Solomon Creed

41

Hector Rodriguez Alvarado — ‘El Diablo’ behind his back, ‘Papa Tío’ to his face — sat in the centre of a semi-circular desk that resembled a huge bagel with a bite taken out of it. It was lined with flat-screen monitors, seven in total — one for each deadly sin, someone had once said. Right now they were displaying a stock chart, an Arizona news station and an article on the Forbes website detailing how Hector ‘Papa Tío’ Alvarado had made it on to that year’s list of billionaires again. The rest of the screens were filled with photographs blown up and arranged like exhibits at a gallery, blue tattoo lines on dead flesh, numerals, outlines of guns, a pale man with a red burn on his arm, and a blackened skull in the rain, the metal plate shining in the shadows. He selected this photo, sent it to the printer then rolled his chair back from the bank of screens and stood up slowly.

His knees cracked as they straightened and he leaned back to stretch the tension from his spine and walked stiffly over to where the printer was steadily spooling out the picture on a full sheet of paper. He opened one of the drawers in the unit beneath it, selected one of the cell phones inside then switched it on and peered through the slats in the blinds at the dry, rocky world outside.

His compound stood on a steep hill in the Sierra Madre Mountains, fifty miles from the US border, impossible to approach without being spotted and therefore easy to defend. It was also blowy as hell, the grit-filled wind howling in the roof timbers and making it sound like the whole place was haunted. It had been Tío’s home for the last eight years, ever since he had got sloppy and ended up in a jail cell he’d had to expensively bribe his way out of. He’d gone into hiding after that and this had become his bolthole; a kind of freedom but one that looked and felt exactly like captivity.

He took in the dim, double-garage sized space that had become his world, the screens his eyes and ears on the world beyond. He lit upon the one showing the news channel. It was still broadcasting live from the desert, rain pouring down and steam floating up. Happy, soot-streaked faces waving at the camera as it flew overhead. His son had died and these people were happy. It made him want to go there and stab them all in the face.

The printer went silent and he picked up the photo and stared into the empty eye sockets of the skull. He remembered the hate he had seen in those eyes the last time he had been with Ramon. It had been a while back, a few months, after some trouble he could not now remember. He tried to recall the last thing he had said to his son; something angry, no doubt. He couldn’t remember. It hadn’t always been that way. They had been close until Ramon turned seventeen and was beaten up so badly he ended up with the plate in his head and an addiction to strong painkillers that eventually progressed to heroin. Ramon blamed him for that, and he was right to. If Ramon had not been Tío’s son, none of it would have happened. And now he was dead, just like his sisters. All his children dead.

He checked the battery and signal on the phone, took one last look at the room he had spent most of the last eight years inside and flicked the master switch on the wall. The seven screens blinked to black and the happy faces of the fire survivors vanished. It was as easy as that — flick a switch and they all disappeared. He could do that for real, had done it many times, sitting here, staring at these screens, but he didn’t want to do that now. Not this time. This time he wanted to do more than send out orders and wait for results. This time his family had been hurt, so it was down to him to avenge them personally.

He took down a battered Western Express cattleman hat from a hook on the wall and an old pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket with rainbow lenses like oil spilled on water and slipped them over his eyes, opened the door and stepped outside.

The sunlight was nuclear after so long in the gloom. The heat was brutal too, as if the whole world was warming up and getting ready to burn. He smiled at this thought and walked out into the sunlight. Two men sprang from the shadows and hurried over, making a big show of scanning the surrounding hills for movement, their hands resting on the stocks of their M60 machine pistols.

‘Get the car and load some full gas cans in the back,’ he said.

The guards looked at each other, puzzled, then one scurried off towards an outbuilding while the other stayed close and checked for intruders who couldn’t possibly be there, given the small army of guards patrolling the wider perimeter, and the minefields and Claymores lining the roads leading up to the compound.

He had tried for years to have more kids. God knows he had fucked enough putas to seed a whole dynasty, but that, in the end, had been his problem. The life he had led when he was younger and the women who inhabited it were from the street, same as he was, their bodies and youth just another form of currency that, like all coin, quickly got dirty from too much handling. He had caught about everything going and been proud of the fact, like it was evidence of what a man he was. He had three kids too, further proof of his virility, and had thought that was plenty. He had a son to hand his empire on to when the time came, that was all he needed.

It was only later in life, after his relations with Ramon had soured, that he spotted a pretty girl on a TV singing contest, bought his way into her heart with record contracts and diamonds, and discovered the cycle of infection and cure, infection and cure, had burned away any ability he had to father more children. And now the three he’d had were all dead. His bloodline had ended and his name would die with him.

‘Wait here,’ Tío said, then pushed through the sun-gnarled door of a barn with a tortured shriek of old hinges.

The inside was dark and stifling and smelled of oil and trapped heat and dust. The windows were covered with boards that leaked sunlight through thin cracks that slashed through the darkness and threw light on two figures slumped on their knees in the centre of the space. They were tied by their wrists with climbing rope hanging from the central roof beam, their arms raised above their drooping heads as though they were silently pleading with God for a forgiveness they had little chance of getting. Their clothes were ripped, their jeans and shirts wet with dark blood. The faces of two young women looked down at them like angels in the dark, blown-up photographs that accentuated the family resemblance to their father.

Tío pulled off his shades and blinked away the darkness as he walked around the edge of the floor, keeping close to the walls and avoiding the middle where the men were. The tin roof ticked above him and threw down so much heat it felt like someone had lit a fire on it.

‘Man it’s hot in here,’ Tío said to the darkness, and took a five-gallon container down from the shelf. ‘But I’ll tell you something,’ he unscrewed the cap and walked over to the far wall, ‘Hell will be hotter.’ He placed the container on the ground and pushed it over with his foot.

Fuel spread across the hard dirt floor, fouling the air with its fumes, and a moan rose up from the centre of the room, followed by panicked breathing. It sounded wet and wheezy, the man’s broken nose and the tape over his mouth making it hard for him to catch his breath.

‘You smell that?’ Tío said, taking down another can and unscrewing the cap.

The rapid breathing intensified. One of the men had lifted his head a little and was staring over at Tío out of one eye. The other was swollen shut. The second guy still hadn’t moved. Maybe he was dead. Lucky for him if he was.

Tío took a step forward and splashed fuel over the conscious man, who flinched then yelped as the jagged edge of a broken rib sawed at swollen flesh inside him. Tío threw more fuel over him, splashing the other man too, who still didn’t move. The conscious man was hyperventilating now, his eye wide and staring as he pulled at his bindings, ignoring the pain that came from it.

Tío emptied the can and threw it at them. It struck the unconscious man on the head and he grunted but didn’t rouse. Tío smiled. He wasn’t dead after all. The conscious man continued to freak and Tío watched, enjoying his frantic attempts to pull free, knowing each move must be agony with all the damage he’d already done to him. It didn’t take long for him to wear himself out. He looked up at Tío, blood and snot blowing in and out of his ruined nose, knowing what was coming.

‘You’re Raoul, right?’ Tío asked. The man nodded. ‘You know what happened to Ramon after you dropped him off at the airfield, Raoul? You know what happened after you packed him away on that old plane and called whichever fucking scumbag had promised you money or pussy or whatever fucking thing you thought you wanted more than the painful and horrible death you’re going to get?’

The man shook his head fiercely, his open eye wide and pleading. A sound squeezed out from behind the tape on his mouth.

‘What’s that? You didn’t sell him out, that what you telling me?’

The breathing faster. The head nodding.

‘You sure about that?’ He reached into his pocket, pulled out a box of matches and shook them.

Raoul reacted as if an electric current had passed through him. He yanked hard on his bindings again, rubbing flesh from his wrists and shaking dust from the roof. Tío took the phone from his pocket, tapped an icon of a fly and selected a number from a list. Raoul was crying now, a wheezing, mewling noise that sounded like a whimpering dog. Tío stepped forward and ripped the tape from his mouth. ‘Anything you want to say, Raoul? Anything you want to tell me?’ He threw the bloodied tape aside and dialled the number he had selected.

Raoul gulped air and shook his head. ‘IdinDoit,’ he said, his swollen mouth turning the words into one sound. ‘IdinDonothin.’

