The Mexican Tree Duck

  “Hurry,” I whispered to Frank as I jerked one of the flash-bangs out of my vest, then shouted, “Jimmy! Ears!” and tossed it up to the second story, and Frank and I ducked beneath the stairs. Even under cover and at that distance, the little grenade still cut through the ringing in our ears and the flash seeped through our hands pressed hard over eyes squeezed shut. As Frank and I charged up the stairs, I could only hope that Jimmy had sense enough to get down.

  Frank went to the right, I went to the left.

  My bedroom was empty. A jammed AK lay on the bed. “Jimmy!” I shouted. “Here!” Frank answered, so I put a couple of rounds into the bed, then a couple more into a mirrored antique wardrobe.

  One of the women tumbled out, bleeding from the thigh and the abdomen, a suppressed .22 clutched in her hand. She got off one wild round, by which I mean she hit me in the vest right over the heart instead of the eye, and I put two jacketed hollow points into her chest as I hit the wall behind me hard enough to splinter the oak panels.

  The Kevlar had stopped the .22 round, but I had absorbed it. If she had hit me over the liver or the spleen, I might have been sorely fucked. As it was, I was just sore.

  “Sarge,” Frank shouted.

  “Here,” I answered, trying not to groan, trying to stand up without leaning on the wall. “Where’s the woman?”

  “Right here, gentlemen,” came a soft voice from the landing between the bedrooms. “And she’s got a gun to my head …”

  When I peeked quickly around the door frame, Sarita stood in front of the bedroom at the end of the wide hall, the other woman guard behind her holding a small automatic at the base of Sarita’s skull and chattering in terrifically rapid Spanish.

  “And she will kill me in five seconds if you don’t throw your weapons out …”

  “Sughrue?” Frank said softly.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  Frank slid his service .38 across the floor toward the guard. “It doesn’t work that way, honey,” he said.

  When she glanced down, I put a round through her elbow, then the next one through her ear. The woman guard hit the floor dead; Sarita hit it in a dead faint, covered with brains, bone splinters, and blood.

  We looked at each other and smiled. I hope I looked better than he did. Our blood still boiled, but this part was done. Whatever waited at the bottom of the hill hadn’t begun yet.

  Sarita had to be carried; Jimmy led. She wouldn’t come around, and Jimmy still couldn’t see or hear from the grenade. But we got them down the stairs and out to the porch, where Barnstone waited at the top of the steps.

  “You heard?” was all he said at first as he heaved Sarita over his shoulder. “I don’t know what we’re going to find down the hill. But I got a call as I was driving up.”

  “A call?” The modern world of cellular telephones and satellite communications had ended for me in the kitchen.

  “Dottie called, man, and said that the baby was bugged,” Barnstone huffed as we stumbled down the steps.

  “The baby was bugged?” Frank said.

  “And everything else Wynona carried,” he explained.

  Just then another rattling burst of automatic gunfire echoed up the hill.

  “Joe Don,” I said. “And that’s the only way out, right?”

  Barnstone nodded grimly.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Frank said softly, pumping up.

  “Let’s take these rides,” Barnstone said, nodding toward the Japanese vans. “And let’s hurry. The plane can’t land after dark.”

  Barnstone dumped Sarita in a backseat, strapped her in with the belt, then went to work on the keyless ignitions. Frank and I put Jimmy beside her before we ran back into the lodge to search for the keys and gather and reload whatever weapons we could find as the tiny firefight moved up the hillside toward us.

  Some shit never ends.

  In spite of Norman’s legs, smashed in a dozen motorcycle wrecks, and Solly’s fake foot, they had done a good job of holding off Joe Don’s minions as they moved up the hill, so they weren’t ready for us when we came through. We picked up our gimpy fire team about halfway down the road, then sent the first van down the hill with a grenade strapped to the gas tank.

  When it exploded among them, we charged through the fire with Sarita, still unconscious, wrapped in our flak vests, and the windows of the van bristling with firepower. Nobody could tell if it was the curtain of fire we laid across Joe Don’s hoods—nobody had a confirmed kill—or the forest fire we started, though a crazed but semi-lucid Jimmy claimed a dozen hits, but we made it through them and to the runway just before dark, and took off into the roiling clouds of smoke black in the final rays of dusk.

