by Don Winslow
“I want it to happen.”
“You got thirty minutes on that beach,” Sal says. “In thirty minutes we’re back on the boat and heading out. Last thing we need is to get stopped by a Mexican patrol boat.”
“I got it,” Art says. “How long until we get there?”
Scachi kicks the question to the boat’s captain.
Two hours.
Art checks his watch.
They’ll hit the beach around nine.
Nora makes her mistake at 8:15.
She starts to fall asleep standing up, but they shake her and walk her around the room. Then they sit her down again as the interrogator comes in and asks—
“Do you remember what you watched that night?”
“Yes.”
Because I have to get some sleep. Have to sleep. If I can sleep I can think, and I can think my way out of this. So give him something, a little something, buy some sleep. Buy some time.
“Very good. What?”
“Amistad.”
“The movie about slaves.”
“That’s right.”
Go ahead and ask me about it, she thinks. I’ve seen it. I remember it. I can talk about it. Ask me your questions. Fuck you.
“There are no network movies on a weeknight, so it must have been pay-per-view or HBO.”
“Or some other—”
“No, I checked. Your hotel has only HBO and pay-per-view.”
“Oh.”
“So which was it?”
How the hell should I know? Nora thinks.
“HBO.”
The interrogator shakes his head sadly, like a teacher whose student has disappointed him.
“Nora, that hotel does not get HBO.”
“But you just said—”
“I was testing you.”
“Then it must have been pay-per-view.”
“Was it?”
“Yes, I remember now. It was pay-per-view because I can remember looking at that little card they put on top of the television and wondering if the staff thought I was ordering porn. Yes, that’s right, and I . . .what?”
“Nora, I have copies of your bill. You didn’t order a movie.”
“I didn’t?”
“No. Now, why don’t you tell me what you were really doing that night, Nora?”
“I did tell you.”
“You lied to me, Nora. I’m very disappointed.”
“I’m just confused. I’m so tired. If you let me get some sleep . . .”
“The only reason to lie is to cover something up. What are you covering up, Nora? What did you really do that night?”
She puts her face in her hands and sobs. She hasn’t cried since Juan died, and it feels good. It’s a relief.
“You were somewhere else that night, weren’t you?”
She nods.
“You’ve been lying all this time.”
She nods again.
“Can I sleep now, please?”
“Give her some Tuinol,” the interrogator says. “And get Raúl.”
Adán’s door opens.
Raúl comes in and hands him a pistol.
“Can you do this, brother?”
She feels a hand on her shoulder.
Thinks it’s a dream at first, then opens her eyes and sees Adán standing over her.
“My love,” he says, “let’s go for a walk.”
“Now?”
He nods.
He looks so serious, she thinks. So serious.
He helps her get out of bed.
“I’m a mess,” she says.
She is. Her hair is disheveled and her face is puffy from the drugs. It occurs to him that he’s never seen her without makeup.
“You always look lovely,” he answers. “Here, put a sweater on. It’s chilly—I don’t want you to get sick.”
She walks out with him into the silver mist. She’s groggy and has a hard time getting her footing on the large pebbles of the beach. He holds her by the elbow and gently walks her away from the cottage, toward the water’s edge.
Raúl watches from the window.
He saw Adán and his woman leave the stone cottage and walk into the dark. Now he’s lost sight of them in the fog.
Can he do it? Raúl wonders.
Can he put the barrel to the back of that pretty blond head and pull the trigger? Does it matter? If he doesn’t, I will. And either way, I am the new patrón, and the new patrón will run things differently than the old one. Adán has gotten soft. Always the little accountant—good with the numbers, not so good with the blood.
A loud knock at the door interrupts his thoughts.
“What?!” he snaps.
One of his men comes in. He’s out of breath, as if he’s run up the stairs.
“The soplón,” he says. “We just got word from Rebollo. He got it straight from the DEA guy, Wallace—”
“It’s Nora.”
The man shakes his head. “No, patrón. It’s Fabián.”
The messenger lays out the evidence—the sealed murder indictment, the threat of capital punishment, then the smoking gun: copies of deposit slips, deposits made by Keller in Fabián’s name in banks in Costa Rica, the Caymans and even Switzerland.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars—profits from the tombes pulled off by the Piccone brothers.
“They made him a deal,” the man says. “Plata o plomo.”
He took the silver.
“Let’s sit down,” Adán says.
He helps Nora down and sits beside her.
