Warlord of Azatlan

4

A thousand odors struck them. The perfumes of flowers and citrus. The stink of caged chickens and tethered pigs. The rot of vegetables and fruits mashed under thousands of sandals. Diesel soot from the buses. All mixed and fermented under a sun that blazed on a land only fifteen degrees north of the Equator.

Watching for the men who would kill them, Lyons and Blancanales followed Captain Merida through the market stalls. The narrow passages were claustrophobic with crowding Indians and Ladinos, with overhanging awnings and piled goods.

Lyons and Blancanales scanned the faces and hands of the people, watching for weapons or sudden movement. The confusion of colors and faces and objects threatened to overwhelm their danger-heightened perception.

Voices called out to them in Spanish. Women talked to one another in guttural Indian languages. Children whistled and pointed at the North Americans, chattering to them in languages Lyons had never heard before. Animals squealed. Cassette players and radios blared a cacophony of music and songs.

Gadgets had stayed in the Silverado, supposedly to watch their weapons and gear. Actually he had hot-wired the vehicle and now waited for a signal to move. Lyons wore his earphone, and kept his hand-radio channel open for instant communication. Blancanales still monitored the microtransmitter in Colonel Morales's pocket.

The Terminal de Autobuses Extraurbanosoccupied a block-square section of the city. The crowded markets surrounded the terminal itself, an asphalt area where the buses shuttling from the villages to the capital exchanged passengers and loads. Leaving the market stalls behind, the three men came to the buses.

The designers of the terminal complex had built it in accordance with Third World realities. There were no ticket offices, no waiting rooms, no service garages. The drivers collected the fares, passengers waited on the buses, mechanics worked on engines and brakes and transmissions while the waiting passengers supervised. Pay lavatories offered privacy to those with five centavos. The poor used the corners and the gutters.

The air was gray with diesel exhaust. Hundreds of Ford and Chevrolet and Bluebird buses jammed the blacktop. Rows of buses, parked side by side, only inches separating one bus from the next, waited for passengers. Passengers carrying burdens of packages and sacks and children wandered along the rows searching for the buses that would take them to their villages. Drivers waited behind the wheels or tinkered with engines as assistants lashed goats and furniture and bundles to roof racks. Other assistants, shouting over the noise of radios and horns and blaring rock and roll, announced the names of cities and villages.

"Xela!"

"Chi-Chi!"

"Antigua!"

"Sacatepequez!"

"Nebaj!"

Arriving and departing buses eased through the chaos of the narrow lanes, assistants walking a step ahead of the front bumpers to part the chaos of crowding people and other maneuvering buses. Assistants guided drivers into narrow spaces with slaps on the fender: two slaps to continue, three quick slaps to stop.

A few steps behind Merida and Lyons, Blancanales lifted his coat as if to glance into an interior pocket, and whispered into his concealed hand-radio.

"Political to Ironman and the Wizard. I'm getting traffic sounds from the colonel. Must be on his way with his hit team. Wizard, we're in the terminal. Zero this far. No shadows, no badguys. Zero."

"Nothing here," Gadgets answered. "But I'm cocked and unlocked."

His partners' voices whispered in his earphone as Lyons followed Merida. The officer glanced back to the North Americans from time to time as he led them through the crowds. He read the hand-lettered destination signs-of buses.

A teenaged assistant called out to Lyons in awkward English: "Okay, man. Where you want to go? We go. Cheap. Anywhere you..."

The teenager saw Merida. His voice stopped in mid-sentence. Looking from the Guatemalan officer to the North American, the teenager stepped back between two buses and disappeared.

Lyons saw other bus drivers and assistants spot Merida. Most of the men and teenagers carefully ignored the officer. Others went quiet as the Guatemalan in the expensive suit passed. Lyons, with his years as a uniformed police officer, then as a plain-clothes detective, knew the reactions: the people recognized Merida as a police officer, and they hated him.

But why would they hate Merida? Unlike the pimps and dealers and male prostitutes who had despised Lyons because he represented law and decency, these bus drivers and their teenage assistants worked for a living, they sweated long hours behind the steering wheels of their buses or under the hoods repairing the engines. In the United States, bus and truck drivers joined police officers at the same all-night hamburger stands and doughnuts shops, sharing stories and jokes, often exchanging information. Why would it be different here?

