Bordersnakes

  “Howdy Doody, motherfucker,” I said. And I took Forsyth out of the equation with a single round to the face. The 10mm round must have been a jacketed hollow-point because most of the back of Eddie’s head blew into the next room and he hit the tiled floor like a sack of freckled shit.

  But Xavier, quick as a snake, dodged behind Kate and had his pistol lodged at the base of her skull before I could pop him.

  Sughrue

  Fucking Milo. He was always crazy about seat belts. Wouldn’t ride with me if I didn’t buckle up. So the seat belt saves my ass. That and the failure of the Suburban’s bumper, which rips like pot metal while the two vehicles are turning in the air. When the vehicles land on their wheels, I stay in the seat, while the four Mexican banditos fly like broken dolls through the open doors of the Suburban. My GMC pickup is a total loss, which I hate, the rear axle propped on a small boulder in the shallow river, but I’m mostly okay. Nothing important broken, no arterial bleeding. The Suburban rests nose-down in the middle of the river, but its four occupants are scattered like so much trash on the steep slope above.

  As I scrabble up to check the bodies, I hope they’re all dead, skin bags of shattered bone, burst viscera, and blood. But one isn’t. He’s dying but not dead, his flight broken by a clump of prickly pear. And he opens his eyes long enough to see me. I can’t have that, so I take his mini-Uzi, thinking I will do what I have to do. This is no time for ceremony. Although there’s no fire, the explosive dust from the wreck rises like a firestorm in the afternoon sky.

  Even as I have the sights of the automatic weapon aimed into the middle of his forehead, the Mexican’s eyes cloud over. Goddamn, I’m tired. Fucker meant to kill me. But I close his sightless eyes before I leave, and find myself jerking a cluster of barbed pear spines from his forehead. Finally, I make myself leave when a red ant crawls between the slack lips. Jesus. For a moment I understand how Milo must have felt when he gave up gunfire. But Milo only has himself to think about. I hammer the license plates off the pickup, hoping it will slow the pursuit, grab a pair of running shoes out of the tool box, wash my bloody head in the river, stretch my legs, then go.

  I leave the Uzi behind because I know where to safely cross the Rio Grande after dark, know where my paranoid stashes of weapons and supplies are cached, know I can run to Whitney and Baby Lester before daylight, pray I can beat the bastards to my home.

  Milo

  “It appears your left hand still shoots quite well,” Kaufmann said to me quietly. “As does Xavier’s.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but is he willing to die?”

  “Please,” he said, then nodded carefully toward Suzanne. “I know you wouldn’t care if this one died,” he added. “Even though I love her deeply…”

  At this Suzanne snorted.

  “…she is a viper the world could do well without. But I suspect you have slightly different feelings about her sister.” When I didn’t respond, Kaufmann continued, “So I am confident that now you have good reason to negotiate.”

  “It looks like a Mexican standoff,” I said, laughing. “But before we get into deals, I’d like to know what’s at stake here.”

  Suzanne and Kaufmann looked at each other for a long time.

  “If you don’t release this infernal device,” Kaufmann said quietly, “Xavier will kill Katherine.”

  “How about I give you a couple of notches,” I said, “and you tell me what the fuck is really going on.”

  —

  In order to have a weapon that wouldn’t set off a metal detector or show up on an X-ray, it had taken a gunsmith, a watchmaker, an aeronautical engineer, and a robotics technician. And the cost had been almost prohibitively expensive—I flinched when the guy who made Carver D’s shotgun cane told me the price—but once I had the key to the financial machinations on Ray Lara’s floppy disk, money was no longer a problem. Instead of trusting his memory, since a second wrong attempt would wipe the information, Ray Lara had it tattooed inside the dog’s mouth. Good old Sheba. She’d held the key all that time. And once I convinced Betty Porterfield to return one of my several calls, it was no problem to have Carver D’s computer friends trace the remainder of my father’s money to several numbered accounts in Panama, then transfer it, plus a healthy chunk from some of Ray Lara’s other skimming operations, back into my trust account in Meriwether. Only this time, I had to be at the bank in person to remove or move the money. In case I didn’t make it back across the border, my new will left almost everything to Baby Lester.

