The Dogs of Mexico (18 page)

19

El Perro Rojo

U
NWILLING TO LEAVE
the tire for even a second had left him no opportunity to return to the room for the aluminum case with the Bible and it’s photos. He had also left his one remaining carry-on. The extra cartridges for the .380 were in that carry-on. If there was a bright side, it was that without the Bible he could with a clear conscience forget delivering the photos to the Valdez guy in Oaxaca.

Okay, he told himself, take one of the dirt tracks off the pavement to the ocean. Park on the beach. Take everything and sleep hidden in the nearby brush where he could keep an eye on the car.
 

A few miles east he slowed and turned onto a sandy road that looked promising. But a quarter of a mile in, instead of a beach the road opened into a clearing where a mercury-vapor lamp on a utility pole cast a pale greenish light over a dozen or so pickups and trucks parked before a sprawling cantina.

Robert crept the Nissan forward and brought it to a stop.
 

Robert sat for a minute, scouting the place. Nearby, a caged dog in the bed of a pickup barked, then went silent, fierce red eyes watching him. The building rose out of a lot trashed with tatters of paper and plastic. The front door stood open, mariachi music seeping through a curtain of beads hung in the entranceway, the words E
L
P
ERRO
R
OJO
crudely lettered above. The front and one side of the building were visible from where he sat. Neon beer signs blinked in murky windows recessed in concrete-block walls slashed with graffiti. A few burros stood alongside, tethered to iron rings cemented into cinderblocks scattered among clots of moldy hay and dung. His nose wrinkled, breathing shallow, forced to inhale the warm rancid air through the car’s broken window.
 

A roar of noise—shouts of laughter combined with snarling, howling dogs, sounded from a walled courtyard in the rear. Dogfights, he realized. The caged dog in the pickup crouched, tense, silent.
 

He considered hot-wiring one of the vehicles.
There was a chance of getting caught, but he could probably handle it with two handguns…
 

You’re losing your mind
, he said to himself
.
Bad enough having Fowler’s men breathing down your neck, much less the Mexican police on your tail and you in a stolen vehicle.

While this remote cantina wasn’t what he had had in mind, it was better lit than the beach would be. If he hid back in the brush, he could easily see anyone approaching his car.

With the towel, he wiped at the sweat trickling down his temples, then draped it around his neck and got out. He stood for a minute as the dog in the pickup bed lunged against the wire cage, snarling furiously.
 

Robert let the hammer down on the .45 and tucked it in his belt alongside the .380. He removed the tire from behind the seat and rolled it to the darkened underbrush some twenty yards back near the entrance road. Careful of cacti, he eased into the scrub, picking his way among philodendrons, sumac and palmetto. He wondered if rattlesnakes inhabited this southern coast of Mexico.
 

In the ambient light of the vapor lamp, he spread the towel over a strip of sand surrounded by undergrowth. He had barely settled himself when a vehicle approached, headlights glimmering through the thicket. He cocked the .45 and crouched in wait. An old pickup went past not ten yards away and came to a stop not far from the Nissan. Two men got out, smoking cigarettes, staggering a little. They ignored the dog snarling at them, and began singing along with the distant music from inside the cantina. Without so much as a glance at the Nissan, they sauntered among the old cars and trucks, parted the beads and disappeared inside.
 

Noise, both human and canine, sounded bestial from the enclosed courtyard. A man appeared backlit in a doorless archway in the courtyard wall. He dragged a dog by its hind legs, swung the limp form up onto a small two-wheeled trailer and went back inside. Other dark forms were visible on the trailer. Robert shivered with revulsion, suppressing an urge to charge in with both guns:
You want blood, you pathetic sonsabitches, I’ll show you blood!

He uncocked the .45 and lay on his back on the towel. He tried not to listen, but took slow, deep breaths in an effort to relax. Sleep began to overtake him. Stress, fatigue—turning him into a basket case.
 

Somewhere in a dreamy purgatory of sleep, a loud hammering sounded, waking him, slowly, against his will, then with a jolt. It took a moment before he was able to focus—a mufflerless flatbed
GMC
truck with staked side rails pounded past into the clearing. Two men in back stood leaning over the cab. The truck shuddered to a halt alongside the Nissan. The engine coughed and died. The dog on the opposite side set up a yowl of noise.

