Baby Lester missed his mom in a thousand ways. We could see the loneliness and fear on his small, stained face, could hear it in his cries, which sounded hopelessly lost. So Dottie spent all her time trying to make it better for him. And none of it on me.
One afternoon early on, though, she let Barnstone take care of the baby while I took her for a brief bar tour of the Hardrock Valley.
The November snow reflected a winter sky as thin and gray and ugly as slug tracks. A sharp, unforgiving wind scraped our faces to the bone. The weather acted as if it were already February. So did we. The cocaine froze in our noses, the marijuana smoke drifted darkly in the van, and even the Buffalo Springfield tape sounded tired. We wrestled briefly and ineffectively on the crib in the back of the van. Dottie said she didn’t care about coming while she was worried about the baby. And I just said I didn’t care.
On the way back to the ranch, our tour aborted, we stopped at a small, cold roadside bar. A couple of Benniwah breeds and their women played pool like ghosts, occasionally dozing over their shots.
Dottie and I began to argue about Baby Lester and Wynona before the bartender delivered our first drinks. We endured the trip back, but no more, then drifted apart at Solly’s, neither drunk nor high, without even the energy to argue, complain, or mourn. That was the end of something.
And, of course, the beginning of something worse. Days of daytime television, cocaine, and beer; nights sweating. At some point Sarita joined me on my day watches, her elegant neck arched over a lacy line of cocaine, lines chased with red-wine winter cool sparkling on her dark red lips.
That’s how it started, as I remember, my tongue licking a drop of Bordeaux off her upper lip. Then from the hollow of her neck, the hollows beside her hipbones, the smooth edges of her thighs. Sarita became the drug; I, the addict.
A most generously sensual woman. I could hug her fully dressed and feel my body sink into the peace and comfort of her creamy dark flesh. When she lifted her legs to accept me, or mounted me, or raised her buttocks toward me, or took me in her mouth, it was like fucking the sun, the fire, or the wine-dark sea, the wave, or the darkness beyond death, the heated wind. And the few times she stopped giving and started taking, her orgasms were as impressive as natural disasters, earthquakes or prairie fires or human plagues, leaving her spent and weeping, forlorn and empty.
Wynona, gone, occupied my mind endlessly. The easy grace of her body, her laughter, her child. Even gone, she still had her hand on the remains of my heart. But Sarita took something else from me: the waking fear; the gutshot dreams. Beside her body, you could not dream.
Once in that timeless afterward time as I licked the tears from her face and held her long, smooth quaking body, Sarita whispered, “Thank you. I never knew any love but duty.”
“I hate like hell to trade you, lady,” I said, “but I have to do it.”
“I understand,” she murmured against my arm, “la familia is love, also. Wynona is tied to you by the blood of friends. You two are family.”
“What are we, you and me?”
“A lovely accident,” she said.
“And your husband?”
“My husband,” she said, “no more. But no less, either.”
“You know I’m going to kill him,” I said. “After the exchange.”
“I think not. I hope not. I pray that you are the man who makes love to me,” she said, “and not the man like your friend Rainbolt. He can only hate.” Then she turned back to face me.
Her dark eyes possessed a knowledge that I could only imagine. Her family had existed for three hundred years, had occupied the same hacienda for two hundred of those years. My people had just stopped sleeping with the barnyard animals shortly before WWII. And I was the last of them. “I cannot beg, Sughrue,” she said, “but I can ask: please don’t kill him.” And then she said something so startling that at first I didn’t understand it. “He needs me.”
“What?”
“Like you, my friend, my love, he cries in the night.”
“He never did shit over there, lady,” I said. “He has no fucking right.”
“Just the right of those who have never known any part of life but the fear,” she said softly, then her voice went flat with promise. “If you kill him, I cannot love you.”
I thought about it, did a line, poured her a glass of wine, opened a beer, then did the only thing possible: I lied.
“I guess it’s time to tell me what you know,” I said. “That might change my mind.”
“I told you about the cocaine …” she began, suddenly stoned and frightened.
“You told me,” I said, “but I don’t believe it. This is not about fifty million dollars’ worth of coke.”
