Wild Card

SEVEN

They had started out in the dodge coupe from their appointed meeting place in Sonora and driven south on State Route 99 to cross the San Joaquin River some miles above Fresno. There Lathrop turned onto a series of local roads that took them eastward through the rolling dry country with its hills of eroded sandstone and occasional clumps of rough grass, sagebrush, and piñons on their dull, sunbaked faces.

The air conditioner worked well enough and they kept their windows shut as the temperature outside steadily climbed. Ricci sat in the passenger side saying very little, observing the monotonous scenery, and sipping coffee from the lid of the thermos bottle in the compartment between them. It had a thin, stale taste that got less palatable as they rode along, and was barely lukewarm by the time he noticed Lathrop slow the car coming up on a sign for some place called Amaranto.

Ricci remembered the smell of the coffee Julia Gordian had brought and how it had spread pleasantly in his dining room. Then he lowered his window partway, and as the hot air outside hit him, he extended his arm away from the flank of the car and sloshed what he had left in the plastic thermos lid onto the dusty blacktop.

Lathrop looked over at him.

“Don’t like my brew?”

“No.”

“Neither do I,” Lathrop said. “But it’s all we’ve got and I have to drive awhile longer.”

Ricci didn’t respond. He pressed the button to shut his window, put the lid back in place on the thermos, and glanced at the fuel gauge. The needle had fallen to just above the eighth-of-a-tank mark.

“We’re low on gas,” he said.

“I know.”

Ricci motioned toward the road sign. It had a generic pump symbol below it.

“We should probably fill up,” he said.

Lathrop shook his head.

“Not in Amaranto,” he said. “Unless you want to find trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“The sort with eyes and ears connected to the Quiros family,” Lathrop said.

Ricci grunted.

“Makes sense why you’re riding heavy on the brakes,” he said.

Lathrop gave him a small nod.

“I don’t want to get stopped by any badges,” he said. “They’re the ones with the high-speed connections.”

Ricci thought a moment. “How much farther to that ranch?”

“I told you, a while,” Lathrop said. “About five minutes after we pass the town exit, there’ll be an unmarked turnoff on the right. We’ll have to take it north for fifteen, twenty miles through a whole lot of nothing.”

Ricci leaned back, returned his eye to the fuel gauge.

“We’re cutting it close,” he said.

Lathrop shrugged, his hands on the wheel.

“Salvetti’s expecting us,” he said. “He’ll be ready with whatever we need.”

The turnoff led to a narrow, undivided road that ran away from the shoulders of the hills in meandering curves. Soon the ridges had almost disappeared behind them in the incessant flood of sunlight, and the surrounding landscape leveled into plains stubbled with more sagebrush, creosote shrubs, and, increasingly, widespread mats of those hardy grasses that somehow manage to thrive across the alkaline flats.

As they went on, the paved road became cracked and rutted from lack of maintenance and, with several bumps that seemed a final, rattling protest against this gradual but complete deterioration, surrendered to a hard dirt track that actually proved smoother by contrast. Looking out his window, Ricci saw brown- and white-fleeced goats grazing at the patches of grass in loosely defined groups, and then a weathered old barn with a couple of workhorses outside in a corral and chickens penned near some big, lounging mixed-breed watchdogs.

They rode for another three-quarters of a mile or so. Then Ricci spotted a vehicle up ahead in the glaring sun, a red open pickup truck. He could tell at once it wasn’t moving and, as they got closer, realized it had been pulled across the track to block their advance.

Lathrop nosed the Dodge to within a few yards of the truck, stopped, cut the engine, and waited. The pickup’s driver was its sole occupant, and a minute later he got out and approached the car. A solid, broad-shouldered man of about fifty with thick, neatly cut waves of salt-and-pepper hair, dark brown eyes, and a clean-shaven face with a firm, squarish chin, he wore a white T-shirt, dungarees, and cowboy boots.

Lathrop turned to Ricci.

“He’s going to want to put a name on you,” he said. “Any preferences?”

“Yeah,” Ricci said. “Mine.”

Lathrop shrugged and brought down his window as the man came around his side of the car, tugging a work glove off his right hand.

“Lathrop,” he said, and leaned over toward the window. “Been a long time.”