  Sarita was awake by then, staring out the window of the small South American prop jet at the flaming remains of her hunting lodge. I wanted to ask her something, but her face seemed so painfully resigned, tears spilling silently down her tight high pale cheekbones glowing pearlescent rose in the failing light, that I turned away before asking.

  Then Solly limped down the stripped interior of the plane to me, his right side sodden with blood. Either a series of flattened ricochets or flying gravel had chewed up his side from the trapezius to the hip. And he had taken a round through his artificial articulated ankle.

  “Guess you need a new foot,” I said.

  “I’ve needed a new foot ever since that day I wasn’t quick enough,” he said. Solly had been humping down a paddy dike when his foot caught the trip wire that jerked the unpinned grenade out of the Coca-Cola can. He had nearly caught the handle, but even as he missed it, he dove into the paddy water before the grenade exploded. If it hadn’t been an old pineapple, circa WWII, he would have been either dead or even more badly fucked. “I’m really sorry, man,” he said, “but she stepped off to pee behind a bush, and they got between us.”

  “At least she’s not dead,” Norman said as he joined us. “I saw this blond guy with his hand in a cast dragging her away.”

  Fucking Lenny. Not a good sibling. Now I regretted not hitting him harder.

  “Goddammit,” I said, “what’s Baby Lester going to do without his mom?”

  “I’ll provide,” Sarita said softly, staring out her window into the star-studded darkness of the eastern sky.

  “Have you talked to her?” I whispered to Norman. But he shook his head and retreated. I patted Solly on his unwounded shoulder, then hobbled like an old man to the front of the plane, where Frank and Jimmy leaned against the bulkhead, flanking Barnstone. The two Mexican officers sat across the airplane from them.

  “Where we headed?” I said to Barnstone.

  “Durango,” he said, “to divest ourselves of the weapons and get legal again so we can cross the border.”

  I leaned against the bulkhead and slipped out the Browning, replaced the half-empty clip, then charged it, leaving the hammer cocked, and stuck the barrel into the face of the tall one who looked like Dagoberto. “Who were those guys?” I asked them. “And who are you guys?”

  Barnstone reached for my pistol, but I slapped his knuckles hard enough to draw blood with the barrel, then put it back on the Mexican officers. Who, quite frankly, didn’t seem impressed.

  “I believe we’re pressurized,” the short one said, “and decompression might put us down.”

  “Tell somebody who gives a shit,” I said. “Fucking answer me.”

  “Peruvians, maybe,” he said quietly. “Sendero Luminoso, probably, Shining Path hard-core Maoists.”

  “What the fuck are they doing in Mexico?” I said.

  “Too much cocaine and money on the deal from them to stay out of it,” the other one said angrily. “Gringo money for gringo noses.”

  “And you assholes?”

  “Mexican military intelligence,” Barnstone said tiredly. “Anyway that’s my guess.” Then he paused to sigh. “Shit, I’m sorry, Sughrue. How the hell was I supposed to know I was supporting these assholes with washing machines?” he said.
br />   “Antiterrorist command, actually,” the tall one corrected him.

  “You let us go up against those bastards,” Jimmy said to the Mexicans, “those hard-core motherfuckers, you let us go up against that kind of shit without a fucking word. Thanks for letting us do your dirty work.”

  “We’ve done yours often enough,” the short angry one said. “Usually with hoes and cotton sacks.”

  “What do I know from cotton?” Jimmy said. “Fucking cotton comes in shirts and shorts, not sacks.”

  “Excuse the fuck out of us, sir,” Frank said, suddenly in the conversation. “What’s your plan now? How about a couple of rounds with a Cuban parachute brigade?”

  “After you turn in your weapons and we debrief you in Durango, you will understand …” the tall one started to say.

