Iron River (34 page)

“Then Mexico will be trading one generation of selfish tyrants for another.”

“The bloodshed and confusion will pass. Help me make them pass, Luna. Be loyal to hope, not foolishness.”

“Hope does nothing.”

“Then be loyal to your family and the abundance you can bring them. Heal your son.”

“I will not.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t work for the enemies of Mexico.”

“Oh? Then who is this standing behind you? And who is this pathetic man on the horse? They are Americans, and Americans are the enemy of Mexico. They have the appetites of Satan and the money and guns to satisfy their appetites. They are rotting with luxury and godlessness and they have spent themselves into ruin. They have nothing in common with us but a border.”

“You kill and kidnap.”

“So that rotting America will help me drive this rotting government from our land.”

“And to put five million into your pocket.”

“It will finance the revolution as well as myself. Share it with me, Luna. For Mexico and for yourself.”

“You are not a revolutionary. You are a murderer and a beheader. I will not work for you.”

Vascano stared down at him white-faced and crazy-haired, then he pulled an overlarge revolver from his holster and shot Luna straight through the heart. The bullet twanged off a rock behind Hood. Luna rocked back, then charged, but the shotgun roared and caught him high, knocking him backward off his feet onto the sand. He rose slowly, his great head a bloody mask, tattered and featureless and grotesque. He charged again, but this time it was into the river where he fell forward on the rocks and lay still in the shallow brown water.

Hood had moved toward Luna and now stood before Vascano. Vascano had lowered his gun, but it was still in his hand resting against the saddle blanket.

“Who are you?”

“Deputy Charlie Hood of Los Angeles.”

“You volunteered for this?”

“It’s my job to do this.”

“Are you a friend of Jimmy Holdstock?”

“Yes.”

“What do I do with two rotting gringos?”

“You let me take Jimmy back like you said you would.”

“If you go back, you can say where I have been. You can fight another day. You are worthless to me alive. You are weak. You are nothing without thousands more of you. Jorge, what do I do with them?”

His son eased his mount forward and he stopped abreast of his father. Again the shotgunner maneuvered to his left for a clean sight line.

“You send them home so they can tell the tale of Vascano, the revolutionary who destroyed the puppet Luna. The world will fear you more, and the men and women of Mexico will love you more. These men are your prophets.”

“This would be letting rattlesnakes go free.”

“Their stories will help us. They will give us a face.”

Vascano looked at his son. “You will be our face.”

A cough erupted in his chest and continued, deepening. He turned and motioned to the shotgunner, then he raised his pistol toward Hood and fired. The bullet screamed by Hood’s head, both a sound and a feeling.

Vascano lowered the gun. The shotgunner spoke into a satellite phone, but he kept his other hand on his weapon, the barrel aimed at Hood.

A moment later a helicopter suddenly surged over the top of the canyon and cut a sharp descent toward the water in graceful switchbacks and finally it pivoted itself down upon the rocks near where Luna lay. The water around the machine quivered as if rising to a boil, then burst into a chop, and downstream of Luna it was turned pink by the deafening and indifferent blades. Two of the Zetas carried the backpacks to the helo, and Vascano and his son dismounted and gave the reins of their mounts to the shotgunner and stroked their horses adios, then strode to the helicopter, ducking under the rotors and climbed in with the money. The machine rose back into the sky and within moments had vanished over the canyon rim.

The shotgunner barked something to his men, and three of the Zetas started back toward town. Three more came up behind Hood and he felt the barrel of a gun against his spine and he fell in behind the first three. He heard the others behind him and he turned to see one of the men leading Jimmy’s horse. Jimmy slumped and swayed not quite with the rhythm of the animal. The bandages on his hands looked smaller than they had at Imperial Mercy and they looked clean, their whiteness jarring in this bloody desert.

