The Dogs of Mexico (35 page)

They ran.
 

He tried to watch everything—the bus ahead, the wall behind, the brush on either side. Ana did a good job of keeping up. He slid down on his knees near the bi-fold door and dropped the aluminum case. She slid down close behind, huffing for breath. He swung the bus door open, the Beretta ready.
 

The specter of the old woman in the courtyard loomed within the shadowy interior. In the same moment he was awash in the smell of filth and untended old age. He slammed the door shut and fell back. Ana shrank down close behind.

Robert glanced toward the creek. “Come on,” he whispered. He picked up the case and they raced across the broken terrain for another hundred yards to the tree line where they plunged into the undergrowth and fell to the ground, breathing hard. Running water made light tinkling sounds in the shallow stream behind. Robert covered the case beneath the weedy brush so it didn’t reflect the sun. He laid the .380 on the ground before him, then cocked the Beretta and held it ready. Ana laid the .22 down, cupped her face in her hands.
 

Robert gave her a quick look. “Still with me?”
 

With a tremulous intake of breath, she took the .22 again in both hands, squinting through the brush toward the bus.

Robert’s mental vision reverberated with the mummified image of the old woman inside the bus—a dried cocoon of old age, but there had been a glimmer of life, of terror, in the depths of those rheumy eyes. He could only guess that she was a relative of the old woman lying dead in the courtyard, a sister perhaps. He suffered a moment of profound regret for them—for all the poor people of the world who were struggling just to survive, innocents murdered indiscriminately by greed and madness. He didn’t exempt himself.

He snapped alert, seeing Geraldo scuttling along the courtyard wall, coming toward the gate from the opposite direction. Geraldo paused at the entrance, peered inside, then gazed toward the bus.

“He doesn’t know where we are,” Robert whispered. “He thinks we might be in the bus. He’s in a bind.”

Ana lifted the .22.
 

Robert slapped his hand over hers. “No, no! We’d never hit him at this distance, not with handguns.”

“Both of us, we can kill him,” she whispered savagely.

“We’d just give ourselves away.”

“Three guns… We have three guns…”

“He could level this brush to the ground while we’re trying to get off a few shots. He’ll check out the bus, then if he comes this way we’ll let him walk right up on us and nail him good.”

“I want to do it!”
 

He stole a look at her. Nothing childlike in her expression now—eyes hard and bright as flint.

Geraldo plunged through the gate, disappearing behind the courtyard wall. The Uzi clattered several short bursts inside the compound.
 

“I don’t know what the hell he’s shooting at,” Robert whispered. “There’s nothing in there.”
 

Geraldo reappeared, peeked around the wall toward the bus. Then he made a break for it—a small, wiry animal loping across the clearing in cowboy boots. He brought the Uzi up and began to fire. The bus went polka dotted, glass and dust shaking out. Geraldo dove, rolled and came up on his knees alongside the door in a crouch. He jerked the magazine out, snatched a fresh one from his belt and then threw the door open and plunged inside, Uzi hammering. The shooting stopped. Geraldo staggered back out through the doorway, shoulders hunched.
 

A sharp
bang
sounded next to Robert. A spent cartridge arced out of the .22 into the weeds. The bullet hit the bus a hundred yards away with a faint
tink
. In the moment it took to register, another
bang
and a puff of dust jumped up fifteen feet short of Geraldo.
 

Robert slapped his hand over the Walther as Geraldo dove into the weeds and rolled behind the bus.

“Dammit, Ana—!”

The Uzi opened up. Bullets cut through the brush to their right, rattling toward them, hammering through the foliage like hail. They hugged the ground as limbs snapped and rattled overhead. Twigs and leafy debris dribbled down.
 

Silence.
 

Seconds passed.
 

The insects had begun their mono-music again when Geraldo raked the brush to their left. Then he made a break for the compound.

Though the distance was too great for a handgun, Robert took aim with the Beretta, leading high and out front—
Bam Bam.
A puff of dust jumped up beyond Geraldo. He stumbled and almost fell.
Bam Bam.
Dust showered off the courtyard wall as Geraldo regained his balance and ran limping toward the gate.
Bam Bam.
Geraldo lunged inside, the last bullet whining into the distance.
 