  But his voice trailed off when Jimmy placed the suppressor of his .22 against his nose. “You’re gonna debrief shit, man. Talk to us now or fucking die. This pissant little round won’t make this fucker decompress, but it’s bound to run around inside your head like a fucking rabid mouse!”

  “Easy,” I said, acting calmer than I felt. “I ain’t exactly happy about any of this. I find it hard to believe that Wynona is alive after all this, and I feel mightily shit upon, so I’m with Jimmy …” I had to grab a sob. “It might be Mexico where you are, motherfucker, but where I stand it’s fucking America—not the government, man, but a horde of redneck motherfuckers, and I’m in front … So like they say in my part of the world, you’ll get my weapon when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers …”

  Suddenly, Sarita was standing between us, tall and lovely in the dim light as she pulled the pins from her dirty hair and let it hang in shining strings around her oval face. “Please, gentlemen,” she said softly. “I believe I can shed some light on this before we suffer more gunfire …”

  She tried.

  However tough, fucked up, and dirty we were, Sarita was still an imposingly lovely and composed middle-aged woman, even in stiffly stained jeans and a sarape that looked as if it had survived the revolution, and we made room for her, found her a place to sit, gathered at her feet as if she were La Lengua Materna Verdad, the mother tongue of truth. Sarita smiled once, sadly and briefly, amused at our efforts to please, and for a moment I caught a glimmer of what Wynona admired, that breeding and social ease that rednecks so often secretly admire and so terribly mistake for integrity. Sarita clasped her hands together, swung them between her slim legs, and talked.

  “My husband, it is no secret, has suffered losses recently,” she began, her voice barely audible above the prop wash, “losses of a political, personal, and financial nature. As a result, he has not been himself in some time now. Not for a very long time. And quite frankly, my family did not help.

  “Not that they did not offer financial assistance. They did. They offered it in embarrassingly large amounts, amounts so large they robbed him of that dignity without which a man cannot live.” Then she paused, glanced around the rapt group, smiled self-effacingly, and continued. “I must confess that occasionally we Mexicans, who treasure dignity with pride, are guilty of failing to remember that you Americans are capable of that same dignity and pride.

  “My husband was such a man,” she said, her tones as somber as a state funeral. “As often happens, he made a foolish mistake trying to regain what he considered his rightful place in society …” Then she paused again.

  “Joe Don went into the cocaine business,” I said into her silence.

  Sarita stared at me as if she had never seen me before, then smiled indulgently, as if I were a particularly pretty but stupid child.

  “Just this once,” she finally said, “and at such a level that he would never have to do it again …”

  “And with the wrong people,” I suggested.

  “How very true,” she said. “Suddenly, there was so much money involved …”

  “How much?” Frank wanted to know.

  “During my captivity, I heard the figure fifty million in street value mentioned several times, but fifty million what, I am not sure,” she said. “Quite frankly, gentlemen, my captors did not have an impressive command of the language. Their grammar was as confused as their politics,” she said, then lifted a long slim finger as if to lecture. “They kill their own people, you understand. As far as I am concerned, that is revolting, rather than revolution. And completely untenable, untoward, and unforgivable …”

  “Lady,” Frank said, “your fucking husband wants to smuggle tons of cocaine into the country, and you think you have the right to judge some peones who at least have the courage of their convictions?”

  “Your people,” Sarita said stiffly, staring at Frank’s dark face, which to her eyes could have been Indian or Negro, some mestizo mongrel mix. “Your people,” she repeated so we would know what she meant, “have a particular greed for drugs that passes understanding among decent people of the world.”

  “And you ricos simply have a particular greed?” Frank said.

  “I am certain that my husband meant no harm,” she said. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I am tired.” Then Sarita stood as if to exit to a royal bedroom just offstage.

  “No, excuse me, please,” I said, “but I’d like to know why you went to Sun Valley with Wynona.”

  Sarita answered from her great height without pause. “I had just discovered my husband’s plans to … to recover his losses and I needed some time to myself to consider these new developments. Also, Wynona is a sweet child, a good friend, and the mother of my husband’s son.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then who were the Mexicans waiting for you in Sun Valley?”