She says, “I’m cold.”
He puts his arm around her.
“Do you remember that night in Hong Kong?” he asks. “When you took me up to Victoria Peak? Let’s imagine we’re there.”
“I’d like that.”
“Look out there,” he says. “Can you imagine the lights?”
“Adán, are you crying?”
He slowly pulls the pistol from its place at the small of his back.
“Kiss me,” Adán says.
He turns her chin to him and kisses her softly on the lips as he eases the gun barrel behind her head.
“You were the sonrisa de mi alma,” he whispers into her lips as he pulls the hammer back.
The smile of my soul.
Brother, I’m sorry. By the time the information reached me, it was too late. Such a tragedy. But we will avenge ourselves on Fabián, you can be sure of that.
Raúl rehearses his lines.
Deal with La Güera now, Fabián later, he thinks. It will destroy Adán, killing this woman. He won’t be able to resume control of the pasador.
He’s your brother.
Está chingada, he thinks. It’s fucked.
He pushes the messenger aside and runs down the stairs and outside into the night.
Yelling, “Adán! Adán!”
Adán hears the shouts, muffled in the fog.
He hears the footsteps running on the stones, coming closer. He tightens his finger on the trigger and thinks, I can’t let it be him.
Over his shoulder, he can see Raúl’s tall form loping toward them like a ghost in the mist.
I have to do it.
Do it.
Art jumps out of the boat before it reaches the beach.
He stumbles through the ankle-deep surf, trips and falls face-first onto the beach. He gets up and crouches down low as he moves up the slope and then he sees—
Raúl Barrera.
Running toward—
Adán.
And Nora.
It’s a long shot, a hundred yards at least, and Art hasn’t fired an M-16 in anger since Vietnam. He raises the rifle to his shoulder, presses the nightscope to his eye, leads Raúl by a few feet and squeezes the trigger.
The bullet takes Raúl in mid-stride.
Square in the stomach.
Art sees him tumble, roll and then start to crawl forward.
Then the night lights up.
Raúl crumples to the ground.
Rol
ling in agony on the rocks, shrieking in pain.
Adán runs to him. Drops to his knees and tries to hold him, but Raúl is too strong; his pain is too strong and he writhes out of Adán’s grasp.
“¡Dios mío!” Adán yells.
His hands are drenched in blood. The front of his shirt and his pants are soaked with blood.
It’s hot.
“Adán,” Raúl groans. “It wasn’t her. It was Fabián.” Then he howls to God, “¡Dios mío! ¡Dios mío! ¡Madre de Dios!”
Adán tries to clear his head.
The world’s exploding around him. Gunfire everywhere, and the sound of footsteps running toward them on the rocks. Then Raúl’s bodyguards are there, some firing behind them, others trying to lift Raúl off the ground.
“Get a car!” Adán yells. “Bring it here. Raúl, we’re going to get you to the hospital.”
“Don’t move me!”
“We have to.”
They start to drag him up the beach, away from the attack.
Adán grabs Nora by the arms and starts to pull her up.
“Come on!”
A grenade lands a few feet away and bowls them both over.
Nora lies on the rocks, concussed, blood flowing from her nose. Adán is screaming something but she can’t hear a thing. Manuel is pulling him away. Adán’s screaming and trying to pull his way back to her, but the campesino is too strong for him.
Two sicarios try to grab her, but two short bursts of gunfire cut them down.
There’s another flash of light, and then darkness.
Art sees Raúl and Adán being dragged up the hill toward some Land Rovers at the top of the hill, near the main house.
He heads for them.
Bullets stitch around his feet.
A slight man with rimless glasses comes out the front door of the cottage and starts to run up the hill, but a short burst of bullets catches him as he runs, and he flies backwards like a silent-movie comic slipping on a banana peel.
The door slams shut behind him and gunfire starts to blaze from the windows. Art drops to the ground and crawls toward Nora. Callan moves beside him, rolls, shoots in bursts of two and then rolls again.
Then Callan yells behind him, “Rounds!”
A second later a grenade whooshes through a window of the cottage and explodes.
The shooting from the cottage stops.
Raúl shrieks with agony as his men lift him into the backseat. Adán gets in from the other side and cradles his brother’s head in his lap.
Raúl grasps his hand and whimpers.
Manuel jumps behind the wheel. Raúl’s men try to stop him, but Adán yells, “I want Manuel!” and they let him go. The car starts up the beach, every bump a jolt of agony for Raúl.
