Verdugo Dawn

by Blake Banner

  Outside, the tramping boots were getting closer. I had seconds.

  The colonel’s face said he was thinking the same thing. He said, “Who are you?”

  I snapped, “Not who you think! There is no time, Colonel!”

  The door burst open and the sergeant and a grunt burst in, followed by two guys in Italian suits. The colonel pointed at Sole and roared, “Arrest that woman!”

  Hunter and Lovejoy looked like a couple spending the day at Wimbledon engrossed in a close match, looking from the colonel to me and back again, waiting for somebody to score. As the colonel’s words left his lips, I shot them both in the head over Mendez’s shoulder.

  There was a stunned silence in the room. Everyone was staring at the astonished bodies on the sofa, the small red-black holes in their foreheads, and the mess of gore on the wall behind them.

  I said, “You want Uncle Sam’s men? There they are! Staring you in the damned face!”

  The colonel’s voice was a rasp. “Who are you?”

  “The guy who just saved Eulogio Mendez’s life.”

  Mendez was struggling, but I had my left arm around his neck in a choke hold and the muzzle of the Sig rammed against the back of his neck, so there wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do.

  The colonel pointed suddenly at Sole and snarled, “Cójanla!”

  The sergeant reached down and grabbed a handful of her hair. He dragged her to her feet and the colonel stepped over and slapped her across the face twice. It silenced her and her eyes dilated wide and dark.

  I said, “Check her. See if she’s armed.”

  The colonel gave the order in Spanish and the grunt frisked her. What he found was a small branch from a pine tree, sharp and jagged at one end, concealed up her right sleeve. Mendez spluttered something about her mother being a whore, so I tightened my choke hold. The colonel was looking at me with narrowed eyes that had a million questions to ask.

  I didn’t give him time to pick one. I snapped, “You better call that plane in, Colonel. Hunter and Lovejoy worked for US Intelligence. Two gets you twenty they notified their handlers about the plane and they are searching for it as we speak.”

  It was a step too far and he shook his head. “I do nothing until I know who you are.”

  I roared at him, “What difference will it make? Will you believe me if I tell you? Can you check my story? You think I’m in a position to prove anything to you? This is a crisis and we need to act and react! Now! That plane needs to land and Mendez needs to go back to Alamogordo! Now!”

  He was a man of action, and I was telling him he had to do what he wanted to do. It was a fair bet he was going to do it. He looked at Mendez. “Tell the plane to land. He is right. We can’t delay anymore.”

  Mendez’s voice came out strangled and twisted. “Are you insane? He is the Verdugo! He will destroy us!”

  I could see the indecision on the colonel’s face and cut in. “I just saved your life, asshole! If I wanted to destroy you, why the hell would I save your life? I’m here to protect you, and if that shipment is not made on time, there are going to be a lot of very pissed people, in Mexico and New Mexico, and my job will change. Believe me, if that happens, things will get real ugly.”

  Mendez started kicking his legs and making noises of frustrated choking while he tried to struggle free. I squeezed a little tighter.

  “Mendez, I have been told to keep you alive, but not at any cost. The first priority is to protect the vested interests of my employer, and what you are doing right now is to damage those interests. That is not a good idea.”

  The colonel turned a little pale and muttered, “Dios!”

  I ignored him and went on. “Now, I have to ask you, will you order the plane to come down now, and will you ensure the product is delivered immediately to Dell City?”

  “Go to hell!”

  He hadn’t finished saying “hell” when I reached out and shot the guys in suits who’d come in with the soldiers. I shot them both through the temple. Their heads whiplashed one after the other, like they were doing a wave. They stood for a second and then leaned and dropped sideways.

  The soldiers backed up, dragging Sole with them and training their guns on me. The colonel pulled his service Glock and trained it on me, too. I squeezed so tight on Mendez’s neck that he couldn’t speak, and his face turned an angry red. I snarled at the colonel.

