Under the Skin

The road from Brownsville to Kingsville runs straight north and the sparse traffic moves fast.

They make good time to Corpus Christi before being slowed by one stoplight after another. The coastal lowland is a patchwork terrain of swamp and scrubland and grazing pasture, and Gustavo remarks that it looks the same as the gulf country in Mexico. Angel tells him this region was part of Mexico at one time, before the gringos stole it for themselves about ninety years ago. The information comes as outrageous news to Gustavo and he falls to a fit of low cursing of every gringo ever born, be he dead or alive.

They take turns trying to nap in the backseat of the car while the other drives but their sleep is fitful at best and both of them are left unrested and irritated.

At sundown the sky is the color of raw beef. They stop at a roadside café called La Mexicana to have an early supper. Angel orders pork tacos and Gustavo goes for the chicken enchiladas and both of them are greatly disappointed with the food. When they go to pay at the register, Gustavo tells the cashier that the food isn’t fit for pigs, but she is an Anglo woman who speaks no Spanish and only stares apprehensively at their hard brown faces.

Then they are on the road again, bearing into the darkness of the newrisen night.

I turned west at the seawall, away from the bright lights of the boulevard’s good-time joints. The sky was clear, the stars thick and blazing in the east, dimmer in the west, where the moon was gleaming like a silver egg high above the gulf. She laughed at the pleasure of her hair whipping in the wind and had to keep brushing it from her eyes. The radio was tuned to a big-band station and she swayed to the rhythms of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” The Hollywood Dinner Club’s big spotlight beam was revolving in the sky ahead of us and off to our right. She said the Avilas had told her all about the Hollywood, even though they themselves had never set foot inside. They had told her it was as luxurious as a palace, that it belonged to the man I worked for.

“Him and his brother,” I said. “Would you like to go dancing there sometime? They have swell dance bands.”

“Swell?”

“Very good. Excellent.”

She slid closer to me on the seat and hooked her arm around my elbow. I felt the light press of her breast against my arm, the touch of her thigh against my leg. “I think that is a swell idea,” she said.

I drove almost all the way out to the west end of the island before turning off onto a narrow hardpacked access road that connected to a stretch of beach hardly anyone ever used except for a few daytime fishermen. The Hollywood spotlight was far behind us now and we could no longer see the glow of the city lights. I parked alongside a row of dunes and cut the lights and motor. The tide was in, and we sat in the car, listening to a mild surf lapping along the beach. The gulf was almost placid, its waves low and gentle and gleaming bright under the moon.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“It’s the same water you swam in at Veracruz. But like I warned you, girl—it’s probably colder right now than what you’re used to.”

She slapped my shoulder playfully and said, “I am not so afraid of cold water as someone I know.” Then slid across the seat and got out of the car.

I stepped out and stripped down to my bathing trunks and tossed my clothes on the car roof. The Mexican Colt was under the driver’s seat. When she came around the car she had her dress in one hand and her bag in the other and she placed them both on the hood of the Terraplane.

The bathing suit she wore was a stunner—a black sleek thing that clung to her like a second skin. It rode high on her legs and was held up by a pair of thin straps and was cut so low in the front it exposed the tops of her breasts. She held out her arms and did a model’s pirouette and I saw that the suit was backless almost to her waist. If she’d worn that thing on a public beach she would’ve been arrested for indecent exposure. My dick swelled in my swimsuit.

“It was made in France. I bought it from a catalog but I have not worn it until now. If it shocks you I can put my dress on and swim in that.” She could probably read my face in the moonlight. Her voice was full of fun.

“No. It’s fine. It’s…I like it.”

She laughed. “I thought perhaps you would.”

She reached in the bag and took out a folded cotton bedsheet and handed it to me. “So we don’t have to sit on the sand,” she said.

As I spread the sheet out on the sand, she ran into the water, her legs flashing, her hair flying. She took long splashing strides until the water was to her thighs and then dove into a swell. She came up about ten yards beyond where she’d gone under, then stood in water as deep as her breasts, her hair plastered to her head and shoulders. She waved to me and yelled, “Come on, pollito—it’s not so cold! Don’t be afraid to get your feathers wet!”

I ran in. It wasn’t as cold as it could’ve been but was cold enough. I whooped and dove and came up sputtering. I trudged toward her through the waist-deep water and she laughed and began backstroking away.

I dove again and started swimming hard, but every time I paused to look ahead of me I saw that she had put even more distance between us, backstroking smoothly, moving through the water as lightly as a canoe.

I swam on in my clumsy fashion, forcing myself to breathe in rhythm with my strokes. The next time I looked in front of me she was treading water twenty feet away, watching me. I stroked on, then stopped and looked again and couldn’t see her. Then heard her laughter and saw that she had moved off to my left.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Youngblood? Are you lost?” I could see the whiteness of her teeth. She went into a smooth crawl, heading for open water. I swam after her.

She went out a long way before she finally stopped and turned around to watch me plodding toward her. When I got to within a few feet of her I stopped stroking. We were out farther than I’d ever been before. From way out here the beach was a thin pale strip in front of a vague dark line of dunes.

We treaded water, rising and falling on the mild swells. The moon was slightly behind me, its light on her face, her smile. I slowly sidestroked closer to her until we were within arm’s length of each other. Her foot lightly brushed my leg. She reached out and touched my face.

Then her eyes shifted past me and went wide and she said in a whisper, “Ay, dios…”

I turned to look—and saw a black fin standing high against the light of the moon and cutting toward us like an enormous cleaver.

Twenty yards away…fifteen…

Daniela grabbed my arm and yanked me to her and swirled us around so that she was between it and me. I tried to get back in front of her but she held me off balance with an arm around my neck, pinning my head against her shoulder. She ordered me to pull my feet up under me as high as I could. She had the physical advantage over me in the water and I couldn’t have broken loose of her except with a struggle that wouldn’t have helped matters at all, so I drew my feet up and her legs pulled up against mine and she clutched me tightly to her, one arm still around my neck, the other around my chest.

The thing barreled past us, its rush so strong and close that the wash lifted and pushed us aside and I saw the white scars of buckshot and bullets in the monstrous fin. Its wake had a fiery sparkle and the tailfin hissed by like a scythe blade.

Daniela held me fast, turning us so we could see the phosphorescent streaks as it bore away.

Then it swung around and started back.

“Levanta los pies!” she said, nudging my leg—and I pulled my feet back up under me as high as I could. Her legs clamped up around mine and she held us in a tight bobbing tangle of arms and legs as the shark came at us again.

Daniela kicked at it as it bumped us. I saw grooves along the front of its wide flat hammerhead and saw the eye on its outer edge—black as a shotgun muzzle and twice the size. It knocked us aside as lightly as a ball of cork.

The high fin trailed its glimmering fire toward the moonbright horizon and then vanished under the surface.

“Vete!” Daniela said, pushing me off toward the distant beach.

I swam—fighting down the fear that surged at the thought of the thing turning around and coming for us again, this time from underneath and with its jaws wide.

She could’ve made it back to the beach in half the time it took me, but she stayed at my side, swimming easily and slowly and with hardly a sound, while I stroked as hard as I could, busting up the water and gulping mouthfuls of it and huffing like a bellows. I had no idea how long it was before we were in water shallow enough to stand up in. I hacked out some of the water I’d swallowed and we slogged out of the surf and staggered over to the bedsheet and sprawled onto it.

I lay on my back, panting, staring up at the stars. She hugged my chest and pressed herself against me, her face on my neck, her breath rapid and warm on my skin.

When I was finally able to talk, I said, “Jesus Christ!”

“I have never seen a martillo so big.”

“Whooo! It had to be that Black Tom bastard they tell about. They say it’s been around here forever. They say it’s eaten more than a dozen men over the years. They say it once ate a goddamn rowboat—and the two guys in it.”

“Then we must thank God we were not in a…goddamn rowboat,” she said.

My laughter started me coughing again. I propped myself up on an elbow and got the fit under control.

“What made you think,” I said between hard breaths, “of pulling up our legs?”

“My father was a fisherman. He knew very much about sharks. But he said the trick does not always work.”

Her eyes were bright and wide, her breasts pumping. I’d nearly pissed at the sight of that monster. And she’d kicked it.

I put my hand on her leg and she lost her smile and for a moment I thought maybe I was pushing things. Then she hooked a hand around my neck and pulled my face down to hers.

We kissed long and hard. Our tongues got into it. I stroked her leg and then moved my hand to her breast and she made a low sound. I pushed the straps off her shoulders and tugged down her top. Her nipples were erect under my fingertips. I put my lips to them, my tongue, and she arched her back and pulled my face harder against her. She slid a hand down my chest and belly and into my trunks and closed it around my erection.

We slipped off our suits. She sucked a deep breath when I entered her. Her legs clamped tight around mine and we rocked and rocked and it couldn’t have been a minute before I came and collapsed on her like I’d been clubbed, my face against her neck and hers against mine, both of us gasping like we were trying to inhale each other from under our skins.

After a while we were kissing again, stroking each other’s hips and ass. My cock hardened inside her. We started rocking once more, this time more slowly and gently. I had better control now and held myself back until I sensed her getting close—and just as she arched against me and gave a high moan I let myself go.

We held to each other and didn’t talk much as the night grew cooler. The moon was a lot closer to the gulf when she whispered that Señora Avila would be worried. We hugged and kissed and the press of her breasts and belly started rousing me again. She laughed low against my ear and then rolled away and stood up and went to retrieve her dress from the car hood, saying we really shouldn’t make Señora Avila worry. So I got up and got dressed and put the top up on the Terraplane. We kissed a few times more in the car and then I got us rolling.

It was a little past ten o’clock. She was right that Mrs. Avila would be anxious. She snuggled against me and hugged my arm, her legs folded under her on the car seat, her skirt high on her thighs. Her face was against my shoulder and her damp hair smelled of the sea. We rolled along without talking, just listening to the radio—“Temptation,” “Begin the Beguine.” She knew “Red Sails in the Sunset” in Spanish and softly sang along with the instrumental.

I supposed there was really no reason to be surprised that she was so bold about sex. Anybody as brave as she’d been with that hammerhead wasn’t likely to be afraid of too many things or be one for coyness. Except for whores, though, I’d never met a Mexican girl so sexually direct. Most Mex girls of respectable family made at least a show of being good girls, and most actually stayed virgin till their wedding night. But Daniela was no virgin, and I wondered how she’d lost it, especially since she was hardly more than a kid. But I didn’t wonder about it for long—because when you got right down to it, what the hell difference did it make?

The Avila porch light was on, of course, and light showed in all the windows. At the end of the street the Casa Verde was all lit up too, the card game still in progress. I parked in the shadows of an oak in front of the Avila house. We were kissing goodnight when the screendoor screeched and the señora came out to the top step and looked at us with a theatrical hand over her eyes like she was scouting the open sea under a bright sun.

In the darkness of the car, Daniela giggled and held my hand pressed to her breast. She kissed me and said, “I must go.”

“Will you have breakfast with me tomorrow?”

“Of course.” She put a hand to my face and kissed me again.

“Seven?” I said.

“Yes.”

I got out and went around to her side of the car and opened the door for her and she slung her bag over her shoulder and I held her hand as we went up the dirt walkway to the Avila porch, where the señora stood with her arms out to receive the girl.

“Goodnight,” she said. “I had a very lovely time.”

I raised her hand to my lips.

“Ya, basta!” Mrs. Avila said, coming down to put an arm around the girl and pull her away. Daniela said goodnight again and laughed like a child as she allowed Mrs. Avila to steer her around and up the porch steps.

At the door she looked back at me to smile and wave and I raised my hand to her. Then the screendoor slapped shut and the wooden door closed behind it.

I parked the Terraplane next to the rickety fence in front of the Casa Verde, and as I clumped up the porch steps and entered the parlor I heard laughter and radio music and good-natured cursings coming from the kitchen. The house smelled of cigarette smoke and fried chiles. I went to the kitchen doorway and saw Pablo Lopez laughing and pulling in a pot at the table. They were all happily half-drunk. The countertop was littered with empty beer bottles and the sink crammed with greasy plates.

Gregorio looked over at me and said, “Qué tal, joven? Como te va?” Then he frowned slightly and I remembered what my face looked like.

