Do They Know I'm Running? (41 page)

Seeing the look on Roque’s face, he said, “Better them than you,” then headed for one of the two men sprawled out on the asphalt. “Or am I wrong?” There was an almost feral indifference in his eyes. “There’s another rifle around here somewhere. Find it before the second truck shows up.”

Near the Corolla, Lupe was tending to Tío Faustino, still dazed, head lolling on his shoulder, and she dabbed at his facial wounds with the corner of her shirt while Samir, with Beto looking on passively, assured himself the remaining three men from the truck were dead, an insurance round to each skull. Roque felt like he might get sick, then caught the shrill grind of the second pickup downshifting into the bend. He scoured the ground, looking for the rifle Samir was sure lay somewhere nearby, while the Arab took up position in the middle of the road, shouldering his weapon.

The second pickup rounded the curve and Samir opened fire, at the same time circling quickly toward his right, the truck’s left, leaving the cone of the headlights and making himself a moving target while aiming at the driver, head shots with his first two rounds, then taking on the men in back who’d begun to return fire. Roque, on his hands and knees, continued his frantic search of the ground until Lupe screamed, the sound torquing his head her direction. She stood there against the Corolla, trying to hold Tío Faustino up as he slid down the fender to the ground, shuddering visibly as he clutched at the blood streaming from his throat. Please no, Roque thought, while Beto—standing in the road between Roque and the car, firing away—had his head jerked back suddenly like he’d been head-butted, then he dropped hard to his knees, eyes glazed, brow furrowed as though he were contemplating some impossible thought, a portion of his skull drilled open just above the eye.

Roque knelt there paralyzed until Samir shouted, “Help me, grab a gun, shoot, shoot, fucking hell …” The Arab continued
moving through the darkness in the same wide circle, muzzle flash like a flaming spark in the night. He’d picked off two of the gunmen in the truck bed, the third clung to the railing with one hand, the other clutching his shoulder. The man still alive inside the cab was shooting wildly out his window on the passenger side as the pickup drifted on, its driver dead. Roque lunged toward Beto’s body—it lay in a strange lump, folded forward, as though he’d fallen asleep in the middle of a prayer—and pried the rifle from his hands.

He’d never held a gun before, never aimed one, never fired one. How hard can it be, he thought, raising it to his shoulder, aiming vaguely toward the pickup’s windshield, pulling the trigger. The noise was ear-splitting, the butt plate bit into his shoulder and ricocheted hard against his jaw even as the weapon almost jumped out of his hands. He nearly tumbled flat but collected his legs as the brass shell casing pinged against the blacktop. Jerking the weapon back to his shoulder, he re-aimed, forcing himself to ignore the bullets whistling past, willing himself not to look at his uncle or Lupe, not now, not yet. Following Samir’s example he began circling to his right, crouching as he pulled the trigger, once, twice, again, aiming toward the pickup cabin, not seeing faces, just shapes, firing over and over with no idea if he was hitting anything and then the rifle clicked helplessly. He was standing to the side of the pickup, dazed, his entire body cold with sweat. Only then did he notice the quiet: no gunfire. Just Lupe’s muffled sobs, the moans from one or two of the gunmen and once again the ocean wind, the swaying hillside grass, the surf below.

He threw down the rifle and ran to his uncle while the two-tap reports of Samir’s coups de grace punctuated the stillness.

Holding his uncle’s head in her lap, Lupe pressed hard against the wound, blood seeping up between her fingers as she murmured frantically,
“No, no, no
…” A tourniquet was out of
the question, no way to tightly bandage the wound and stay the bleeding without cutting off his air. His eyes rolled back behind fluttering eyelids, a mindless twitch in his hands.

—
Here, let me
, Roque said, nudging Lupe’s hand aside, seeing the wound for the first time, lit by the glow from the pickup’s headlights, an inch-long rip in the flesh of the throat, black and wet, the bullet having sliced an artery, the blood a throbbing stream. Only then did he see how soaked through Lupe’s jeans were. He reached around the back of his uncle’s neck, felt for the exit wound, fingered a tear in the skin twice the size of the one in front, the blood pouring out. He tried to press against both wounds at once but his uncle’s eyes glistened whitely, his breathing was shallow, his skin waxy and cool. Lupe wept faintly, her face smeared with blood where she’d wiped away tears. She began whispering,
“Lo siento,”
I’m sorry, over and over and Roque whispered that it wasn’t her fault but she merely shook her head, closed her eyes and pounded her head with her fists.

Samir approached from behind, dragging the butt of his rifle against the pitted asphalt. Roque looked up over his shoulder into the Arab’s face.

“We need to get him to a hospital.”

“There isn’t time.” Samir’s voice was soft and sad and strangely peaceful. “Pray for him. That is what he needs from you now.”

Roque felt it then, the slackening of his uncle’s musculature, the stillness in his chest. Lupe’s whimpering grew louder, her eyes pressed shut and she pounded at her head even harder until Roque reached up, took her wrist.—
Don’t
.

—
He was so kind to me
.

—
He wouldn’t want it
.

He felt Samir’s hand in his armpit, snagging a fistful of cloth, pulling him to his feet. He had to fight off an impulse to swing around, leading with his elbow, catch the Arab square in the face. What would that atone? Their eyes met. Samir said, “I need you to help me.”

“You’re quite the killer.”

“I told you, I was in the army. Now—”

“My brother says the Iraqis were piss-poor shots. You were like—”

“Your brother doesn’t know everything. Now come, I need your help.”

