as the heat of the day climbed out of the canyon around them, Hood saw vultures circling far away in the blank sky.

“Batopilas gave the world its silver and copper,” said Luna. “The Spanish took it, then the Americans. An American named Shepherd developed the mines in the late nineteenth century. He built a castle and a hacienda and a foundry. He brought turbines from the United States and made hydroelectricity from the Batopilas River. At that time it was the only city in Mexico with the luxury of electricity, apart from Mexico City. After the big wars, the mining collapsed. Now Batopilas is a ghost town. There are mansions and buildings abandoned. There are tons of opium and yerba grown in the canyons. Occasionally the government sends in soldiers. The growers bribe the soldiers to leave them alone. If the soldiers find a grower who has not arranged his bribes then the grower is given three choices. He can choose bote-prison for ten years. Or, he can choose leña-to be beaten half to death with wooden clubs. Or he can choose plomo-lead. This means the grower is given a head start into the bushes then the soldiers cut him down with machine guns. He has a small chance of getting away. Plomo is the most popular choice. It is considered valiente. Valiant. Very Mexican. There are a few tourists but not now, with the violence and the summer heat. There are telephones, but they don’t always work.”

Outside of town, Shepherd’s castle lay hollowed and crumbling by the river. It was three stories high, with Gothic windows through which Hood could see the walls of the opposite side. There were towers at both ends and these were partially engulfed by tree branches that grew through the window openings. The roof was gone, and the masonry had long sloughed off the walls.

Hood put the vehicle into park, then he and Luna hoisted their weapons from the back and checked their ammunition and placed the combat shotgun and the automatic M16 between them, barrels down on either side of the transmission hump, the butts resting against their seats.

Around the next bend, four vultures raised their pink faces from a dead man on the side of the road. They looked at Hood irritably but didn’t move. Hood drove the Tahoe forward and they hopped away and managed to take flight. Hood and Luna got out and saw that the man was a soldier and he had been shot several times and beheaded, but they saw no head. Flies buzzed in the still heat, endlessly repositioning themselves on the man. One quarter mile closer to town they came upon two more soldiers similarly killed and mutilated. Still seated, Hood looked down at the bloating bodies, and their smell mixed with the sweet scent of the Batopilas River nearby, and these smells and the heat tried to sicken him.

He drove. Then there was a steep descent and another tight switchback that straightened to reveal the three heads on the left side of the road, the faces eaten by the birds but still with expressions somehow forlorn and regretful. The vultures stood blinking twenty feet away in the scant shade of an agave.

“There’s no excuse for this,” said Hood. “What does this signify? Who is it for?”

“Us.”

Just outside the village, another six soldiers lay dead and piled upon the road. The vultures stood atop them, fanning their wings in the heat. Hood saw that the men had been dragged and left there as a roadblock, and he wondered if the remaining five were blocking the road on the other side of Batopilas. They were abundantly shot but not mutilated.

Hood and Luna stepped from the Tahoe and together dragged three bodies to the side of the road so they could drive past. Hood thought his chances of dying in an ambush right there and then were very good. He was willing to strike a protective deal with any god or devil who would offer him one, but he heard no voices in this place or in his heart and he felt forsaken.

Two mules stared at them as they entered the village. In Batopilas plaza, two ancient men watched them from a bench. Their faces were dark and wrinkled and they squinted at the Tahoe as if facing a storm. One of the men lifted his hand and pointed them onward down the street of river stones. A woman in a bright-yellow-and-orange shawl refused to look at them, then scuttled quickly around a corner. There was a small store open and two Zetas with AK-47s stood on either side of the door and there were two more across the street outside a carnicería. They were young and dressed in uniforms of solid green, with black boots and black vests and helmets, and they had emblems of some kind on their shirt sleeves up by the shoulder. They bulged with ammunition. The Zetas stared at them with bored expressions, but their fingers were inside the trigger guards of their weapons. One gestured slightly with his gun and Hood drove. Outside the police office was a streetlamp and from it hung by his neck was a man with a badge pinned to his shirt pocket. His face was black and his eyes bulged on stems like a crab’s and his neck was stretched obscenely, and beneath his dangling boots a black straw cowboy hat sat upturned on the sidewalk. Another Zeta stood in the open doorway of the office and he pointed his gun at Hood’s face and tracked him in the sights as Hood drove by. He looked sixteen. He wore a pendant bearing the image of a bearded man, Jesus Malverde, Hood knew, patron saint of narcos.

“And he takes his bullets to Malverde shrines to get them blessed,” said Luna. “So they fly straight and kill his enemies. And Malverde blesses his shipments, too, for safe passage to the United States. Look how eager he is to kill. It is his passionate desire.”

Outside a cantina at the far end of town a slender, older Zeta waved Hood over and told him to park. Two more men came from the cantina with their guns lowered, and Hood now understood Luna’s amusement at the weapons they had brought. Faint music played from inside the cantina.