Tío put the phone on speaker. ‘You swear that, Raoul?’ The phone rang, the sound of it echoing in the dark space. ‘You swear it on your mother’s life?’

‘Bueno?’ a woman answered.

Raoul howled when he heard his mother’s voice. ‘Mamá!’ he called out, but Tío cut her off before she could hear.

Raoul slumped down, sobbing, his body wracked with pain, his spirit broken. Tío put the phone away and took a single match from the box.

‘You believe in heaven, Raoul?’ He struck the match and it flared in the dusty dark. Raoul stared up at the tiny flame burning above him. Nodded slowly.

‘That’s good,’ Tío said, turning the match in his fingers and watching the flame grow. ‘But if you believe in heaven, you also got to believe in hell, no?’

He flicked the match and it arced through the air. Raoul screwed his eyes shut, anticipating the whoosh of fire. He didn’t see the match land in the spreading puddle of fuel and snuff out with a barely audible small hiss.

‘Well, would you look at that,’ Tío said, his head cocked to one side and staring down at the blackened twist of match floating in the fuel. ‘A miracle. God must have spared you for a higher purpose.’

Raoul gulped air, his mouth hanging open, blood drooling thickly down from it. Tío laughed, a great hoot that rang inside the confines of the cabin. ‘It’s diesel ya moron, you can’t set light to diesel with a match. You need to heat it up or pressurize it first, get some fumes going, then it burns real good.’ He turned back to the shelves and started hunting through the boxes of supplies, looking for something. ‘The other thing that works is a wick.’ The sound of ripping plastic cut through the gloom and Tío turned round holding up a large roll of kitchen towel. ‘This’ll work.’

He unwound a few sheets then stuffed them into the central tube so the whole thing resembled a huge candle. ‘Diesel got a real nice steady burn, not like gasoline, that’ll blow up in your face and burn itself out quick. Diesel will burn long and slow and hot and leave nothing behind but ash.’

He crouched down and dipped the wick into the diesel, turning it slowly to let the fuel soak in. ‘If you want to get rid of anything and leave no trace, diesel is what you use. Aviation fuel is a lot like diesel, did you know that?’

Raoul was hyperventilating again and a strange noise came out of him. ‘Idindonothin,’ he said again between panicked breaths. ‘Idindonuthin.’

Tío placed the diesel-soaked roll of towel upright in the puddle of fuel and struck a fresh match. ‘You know what?’ he said and touched it to the wick. ‘I believe you. That’s why I won’t pay Mama a visit.’

He stood back, watching the yellow flame creep down the paper and start spreading over the main roll. He moved over to where the photographs of his daughters were hanging from nails in the wall, took them down and grabbed a couple more gas cans. Then he put his shades back on and stepped out through the door with another tortured shriek of metal.

Outside, the two guards were waiting by a white Explorer with its engine running. One was behind the wheel, the other standing by the open passenger door, still holding his M60 and checking the empty hills like a moron.

A shrill scream pealed out from the building and the guard’s eyes flicked towards it. Smoke was starting to seep through the cracks in the door, but Tío didn’t see it. He was taking his last look at the group of shacks that were the centre of his vast empire that turned over more money each year than most countries. It had taken him a lifetime to build and it was all for nothing. He was still living in a house not much bigger than the one he had been born in. He thought of all the smiling faces he had just seen on the TV screen, people who genuinely did have nothing — nothing except their lives and their freedom.

‘Where to, boss?’ the driver called out.

‘America,’ Tío replied and got into the back of the Jeep.

‘Land of the free. Land of Redemption.’

42

The swampy odour of the interview room hit Holly the moment Donny McGee opened the door for her. He pointed at one of the chairs, the one reserved for suspects, and metal legs screeched against concrete as she pulled it out and sat down. Another chair faced her across a table that was bolted to the floor.

‘You want anything, Mrs Coronado?’

‘I want to give you my statement and then go home again.’

‘I mean like a coffee, water, something like that.’

‘No.’

‘All right then. Sit tight, someone will be along soon to talk with you.’ He closed the door behind him and she noticed there was no handle on the inside.

She turned to face the table and placed her hands flat against the scarred surface. It felt cool. She could hear sounds beyond the door, footsteps and conversations, but they all remained distant. None came her way.

She sat perfectly still, staring at the grey painted walls, the daylight leaking in through the bars of a small window, and the camera fixed high in the corner.

She waited.

Morgan and Mayor Cassidy were waiting too.

They were in Morgan’s office, Morgan behind his desk in his antique chair, Cassidy pacing. Morgan was feeling calm and in control. His hands were stinging beneath his dressings and he glanced at his computer screen showing the feed from the camera in the interview room. Holly Coronado looked small in the picture. Small and isolated. He liked that.

‘What if this doesn’t work?’ Cassidy asked.

He was driving Morgan nuts with his pacing. ‘Then we switch to plan B.’

‘Which is?’

‘Why don’t we wait and see if plan A works first.’ Morgan glanced down at the cell phone lying on his desk. ‘As soon as it’s done, we’ll know — and so will Tío. Then we’ll see how things sit.’

‘But what if it turns out this Solomon Creed or whoever he is hasn’t got anything to do with anything?’

‘I told you, Tío won’t care. He was there, that’s good enough for him, and he’s connected to James Coronado.’ He nodded at the camera feed. ‘He’s also been talking to the not-so-merry widow, so whichever way you look at it, it’s going to be better for us when he’s gone. One less problem. It’s like the fire; that was our most immediate problem and we dealt with it. This guy is a problem too, so we’re dealing with him. Maybe that helps us with Tío, maybe it doesn’t. We deal with each thing as it comes.’

The desk phone rang and Cassidy jumped.

‘Try and get a grip on yourself,’ Morgan said, snatching the phone from its cradle. He nodded, then pushed a button. ‘Hi, Pete, I got Ernie here too. You’re on speaker.’

‘Well there ain’t nothing for either of you to hear.’ The voice was dry as sand. ‘Didn’t find a damn thing. If Jim had the files, they wasn’t at his house.’

Morgan and Cassidy exchanged glances. More loose ends. ‘Where are you now?’

‘I headed back to the ranch soon as the wildfire was out.’

‘Everything OK there?’

‘A few horses spooked is all, the storm drain kept the fire back. Ellie was spooked too.’

‘Did you hear about Bobby Gallagher?’

‘I did. Terrible thing. Can’t pretend I’m sad that he won’t be bothering Ellie no more, but he was harmless enough. Hell of a thing to get himself burned up in a fire like that. I wouldn’t wish that on no one. What about this stranger Ernie was telling me about — you got it in hand?’

Morgan rubbed at the spot between his eyes. It was typical that somehow all of this was his responsibility. Morgan looked up at Nathaniel Priddy staring out from the wall of sheriffs. He’d always wondered exactly how much he’d done to help build this town; more than he’d been given credit for, he guessed. They’d named this building after him but there were twenty others with ‘Cassidy’ written on the side. Just the way things were. Poor people did the dirty work while the rich people kept their hands clean and took all the glory. Least that’s how it ran until someone staged a revolution.

‘I got it in hand,’ he said, and ended the call. He knew Tucker would be pissed at being cut off like that, which is exactly why he’d done it.

Cassidy huffed and turned away. Started pacing again.

Morgan sat back in his seat. The truth was he didn’t need a backup plan because his original one was working just fine. Solomon had been an unexpected variable, but he would be out of the way soon. Holly Coronado was angry, but he didn’t think she was dangerous, even though she had shot him. Tío was the only major thing to worry about. Mayor Cassidy and Old Man Tucker were shitting in their pants at the thought of him coming, but not Morgan. Morgan wanted him to come. He was counting on it.

The cell phone vibrated against the desktop and Cassidy stopped pacing and stared down at it. Morgan picked it up. Opened the message. Frowned.

‘What?’ Cassidy asked.

‘He’s gone,’ Morgan said.

Cassidy nodded. ‘Well that’s that then.’

‘No,’ Morgan said. ‘I mean he’s gone. He wasn’t in the house. Solomon Creed has disappeared.’