  “What is wrong with you people? What do I need to do to get you to wake up? That plane needs to come down and the cargo needs to be delivered! How many of your men do I need to kill before you make the order?”

  Mendez’s remaining two men came in through the glass door and reached for their weapons. I glanced at the colonel and pressed hard with the Sig into the back of Mendez’s neck.

  The colonel raised a hand and Mendez croaked, “Esperen!”

  I said, “What’s it going to be, Mendez? I’d rather take you home safe and sound and have you running the operation. But if you want to do it the other way, we can do that instead.”

  I didn’t give him a second to answer. I shot the two boys one after another in less than a second and a half. There was a lot of screaming and shouting. The sergeant didn’t know whether to try for a shot and let go of Sole or keep hold of her and wait for orders from the colonel. The colonel was shouting at me to stop killing people. Mendez was screaming through his constricted throat muscles, trying to tell them again I was the Verdugo.

  I was pretty sure now I had accounted for all of Mendez’s boys. I screamed in Mendez’s ear, above the shouting and hollering that was going on around us. “How far do I need to go, Mendez? Are you next? Instruct the plane to come down and take you to Dell City or I swear by almighty God I will blow your brains all over this goddamn floor!”

  The colonel barked at him. “Mendez! For God’s sake! Call that plane down!”

  My belly was on fire. I knew that in a second or less, I was going to have to take out the sergeant, the grunt and the colonel too, and Sole and I were going to die in that exchange.

  I switched the Sig from his head to the small of his back and screamed in his ear. “The plane or the rest of your goddamn life paralyzed! Three…!”

  The colonel’s face was scarlet. “Mendez!”

  “Two!”

  “Mendez! No sea imbecile!”

  “One!”

  In a microsecond, I decided I’d take the sergeant first, then the colonel and then the grunt. I shifted the Sig, Mendez felt it and screamed, “All right! All right! Don’t shoot!”

  I snarled, “How do you contact the pilot?”

  “My cell. In my pocket.”

  “Colonel. The phone.”

  He stepped over and pulled the cell from Mendez’s inside pocket. Mendez croaked, “Avioneta Uno…”

  Plane One.

  The colonel scrolled through the address book, found it and called. While it rang, I snapped, “You talk. You tell him to bring it down at the beach and wait for us. You tell him it will be Mendez, Mendez’s girl and a man. If he needs confirmation, Mendez will confirm it.”

  The colonel started to bark orders into the phone, and I leaned close to Mendez’s ear and whispered like his worst nightmare. “Make one, small mistake and I swear I will blow your spinal cord in half and leave you here to be eaten by ants.”

  The colonel said, “Ahora le confirma su patrón…” He held the phone to Mendez’s ear.

  Mendez swallowed hard and said, “Confirmado, Adolfo, traigan la avioneta.”

  The colonel hung up and put the phone back in Mendez’s pocket. Then he stared hard into my face. “It will be here in fifteen minutes. Now tell me, who are you? I need to know who you are.”

  I nodded. “I agree. I will tell you exactly who I am; you deserve to know and so does Mendez. But first, your grunt here needs to find some rope, or some packing tape, bind Sole and then get down on the beach with a couple of flashlights to guide the plane in. We’ll take care of the bitch in Dell City and bury her in the desert.”
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  She stared at me with wide, crazy eyes. The colonel nodded.

  “Yes, yes, indeed.” He snapped some orders in Spanish and the grunt ran off to the kitchen. He reappeared with a roll of packing tape and taped Sole’s hands behind her back. She held my eye throughout, and it seemed to me that there was only hatred there.

  When he was done, he sat her on the sofa and I said, “OK, Colonel. Let’s have your GI here go to the beach with a flashlight and guide the boat plane in, and while we wait, I’ll explain who I am, and why I’m here.”

  He rattled more orders at the grunt and the small, Mexican soldier ran out into the garden and disappeared in the dark toward the beach. That left me, holding Mendez, Sole bound on the sofa and the colonel and the sergeant standing, facing me. I shifted the gun back to the base of Mendez’s skull, where it was easier to maneuver.