Hood stepped from the vehicle, and the Zetas pushed him against the car and took his weapons except the derringer in his boot heel. They took the cash from his pocket. They dragged the heavy packs from the back of the Tahoe, and Hood heard them crunch to the street next to him. They opened the packs and looked in but did not touch the money. Then one of the Zetas motioned with his gun, and Luna and Hood each knelt and hoisted the heavy packs to their shoulders. Then Hood felt a gun barrel poke the back of his head, aiming him down the road.

There were three Zetas ahead of him and three behind. Past town, they came to the five dead soldiers strewn across the road beheaded and they stepped over and around them while the vultures scattered into the brush. A hundred yards farther were the heads lying beside the road. After half a mile, they went left onto a trail through the palms by the river, and the trail narrowed, then it opened on a broad flat beach of brown sand and boulders along the thin, slow Batopilas River, and there were four men on horseback waiting. One of them was Jimmy. He sat on the horse hunched and wavering, and he stared blankly at Hood and Luna. His wrists were tethered to the pommel and the big bandaged mitts of his tortured hands rested on either side of it. They had dressed him in a gold-and-blue Mexican football jersey.

“Hi, Jimmy.”

Jimmy didn’t look at him.

Vascano was a big man with a heavy face and curly black hair, and he wore the same uniform and armored vest as the other Zetas. Hood could see that Vascano’s face was pale and sagging and dark around the eyes, and he could see that the teenaged boy on the horse beside him was a young version of his father, stout and alert and handsome. The son sat with an AK-47 ready across his saddle, and the fourth man brought his horse around and lowered the barrel of his shotgun at them.

Hood shrugged off the pack and let it drop to the ground and so did Luna. Two of the men on foot dragged the packs toward the horsemen and they opened the flaps and upended the packs and the one-pound bundles of drug money tumbled out into the sand. The men sifted through the packets, looking for dye and transponders.

Jimmy’s horse snorted and lowered his head in search of grass, and Hood saw that Holdstock was weak and his balance was bad. Jimmy looked down as if to help the horse find something.

“Jimmy, look at me,” he said.

After a moment he looked up, but Hood wasn’t sure if Jimmy recognized him or not.

“Luna,” said Vascano. He spoke Spanish, and Hood could follow his meaning if not all of his words. “I am pleased to meet you. When I heard your name, I decided to sell this man to you and not to Armenta. It wasn’t only the money. It was because of you. You run your enemies down like dogs. You kill with guns and a bow and arrow. You accept no bribes. You are loyal. You are an unusual man. Step forward.”

Luna stopped halfway to the horses.

“But you are poor as a peon and your family has nothing and your department is corrupt. Your government is corrupt. The soul of your country is corrupt. So what are you loyal to but your own foolishness? You are a dog chasing its tail. Come and work for me. I’ll pay you ten times what they pay you now.”

Luna looked up at Vascano but said nothing.

“Say something,” said Vascano.

“We choose. We decide and that is final.”

“Who says what is final?”

“Each man.”

“Prove to me that you profit from your loyalty.”

“There is no profit. There is want and need and humiliation at the hands of the weak. But that does not change things.”

“But your wife wears old clothes, and one of your sons needs surgery and your daughters have no prospects because they are thick and bullish and built for fighting, like you are. I know these things, Luna. They are facts.”

“My wife is still beautiful in old clothes and the bones of my son will heal. My daughters will marry warriors like themselves.”

Vascano nudged his horse forward. Hood saw that it was black and beautiful and there were silver studs in the black leather of the harness and rimming the shiny black saddle. Vascano looked down at Luna and he coughed, and the cough multiplied itself until Vascano evacuated it with one deep convulsion. Vascano’s face was white and his hair was a madman’s. His son rode forward to wait beside him, and the Zeta with the lowered shotgun shuffled left to keep a clean line of fire.

“It is not you and me,” said Vascano. “It is Mexico. Everything must be torn down. Everything must be rebuilt. The age of privilege and corruption is nearly over. There is always revolution in the hearts of men, and now those men have guns to match our hearts. We will cut the head from the snake. We will stamp the last life from the body and then Mexico will have new life and a new body.”

“Then Mexico will be trading one generation of selfish tyrants for another.”

“The bloodshed and confusion will pass. Help me make them pass, Luna. Be loyal to hope, not foolishness.”

“Hope does nothing.”

“Then be loyal to your family and the abundance you can bring them. Heal your son.”

“I will not.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t work for the enemies of Mexico.”

“Oh? Then who is this standing behind you? And who is this pathetic man on the horse? They are Americans, and Americans are the enemy of Mexico. They have the appetites of Satan and the money and guns to satisfy their appetites. They are rotting with luxury and godlessness and they have spent themselves into ruin. They have nothing in common with us but a border.”