  And now it looked as if I wasn’t going to make it back.

  —

  “First, I’m sorry to disabuse you of the notion that I control the cocaine smuggling in this section of northern Mexico,” Kaufmann said, “although at one time many years ago, when my father saw fit to cast me out of the familia, in revenge I invented the marijuana distribution system sometimes known as the Dallas Parkway and made quite a bit of money, enough so that, once my father died, I was able to buy back into the family business…” Kaufmann paused. I’d given him enough slack to ease his fingers from beneath the filament cutting into his neck. He took a deep breath. “And frankly, even before cocaine smuggling seized the border, I found myself troubled by the violence and removed myself from that area of business.”

  “So what was that shit earlier about how the DEA couldn’t touch you?” I asked.

  Obviously, this was a question nobody wanted to answer. Kaufmann coughed, Suzanne squirmed, and Xavier spoke for the first time.

  “I grow weary of this nonsense,” Xavier said quietly. “Release him, or I’ll kneecap this skinny little dyke. Now.”

  “You’ll be dead before she hits the floor, kiddo,” I said. “I’ll blow your nose right out the back of your head.”

  “Xavier, please,” Kaufmann said. “I know it is not your nature, but please stay calm. We can work this out.” Then he tried to shift his head to look at me. “Perhaps Mr. Milodragovitch will release my throat just a tiny bit again. As a gesture of good faith?”

  “I think it’s only fair to warn you,” I said, “that if I release the spring too much, you face a much more horrible death.”

  “What could be…”

  “AIDS,” I said. “Too quick a release triggers a small plastic dart filled with the HIV virus.”

  “Jesus, you’re sick,” Suzanne sputtered. “Sick.”

  “I didn’t start this shit, lady,” I said, then gave Kaufmann two clicks worth of slack, a quarter inch. He flinched and might have fallen out of the chair if he could have. The AIDS thing was an ugly idea that Carver D had added. The part about the dart was true, but not the AIDS part. But it insured that even if Kaufmann escaped the noose, the rest of his life was ruined by the worry. “I didn’t steal any money, didn’t have anybody shot,” I continued, “didn’t start any of this shit. But believe me, I’m going to have the last word.”

  “What do you want?” Kaufmann sighed as he touched his throat. “Just tell me.”

  “First, Xavier puts his pistol down,” I said, “then…”

  “Not a fucking chance, gringo,” Xavier said.

  “So much for negotiations,” I said.

  “Xavier!” Kaufmann shouted.

  “You old fool,” Xavier said, shaking angrily. “I should have killed you a long time ago.”

  “You tell me what it’s like to jack off with a plastic hand, culo,” I said to Xavier, since it seemed the asshole wasn’t going to recognize me, “and I’ll tell you what it’s like to dig your own grave.”

  “You!” he shouted.

  “Katie, hit the floor!” I shouted, and had two rounds into Xavier’s face before he pulled his trigger, gouging a short furrow of flesh out of the back of Kate’s shoulder.

  “I hope he wasn’t one of your favorite sons,” I said to Kaufmann, who shook his head slightly as Suzanne vomited into her briefcase. “Now let’s get this shit over. I want some answers.”

  Kaufmann nodded and murmured, “He’s not my son.??
?

  Suzanne wiped her mouth, went to Kate’s slack, unconscious body, tugged her out of the gore, then untied and ungagged her and pressed a silk scarf against her bleeding shoulder.

  “Who killed Rita?” I asked Kaufmann.

  “Eddie,” Suzanne answered breathlessly from her knees.

  “Why?”

  “He loved me. We met on that dumb fucking football movie in Austin. And he just decided he loved me,” Suzanne said mournfully. “And when I told him…asked him to lean on Rita—she got homesick in Mexico—and she wanted more money to stay down there and let me use her identity. Plus the fat bitch told Aaron what was going on…”

  “And he wanted money, too?” I suggested.

  “Not money,” Suzanne said. “The stupid bastard wanted a part in my movie. Can you believe it? He couldn’t stand still in front of an empty camera.”