“Without the money, my husband will lose the drilling rigs,” she babbled, “and without the rigs, he will be nothing again …”
And there it was: the big truth in the little lie.
“If everybody’s looking for drugs,” I guessed, standing up, watching in my mind Joe Don watch the ditchdiggers toiling toward the new border crossing, “nobody’s paying attention to the Mexican crude in the Pemex pipeline. The son of a bitch is smarter than I thought. He’s going to run crude across the border to salt his dry holes.” Sarita stared at me, her eyes gleaming with anger. I remembered that Rose Rosenbloom had said that Sarita was the real money, Joe Don just the front. “Or maybe it wasn’t Joe Don’s idea at all. You and Dagoberto—shit, I’d bet money he’s your cousin …”
“Nephew,” she said flatly.
“Fucking rich-bitch dilettante revolutionaries financing your cause with stolen oil instead of your own money,” I said, then laughed. “You gotta love it,” I added. Sarita didn’t; she wasn’t even faintly amused. “That’s the best kind of revolution,” I added, “the bourgeoisie take up the call. Usually, it takes the real guys, like those bandits from Sendero Luminoso, guys with the theory and the training, about twenty minutes to fix your wagon.”
“Fix your wagon? I don’t understand,” she said, even more angry than before. She stood up, proud and lovely and naked as the day she had crawled out from under a flat rock. “Don’t mistake us for dilettantes,” she hissed, then took a swing at me. I took a fairly good right cross, then turned away, laughing.
“Right,” I said, chopping lines. “Let’s have one for the road, honey, or two, and a cocktail. Then maybe we’ll open our asphalt hides, let the real people out for a fuck.”
“Chingadero!” she screamed, then hit me again, this time in the back, spilling cocaine across the night table. “I have!” Then she threw herself into me.
I wouldn’t call it love. We fucked as if trying to scour the skin from our flesh, the flesh from our bones, as if we could get deep enough to find some remaining heart gristle. Sarita tore at my short ribs and back like a rapacious cat; I tasted the cords of her neck, the muscled flesh of her thighs. Even our sweat seemed bloody, our secretions a precious fluid. It was either the best or the worst twenty-four hours of my life. Whichever, I wasn’t unhappy when Jimmy came to bring me the news.
“You guys have a fistfight?” he asked when I closed the bedroom door.
“Something like that,” I said. “But it’s over now.”
“Just beginning,” he said, then told me we were ready. We had transportation, three days of snow and ice predicted, perhaps twelve inches. I raised an eyebrow. He told me the rest. Solomon Rainbolt’s name did not appear even in the deepest recesses of the DEA’s computer files; nor did that of Joe Don Pines.
Back in the bedroom as I dressed, Sarita stretched like a sated jaguar, the weak winter sun mottled across her dark flesh. Then she smiled. “Your friend the lawyer, you won’t let him kill my husband, will you?”
“Not on your life,” I promised, kissed her bruised lips one last time, then I left, climbed the stairs back to the main floor.
Pride & Joy had suffered boom and bust three different times. The last time during the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy. Th
ree thousand souls had riven their hearts for greed, lust, and glory in the single-wall shacks and badly supported shafts and drifts at that time, but the ore was so poor and the thirty-five miles of mountain trail often too tough for even mule-drawn wagons, so the town died. The miners, gamblers, bootleggers, soiled doves, and decent god-fearing citizens just walked away. In the early sixties, the state tried to restore the town for tourists, but the road was too much a chore for even four-wheel-drive rigs. But it was perfect for us.
Joe Don had to come in by snowmobile with Wynona, come into our waiting while Dottie held Baby Lester at Solly’s place. It seemed like a clean exchange—deep snow, winter silence, and we held the high ground—but Joe Don showed up a day early, lazy and thinking we must be stupid, because he left Wynona with three of his men and the Cuban woman at the bottom of the slope, where I had left Barnstone and Norman in insulated tents with a pair of the Dahlgren twins’ air-cooled fifties and Carney with a knife.