43

Solomon walked through the humid desert, glad of the boots on the flinty, spiky ground. The rain had carved tracks in the dust, wavy lines that followed the contours, as if hundreds of snakes had slithered through here. The day was starting to brighten again, the clouds thinning to let the afternoon sun and heat back in. His shirt was sticking to his back, but he didn’t remove his jacket or ease his pace.

He headed northwest towards the spill piles of the mine. He wanted to head north, out across the burned desert to the Tucker ranch, but it was too far to walk. He could see the airfield stretching away in the same direction, the parked squadrons of aircraft forming patterns across the land. He would have to detour round that too, which would make the journey even longer.

He took the almost squeezed-out tube of sunblock from his pocket and rubbed more on the back of his neck and over his ears and face. It felt slimy and awful but he put it on anyway. He thought about the ugly hat he’d left in Morgan’s car and wished he’d kept hold of it. He put the tube back in his pocket and pulled out a pair of sunglasses he had found in the house. They must have belonged to James Coronado too and he thought as he slipped them on that he was now walking in another man’s shoes and seeing the world through his eyes too.

He continued onward, keeping away from the houses and out of sight as long as he could until he reached the road and the fence surrounding the mine. There was no sign of industry beyond it, only more abandoned buildings. He spotted the mine entrance through a gap in the spill piles and lifted the sunglasses to get a better view. Some barrels were stacked outside, next to a trailer with coils of clear tubing piled on the back. The wheels of the trailer were slightly soft and the barrels had rust around the bases showing they hadn’t moved for some time. It seemed more like set dressing than actual equipment for a working mine. The low hum of an engine was coming from somewhere, steady and rhythmic, a pump most likely. It sounded as if it was underground but not far, not as far as it should be if it was flushing ore out of a mine that had already been depleted by years of heavy working.

The only modern thing about the whole place was the fence and the cameras on poles. The rest looked abandoned and felt deserted. He could see why the trusts were so important to the town. The mine couldn’t be producing enough revenue to pay for the church lighting bill. Solomon continued down the road until the fence ran out and he saw what he had come here for.

The livery yard was set back from the road, the horses moving around in their corrals now the rain had stopped. They seemed skittish, restless, like a wolf was nearby. They were swirling around the corral like a slow tornado, pawing the wet ground, snorting and tossing their heads. A horse was the only way he could get to the Tucker ranch on his own. He didn’t have a car and he hated being in them anyway. He wasn’t even sure whether he could drive. Truth was, he wasn’t sure he could ride a horse either. There was only one way to find out.

He left the road and walked beneath a high wooden arch with ‘Sam’s Livery Yard’ spelled out on it in roughly nailed saguaro ribs. There were a couple of barns surrounding the corrals, an old-fashioned covered wagon and a stagecoach parked over by one of them. The wagon had the name of the livery yard stencilled on the canvas, along with a website URL that spoiled any sense of authenticity they may have been going for. There was a parking lot to his right with a beat-up old pick-up truck in it, suggesting someone was here. Solomon surveyed the yard, trying to spot them, and saw the girl instead.

She wasn’t much bigger than an infant but her clothes and her stillness made her seem older, like a grown woman rendered in miniature. She was standing further up the track by a gate leading out to the desert, staring straight at him, her hands folded in front like she was in chapel. Her skin and hair were as white as his. She held Solomon’s gaze, her face shaded and fringed by an old-fashioned bonnet, then turned and walked away, heading towards the gate and the desert beyond, her eyes scanning the ground as she went like she was searching for something. The horses nickered and moved away from her as she passed but she didn’t seem to notice. Solomon watched until she disappeared round the edge of a barn then turned and saw a man staring right at him.

‘You can see her, cain’t ya?’ He was leaning against the fence on the far side of a corral, his stockman’s hat pushed far back on his head and gloved hands gripping a coiled lariat. Solomon turned back to the barn, searching for the girl, but he couldn’t see her. ‘What has she lost?’ he asked.

‘I ain’t never got close enough to ask her. Most of the tourists don’t see her at all, though their kids do sometimes — dogs too. All the folks that work here see her, but I guess we’re used to her, or she’s used to us. The horses sure know she’s there. Don’t usually see her at this time of day though. Usually it’s evening, when the light is softer. She’s burning like a light bulb today. We call her Molly.’

‘Her name was Eldridge,’ Solomon said.

The ranch hand nodded. ‘I’ve heard that said before.’ He dropped his head to one side and squinted. ‘Say, you’re the fella they say brung the rain, ain’t ya?’

Solomon smiled. ‘Is that what they’re saying?’

‘That’s what I heard.’ The man continued to nod as if the world was suddenly making sense to him. ‘Help you with somethin’?’

‘I need a horse.’

‘Well then, I believe you come to the right place. Anything in particular?’

Solomon studied the herd of animals moving between them, a mixture of Quarter Horses, Arabians and Palominos, his mind providing their names as easily as if they had labels stuck to them. He approached the fence and held his hand out flat. A tan Palomino sniffed at it, snorted and moved away.

‘They can probably smell the smoke on you,’ the ranch-hand said. ‘They got real spooked by the fire. All I could do to stop them kicking down the fences and running wild.’

Solomon moved round the edge of the corral and the horses all edged away before he got near. A flash of white in the corner of his eye made him turn round, expecting to see the girl. Instead he saw a horse standing alone in its own corral, tossing its mane and looking straight at him. It was an American Saddlebred, a pure white stallion, easily seventeen hands high. Magnificent.

‘You don’t want that one,’ the ranch-hand said. ‘That one’s mean and it ain’t for hire.’

‘What’s his name?’ Solomon asked, moving towards it.

‘Sirius, though most of the guys here call him “Serious”, cos he sure is one handful. That there’s the mayor’s horse, though he don’t ride him much no more. I ride him when he’ll let me to keep him exercised, but I don’t like doing it and I guess he’s none too fond of the arrangement neither. He’s thrown me more than once, and I got the bruises and scars to prove it.’

Solomon reached the fence and held out his hand. ‘Sirius,’ he whispered, and the black nostrils flared then it dropped its head and started to walk towards him.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ the ranch-hand muttered. ‘I ain’t never seen him come to a stranger before.’

The stallion drew closer and Solomon watched the roped sinews of its muscles ripple between the white velvet of its skin. He could sense the power in it, like lightning made solid, and his mind began to riff on its name:

Sirius. Brightest star in the night sky. Worshipped as a god in ancient Persia. Sometimes depicted as a white stallion named Tishtrya — the rain maker.

The horse stopped in front of him and lowered its muzzle to Solomon’s palm.

Maybe it was you who brought the rain and not me.

Solomon moved his palm up from beneath its chin and over the muzzle to stroke its cheek. The stallion stepped closer, its head moving over the top bar of the fence and dipping down to rub against the side of Solomon’s head.

‘Well look at that.’ The ranch-hand shook his head and pushed his hat back about as far as it would go without falling off his head. ‘You two are just about the exact same colour. You can’t tell where one of you ends and the other begins.’

Solomon turned and studied the man. He was sinewy and lithe like the lariat he was holding, his skin burned leathery by living outdoors, making him appear older than he was. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Name’s Marty.’

‘How about I borrow this horse, Marty? He looks like he could do with the exercise, and it’ll save you a job.’

Marty smiled and shook his head. ‘Like I said, this is the mayor’s horse and he ain’t for hire.’ He pointed back at the main corral. ‘I can fix you up with a grey Palomino, if it’s the colour you’re partial to.’

‘I don’t want to hire him, I only want to borrow him. Why don’t you call up the mayor and ask him for me?’

The smile melted away. ‘You want me to call Mayor Cassidy?’

‘Tell him Solomon Creed respectfully requests the use of his horse for a few hours.’

Marty ran his hand across his forehead as though he was wiping sweat away and rearranged his hat on his head. ‘I got his contact details back in the office, I could call him from the phone in there I guess.’

‘The mayor and I have an understanding,’ Solomon lied. He knew he needed a horse and he knew he had no money to hire one.

Marty looked at the horse then back at Solomon. ‘All right then. But don’t be surprised if the answer is “no”.’