Roque wiped his bloody hands on his pants and followed Samir toward the second pickup, still relatively intact. He smelled the lingering stench of cordite, the salt off the ocean.

Samir shuddered from exhaustion. “We’ll load the bodies into the Corolla.”

“Why?”

“Set fire to the car, let them think it’s us.”

Roque turned toward a sudden rustling sound. Beyond the headlights’ glow, he caught the vague outline of a
zopilote
rucking its wings as it planted itself on the edge of the kill zone.

Turning back to Samir: “They’ll figure it out sooner or later, the other truck—”

“It will buy us time. We’re going to need it.”

They set to work, dragging bodies from the truck, shoving them into the car, tossing in Beto too, a filthy business all around, the blood, the piss, the gore, the shit—men don’t die in real life like they do in the movies, Roque thought. Twice, he needed to stop, walk to the edge of the road, hurl. Then they heard the distant grinding of gears, the whine of an engine downshifting into the approaching turn. A truck was coming. Samir took one of the rifles, waved Roque and Lupe out of sight, then knelt by the back of the second pickup, waited for the headlights to appear. He fired twice into the air. The truck lurched to a stop, the hissing shriek of brakes, the clatter of gears—the driver backed up, his rig vanishing back beyond the turn.

“Hurry,” Samir said. “He may have a shortwave, a cell phone.”

They finished packing the car with the dead, stopping at five,
then collected their own few belongings from the trunk. Samir found a jerry can of gas behind the rollover pickup’s passenger seat and he doused the Corolla while Roque and Lupe dragged Tío Faustino’s body to the intact pickup and laid him out in the truck bed, covering him with a tarp they found bundled up there. Using matches he scoured from Beto’s pocket, Samir set the Corolla ablaze, then collected all the weapons lying on the ground, tossed them in the back of the pickup under the tarp with Tío Faustino’s body, jumped in at the passenger-side door and said, “Drive! Now!”

They were beyond the first bend when the Corolla’s gas tank blew, the roar deafening and the plume of flame reaching high into the predawn darkness, rendering in harsh silhouette the intervening hills with their shaggy crown of windblown grass. The buzzard rose into the sky, fleeing the fireball, visible only briefly at the edges of the rippling light. Roque pushed the truck as fast as he could, peering past the two holes in the windshield, a spiderweb pattern surrounding each one, reaching over when he could to console Lupe, telling her again it was not her fault, there was nothing she could do, until finally she fell still and sat there, staring out through the same shattered windshield.

IT WAS LUPE’S IDEA TO STOP AT THE CHURCH
.

They’d driven for an hour, daybreak brightening a cloud-jumbled sky, but once they passed the village of Barra de la Cruz they knew trusting their luck any longer was foolhardy. The Bahías de Huatulco lay ahead with their tony resorts; sooner or later they’d reach a checkpoint and it wouldn’t much matter who manned it, the police or the army, vigilantes or paramilitaries, not with the ambushers’ weapons and Tío Faustino’s body in the truck bed.

The sign for the church pointed up a steep and rutted dirt lane shaded by majestic ceibas with their hand-shaped leaf clusters, the peaks of the Sierra Madre del Sur in the distance. There was a notice posted beneath the sign, a declaration from the local archbishop, warning of a con man working the area, impersonating a priest and performing sacred functions—confessions, deathbed absolutions, baptisms, even weddings—for a fee. Atop the hill, the church sat in a clearing surrounded by cornfields—a short steeple lacking a cross, walls the yellow of egg yolks, wood shutters painted an electric blue. Shaped differently, Roque thought, it might have passed for an Easter egg.

Lupe gestured to Samir to let her out.—
Let me talk to the priest
.

Samir didn’t move.—
What will you tell him?

Her face was weary with grief.—
I’ll say we got attacked by bandits along the road. We have someone we need to bury. He was a
good man …
She trembled, choking something back.—
He deserves to buried by the church, he deserves to be blessed and prayed for
.

—
Look at you
. Samir eyed her blouse, her jeans, caked with dried blood.—
He’ll think you’re crazy. Worse, he’ll think
—

With the fury of a child, she began slapping at his head, his chest, his shoulder.—
Let me out, asshole. Now. Out of my way …

Samir obliged, if only to escape the indignity. She slid across the seat into the gathering sunlight and stormed off, even her ponytail clotted with blood. Samir slid his hand around his face, chafing the stubble, eyeing her as she climbed the wood-plank steps to the church’s front doors. They were locked. She rattled them hard, testing to be sure, then ventured around back, to an add-on section that looked as though it might be the rectory. A modest cemetery lay beyond.

As she vanished around the corner, the Arab leaned his weight against the pickup’s open door, as though only that were keeping him upright.

“We can’t drive this truck much farther.” Roque checked the gas gauge, an eighth of a tank remaining, but that wasn’t what he was getting at. “We get to a roadblock, it won’t just be the bullet holes we have to answer for. Even if we bury my uncle’s body here, ditch the guns—”

“You seriously want to continue without weapons?”

“The worst is behind us.”

“Says who?”

“The truck’s registered in somebody else’s name. That alone, boom, we’re done. And for all we know those men we killed were police, military, someone else we’ll have to answer for.”

Samir squinted against the dusty wind. “All this I already know.”

“Fine.” Roque opened his door, dragged himself out from behind the wheel and stretched his legs. His clothing, too, was crusted with dried blood. Turning to the truck bed, he checked
the tarp covering the weapons and Tío Faustino’s body, tugging at the corners. He lacked the nerve to peek underneath. “Since you already know everything, solve the problem.”