The truck’s passenger door opened. Robert snapped wide-awake as Helmut slid out. Helmut stood for a moment, his own knapsack slung by its strap across his shoulder. He looked the Nissan over, scanned the lot, the cantina.
 

The truck driver, a Mexican in a straw hat, got out. The two men in back swung over the side rails and dropped to the ground, mumbling, gesturing at the Nissan and the cantina.
 

Helmut shouted at someone in the cab. After a moment he lunged inside and
,
after a brief struggle, dragged Ana out and threw her in the dirt. He lifted her to her feet and slapped her, hard. She went to her knees again, both hands covering her head.

Robert leaped to his feet, but then checked the impulse to rush forward and shoot Helmut dead. It was the fear of detention that stopped him, interfering with his nailing Fowler.
 

The men with Helmut looked on as he lifted Ana to her feet and shoved her before him, stumbling her way through the curtain of beads into the cantina. The men followed.
 

Robert tucked the .45 in his belt, then rolled the tire out of the brush and across the lot to the truck’s driver-side door. The door was locked. He glimpsed Helmut’s laptop half hidden under the bench seat on the passenger’s side.
 

He dropped the tire, then hurried around and took the bolt cutter from the Nissan’s rear footwell. It took several blows before the truck’s window gave way. It was an old truck and he was surprised when the horn began to honk in time with its flashing headlights. The dog set up a howl from the other side of the Nissan. Along the wall the burros brayed, laid their ears back and dragged at the halters tethering them to the cinderblocks. There wasn’t time to hot-wire the truck.

The cantina’s entrance foyer projected a couple of feet out from the wall. A bougainvillea bush grew in the niche alongside. Robert ran forward and wedged himself into the shadowy space behind. He hoped to catch Helmut by surprise, slam him in the head with the bolt cutter when he came out, get the keys, smash the computer and maybe take the truck. He hardly had the bolt cutter lifted overhead when two men came charging out, the beads slapping about in their wake. At the same moment, several more men surprised him, running past on his left, cursing, coming from the rear courtyard. Helmut hurried past. Ana ran limping close on his heels. Robert judged the distance and charged as Helmut paused near the honking truck.
 

Ana paused too, her expression turning to shock, a strangled cry as Robert shot past her with the bolt cutter. Helmut turned, surprising Robert by snatching a small handgun from his shoulder bag. Robert swung the bolt cutter as Helmut raised the pistol. The bolt cutter hit the gun just as it discharged. The bullet whanged against the cutter, throwing Robert off balance, and the two of them went down in a tangle of arms and legs. Helmut lost his grip on the gun, but Robert held to the bolt cutter, struggling to get it over his head for leverage. The three men with Helmut dove behind the honking truck as Ana snatched the pistol out of the dirt and shoved the muzzle in Robert’s face.

“Stop!” she screamed, shaking so badly he thought she would shoot him whether she intended to or not.
 

Helmut took advantage of the opportunity and charged. Robert stepped to one side, stuck his foot out, and jerked Helmut forward by his shirtfront so that Helmut tripped headlong into the dirt. Robert raised the bolt cutter again. Ana fired the handgun. Robert didn’t know whether she intended to kill him, but the bullet hit the building and sang off into the night. The dog and the burros—already made frantic by the honking truck and it’s flashing headlights—went into a further frenzy, the burros dragging their cinderblocks among the pickups and trucks, men diving behind whichever vehicle was handiest. Robert’s hand darted to the .45 under his shirt, ready to shoot Ana before she killed him—but she had the gun trained on Helmut.

Helmut got to his feet, gingerly holding his bleeding right hand in his left. He shouted something at her in German.
 

She crouched, trembling. “Stay back!”

“You would shoot me?” he said in English. He took a reckless step toward her, holding his left hand out for the gun, the other curled at his side, bleeding.
 

Ana took another step back, the gun wavering. “Stop!” she cried.

“Amigos!”
 