Lathrop nodded.

“Don’t know how you always manage to look the same.”

“That’s for me to know, and you to find out.”

“Sooner or later,” Lathrop said, “I will.”

The pickup driver grinned, reached his gloveless hand through the window, and gave Lathrop’s shoulder a masculine squeeze, his eyes going to Ricci’s face at the same time.

“Al Salvetti, Tom Ricci,” Lathrop said. “Ricci, Al.”

Salvetti took his hand off Lathrop’s shoulder and stretched it over the back of his seat. He grasped Ricci’s and shook it, holding his gaze on him a few seconds longer.

“Good to meet you,” he said, then shifted his attention back to Lathrop. “I’ll turn my truck around and you can follow me up to the house. Got some food in the fridge, and everything ready for working out the details of the flight.”

Lathrop looked at him.

“We’re on fumes,” he said. “That old service station off the main road closed down and I wanted to steer clear of those sons of bitches in Amaranto.”

“Can’t blame you,” Salvetti said. “Hang on, I’ll bring a jerrican from the truck, put some gas in your tank to be on the safe side.”

Salvetti turned and started back toward the pickup.

“Doesn’t look like some boondocks rancher,” Ricci said, watching him. “Or sound like one.”

Lathrop faced him but didn’t say anything.

“Chicago, south side,” Ricci said. “I’d guess that’s the accent.”

Lathrop remained silent another moment and then shrugged.

“He is what he is,” he said. “If he used to be something else and wants to tell you about it, it’s up to him.”

Salvetti’s ranch house was a small, single-story building with rustic furnishings that looked as if they were mostly handcrafted. Its main room was off the kitchen and had a large trestle table with benches on either side, a Native American rug of some kind in the middle of the dark hardwood floor, and pine chests and chairs here and there around it. Ricci saw a computer in a hutch against one wall, a crowded bookshelf above it, and against the opposite wall a stereo with a turntable on a stand beside several stacked crates of vinyl albums. He didn’t notice a television.

“I’ve got something for your stomachs,” Salvetti said. He’d emerged from the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches and sweating ice-cold soda cans and set it at one end of the table. “Grab whatever you want; the bread and cheese are homemade.”

Lathrop sat on a bench and reached for a sandwich. Ignoring the food, Ricci stepped toward the opposite end of the table to look at a pile of open and semi-unfolded maps.

“These for us?” he said.

Salvetti nodded, came around next to him.

“I had most of them handy, downloaded the rest off the Internet. Aerials, government topos, Triple-A road maps.” He shuffled one out of the pile and fully outspread it. “This’s a satellite closeup of that area out there south of Yosemite.” He glanced over at Lathrop. “I circled off your major landmarks. The twin buttes, that creek… only thing I couldn’t locate is the Miwok trail. If it’s really there like the man told you, you’ll have to sniff it out on your own.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Miwok?”

“It’s the name somebody or other gave the Sierra Nevada Indian tribes after they were happy to call themselves Ahwaneechee for four thousand years,” Salvetti said.

“For God’s sake,” Lathrop said. “Listen to you.”

Salvetti smiled a little.

“It pays to know your neighbors,” he said. “Or at least to know who they are.”

Lathrop rose from the bench and joined the other two, carrying his sandwich with him.

“You decide on someplace to put us down?” he asked.

Salvetti slid a finger over the map until he got to a site he’d inked a heavy black ring around, then tapped it twice.

“This mesa here should be perfect,” he said. “It’s low and wide so you can hardly notice its elevation. Pretty naked, too, and that’s firsthand knowledge… I’ve flown over it before.” He paused. “Brings you to within five miles of those buttes, the closest I can get.”

Ricci looked at him again.

“Seems like it’d be a rough landing.”

Salvetti seemed mildly surprised by his remark.

“I tell people I can bring them anywhere in my plane,” he said. “They won’t ever hear me guarantee it’s going to be easy.”