Joe Don came in flanked by his two Cuban bodyguards, bulky boys in snowsuits driving the snowmobiles as if they were tiny tractors, with another riding point and Leonard riding drag. Joe Don dismounted his machine, slapping the snow off his suit, then looked around as if he was making plans. But we had been in place for twenty-four hours. I hoped for a chance at civilized conversation, a chance to get Wynona out of his hands before the gunfire started. He couldn’t let me live any more than I could let him.
When I stepped out of the remains of the community church, my hands spread wide and empty, Sarita stolid beside me, Joe Don would have jumped a foot if he could have gotten his feet out of the snow. The Cubans scrambled for their suppressed MAC-10s hanging from slings, but their mittens got in the way. Leonard, though, had bought some shooting mittens, so he straddled his snowmobile with a large fancy automatic pistol in his bare fingers.
“Hey, Lenny,” I said, “you fire, man, everybody dies.”
Either he didn’t believe me, or he didn’t care. I don’t know how he missed me as I shoved Sarita one way and dove the other, shouting into the mike, “Kill somebody, Solly!” rolling in the snow. So much for civilized conversation. “Kill one of the Cubans!”
The point bodyguard dove left and exploded just as I got behind a large stump in front of the church, digging for the Browning in my parka pocket. The bodyguard’s vest was useless against the heavy-caliber round. The hydrostatic shock blew his eyeballs out of his head and jets of blood out of his ears and mouth.
Then the sound of the .300 Weatherby followed like a single round of howitzer fire. I thought we must all drown in avalanches.
Then a second rifle round knocked over a snowmobile and gave me time to put three rounds into the hip of another one of the Cubans who flew through the side of the old saloon, his arms flapping like a man who had to fly or die.
Joe Don fell to his knees, crawling toward Lenny and his snowmobile. But his other bodyguard got his MAC-10 out just as Jimmy burst through the sidewalk boards across the street. The Cuban got one burst at Jimmy before I put two 9mm rounds into his chest, which knocked him down long enough for Frank to step around the corner of the old mercantile store and put a load of buckshot into his helmeted head. The Cuban flew sideways into a deep drift.
But by that time I had dashed to Jimmy, who was filling the snowy air with goose down and blood. Most of the subsonic rounds had lodged in his vest, but one had cut a deep furrow into the meat of his right shoulder. And pissed him off. If he could have gotten his breath, he would have cursed the sky. With Frank’s help, I got the little fart under control and sitting down, cut away the parka sleeve, packed the flesh with cocaine and snow, then wrapped it in torn nylon.
By then, though, Joe Don and Lenny had fled down the hill, leaving his wife to me. Sarita hadn’t moved since she hit the bare frozen ground behind the church, and when I rolled her over, I saw why. One of Lenny’s rounds had punched through her thigh. The leg of her down expedition suit lay heavy with blood. But by the time I cut it open the dark bloody seep had already slowed. The jacketed round had missed the bone and the artery. I tore off my mittens, stuffed one over each wound, then bound them with her belt. Just before she fainted, Sarita smiled, grasped my hand, and whispered, “Remember. You promised …”
Then the deep-throated chug of the .50-calibers echoed up the mountainside. Snow streamed from the pine branches and the roofs in the echoes. I turned to Frank, my face frozen.
“Hey, man, get Solly loose,” I said, “then you guys bring Jimmy and Sarita down.”
“No,” Frank said.
“Over my dead body,” Jimmy groaned, propped against the raw boards of the abandoned saloon.
Then the voice in my ear: “Sughrue, too bad the deal got fucked,” Solly said over the communicator, “but it wasn’t my fault, so get me off this fucking mountain before I freeze my butt off.”
Frank and Jimmy stared at me. They had heard, too. Small-arms fire rattled downslope, then the .50s fired again.
“Fuck you, Rainbolt,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
“I made the shot once,” Solly said, “and I’ve got a lot more time now. If anybody moves but you coming up the hill with the key, I’ll take Gorman’s head off. And that’s a promise.”
“I told you we should have killed him,” Frank said softly.
Solly said, “Sughrue doesn’t like to kill people he knows.”