Robert half turned with the others to see a man in a dirty apron, a bar towel around his neck. The man, obviously the bartender, held a sawed-off shotgun on them. A small crowd of sweaty-faced men had gathered behind, mumbling in Spanish.

“Vaya!” The man gestured with the shotgun, emphatic. “Ponga la pistola de distancia! Put the pistola away. Ahora! Now!”

Ana paused, her face fiercely contorted as she took the little gun by the barrel and threw it in a long arc out into the peripheral darkness.

The bartender had turned the shotgun on her, even as she wound up for the throw.
 

“Señorita, you—“ the bartender began, but paused, for in the same instant Robert had lifted the .45 from his belt, jacked a cartridge into the chamber and touched the muzzle behind the bartender’s ear, all in one continuous motion.
 

“Drop it and stand back,” Robert said, a small nudge with the gun muzzle.

A murmur from the crowd blended with the truck’s alarm and the yapping dog as the bartender carefully lowered the shotgun to the ground.
 

“Stand back,” Robert said. “I don’t want to kill you.” He picked up the shotgun, one eye on the crowd.
 

Helmut took a tentative step forward, but stopped when Robert lifted the shotgun at him.
 

“Good,” Robert said. “Just keep on coming. But remember, I’m not Ana. Nothing I’d like better right now than blowing your ugly face plumb off the map.”

Helmut hesitated, eyes glinting behind his glasses with barely suppressed rage.

The little crowd shuffled in place, uncertain.

Robert nodded to Ana. “Tell them what I said. I don’t want to hurt anybody, but the first one moves is a dead duck.”

Ana watched him a second through big glassy-green eyes, and then began to repeat nervously in Spanish. The men stood by, heads cocked in a gesture of listening.

“Tell whoever owns this truck to unlock this door,” Robert said. Ana translated. Several men looked at the driver. The
 
driver glared, but stepped forward and unlocked the door.
 

Robert backed to the truck. Holding the shotgun leveled on the men with one hand, he tucked the pistol in his belt, took the laptop from under the seat, flipped it open, and stood it up in the dirt—a mini A-frame. The few men in the line of fire didn’t have to be told, but hurried out of the way as he lifted the shotgun. The recoil jolted his shoulder as the muzzle kicked up and the empty hull jumped out of the breech. Plastic and metal blew apart in a cloud of straw and dung, the echo slamming off the cantina wall as the remains cartwheeled through the muck, the humid air pungent with the smell of burnt gunpowder.
 

Helmut took another step forward.

Robert lifted the shotgun at him. “You think it’s worth it, come ahead.”

“Please don’t,” Ana begged.
 

Robert gestured at the bartender. “Ana, tell this guy to go around to the other side of the truck. Go with him. Tell him to get the tire. Bring it around and put it in my car. Tell him! Now!”
 

She spoke to the bartender in Spanish, the others looking on, listening.
 

Robert opened the Nissan’s rear door. “Try anything, and that’s all she wrote,” he said.
 

They returned immediately, the bartender rolling the tire. Robert stepped back. The bartender lifted the tire inside, behind the seat.
 

“Please, take me with you,” Ana said, a note of desperation.

Robert ignored her, turning to Helmut. “Show up in my face again, you’re deader’n hell.”

Helmut held his wounded hand to his chest. “Hah! We see how
that
plays—as you Americans like to say.”
 

“Please, you can’t just leave me here,” Ana said brokenly.
 

“Like hell. You hang out with this crazy nut case, you deserve him.”

“Can’t I just ride back to Puerto Escondido? Please, I’m begging you.”
 

Robert had every intention of telling her to go to hell. But she looked pathetic—dirty, red-eyed, hair falling down, eyes glassy and full of desperation. Her cheek was still red where Helmut had slapped her.
 

“She is not going anywhere,” Helmut muttered.

That settled it. Robert nodded to Ana. “Get in the car.” He held the shotgun on Helmut as Ana rushed around and slipped into the front passenger seat. Robert took the .45 from his belt again. He stood the shotgun muzzle down in the footwell next to the center console on Ana’s side, and slid in behind the wheel.
 

The men looked on as he backed the Nissan around. He shoved the clutch in, stopped, turned to Ana. “Where’s your bag?”