“I don’t think so. You might blow up the lock all right, but that bar running into the post is just going to freeze in place. Besides, too noisy, too messy.”
Marty pulled out the handwritten map one more time. “I ain’t walking, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not across this goddamn desert in these good shoes, in the dark with the wind blowing like a hurricane. Not thinking of doing that, are you?”
“Marty, we’ll do what we have to do to get the job done. It’s not any more complicated than that. I remember something else on that sheet of paper, something about another entrance. What’s it say?” He leaned forward, resting on the steering wheel, wondering how long they had until first light. The flat tire and then killing the policeman and putting his body in the tank had cost them over an hour. His watch showed the time was nearly 3:30.
“Down at the bottom here it says there’s another entrance a half mile farther east. Got to turn left first, then circle back south under the highway and a railroad trestle. Says, ‘Old unlocked gate near the trestle.’ Guess people aren’t supposed to know it’s there.”
“My God, this is becoming a damn nightmare.” The driver let out another of his long breaths and wiped the palm of his left hand across his face. “Let’s try the alternate entrance. We’ve got to get a move on, though.”
A semi rolling hard and fast through the Texas night screamed by them, heading east.
“Look, way up there by that mountain—” Marty pointed. “I think I can see house lights barely twinkling through all this brush and cactus and shit. Suppose somebody’s up and around this time of night?”
“Might be yard lights of some kind. Farms have those.” The driver went back on the highway and accelerated.
“This is a ranch, not a farm, ain’t it?” Marty was holding his Beretta on his lap, coming up to his killing state of mind.
“Ranch, farm, all the same far as I’m concerned,” the driver said, slowing again and making a left turn off the highway, steering the Connie down a dirt track just short of a railroad trestle. As instructed, he followed the track where it circled back under Route 90 and then under the trestle, bringing them to another gate, which was nothing more than framed wire.
“Check it out, Marty, and hurry.”
Marty got out of the car and stepped into a fat stand of prickly pear cactus growing and spreading over two square yards. “Jesus! Goddamn, I’m hung up in thistles and shit. Man, do they hurt, poking right through my good suit pants, too. Think I ripped my pants.”
“Hurry, Marty. We’re running short of time. Be first light sometime before too long.”
“Just a minute, goddammit. Got to get out of this fucking briar patch.” Pointing the flashlight down, he gingerly extricated each thorn from his skin and pants, then rolled the trousers up to his knees and minced sideways out of the cactus and toward the gate.
By now, the driver’s palms were sweaty. This was his operation to manage. Marty was the main triggerman, and the triggerman looked like some kind of circus clown out there in the headlights with his pants rolled up and his coattails flapping in the wind.
Marty unfastened a length of chain and dragged the gate back toward the Lincoln. “Think I should close it after you take the car through?” he shouted over the wind.
The driver leaned out the window. “No. Leave it open; we’ll come back out this way. I’ll pull up a little so you don’t have to fight the cactus again.”
Back in the car, Marty picked up his Beretta, cradling it in his lap. “Let’s get this fucking job done and get the fuck out of Texas. I’ve about had it, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, I sure have. Now all we got to do is find the house. I can’t see any lights from where we are now. Now, the highway curved a little southeast before we hit the trestle. We turned approximately north off the highway, then came back south under the trestle. That means the house should be somewhere between straight ahead and off to the right. Not being able to see any lights, I figure we must be on the down side of a little slope, with the house on the other side of the slope. Maybe a mile or two away.”
The Lincoln bumped and bounced over the rocks of a ranch road angling in the general direction the driver wanted to go. “Should douse the lights, but I can hardly make out this road as it is. Jesus, listen to the scrapes—sounds like this brush is taking paint right off the car.”
From his place on the side of Guapa Mountain, Peter Long Grass had seen car lights stop by the main ranch gate. He watched them as they moved farther east along Route 90 and turned back under the Southern Pacific trestle. And now the lights were coming across the desert toward where he sat just above the main ranch house. He stood, gathered his tools, and began quietly descending Guapa Mountain, stopping every thirty feet to check on the position of the oncoming vehicle.