“That’s never been your problem,” Frank said. “Has it?”
“You don’t know everything,” Solly said. “Get up here, Sughrue. Or I promise …”
“Keep your fucking promise,” I said, then walked to Frank without a word. He handed me the key, then I headed up the ridge.
“Let them go,” I said into the mike. “Put me in your cross hairs, Rainbolt.”
“Not a chance, Sughrue,” he replied. “You never gave much of a shit about dying. They stay where they are.”
When I made it to Solly’s position, he held the rifle on me as I unlocked the leg cuff. “You know, Sughrue,” he said, “you think you could kill me with your bare hands, right?” I nodded slowly, staring into his blue eyes, dark with laughter and pain. “Look at my foot,” he said.
When I got the insulated snow pack off, I took off his heavy sock. Parts of his small toes came with the sock, and the others were as black as a dead man’s face.
“The cuff was too tight, I think,” Solly said. “Aren’t you going to laugh?”
“Sarita’s shot,” I said, “and Wynona’s down there. I ain’t laughing.”
“Let me have the Browning,” he said. “You’ll have to carry me.”
“No shit,” I said, handing him the pistol. “My people have been carrying your people for generations.”
“What the hell’s that mean?”
“Like Jimmy said, if you don’t fucking know, I can’t tell you.”
With my own pistol held to my head, with my snowshoes sinking deeply into the snow, I piggybacked the son of a bitch down to the ghost town and the snow machines.
Frank strapped Jimmy behind him and draped Sarita across his lap on Joe Don’s snow machine, while I carried Solly to one of the bodyguard’s machines, then we eased down the old road toward the occasional sound of gunfire, down toward disaster.
Barnstone and Norman had let Joe Don, Lenny, and the remaining help make it to a rocky depression just down the hill from their positions, then pinned them there. The Cuban woman held an automatic at Wynona’s head. As we watched from the switchback just above, Carney in a camo snowsuit slithered toward the depression, bounded over a boulder and a dead bodyguard, and faster than I could see, sliced the Cuban woman’s throat, then shoved her body away and grabbed Joe Don’s head and pulled it back and lay the blade against his exposed throat. But Lenny leveled his pistol at Wynona’s prone blue-suited and helmeted figure.
“He hurts my daddy, Sughrue, I’ll blow her head off!” Lenny screamed in a high, frightened voice.
“She’s your fucking sister!” I shouted.
/> His laughter sounded like pond ice cracking. “Half sister,” he giggled, “and bad half at that.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Drugged,” he answered.
“Just walk away,” I shouted. “But leave Wynona there.”
“No fucking way!”
Barnstone picked up his .50 and the tripod and stepped out of the tent. The surviving bodyguard threw his M-16 into a snowbank. You could almost hear the knuckles turn white on the triggers.
Suddenly, Carney started talking in one of those soft, slow Texas accents, confident and almost happy, like a broker who advises you to invest in research rats. The coming thing. And you’re writing the check even before he stops talking.
Carney said, “You, sir, please, the brother. Why don’t you take your piece off the girl and put it against the back of my head. Please. Do it easy and nobody will get hurt …”
“Wait!” Solly screamed. Everybody did. “Take me down there,” Solly whispered into my ear. “I want to look the fucker in the eye.” So I did. Then we climbed off the machine, and like some odd beast, I carried him into the depression, filled with spent brass and rock chips where the .50s had torn a ragged edge.
“I’ve got a bead on him,” Frank said, “but watch him, Sarge.”
“Back off,” Solly said over my shoulder to Carney as he leveled the Browning in Joe Don’s face. Carney took the knife away and stepped back. “Joe Don Pines,” Solly said, “you dirty rotten son of a bitch.”
“Who the fuck is this?” Joe Don asked, desperately confused. “I never did anything to him. Hell, I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
“Solomon Rainbolt,” I said, “Captain, U.S. Army.”
“Oh,” Joe Don said, “you’re the guy with the offshore list …”
Now it was my turn for confusion.
“Bank accounts” was all the explanation Solly bothered to offer me.