He turned and Solomon watched him walk away across the livery yard towards a wooden building decorated with posters advertising genuine cowboy experiences.

The stallion snorted and took a step back from the fence, tossing its head and shaking Solomon’s hand free. Solomon looked up at the huge animal, all muscle and mass. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s you and me find out if I can ride.’

Marty pulled his glove off and pecked Mayor Cassidy’s name into the office laptop one letter at a time to get his details then dialled the number on record. He straightened up and looked back out into the yard. Molly had appeared again. She was standing by the water trough, staring at the spot where he had left Solomon. It was the first time he had ever seen her do anything other than stare at the ground. The phone connected and the mayor answered, sounding anxious. ‘Yes?’

‘Mayor Cassidy. This is Marty over at Sam’s Livery.’

‘Oh, hi, Marty.’ Now he sounded relieved.

‘I’m awful sorry to bother you, sir, but I got a fella here name of Solomon Creed says he wants to borrow your horse.’

‘He’s … is he there now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you keep him there?’

‘Sure. I need to saddle him up so I can easily stretch it out as long as — Jesus …’

A flash of white streaked across his view, snatching the words from his mouth.

‘What? What happened?’

‘It’s him.’ Marty craned forward and the brim of his hat hit the window and knocked it off his head. ‘He’s taken Sirius.’ He watched horse and rider thread their way past the corrals and on to the track leading out to the desert.

‘I thought you said he wasn’t saddled?’

‘He’s not.’ Marty stared at the slim figure of Solomon Creed hunched low on the horse’s back and gripping its mane with his hands. ‘He’s riding bareback.’

44

Cassidy hung up and looked over at Morgan. ‘He stole my horse.’

‘Who?’

‘Creed.’

‘Why?’

‘How would I know?’

‘But … where’s he gonna go?’

‘I don’t know. Away from here.’

Cassidy stared out of the window. Morgan’s office faced the square, so he couldn’t see much beyond the church opposite and the mountains rising in the distance. ‘What are we going to say to Tío? He was supposed to be—’ He turned round and lowered his voice. ‘He was supposed to be our … offering.’

Morgan’s face softened into a smirk. ‘Well, you changed your tune. An hour ago you were wringing your hands about whether to give him up or not, now you’re pissed he got away.’

Cassidy had never liked Morgan. Even as a kid he’d had a slightly sneering, superior manner and it had been made much worse by the addition of a uniform and some authority. Right now he hated him. He blamed him entirely for the mess they were in. He was the one who had suggested taking occasional shipments to boost the town’s flagging finances. He was the one who had made the initial introductions to the cartels. And he was the one who’d said ‘yes’ to smuggling Tío’s son into the country without consulting either him or Tucker. It was all his fault and now he was smirking at him.

‘So what do we do?’ Cassidy asked.

‘I guess we try and find him.’ Morgan leaned forward in his chair and picked up his desk phone. ‘He won’t get too far on horseback.’ He punched in a number and waited for someone to answer. ‘Rollins, it’s Morgan. Put out a BOLO on one Solomon Creed, last seen at Sam’s Livery, probably heading out of town on a stolen white horse.’ He gave him a description then hung up. ‘Might as well call the field too, see if we can’t put something in the air and spot where he might be heading. We can still salvage this, don’t worry.’

Cassidy shook his head. ‘So much for keeping him off the record.’

Morgan shrugged. ‘Times like this you gotta be flexible.’ He began to tap in a number from memory, stopped when the phone began buzzing on the table. He glanced up at Cassidy, put the desk phone down carefully and picked up the cell. The caller’s number was withheld.

‘Yes?’ He took a breath then nodded. ‘OK.’ He hung up. ‘That was Tío,’ he said.

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he was on his way.’

Cassidy felt the room get colder. ‘Here?’

‘Where else?’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’

‘But he never goes anywhere. Why would he come here? Why would he need to?’

The phone buzzed again, a message this time. Morgan opened it, read it, then turned it round so Cassidy could see.

‘That’s why he’s coming,’ Morgan said. ‘Because debts like this he collects in person.’

Cassidy pulled his reading glasses out of his pocket and squinted down at the two word message on the screen.

The town where Tío had been born.

The town that had betrayed him and paid the ultimate price.

The town that was no longer there.

45

Tío watched his message go then gazed out at the flat, dry land passing by. His old self, the man who had stayed in his hilltop hideaway for eight years, would not have sent the message. That man was cautious, careful, risk-averse, always with an eye on the future and doing what he could to safeguard it. He looked down at the seat next to him where the framed photographs of his daughters lay next to the printout of the burned skull. He had no future now. ‘Pull over,’ he said and the Jeep crunched to a halt on the side of the road. ‘Get out.’

The driver glanced at the guard in the passenger seat, then they both got out.

Tío closed the messaging app and opened another, which looked like nothing more than a big red button. He tapped in his password — carlosmariasofia — the middle names of his three dead children, then got out of the car.

The taller of the two guards stepped forward, finger on the trigger of his M60, his eyes alert. He was called Miguel, had a father in the cemetery and a mother called Maria-Louise he sent money to regularly and who lived in a nice bungalow on the Baja coast. The other guard was Enrique but everyone called him Cerdo because he ate like a pig and looked a little like one too.

‘Look back down the road,’ Tío told them, and they obeyed, neither of them quite sure what they were supposed to be seeing.

Tío could just make out the buildings of the compound perched on a hilltop about three or four miles back. It appeared tiny at this distance. Insignificant. It was supposed to. Anything big or grand would have attracted attention. The only thing drawing attention to it now was the smoke coming from one of the outbuildings. Tío lifted the phone, took one last look and tapped the red button on the screen.

There was a rumbling like thunder that shook the ground then the whole vista erupted in dust and fire as all the defences tripped at once.

Miguel and Cerdo raised their guns and instinctively moved towards Tío as a second series of explosions shook the ground and the whole hilltop disappeared in a cloud of dust and debris. Tío watched until it settled enough that he could see everything was gone. His whole world for the past eight years, swept away at the push of something that wasn’t even a button. So much for his legacy.

‘Let’s go,’ he said and got back in the car.

They drove away, following the signs to Highway 15 that would take them north to the Arizona border.

Tío never once looked back.

46

Holly Coronado walked out of the Priddy building and into the bright afternoon sun feeling like she wanted to punch someone. Not, not someone — Morgan.

They had kept her in the interview room for almost an hour before some timid man in a uniform stuck his head round the door and told her no charges were being pressed and she was free to go. Morgan hadn’t even shown his face.

She hurried down the street, her anger driving her on. She had avoided going out since Jim had died, not wanting to face the public and their looks of sympathy. Now she didn’t care. She was also aware that it probably suited Morgan and his cronies if she kept out of the way and her mouth shut. And that’s why she was going to do the exact opposite.

The hospital had a strange holiday feel about it when she stepped into its antiseptic interior. There was a buzz about the place, a kind of euphoria that had been carried back by all the staff who had returned victorious from facing down the fire. She saw it shining in the face of the receptionist, only to vanish a moment later when she turned to Holly and recognized her.

‘How do I go about requesting a copy of a coroner’s report?’ Holly asked, and a look of pity passed over the receptionist’s face.

She picked up a phone and pressed a button. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, in a way that made it sound like she was actually saying I’m sorry for your loss.

Holly turned away while the woman spoke to someone. She hated the fact that the tragic details of her life were so public. She hadn’t even given her name but the woman had known exactly whose report she was asking about.

Two orderlies burst through a door into the reception area, their laughter heralding their arrival. It was strange for her to think of a hospital as a happy place, they held too many bad associations for her. The last time she had been in this building was when she miscarried, and the smell of these places always took her back to the dark days of her mother’s final months. She had moved back to St Louis and spent days breathing in this hospital smell while watching the cancer gnaw her mom away to nothing. She was only sixty-seven.

Her parents had already been fairly old when they’d had her, a last snatched chance at a family after chasing down careers. They had always been the oldest parents at the school gate, the oldest at her graduation — the first to die. Her father was seventy-six when his heart had called it quits after a lifetime as a workaholic trial lawyer fuelled by coffee and cigarettes.