  “Did you ask Eddie to lean on Aaron, too?” I asked.

  Suzanne nodded slowly, as if she were actually filled with remorse.

  “So where the hell does Jacobson fit into this shit?” I asked.

  “Andrew belonged to me,” Kaufmann said like a man suddenly awakening from a long, blurry nap. “Dead-end job in a small-town state-chartered bank, married to an ugly woman…You know how it is…He and Raymundo were in the Army together…”

  “So who the fuck’s idea was it to steal my money?”

  “Jacobson’s,” they answered in unison. A bit too quickly to suit me. “It was his way out.”

  “And the other money?”

  “She convinced him to steal from me, too,” Kaufmann said. “She fucked him stupid.”

  “Jesus,” I said to Suzanne. “Who haven’t you fucked to make this movie?”

  Suzanne turned to face me, her face proud and angry and beautiful. “Myself,” she said. “I haven’t fucked myself.” Then she stood up as Kate began to stir.

  If it had ended there, perhaps she would have been right. But I’d made a crucial mistake. I’d sold the old boy short.

  The barrel of the street-sweeper shotgun tapped against the carved wood of the doorway, tapped softly like a small branch against a rain-dark window, a light tap, but as insistent as death’s final pointed knock, then the real Baron of Enojada stepped over the bodies in the doorway and into the office, tall and erect as if in dress blues, a military Colt .45 automatic carried loosely in one wrinkled hand, a large smile almost softening his weathered face.

  Sughrue

  Three of them make the mistake of waiting outside. Three city guys in baggy suits and street shoes waiting in the brush around the double-wide, their black Suburban only half-hidden behind the tin shed where Milo’s Caddy is parked, the smoke of their cigarettes hanging in the still air of the desert dawn. A dark blue roil of clouds threatens just beyond the mountains to the north. I could wait for the wind and rain. It would be easier in the rain with the wind to cover the sound of my movements. But I can’t wait.

  I strip off my bloody and torn uniform, dress in my breechcloth and knee-high moccasins, and take them one at a time with the Bowie. It’s all I can do to keep from taking their scalps. A knife makes you think that way.

  Luck is with me. Through a crack in the living room curtains I can see Whitney and Lester bound and gagged on the carpet, a sleepy thug on the couch, another goddamned mini-Uzi resting on his knees. I watch for a moment. Whitney and Lester look exhausted and terrified but awake and alive. Thankfully alive.

  There’s a silenced .22 in my gear, but I can’t kill him in front of my family. Can’t. So I crawl beneath the steps, crouch, waiting, occasionally tapping on the aluminum door with my blade, tap until the bastard steps outside to see what’s happening.

  When I cut his throat, I nearly take his head off.

  I can’t go inside covered with blood, can’t scrub the blood off me with sand, can’t leave the bastard’s body sprawled at my front door. So I stash it in their Suburban. And the others, too.

  Then I head for the horse trough to wash away the dark smears that cover my body. I don’t know how long I stand naked in the water. Long enough for the blue norther to triumph over the dawn, arriving on blistering gusts of wind and needles of sleet. Long enough to remember the long float down the irrigation ditch, muddy water thick in my mouth, my blood leaking like sand. Long enough to know I’ll never be afraid again.

  Only then do I retrieve my gear from the brush, dress, and climb the steps as if climbing a gallows into my house.

  Now, goddammit, now nothing will ever be the same.

  —

  Lester is the easiest to calm. The long silent Apache hours we’ve spent in chaparral have paid off. He’s tough, no longer a baby. He drinks the hot milk and coffee, then goes to pack without asking a question. Just a few things, I tell the boy. You have to choose what you can’t leave behind.

  Whitney, on the other hand, tough as she is, has a lot of questions. Too many. But after a few minutes of long, hard holding, she, too, throws a few things together she can’t bear to leave behind—a picture of her parents in a canoe in the Boundary Waters; a perfect obsidian arrowhead she once found outside Terlingua; our marriage license—then waits for me at the door.

  “You’re not taking anything?” she says.

  “You and our son,” I answer. “That’s all I need.”

  Whitney hugs me until my ribs crack.

