Under the Skin (35 page)
“Te doy un recuerdo de Felipe Rocha,” I said. He opened his
mouth to speak but never got it out before I shot him in the eye.
I reloaded the Colt and went on up to the top landing, moving
warily now. I heard the BAR again—and then froze at the sound of a
submachine gun, firing rounds faster than LQ’s Browning ever could.
It was a long burst.
A tommy gun. Jesus.
The tommy and the Browning fired at the same time, long
bursts... and then nothing. I stood waiting, and there came a few
pistolshots, and then no more gunfire. Nothing but the muted crying and wailing of wounded men and terrified women.
But Daniela was somewhere up
here
—and the thing to do right
now was find her.
The first room I tried was an empty bedroom. In the next one a
young maid was huddled in a corner and crying.
“Donde está Daniela Zarate?”
Gone, she said. The patrón took her—just a few minutes ago.
There was a private stairway in his chambers.
I grabbed her and shoved her into the hall and told her to show me
the way to Calveras’ room. She looked down the hall and her eyes
went large and I stepped out into the hall and pointed the Colt at a
guy dressed like some dandy from another age. He wore a sharp little beard in the old gachupín style and his hair was tied back in a
ponytail. He’d been about to descend the staircase but now put his
hands up slightly and said he wished me no harm and was surrendering without conditions. He lowered his hands to his side and turned
the palms outward in a show of capitulation and asked how he could
be of service. I asked where the patrón’s chambers were. He pointed
past me and even as I turned to look I sensed my mistake and I
whirled back around to see him raising a pocket revolver and we both
fired. I hit him in the heart and he dropped like a puppet with its
strings cut.
I felt a burning in the muscle between my neck and shoulder and
found that he’d nicked me through it. It burned but the blood flow
wasn’t too bad. I stuffed a handkerchief against it up under my shirt
and coat. The maid was pressed back against the wall with her hands
at her mouth.
“Enséñame la escalera,” I said, and she led me to the patrón’s
chambers and showed me the secret stairway. It was a narrow winding thing, tight as a corkscrew. I followed it down to a little door that
opened into a patio at the rear corner of the house, next to a narrow
driveway that curved around from the courtyard.
There was only one way out of the compound—so if LQ was still
holding the gate, Calveras was still inside the walls. I hustled back
around to the driveway in front of the house, the Colt in my hand.
The wailing was louder out here. LQ had done plenty of damage with
the Browning. A group of house servants caught sight of me and ran
back into the casa grande. The courtyard was deserted, the bodies already removed except for the dead guy in the hedge. Brando was gone
too, but the torchlight was sufficient to show the dark bloodstains
where he’d fallen.
As I hurried down the drive, others saw me coming and fled into
the darkness to either side of the hedges. They did the smart thing. I
was ready to shoot anybody who even looked at me wrong. The
moaning and crying was scattered in the darkness to my left, but
much of it was concentrated over where a cast of light showed above
the trees. According to the hacienda map the bunkhouse was over
there, and I supposed that was where the wounded had been taken,
the dead too, probably. I wondered if Brando was among them—and
figured I’d know soon enough.
I could see the gate up ahead. Somebody was sitting there with his
back against the open door. If it wasn’t LQ I hoped it was somebody
dead or too shot-up to shoot me.
was all dark. As soon as the shooting started, the peons had probably
shut their doors and blown out their lamps. They didn’t need to know
what was going on to know it was no business of theirs.
The torchlights were bright on me, but even as I got closer to the
gate I still couldn’t make out who was sitting there in the shadows.
And now I noticed that the open gate-door was slightly askew, its
lower hinge twisted almost free of the wall. Then LQ’s voice said,
“Who goes there, friend or foe?”—and he chuckled.
“How you doing, man?”
“Could be worse. Where’s Ray?”
“I don’t know. I saw him get hit but I don’t know how bad. I
thought he might’ve come back here.”
“Nah he aint,” he said. “Think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think we done for of all of them who wanted to make a fight of
He had the BAR across his lap. The .380 and an extra magazine
for it were on the ground beside him. He was hatless and coatless and
both his shirtsleeves had been ripped off and I could see he’d used
them to bandage his left arm.
I squatted beside him and lit a cigarette and handed it to him.
“How bad?”
“I got the bleeding pretty well stopped. Armbone’s busted.” His
voice was tight with pain. “You find her?”