The moment he entered the hut, Pedro saw Marissa Vasquez watching him from her place on the floor. Always, she watched him. And always looking back into her eyes filled Pedro with a venom for this schooled and coddled daughter of privilege that only equaled his desire to have his way with her. It was as if the hateful resentment and lust fueled each other, and he wanted her to feel its relentless, intolerable inner burning just as he felt it. Physically feel its volcanic release inside her. And soon enough, when the time came, he would do it. He would treat her no better than the cheap Tijuana whores he left weeping in pain and degradation on their filthy sheets, on their bare backs, his crumpled bills reclaimed from the purses in which they had stuffed them. Treat her without even as much regard, for they did not ever think to stand up taller than he. Soon, yes, soon. Pedro would give her what roared within him like an angry, hungering beast, pound it into her, and as she fought and cried out in resistance, he would let her have still more of it. He would force upon her an education that not all her father’s wealth could have provided, show her for once what it was to live in common flesh. And in that sharing Pedro would take something from her as well, for whatever long or short time she had left. And there, for him, would be the true and lasting satisfaction.

He stepped toward her in his combat-booted feet now, stood with hands on his hips. Her face was gaunt from weariness and anxiety, her hair hanging around it in tousled disarray. But her eyes were sharp and clear.

And they watched him

“I have good news, hermosa,” he said. And glanced at her constant guard. “If César has not already broken it.”

Marissa said nothing. The guard shook his head slightly but did not otherwise move. He would, of course, never have taken it upon himself to tell her of the information that had reached them from Modesto.

“A man comes to free you,” Pedro said. “As soon as today, I am led to believe.”

She did not speak.

“He has been sent by your father,” he said. “A gringo whose services the millionaire Esteban Vasquez has bought, as he always buys his adored niña’s safety and comfort with his money.”

She studied Pedro’s masked face with restrained interest, as if not wishing to yield him the gratification of a perceived ruse. Her composed silence and stillness clawed at his stomach, made him impatient for the release he himself held tightly in check.

“Do you believe me about this?” he asked.

She did not speak.

“Do you believe me?” he repeated, an insistent edge in his voice.

Marissa finally shrugged.

“I’m not sure about anything my father will do,” she said. “If someone comes, I suppose I’ll know.”

“Perhaps only after I throw your rescuer’s dead body at your feet,” Pedro said. “For the impressive gringo who comes for you, this one who is said to have delivered the daughter of a great and famous American businessman from her own unfortunate captivity, has been betrayed by his compañero for the money of the millionaire who pays me.” He showed a grin through the mouth opening of his balaclava. “We know where he will arrive. We know about when. And even now my men disperse to set their trap for him.”

Marissa looked at him without answering.

Pedro’s grin hardened. “So what do you think, flora?” he said. “Of how money brings us full circle, and the rest?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, released a drawn out but steady breath.

“I don’t know what to say that you would understand,” she replied.

Pedro stared at the girl a second, feeling the angry urge to take her right there and then. On the ground, in the dirt, with his hands around her throat, he would add to her humiliation by doing it while César watched. But then he caught hold of himself. This affair was not over, not yet. If he was to collect on his own fee, he must still be bound to Juan Quiros’s wishes.

He turned back through the hut entrance, suddenly perspiring under his full face hood, his mouth parched with thirst. Outside, he started to reach for the water canteen on his gear belt but changed his mind, his hand going instead to the metal flask of whiskey in his breast pocket.

The deep swig Pedro took quenched neither his thirst nor his seething rage. He had not expected that it would.

The slut’s time was coming, he thought, and swiped a hand across his lips.

Not yet, no. Not yet.

But coming.

Salvetti drove them a short distance past his ranch house and then pulled the truck to a halt. Up ahead, a single-prop Grumman Tiger sat on a twelve-hundred-foot improved airstrip.

“That plane come with the ranch?” Ricci asked from the backseat.

Salvetti craned his head around.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “The chickens also.”

Ricci just looked at him.

Salvetti turned away, pushed open his door, glanced up at the cloudless sky, and checked his watch.

“Haul out your gear and I’ll get us loaded aboard and flaps-down in the air,” he said. “Under these flying conditions, we should be over the Sierra in a hop and a skip.”

Pedro pushed through a tangle of manzanita and joined the three lookouts he’d posted on the other side. Then he gazed straight ahead northward, where the double buttes heaved up from the flat valley bottom, scored and knobbed with erosion, but stacked high above the surrounding landscape as if in a display of resistant strength.