I said everything was fine as could be, and he shrugged and said, “Ya lo creo.” I exchanged hellos with the others at the table and they also refrained from remarking on my bruises. All this time as their neighbor and I still made them nervous. I fetched a beer from the icebox and leaned against the counter and watched Morales form up the deck and begin shuffling.

There was an awkward silence while “Arbolito” played on the radio and then Gregorio asked if I wanted to sit in. The others all nodded and said yes, join us, please, and so forth. I said no, thanks, I was tired and going to bed in a minute. Avila’s wife must’ve told him of Daniela’s date with me, but of course he would make no mention of it. I was debating whether to tell them of our adventure with Black Tom when Gregorio asked if I’d seen my telephone message on the slateboard. I hadn’t. The only messages I’d ever received at the Casa Verde had been from the office and I hadn’t gotten one in so long that I rarely even glanced at the board anymore when I came into the house.

I went down the hall and saw “llamo el clobb—10:06 pm” scrawled on the slate next to the phone. I picked up the earpiece and dialed Rose’s number and he answered on the first ring.

“Youngblood,” I said.

“Where the fuck you been?”

I started to tell him but he said, “Never mind—just get your ass down here.”

“What is it?”

“Micks. Now get over here.” He hung up.

I figured I’d better be prepared for anything, so I went up to my room and packed a small valise. I put the .380 in the bag and took off my coat and put on the shoulder holster and slipped the Mexican .44 in it and put my coat back on. Then I went back downstairs and put the valise on the table by the phone and went into the kitchen. The game had just broken up and some of them were laughing and counting their money and some were bitching about their rotten luck, and then they all shut up and looked at me.

I told Avila that Daniela was expecting me to take her to breakfast in the morning but something had come up and I might not be able to meet her as I’d said. I said to tell her I didn’t know how long I would be away, maybe only until later tomorrow, maybe a few days, but in any case I would call on her as soon as I returned.

“Sí, claro, le daré el mensaje,” Avila said, nodding rapidly.

“Okay then,” I said.

They’d hit the team that made the nightly cash collection from the joints along the north end of the county—including all the places where Ragsdale had put in the Dallas slots. The two Ghosts had come out of a little club in Dickinson with the next-to-last pickup of the night and had just got in their car in the parking lot when a black Hudson sedan pulled up beside them and the men at the passenger-side windows opened fire with .45 automatics. The Ghost behind the wheel took hits in the head and died in a blink but our other guy—a fellow named Dooley—managed to tumble out the right-side door and run off with the attackers chasing him on foot and still shooting at him and he made it into the woods behind the club and hid in the darkness. He stayed crouched in the bushes and tried not to even breathe. He wouldn’t know it until after he was taken to the hospital but he’d been hit three times. He heard the shooters walking along the edge of the woods and cursing. He heard one of them say “Pete’s gonna shit.” Then he heard them walking away on the parking lot gravel and then somebody yelled something and there were a few more pistol shots and a moment later the Hudson went tearing out of the parking lot.

The last few patrons who’d been in the club would tell the police they heard the shooting and came out and saw two men walking back toward a pair of cars parked side by side. One of the men fired shots over their heads and the patrons all ran back inside and the shooter fired several rounds through the glass front window and they all hit the floor. The owner of the joint had crawled over to the telephone and called the police. What the owner didn’t tell the cops was that he also made a call to the Turf Club. After a while one of the patrons had peeked outside and saw that one of the cars was gone but the other car was still there—and then saw another man come staggering from behind the club and into the lot and fall down, but everybody in the club was too scared to go out and help him. Then the cops showed up.

The witnesses had all been smart enough not to spill too much to the police. They all said they’d never seen either of the two victims before. None of them had been sure of the make of car the shooters were in or if there had been another man in the car. Dooley the wounded Ghost feigned unconsciousness to avoid being questioned. Then one of Rose’s lawyers showed up ahead of the ambulance and had a private moment with Dooley before the ambulance guys took him away. He got the story from Dooley and told him what to tell the cops when they questioned him in the hospital. The lawyer then had a talk with the sergeant in charge of the investigation. Then he and the sergeant went to the station and chatted with the captain. When the official report was released it detailed a homicide by unknown assailants during the commission of an armed robbery and said the perpetrators stole nothing more than the wallet of the murder victim. The report made no mention of the Maceo name or that the guys in the Hudson had made off with more than two grand of collection cash.

“I figure they been checking us out the last few days,” Rose said. “They knew the places where Willie Rags put in those slots and they cased the route. They picked the Dickinson club for the hit because it’s on an open stretch of road, not much else around there, not many witnesses passing by. It makes for an easy getaway.”

It was nearly eleven-thirty and we were sitting in the office, me and him and Sam. I asked Rose what made him so sure it was the Dallas micks.

“Who else?” Rose said. “They hit the collection on the slots those Dallas fucks think belong to them. It aint coincidence.”

“What if the robbers were just anybody and didn’t know what route they were hitting?” I said. “And if it was Dallas, what would be their point? They couldn’t expect the take to cover the worth of the machines they lost.”

“Their point,” Rose said, “is to try to fuck with our business, to scare the piss out of our customers, make us think it can happen again, make us wonder when and where, maybe get us to reconsider their offer to negotiate. That’s their fucking point. Or maybe they just wanted to do something to feel better about losing their goddamn machines. That would sure as shit be my point.”

He blew out a hard breath and ran a hand through his hair. He was smoking mad. Outsiders had not only robbed his men, they had done it on his own turf.

“We’re not just guessing it was them,” Sam said. He slid a photograph across the desk to me. I turned it around and regarded the picture of a beefy, well-dressed blond guy sitting in a circular booth and showing his big white teeth at the camera, a goodlooking woman on either side of him. He was close to handsome even with a small scar over one eye and a nose that had been broken sometime. His eyes were so lightcolored they seemed to have no irises at all.

“That’s Healy,” Sam said. “Peter Healy. Pete Healy. As in ‘Pete’s gonna shit.’”

I looked up from the picture and Rose was showing that smile of his that had nothing in it that smiles are supposed to have.

“I don’t move on just a guess, Kid,” he said. “You oughta know that by now. And I aint been sitting on my hands these last few days. While they been checking us out I been checking them out. This Healy’s got a rep. He’s a comer, a hardass. Got his start on the loading docks in New Orleans but the word is he killed a guy and took off to Fort Worth. Got in with the Carlson bunch. Then he moved over to the Burke outfit in Dallas. Went on his own over a year ago and took a gorilla named Parker with him. Parker used to do muscle and clip-work for Burke. Six-four, two-seventy they say, scares everybody shitless. Healy was already getting a piece of most of the slots in both Tarrant and Dallas County. Now he owns all the machines up there.”

“The Fort Worth and Dallas outfits are afraid he’s getting too ambitious,” Sam said. “Afraid he might start moving in on their gambling clubs, maybe the cathouses.”

“Those Dallas guys are pussies in cowboy hats,” Rose said. “Too scared to put the fucker in his place—six feet under.”

“Healy keeps beating them to the punch,” Sam said. “He popped Lou Morgan, Carlson’s main muscle—and I mean he did it. Went up to Morgan in some little sandwich joint and boom-boom, two times in the head and walked out cool as could be. Broad daylight, a dozen people in there, and nobody saw a thing. The Parker guy’s a piece of work too. He took down two of Burke’s biggest palookas in an alley fight. Bit one’s nose and ear off. Broke the other one’s back.”

“It’s getting close to a fucken war up there,” Rose said. “A month ago one of Healy’s biggest joints burned down. Next day three of Burke’s best boys vanish. A week later one of them pops up in White Rock Lake. They drag the lake and bring up a car with the other two guys in it. All three had a bullet behind the ear. Persons unknown, the cops said, but the outfits know who it was.”

“With so much going on up there,” I said, “why would Healy start trouble with us by moving his machines down here?”

“That was Ragsdale’s doing,” Sam said. “Willie Rags contracted the slots from Healy and told him he was going to put them in Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur, all over the oil patch. But then he got ambitious. Thought he’d impress Healy by getting some of them into Galveston County.”

“So Healy’s big mistake was dealing with Ragsdale,” I said.

“No, that was only his first mistake,” Rose said. “His second mistake was thinking the slots still belonged to him. Then he hit my guys…that was his big fucken mistake.”

“I guess I’m off to Dallas,” I said.

“I want it done yesterday,” Rose said. He took two envelopes out of his top drawer and tossed them to me. One contained expense money, the other a city map of Dallas with exact directions to Healy’s office and to his home, and map markings showing the locations of several of his favorite restaurants and bars.

“Parker too,” Rose said.

“We talked to the Fort Worth and Dallas outfits an hour ago,” Sam said. “We’ll be settling our thing with Healy but we’ll be doing them a hell of a favor too—Healy out of their hair and their hands clean, nothing to hide from the cops. But they want Parker out too, and to show their appreciation they ponied up a big advance on a contract to buy all their machines from us from now on.”

“The least they can do,” I said.

“You and your partners will get a bonus on this one,” Sam said with a grin. “The least we can do.”

I stared at Rose. He almost smiled—then looked at his watch.

I got going.

The phone rang and rang before somebody finally picked up. A woman. “Jesus…what?” she said.

“Sheila?” I said.

There was a moment’s hesitation, and then, in barely above a whisper: “Who’s this?” One of those who never knew when one beau might call while she was with another.

“Let me talk to LQ,” I said.

“Huh? Say, who is this?” I could tell by her voice she was half in the bag. “You know what time it is? Do I know you?”

“Just put him on the phone, will you, sugar? It’s real important.”

The softer tone and the “sugar” did the trick. “Well…he’s sleeping pretty hard right now.”

“He’s passed out, you mean?”

“I don’t know if I’d say that. Just he’s sleeping pretty hard and it’d take a while to wake him, I think. Say, now, don’t I know you…?”

“How about Brando?”

“Who?”

“Ray.”

“Oh…Just a minute, I’ll go look.”

The phone clunked down and then I heard her voice at a distance but couldn’t make out what she was saying. After a minute somebody picked up the phone and coughed and said, “Yeah?” Brando.

“It’s me. Tell me how to get there. We got work.”

He gave me directions to Sheila’s house and then said, “Where we headed?”

I gave him a rundown on what happened to our men in Dickinson and what the job was. “I’m on the way to the ferry right now,” I said. “See you in about three hours. Be sure the Dodge is gassed.”

“It’s gassed already. Listen, me and LQ aint got but pistols. If we gonna need—”

“I already saw Richardson and got two Remington pumps with buckshot loads,” I said. Richardson was a graybeard who ran a hardware store in town but his real business was guns. He could get you any kind you wanted in almost any quantity. He even made after-hours deals at his home—his attic was an arsenal. He did a lucrative trade with Maceo men.

“Pumps,” Brando said. “Outstanding.”

“Be ready, both of you.”

The Dodge was parked at the curb in front of the house. I pulled up behind it and snapped off the radio in the middle of “Limehouse Blues.” It was close to four o’clock. The moon had set behind the pines but there were only a few thin clouds and the stars were thick and bright. There was an old Ford coupe in the driveway. The living room window showed light behind the curtain. I gunned the engine a couple of times and somebody pulled the curtain aside just enough to peek out and then let it fall back. Then the house went dark and the front door opened and LQ and Brando came out with their bags. The women stepped out with them and there was a lot of hugging and kissing and patting of asses while I locked up the Terraplane.

I put my valise in the trunk of the Dodge and got in the backseat. LQ and Brando came over and put their Gladstones in the truck too. There was a smaller bag with the pickup money and LQ jammed it under the front seat.

“You drive,” he told Brando, and settled himself by the shotgun window. Brando went around and got behind the wheel and cranked up the motor.

“Too bad that Terraplane seats only two inside,” Brando said. “I’d like to drive that honey to Dallas.”

“We took that honey to Dallas I’d be driving and you’d be the one riding in the rumble seat,” LQ said.

“Drive this,” Brando said, jacking his fist. He got us rolling. The radio started blaring “Stardust” and he turned the volume down.

“Goddamn day would have to have a lot more than twenty-four hours in it for you to’ve picked a lousier time to roust us,” LQ said without looking back at me. I could tell by his voice he was still partly drunk.

“Twenty-seven o’clock,” Brando said, and chuckled. “Thirty-three o’clock.”

“It didn’t take you three hours to pack a bag,” I said. “While you’ve been sleeping it off some more I’ve been driving, so don’t cry on my shoulder.”