A driver saw Lyons, smiled and motioned him over. Another man hissed to the driver, nodding toward Merida. The driver's face went hard, his eyes narrowing as he linked Lyons and Blancanales to Captain Merida. Lyons took a step toward the driver, only to have the driver turn his back.

None of the working-class Guatemalans could mistake Lyons and Blancanales as countrymen; Lyons's blond hair and blue eyes identified him as a North American, and Blancanales, though darker, with Hispanic features and easy Spanish, did not look Guatemalan. Even though the drivers recognized the two separate North Americans as foreigners, which meant Lyons and Blancanales could not be Guatemalan police or security officers, the drivers still gave them the same cold hatred as Merida. Why? Did they mistake the North Americans for someone else?

Lyons paused, secretively keyed his hand-radio. "Pol, I do not like this. Something's happening here and I don't know what."

"Think Iknow?" Blancanales whispered.

Drivers and assistants and passengers scattered. An Indian woman waiting in a bus saw something moving below her window — her eyes widened and she dropped down out of sight. The sidewalk cleared, people shoving their friends, hurrying them away.

Lyons's pulse roared in his ears. He snapped a glance back at Blancanales, saw the ex-Green Beret already dropping to a crouch, his right hand going under his coat for his pistol. Lyons heard Gadgets's voice shout through his earphone: "They're here! The colonel and four goons in flashy suits..."

Through the radio, he heard brakes screech. Then the frequency went to electron noise.

Lyons pulled his four-inch Colt Python from his shoulder holster and crouched with his back to the red and turquoise front of a bus. His eyes searched the area — the now deserted walkway and vendor stalls in front of him, the bus windshields and windows behind him. He eased his head past the right headlight and looked down the eighteen-inch gap between the bus and the next. Nothing moved.

Meanwhile Blancanales called Gadgets again and again. No answer. Finally: "Carl! Where's Merida?"

"Our liaison? Probably out there with a goon squad."

Looking across the walkway, Lyons saw two Indian children watching him. Their eyes flicked back and forth, from him to a point on the left side of the bus, six feet from where Lyons crouched.

Lyons shifted the Python to his left hand. He extended his left arm. He leaned down to look under the bumper. He saw two scuffed and torn shoes behind the front wheel. Infinitely slowly, the shoes crept through the black fluid and the filth and litter in the gutter. The shoes neared the front of the bus.

The front sight and barrel of a revolver appeared around the edge of the bus at waist height. Lyons tensed, then made his move even as the shoes splashed through the gutter, the man jumping out from around the fender to shoot, only to sprawl as the North American grabbed the pistol's barrel and jerked the gunman off balance. As the man fell, Lyons whipped back his Python and backhanded the gunman with the pistol's heavy barrel.

Shots. A bullet slammed into a fender. Lyons straightened, turned, heard the quiet rip-rip-ripof Blancanales's silenced Beretta 93-R, the three-shot burst hammering steel and breaking glass.

"DON'T SHOOT!" Lyons screamed. "THERE'S PEOPLE AND LITTLE KIDS EVERYWHERE!"

But the other pistol fired again. Lyons felt a fist slam into his head. He struggled with the gunman who had risen up from the sidewalk, the man's right fist clubbing Lyons in the head and face and shoulder again and again.

Lyons saw who he fought. The man looked like a beggar, his clothes ragged and patched, but he was not old. Webbed scar tissue twisted the right side of his face and hooded his sunken, blind right eye. The beggar's left hand gripped a blue-steel revolver. His right hand would never grip anything again, only knotted burn scars and stubs of fingers remaining.

Forcing the beggar's pistol to the concrete, Lyons blocked another blow from the stumpy hand and put his Python against the beggar's throat. But he did not fire. He wanted a prisoner. Lyons ended the fight by slamming his knee up into the beggar's crotch. He heard the man gasp and choke with the pain. A slug tore past Lyons's head.

Broken glass showered him, gutter slime splashed his face as he rolled off the low curb and went flat under the bus. The beggar was already gone.

Lyons crabbed under the bus, his hands sliding in the mashed vegetables and excrement and motor oil, the underside of the engine and transmission tearing at his sports coat. He paused for an instant, looking in the direction of the shots.

Two buses away, he saw expensive shoes. He recognized the fabric of the slacks. Lyons went flat on his belly in the dirt. He raised his filth-covered Python, sighted on Merida's right food, and fired.