After a moment Pedro turned to the man beside him. Leaving the hut out of sight had quieted his ache for their captive in a way the whiskey had not, but now he felt a restlessness to spring the ambush. It would, Juan Quiros had promised, be an action well worth his trouble.

“I take it the others are on the move, Lafé?” he asked.

“As you ordered,” the guard said.

Pedro grunted with satisfaction, looked toward the buttes again. Though still washed in afternoon heat, he could barely wait for the chirping of the insects to announce dusk’s arrival in the valley.

“The maricone will come for the girl from the direction of those spires,” he said. “And he will go to his death under their shadows.”

With its thirty-one-foot wingspan and high-rev Lycoming engine, the Tiger had been designed to be feather-light and fighter-powerful. And so it was as Salvetti piloted the little four-seater over an irregular terrain of jutting peaks, pine-forested upper slopes, and arid, shadow-splashed foothills and depressions studded with thickets of dryland scrub, all of it visible in panorama below vaporous white swags of low-altitude clouds.

Quiet since they had gone wheels-up, Ricci sat behind Salvetti trying to match what was depicted on the USGA map across his lap to what he saw through the aircraft’s wide canopy and windows, occasionally glancing at the digital ground image on the avionic panel’s navigational display for additional comparison. In the copilot’s seat, Lathrop also kept his words to a minimum, but had seemed not once to look at the ground as he gazed outward into space.

Ricci observed this by chance and filed it away in his mind without particular inference.

Half an hour after takeoff, Salvetti pointed out the lined, wattled necks of the buttes projecting between the walls of a shallow valley or basin to his left.

“You’re going thereabouts,” he said, and then nodded his head toward the forward curve of the canopy. “Look out and you’ll notice the land flatten in front of us almost like it’s been smoothed over by giant rollers. A kind of dark rim around its edges, see?”

Ricci leaned forward.

“Shadows,” he said.

Salvetti nodded.

“They outline the mesa’s plateau, give you an idea how it barely rises over the plain,” he said. “If this was around noontime instead of three in the afternoon, you’d have the bright sun overhead and might not even notice that it mounts.” He paused, adjusted himself behind the controls. “You fellas better strap in — I’m going to drop down and run a couple of passes to scout a landing spot that won’t throw our spines out of whack.”

Lathrop reached for his seatbelt buckle.

“We hope,” he said to finally break his long, staring silence.

It wasn’t exactly easy. But it could have been much worse.

The Tiger grooved out of the sky to land with a jarring bump and then rumbled shakily on across the mesa’s open table for several hundred feet, its propeller whipping up a cyclonic cloud of dust, its treaded wheels scraping out corrugated channels of parched earth and pebbles that tacked like hail against the underside of the airframe.

Inside the cabin, Salvetti had his lips puckered into a spout as he gripped the control column. Ricci couldn’t hear him through the noise, but looking around his contoured headrest thought for a second that he might have been whistling.

Then there was another, lesser jolt. Ricci lurched forward against his seatbelt, and back against the leather upholstery, deceleration slapping his stomach like an iron hand in a furry mitt. Moments later the grating bombardment of dirt abated and the prop’s blurry rotation slowed until its separate twin blades were distinguishable at the nose of the plane.

Salvetti rolled to a halt and exhaled a surge of breath, his mouth wide open now, his knuckles relaxing around the column.

“Did it again,” he said in a half whisper.

Then he took his hands off the controls, leaned back, and briefly closing his eyes, tipped a finger toward the heavens and crossed himself.

The five guerrillas came midway down the trail, where they could see the bend of the sluggish creek it followed winding away from the buttes. Then they took cover, three hiding in the snarled vegetation that bordered the trail on its right, two splitting off to its left.

They dumped their knapsacks, put their weapons down at their sides, and settled into position.

“There are still hours until sundown,” one of them said to the man beside him in Spanish. He extracted a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook a couple out. They were unfiltered American Camels. “Nothing to fucking do but wait.”

The man beside him nodded and accepted the cigarette that had been offered.

“It should be cooler soon,” he said.

“Yes,” said the other man, putting the rest of his cigarettes away and reaching for his Zippo lighter. “But then the biting flies come out.”