“You kill and kidnap.”

“So that rotting America will help me drive this rotting government from our land.”

“And to put five million into your pocket.”

“It will finance the revolution as well as myself. Share it with me, Luna. For Mexico and for yourself.”

“You are not a revolutionary. You are a murderer and a beheader. I will not work for you.”

Vascano stared down at him white-faced and crazy-haired, then he pulled an overlarge revolver from his holster and shot Luna straight through the heart. The bullet twanged off a rock behind Hood. Luna rocked back, then charged, but the shotgun roared and caught him high, knocking him backward off his feet onto the sand. He rose slowly, his great head a bloody mask, tattered and featureless and grotesque. He charged again, but this time it was into the river where he fell forward on the rocks and lay still in the shallow brown water.

Hood had moved toward Luna and now stood before Vascano. Vascano had lowered his gun, but it was still in his hand resting against the saddle blanket.

“Who are you?”

“Deputy Charlie Hood of Los Angeles.”

“You volunteered for this?”

“It’s my job to do this.”

“Are you a friend of Jimmy Holdstock?”

“Yes.”

“What do I do with two rotting gringos?”

“You let me take Jimmy back like you said you would.”

“If you go back, you can say where I have been. You can fight another day. You are worthless to me alive. You are weak. You are nothing without thousands more of you. Jorge, what do I do with them?”

His son eased his mount forward and he stopped abreast of his father. Again the shotgunner maneuvered to his left for a clean sight line.

“You send them home so they can tell the tale of Vascano, the revolutionary who destroyed the puppet Luna. The world will fear you more, and the men and women of Mexico will love you more. These men are your prophets.”

“This would be letting rattlesnakes go free.”

“Their stories will help us. They will give us a face.”

Vascano looked at his son. “You will be our face.”

A cough erupted in his chest and continued, deepening. He turned and motioned to the shotgunner, then he raised his pistol toward Hood and fired. The bullet screamed by Hood’s head, both a sound and a feeling.

Vascano lowered the gun. The shotgunner spoke into a satellite phone, but he kept his other hand on his weapon, the barrel aimed at Hood.

A moment later a helicopter suddenly surged over the top of the canyon and cut a sharp descent toward the water in graceful switchbacks and finally it pivoted itself down upon the rocks near where Luna lay. The water around the machine quivered as if rising to a boil, then burst into a chop, and downstream of Luna it was turned pink by the deafening and indifferent blades. Two of the Zetas carried the backpacks to the helo, and Vascano and his son dismounted and gave the reins of their mounts to the shotgunner and stroked their horses adios, then strode to the helicopter, ducking under the rotors and climbed in with the money. The machine rose back into the sky and within moments had vanished over the canyon rim.

The shotgunner barked something to his men, and three of the Zetas started back toward town. Three more came up behind Hood and he felt the barrel of a gun against his spine and he fell in behind the first three. He heard the others behind him and he turned to see one of the men leading Jimmy’s horse. Jimmy slumped and swayed not quite with the rhythm of the animal. The bandages on his hands looked smaller than they had at Imperial Mercy and they looked clean, their whiteness jarring in this bloody desert.

A gun barrel found his back again and Hood turned to the trail and he listened to the clopping of the horses behind him. At first he thought of the heat and of the bodies ahead on the road and of Luna dead in the river, but these thoughts fell away by their own weight. With the sound of the horses, Hood thought instead of years ago, riding with his father and mother and brothers and sisters when he was a boy in Bakersfield, trotting past the oil pumpers that sometimes spooked the rented mounts, galloping along the smooth flat edges of the cotton fields with the morning sun warm on his back and feeling that life was good and it was going to get even better and he was impatient to get to all those better things. The world was a place of wonders.

Back at the cantina, the six footmen watched while the shotgunner tethered the horses to a hitching post and helped Jimmy down. The shotgunner pointed his weapon at a battered station wagon, once white but now eaten by rust. It was a Vista Cruiser with a large smoked roof window for viewing the sky and the sights. Hood let Jimmy drape an arm over his shoulder, then they slowly moved together to the car. The front seats were little more than loose foam, the vinyl having cracked away years ago. The windshield was cracked from bottom to top, a seam that glistened even through the dusty glass. Hood helped Jimmy into the backseat, where he could lie down, then he got behind the wheel and turned the key to check the gas.

The shotgunner came from the cantina with a plastic bag and a neatly folded amount of American cash. Through the driver’s-side window he handed Hood the cash and the bag, and when Hood looked inside he saw a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a roll of white tape and a bottle of tequila.

“Gracias,” said Hood.

“I was trained in the United States. They were decent men. Armenta is looking for Jimmy. They will be on the roads that lead to the legal crossings. Smuggle yourselves in, like we do.”