“No. But I saw him, and a maid said he’s got her. As long as we’re
on the gate, he’s not taking her anywhere. Soon as it’s light I’ll start
looking.”
“Ah hell, Jimmy, he’s gone, man. I can’t say if she was with him,
but if you didn’t find her she mighta been with—”
I grabbed his good arm. “What the hell you talking about, he’s
gone... if she was
with
him?...
When?
”
“Hey, man.”
He jerked his arm and I let go of it.
“Fucken Cadillac. Who else it gonna be but him? It come tearing
out of that hedge. I give it a burst, but this gorilla leans out the window and opens up on me with a goddamn
Thompson
. I about shit. I
hunkered down outside the wall and
wham,
they clip the door and go
skidding by with a fender peeled back and the bastard gave me some
more of the tommy gun and nailed me in the arm. But I sureshit
nailed him better. The Caddy had to cut a sharp turn on account of
we blocked the road and the shooter come tumbling out. That’s him
yonder. I put a coupla .380s in his head to be sure he wasn’t just resting up.”
He was pointing at a big man lying a dozen yards beyond the gate,
faceup, his arms flung out, his legs in an awkward twist. The tommy
gun lay close by.
“I couldn’t see in the car all that good,” LQ said, “but I guess she
mighta been in there.”
She was—I knew she was. She would’ve told him I was coming.
She would’ve kicked at him and said James Rudolph Youngblood was
coming. As soon as he heard the shooting he would’ve known who it
was and he would’ve taken her with him. I stood up, telling myself
to stay cool, to
think
.
“We blocked the only road. Where’d he go?”
“Thataway, around the corner.” He waved toward the east end of
the compound wall.
The moon was high and bright as a gaslamp. My wound burned
and I checked it with my fingertips. It was swollen but the bloodflow
had slowed to nothing and was already clotting. I went over to the
dead guy. He had a big droopy mustache and there was enough
moonlight to show the white scar at the edge of his eye. More good
news for Rocha.
Then I remembered the river. The map showed a river running
past the hacienda a couple of miles east of it, running all the way out
to the ciénaga. I picked up the Thompson and went back to LQ.
“I’m betting there’s a road that goes over to the river. From there
he’ll try to make it to the Monclova road.”
“Shitfire,” LQ said. “There’s nothing between here and there but
desert, all rocky ground for... what’d we figure, forty miles? He aint
making it to that road, not without a pair of wings.”
I detached the tommy gun’s magazine and checked the load, then
snapped it back in place and handed LQ the weapon and he tested a
one-hand grip on it, bracing the butt against his hip and swinging
the muzzle from side to side. He grinned and cradled the gun under
his arm.
“I’m gonna go get her.”
“That’s why we come,” he said.
“Got enough smokes?”
“Yep. Could do with some handy water.”
I went over to the Hudson and had to duck under the dash and
hot-wire the ignition, since Brando had the keys. I cranked up the engine and backed the car around and drove up beside the gate. I took
the water can out of the back and filled a couple of empty beer bottles for myself and jammed them between the backseat and the door
so they wouldn’t spill, then set the rest of the can next to LQ, together with a tin cup.
“Be back soon as I can,” I said.
“Good Lord willing, I expect I’ll be here.”
I
drove to the northeast rim of the bluff behind the compound
and got out of the car. From there I could scan the country to
the north for miles—a pale wasteland under the blazing white moon.
To the northeast I could also see the lower portion of the river, extending into the distance like a wrinkled silver ribbon and ending at
a dark patch of ground that had to be the ciénaga.
of dust moving slowly north alongside the river. It was them. He had
his lights off. Me too. We didn’t need headlights anyway, not under
that moon.
I hopped back into the car and wheeled it around and eased it
along the dense growth of brush and mesquites at the edge of the
open ground, gunning the engine, searching for the road to the
river. And then I found it. It wasn’t a road so much as a rocky trail
rutted by cartwheels. It went winding through the scrub and was
so narrow that mesquite branches scraped both sides of the car. I
had to take it easy over the rough ground—but even as slow as I
was going, the Hudson swayed and bobbed like a boat on choppy
waters.
Finally the scrub thinned out and shortened and the river came
into view again, much closer now and shining bright under the
moon. It was shallow and packed with sandbars. A few yards from the
bank the trail turned north, and it was still rough going. Even at fifteen miles an hour the car bounced and swayed and the steering wheel
jerked every which way. Now I was raising some dust too, and I wondered if he’d seen it.
