It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (7 page)

I closed my eyes, trying to place the man the voice went with.

“And here I thought you never got caught,” he added.

I shook my head, amused as well, and turned.

Refugio.
Officer
Refugio.

“Didn’t think they sent you out anymore,” I said, not looking to my pack, still tucked under the bush.

“Even old horses need their exercise.”

He was still speaking Spanish.

The last time I’d seen him, we’d been in a wood-paneled real estate office, the movable kind, down toward Laredo. It had been an accident, too, us being in the same room at the same time. The clients then had been smart, though: they were paying both sides. One opened the gate, one walked through.

It had been bad luck for Refugio, good luck for me. For nearly two years now, Refugio had been my fallback, the name I was going to say into the microphone in some interrogation room, so that, once they got hold of him, showed him my mug shot and told him that I wasn’t talking, he’d understand the deal I meant: get me out of this, and I keep on not saying anything.

Only, now, here, he could wipe the board clean.

“You coming or going?” he said.

“Second leg,” I said, shrugging, looking vaguely south. “Return trip.”

Refugio laughed, spit a brown line into the dirt and rubbed it in with the toe of his boot.

“That’s why you didn’t leave any tracks to the north?”

“I don’t leave tracks.”

“Then there won’t be any to the south either, qué no?” He could make this last all day if he wanted.

“I thought maybe you were a short-timer,” he said. “Or that you’d retired. Never thought it would come to this, I mean.” I cased his truck, half a section away, its exhaust muffled by the netting my head had been wrapped in. “You’re a ghost, I mean,” he said, in English now.

“Thing about ghosts,” I said, because I had to try, “is that they don’t exist.”

Instead of smiling about this, Refugio smoothed his thick, chollo moustache down. It was probably supposed to make him look like a Texas Ranger. Less Mexican, anyway. The gun on his hip was standard issue, auto .45. The leather catch was thumbed back. Of course.

“Well what do you got, then?” he asked, finally.

“What do you mean, what do I got?”

“If you’re coming, you’re carrying something. If you’re leaving, then you’ve been paid.”

I just stared at him.

This was the same guy who’d been in that real estate office, yes. What he was talking was cuts, percentages, tariffs. We could walk away from this, different ways. Maybe.

If I answered right, here.

“A thousand,” I said, shrugging one shoulder, my eyes locked on his lips, for the flicker of a smile.

Instead of a flicker, he grinned wide, pushed his taco hat back on his forehead.

“I did some research on you ... before,” he said. “Y’know, in case.”

I wasn’t saying anything now. Knowing my face was one thing. Knowing my history, that was another thing completely.

“Dodd Raines,” he recited. “Married once, one daughter, two years of community college, currently wanted for grand larceny, evading arrest, firing on —”

“That’s somebody else.”

Refugio raised his eyebrows to me, held them there.

“Well then, Mr. Somebody Else, my question still stands. What are you carrying?”

To show what he was talking about, he hooked his chin over to the bush I’d been sleeping under.

“Just my pack,” I said. “Water, couple bags of chow. Some rocks for my—”

“For your ... ?”

“Not for pay.”

“Well then,” he said, making it to the bush in three steps, pulling the pack out with the toe of the boot he’d been using to rub spit into the dirt.

To inspect its contents, he squatted down, his pistol snaked into his left hand, resting against his knee, angled in my general direction.

I stayed back.

Out here, there would be no witnesses, no tracks that couldn’t be swept over, no story that couldn’t be made to fit. He dumped my water, tools, silver nitrate, and about half the canisters out into the dirt. The canisters clinked against each other. Then he shook it more, for the rest of the canisters, then pulled out the light rope I carried, and ferreted the flashlight from the side pocket.

“No radio,” he said. “That’s in your jacket, yeah? You were wearing headphones for that first bank job. Like you needed a ... what? A soundtrack? Some theme music?”

This was A-material to him.

I still wasn’t saying anything.

He stood with one of the canisters, shook it close to his ear. The rock inside clunked against the plastic insulation the canister was lined with.

“Nothing narcotic here, is there?” he said.

“Same as there wasn’t in Laredo,” I said.

Refugio nodded to himself, as if he’d been expecting me to use that sooner or later, yeah. And then he twisted the cap off the tenth canister. Using one of my silver nitrate sticks like a monkey might, digging grubs from a rotten tree, he eased another black rock out.

“Like I said,” I told him. “Just rocks.”

“And you collected them ... out here?” he said, opening his hand to the pasture.

I nodded.

“And you just ... what? Shrunk-wrapped them, I guess? With all this shrink wrap you’ve got in your pack?”

I scratched a spot just above my left ear.

Refugio shrugged, spun the rock in the air and palmed it as if weighing it, then rolled it back into the canister, spun the cap back on.

“Two,” he said.

I narrowed my eyes, unsure.

“Okay then,” he said, like this was all a game. “Three. In cash.”

“Just tell me when.”