A gun barrel found his back again and Hood turned to the trail and he listened to the clopping of the horses behind him. At first he thought of the heat and of the bodies ahead on the road and of Luna dead in the river, but these thoughts fell away by their own weight. With the sound of the horses, Hood thought instead of years ago, riding with his father and mother and brothers and sisters when he was a boy in Bakersfield, trotting past the oil pumpers that sometimes spooked the rented mounts, galloping along the smooth flat edges of the cotton fields with the morning sun warm on his back and feeling that life was good and it was going to get even better and he was impatient to get to all those better things. The world was a place of wonders.

 

 

 

Back at the cantina, the six footmen watched while the shotgunner tethered the horses to a hitching post and helped Jimmy down. The shotgunner pointed his weapon at a battered station wagon, once white but now eaten by rust. It was a Vista Cruiser with a large smoked roof window for viewing the sky and the sights. Hood let Jimmy drape an arm over his shoulder, then they slowly moved together to the car. The front seats were little more than loose foam, the vinyl having cracked away years ago. The windshield was cracked from bottom to top, a seam that glistened even through the dusty glass. Hood helped Jimmy into the backseat, where he could lie down, then he got behind the wheel and turned the key to check the gas.

The shotgunner came from the cantina with a plastic bag and a neatly folded amount of American cash. Through the driver’s-side window he handed Hood the cash and the bag, and when Hood looked inside he saw a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a roll of white tape and a bottle of tequila.

“
Gracias,
” said Hood.

“I was trained in the United States. They were decent men. Armenta is looking for Jimmy. They will be on the roads that lead to the legal crossings. Smuggle yourselves in, like we do.”

 

 

 

 

I
t was dark by the time they made La Bufa. Jimmy lay in the back asleep. Hood filled the tank and bought food and water and began the steep ascent to Creel. The old station wagon was powerful, but the transmission was imprecise and the steering was loose and the worn tires slipped on the fog-slicked rocks. For a while, Jimmy slept, then he sat up. Hood could see the outline of his head in the rearview.

“It’s good to see you, Jimmy,” he said. “We’re going home.”

But Jimmy had said nothing to that point and he said nothing then. So Hood drove. He peeled tortillas off the bundle and ate them folded with one hand as he steered. He handed the pack back to Jimmy. The soft drinks had been warmed by the heat of the lower barranca. He told Jimmy how hard they had tried to find the tour bus and about the powerful monsoon that hit later that day and about the Guardsmen now stationed in Buenavista and the reporters everywhere and all the Americans who wanted to invade to get Jimmy back and all the tension between the countries and how even the president had acknowledged the idea of U.S. military action. Jimmy’s silhouette came in and out of view in the mirror in the darkness, but he said nothing, then lay down across the seat again.

Just after sunrise in Creel, Hood was able to call Ozburn on a pay phone. Ozburn screamed in joy when he heard that Jimmy was alive and free. He called back ten minutes later to say that in four hours a capable Mexican state police captain named Wilfredo Duarte and two of his officers would collect and drive them to the border at Douglas. Customs would be ready for them. They would be back in the U.S. of A. by midnight.

Hood and Jimmy slept through the morning in Creel on two double beds in a small pension room, Hood with his derringer under the pillow and Jimmy snoring. Music came faintly from a room down the hallway, and the air was cool and fragrant with juniper and pine.

 

 

 

They all left Creel at ten A.M. in Duarte’s white Chihuahua police Suburban. It had a light bar on top and state emblems and green lettering on the sides. Duarte drove. He was middle-aged and had a somber face and a paunch. His men were younger, one muscled and bald and one slender, with thick black hair. One sat up front and one in back with Hood and Jimmy. The policemen spoke among themselves, and Hood snoozed with his face against a window until the heat woke him up. Jimmy watched the landscape roll past and said nothing.

Close to eight P.M., Duarte answered his satellite phone and a long discussion ensued. Hood caught some of it: Armenta’s Zetas were targeting the Douglas crossing. Duarte said that Nogales would be better. Hood reckoned Nogales was another two hours west, which meant another two hours for Armenta’s men to find them. Jimmy looked at him. Duarte listened. He unleashed a string of sentences too fast for Hood to comprehend. He heard the word
Ozburn
twice. Then Duarte punched off and turned his head slightly to Hood and Jimmy in the back.