WHEN HER ALARM went off at three-thirty, Sonia Dominguez rose and put on her bathrobe. Pablo Espinosa was sleeping on the blanket in her kitchen.
She shook him awake. “Get up, old man, it’s time for you to go.”
“It is still night,” mumbled Pablo Espinosa. “I go at first light; I am weary of stumbling through darkness.”
“I will make coffee and cook eggs for you. I want you over the ranch boundary and on the highway by first light. It is an easy walk west along the road and then turn north when you come to the western fence line.”
“I have done it before.” Pablo Espinosa struggled onto a chair and rubbed his eyes with the knuckles of both hands. “I need to use the toilet.”
“Go use the toilet, then. The blue towel I laid by the sink is yours.”
“I think I still have a fever.”
“Your fever will be gone when you get back home. If things go right and la migra gives you a ride, you’ll be there before sundown.”
Ten minutes later, Pablo Espinosa sat again at the kitchen table of Sonia Dominguez. He ate tortillas and eggs with salsa spread over them. The coffee was strong and black, too strong and too black, so he asked for a little milk and sugar.
“Old man, you must drive your wife loco with your whining and your demands. Do you drive your wife loco?”
“No, my wife loves me and knows how I take my coffee.”
Sonia Dominguez looked out a living room window and saw lights in Winchell Dear’s house a quarter mile away. The old man must be staying up all night; he did that sometimes. She glanced toward the east, where dawn was coming up on Tallahassee, Florida, and was running hard toward West Texas.
As the Lincoln mounted a rise, the lighted windows of a ranch house were visible only three hundred yards away. The driver cut the headlights and stopped. “I think we walk from here, Marty. I can’t see where I’m going without the lights, and I can’t leave them on any longer. We’ll take the guns and flashlight, leave the car here.”
“Aw, for chrissake—”
“Don’t argue,” the driver interrupted, voice tense and sharp, out of patience and out of time. “This job is my responsibility. You’re the shooter, I run the operation. And I say we walk from here. Locate the target, do the work, and we’ll be back in El Paso before lunch. Find a good hotel, get something to eat and some sleep, and I’ll have you home in L.A. by day after tomorrow, maybe sooner. And, for chrissake, help me remember to grab two suitcases full of product. Also, there was some miscommunication and a mule was sent out a few days ago about the time we got the assignment. He was due in tonight. We’ve got to make certain we take all the product and drop it off at an address in Van Horn before we go through the Sierra Blanca checkpoint.”
“Should’ve picked up some things at Abercrombie and Fitch, like I said before,” Marty grumbled.
They left the car and began following the road, driver pointing the flashlight straight down. In the clear desert air, Peter Long Grass could see a small glowing circle coming along a ranch road, the jiggle and bounce of the glow indicating someone was on foot and carrying a flashlight.
WINCHELL DEAR had sat in the living room for a long time. His whiskey was gone, a
nd he went back to the kitchen, where he poured a small amount in the glass, looking up at the Regulator clock: 3:45. The long night would soon be over. The fear, the sense of something wrong, must have been all in the imagination of an old man. That sort of thing happened to older people, some inexplicable panic that a certain night might be their last. He’d read that somewhere. Well, he was pretty certain he’d read it somewhere. With the Cadillac gassed and ready to travel, he began thinking about driving up to Las Vegas and playing a little serious poker.
The dog sleeping under the kitchen table had looked up when Winchell walked into the kitchen, putting her head back down after a moment. A night breeze came in through one of the windows facing east, and the dog suddenly jerked her head up again, open-eyed. She got to her feet, walked to the window, sniffed, and growled.
“What’s the matter now, girl?”
The dog growled louder, hair on the nape of her neck coming up straight. Winchell Dear slid the .380 Colt from his boot and worked the slide, injecting a cartridge into the chamber, leaving six in the clip. He turned off the kitchen lights and walked to the window, standing above the dog. The dog looked up at him, then out the window, and deepened the intensity of her growl, barking once, then again.