I took off my coat and balled it into a pillow and stretched out on the seat with my back toward them and closed my eyes.

“He don’t sound real eager to hear about our good time, does he?” Brando said.

The weather stayed pleasant with only a hint of chill. The day broke cloudless and the air smelled sweet and dry. They hadn’t had a good look at my face till the morning light, and they naturally made a bunch of jokes about it—LQ saying it looked like I’d picked a fight with the wrong little girl—before I told them about the sparring match with Otis.

“Hellfire,” LQ said, “I never did understand why you done all that boxing anyhow. Playfighting by a bunch of rules. That don’t help a man a damn bit when he gets in a for-real fight. How you done him is proof of that.”

“What I don’t get,” Brando said, “is why you waited till you got knocked on your ass so many times before you busted him up. First time he floored me would’ve been the last.”

We stopped at a roadside café and took a booth in the back corner and all of us ordered coffee and cornbread, eggs and pork chops and grits. The waitress was a trim pretty thing in a tight skirt and we all gave her the once-over and she smiled at our attention.

She’d just walked off to the kitchen window with our orders when Brando said, “Oh man, I can’t keep it to myself no more—you gotta hear this,” and started telling me all about his fun with Cora Jane, the friend that Sheila had gotten for him. Cora Jane had done this to him, he said, she had done that, she had done everything. She had even shown him a couple of tricks he hadn’t heard of.

He didn’t shut up about Cora Jane till the waitress showed up with our breakfast plates. She fetched the coffeepot and refilled our cups and gave us all another pretty smile and said to just whistle if there was anything else we’d like.

LQ watched her sweetlooking ass walk away and whispered, “I got half a mind to tell her what I’d like…”

“You got half a mind, period,” Brando said, then got back to the subject of Cora Jane. There was no denying he’d had himself a time.

“That Cora Jane sounds like a ball of fire,” LQ said. He said Sheila was fun in bed but she liked her booze a little too much. After she’d been drinking a while he got the feeling she didn’t really know who she was fucking or really care.

“Hell man,” Brando said, “what difference does it make what’s going on in her head as long as you get to put it to her?”

“Makes a difference,” LQ said.

“You’re never satisfied, that’s your trouble. You expect too goddamn much.”

“What the hell you know about it?” LQ said. “You’d hump a rock-pile if you thought a snake was in it.”

“Snake this.”

We got back on the road but took our time. We didn’t want to get to Dallas till just about dark. Brando drove while LQ and I sat in the back and went over the maps and the directions to Healy’s office and to his home. The routes had been clearly marked on the map in green ink. Because his house was a couple of miles south of downtown and not too far off the highway, we decided we’d check it first, even though it wasn’t likely he’d be there at such an early hour. His office was in a downtown building a few blocks west of the city park and close to the railtracks. If we didn’t find him there, either, we’d start checking his favorite hangouts.

We stopped at a roadside lunch wagon and bought hamburgers with all the trimmings and bottles of ice-cold Coke and ate the lunch at a picnic table in the shade of a tree. When we got going again, LQ was at the wheel while I went over the maps with Brando.

“What if he aint anywhere we look?” Brando said. “Could be we’ll check someplace and he aint there and then we head for another place and he’s headed for the place we just checked.”

“We’re not leaving Dallas till we put him down,” I said. “If we don’t find him tonight we’ll hunt for him again in the morning. If we spot him in daylight we’ll tail him till it’s dark, then pick our best chance to do it. No daylight hit if we can help it. Too chancy.”

“We could end up hunting him for days,” Brando said. “What if we find him and he’s got ten guys with him?”

“Damn poor odds, all right,” LQ said. “To be fair we’d have to let him send for more guys.”

His big grin filled the rearview and I gave him one back.

“Ha ha,” Brando said. “I’m serious, man. What if we find Healy but the Parker guy’s not with him? Or what if we find Parker first? As soon as we do one of them, the other’s bound to hear about it and get set for us—or make himself too scarce to find.”

“Parker’s his main muscle,” I said. “Wherever Healy’s at, Parker’s probably with him.”

“One of these days I’d like to have a plan that aint got no prob’ly to it,” LQ said.

“Be nice if Healy was home when we got there,” Brando said. “And if there wasn’t nobody with him but Parker.”

“Yeah, that’d be nice, all right,” LQ said. “And it’d be nice if they got killed in a car wreck today. Or if they both came down with a case of the blues so bad they shot theirselves and left a little note saying they just couldn’t stand it no more and we heard about it on the radio as soon as we got to Dallas. That’d be nice.”

We passed the city-limit sign at dusk. LQ pulled off onto a side road and stopped the car and Brando got out and poured some Coke in the dust to make enough mud to smear on the license plates. He wiped his hands on a rag and got back in the car and we moved on. By the time we were making our slow way through the streets of Healy’s neighborhood and reading the street signs by lamppost light, the sky was dark and the moon fat and orange and just above the trees.

“It’s the next right,” LQ said from the backseat.

“I know it,” Brando said.

“Don’t slow down when we drive by,” I said.

“I know it.”

We made the turn onto Carpenter Street and I counted three houses down on the right. There was a dark-colored Chrysler parked in the driveway of the third house and a pair of men were just then coming out the front door and down the porch steps. One of them was a blond guy holding his hat and adjusting the crown crease with the edge of his hand. The streetlight showed Healy’s face clearly—he looked just like his picture. The other guy was so big there was no question who he was. He must’ve said something funny because Healy laughed as he put on his hat. Parker gave us a glance as we passed by, but you could tell he was checking nothing but the car speed.

“Sweet Jesus,” LQ said softly. “You believe this luck?”

I turned to look at them through the rear window and saw them getting in the Chrysler, Parker behind the wheel. I told Brando to take a slow right at the next corner, and as we made the turn I saw the Chrysler back out into the street and then head off in the other direction from us. And just-like-that, I had a plan.

“Take a right and floor it, man,” I said. “Get us in front of them before they hit the highway.”

Brando screeched the Dodge around the corner and gunned it down the street running parallel to Carpenter as I told them what I had in mind. LQ and I grabbed up the shotguns and jacked shells in the chambers. There was hardly any traffic on these residential blocks and we zoomed through three stop signs in a row and almost hit a scooting cat. We barreled up to a T-intersection and Brando had to brake sharp for it and take the turn pretty wide and we just did miss colliding with an oncoming car that went veering off the road.

“Yaaaa-hoooo!” LQ hollered.

We went barreling up the block and there was the Chrysler, coming from our right on Carpenter. Brando wheeled a hard left just in front of their car and Parker had to stomp his brakes to keep from ramming us. We came to a halt at the stop sign at the corner, the highway just another block ahead, and the Chrysler rolled up behind us with its klaxon blaring.

Parker stuck his big head out the window and shouted, “You stupid shit! I oughta yank you out of that car and rip your ass in half!”

There was one car coming our way from the direction of the highway and no traffic at all behind the Chrysler.

“Now,” I said. LQ stepped out on one side of the car and I got out on the other and we swung up the shotguns. Behind the glare of the Chrysler’s headlights Healy was just a dark shape on the other side of the windshield for an instant before the glass exploded in the blast of my Remington. LQ’s shotgun boomed at the same time and we pumped fast and fired three more loads apiece and then scooted back into the Dodge. Brando sped us across the intersection and past the car stopped on the other side. Nobody in it could’ve seen our faces under our hat brims even if they’d tried to, especially not against our headlights’ blaze. Hell, all they would remember was the flashing blasts.

Then we were on the highway and headed back south.

“Wooooo!” LQ yelled. “Yall see that big bastard’s face when I pointed the pump at him? The surprise of his goddamn life. Half his head went all over the backseat. Yow!”

“Piece of cake,” Brando said. “Just like I figured.”

An hour south of Dallas we stopped at a roadhouse and gorged on barbecue ribs and corn on the cob and shared two pitchers of beer. We were loud and happy and laughing like hell. Everything tasted great, every wisecrack was hilarious. Just being alive was a kind of aching pleasure from way deep inside.

“Listen,” LQ said. “There’s a place called Miss Jenny’s just this side of Waco. Aint all that much out of our way. I hear it’s worth every penny. Hell boys, we deserve us a reward.”

All I really wanted was to get back to Galveston, but Brando said “Damn right!” and I wasn’t about to argue against their fun, so I said, “Why the hell not?”

We took the junction road to the Waco highway and got to Miss Jenny’s an hour later. Because it was Sunday night, business was slower than usual and we didn’t have to wait long before we got taken care of. I picked out a brownskinned girl that looked part Mexican but it turned out she was another one born and raised in the U.S. who couldn’t speak but a few words of Spanish. She was enthusiastic but I had a little trouble finishing up until I closed my eyes and imagined Daniela—and then I came like a shot. But while I was getting dressed I felt even glummer than usual after getting my ashes hauled.

I was the first one back to the parlor. Brando came out a minute later, eager to tell me what a great time he’d had with a six-foot blonde named Queenie. LQ had bought himself two girls and so he took a while longer. He finally emerged from the hallway about a quarter hour later, grinning big and swaggering like a rodeo rider.

“Could be I was wrong about you’re never satisfied,” Brando said. “You looking plenty satisfied this minute.”

“And I’d like to say, Chico, that it’s a real pleasure to hear you say something that’s correct for a change.”

We hit the road again but hadn’t gone thirty miles before all of us were yawning, the adrenaline charge was worn off now and our lack of proper sleep the night before was getting to us. So we pulled into a motor court in a burg called Marlin and got rooms for the rest of the night.

We slept late and then had a big breakfast at a café down the road before we got rolling south once more. We swung east at Houston and got to Sheila’s house at four-thirty in the afternoon. I got out of the Dodge and tossed my valise into the Terraplane. LQ and Brando had started hinting around about maybe spending a little more time in Orange before heading back to Galveston, but I told them to forget it. They were still holding Friday’s collection money and Artie Goldman would be mighty red-assed if it wasn’t handed in today. I gave them the rest of the expense money to turn in too.

Where the hell was I going, LQ wanted to know.

“Got a date.”

“Who with?” Brando said.

“You guys don’t know her. Tell you about her next time.”

“Well, ex-cuse us for asking,” LQ said. He nudged Brando with an elbow and said, “Must be he don’t want you to know he’s took up with your momma.”

“Only because the two-dollar line to see your momma is so damn long.”

I followed them through Port Arthur and Sabine to the coast highway, then down the Bolivar Peninsula to the ferry. While we were crossing the bay we had a smoke at the bow rail and watched a school of porpoises rolling ahead of the ferryboat in the last of the orange sunset. Then we were at the dock and the gate went down and we drove off the boat. LQ and Brando headed for the Club and I turned off toward La Colonia.

I had intended to go to the Casa Verde and get cleaned up before calling on her, but when I saw how dark the Avila place was I pulled over. Their old Ford wasn’t in its usual spot alongside the house, so maybe they’d all gone out to eat or something, but even so they would’ve left the porch light on. The rest of the neighborhood looked and sounded the same as always—porch lights glowing, lights in the windows, faint music from radios, the sporadic laughter of kids.

I went up on the porch and knocked and knocked but got no answer. I tried the door and it was locked. I went around to the back of the house and there the Ford was, where Avila never parked it. The blinds were down in every window but there wasn’t a show of light behind any of them. I was about to break a pane in the kitchen door, then thought to try that knob too and the door swung open.

I switched on the kitchen light, then crossed into the dining room and turned on that light. The dining table was turned out of place and a corner of it had hit the wall hard enough to crack the plaster. A couple of dining chairs were on their sides and ants were swarming around the sugar bowl on the floor. The living room was such a jumble of skewed and upset furniture and scattered bedclothes that it took me a moment to see Rocha lying on the sofa—hugging a pillow against his stomach and staring at me, his head bandage gone and his face caked with dried blood.

I took a fast look for her—in the bathroom and in the Avilas’ bedroom. The couple was lying facedown on the sagging mattress in a furrow of dark jelled blood. The smell was getting high.

I went back out to Rocha and righted a table lamp and turned it on. Under its light his eyes were bright with pain. The bandage off his head was lying at the foot of the hallway. In addition to the head wounds I’d given him he now had knife cuts on his scalp and face. The worst wound was in his stomach.

“Cómo te parece?” he said in a rasp.