“You hit him,” Ana cried. “You hit him!”

“Shh.”
 

“You hit him!”
 

“Shh. Keep it down!”

“You think he’s badly hurt?” she whispered eagerly.
 

“Dammit! I told you not to shoot—”

Holding a duffel bag up alongside his body, Geraldo came plunging out through the gate and ran hobbling to the car. Robert aimed high again and emptied the Beretta’s ten-round single-stack clip. A puff of dust kicked up just short of the Plymouth. The rear side-window spider-webbed as Geraldo slid in behind the wheel and shoved the duffel bag up in the passenger seat as a shield. He backed the car around and gunned out toward the tree line along the creek on the far side of the compound. Robert jerked out the .380, but at over two hundred yards, the distance was far too great and he didn’t want to use all of his ammo before he could get back inside the yard and reload.

The Plymouth hit through the creek throwing out a sheet of water on either side, and then trailed dust up the hill through the cane field, over the ridge and out of sight.

“I told you not to shoot!”

“I wanted to kill him!” she said, a fierce wildness ringing her eyes.

“Well, hell. He’s gone now.”
 

He wasn’t sure how much damage a nine-millimeter bullet might do at such a distance, but he doubted the bullet would
 
seriously penetrate. A bad bruise maybe. However it had spider-webbed the rear window so maybe it had done some damage after all.

There was still Helmut to consider, though he was probably dead. But then Geraldo could just as likely have been shooting butterflies.

“Let’s get going,” Robert said.
 

“Where?”

“We’ll hoof it back to the highway, see if we can flag a ride. Catch a bus maybe.”

He paused as they neared the shot-up bus, the old woman inside. He didn’t want to look, but if she was still alive…well, you couldn’t just go off and leave somebody like that. On the other hand, there would be little he could do if…

“You go on. I’ll catch up.” He held his breath, opened the door and then quickly closed it.

“What? What is it?”

“Nothing. Let’s go.” It wasn’t something anybody would want to know about.

“There’s somebody in there…”

“Come on. Let’s get a move on.”

“N–not Helmut?”

“No, no. Come on now.”

They hurried to the compound. “You stay here by the gate,” he said. “I’ll get our stuff.”
 

“You’re not going back in there…”

“There’s been a lot of shooting here and we don’t know how far it is to the nearest house. Wait here. Keep your eye on the road and yell bloody murder if you see anything.”
 

He set the aluminum case down, held his breath and plunged inside, hurrying past the bodies already swarming with flies. He placed his carry-on on the table, stripped the cartridges from the last two rectangles of cardboard Helmut had left on the table and stuffed them in his pocket.
 

He entered the room opposite the chicken roost. A dirty mattress of cornhusks and a soiled blanket lay on the floor under shelves of empty canning jars gray with dust. On the wall, cheap religious prints were grouped around a plastic crucifix.
 

Robert unzipped Helmut’s bag and upended it on the floor. Clothing, shaving kit and the rubber-banded cigarillo box fell out along with Helmut’s new laptop. Robert collected his fake passports and other identification. He placed the laptop on the ground, angled against the wall, and stomped it, crushing it into a V. He pried the hard drive out and mangled it with a broken chunk of cinderblock. He found a box of .22
long-rifle
cartridges in Helmut’s shaving kit and stuffed them loose in his other front pocket.
 

In a duffel bag, he found a Mexican police uniform, a red leather miniskirt, yellow caftan, an old issue of
Playgirl
, a pair of oversized panties, black fishnet stockings and a pair of worn sneakers. Otherwise, there were only a few toilet articles—makeup, false eyelashes, and a medical booklet with illustrations depicting the procedures required of a sex change operation.

Valdez’s clothes had been carelessly tossed in a corner, his wallet emptied of money. But his Mexican drivers license was still in its plastic sleeve; at least the authorities could make a positive ID. Robert wiped it clean of his own prints and put it back.