Winchell Dear went into the living room and shut off the last remaining lamps in the house. Looking northwest, he could see lights on in the place where Sonia Dominguez lived. That meant nothing to him, knowing as he did that she always seemed to keep strange hours. He returned to the kitchen, took down his eight-cell portable spotlight from a shelf, and looked out the window where the dog sat, still growling.
MARTY HAD UNDERGONE a transformation, the driver noticed. No more complaining, ratcheting himself up to another level, the Marty he’d seen before on other jobs and counted on seeing when the time came for it: tight faced and cool, the shooter ready to do his work. They stumbled along the rough road, shoes filling with dust and slowly tearing apart on rocks and gravel. Anything sharp, and everything on the road seemed to be sharp, poked up and almost through the soles of fine city shoes. So far, they’d missed stepping on mesquite thorns, which would come up and through leather like a nail.
The wind blew, and somewhere on it came the sound of a dog’s bark.
“Jesus, what’s that?” Marty grabbed the driver’s jacket with one hand and stopped him.
“Where, what?”
“Right up ahead, something big and moving.”
Instinctively, the driver flashed the light toward where Marty was pointing. “Holy shit!”
A dozen longhorn cattle stood ahead of them and looked back. Some of the steers weighed 1,500 pounds and carried horn spans of six feet.
“Cows, biggest goddamn cows I ever seen, bigger’n a fucking truck!” Marty said. He brought up his Beretta and leveled it toward the cattle.
And maybe for the first time on this trip, in spite of the long drive and the long roads that had brought them through great Texas spaces and should have accustomed him to how marked and different this land was from his usual world, the driver began to get a feeling that he was far out of his element. Inside the Connie, he’d felt control and power and confidence. But now he shivered, and in spite of his size and the Beretta in his hand, he suddenly went small in the forever reach of the high desert, with the wind whipping through stunted trees and the light beam reflecting the eyes of longhorn cattle. Some of the steers were red, some white with black spots, some a combination of all three colors. The longhorns gave no sign of moving or even of fear. They simply stared back at Marty and the driver.
“Well, it doesn’t look like they’re going to charge or anything,” the driver whispered. “We’ll cut off around them, go left. That ranch house is only about a hundred yards ahead.”
“Yeah, well, notice the lights have gone off.”
“You’re right. Probably doesn’t mean anything. Somebody went to bed, that’s all.”
For once, things worked out. Marty and the driver detoured around the cattle and found the ranch road again. They were fifty yards from the main house.
LOOKING OUT THE kitchen window, Winchell Dear had caught the momentary flash of a light out in the desert. His gut jumped, his heartbeat immediately came up thirty points. He saw the light again. It remained steady, directed at something for a few seconds, then disappeared from his view. He moved to one side of the window and watched but could see nothing.
Northwest of the main house, Sonia Dominguez was picking up Pablo Espinosa’s breakfast dishes, though he hadn’t quite finished eating.
“It’s time, old man. Vamos, ándale.”
Pablo Espinosa thought of the long day before him and the long road back to Santa Helena and how he would have to tell his story once again to la migra. They would be able to prove nothing. He would be home, perhaps by this evening or, with great luck, by late afternoon. Still, it seemed a long risky way to him, as it always did.
Sonia Dominguez cracked the front door and looked toward the main house. It was darkened now; Winchell Dear had finally gone to bed.
“Come,” she said to Pablo Espinosa.
He went through the door and onto a road in front of the adobe. Then he turned right and began walking toward the western fence line of the ranch. There he would turn north and follow another ranch road to Route 90. His legs were some rested, but he was still tired. Yet his feet again seemed to have a life of their own, and the sandals began their relentless shuffle, this time toward the border and home.