‘Mrs Coronado …’ She turned and saw a man in a white coat holding out a manila envelope. ‘It’s a copy of the coroner’s report on your husband,’ he said. ‘I thought you might come for it, so I got it ready.’

She glanced at the doctor’s badge. ‘Thank you, Dr Palmer.’ She frowned as her brain caught up with what had just happened. ‘How did you know I’d ask for it?’

‘I treated a patient earlier — Solomon Creed? He was asking after it. He was asking about you as well. I figured once he caught up with you, you’d come for it. And here you are.’

‘Yes.’ She took the envelope and slid her finger beneath the flap. ‘Here I am.’

‘I had a read,’ he said. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ Holly pulled out the folded sheets. ‘The toxicology tests were all negative, and the BACS readings were negligible — that’s his blood alcohol concentrations. He hadn’t been drinking. He must have fallen asleep at the wheel or swerved to avoid something. His skull trauma is consistent with a car wreck. There were no other broken bones and no major organ damage. He was very unlucky. I’m sorry, Mrs Coronado. I hope this is of some help.’

She folded the papers and slipped them back in the envelope. ‘Thank you, Dr Palmer,’ she said, ‘you must have to deal with a lot of death in your line of work and I appreciate your time.’

‘Grieving is a hard process and it’s often difficult to make sense of it. Knowing the details can be a big part of coming to terms with what has happened. It never gets easy, but it does get better. I thought you might want this too.’ He handed her another envelope with a PD sticker and a crime number printed on it. ‘It’s what was in your husband’s pockets when they brought him in here. We don’t need to hold on to it any more.’

Holly took the envelope and felt something heavy shift inside it. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s very kind.’

She felt tears welling up from somewhere deep and she turned and walked away before the doctor could see them and feel moved to offer any more sympathy. This was exactly the sort of thing she had gone out of her way to avoid. She didn’t want people’s pity.

She pushed through the main door and escaped the cheery, disinfected atmosphere of the hospital. Outside the heat was building again and she walked across the parking lot to the shade of some mesquite trees. She broke the seal on the envelope and tipped the contents into her hand. The heavy thing she had felt was Jim’s car keys. They had a door key on them too, the key to their home, a key he would never use again. There was also twenty dollars in notes and change and a small piece of brown paper with a number on it and a printed note that read: Your document request has been approved and is now ready to collect.

It was a requisition slip from the town archive. Jim’s study had been littered with the things ever since he’d started work on his book. The tear-off stub at the bottom was still in place. It meant he had never picked it up.

Holly checked the time then looked down the street to the museum building that housed the Cassidy archive. It should still be open, just about. She stepped out of the shade and into the heat. She didn’t want to go home yet anyway. She wasn’t sure she would ever want to go back there again. It was tainted now. They had trespassed there and torn it apart — along with everything else.

47

The moment Solomon’s weight had settled upon the stallion he had known he could ride him. He could feel him, like an extension of himself, and only had to look out at the desert and the horse had taken him there. He couldn’t imagine fixing a saddle to the horse’s back and putting a barrier between them, it would be like placing a board between two people dancing the tango. That was what it felt like, like they were dancing, dancing at full speed across the flame-scorched desert, the thrum of the hooves like a heartbeat across the ground.

They had taken a wide course round the airfield because he knew people would be searching for him now. The rain had dampened the ground so he rode fast with no fear of kicking up dust. There were no cacti left standing in the fire zone, only blackened stumps and the pulpy remains of exploded flesh where the heat had boiled them from within then baked them into black puddles. He could smell their remains, the smoky notes of roasted organic matter with sweet hints of putrefaction already starting to blossom. The flies had smelt it too and were already feeding on the dead cacti and whatever animals had been caught by the fire, teeming in black clouds like animated embers buzzing in delight at the feast.

Solomon reached the edge of the blackened ground and looked down into a wide gorge worn over centuries by a river. A wide stream snaked its way along the middle of the riverbed, rain running off from the mountains. On the opposite bank were lines of tracks in the drying mud where animals had come down to drink, drawn by an instinct that told them water flowed here when the rains came. There were no tracks on his side; everything his side was dead. He scanned the land beyond the river. To the northeast he could just see the fan of a windmill rising above the desert and turning gently in the breeze.

The Tucker ranch.

A turkey vulture flew overhead, the broad black cross of its wings moving leisurely across the sky, its primary feathers splayed like fingers. It turned slowly, its head cocked sideways to check him out, then banked away and drifted off to the northeast, the same direction he was heading.

Solomon moved down the bank to the stream, slid from the horse and crouched to cup water from the river. It tasted of ozone and earth and felt warm as blood as it slipped down his throat. The horse drank too, nudging him gently with its foreleg to check he was still there.

When the horse stopped drinking Solomon leaped on to its back and waded across the stream, then rose up the bank and broke into a steady trot, heading straight towards the distant windmill. Ranch buildings took form as they drew closer, lines of fences sketched on the land and curling round to form corrals. The horses inside them didn’t move, adding to the stillness of the place. The only movement came from the windmill and the turkey vulture turning slowly in the air above it.

The ranch felt deserted and Solomon wondered if the owner and all the hands had gone to fight the fire along the edge of their land or were inspecting damage and repairing it. Or maybe they were watching him through the crosshairs of a hunting rifle.

The horse moved on towards the still and silent buildings. He could hear the squeak of the windmill and was catching the smells of the place on the breeze: baked wood, animal dung and something fresh and sharp and metallic. The horse snorted and tossed its head as he smelled it too and Solomon understood why the turkey vulture had flown here rather than back to the burned wasteland where roasted treats lay thick on the ground. It was because there was something more enticing here, something that called to the primitive brain of the carrion bird. The smell of freshly spilled blood.

48

The jeep bounced Tío from his daydream as it left the road and started travelling over rougher ground towards the western horizon. He had been remembering his father and the whitewashed, red-tin-roofed shack he had grown up in and how they used to sit in the shade of the front wall, resting after a day spent in the opium fields hidden high in the mountains. His father had been a gomero, an opium farmer, like all his uncles and everyone else he knew, tending the fields, irrigating the crops, then slicing the seed heads with razor blades and carefully collecting the thick white sap until they had enough to sell to the middlemen who drove around the area and screwed everyone on price: everyone except his father. He had never given in on a deal and had taught his sons that every dollar you gave away was a dollar you were putting in another man’s pocket. He always said you had to have pride in yourself, in your work, and, most of all, your family.

Tío gazed out of the window and watched the distant poles moving past; slender sentries that did nothing to stop the flow of people and goods heading north. The track they were driving along ran parallel with the US border, the most crossed national border in the world — three hundred and fifty million each year, and that was only the legal ones.

When George W. Bush had been in office he had pledged to erect a fence along the entire length of the border, almost two thousand miles, at a cost to the American tax payer of almost three million dollars a mile. They had managed to cover about six hundred miles before the project ran out of money and the Obama administration shut it down. The gaps that remained were plugged with these tall poles fitted with security cameras and infra-red sensors to alert National Guard units or SWAT teams if there was any attempt to cross the border, any time of day or night. They created what they called a ‘virtual wall’ and Tío had an army of paid informants feeding him up-to-date information about which parts were being repaired, or were out of service. This was another lesson he had learned from his father — the value of information.

Once, when they had been waiting for the middleman to come and buy their sticky black loaves of opium tar, he had told him, ‘The man who has the most information always has the upper hand.’

And it was true. The reason his father had always driven such a hard bargain was because he took the time to talk to the other farmers, check their yields and how much they were charging. It was a constantly fluctuating market and he would hold out for more money when the others, who never worked as hard as he did or tended their fields as well, fell short on their crop. He would use this information to sell at a premium, standing steady in the face of the middlemen who protested that he was robbing them blind with the prices he was charging. They always paid though. Expensive product was still better than no product at all and the extra cost would get kicked up the supply chain, so no one lost out. That’s what his father had figured. But there was a flaw in his reasoning and ultimately Tío had learned from his father’s mistake. And of all the lessons his father had taught him, this had been the most important, and the most painful.

‘You want me to stop by the house, boss?’ Miguel asked from the driver’s seat.

Two small barns and a tin-roofed shack had appeared on the track ahead: a cattle station and pump house.