“They are hateful creatures.”

“Yes, that is the word. Hateful.”

“I wish I could kill them. Kill every last one.”

“I wish I could kill them all, too,” said the man with the pack of smokes. He fired the cigarette in his mouth, then held the lighter to the tip of his companion’s. “And I would like to kill both those fools who come for the girl.”

“For making us sit out here in these bushes?”

“Yes. I ask you, what extra pay will we get for it?”

“Nothing.” The man who’d been given the Camel puffed to get it started. “You have a point, but we can only kill the one.”

“Yes.”

“We are, unfortunately, limited.”

“Yes, limited, I agree,” said the man with the lighter in his hand. “That is another very good word.”

He spit a fleck of loose tobacco from the tip of his tongue and then lapsed into silence, smoking and waiting for the dusk.

Outside the plane, Salvetti got their packs and other gear from the luggage hold and handed them off as they waited.

Ricci took his duffel, reached for his rifle case, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he turned to where Lathrop was on his haunches studying one of the maps, and walked over to him.

“We’re basing what we’re doing on something some small fry Quiros ringleader south of the border told you,” he said. “You sure you weren’t duped?”

Lathrop glanced up at Ricci. He had put on dark mirrored sunglasses that gleamed in the sunshine.

“It’s late to be asking again,” he said.

“Not too late yet.”

Lathrop continued looking into the brightness.

“He knew what was at stake,” he said. “I knew he was too scared to have lied.”

Ricci stood there.

“Still haven’t told me how his stake paid off for him,” he said.

“And maybe that’s how I want to keep it,” Lathrop said. “But if I’d gone to Juan with anything besides the goods on Marissa Vasquez, he’d have laughed in my face. Instead he confirmed every piece of information I got and filled in blanks I left to see how it all fell in line.”

“Because he thinks I’m the man who did whatever you won’t tell me you did to his cousin down there in Baja,” Ricci said.

Lathrop nodded.

“And because he thinks I hired you to help me grab the Vasquez girl back for her father,” Ricci said.

Lathrop nodded.

“And because he thinks you’re pulling a double-cross on me,” Ricci said. “Setting me up for an ambush on that Indian trail. Dumb blanco that I am.”

Lathrop nodded again.

“Except,” Ricci said. “It isn’t me who’s being set up.”

Lathrop’s head went up and down a fourth and final time, the sunlight slipping across his lenses like quicksilver.

“Role reversal,” he said. “With a twist.”

Ricci looked at him awhile without saying anything more. Then they both heard Salvetti slam the door of the Tiger’s baggage compartment.

Rising from his squat, Lathrop folded the map, stuffed it into his shirt pocket, and lifted his packs off the ground.

“We better get on the move,” he said.

Sunset, the western sky bleeding red across the horizon. Ready now, the guerrillas increased their vigilance, the stocks of their HK G36 submachine guns tucked against their arms.

A last Camel was ground out in the scrub, dirt kicked hastily over its charred remnant.

The smoker cleared his throat of phlegm and swatted helplessly at the tiny winged biters as they swirled in, attracted to some chemical in human sweat.

“God damn this job,” he said in a hushed tone. “I only want it to be over.”

The man beside him nodded.

“What spares Lafé from coming out here?” he whispered. “Or even Manuel? It’s as if his softness is being rewarded.”

“He’s already gotten his reward, or haven’t you taken a look at the girl he seduced?”

“Of course I have. And between us, Pedro won’t be satisfied until he takes his turn with her.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed.”

“He’ll have it before all this is done, too, I would bet.”

“Yes. You can see how he waits. In his eyes, you can see. It could happen very soon.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes,” said the man who’d brought the cigarettes. “Yes, I do. While we’re out here getting eaten up by bugs.”

The other man frowned.

“You’re right when you say this job stinks and must be gotten over with quickly,” he said.

“And,” said the man with the cigarettes, “keep in mind it hasn’t even really begun.”