  “Friends,” she said simply, then swiftly turned and vanished toward the darkness at the rear of the cabin.

  “What a piece of work,” Frank said.

  One of the Mexican officers started to say something, but I couldn’t tell which one in the dark. “You fucking guys shut up,” I said to them. “I still ain’t happy about you letting us walk into that shit without a single word, and I ain’t happy about your facial features, Short Round, so unless you want me to turn the dwarf loose on you, just shut up …”

  “Who you calling a dwarf?” Jimmy wanted to know, but we ignored him.

  “And we ain’t going to Durango,” I said to Barnstone. “Fix it.” He nodded and stuffed his bulk into the cockpit to talk to the pilot.

  “Frank,” I said, “you and Jimmy tie these guys up. Tight. If they complain, gag the fuckers with their own socks.”

  Solly, Norman, and I gathered at the middle of the cabin, crouched as if over a small fire. “You got any whiskey?” I asked Solly.

  “In the cargo pocket,” he answered, “but my side’s too stiff to reach it.”

  I could, so we all had a good hard taste out of Solly’s flask full of ancient Scotch. “That’s better,” I said, then turned to Norman. “What do you think, man? Is that her?” I asked.

  “Just like I remember, C.W.,” Norman said quietly, “but she used to be nicer.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard,” I admitted, then turned to Solly. “You’re a professional,” I said, “so I won’t try this at home, but what do you think, counselor?”

  “I think I’m tired, old, shot to shit without glory waiting in the wings,” he said, then tried to sit down on a duffel full of weapons. I helped, and we shared the flask again. “What sort of Purple Heart do you think they give if you’re shot in a prosthesis?”

  “Artificial?” I said.

  “Perfect,” he said. “You should have been a lawyer, Sughrue.”

  “No, thanks,” I said, waiting for the rest.

  “Jesus, man, I’m just guessing but my best guess is that the lady is scared to fucking death,” he said. “I don’t think she has the vaguest idea what’s going on, and I think her family is involved in this shit up to their cojones.”

  “At least we agree on something,” I said.

  “Get me some more codeine, Sughrue,” he
said, “and I’ll always agree with you. But I’d sure like to know what made Mrs. Pines run to Sun Valley …”

  As I dug into Barnstone’s first-aid kit for the painkillers, Norman moved over to kneel next to me.

  “What should I do?” he whispered.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I guess I want to talk to Mary, man.”

  “Jesus, Norman, you are in fucking love,” I said, still amazed.

  “I guess I am,” he answered, a goofy grin shining in the dark. “And, man, I’m really sorry about Wynona. She’s one tough little number. But it wasn’t Solly’s fault. Really.”

  “Right,” I said. “We’ll get her back. We’ve got a body to trade. You always need a body to trade.”

  And a place from which to trade it.

  Since Barnstone’s pilots had some experience crossing the border at brush-top levels, we decided to return to America low-level and low-profile. Also, since Joe Don had proved less worthy of trust and smarter than any of us expected, we decided to get to the heart of the matter.

  After we landed on a dirt strip south of Palomas to clean up, release our Mexican nationals with a cover story that matched ours and a promise to make public their ownership of a restaurant in fucking Aspen if they didn’t cover our asses, we let Barnstone make his arrangements by cellular telephone, then executed a brief hop across the border right to the airstrip at Joe Don’s ranch. Sarita stayed apart from us, silent and distant, almost bored. A stance, I was now convinced, she held out of fear.

  On the other hand, Joe Don’s mom wasn’t afraid. She was at the ranch, unguarded except for two ancient Mexican retainers, who probably would have died for her, given the chance, but they had no chance. They were still struggling with their spectacles and boots by the time we had rushed down the road into the Hole. The elder Mrs. Pines was snug abed, thankfully; if she’d been awake, I suspect we would have had to shoot her to settle her down and get her outside. After fifteen minutes enduring her prickly pear of a tongue, I was more than willing. But Sarita managed to stuff her with bourbon and Valium, a mix with which the old lady seemed quite familiar.