I said it didn’t look too bad but he needed a doctor and I’d get him to one. But first I wanted to know where the girl was.

They took her, he said. Two of them, both Mexicans, both big. One with a pencil mustache and the other with a big bandido and a squinteye scar.

Did he know who they were?

Well hell yeah. They had to be the rich fuck’s guys.

What rich fuck?

Calveras, who else?

Who was that?

I didn’t know about Calveras?

“Dígame,” I said.

He said that on the drive from Brownsville she had told him a story she’d already told his aunt and uncle about getting kidnapped down in Veracruz by a rich guy named Calveras. Had a wooden leg and only one eye. Had a hacienda in Durango or Chihuahua, he couldn’t remember where she’d said. Las Cadenas, the place was called—after a river it was next to. She’d been a prisoner for months before she escaped and went to hide in Brownsville with Rocha’s aunt and uncle, who’d known her since she was little. Rocha thought she might be pulling their leg about the rich guy—she seemed the type to overdramatize things, didn’t I think so? But his aunt and uncle believed her, and when she said she was afraid of being so close to the border because Calveras might find her, his uncle Oscar invited her to come to Galveston. Then the Avilas heard her story and they offered her a place to stay. Rocha himself still hadn’t believed her, though—not until those pricks showed up last night.

They’d come in the back way. One-thirty, two o’clock. Quiet as cats. Daniela was sleeping on the sofa, he was on the floor. He woke up as one of them was starting to crouch over him and there was just enough light to see the knife. His shotgun was in the closet and might as well have been on the moon. He kicked the guy and they tangled up and Daniela let out a scream that got cut short. They went crashing all around and the guy was cutting at his head and trying for his throat and then stabbed him in the stomach before Rocha locked on the guy’s knife arm and got his teeth in his ear. The guy pulled away as the hall light came on behind Rocha and he heard Avila say “Qué pasa? Quién es?” and that’s when he got his look at them—the other guy was holding Daniela from behind with a hand on her mouth. Then the light cut off and a door slammed and Rocha threw a shoulder into the guy and sent him crashing and bolted through the kitchen and out the door. He ran across the yard and tore through the hedge into the neighbor’s backyard and fell down, choking bad, then realized he had a piece of ear in his throat and managed to spit it out. He had to keep wiping blood from his eyes but the real pain was in his gut. The neighbor’s house was still dark—probably nobody in the neighborhood had heard a thing. He was expecting them to come through the hedge looking for him and he lay still to keep from giving himself away. He had no idea how long he’d been lying there before he heard the Avilas’ car start up beside the house and then pull into the backyard. A moment later he heard whispering at the Avila back door but he couldn’t make out what was being said. He heard a low cry and one of them cursed and said to shut up and he knew they were taking her. He heard them moving off through the grass. And then he didn’t hear anything until a car started up somewhere down the street and drove away.

He didn’t know any of the neighbors, didn’t know if they could be trusted, so he went back into the Avila house. He found them with their throats cut. There was no telephone but even if there had been he wouldn’t have called the police. He’d been a cop himself—which came as news to me—but it wouldn’t help him much, since he’d been fired and now had an arrest record for various felonies. He figured the police would find it easier to charge him with killing the Avilas than to believe his story. He’d stretched out on the sofa to ease the pain in his gut and to think things over but he must’ve passed out. When he came to, he could tell that it was late in the day. His belly hurt bad but the bleeding had slowed down to an ooze. And then he was out again. The next time he opened his eyes, there I was.

Well hell. It wasn’t like I didn’t know how fast things can change.

What I wanted to know was why the Avilas hadn’t told me the goddamned truth?

Because she told them not to tell anybody, Rocha said. She came up with the stuff about being orphaned and the Picachos being her godparents, and the Avilas went along with it because she said the truth was too complicated and shameful and didn’t matter to anybody around here anyway. Besides, who the hell was I they had to tell the truth to? All they knew about me was I was a pistolero with gringo eyes. They were afraid of me.

She wasn’t. Why didn’t she tell me?

Christ sake, she was a woman—who the hell knew why a woman did anything? He gave a raspy chuckle and said maybe she trusted some guys more than others.

I asked if that was why he’d stayed in Galveston—in some longshot hope that she’d give him a tumble.

He said to go to hell. Maybe she would’ve, if I hadn’t shown up with my goddamn fancy clothes and boots and cars.

I said if he was waiting for me to apologize for spoiling his plans he was going to bleed to death first—and we both grinned. Then his face clenched in pain, and I got busy.

I called Rose from the Casa Verde.

The phone picked up and he said, “Yeah?”

“Youngblood.”

“Why the hell aint you here?” He said LQ and Brando had told him about how smooth the Dallas job had gone. He sounded tickled pink.

I said I’d be there but I was with a guy in bad need of a doctor who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions or pull the cops into it.

“What? Bullet?”

“Knife in the belly. Bunch of other cuts.”

“One of our guys?”

“No, just a friend.”

There was a second’s silence on the line.

“Warrants?”

“No, but he’s Tex-Mex with a record and he’d be an easy fall guy if they connect him to the thing. Double killing. The guys who did it are long gone.”

“Cops onto it yet?”

“No. Once the guy’s safe I’ll phone the cops with an anonymous tip about the bodies.”

“Christ, Kid, what the fuck company you keeping? Hold on.”

It took about fifteen minutes but it seemed like an hour before he was back on the line and saying my guy was cleared for admission to the hospital and nobody there was going to be asking the wrong questions or calling the cops.

“Just tell the guy at the emergency desk your man’s name is Johnny Garcia. They’ve got him down as a driver for Gulf Vending and he’s coming in for an appendectomy. All taken care of. And listen: soon as you drop him off you get your ass over here. We got something here belongs to you.”

Up in the Studio Lounge LQ and Brando were at the bar with Sam. They waved me over and I saw Sam say something to the bartender. A bottle of beer and a double shot of tequila were waiting for me when I got to the bar.

LQ and Brando had been drinking since they’d turned in the collection money to Mrs. Bianco and they were loudly happy and slightly buzzed. Sam was in high spirits himself. He clinked his shot glass against mine and said, “Nice going, Kid. Here’s to success.”

He ordered another round for all of us and said, “Hey, fellas, what do you call a woman who’s having her period and owns a crystal ball?”

We looked at each other and shrugged. “We give up,” LQ said.

“A bitch who knows everything.”

He said for us to come on and we followed him to the office.

Rose was at his desk when we came in. He took three envelopes from a drawer and handed them to Sam and Sam passed them out to us. Each envelope held ten fifty-dollar bills.

“A little something to show our appreciation for a job well done, fellas,” Sam said. “Enjoy.”

I hadn’t told LQ and Brando about the bonus and they were happy as longshot winners. I slipped the envelope into my coat pocket. All I wanted now was to get going.

But then Rose said to me, “So? Who’s the guy in the hospital? Friend of yours, you say?”

I’d intended to have a good story to explain Rocha if I had to, a story that wouldn’t promote too many questions or involve mention of Daniela. But on the way over from the hospital I’d had other things on my mind. All I could think to say now was, “He’s the cousin of a friend. They’re damn grateful for what you did.” I hoped that would get me off the hook for having to know anything more about the guy. The last thing I wanted was to get into a discussion about any of it.

“Come again?” Rose said. “I pulled strings to help a guy who’s not even your friend? Hey, Kid, I aint in the habit of doing big-time favors for just anybody.”

“I know. Like I said, my friend’s grateful. Me too.”

“I get it,” Sam said. “This friend of yours…it’s a girl, right?”

If I said no, I’d have to invent some guy on the spot, and I wasn’t up to it. “How’d you guess?” I said, smiling big. But now I was going to have to give them some of it.

“When a guy does something for no good reason, there’s usually a girl,” Sam said.

“It’s kind of a rough story,” I said.

LQ and Brando had started for the door but paused and gave me a curious look at Rose’s mention of some guy in the hospital. On hearing about the girl, they exchanged a look and sat down on the small sofa. Sam lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. Rose tapped his fingers on the desktop.

Except for saying they were cousins and that I’d met them at a neighborhood party and taken a shine to them—especially her, I said, waggling my eyebrows to show what a casual thing it had been—I told it pretty much as Rocha had told it to me. Why not? But I didn’t clutter it up with a lot of detail. I said it turned out she’d been kidnapped in Mexico by some rich guy and finally got away from him and came to Galveston with Rocha. They were staying with friends of theirs named Avila. Last night a couple of goons who must’ve been the rich guy’s muscle busted into the house and grabbed her. They killed the Avilas—dead witnesses tell no tales—and tried to kill Rocha too but only left him in bad need of a doctor. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, he probably wouldn’t have made it. Or if Rose hadn’t got him in the hospital without the police getting involved.

LQ and Brando were watching me closely.

“I gave the cops a call,” I said. “They’re probably at the scene right now, but they won’t get much. It’s a neighborhood where nobody ever sees anything, even if they do. Anyway, I figure those two are over the border by now.”

“With the girl,” Rose said.

“I guess,” I said.

“Some story, Kid,” Sam said. “You weren’t kidding about rough. You knew the people who got it?”

“Yeah. Nice folk.”

“Jeez, tough break for them.”

“Goes to show you can’t be too careful who you take in under your roof,” LQ said. “Come on, Ramon, I could use a drink.” They got up and went out.

I started to get up too, but Rose said, “Hold on a sec, Kid,” and waved me back down in my chair.

“I better go press the flesh,” Sam said. “Make sure everybody’s drinking up and staying happy.” Then he was gone too.

Rose studied me over the flame of his lighter as he fired up a smoke. “This girl…she’s kind of special, huh?”

“I wouldn’t say that. We went out a coupla times.”

“How long you say you know her?”

“Not long. Didn’t really get to know her very well.”

“How long’s not long?”

“Well…a couple of days.” I grinned to show him how funny I thought it was.

He wasn’t buying it. “They say it don’t take long, sometimes—to get to know somebody pretty good, I mean.”

“Yeah, so I’ve heard.”

I stood up.

“So what you got in mind now?” he said.

“Do a little drinking with LQ and Brando, celebrate the bonus. Thanks a lot, by the way.”

“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Kid. Only reason you aint already on the way to the border is you needed cash.”

I had made up my mind to go after her the minute Rocha told me what happened—but I’d wanted to avoid any talk about it. There wasn’t anything to talk about.

“I gotta get going,” I said.

“Let me tell you something about women, Jimmy.”

“I have to go,” I said. I felt like I had a snake twisting around inside me.

“A woman’s never the reason. It’s always something else. Always. The important thing is to know what it really is.”

“All I know is, he’s not gonna decide how it goes.”

He stared at me without expression for a second—and then showed that smile that was nothing but teeth.

“Well hell, Kid…now you’re making sense.”

LQ and Brando fell in beside me as I made my way through the Studio crowd and headed for the elevator. LQ had his hands in his pockets and was twirling a toothpick between his teeth. Mr. Nonchalance. Some guy not watching where he was going bumped hard into Brando and said “Hey Jack—” and started to turn. And then he caught Ray’s look and shut up and moved on.

We rode down in a packed elevator. When we got out on the street I said I’d see them later and started around to the parking lot to get my valise out of the Terraplane. The train station was close enough to walk to.

They came along behind me, LQ whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I asked where they thought they were going.

“Name it,” LQ said.

“I got something to tend to that’s nothing to do with business. See you guys later.”

“Sure enough will, because we’re coming,” LQ said. “Won’t take but a minute to get our bags.”

“I just told you it’s not a business thing. It doesn’t concern you guys.”

“Bullshit,” Brando said.

“Goddamn it, it’s personal, I’m telling you—”

“We’re partners,” Brando said.

“Business or personal,” LQ said around his toothpick. “In sunshine or in rain.”

As soon as we got on the move the snake inside me settled down, but it felt coiled and ready. We left Galveston well before dawn, then grabbed the first westbound connection out of Houston. The day broke red behind us as we pulled out of the station. I’d called Rose from the Galveston depot and said LQ and Brando were going with me. He said he’d figured they would be and that their visas would be ready too when we got to the border.

The train made stops at several small stations along the way and finally pulled into San Antonio a little before noon. It stopped there long enough for us to get out and have a café lunch rather than eat in the dining car. It was the first time I’d been to San Antone since the night two years before when Rose and I had gone speeding out of it in the Cadillac, leaving dead men in the street.