“Nogales,” he said. “Armenta. Is good. Ozburn knows.”

“I need to call Ozburn.”

Duarte picked up the big phone and dialed. A moment later, Hood heard Ozburn’s voice.

“It’s okay, Charlie. Your guys know what they’re doing. Douglas is a bust, man. Use Nogales. You’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

They approached Nogales in the thick of night. The two officers checked their M16s and set them muzzles-down and close by. The satellite phone rang again and Duarte answered with an expletive. He listened. He said if not Nogales, then where, and he listened for a long while after that. He said yes six times in a row, then cursed again and punched off.

“Nogales is not good,” he said. “But we have a plan.”

 

 

 

They drove west and north toward Sonoyta. The moon struggled up and dusted the desert with light. Hood knew this road by map only and he knew that it was the one paved road for miles and if Armenta’s Zetas chose to patrol it, they would be easily found. The officers became nervous and held their guns close. Hood was pleased by their nerves because he knew that these Chihuahua policemen could deliver them to Armenta for more money than the officers would make in their lifetimes. They cleared a rise, and Hood saw the new border wall. This was badlands, the hills bald and deeply carved by sudden rain and scorched for months by the sun. In the faint moonlight, Hood saw the steel panels of the wall serpentining along the contours of the terrain until it came to a sudden end. Here at the end of the wall, security lights pounded down on the naked land in clusters of four lights atop portable trailer towers that washed the ground white. Hood saw stacks of steel panels and pallets of concrete and mounds of mixing sand and the Cat D4s with the augurs attached and the mixers and the big water trucks casting shadows.

Duarte slowed and eased off the highway onto a dirt road. The road was narrow and rough and the Suburban bounced gently on its long wheelbase. They descended into a gulley and stopped out of sight from the highway and Duarte flashed the lights twice, then left them off. A set of lights flashed an answer across the desert from the United States, from out in the darkness beyond the end of the wall, twice, then once again.

Duarte turned to Hood. “
Apúrate, gringos!
”

Hood climbed out and helped Jimmy to the ground. He thanked Duarte, then got his duffel off the seat and started down the dirt road with Jimmy beside him. Hood could hear the cars on Highway 2 behind him, but when he turned, he could see nothing of it. The Suburban still sat at idle, lights off, the officers watching them. The road narrowed to a path, and the path led toward the wall. Hood saw empty water bottles and tatters of clothing and plastic bags tied to rocks and bushes used to mark the way north. The pathway followed the low spots between the badland hills and for a moment they walked between the mounds, invisible to the world. But Jimmy slowed, then stopped, and he looked at Hood, then behind them, then ahead. He was breathing hard and very pale. Hood tossed his duffel into the desert and took Jimmy’s arm around one shoulder and together they found a difficult balance and continued.

They followed down a valley and along its bottom, then they climbed again. They came to the crest of the rise and looked out at the wall and the building equipment bathed in the bright lights. He looked ahead to where the headlights had flashed and saw the glint of windshield and for the first time in two days, he allowed himself to taste the hope of making it out of here alive with Jimmy. Jimmy leaned heavily on him and breathed fast.

“There it is, Jimmy,” said Hood. “That’s home and we’re going there.”

With that, something caught Hood’s eye and when he turned to his right, he saw the headlights coming through the desert toward them. They came from the Mexico side and they were two miles out at least, but he knew if they were Armenta’s Zetas and they could see the Suburban tucked into the little gulley, they would drive toward it, and he and Jimmy would be stranded here in the badlands without cover or weapons. A second pair of headlights appeared south of the first.

“Faster, Jimmy.”

Hood picked up his pace, and Jimmy grunted with every other step, trying to find a rhythm. He stumbled and fell and Hood helped him stand. Hood looked at the headlights approaching. The two sets had become three.

“Come on, Jimmy. It’s now or never for us.” But Jimmy ceded even more of his weight to Hood, and Hood looked ahead to the United States and the glint of mirror glass, then looked at the vehicles coming from Mexico, and he reckoned that he and Jimmy wouldn’t make it at this speed. “Jimmy, you’ve got to climb on.”