  I sighed and said, “We haven’t got a hell of a lot of time, but it’s a complicated situation. I’ll try to be brief.”

  The colonel frowned and drew breath to answer me. I didn’t give him the chance.

  “Colonel, I am the Verdugo.”

  I shot him through the chest. A tiny shift in my wrist and I shot the sergeant through his right eye. Mendez started a long, hysterical choking screech in his throat. I smashed the butt of the Sig into the back of his head. He shut up and slumped and I dropped him on the floor.

  After that, I bound his wrists behind his back with packing tape. I bound his ankles together, and I bound his mouth and his eyes. Then I took the laces from his shoes and tied his ankles and his wrists with them, too. Sole watched me do the whole thing in silence. Finally, I walked over to her and cut her free. We stayed like that for a long moment: her sitting on the sofa, looking up at me, and me standing, looking down at her.

  Finally, I said, “Don’t touch him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m telling you not to touch him. You need another reason?”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business what I do or who I touch.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I gave my head a small twitch. “Well, it’s none of your goddamn business what I make my business. And I made you my business. So don’t touch Mendez. Is that clear?”

  “So what then?”

  “The beach.”

  She scowled and glanced at Mendez’s slumped form. “What about him? You’re going to let him live?”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  Her cheeks flushed. “I want him!”

  “That’s not going to happen. Get up.”

  She didn’t move.

  I said, “We’re going down to the beach. You can go tied up or you can go free. You choose.”

  She sighed. “I’ll go free.”

  “If you run, I’ll shoot you in the leg. You know I’m serious.”

  She stood. “So what happens on the beach?”

  “We tell the pilot Mendez has been delayed and he’ll make his own way. Once we’re over the US border, we take control of the plane and we call the Feds. We land at Tucson and hand the cargo and the plane over to them. Were you serious about all the information you have on this clown?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I have enough to sink him and several like him, and to damage the Mexican side of the operation, but that’s not enough.”

  “I know what he did to your father.”

  Her skin drained of color. “How do you know that?”

  “Olaf told me.”

  “Who?”

  “Olaf. An old guy. He lives in the desert, past the Cabrito Veloz.”

  “How the hell does he know?”

  I shrugged. “He goes to the Casa Castaneda. I figured you told him.”

  “I don’t even know who he is. I never told anybody what happened to my father, much less some old guy who’s a customer. I want to know what the hell is going on!”

  I shook my head. “Not now. We have plenty to talk about, but when we get back. Let’s go.”

  She jerked her head at Mendez. “What about him?”

  I held her eye.

  She stared back.

  I said, “You know my name?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head. “No, not that name. My name is El Verdugo. The executioner.”

  Twenty-One

  We made our way through the garden and out the gate, and then trudged through the cold sand down the dunes toward the luminous surf, where it was rolling in, sigh by sigh, from the moonlit ocean. Far out, I could just make out the winking red light of a plane. It was still a few miles away, but approaching at good speed. On the shore, holding a flashlight, swinging it from side to side, was the Mexican soldier the colonel had dispatched ten minutes earlier. I leaned close to Sole and whispered in her ear.

  “Speak to him as we approach, like everything is normal and OK. Make some banal comment about the plane arriving on time.”

  We descended the beach in silence until we were thirty or forty feet away. Then Sole called out, “Buenas noches! Es puntual la avioneta? Hace frío para estar aquí!”

  He turned and frowned at her. He looked like he was going to say we shouldn’t be there and where were Mendez and the colonel. He had it written all over his face.

  I preempted him and said to Sole, “Take the flashlight.”

  She frowned at me, like that didn’t make sense, but before she could say anything, I had shot the soldier in the head and he had dropped the flashlight. Then it made sense and she picked it up and started swinging it the way he had.