We hadn’t talked much on the train, every man pretty much keeping to his own thoughts, but once the waitress served us our steak sandwiches and slaw, Brando said, “So how long we got to wait before hearing about this girl?”

I said she was Mexican and her name was Daniela, she was damn pretty and spoke good English. I told about meeting her at the Avilas’ after the fight with Rocha but said I’d first seen her on New Year’s Eve when she went by in front of us in a beat-to-hell Model T.

“Hellfire, I remember that!” LQ said. “She was a finelooking chiquita. You young rascal—you track her down or what?”

“No. Just luck.”

Brando wanted to know what chiquita we were talking about, how come he didn’t know about her.

“If you’d pull your head out of your ass every once in a while,” LQ said, “you might catch some of what’s going on.”

“Catch this,” Brando said.

I told about having breakfast with her at the Steam Whistle and then about our swim in the gulf that night. The part about the hammerhead knocked them for a loop.

“I’ve heard tell about Black Tom since I was a kid,” LQ said, “but I never believed he was no damn twenty-foot long. I still don’t.”

“Well I didn’t put a measuring tape on it but it was like a train going by.”

“Goddamn, man!” Brando said. “She saved your ass.”

“I’m not ashamed to admit it.”

LQ said, “She took a kick at that thing, no lie?”

“No lie.”

“That’s some girl.”

“Yeah.”

“Then what?”

“I took her home.”

“Well now,” LQ said, cutting a look at Brando, “what I can’t help but wonder is, did you and this ladyfriend have the pleasure of, ah, doing the deed, shall we say?”

“Yeah,” Brando said. “That’s what I can’t help but wonder too.”

“None of your goddamn business, either of you.”

They grinned right back at me. “Thought so,” LQ said.

We got back aboard and the train rolled out of San Antone. For a while we just stared out the window at the changing landscape. The grass thinned out and the trees got scrubbier and there was more dust and rock. The sky enlarged as the country opened up.

Then LQ said, “So what’s the plan, Kid? I mean, we just gonna go knock on his door and ask him to hand her over, or what?”

“I’m not asking him a damn thing,” I said.

They both smiled.

“So? What’s the plan then?” LQ said.

“Don’t know yet. A guy’s meeting us at the border with the kind of information we need for a plan.”

“This rich guy,” Brando said, “he’s bound to have some muscle on the payroll, right? Maybe more guys like the two he sent to snatch her?”

I said I didn’t know, but Daniela had told Rocha the place had cattle, so the guy had plenty of ranch hands for sure.

“Cowboys, shit,” LQ said. “If all he’s got is cowboys, I don’t care if he got a hundred. I never met a cowboy any damn good with a gun.”

“Jimmy here’s a cowboy,” Brando said.

“Not since we known him he aint,” LQ said.

That afternoon we reached the border at Del Rio. A dapper and neatly barbered Mexican named Lalo Calderón was at the station to greet us. He spoke good English and wore a white suit, dark sunglasses, and a mustache as thin as a line of ink. He smelled strongly of a flowery perfume. My face had healed up pretty well except for the shiner, and he gave it a look but made no remark on it. The only thing Rose had told me about him was that he was “a former associate” and very efficient. He now owned an import company with offices in Del Rio, Laredo, and San Antonio. I figured Rose hadn’t told him anything more than necessary about us.

We went into a café and took a table in a front corner by the window and ordered a round of beers. Calderón handed me our passports—mine in the name of Michael Chavez, LQ’s and Brando’s identifying them as George Thompson and Leon Buscar. He also provided a roadmap with a route marked for us in red ink all the way from Villa Acuña to a small town called Escalón, and a folded sheet of paper with a hand-drawn map of the way from Escalón to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, a distance noted in pencil as about twenty miles. He said the estate was deeded to one César Calveras Dogal. On another sheet of paper was a diagram of the hacienda itself, with several notations in Spanish.

“What about police?” I said.

“The nearest station of police is in Jiménez. That is fifty miles from Escalón. At Las Cadenas, Calveras is the police.”

He gave us directions to Sanchez’s filling station across the river in Villa Acuña and said a car would be waiting for us there. He stood up and apologized that he could not stay longer but he had another pressing engagement. He hadn’t touched his beer except to toast our health.

“Good luck with your business, gentlemen.”

He went out and crossed the street to an idling Chrysler waiting at the curb and got into the backseat and the car took him away.

“You get a good whiff of that fella?” Brando said. “About like a whorehouse parlor.”

It was an altogether different smell when we walked over the bridge and caught the Rio Grande’s ripe stink of shit and dead things.

“Fall in there and you’re like to die of poisoning or some godawful disease before you can even drown,” LQ said.

The town was a tangle of rutted dirt streets flanking a large plaza. Dogs and chickens dodged rattling burro carts and honking jalopies and grinding trucks. We went past an open marketplace full of hagglers and snarling with flies, hung with the butchered carcasses of calves and pigs and what Brando was absolutely sure was a dog. One stall held a row of skinned cowheads. The air was hazed with the smoke of cooking fires. Street vendors hawked sticks of meatstrips roasted on charcoal braziers. The sidewalks were full of squatting old women beggars in black rebozos.

“We damn sure aint in Galveston no more,” LQ said. “Sweet Baby Jesus, look at this goddamn place.”

“Wish all I had to do was look at it and not smell it,” Brando said.

The Sanchez filling station consisted of a small tin-roofed garage and two gasoline pumps. The ground all around the building was black and pungent with drained motor oil, littered with torn tires and rusted car frames and half-gutted engine blocks. Sanchez was a little guy in filthy overalls. I told him my name was Chavez and he said yes, yes, he had been expecting us. We followed him around to the back of the garage and there stood a black Hudson sedan. Gleaming from a fresh washing, it was the cleanest-looking thing in town.

Sanchez beckoned us to the rear of the car, saying, “Hay una sorpresa para ustedes en el portaequipaje.”

He worked the key in the trunk lock and took a squinting look all around, then raised the lid and gestured grandly into the trunk. It contained a pair of lever-action Winchester ten-gauge shotguns and a huge rifle of a sort I’d never seen.

“Son of a bitch,” LQ said. “That’s a BAR.” He took out the weapon—and Sanchez had another nervous look around.

A Browning Automatic Rifle, LQ said, U.S. Army issue, .30-06 caliber, with a magazine holding twenty rounds. He said he’d fired one many a time during his army days. He detached the loaded magazine and showed us how the weapon’s action operated, then snapped the magazine back in place and worked the slide to chamber a round and then set the safety.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, patting the rifle, “this here’s about half of any plan a man will ever need.”

There was also a shoulder-strap canvas packet holding five more loaded BAR magazines and a couple of cartons of ten-gauge shells.

I asked Sanchez who provided the weapons. He didn’t know, but Don Lalo had instructed him to be sure to show it to us. I told LQ and Brando what Sanchez said and LQ wondered how come Calderone would do us such a kindness.

“Rose is how come,” I said.

We went into a restaurant and had chicken enchiladas and beer and fought off the flies while we ate our supper and studied the roadmap. La Hacienda de Las Cadenas wasn’t on the map but its approximate locale had been marked with an X and we figured its distance from Villa Acuña at roughly 400 road miles. The only town of size on our route was Monclova, which lay almost due south about 200 miles. The map showed only a few scattered placenames along the way—all of them little villages, the waiter had told us, and none with electricity. At Monclova we’d turn west into what looked like even rougher country.

“It’s nothing but desert for at least a hundred miles to either side of the damn road,” Brando said.

“I bet this here says ‘Middle of Nowhere,’” LQ said, tapping his finger on a blank portion of the map labeled BOLSON DE MAPIMÍ. Back on the YB I’d always heard that the Mapimí was one of the meanest deserts anywhere, but I didn’t see any reason to mention it just now. The last fifty miles or so of our route would take us through the south end of it.

We then studied the diagram of the rectangular hacienda compound. It was enclosed by high walls and marked as 250 yards deep and a quarter-mile wide, its length running east-west. Its only entryway was a double-doored gate in the center of the south wall. Directly under the gate description was a penciled note in Spanish saying that the gate was always open and posted with an armed guard. The driveway into the compound ran straight for about seventy-five yards to a big courtyard. The casa grande was on the far side of the courtyard and faced south toward the gate. Another notation said the servants’ quarters were on the lower floor, the family’s rooms on the upper. There were various patios and small gardens all about the house, and a large garden directly behind it. Just past the big garden were a corral and a riding track, and, beyond them, a mesquite thicket that ran the length of the compound’s rear wall. An unbroken row of tiny penciled squares along the west wall was labeled as the peon living quarters. Over against the east wall, adjacent to the woods, a small square indicated the stable. A square at the southeast corner of the compound was the garage. Between them was the vaquero bunkhouse.

The way I saw it, everything depended on getting past the gate. If they were able to shut us out, the whole business could get pretty bitchy. Once we were inside the compound, all we had to do was get to the house, get Daniela, and then get out again.

“Sounds so damn simple,” LQ said, “I can see why you were ready to do it by yourself.”

“Unless the guy’s got a bunch of pistoleros, I figure there won’t be that much to it,” I said.

“That’s the thing,” Brando said. “What if he does have a bunch of pistoleros?”

“They might be smart enough not to argue with a BAR.”

“And if they aint smart enough?”

“Then we’ll play it any way we have to.”

They stared at me. Then Brando said, “That’s the plan?”

“You don’t have to have any part of it, either of you. You can cross back over the bridge and catch a train to Galveston.”

“You say that again I’m liable to take you up on it,” LQ said.

“You don’t have to have—”

“Go to hell, wiseguy,” LQ said.

“If anybody’s got a better plan,” I said, “I’m ready to hear it—as long as it doesn’t mean waiting. I’m not waiting.”

Brando blew out a breath and threw up his hands.

“The best plans are always simple,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

“In that case,” LQ said, “we got us the greatest goddamn plan in the world.”

We took rooms in what was said to be the best of the hotels in town and went to bed early so we could get going before daybreak. But when we met downstairs at dawn LQ and Brando were red-eyed and full of complaints about the lumpy beds and the light of the full moon blazing in through the gauzy curtains and the ranchero music that blared incessantly through much of the night from the cantina across the street. It didn’t help their mood much when I said I’d had a pretty good night’s rest myself.

I said that just to needle them. The truth was, I dreamt all night, one dream after another—of being out in the deepwater sea with a giant shark circling around me; of Reuben lying in the dust with a terrible stomach wound and calling for me to help him; of Daniela standing naked on a brightly lit platform while a crowd of men in the surrounding darkness bids to buy her. And of Rodolfo Fierro, sitting in a high-backed chair on an elevated platform, dressed in a fine black suit and cloak and wearing a Montana hat at a cocky angle, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles and his coatflap fallen aside to expose a holster holding a Colt .44 with ivory grips of carved Mexican eagles. He was staring down at several long rows of clearly terrified men while a voice speaking in Spanish delivered verdicts of death. Then he looked over their heads at me, and in English I said, Hey Daddy…and he smiled…

We put a five-gallon can of drinking water on the floor by the backseat and three cans of gasoline into the trunk and got on our way before daybreak. The sun rose out of the flatlands and shone red on the mountains to the west just under the setting silver moon. The sky was clear except for the dust we raised behind us on the packed dirt road.

The countryside reminded me of the YB Ranch—cactus of every kind and mesquite trees and creosote scrub, mesas and mountains on every horizon. But it was alien territory to LQ and different even to Brando, who came from a part of Texas with geography a lot tamer than this region of brute rock ground and thorns on damned near everything.

Now and then we’d see a small cross—sometimes a cluster of crosses—stuck in the ground alongside the road and we came to find out they had been placed by the families of people killed at those spots in motor vehicle accidents.

Two hours after leaving Villa Acuña we reached the junction road from the border town of Piedras Negras. There had been a rainstorm a day or so earlier and truck traffic had made a washboard of the road surface. The car jarred hard and sometimes jerked to one side or the other and Brando cursed and fought the wheel. There were plenty of stations within range of our radio, most of them playing ranchero music, which LQ and I liked but Brando had had enough of, and he searched the dial till he found one out of Eagle Pass broadcasting Texas string-band stuff.