‘Take it round to the far side and park up by the windmill.’

The front door of the homestead opened as the car drew closer and a man burned almost black by a lifetime spent in the sun stepped out.

‘Flash the lights,’ Tío said, ‘twice fast then once slow.’

Miguel obeyed and the man on the porch turned around and went back inside, closing the door behind him. Tío remembered how hot it got inside a tin-roofed house like this, the hot metal pouring the day’s stored heat down until you could hardly breathe. He and his brothers always had to stay inside whenever the middlemen came round. ‘This is men’s business,’ his father had told them, ‘but you need to learn it. You’ll be men soon enough. So listen but don’t talk and don’t make a sound.’

Not one of Tío’s brothers had made it past their fifteenth birthday. Two died of fever and Ramon, the eldest, the one he had named his own son after, was shot alongside their father. Tío had learned a valuable lesson from that too.

‘Right here,’ he said, and the Jeep pulled to a halt in the shadow of the small pump house built at the foot of the windmill tower.

Cerdo got out first from the passenger seat, pulling his M60 from the footwell and doing his secret service shit again. Tío got out next, not bothering to wait for Miguel. He walked to the door of the pump house and threw it open, letting sunlight stream into the cramped, dusty interior.

‘Take the stuff out of the trunk and give me the keys,’ Tío said, stepping into the pump room and sliding a large polystyrene foam crate to one side to reveal a manhole cover beneath. Miguel held the keys out as Tío walked past and he took them and carried on over to the shack.

The rancher opened the door when he was still a few feet away. He stared out from the boiling darkness like a man peering out from hell. Tío could smell the sweat burned into the air and the fabric of the building.

‘¿Me Sabes, eh?’ Tío asked.

The man nodded, a single downward jerk of his chin, his doleful eyes never leaving Tío’s, the watchful fear in them showing that, yes, he knew exactly who the man standing in front of him was.

‘Tomas las llaves y vayansa.’ Tío held out the keys. ‘Nunca tell vuelves. Nunca! ¿Entiende?’

The man nodded again. He took the car keys and disappeared inside for a moment, leaving the door open. There was almost nothing in the house, a table and two chairs, a single cot pushed up against a wall with blankets piled on one end, a stove with an old-fashioned coffee pot on top and a five-gallon oil drum with its top cut off and a pile of scavenged mesquite twigs sticking up from inside.

The man reappeared clutching a battered canvas satchel he was stuffing an iPad into, the only thing that hinted at the greater income and lifestyle he enjoyed as a tunnel master. He walked past Tío without a word and headed straight for the parked car.

Miguel and Cerdo glanced up as he approached, gas cans dangling from their hands. Miguel looked at Tío, uncertain what to do. Tío shook his head and watched the dusty figure of the man close the trunk, walk up to the driver’s side, get in and start it up.

The Jeep backed away from the pump house then drove off in a wide circle back towards the same track they had come in on. The tunnel master might have been living in this place for years, but he had driven away after one word from Tío and never even looked back. There was something powerful about that. Something liberating.

Tío stepped into the house and felt the heat close around him like a fist. He tore a strip from one of the blankets then went outside, winding it round his hand as he walked back to the pump house, thinking about what he had said to the rancher:

Nunca tell vuelves. ¡Nunca!

Never come back. Never!

He stepped into the pump house, opened the hatch in the floor and lights blinked on automatically, illuminating the painted concrete sides of a wide shaft below. There was a hydraulic platform wide enough to carry almost a ton of product and Miguel dropped down on to it while Cerdo started passing everything down from the car.

Tío took in the landscape, this land he had owned and run far more effectively and comprehensibly than any government. This had been his kingdom and he had been its king, though he had never felt more free than he did now. He remembered the line from some song that had been a hit when he was a kid, something about freedom being just another word for nothing left to lose. That was how he felt now. Losing his son had set him free because he had nothing left to lose either. He turned and took one long last look at the country he would never see again.

Never come back.

Damn right.

Then he stepped down through the manhole and into the tunnel that would take him to America.

49

Solomon slipped down from the back of the horse and listened to the tick and creak of the ranch buildings cooling in the afternoon air. There were three long barns and a large wooden homestead arranged around a loose quadrant. The house seemed still, the tied-back curtains in all the windows revealing dark rooms framed by white-painted boards worn back to the wood in some places by the weather.

The flutter of soft feathers broke the silence as the turkey vulture settled on the roof of the pump house in the corner of the quad. The wind ruffled its feathers and rotated the blades of the windmill above it with a slow squeak. Other than that, everything was still, everything was silent. The vulture folded its wings and cocked its head to one side, looking straight at the barn facing the main house.

‘I smell it too,’ Solomon murmured, heading towards the two large barn doors hanging suspended from steel runners. There was a gap in the centre through which the smell of blood was leaking out. His horse moved away, over to a corral where other horses twitched and flicked their heads nervously, the smell of fresh hay and water drawing him as surely as the scent of blood drew Solomon and the vulture to the barn.

The afternoon sun was dipping towards orange now and throwing a reddish light over the side of the barn, as if the blood inside had begun to soak into the building. He stopped short of it and studied the darkness framed by the outline of the doors. Inside, thin shafts of light cut through the dusty gloom from skylights set into the roof, sketching out the edges of horse stalls with feed baskets at head height, and a faded blue pick-up truck parked over to the left that smelled strongly of motor oil and hay. It was the same smell that had lingered in James Coronado’s study. Whoever had ransacked the house had come from here. Tucker, he presumed, one of the inner circle.

The vulture’s wings flapped softly behind him as it moved from the pump shack to a closer perch, drawn by the smell of blood. The bird did not seem at all wary of him, as if he saw him as a kindred creature.

Is this what I am? Solomon wondered. A carrion beast drawn to the smell of death?

He took another step and passed through the gap in the doors, out of the light and into the darkness.

The smell of blood was like a physical presence inside the barn, as solid as the shadows. It was coming from his right where no skylights leaked light and the blackness was total. He stared into it, listening for the soft breath of someone lying in watchful wait or the thrum of a heart charged with adrenaline, pushing blood into muscles that were coiled and ready to spring. He heard nothing.

He reached out, gripped the edge of the door and started walking forward, dragging it open in a steady rumble and spilling daylight into the darker interior of the barn. The body was lying against the far wall, the hands tied together by a rope that had been thrown over the ceiling beam. He was stripped to the waist, his grey skin streaked with blood.

‘Old Man Tucker, I presume,’ Solomon whispered.

The door banged to a halt against the end of the runner and Solomon gazed upon the study in death before him, examining his own reaction to it as much as the details of the murder. He knew this was a shocking thing he was looking at and yet he was not shocked by it, and it was this that disturbed him more than the slaughter. What kind of a man must he have been to feel nothing at the sight of this?

Behind him the turkey vulture hopped closer and he imagined it cocking its head to one side so it could feast its eager eye on the delights Solomon had revealed inside the barn. He envied the bird its pure, uncomplicated existence, refined over thousands of years until it was the perfect embodiment of its purpose. It did not need to analyse its responses or try to work out what they meant. Blood meant food. Blood meant survival. For Solomon, blood complicated things. It slammed a door in his face and meant he could not now question the man who had most probably broken into Holly Coronado’s house and ask him what he had been looking for. No doubt whoever had killed him had asked, most likely got answers too. He had been tortured before he died. There were four raw patches on his exposed upper body where the flesh had been neatly sliced off in strips, two either side of his spine and one on each side of his neck, the precision of the cuts hinting at considerable skill with a knife and a familiarity with the torturer’s craft.

The flesh is thinner in these places, Solomon’s mind whispered to him. The nerve endings are closer to the surface, making the cuts more painful.

There was one final wound in the centre of the old man’s chest above his heart and the dirt all around him was painted with arcs of arterial blood that had come from this deathblow. The blood was still wet and fresh and Solomon wondered if the killer was still here. At the same moment, he sensed movement out in the yard. He turned. Saw the girl walking towards him. And saw the shotgun in her hand.