Lathrop scuffed down the embankment, Ricci taking the moderately steep grade a little to his side, the two of them pausing there to orient themselves and catch their breaths, the weight of their gear pressing their backs and shoulders. Rocks and grit lay scattered around their boots. Within a few dozen feet of them to the left, the creek bed, more mud than water, serpentined north and east over the humped terrain. Straggly plants grew in a kind of apron around its banks, and higher up the valley ridges through which it wound its slow, undulant path away into the distance, ponderosa and blackjack pine grew in intermingled and surprisingly dense terraces.

Not for the first time since they had left the mesa, Lathrop pulled his map out of his shirt pocket, studied it, then studied the ground. The paper was damp with his perspiration.

Several moments expired. Ricci waited in silence under the lengthening shadows of the buttes as Lathrop raised his eyes from the map and stared out toward the creek, his lips slightly parted.

Then Lathrop turned to him, his finger pointing at a slight angle from the languid waterway.

“Over there through the brush,” he said. “That’s where I think we’ll find the trail.”

On inspection minutes later, he proved to be correct.

They didn’t take it.

Crouched above the trail with his heels deep in a carpet of pine needles, Lathrop peered down between the evergreen trunks with his binoculars, then handed them off to Ricci.

“How many men you see?” he said in a hushed voice.

“Five,” Ricci whispered. “Three on this side, two on the other. Bunched close together.”

Lathrop nodded.

“Checks with what I saw,” he said.

Still holding the binoculars, Ricci brought their focus up from the stony Indian trail, swept them across the cut it followed through the blunt hillcrest. Then he dropped the lenses from his eyes.

“You were on the money about the guns they’d be toting,” he said. “They’re HK carbines. Five point five-six mills.”

Lathrop nodded. “Good thing I told you to bring one of your own, isn’t it?” he said.

Ricci looked at him, then motioned to the cleft’s opposite shoulder.

“I’ll make my way around this rise, take out the two from over there,” he said. “You stay back and handle the three.”

Lathrop nodded again, lowered the strap of his rifle case, tapped the face of his wristwatch.

“We’d better synch up before you move off for your boys,” he said. “Does that UpLink watch you wear tell time, or is it only for communicating with Moon Maiden in her space coupe?”

Ricci was impassive.

“I’ll need ten minutes,” he said.

One minute and counting, Ricci thought. His eye was against the scope of his carbine, taking advance measure of his targets.

Down below in the near twilight, their backs to him, the pair of men in camouflage outfits was barely hidden from sight in the thicket. Your boys. The trick for him was to nail them exactly when Lathrop sniped the others. Do it in a couple of accurate bursts, three at most, and mask Lathrop’s rifle shots from however many of the kidnappers had remained behind with Marissa Vasquez. If the plan worked the way it was intended, they would mistake the sound of Ricci’s HK firing at the ambushers for that of their guns shooting him as it echoed through the valley, think that Lathrop had led him into their ambush and he’d been the one who was erased.

He checked his watch now. Thirty-five seconds. Thirty-four, thirty-three…

Ricci’s jaw tightened. A plan for success, he thought.

Except he did not like how it felt to kill men, and especially did not like how it felt shooting men in their backs. Not even men who had set themselves up to kill him.

Your boys.

His watch again. Its digital second readout ticking down the seconds.

Eleven left. Ten. Nine. Eight.

His heart pumped. He breathed through his front teeth. His finger steadied on the trigger.

Six, five, four, three, two…

His eye to the sight, the carbine rattled in Ricci’s hand, its stock bucking against his shoulder.

Your boys.

Beneath him, his bullets ripped into their bodies, knocking them forward into the dirt, snuffing out their lives before they could have possibly known what hit them. And as he fired, Ricci could hear coordinated shots from the opposite slope.

But then, he was listening for them.

On his belly in the dirt, Lathrop relaxed his grip on the sound-suppressed SIG-Sauer SSG’s trigger.

It had been neat and precise, just how he liked it. Three cracks of the rifle, three more pieces of dead meat to feed the crawling, wriggling, and buzzing local scavengers.

And making it all the more perfect, he’d ended up with a leftover round of ammunition in his clip.

Moments after he heard the stutter of the rifles, Pedro entered the hut and glanced knowingly at César. Then he let his eyes sink slowly down to Marissa Vasquez and meet her own disconcerted gaze.

“Gunfire,” he said. “Do you recognize the sound of bullets spat from a gun?”