He took Helmut’s wrecked laptop and the cigar box out to the yard
.
Ana was on the job at the gate, anxiously watching the road and watching him. He saw now how bedraggled she was, channels of dirty sweat trailing down her temples and neck, hair matted and falling down, a feral cast in her eyes. He picked her purse out of the dirt, put the cigarillo box in it and then put the purse in her new carry-on. He hurried into the other room and gathered her wrecked bra, panties and shirt into two garbage bags, one inside the other for strength.
 

Back under the tin roof, he stuffed the mangled laptop and its hard drive into the same garbage bag, added the linings from his carry-ons and the scraps of cardboard. As there were no more cartridges for the Beretta, he tossed it in the bag also. Geraldo’s yellow-handled knife lay in the dirt where Ana had dropped it. He folded it into the garbage bags and secured the openings with a twist tie.

Last, he picked his and Ana’s good clothes out of the dirt near the table, shook them out and repacked them in their respective carry-ons.
 

He took a hurried look around for any other evidence linking them to the carnage. There was the mangled tire but there wasn’t much chance of anyone tracing that. He had lost his clip-on holster but that too would be hard to trace.

He hustled the doubled garbage bags and Ana’s bag past the bodies to where Ana stood at the gate nervously fingering the buttons on her shirt. He took the .22 from her, reloaded it and flicked the safety on. She put it in her pocket without hesitation. He hurried back for his own carry-ons.
 

He replaced the canister in the projector, the projector in the haversack, and hung it over his shoulder. He picked up one of his carry-on’s and the aluminum case. Ana carried her bag and the garbage bag. They left Jinx’s and Helmut’s luggage. Ana followed Robert along the wall in the opposite direction of the bus. He stopped at the corner and scouted the terrain.
 

“We’ll get down to the creek, then follow it back to the road.”

They ran as best they could, awkward, with their respective loads, bending low until they broke through the undergrowth along the graveled creek bank. Ana dropped her baggage and sat for a moment, breathing hard. He looked back toward the compound but there was nothing other than a whir of insects they had stirred up from the weeds.

The undergrowth along the creek was dense, but if they stayed with it they would come to the road where it intersected the creek and then to the asphalt road farther down. Ana followed, pushing doggedly through the brush with her luggage.

“We could cut through this cane field,” he said, ”but that’s wicked stuff. Snakes over the ground every which way then turns straight up. A real tangle.”

The dirt road was almost within sight when the underbrush rustled up ahead. They melted down behind the luggage under a canopy of palmettos. Robert took the .22 from Ana and placed it on the case before her. “No shooting until I do,” he whispered. “I mean it, okay?” He held the
.380
ready.

37

Cleansing

S
UNLIGHT SLANTED THROUGH
the trees. Insects trilled their mono songs in surround-sound. The brush crackled again and the wounded dog from the courtyard limped out of the undergrowth and dragged itself into the cane field. The tops of the stalks shook, leaves rattled.

“Damn,” Robert mumbled, letting go a breath.

Ana lowered her forehead on her arm. “That poor, poor dog.”
 

“Try not to think about it. Here, I’ll cut us a few joints of that cane. It’ll help your thirst.”

“Yes. Thank you, I—” The Uzi opened up on the ridge above the field, a staccato pop pop pop. Cane around the dog clattered and folded in a boil of dust. Robert threw himself across Ana and hugged her to the ground beneath the palmettos. The shooting stopped. The dog dragged itself out of the settling dust onto the road. It circled, shivering, tentatively inspecting the viscera entangling its hind legs.

Geraldo rose above an outcrop of rock at the top of the ridge. He crouched, peering toward the dog, jerking the Uzi about with quick nervous motions. Just as quickly he dropped back behind the ridge from sight. Robert heard the car start up. It stopped at the blacktop and then the engine revved and faded into the distance.

Ana pressed her fingertips to her temples. “H–he thought it was us.”

Robert set the safety on the .380 and tucked it and the .22 in his belt. Wordless, they took up the luggage and hurried past the whimpering dog into the undergrowth across the road.
 

“You go on. I’ll catch up.” He set his luggage down. “You don’t need to look.” He went back to where the dog stood shivering in the road. He took aim with the .22. A sharp
bang
and the dog dropped without a sound. Ana waited, her back to him, shoulders hunched as he took a replacement cartridge from his pocket and thumbed it into the clip.