50

The elevator platform bumped to a halt against soft rubber buffers and lights flickered on in the first section of the tunnel. The tunnel extended north for almost a mile and had cost two million dollars to build, cheaper than the border fence designed to keep them out. Tío had built ninety tunnels like this along the western side of the border ranging from Baja California to Texas, every single one paid for with the profits from the very first consignment each had carried. Tío stepped off the loading platform and on to one of the railway carts. Miguel and Cerdo shifted a bag of weapons and the cans of gasoline off the loading platform and on to the carts, then Tío pushed a button to engage the electric motors.

The carts moved smoothly forward and Miguel and Cerdo crouched down as they left the loading area and the ceiling got lower. Tío sat down and settled in for the ride. It would take ten minutes to cover the mile of track and he closed his eyes and let the gentle movement of the cart rock him into a state of calm, thinking again of the day his father and brother died.

He and his brother Ramon had been hiding in the heat of the house, sent there by his father because the middleman was coming to buy their crop. They had heard him drive up in his car, greet his father, then the boom of a gunshot had shaken the walls. His brother had reacted immediately, pulling his work knife from his belt and running out the door. A second shot had boomed. Then there was nothing.

Tío had never forgotten that silence, how total it seemed, like it would swallow him up. He remembered hearing the click of the shotgun being broken and reloaded and realizing that it was just him now, him and the man with the shotgun. His father never liked his mother being around when the deals were being done, so always sent her down to the market in El Rey.

He remembered hot tears running down his cheeks, tears of fear and anger. He had bitten his fist to stop himself from sobbing, because he knew the man would be listening, trying to figure out where he was, and the thin wooden walls of the shack would offer no protection against a shotgun blast. For the first time in his life he’d realized there was no one there to protect him, no one but himself. Tío on his own. Tío when he was still Hector Rodriguez Alvarado. Tío when he was only two weeks north of his eighth birthday.

He remembered his hand closing around the handle of the knife he had been given as a gift on his birthday to use in the fields, because he was becoming a man now and a man needed his own knife. He didn’t feel like a man right then, tasting the blood from biting his fist and the salt of his tears. The crunch of footsteps drew closer and he wondered if he could be quicker than Ramon, dart outside and stick the knife in the man’s neck before he could shoot. His anger and fear almost drove him to do it, but then something made him stop. He knew he was fast but not faster than a bullet and the man would be aiming right at the door, waiting, because it was the only way in and out of the shack. It was his survival instinct that had made him stop; stronger than fear, stronger than anger even. He heard another soft crunch outside and realized that if he did nothing, if he stayed where he was, the man would come into the shack and shoot him where he stood. He couldn’t leave witnesses and he couldn’t afford to wait it out either. There were two dead bodies lying out there for everyone to see and the sound of the gunshots would have echoed down the valley. Soon, people would come to see what had happened and the man needed to be gone. Another crunch. Closer now.

Tío moved away from the wall and slowly across the room so as not to make any sound. He had pushed the blankets together on the cot he shared with Ramon, moving them into a pile so it might look like he was hiding there, then stole back to the door, still wide open after Ramon had run through it, and pressed himself flat to the wall.

The barrel of the shotgun appeared first, sliding into view through the crack between door and wall. The middleman followed, squinting into the dark cabin with his sun-drenched eyes. Tío saw his face and recognized him. He was called Tuco, a sour man his father had a particularly low opinion of.

‘He’s nothing but a thug with family connections to the bosses,’ he had told them once after one of his visits. ‘He has no brains and he knows I know it. I can always make him pay more than he wants to because he’s too stupid to outsmart me.’

Tuco stepped through the door and moved towards the bed. Tuco the thug with the family connections. Tuco with the shotgun and the blood of his father and brother on his hands. He levelled the shotgun at the bed. And Tío ran.

He slipped from his hiding place and burst through the door, nearly tripping over the body of his brother as he headed across the ground towards the jagged rocks that marked the start of the mountain path.

There was a bang behind him as Tuco turned and caught the barrel of the gun on the edge of the door. Tío darted right then left, zigzagging across the ground like a rabbit with a dog after it. He reached the entrance to the mountain track just as a boom echoed down the valley and rock exploded around him. He felt a sharp sting on his leg but he kept on running, keeping below the level of the uneven ground as he ran up the path and into the mountains. Another crack of gunfire sent shards of rock flying through the air but nothing hit him and Tío was gone before Tuco could reload.

He’d spent three nights in the poppy fields, drinking water from the irrigation tanks and listening to the farmers who came up to work the fields. He learned that Tuco was telling everyone he had found his father and brother already dead and that someone must have robbed them and taken the youngest boy with them. To Tío’s amazement, the farmers didn’t question the story at all. They were only interested in who might have done it and whether they might be in danger themselves.

He cried that first night, furious at the injustice of the world and frightened and hungry and alone. He felt such anger; anger for his mother, grieving for a dead husband and son, and worrying about her missing child. He wanted to go to her, show her that he was OK, only he knew things could never be OK, not now. He was frightened of going back too. If he told everyone what had happened they would most probably despise him for running away instead of trying to fight like Ramon had done.

He had lain there for two days working out what he should do, hiding in the fields of poppies with the petals falling round him like snow. He was feverish and hungry and his leg was starting to swell around the spot where the buckshot had caught him. The opiates in the pollen numbed the pain in his leg a little, though not the one in his heart, and they gave him strange dreams where he imagined he was talking to a shining man trapped inside a mirror who told him how he could get his revenge.

He thought about all the advice his father had given him and how, in the end, none of it had been any use. He was dead and the man who had killed him was alive. He realized then that it was not enough to have the most information, or the upper hand in a negotiation, or the best product to sell at market, you also had to be the one with the power. And he would never have any power if he ran away. So he went back down, limping all the way on his bruised and swollen leg.

His mother had wailed when he walked back in the door, crying in relief and horror at the sight of the dirt- and blood-streaked, half-starved little boy she thought she had lost. She cleaned him up, gave him food and summoned his uncles so he could tell them what had really happened. He’d felt a great relief as he spoke, like he was shifting a huge weight off his back and handing it to them. They were the grown-ups, his father’s brothers, Ramon’s uncles too, they would get justice for them both.

He remembered lying on his cot, his alone now Ramon was dead, while his uncles talked on the far side of the room, a rumble of low voices, the sound of serious things being discussed. Finally Uncle Herrard had walked over, sat down on the bed and told him he was never to repeat what he had told them because Tuco was Don Gallardo’s cousin and no one would believe the word of an eight-year-old son of a dead gomero over his. He’d said he needed to move away, for his own safety, and that they would arrange for him to go to Tijuana where a cousin had a fishing boat. Tío had been dumbstruck. He didn’t want to move away from his mama and he didn’t want to become a fisherman. What he wanted was for one of his uncles to go down into the town, find Tuco and put a knife in his heart for what he had done. But they were going to do nothing. Only he could avenge them.

The next day he waited for his mother to go and fetch the water, then he slipped out of the house and walked down the road and into El Rey. There was a café in the market square where all the important people ate their meals and he headed straight to it. He saw Tuco sitting at a crowded breakfast table drinking fresh orange juice and shovelling eggs into his fat mouth. He had wanted to run over right then and stick the fork in his neck, but he knew he had to be patient if he wanted to stay here. Tuco was sitting two seats down from Don Gallardo, head of the family who ran everything. He watched him, stuffing his face and laughing at the boss man’s jokes. He knew he would have to be smart if he wanted to one day sit at that table in the centre of the town, and have people laugh at his jokes and make sure no one would dare try to hurt his family again.

He’d waited until they’d almost finished eating then slipped out of the shadows and walked towards them. Tuco saw him first and went pale. It had made Tío feel good, like he had a little power already. The table fell quiet as he got closer, even Don Gallardo stopped talking and turned to look at the little boy walking over to his table.

Tío came to a halt, bowed, then spoke. ‘Señor Tuco, I want to thank you,’ he said in a voice that surprised him with its steadiness. ‘If you had not arrived when you did the banditos would have surely killed me too. Please take this as a symbol of my family’s thanks.’ He held out his hand and placed his father’s ring on the white linen tablecloth. He had found it by his mother’s bed. She must have taken it off his father’s hand before they buried him, worried about the future and no money coming in.