She kept silent.

“Perhaps you have never heard it in your town’s favored streets. Or at the university you attend, eh?” He grinned, reached for his tin of whiskey, and uncapped it. “Let me know, mi hermosa, are such places too sheltered from the world’s ugliness for such disturbances to their peace and quiet?”

She looked at him.

“I told you your father sent a rescuer,” Pedro said. “And now I can tell you the rescuer is dead.”

Marissa’s gaze, filled with increasing dismay and confusion, finally lost its determined steadiness.

“No,” she said, finally averting it from him.

Pedro’s own eyes stayed on her, roving up and down, lingering in places. Then they went to César.

“Go outside and tell the men to bring their bloody carcass in here when they arrive,” he said, and swigged deeply from the flask. “After that I want to be left alone… The other gringo can wait, am I understood?”

César nodded, left the hut, and Pedro turned back to Marissa.

“You would not believe me when I said someone was coming for you, but now you’ll have a dead man for proof… and to keep us company,” he said, taking another long drink, his eyes studying her again. “Who knows what may occur before his unseeing eyes? What acts we will perform that his mouth cannot speak of? Who, indeed, knows, hermosa, for the dead can tell no tales of what pleasures the living will soon enjoy.”

“What’s happening?” Manuel asked César. He had emerged from one of the other thatch shelters upon hearing the submachine gun salvos.

César paused on his way toward the brambles screening the trail head.

“They’ve got the one her father sent,” he said. “El jefe wants his corpse brought into the hut.”

Manuel looked at him.

“Why in there?” he said.

“I don’t think about it,” César said. “You shouldn’t either.”

He started forward, but Manuel reached out and grasped his arm.

“Let go of me,” César said.

“Pedro’s lost his mind,” Manuel said. “He’s turned this into something it wasn’t supposed to be.”

César’s eyes bored into him.

“It isn’t up to me what he does,” he said. “I told you to let go.”

Manuel held onto his elbow another moment, sighed, and then released his grip.

“We’re all bastards,” he said.

“And well-paid ones,” César said, shrugging away from him to step toward the fold of brush.

As he did there was a muffled pop from behind it, another.

César grimaced and collapsed to the ground dripping blood, Manuel going down inches behind him.

And then the brush parted.

Pedro turned from Marissa Vasquez the moment he heard what he recognized as silenced shots outside, instantly reaching for the gun holstered on his belt.

His eyes landed on the two white men standing in the hut entrance, widened. One had a rifle strapped over his shoulder and, more importantly, a pistol in his right hand aimed at Pedro’s chest. The other held a submachine gun.

Pedro straightened, staring at them, his fingers clenched around the butt of his own weapon.

“Fuck you,” he said, and spat. “You might as well do it.”

Lathrop centered his Glock on Pedro’s chest, fired a third round from its barrel, and looked over his body into the hut as it fell.

“There’s our girl,” he said to Ricci. “Safe and sound.”

Ricci saw Marissa Vasquez shackled on the floor at the rear of the hut and rushed through the entrance a half step behind Lathrop.

Then he noticed Lathrop drop back and halted, not thinking about why, or consciously thinking about why, just turning to look at him.

A cell phone had appeared in Lathrop’s left hand.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said.

Lathrop flipped open the phone. “We need to contact Salvetti and tell him we’re done,” he said.

Ricci stood looking at him.

“That can wait,” he said. “He’ll find out when we get back to the mesa.”

Lathrop held the cell phone open in his left hand. The Glock had remained in his right.

“The plane needs to get warmed up,” he said.

“That plane can take off on a dime,” Ricci said. “And you know it.”

Lathrop’s gaze went to his.

“I’m making my call.”

“To Salvetti,” Ricci said.

Their eyes remained locked.

“Or whoever I want,” Lathrop said.

Ricci shook his head.

“What’s the game this time?” he said. “You call Salvetti and he calls somebody else with a message? Or did you only toss his name at me on the spot.”

Silence. Lathrop held the phone.

“Give it to me,” Ricci said. “This isn’t worth it.”

Lathrop shook his head. “Sure it is,” he said. “We can double our take on this job. Triple it. Doesn’t hurt anybody or anything except some dope dealer’s bankroll.”