As the morning grew warmer, pale dust devils rose in the open country and went whirling toward the dark ranges in the distance. Around midmorning we came to a ferry crossing at a river the color of caramel. The ferry was a rope rig and could carry only three cars at a time. There were four cars ahead of us, so we had to wait. There were three small crosses at the edge of the riverbank. LQ and Brando napped under a tree and I skipped rocks on the water until it was our turn to cross.

We got to Monclova in the early afternoon and gassed the car at a filling station. I got directions from the attendant to get to the westbound road. Brando wanted to have a beer before moving on, so we parked around the corner from the main plaza and went into a cantina.

The place was cool and dim and a radio was playing mariachi music. Besides us the only other patrons were two guys at a table against the wall and another three standing together at the far end of the bar and laughing with the cantinero. You could tell by their clothes they were vaqueros—and by their laughter and gestures that they were drunk.

The cantinero came over and looked at each of us in turn, then asked Brando, “Qué quieren de tomar?”

“Cerveza,” Brando said with his gringo accent. He looked at me and said, “Tell him I want the coldest one in the joint.”

“Tres cervezas,” I said. “Bien frías.”

The cantinero stared at my eyes and then gave Brando another look before going to fetch the beer. He set the bottles in front of us and went back to his friends at the end of the bar and whispered something to them. They turned to look at us. One of them, the biggest, came down the bar, puffing a cigarillo.

“Buenas tardes.”

“Buenas tardes,” I said.

He asked to know where we were from, and I told him.

“Ah, Tejas,” he said. He looked at LQ and said that a blond gringo certainly had a good reason for not speaking Spanish. Then looked at me again and said anybody who looked Mexican and could speak Spanish as well as I did could be forgiven for having gringo eyes. But what he was curious about, he said, turning to Brando, was why a guy who looked so fucking Mexican couldn’t speak Spanish well enough to ask for a cold beer.

“Eres un pinche pocho, verdad?”

The vaquero was looking for a fight but he badly underestimated Brando’s readiness to give it to him. The insult was barely off the guy’s tongue before Ray brought his knee up into his balls and hit him in the mouth with the bottle of beer. Glass shattered and beer sprayed and the vaquero went down on his ass and over on his side, drawing his knees up and clutching his crotch. He puked through his broken teeth.

The cantinero started to sidestep down the bar but LQ already had the .380 in his hand and waggled it at him, and the barman brought his hands up in view and stepped away from the counter. The two at the end of the bar stood gawking. The pair at the table were beaming at the entertainment.

LQ put up his pistol and leaned over the bar to peer into the shelf under it and came up with a cutoff single-barrel sixteen-gauge. The cantinero looked apologetic. LQ opened the breech and took out the shell and flung it across the room, then stood the shotgun against the front of the bar.

“Let’s get a move on,” I said.

“Gimme another beer,” Brando said to the cantinero. “For the busted one.”

“Mándame?”

“Dale otra cerveza,” I said.

He went to the cooler and fetched three beers to the bar.

“Put them in a bag,” Brando said.

“Cómo?”

“Ponlas en una bolsa,” I said.

He looked around and found a paper sack and put the bottles in it. Brando picked it up and carried it out under his arm.

LQ and I paused at the door and eyeballed everybody in the room. I didn’t think any of them was likely to discuss us with the police. We went out the door and down the street to the car. Brando already had the engine running. We got in and he drove us off nice and easy and I gave him the directions out of town.

When we got on the open road, I opened the beers and passed them around and we took a few pulls without talking until LQ said, “You getting awful thin-skinned, aint you, Ramon? All the fella called you was a phony Mexican.”

He leaned so that Brando couldn’t see his face in the rearview and he gave me a wink.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Jimmy,” LQ said, “but aint that what pocho means—a phony Mex? A Mexican who talks and acts American?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

Brando kept his eyes on the road, steering with one hand and holding his beer with the other, but he was still pretty tight about the whole business—you could see it in his jaw and how he was gripping the wheel.

“I mean, you’re all the time saying you aint Mexican, no matter how much you look it, always saying how you were born in the States and all,” LQ said. “Seems to me he was saying the same thing. So what’s there to get blackassed about?”

“It’s how he said it,” Brando said.

“How he said it? Goddamn, you bust up a man ’cause you don’t like how he says something? Woooo, you even thinner in the skin than I thought.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Brando said.

“Ah, Ramon,” LQ said with the usual big sigh, “if only I could. I’d be doing it with—”

“You’d be doing it with a dumb-ass redneck nobody but you can stand,” Ray said.

I smiled out at the road.

“Well golly gee, aint we in a mood?”

“Mood this,” Brando said—then caught sight of LQ’s grin in the mirror and couldn’t restrain his own.

Pretty soon they were talking about how they couldn’t wait to see Sheila and Cora Ann again and how much the girls would like it if they took them some Mexican sandals, maybe a sombrero.

“Hell, Kid,” LQ said to me, “you and your chiquita—we oughta call her Danny—you and Danny ought to come over and join us for a backyard barbecue or something.”

“Damn right,” Brando said. “I think we oughta do it as soon as we get back home.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

We didn’t see anything but desert for the next hour and a half and then came to a wide spot in the road taken up with a few weathered shacks and a one-pump filling station and a tiny café with an open wall and a pair of bench tables. The guy who filled our tank said there wasn’t so much as another hut, never mind a place to get gas or a bite to eat, between there and Escalón, 165 miles away. We went to the café and had pork tacos and beer, then got back in the Hudson and drove on.

We were pushing deep into nowhere, just like it looked on the map, and the road got worse. It was full of cracks and potholes and the Hudson sometimes thumped into one so hard it was a wonder we didn’t blow a tire. The gas-pump guy had said we were lucky to be making this drive in the good weather of the year, that the heat of summer was unbearable, but even now you could see heat waves where the highway met the horizon.

We rolled through a vast pale desert of scraggly brush and rocky outcrops and long red mesas. Far to the southwest black thunderheads sparked with silent lightning and dragged purple veils of rain over the jagged ranges on the horizon. We saw no other living thing but a pair of vultures circling high over the sunlit wasteland to the north.

“Jesus,” Brando said. “Where the hell are we?”

“I believe we took a wrong turn and come to the moon,” LQ said. He reached over to the front seat and got the hand-drawn map from beside me and sat back and opened it.

“According to this,” he said, “that hacienda place is straight thataway”—he pointed south—“about thirty–forty miles.”

“I know it,” I said. “But there’s no way to get there except by way of the Escalón road—and that’s…what…twice as long, all told?”

“At least that, according to this map. Fella sure lives out of the way, don’t he? Say, what’s this here, where the river runs out?”

LQ leaned over the seat to point out the little clump of penciled tufts labeled “ciénaga” just north of the hacienda.

“Sort of a swamp,” I said. “This close to the desert it’s probably just a mud patch.”

I didn’t say much for a while after that—just smoked and stared out at the passing landscape. I couldn’t have explained it, but there was something about this country that pulled at me. In some inexplicable way it felt like a place I’d once known but had forgotten all about.

The sun was almost down to the ridge of distant mountains in the west and glaring hard against the windshield when the road angled off to southward. The map showed the angle and we calculated that we were less than forty miles from Escalón.

And then, shortly after dark, the road ended at a junction with another highway and we were there.

Escalón was nothing but a tiny railstation and a small rocky cemetery and a dozen scattered houses along a single dirt street. No motor vehicles. No telephone or even a telegraph line.

The road ran north to Jiménez and south to Torreón, which lay even farther away. The fat creamy moon had just risen over the black mountains. A light wind kicked up and carried the smell of charcoal cooking. A dog barked and barked but hung back in the shadows beside the depot. The station door was open and showed soft yellow light. A man in a rail agent’s cap stepped into the doorway and peered out at us.

“Cállate,” he said, and the dog shut up and slunk off. “Buenas noches, señores. Les puedo ayudar?”

I told Brando to keep a lookout and LQ and I went into the station. The agent stepped aside for us and then went around behind the narrow counter. In the light of a pair of kerosene lanterns I saw that his face was badly scarred, as if it had been torn open in several places and then badly sutured. His left arm had been ruined too and he held it at an awkward twist.

“Christ amighty, amigo,” LQ said, “you look like you been in a hatchet fight and everybody had a hatchet but you.”

“Perdóname, señor,” the clerk said. “No hablo inglés.” His face twisted even more awfully and I supposed he was smiling in apology for his inability to speak English.

I told him my friend didn’t speak Spanish, and he gestured with his good arm in a manner to imply that life was full of complications.

I took out the map of the hacienda and spread it open on the counter between us. I asked if he could vouch for its accuracy, if there were any local roads that the map did not show.

He bent over it and considered for a minute and then said it looked correct to him.

So the road a couple of miles south was the only one connecting the Hacienda de Las Cadenas to the Jiménez-Torreón highway?

“Sí,” he said. “Es el único camino.” He asked if we were new employees of Don César. “O no más son amigos de el?”

There was no way he could warn Calveras of our coming and so I said no, we weren’t the man’s employees or his friends, either. I handed the map to LQ. “It’s jake. Just the one road.”

“Ah, pues, son enemigos,” the clerk said. He put his hand to a scarred cheek and smiled his awful smile. “Espero que lo castigan bastante bien. Mejor si lo matan.”

“What’s he yammering about?” LQ said.

“He hopes we kick Calveras’ ass but he’d be happier if we killed him. I don’t think he cares much for the man.”

“Bastard probably give him that face. Ask him does he know how many guns the place got.”

I asked, and he said, “De pistoleros? No estoy seguro. Como una dozena, yo creo.”

“He say a dozen?” LQ said.

“Maybe a dozen, he’s not sure.”

“Y cuantos son ustedes?”

“Tres.”

“Tres?” His ruined mouth twisted and he shook his head.

“Go to hell, Jack,” LQ said as we started for the door. “Odds like that, the sumbitch best send for more guys.”

The road was about as wide as a big truck and went snaking through high dense brush and tall stands of mesquite trees. The hacienda’s pasturelands were somewhere far to the east. We drove without headlights and very slowly, raising no dust, making our way by the small patches of moonlight that filtered through the trees. We’d been on the move for the better part of an hour when we went around a long curve through the heavy scrub and saw the lights of the hacienda in the distance ahead.

When we figured we were within a mile of the place, LQ and I got out of the car. He carried the BAR and the shoulder bag of extra magazines; I had one of the shotguns and one coat pocket full of extra shells for it, the other pocket full of .44 cartridges. The road was still closely bounded and deeply shadowed by brush and mesquite. I headed up the road with LQ ten yards behind me and Brando easing the Hudson along behind LQ, far enough back that I couldn’t hear the motor.

About eighty yards from the compound the trees and taller brush abruptly ended. LQ came up beside me and we crouched in the road’s last portion of darkness. We had a clear view of the compound gate and the guard posted there, but between us and the compound it was all moonlit open ground and there was no shadow at all on the long front wall. Brando was still in the car, about thirty yards behind us.

The wooden gate was tall and double-doored, the left door open inward, the right one shut. The guard sat in a straightback chair in front of the closed door. We could see the red flarings of his cigarette and it looked like there was some kind of long gun propped against the gate beside him. The wall was about twelve feet high and we could see the glitter of the broken bottles cemented along the top of it, a safeguard common to every walled residence, large or small, we’d seen in Mexico. The open gate door was dimly yellow with light from the courtyard within.

We talked it over in a whisper and came up with a plan. I went back down the road to tell it to Brando and then stood on the running board as he very gingerly brought the Hudson up to about fifteen yards from the shadowed end of the road and stopped. We could see LQ’s crouched silhouette up ahead.

“Keep your eye on me,” I told Brando, then I hustled back up to LQ.

“Okay,” LQ said, handing me his hat and the BAR. “Here goes nothing.” He slipped into the brush to the right of the road and vanished. I slung the BAR over one shoulder, the shotgun over the other.

It took nearly half an hour for him to move around to the east side of the compound. I kept watching the far end of the front wall and finally saw his blond head poke out from behind it.

The guard was sitting with his back to him. He’d been chain-smoking and he lit another cigarette as LQ started toward him, walking steadily and sticking close to the wall, his shadow short and leaning a little ahead of him. If the guard turned around and saw him coming LQ would probably have to shoot him—and the ones inside might get the gate shut on us.

LQ was almost to him when the guard jerked around in his chair—maybe he heard LQ’s footsteps. He jumped up and spun around to grab for the long gun but then LQ was on him, clubbing at him with his pistol. I heard the guy hollering—and figured they sure as hell heard him inside—and then LQ had him down and shut him up.