Merida fell screaming. He rolled and thrashed in the gutter, the black slime ruining his Italian attire. Lyons crawled under the buses, found Merida's Colt Government Model .45, and eased down the hammer as the man moaned and clutched his shattered foot. Lyons put the Colt in his pocket, flipped Merida onto his face, and put the Python against the back of his head. Lyons keyed his hand-radio.

"I've got our liaison man. Where'd that beggar go?"

Gadgets's voice answered. "Move it, boys. The whole city must've heard that shoot-out."

Someone ran to Lyons. He whipped the pistol around and saw Blancanales, the silenced Beretta 93-R autopistol in his hands.

"The beggar's gone," Blancanales told him. "No one else..."

"Ironman! Pol! Move it!" Gadgets shouted through their earphones. "We've got to get out of here! I mean, now!"

Lyons looked back the way they had come. "Straight out..."

Each man grabbed one of Merida's arms and jerked him to his feet. He screamed as his weight went onto his shattered foot, then Lyons and Blancanales dragged him from the parked buses.

Drivers stared, people backed away as the three men lurched through the chaos, Lyons and Blancanales sometimes dragging Merida, sometimes carrying him. Lyons shouldered through a wall of baskets. He kicked aside panicked chickens.

Blancanales shouted out: "Policia! Emergencia!"

Thrashing through the hanging plastic of a booth's sunshade, Lyons stumbled over piles of avocados, mangoes and bananas. He went down in a tangle with Merida. The wounded man screamed. The fruit smashed under them. Blancanales jerked them to their feet.

Indian women ran, the bright colors of their huipilesflashing with instants of sunlight. Lyons pushed a child aside, stepped over another display of fruit on a tarp, dragged Merida through the bananas and mangoes. Blancanales called ahead in Spanish, warning the people.

"Alto!" A policeman shouted into their faces, his M-l carbine levelled at them. Blancanales kicked him as Lyons chopped down on the barrel of the rifle.

The policeman fired. Lyons felt the muzzle flash, felt the bullet shock Merida as it hit the already wounded man. Lyons released Merida for an instant as he pulled the carbine from the policeman's hands and straight-armed the man aside. Blancanales carried Merida. Ten steps farther, Lyons threw the rifle onto a corrugated-steel shanty roof.

Leaving the shacks and stalls behind, they ran through brilliant sunlight. People stared as the three filthy, bloody men staggered up a hard dirt incline to the street.

A horn sounded. "Ironman! Politician!"

Weaving through buses and trucks, the Silverado's horn blaring, Gadgets drove over the curb. He braked just short of crashing into a vendor's sidewalk stall. The vendor grabbed a small child and hastily followed his wife and three other children down the dirt slope, away from the crazed North Americans.

Blancanales jerked open the side door. Lyons shoved Merida onto the second seat, then jumped in on top of him. Blancanales followed, crawling over Lyons and Merida as Gadgets threw the wagon into reverse. They bounced off the curb backward, continued swerving backward through traffic. Then Gadgets stood on the brakes, shifted gear, and accelerated.

Swerving from lane to lane, leaning on the horn, shouting out the window, Gadgets careered through the crowded streets. Blancanales crawled into the front seat. He found himself sitting on a bloody machete. He looked over to his partner, saw blood on Gadgets's hands.

"I won't ask what happened."

Gadgets detoured over a sidewalk, crashed through a pasteboard sign, then bounced off the curb. He whipped around a corner, and floored the accelerator.

"Goon squad hits the shit! Film at eleven!"

Tires screeching, Gadgets braked at a stop sign. The afternoon traffic of a major boulevard passed. Waiting for a gap in the cars and trucks and buses, Gadgets eased through a leisurely right turn, and merged with traffic.

In the back seat, Lyons checked Captain Merida's wounds. The Magnum hollowpoint had shattered his foot. Strands of flesh and tendons hung out of the exit-torn shoe. The .30-caliber slug from the policeman's carbine had gouged his ribs, but not entered his chest cavity. Blood had ruined forever the Guatemalan's Italian fashions.

Lyons looked at himself. Blood and filth and mashed fruit covered his clothes. Slime coated his Python. He heard Gadgets laughing. He looked up to see his partner watching him in the rearview mirror.

"Dig it, Ironman," Gadgets said, shaking his head. "I know all about dirty wars — but man, you stink!"