I’d gone downriver about three miles when a front tire blew like a
pistolshot. The Hudson pulled hard to the right but I wrenched it
straight and kept going, the tire flopping. The river narrowed
steadily. Then the ground gradually began to smooth out under the
Hudson and the terrain began to darken and get grassy. I’d arrived at
the end of the river, at the south end of the muddy ciénaga.
I stopped the car and got out to look things over. A cool north
breeze had picked up and it pushed the stink of the mudpit into my
face. The ground was slick under my heel-less boots. If I’d driven any
farther north I would’ve bogged down in the muck.
He couldn’t have crossed the river anywhere along the way. To get
past the ciénaga he had to go around it to the west. There were no
tracks on the smooth ground around me, so he must’ve angled over
the car and followed the edge of the mudpit to westward.
In less than a quarter mile I came on the Caddy’s tracks where they
came up from the south and I could tell from the shape of them that
he’d blown at least one tire on each side. The moon eased around to
my right from behind me as I followed the tracks along the curving
rim of the ciénaga to northward. Then the Caddy’s tracks angled away
from the mudpit and I knew we were past it. The ground was hard
and rough again. The Hudson jolted and pitched.
I drove on, the Hudson’s shadow slowly contracting against the
left side of the car.
And then there the Cadillac was, not a half mile ahead. In the distance it looked like a bug on a dirty tablecloth. It took a moment for
me to realize that it wasn’t moving. I drew the Mexican Colt from my
pants and set it beside me.
I closed in very slowly, then stopped about thirty yards from the
Caddy. I didn’t know how he was armed. If he had a rifle he probably
would’ve used it before letting me get that close. Then again, maybe
he was trying to get me in so close that he couldn’t miss. If he wanted
to bargain I was willing: give her to me and we’d be quits. I was
pretty sure I’d mean it.
I eased the Hudson forward, ready to wheel it sideways and take
cover behind it if he opened fire. Twenty yards from the Caddy I
stopped again. It was slumped forward on two front flats. I pulled up
to within ten yards. Then closer. And then I was idling right behind it.
The interior of the Caddy was too dark for me to see anything in there.
I put the Hudson in neutral and opened my door wide and waited
a minute. Nothing from the Caddy. I had the Colt cocked in my
hand. Then I switched on my headlights—if he’d been looking back
at me, he’d have been blinded in that moment—and I slid out of the
Hudson and ran in a crouch up beside the driver’s door and jumped
up and stuck the Colt in the window, all set to blow his brains out.
He wasn’t there.
But she was—slumped against the passenger door—and in the
same moment that I saw her I realized what a clear target I made in
the shine of my headlights. I dropped down and scurried back to the
Hudson and reached in and switched off the lights.
I went around to the Cadillac’s passenger side and tucked the Colt
in my pants and eased the door open and caught her as she started to
fall. Her eyes were closed and she groaned softly and her breath was
warm on my face. She moaned louder as I eased her over on the seat
and got in beside her. And I felt the blood.
I examined her by the light of the moon. Her elbow was smashed
and her lower right arm was slick with blood. Her right side was
sopped—blood oozing from a bullet hole just under her arm and from
two more, close together, between the ribs and hip.
There was nothing to do about wounds like that. Not in our circumstance. I went back to the Hudson and got one of the bottles I’d
filled with water. Some of it had spilled in all the bouncing around
but there was still plenty. I put the water to her lips and maybe she
sipped some of it but mostly it just ran out of her mouth. I wiped the
dribble from her chin and set the bottle on the floor.
I put my hand to her cheek and said her name. I asked her to open
her eyes and look at me, to say something, but she didn’t. I held her
and crooned to her. I stroked her hair and spoke to her of everything
that came to mind. I told her how beautiful she was, how wonderfully
brave. I told her how my heart did a little flip the first time I’d seen
her. I tried to sing “Red Sails in the Sunset” but forgot the words in
both English and Spanish and told her I was sorry. I described the
moon and said she really ought to take a look at it and I laughed for
both of us at my attempt to trick her into opening her eyes. I talked
to her until the sky turned gray at the rim of the mountains. Then I
leaned down to retrieve the bottle of water to see if she might drink
a little more and when I turned back to her she was dead.