I was already running for the gate and beckoning Brando to come on. I heard the Hudson roaring behind me and I looked back as it shot out into the moonlight and swerved around in a tight circle and Brando gunned it back into the narrow mouth of the road and braked hard—the car now facing back the way we came and blocking the mouth of the road. The door flew open and Brando came on the run, shotgun in hand.

LQ was standing in the open gate pointing the .380 at somebody inside and yelling, “Put it down, man, put it down!” A pistolshot sounded from the courtyard and the round ricocheted off the stone wall. LQ crouched beside the closed door and opened fire with the .380, snapping off three or four rounds in a row, the muzzle flashing yellow, then took cover behind the door.

I ran up and gave LQ his hat and the BAR and whipped the shotgun off my shoulder. Somebody inside was crying in pain and praying to the Holy Mother.

“Map’s got it right,” LQ said. “Driveway goes straight to a pool fountain some seventy–eighty yards off and the house is just the other side of it.”

Brando ran up, grinning big. “Woooo.”

There was a lot of shouting in the compound, mostly unintelligible, some of it demanding to know what was going on, some of it informing that Julio had been shot and needed help. Somebody ordering somebody to shut the fucking gate and somebody yelling back for him to shut the fucking gate.

LQ peeked around the open door and jerked his head back quick as several pistols fired and bullets whacked the thick wood.

“There’s a bunch coming from the right,” he said. “Let’s do it if we’re gonna do it.”

I told him to cover us from the gate—we didn’t want them shutting the door and trapping us inside. “Keep behind me, Ray—straight for the house. I’ll go upstairs, you hold the front door. Shoot anything you aint sure of.”

I slapped LQ on the shoulder and said, “Do it.”

He stood up and leaned around the door and fired a long sweeping burst of the BAR, the rifle pumping out rounds in bam-bam-bam fashion, flaring bright and cracking loud. I’d never heard one before and it was pretty impressive.

Brando and I ran up the driveway. It was wide and cobbled and flanked on either side by torchlights and low hedges, stone benches, various statues. The diagram hadn’t mentioned all the trees on the place. The courtyard was straight ahead, a circular stone fountain in the middle of it with some kind of sculpture spouting water in the center of the pool. The house just beyond it was blazing with light. From the shadowy area off to our right voices shouted, “Por allá! Allá están! Por allá!”

I ran in a crouch as gunshots cracked. A bullet struck a statue close to my head and stone fragments pecked my cheek. Rounds hummed through the hedges. Then LQ’s BAR was hammering again and there was screaming and it sounded like LQ shot up an entire magazine before he stopped firing. There were anguished cries, shriekings for help.

The courtyard hedge was higher than the one along the driveway and as I ran around the fountain a man came rushing out of a hedge pathway with a pistol in his hand and seemed astonished to see me. I blasted him in the chest with the ten-gauge and he flew backward into the hedge and hung there in a bloody tangle.

“Right side!” Brando yelled, and I turned and saw two more with rifles coming out of the other hedge. Brando’s shotgun took half the head off one of them. The other fired at me from the hip and I heard the bullet pass me. I gave him a load in the belly and he bounced off the base of a horse statue and left a red mess on the stone.

The BAR was rapping again and there was more screaming—and then Brando cried out. I turned and saw him on the ground, clutching his side and cussing a blue streak.

Two guys came out of the hedge on the other side of the fountain and I fired at them and one spun around and went down and the other ducked behind the fountain. Brando sat up and pulled his revolver and the guy never knew Ray was there until he peeked around that side of the fountain and his hair jumped when Brando shot him in the head.

“Go on, go on!” Brando yelled.

I started for the house and spotted a man looking down from the balcony—a guy with long white hair and a black eyepatch. I raised the shotgun and he darted away just as I blew fragments off the stone rail where he’d been standing. I thought I heard a woman scream up there. Daniela.

The shotgun lever seized and I flung the weapon away and drew the Mexican Colt and ran up the front steps. A man in an apron and gripping a meat cleaver came at me from a side door—brave but stupid. I shot him and he fell down, blood spurting from his neck. I ran into the main parlor and damn near shot a pair of terrified maids hugging tight to each other.

I raced up the wide stairway, taking the steps two at a time, but as I reached the middle landing a large man suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs and shot at me and my right foot kicked out from under me and I fell sideways on the steps. His next bullet gouged a hole in the carpet under my nose. Then we fired at the same time and my cheek burned and he flinched and his gun hand drooped. He started to raise the revolver again and I shot him in the chest and he discharged a round into the wall and dropped the gun and came tumbling down the steps to the landing and lay on his back without moving.

I sat up and checked my foot and saw that the heel of my boot had been shot off. I raised my other foot and whacked the heel with the Colt barrel a half-dozen times before it broke off. I wiped blood from my right cheek, then stood up and looked down at the guy and saw that he was still alive and staring at me. He had a pencil mustache and a bandaged ear.

“Te doy un recuerdo de Felipe Rocha,” I said. He opened his mouth to speak but never got it out before I shot him in the eye.

I reloaded the Colt and went on up to the top landing, moving warily now. I heard the BAR again—and then froze at the sound of a submachine gun, firing rounds faster than LQ’s Browning ever could. It was a long burst.

A tommy gun. Jesus.

The tommy and the Browning fired at the same time, long bursts…and then nothing. I stood waiting, and there came a few pistolshots, and then no more gunfire. Nothing but the muted crying and wailing of wounded men and terrified women.

But Daniela was somewhere up here—and the thing to do right now was find her.

The first room I tried was an empty bedroom. In the next one a young maid was huddled in a corner and crying.

“Donde está Daniela Zarate?”

Gone, she said. The patrón took her—just a few minutes ago. There was a private stairway in his chambers.

I grabbed her and shoved her into the hall and told her to show me the way to Calveras’ room. She looked down the hall and her eyes went large and I stepped out into the hall and pointed the Colt at a guy dressed like some dandy from another age. He wore a sharp little beard in the old gachupín style and his hair was tied back in a ponytail. He’d been about to descend the staircase but now put his hands up slightly and said he wished me no harm and was surrendering without conditions. He lowered his hands to his side and turned the palms outward in a show of capitulation and asked how he could be of service. I asked where the patrón’s chambers were. He pointed past me and even as I turned to look I sensed my mistake and I whirled back around to see him raising a pocket revolver and we both fired. I hit him in the heart and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

I felt a burning in the muscle between my neck and shoulder and found that he’d nicked me through it. It burned but the blood flow wasn’t too bad. I stuffed a handkerchief against it up under my shirt and coat. The maid was pressed back against the wall with her hands at her mouth.

“Enséñame la escalera,” I said, and she led me to the patrón’s chambers and showed me the secret stairway. It was a narrow winding thing, tight as a corkscrew. I followed it down to a little door that opened into a patio at the rear corner of the house, next to a narrow driveway that curved around from the courtyard.

There was only one way out of the compound—so if LQ was still holding the gate, Calveras was still inside the walls. I hustled back around to the driveway in front of the house, the Colt in my hand. The wailing was louder out here. LQ had done plenty of damage with the Browning. A group of house servants caught sight of me and ran back into the casa grande. The courtyard was deserted, the bodies already removed except for the dead guy in the hedge. Brando was gone too, but the torchlight was sufficient to show the dark bloodstains where he’d fallen.

As I hurried down the drive, others saw me coming and fled into the darkness to either side of the hedges. They did the smart thing. I was ready to shoot anybody who even looked at me wrong. The moaning and crying was scattered in the darkness to my left, but much of it was concentrated over where a cast of light showed above the trees. According to the hacienda map the bunkhouse was over there, and I supposed that was where the wounded had been taken, the dead too, probably. I wondered if Brando was among them—and figured I’d know soon enough.

I could see the gate up ahead. Somebody was sitting there with his back against the open door. If it wasn’t LQ I hoped it was somebody dead or too shot-up to shoot me.

The west side of the compound, where the worker quarters were, was all dark. As soon as the shooting started, the peons had probably shut their doors and blown out their lamps. They didn’t need to know what was going on to know it was no business of theirs.

The torchlights were bright on me, but even as I got closer to the gate I still couldn’t make out who was sitting there in the shadows. And now I noticed that the open gate-door was slightly askew, its lower hinge twisted almost free of the wall. Then LQ’s voice said, “Who goes there, friend or foe?”—and he chuckled.

“How you doing, man?”

“Could be worse. Where’s Ray?”

“I don’t know. I saw him get hit but I don’t know how bad. I thought he might’ve come back here.”

“Nah he aint,” he said. “Think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think we done for of all of them who wanted to make a fight of it. I’d say the rest are just waiting for us to go away.”

He had the BAR across his lap. The .380 and an extra magazine for it were on the ground beside him. He was hatless and coatless and both his shirtsleeves had been ripped off and I could see he’d used them to bandage his left arm.

I squatted beside him and lit a cigarette and handed it to him. “How bad?”

“I got the bleeding pretty well stopped. Armbone’s busted.” His voice was tight with pain. “You find her?”

“No. But I saw him, and a maid said he’s got her. As long as we’re on the gate, he’s not taking her anywhere. Soon as it’s light I’ll start looking.”

“Ah hell, Jimmy, he’s gone, man. I can’t say if she was with him, but if you didn’t find her she mighta been with—”

I grabbed his good arm. “What the hell you talking about, he’s gone…if she was with him?…When?”

“Hey, man.” He jerked his arm and I let go of it.

“Fucken Cadillac. Who else it gonna be but him? It come tearing out of that hedge. I give it a burst, but this gorilla leans out the window and opens up on me with a goddamn Thompson. I about shit. I hunkered down outside the wall and wham, they clip the door and go skidding by with a fender peeled back and the bastard gave me some more of the tommy gun and nailed me in the arm. But I sureshit nailed him better. The Caddy had to cut a sharp turn on account of we blocked the road and the shooter come tumbling out. That’s him yonder. I put a coupla .380s in his head to be sure he wasn’t just resting up.”

He was pointing at a big man lying a dozen yards beyond the gate, faceup, his arms flung out, his legs in an awkward twist. The tommy gun lay close by.

“I couldn’t see in the car all that good,” LQ said, “but I guess she mighta been in there.”

She was—I knew she was. She would’ve told him I was coming. She would’ve kicked at him and said James Rudolph Youngblood was coming. As soon as he heard the shooting he would’ve known who it was and he would’ve taken her with him. I stood up, telling myself to stay cool, to think.

“We blocked the only road. Where’d he go?”

“Thataway, around the corner.” He waved toward the east end of the compound wall.

The moon was high and bright as a gaslamp. My wound burned and I checked it with my fingertips. It was swollen but the bloodflow had slowed to nothing and was already clotting. I went over to the dead guy. He had a big droopy mustache and there was enough moonlight to show the white scar at the edge of his eye. More good news for Rocha.

Then I remembered the river. The map showed a river running past the hacienda a couple of miles east of it, running all the way out to the ciénaga. I picked up the Thompson and went back to LQ.

“I’m betting there’s a road that goes over to the river. From there he’ll try to make it to the Monclova road.”

“Shitfire,” LQ said. “There’s nothing between here and there but desert, all rocky ground for…what’d we figure, forty miles? He aint making it to that road, not without a pair of wings.”

I detached the tommy gun’s magazine and checked the load, then snapped it back in place and handed LQ the weapon and he tested a one-hand grip on it, bracing the butt against his hip and swinging the muzzle from side to side. He grinned and cradled the gun under his arm.

“I’m gonna go get her.”

“That’s why we come,” he said.

“Got enough smokes?”

“Yep. Could do with some handy water.”

I went over to the Hudson and had to duck under the dash and hot-wire the ignition, since Brando had the keys. I cranked up the engine and backed the car around and drove up beside the gate. I took the water can out of the back and filled a couple of empty beer bottles for myself and jammed them between the backseat and the door so they wouldn’t spill, then set the rest of the can next to LQ, together with a tin cup.

“Be back soon as I can,” I said.

“Good Lord willing, I expect I’ll be here.”

I drove to the northeast rim of the bluff behind the compound and got out of the car. From there I could scan the country to the north for miles—a pale wasteland under the blazing white moon. To the northeast I could also see the lower portion of the river, extending into the distance like a wrinkled silver ribbon and ending at a dark patch of ground that had to be the ciénaga.