Adán feels as if his brother’s grip is going to crush the bones in his hand but he doesn’t care. He strokes Raúl’s hair and tells him to hold on, everything is going to be okay.
“Agua,” Raúl mumbles.
Adán finds a plastic bottle of drinking water in the seat pouch, twists off the cap and holds the bottle to Raúl’s mouth. Raúl gulps it down and Adán feels the water pour onto his own shoes.
Adán turns and looks back down the slope.
He sees Nora’s limp body.
“Nora!” he screams. Then, to Manuel: “We have to go back!”
Manuel isn’t having any of it. He has the car in first gear, four-wheel drive, and is moving slowly up the hill, another Rover falling in behind, the sicarios pouring cover fire out the back.
Tracer rounds arc through the night like lethal fireflies.
A rocket-propelled grenade hits the car behind Adán’s and explodes, sending shards of heated metal spinning into the air. The driver tumbles from the car in flames and twirls like festival fireworks in the night. Another body slumps out the open side of the car and sizzles on the rocks.
Manuel hits the accelerator and Raúl screams.
Art sees one of the Rovers go up, tries to peer through the flames and sees the lead Rover chugging up the slope.
“Goddamn it!” he yells. He turns to Callan and orders, “Stay with her!” He shifts Nora’s dead weight onto Callan and starts running toward the escaping Land Rover. Rounds from the main house buzz around his head like mosquitoes. He puts his head down and keeps moving, past the burning Rover and its charred bodies, toward the other Rover that’s struggling up the slope in front of him.
Adán sees him, twists around and tries to get his pistol in position to get a shot, but every muscle he moves sends Raúl into a fresh paroxysm of pain. He sees Keller, still running, bring his rifle to his shoulder.
Adán shoots.
Both men miss.
The Rover crests the ridge. It slips into its downhill slide and Raúl screams. Adán holds him tight as the vehicle picks up speed.
Art stands on the edge of the ridge. He’s hunched over, catching his breath, as he watches the Rover rumble away from him.
He takes three deep, gasping breaths, raises his rifle to his shoulder and sights in on the back left windshield, where he last saw Adán. He takes a long breath, then squeezes the trigger on the exhale.
The car keeps moving away.
Art trots back toward the main house.
Scachi’s men go about their jobs in a workman-like, unhurried fashion. One squad lays down cover fire in short, disciplined bursts, while the other squad moves forward; then they exchange roles. Three rotations of this tactic get one of the men to the side of the house. He presses flat against its stone walls as the others pour fire through the windows. Then, on a signal, they stop shooting and Scachi’s guy attaches a charge to the door and throws himself to the ground as the door splinters.
The other mercenaries jump in.
Three quick bursts of gunfire, and then silence.
Art goes in.
It’s a charnel house, a madhouse.
Blood everywhere, dead and wounded bodies, Scachi’s mercenaries moving efficiently to dispatch the sicarios who linger between worlds.
Three dead sicarios are sprawled on the floor of the front room. One of them lies facedown with two entry wounds in the back of his head. Art steps over him to get into the bedroom.
There are eleven more bodies.
One wounded man, his shoulder a splotch of red, sits against the wall with his legs splayed in front of him. Scachi walks up to the wounded man and swings his foot like he’s trying to make a fifty-yard field goal against the wind.
His boot hits the man’s balls with a solid thump.
“Start talking,” Art says.
The sicario does. Adán and Raúl were here, so was La Güera, and Raúl was badly hurt, gut-shot.
“Well, that’s happy news anyway,” Scachi says. He does the same calculation that Art does—if Raúl Barrera has been shot in the belly, he isn’t going to make it. He’s as good as dead—better, in fact.
“We can catch them,” Art tells Scachi. “They’re on the road. Not far ahead.”
“Catch them with what?” Scachi asks. “You bring a jeep?” He looks at his watch, then yells, “Ten minutes!”
“We have to go after them!” Art yells.
“No time.”
The man keeps spewing information—the Barrera brothers left in the Land Rover, headed for San Felipe to get help for Raúl.
Scachi believes him.
“Take him outside and shoot him,” he orders.
Art doesn’t blink.
Everyone knew the rules going in.
The Land Rover rattles over the busted road.
Raúl screams.
Adán doesn’t know what to do. If he tells Manuel to slow down, Raúl will certainly bleed out before they can get him help. If he tells Manuel to speed up, Raúl’s suffering is even worse.