Tuco looked at the ring but didn’t touch it.

‘The boy is offering you a gift,’ a voice said. ‘Be polite and take it.’

Tuco did as he was told, his soft hand reaching forward and scooping the ring away.

Tío stared into the face of the man who had spoken.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ Don Gallardo asked him.

‘Hector,’ Tío had replied. ‘Hector Rodriguez Alvarado.’

Don Gallardo nodded. ‘You’re a smart boy, Hector. A boy with manners and respect. I like that. Nobody wants trouble here.’ He shot a look at Tuco. ‘Trouble is bad for business.’

That was when Tío realized they all knew. Every man at that table knew that Tuco had killed his father and brother, but all they cared about was business. His father, his uncles, all the mountain farmers who worked the poppy fields were no better than animals in their eyes, mules to do the heavy work so they could reap the harvest.

‘You come here tomorrow, same time,’ Don Gallardo said. ‘I got a job for you.’

And that was how he had got out of the fields and into the organization.

Tío opened his eyes as the carts began to slow and caught Miguel looking at the thin silver chain he was gripping in his hand. ‘This was my mother’s,’ he said, flicking a small silver locket with an image of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe engraved on to it. ‘And this was my father’s —’ He held up the thin gold wedding ring, the same one he had placed on the white linen tablecloth as a tribute to Tuco. ‘You’ve got to keep your family close, am I right? Nothing more important than family.’

The tunnel started to open up a little and the ceiling became higher, then the carts slowed to a smooth stop by a loading platform identical to the one they had left behind on the Mexican side.

‘Welcome to America,’ Tío said, rising from his cart and stretching the kinks out of his back. ‘Land of the free.’

51

The girl was about nineteen, her white-blonde hair falling loosely over her shoulders and down the front of a white cotton dress that made her seem ghostly. Her eyes were pale like Solomon’s and seemed to stare right through him.

Blind, his mind told him. Ellie Tucker is blind.

The pump-action shotgun she held in her hands swung back and forth along with her slow swinging gait and Solomon could feel her scrutiny even though she could not see him.

‘I know you’re there,’ she said. ‘I crawled out the window, you son of a bitch, and I can hear to shoot better than most can see to, so don’t try nothing. I called the cops too. They’re on their way right now, so you better not’ve hurt my daddy none.’

Solomon felt the skin tighten on his neck. If the cops were coming he needed to be gone from here. He looked at the shotgun.

Winchester 12 — ‘The Perfect Repeater’ — 20 gauge — accurate up to 50 feet — six rounds fully loaded, which he had to assume it was.

He glanced at the corral. His horse was drinking from a water trough about twenty feet away, a lot of distance to cover while trying not to make a sound, and still well within range when he got there. His horse would make a noise for sure. Maybe if he was running away she might let him go, leave him for the cops to chase. He studied the way she was holding the gun, tight to her body as if it was part of her. She could shoot, he was sure of that. But would she? She stopped, her head tilted over to one side, listening to the tick of the buildings and sniffing the air. Her face hardened.

‘What did you do?’ Her voice was raw, angry. ‘I smell blood, what did you do?’

The turkey vulture hopped away, disturbed by her voice. She turned towards the faint flap of wings and fired without hesitation.

The bird exploded in a boom of blood and feathers and cartwheeled away across the dirt. She racked another round in the chamber with a smooth, well-practised grace and listened again through the dying echo of the gunshot, her head tilted towards the spot where the carcass of the bird now lay bloody and tattered.

Solomon heard the wail of a siren, in the distance but getting closer. Ellie heard it too and tilted her head back towards the barn, the gun swinging round until it was pointing at a spot marginally to the right of where Solomon was standing. He couldn’t tell if she wanted to keep him here until the cops arrived or shoot him before they did. Either way, it was a bad deal for him. He looked over at the parked pick-up truck to his right, the only thing close enough to give him any cover but still too far away. He breathed slowly, hyper aware of every sound. The siren grew louder. The gun barrel moved back and forth in a small arc that passed through the spot where Solomon was standing. Then his horse snorted on the far side of the yard and the barrel jerked towards it.

‘Ellie,’ Solomon shouted, snatching her attention back to him. The barrel swung back and he leapt to his right just as a shot boomed inside the confines of the barn, shaking dust from the roof beams and chewing up the horse stall he had been standing in front of.

He hit the dirt and rolled forward using the momentum to flip back on to feet that were already running. He heard the snick-snack of the pump action and pictured her, following the sound of his footfalls, the gun following as if radar-controlled. He wished he was barefoot again so he could feel the ground and cushion his steps better. She would know he was heading for the truck and, if she was as good a shot as she claimed, she would aim ahead and fire at where he was going to be, not where he was. He stopped dead at the thought, straightening his legs and skidding to a stop just as another boom shook the barn and chewed the wall in front of him to splinters.

Solomon threw himself forward again, sprinting then diving for the truck, hitting the ground as a fourth boom rang out that ripped the licence plate off the rear fender and sent pain singing through his trailing foot. He landed heavily and rolled over, putting the engine block between himself and Ellie. There were pockmarks in the leather of his boot where the buckshot had hit. The skin beneath stung, but the leather had held. He could still run on it — if he got the chance.

He dropped his head down and peered through the dark oily gap under the truck. Ellie’s bare feet were planted in the dirt in a solid sideways stance showing she was still aiming at the truck. The siren was louder now. He had minutes to get away and she still had two shells in the shotgun. If he tried to run, she would shoot him, no question, probably hit him this time. But if he waited for the cops to arrive they would hand him over to whoever he had seen prowling through Holly’s house with the silenced pistol. He had to get away in the next minute or he might not get away at all.

He looked around for something he might throw to cause a distraction but the floor was clean. He thought about slipping his boots off and using them, but they had already saved him from injury.

The siren howled. Ellie didn’t move. But he had to. He reached up and grabbed the handle and the door creaked open.

‘Steal my daddy’s truck and I’ll kill ya,’ Ellie called from the yard.

Not much of a dis-incentive. She was going to shoot him anyway.

He looked inside, saw keys hanging down from the steering column, and thanked God for trusting country ways. He leapt forward through the door, arm outstretched, and felt springs dig into him from the worn seat. The keys jingled as he grabbed them and twisted them round. The engine coughed. Didn’t catch. Then the whole world exploded in jewels of glass as the side window blew inwards. Ellie had fired level, assuming he was sitting in the driver’s seat. He twisted the key again and the engine coughed. He had maybe a second before she realized her mistake and repositioned. The old engine turned again then caught, the big V8 shaking pebbles of glass down on top of him.

Solomon threw himself forward and out of the cab just as buckshot tore up the bench seat he had been lying on. He scrambled to his feet and started running, out of the shadow and into the sunlight towards his horse. Behind him he heard the slide rack again and a dry click as the hammer fell on an empty chamber.

His horse flicked its head and backed away as he drew closer, forcing him to slow down or risk it bolting. The siren was loud now, bringing men with more guns, all of them fully loaded. He grabbed the horse’s mane and hauled himself on to its back, found his balance and made to turn. Then he stopped.

When the cops arrived they wouldn’t be able to follow him by car but they could on horseback. He edged the stallion towards the gate, kicked the top loop clear and pulled the gate open.

The horses inside nickered and snorted and backed away, favouring the familiarity of the corral to the freedom he was offering. He gave his horse some heel to drive it forward, forcing the herd round. They moved reluctantly, their eyes rolling to white in confusion then one of them panicked and broke away and the rest followed, the ground shaking with hammering hooves as the herd poured out of the gate and scattered across the desert and away from the ranch.

Solomon kicked his horse and followed them. From the corner of his eye he saw the police car, a dust cloud behind it as it barrelled into the yard. Ellie was standing with her head to one side, lost in the noise. Solomon wished he could have told her what Bobby Gallagher had said before he died, that her name was the last thing he had spoken. Maybe he would get the chance later, but right now he had to get away.

He caught up with the rear horses and kept low on the stallion’s back, making it harder for anyone to see which horse he was riding. He rode hard, keeping up with the herd until the desert swallowed him up, and the ranch was lost from sight.