  I grabbed his heels and dragged him up onto the dry sand. I took his AK-47 and his ammunition belt, then I covered him in sand. By the time I had done that, the plane was just a mile out, skimming the surface with its twin props roaring. The floats hit the surface, sending up huge sheets of bright spray; the plane skipped and landed again and began to slow. Its spots came on and it began to coast to a position about a hundred yards out, where it dropped anchor.

  I waved to them and muttered to Sole to do the same. She did and the pilot leaned out and called something.

  I gave him the thumbs-up and shouted, “Cinco minutos!” Five minutes. He gave me a thumbs-up and climbed back into his cockpit.

  I grabbed the Zodiac and pushed it back toward the water. “Get in.”

  She frowned. “What about you?”

  Some dim memory in one of the dark caverns of my mind made me smile. I pulled a pack of Camels from my pocket, flipped the Zippo and lit up.

  “This is where I leave you, sugar.”

  She smiled up at me with more humor than anger. “Sugar?”

  “I have to stay.”

  She shook her head. “You can’t stay here alone. They’ll come in force, the cartel, the cops, the army. They’ll kill you.”

  I smiled again, my mind reaching for tenuous recollection, like gray mist moving in the dark. “There are things I have to do, Sole. Things you can’t understand. Things I don’t even understand myself.”

  “What are you talking about?” She stepped close and put a hand on my chest. “I hated you when… when you walked out and never came back. Just tell me, did any of it mean anything?”

  I held her eye. “I should tell you I don’t know, that I don’t remember. But we will always have Sinaloa, kid. We didn’t have… We’d lost it, but we got it back that night.”

  She stared at me for a long time, then gave a small, incredulous laugh. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

  I shook my head. “No. But it feels right.”

  She became serious. “You said you’d come back with me…”

  I nodded. “And I will. I’ll come and find you. Follow the plan, give the Feds what you have. But I’ve got a job to do. I’m no good at being noble, but even a drifter like me can see that the problems of an amnesiac and an orphan don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

  I bent to kiss her. She held me tight, like she didn’t want to let go. I eased her fingers loose and helped her into
the Zodiac. She sat, holding the handle of the outboard, looking up at me. The night breeze moved her hair across her face and she fingered it away.

  “Mendez will phone in a moment to confirm you’re safe and well.”

  “And then?”

  “The Feds will be there, at Dell City, to meet the plane.”

  I pushed the dinghy out into the surf. She stared into my face and her eyes were pleading. “Come back this time.”

  The engine roared and the little boat smacked across the water toward the great, faintly luminous hulk of the plane. She looked small and vulnerable, stumbling into the maw of a hungry wolf.

  “I will,” I said. But there was no one there to hear it.

  I watched her clamber aboard with the help of the pilot. I saw them exchange a few words and then the door closed behind her, the props started thudding and the aircraft gradually turned to face the open sea. Next thing, its drone was fading and I was watching it climb into the night sky, the winking of its port and starboard lights growing steadily fainter, until the aircraft was just one more tiny star in the vast desert of space.

  I made my way back up the beach and across the dunes to the vast house, its starkly lit rooms occupied only by dead bodies.

  Dead bodies, and Eulogio Mendez. A man who lived only because I wanted Sole to redeem herself, to have a purity of soul which I could never achieve. My soul was stained with blood. Hers was stained with the darkness of anger, of intent, hatred and vengeance. But I believed, as Olaf did, that those stains could be washed away, whereas the stain of blood can never be erased.

  I came through the sliding glass doors, which stood open as they had all night, and saw Mendez lying on the floor where I had left him. But now his eyes were open and he was staring at me in terror. I nodded.

  “She’s gone, with the dope.”

  I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and dragged him into a sitting position. I found a knife in the kitchen, brought it back, fished his cell out of his pocket and cut his right hand loose.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen, Mendez. You’re going to phone your pilot. You’re going to ask him how Sole is. You’re going to tell him to take good care of her and you’re going to tell him to hand his phone to Sole. You’re going to tell her you’re really sorry for the way you treated her. Then you ask to be handed back to the pilot. You tell him again to take care of your treasure and you hang up.”