“Now. And also you tell me what these rocks are. Or else I take them with me in my truck, sign them into the lab.”

He was talking Spanish again. I wasn’t sure what this meant.

I answered in English.

“What if I don’t know?”

“Then you’re not the professional you’re supposed to be, I’d say.”

Scattered around in my pockets and right boot, I had a bit more than two thousand dollars. And was standing up in an American pasture in the daytime. The same way one traffic cop would stop to shoot the bull with another uniform who had somebody pulled over, it wouldn’t be too long until another border cop glassed us from ten miles away, eased over to get a better look.

I’d seen it happen five times already, on different jobs. Watching from safe places in the rocks.

“They’re rocks from the moon,” I said, just flat-out, no build-up.

Since I didn’t have the full three thousand, I was going to have to make the other half of what I was paying him seem like more than it was.

“Bullshit.”

This in English.

“Serious,” I said.

“I’ve been to NASA,” he said, “there’s not nothing walking out of there.”

“Well, some did, I guess. I don’t know how. Or when.”

“There’s like twenty pounds of this stuff in all the world — I thought you went to college?”

“They’re from the moon. That’s all I know.”

“And you’re taking them across?” he said, nodding south.

I didn’t say no. Refugio rolled the rock out again, studied it closer, finally breathed a laugh out his nose.

“Let me ask you something,” I said then, while his smile was still lingering. “What are you doing down here?”

Because he knew what I was asking — how had he caught me? — he answered the different question: “An upstanding American citizen name of — of ... Buford? He died walking across the bridge, proper papers and everything. Nobody’s really sure which side he died on.”

I shrugged, chewed my cheek where an ulcer was starting — I could always tell, because the skin there would be hot, like it was cooking up an infection — and said, “So you cut him in half, what?”

“Not with my knife. His insides were” — he swirled his finger around, to show, then said it anyway: “Slush.”

“I only have twenty-six hundred,” I said then. Coming sudden, in the middle of other things, was supposed to make it sound more like a confession. More true.

Refugio eyeballed me.

I held my arms out so he could search me. With his pistol to my temple, he did, and came up with exactly twenty-six hundred. What I was doing was building trust. I hoped.

He stuffed the money into his chest pocket, right behind his badge.

“You didn’t catch anything from that guy, did you now?” I said, leaning down to tie my boots.

Refugio had his pistol to my head again.

I stopped lacing.

“Buforditis?” he said, smiling so that I could hear it. “Makes you drive your Cadillac sixty miles into Mexico, then walk out carrying fifty-thousand dollars?”

I looked up to him, my heart beating in my throat. The client rep was dead.

“Oops,” Refugio said then, real slow. “Did I say fifty? Think it was more like — what? Twenty-two and change, Americano?”

This made him laugh, the pistol jouncing more than I liked. What I liked less, though, was him telling me about that now-missing twenty-seven thousand. It wasn’t the kind of thing you tell somebody you’re about to release, I mean.

“Buforditis
...”
I said, still trying to play the game.

Refugio smiled, then narrowed his eyes, as if hearing something. “No— no, it was Walford. It doesn’t have the same ring, ‘Walforditis.’ You think?”

I didn’t answer.

He had everything he wanted now, and nothing to lose. He cocked the hammer back, pressed the barrel harder through my hair, so I could tell that what he was doing was straightening his arm. Because he didn’t want to get any brains on his face.

“They’ll come looking for those rocks,” I said, focusing everything I had on his boots.

“Martians?” he said.

“Worse.”

“What could be —?”

“Walford. He was my contact.”

For maybe thirty seconds then, nothing, from either of us. Just me, breathing deeper than I meant to, and him, gears turning in his head.

“You only know his name from me,” he said at last.

I was ready. “Snakeskin boots?” I asked back. “Real bad sunburn on his neck?”

Refugio breathed in, blew it back out.

“Then that means you’re next,” he told me. “They’re cleaning up as they go, yeah?”

“They must have found out about the cut he took,” I said. “Or maybe he was late, I don’t know. Like I’m going to be.”

This made that final gear turn over in Refugio’s head: he didn’t have to pull the trigger at all. I was already dead. I stared at him, nodded so he’d know I was giving this to him, a gift.

In the truck twenty minutes later, the gun in his right hand, still angled at me, he said, “I thought ‘lunar rocks’ was the new word for crack or something.”

In the bed of the truck, bouncing around, were the canisters, just loose. And my boots. And the pack. My water was there too, though Refugio had uncapped each bottle, spit a grainy brown line into it, then screwed the lid back on.

We were taking the ridgelines back south, to Del Rio. I wasn’t asking why.

Refugio’s truck sputtered and coughed with each incline, finally died twice, didn’t want to start again. He blamed it on watered-down gas, and then on the state of Texas, and then on me.

I didn’t say anything.

The second time he came back to the cab, the ether can still in his right hand, he caught me looking at the keys in the ignition.