When she was sure he’d gone, Sonia Dominguez went to her closet and took out a suitcase. She put the case and the old man’s pack on her bed. Carefully, she began the process of repackaging and skimming la mota, visions before her of a solid brick house in the nicer part of Clear Signal, a place where she could live out her years in comfort and style.
MARTY HAD TAKEN a route around the south side of the main house and worked his way along the wall, past French doors leading into an interior room. The driver moved cautiously around the east side of the building. Inside he could hear a dog barking, and he didn’t like that. It might awaken whoever slept within the house. He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch: nearly 4:00.
Marty rounded the house corner and saw lights a quarter mile northwest. The lamps outlined a smaller building, and he knew then where his target was. A figure appeared along the front of the house, and Marty whispered, “See those lights? Down there’s where we’ll find her.”
A voice came back to him: “Who are you, and what do you want?” Not the driver’s voice, somebody else’s. A man speaking strong and direct.
Forgetting the driver was coming around the other side of the house, Marty fired a three-shot burst—phoom phoom phoom—along the wall and stepped backward toward the corner he’d just turned, looking for cover. A flash from near the front door and a .380 slug caught Marty in the upper left shoulder, pistol sound coming an instant later.
“Marty! You all right?” the driver called out, letting Winchell Dear know there was another one out there. All games have their tells.
Not badly hurt, but stumbling backward from the force of the bullet and surprise, and beginning to fall as he tripped over a honeysuckle vine, Marty could hear the driver’s voice somewhere in the night. As he hit the ground, he could also hear another sound, something like the quick, loud rustle of dry leaves as they blow and twist in autumn wind, and one more sound almost obscured by the diamondback’s rattle, the hiss of a large snake in full strike position. For Marty, for humans in general, it was as close to hearing the shriek of red hell as is possible.
And then, if lightning could be slowed, if God had given us swifter eyes, it would have looked like this. The diamondback began its strike with mouth closed and fangs folded back. Somewhere in the middle of the javelinlike thrust, the mouth opened to almost 180 degrees, disclosing a flash of white throat and fangs straightening into bite position. The fangs hit Marty in the neck, plunging through the skin just above where the collar of his eighty-dollar whi
te shirt ended. The jaws closed, and the snake, in its own kind of terror and doing what it could to defend itself, injected nearly a full load of venom into a portion of the body constituting virtually the worst possible place a human can be bitten, directly into a carotid artery feeding oxygenated blood to the brain. Marty screamed and tried to stand. He got to his hands and knees, still clutching the Beretta in his right hand, pulling the trigger involuntarily and scattering shots into the dirt, hitting nothing. The diamondback, wild with its own fear, struck again, this time stabbing into Marty’s cheek and releasing the remainder of its venom load, after which it began a quick backward crawl into the night and away from what had threatened it.
On his feet then and screaming again, Marty did exactly the wrong thing, though not much could have helped him at that point except medical attention, and probably not even that given the bite locations. He began to run in no particular direction, just running crazy into the night and firing the Beretta in random directions, trying to escape the realization of all his fears coming true. He was suffering pain in the bite areas and a heartbeat rising up and over two hundred, partly from the venom and partly from terror. Simultaneously, his blood pressure began to fall, and the touch of his own hand told him he was already swelling on the neck and face.
Marty had forgotten entirely about his bullet wound, from which no pain seemed to be emanating but from which some bleeding was occurring. He ran farther, stumbling toward the smaller house, thinking some kind of help had to be found. He ran and stumbled and came to a staggering halt when the point of a spear fashioned from a long straight branch of mesquite plunged through his chest and into his heart. Peter Long Grass let go of the shaft as Marty fell.
The driver, having no idea what had happened, stayed as calm as he could and tried to refocus himself. The one thing he always had been told was this: You’re the cleaner; we count on you to get the job done, to finish whatever task we send you to do. And the driver was good at that, at finishing. He had been in tough scrapes before. After the shots and Marty’s first scream, he began jogging toward the small building northwest of the main house. Whatever had occurred, Marty would have to take care of himself for now.