Ricci nodded toward Marissa Vasquez.

“How about her,” he said.

Lathrop nodded, the phone raised in his left hand. Ricci had grown more aware of the Glock in his right.

“She just gets home a little later,” Lathrop said.

“All we have to do is play this out. Tell Esteban we saved his daughter’s life and want something more for our efforts. He’ll give us whatever we want of his dirty money. Any amount.”

“A new play, new rules,” Ricci said. “That it?”

Lathrop looked at him. “Explain why not,” he said.

“Maybe because it would make us no better than the men we killed,” Ricci said.

Another silence. The stillness of Ricci’s eyes did not betray the close attention he was paying to the Glock.

“We made a deal and it isn’t going to change for money we don’t even know how to spend,” he said. “Damn you, Lathrop, give me the phone and let’s take her the hell out of here.”

Lathrop looked at him a second longer.

“And what’s my other choice?” he said.

Ricci nodded his chin slightly toward Lathrop’s gun.

“Think you know,” he said.

“Could be I do,” Lathrop said. “But I want to hear you say it.”

Ricci waited a beat, nodded toward the gun again.

“We see which one of us is quicker,” he said.

Lathop stared at him for several long moments, his head angling a little to one side. Then his lips parted, took in air… and shaped themselves into the faintest of grins.

Keeping his Glock pointed down at the ground, he tossed the phone into Ricci’s outstretched hand.

“You going to want my gun, too?” he said.

Ricci shook his head. “You might need it later on,” he said, and then turned toward Marissa Vasquez.

Ricci stepped to the back of the hut, saw Marissa’s expression, paused before he quite reached her. Her captors had used battery lanterns for lighting as dusk closed in around them, and their stark radiance had washed any hint of color from her face. She looked afraid, but mostly she looked to be in shock, her wide, glassy eyes seeming to stare at everything and nothing.

He crouched in front of her and glanced over at Lathrop, nodding toward the bodies of the men they’d killed. Lathrop began searching them for the keys to her restraints.

Ricci looked at her again.

“Marissa,” he said. “We’re taking you out of here.”

Her gaze went to him. At first its remoteness, coupled with the strange, flat look on her face, made him feel only half in her attention. Then she appeared to draw it upon him with an effort.

“My boyfriend needs help,” she said, her voice thin. “They’re keeping Felipe here somewhere.”

Ricci looked at her a moment, then shook his head.

“His name is Manuel Aguilera,” he said slowly. “He was with them from the start.”

She took a while to react. Ricci wasn’t sure she’d grasped the meaning of what he had told her and gave it a while to sink in. But there was Lathrop behind him in the hut, and the possibility of stragglers outside from among the group who’d abducted her, and he could afford only so much time.

“No,” she said at last.

Ricci kept looking at her.

“It’s the truth,” he said.

“No.”

Ricci started to reach out a hand, saw her flinch back, and held it still.

“It hurts,” he said. “But it’s the truth.”

Marissa Vasquez moved her head slightly from side to side.

“No.”

Ricci hesitated.

“I’m not saying I know how he felt about you,” he said. “He might’ve gotten to care, but maybe cared more about things you weren’t part of. It isn’t always one way or the other with people.”

Though Marissa was shaking her head more vehemently now, Ricci saw tears gathering on the rims of her lower eyelids. She seemed to be trying to hold them back.

“His name is Felipe Escalona,” she said.

Ricci looked at her.

“His name isn’t what matters,” he said. “What does is that he helped those men bring you here. And that I’m bringing you out.”

She stared at him. Then her eyes sharpened on his face and she made a choking sound and began to sob, the tears running down her cheeks.

“I love him,” she said, a desperate, pleading quality in her voice.

Ricci extended his hand a little further.

“There’s a plane waiting for us,” he said. “We’re taking you home.”

“I love him.”

Ricci hesitated again, reaching his hand out until it was within an inch of hers.

“I know,” he said. “But you need to trust me.”

A moment passed, and then several more. Marissa Vasquez bent her head, crying hard, her entire body shaking with the release of emotion.

Ricci crouched in front of her without saying anything else, waiting, leaving his offered hand out there between them.

And then, finally, her chained hand came up and took it.