And then I saw something else—a small and barely visible cloud of dust moving slowly north alongside the river. It was them. He had his lights off. Me too. We didn’t need headlights anyway, not under that moon.

I hopped back into the car and wheeled it around and eased it along the dense growth of brush and mesquites at the edge of the open ground, gunning the engine, searching for the road to the river. And then I found it. It wasn’t a road so much as a rocky trail rutted by cartwheels. It went winding through the scrub and was so narrow that mesquite branches scraped both sides of the car. I had to take it easy over the rough ground—but even as slow as I was going, the Hudson swayed and bobbed like a boat on choppy waters.

Finally the scrub thinned out and shortened and the river came into view again, much closer now and shining bright under the moon. It was shallow and packed with sandbars. A few yards from the bank the trail turned north, and it was still rough going. Even at fifteen miles an hour the car bounced and swayed and the steering wheel jerked every which way. Now I was raising some dust too, and I wondered if he’d seen it.

I’d gone downriver about three miles when a front tire blew like a pistolshot. The Hudson pulled hard to the right but I wrenched it straight and kept going, the tire flopping. The river narrowed steadily. Then the ground gradually began to smooth out under the Hudson and the terrain began to darken and get grassy. I’d arrived at the end of the river, at the south end of the muddy ciénaga.

I stopped the car and got out to look things over. A cool north breeze had picked up and it pushed the stink of the mudpit into my face. The ground was slick under my heel-less boots. If I’d driven any farther north I would’ve bogged down in the muck.

He couldn’t have crossed the river anywhere along the way. To get past the ciénaga he had to go around it to the west. There were no tracks on the smooth ground around me, so he must’ve angled over in that direction before coming this close to the mud. I got back in the car and followed the edge of the mudpit to westward.

In less than a quarter mile I came on the Caddy’s tracks where they came up from the south and I could tell from the shape of them that he’d blown at least one tire on each side. The moon eased around to my right from behind me as I followed the tracks along the curving rim of the ciénaga to northward. Then the Caddy’s tracks angled away from the mudpit and I knew we were past it. The ground was hard and rough again. The Hudson jolted and pitched.

I drove on, the Hudson’s shadow slowly contracting against the left side of the car.

And then there the Cadillac was, not a half mile ahead. In the distance it looked like a bug on a dirty tablecloth. It took a moment for me to realize that it wasn’t moving. I drew the Mexican Colt from my pants and set it beside me.

I closed in very slowly, then stopped about thirty yards from the Caddy. I didn’t know how he was armed. If he had a rifle he probably would’ve used it before letting me get that close. Then again, maybe he was trying to get me in so close that he couldn’t miss. If he wanted to bargain I was willing: give her to me and we’d be quits. I was pretty sure I’d mean it.

I eased the Hudson forward, ready to wheel it sideways and take cover behind it if he opened fire. Twenty yards from the Caddy I stopped again. It was slumped forward on two front flats. I pulled up to within ten yards. Then closer. And then I was idling right behind it. The interior of the Caddy was too dark for me to see anything in there.

I put the Hudson in neutral and opened my door wide and waited a minute. Nothing from the Caddy. I had the Colt cocked in my hand. Then I switched on my headlights—if he’d been looking back at me, he’d have been blinded in that moment—and I slid out of the Hudson and ran in a crouch up beside the driver’s door and jumped up and stuck the Colt in the window, all set to blow his brains out.

He wasn’t there.

But she was—slumped against the passenger door—and in the same moment that I saw her I realized what a clear target I made in the shine of my headlights. I dropped down and scurried back to the Hudson and reached in and switched off the lights.

I went around to the Cadillac’s passenger side and tucked the Colt in my pants and eased the door open and caught her as she started to fall. Her eyes were closed and she groaned softly and her breath was warm on my face. She moaned louder as I eased her over on the seat and got in beside her. And I felt the blood.

I examined her by the light of the moon. Her elbow was smashed and her lower right arm was slick with blood. Her right side was sopped—blood oozing from a bullet hole just under her arm and from two more, close together, between the ribs and hip.

There was nothing to do about wounds like that. Not in our circumstance. I went back to the Hudson and got one of the bottles I’d filled with water. Some of it had spilled in all the bouncing around but there was still plenty. I put the water to her lips and maybe she sipped some of it but mostly it just ran out of her mouth. I wiped the dribble from her chin and set the bottle on the floor.

I put my hand to her cheek and said her name. I asked her to open her eyes and look at me, to say something, but she didn’t. I held her and crooned to her. I stroked her hair and spoke to her of everything that came to mind. I told her how beautiful she was, how wonderfully brave. I told her how my heart did a little flip the first time I’d seen her. I tried to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset” but forgot the words in both English and Spanish and told her I was sorry. I described the moon and said she really ought to take a look at it and I laughed for both of us at my attempt to trick her into opening her eyes. I talked to her until the sky turned gray at the rim of the mountains. Then I leaned down to retrieve the bottle of water to see if she might drink a little more and when I turned back to her she was dead.

He hadn’t done it, not wounds like that, not on the side away from him. I didn’t have to take the bullets out and see them to know they were .30–06 rounds from a BAR.

The Cadillac motor wouldn’t turn over. Maybe LQ had hit the oil pan and all the oil leaked out and the engine had finally seized.

I gently laid her on her side and told her I’d be back.

Then I went and got in the Hudson and set out into the deeper desert.

The sun was half-risen behind the jagged mountains and looking like a great raw wound when I spotted him a half mile ahead. At first I took him for another greasewood shrub and then understood what I was looking at. He was lying huddled on his side and the possibility that he was dead made my gut go tight.

I stopped the car ten feet from him and blew the klaxon and he stirred slightly. Praise Jesus.

I got out and walked up to him. His hat had fallen off and I saw the black strap of his eyepatch tight against the back of his head. His lank white hair hung over his face. His breathing was raspy but there were no obvious wounds on him, no bloodstains I could see. His coatflap hung down straight with the weight of something heavy in the pocket and I reached down and relieved him of a .38 revolver and slung it out into the scrub. A portion of his wooden leg was visible between the hem of his pantleg and the top of his lowcut Spanish boot. I gave it a hard kick.

He flinched and groaned. I said for him to look at me.

“Mírame, viejo,” I said. “Mírame bien.”

He struggled to push himself up on an elbow, grunting hard, and he finally managed to sit up. He brushed the hair from his eyes and turned his face up to me, sand clinging to his eyepatch, his good eye baggy and bloodshot.

The sun had just risen over the mountains behind him and it blazed full on my face. I was squinting against its glare. I told him again to have a good look at me, that I was the last thing he was going to see in this world. His eye fixed on me hard.

I pulled down my hat brim to shade my eyes and I took out the Colt. I put the muzzle against his forehead and cocked the hammer.

And the son of a bitch laughed.

Laughed and asked if I was a hallucination. “O eres un espanto?” he said—and laughed even harder, as if the possibility that I was a ghost was the funniest thing in the world.

All these years, he said, all these miserable years gone by and here I was again, threatening his life once more. Well, go ahead and shoot, he said—he was no more afraid of me now than he had been back then.

My finger quivered on the trigger. If he had gone insane he couldn’t appreciate the moment. Then what satisfaction could there be?

He laughed again and said, No, no, of course I wasn’t him. How could I be him, all these years later? I was just one more of his brute kind. There was no end to our kind. Our mongrel breed had robbed him of everything once before, and now, even now, we would rob from him yet again? We would have the girl too? Well, fuck the lot of us. Did I think he was afraid? He spat on my boots. That was how afraid he was. Go ahead, he said…shoot.

I saw the lie in his eyes. He was afraid. He was afraid I wouldn’t shoot him. He wanted to die but didn’t have the balls to shoot himself. Jesus. Who knew what the hell anybody was like under the skin?

I knew that to let him go on living would be greater punishment than to put a quick end to his misery. But it would also be punishment for all the people he would continue to make miserable as long as he was alive.

Or as long as he was able.

I put a hand on his shoulder and smiled at him and tucked the Colt away under my coatflap. His eye went wide with alarm as if he knew what was coming and he tried to break away but I seized a fistful of his hair and held his head fast as I brought out the icepick. He screeched and shut his eye tight and I swiped the tip of the pick through the pinched eyelid and a thin jet of bloody fluid caught the sunlight for one sparking instant—and then his hand was over his eye and blood was running between his fingers and he was screaming.

I left him there, screaming and screaming, staggering around in his darkness under the glaring white sun.

I carried her to the Hudson and then cut the seat-covers out of the Cadillac and used them for a shroud. I replaced the flat tire with the spare and then followed our earlier tracks as I drove back around to the south side of the mudpit. That’s where I buried her. I dug the grave with the tire jack and my hands, working shirtless. It was a long process even in that soft earth. My shoulder wound opened again and blood streaked my chest. When the hole was finally deep enough, I gently laid her in it. And then I covered her up.

I was slow and careful driving back and the tires held up all the way. The sun was directly overhead when I emerged from the scrub trail and pulled up to the compound gate. LQ and Brando were sitting in ladderback chairs in the shade of the gate archway, staring at me. I turned off the motor and got out of the car.

LQ’s left arm had been splinted and freshly bandaged and it was cradled in a clean white sling. He held the tommy gun under his good arm. Brando had the BAR slung on his shoulder and wore no visible bandage but he grimaced and pressed a hand to his side as he stood up.

“Thought you might be dead,” he said.

“Thought you might be,” I said.

LQ gestured at my bloody shirt. “You bad?”

“No. Who fixed you guys up?”

“Bunch of peons,” Brando said. “Took me over to a hut and bandaged me pretty good. Then we come out here and found this peckerwood still alive and they patched him too.”

“Where’re they now?”

“Went home, I guess.” He gestured toward the peon housing on the other side of the compound. “They talked a whole bunch but I never got a word of it.”

“From what I could make out, it was mostly bitching about Calveras,” LQ said. “What a son of a bitch he was and how they hoped he never come back and so on.”

“Well, he aint coming back,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” LQ said. “Where’s—”

“She aint coming back either.”

They stared at me for a second. “Shit,” Brando said. “I’m sorry, Jimmy.”

“He do her?” LQ said. His eyes gave away what he was really asking. I figured he’d been thinking things over, his mind replaying the exchange of gunfire with the guy in the car.

“Yeah. He did.”

He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips and let out a long breath.

Brando put his hand on my good shoulder. “Listen, Jimmy. What say we quit this goddamn country and go home?”

“Let’s do it,” LQ said.

“Let’s,” I said.

Late that night we were back in Villa Acuña. Sanchez’s filling station was closed, and we left the Hudson parked in the rear of it. The car looked a lot less snappy than it had two days ago. LQ wanted to take the Thompson with us, but I said we’d never be able to smuggle it past the border guards, and we left it in the car trunk with the BAR.

A norther had kicked up and steadily strengthened. It gusted hard and cold. We turned up our collars and hugged our coats to us and squinted against the blowing sand. We held tight to our hats as we crossed the bridge. LQ yelled, “So long, Mexico!” and spat over the railing—but just then the wind turned and slung the spit on his hat. He cussed a blue streak and Brando laughed.

They slept as the train rocked through the night. I sipped coffee and stared out at the moonlit landscape, catching sight of a lone coyote now and then, a solitary tumbleweed bounding alongside the tracks. The country regained grass and hills and trees. Brando had cleaned out my wound with tequila and bandaged it with a clean cloth he got from somewhere, but the shoulder had stiffened through the day and the ache of it ran deep under the muscle, down to the bone.

We went through San Antonio, chugged through Seguin, Luling, Columbus, and still I couldn’t sleep.

The day broke gray and very cold and the trees were shaking in the wind. In Houston we changed trains. And then we were over Galveston Bay and at last I fell asleep for the few minutes it took to arrive at the station.

We stepped down from the coach and here came Big Sam through the crowd, smiling his movie star smile—then making a face of sympathy at the sight of LQ’s armsling. He shook our hands and said he was happy to see us all back.

Rose was waiting at the station’s front doors.

“Welcome home, Kid.”

I nodded.

He smiled—and then led the way out, checking his watch as he went, because there were things to tend to, as always. Deals to close, payments to pick up, promises to collect on, warnings to deliver, accounts to settle…