  “Fucking Milo,” she whispers fondly. The boy hears and grins.

  Before we can leave, we hear the sound of a car, its springs creaking over the rough road. Not coming fast. But coming.

  “Shit,” I say, picking up the Uzi. “If anything happens, go out the back door and run. Lester knows the way.”

  The car, an anonymous gray sedan, stops in front as I step outside. It’s the rawboned guy from the DEA compound. He climbs out of the car, not even glancing at the Uzi, ignoring it as he does the freezing rain in his face.

  “Where’s your buddy Milodragovitch?” he says.

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “Exactly. Maybe dead in Mexico. Why?”

  “He called me late yesterday afternoon,” the agent says. “Told me he was bringing Emilio Kaufmann across the border.”

  “What for?”

  “For me.”

  “What for?”

  “To keep your sorry ass off death row,” he says. “But he didn’t show.”

  “Shit,” I say, too tired to think. “Look, I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll take my family to a safe place,” I say, “I’ll go get the son of a bitch for you.”

  “Which one? Milodragovitch or Kaufmann?”

  “Whatever,” I say.

  “Deal,” he says.

  “Deal,” I say, then sigh. “Isn’t that what law enforcement is all about?”

  “Sometimes,” he answers tiredly.

  Milo

  “Emilio,” the General said softly, striding around the desk. “For a smart man you lack the capacity to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions engraved on the heel. I didn’t survive all that time in the Army to lose everything now over a stupid cowboy and a dumb fucking western movie.” Then he pressed the pistol against Kaufmann’s cheek.

  Nobody will ever know how Emilio Kaufmann intended to defend himself because without another word, the General pulled the trigger as Suzanne screamed, “Daddy, no!”

  I have to admit that I flinched, deafened by the muzzle blast, blinded by the bloody splash as Kaufmann’s head exploded in my face. Kaufmann bounced off me, then flopped onto the desk, jerking the cane out of my hand. The General, nearly as covered as I was with blood and brain matter, but completely undaunted, stepped forward, clubbed my wrist with the .45, then stepped back and aimed it directly at my nose as the Glock clattered across the desk.

  “Milodragovitch,” he said, “too many people know you’re here, and I would prefer not to put a round into you. But as you can see, I’m more than willing. So please don’t force me to fire.”

  “It seems I’m out of options,” I said, trying t
o wipe the gore off my face. “What now?”

  His daughters whimpered behind him, and he snapped at them, “You girls shut up!” I understood where Suzanne got her whipcrack voice. “I understand,” he said to me, a sparkle in his watery blue eyes, “that you have a great deal of my money.”

  “I just took back what was mine,” I said. “And maybe a little for my trouble…”

  “I had nothing to do with that,” he said calmly.

  “What about the movie?” Suzanne asked as she rose to her feet, leaving Kate to weep dark tears upon the tiled floor.

  “Fuck the movie,” he said.

  “I’ve heard that somewhere before,” I said.

  “Either restore my money, Mr. Milodragovitch, or I will kill you and everybody you ever cared about.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” I said.

  In that long silence afterward, the guy with the street sweeper stepped into the room to cover me. The four bodyguards in their baggy shorts struggled off the floor and hurried toward their clothes, which seemed more important to them than their weapons.

  “Then you’re a dead man,” the General said calmly.

  And except for Kate, I would have been.

  “Daddy!” she screamed from her knees, Xavier’s small automatic braced familiarly in her hands. The joys of military life. “Daddy, no!”

  The old gentleman didn’t flinch at her scream. But he did drop the .45 without pulling the trigger after she shot him in the elbow. I grunted as if punched in the gut. The guy with the street sweeper was half-turned when she put three rounds into the side of his chest. He did pull the trigger before he stumbled into the desk, but only the computer and the cell phone died. I had the shotgun before he hit the floor. But before I could cover the half-naked bodyguards, they were out the door.

  Within moments unaimed automatic weapon fire tore through the open front door.

  “Can’t you stop them?” Suzanne screamed at her father, who had fallen into Kaufmann’s chair, his arm hanging at an ugly angle, arterial blood pumping in gouts from his arm.