There was a loud bang and a yell from the factory floor. Metal clattered across the concrete, and there was a rending crack as wood splintered. Confusion reigned. There were more shouts—from the factory floor this time—and everybody stopped work as they dashed to help the stricken man.
The forklift truck had reversed away from the jaws of the furnace just as two workers were wheeling a wooden crate across the floor. Their attention had been on the conversation they were having instead of what they were doing. They didn’t hear the warning beep as the motor went into reverse.
Crash.
The foreman dashed to the nearest stairs at the far end of the walkway on the other side of the office. Using both hands on the railings he slid down, his feet barely touching the steps on the way. Another man jogged towards the accident carrying a first-aid box. The other workers formed a circle around the crash site, all facing inwards towards the injured man.
Grant’s head continued to spin. He felt nauseous but managed to fight off the stomach cramp that threatened to double him over. This was an opportunity too good to miss, but he was almost too ill to take advantage of it. He glanced towards the office—the place where any documentation would be kept. Invoices, transport orders, and cargo manifests; the place to look for evidence of Macready’s activities. That’s if Grant was looking for evidence. For now, all he wanted to know was what the Texan was bringing in from Mexico. This wasn’t going to court.
Manifests and transport orders were the sort of things a legitimate enterprise would require. The army convoy across the border wasn’t a legitimate enterprise. Any paperwork filed for tax purposes would be false and misleading. The real evidence was on the factory floor in the crates being emptied into the furnace. Grant ignored the office and went in the opposite direction.
The walkway tracked the back wall around the factory. Metal handrails gave some cover but not much. Grant stayed low despite his screaming knees and kept his back to the wall. His head was just above the angle of the walkway’s edge, giving him a view down into the gathered workforce. He passed the nearest set of stairs and continued to the end nearest the furnace. From the outside, the inverted L shape looked like two separate wings, the storage units and the factory. Inside, it was all one big workspace: the smelting works at one end and the factory floor at the other. The roller shutter doors were simply delivery bays with loading docks for the trucks. Most of the wooden crates were stacked at the loading docks.
Most but not all.
Grant paused at the top of the stairs. Down on the factory floor, the circle had widened so the injured man could be treated. The first aider was examining the man’s extremities while talking to keep him calm. Grant wondered how Doc Cruz would have handled the situation. He remembered how he’d dealt with the frightened boy at the Terlingua medical center. He doubted the foreman would be giving out sweets. With the examination over, the first aider opened the box and began to splint the man’s leg. Another helper unfurled a folding stretcher. This was going to take a bit of time. Grant took advantage of the distraction.
The steps were metal, like the fire escape. Heavy footsteps would sound the alarm. Grant tiptoed down one step at a time, keeping balanced and light and aware of the group in the middle of the floor. He reached the bottom without incident and quickly sidled behind the walkway supports. One final glance at the gathered workforce, then he turned his attention to the furnace.
It wasn’t Sheffield steelworks, but it was big enough. The door was large and circular. Whatever they were feeding it was poured in through the door. Whatever was coming out ran in a glittering stream of liquid metal. The narrow trough split into rectangular casts about six inches by three. Ingot size. Smaller than the ones Auric Goldfinger had been making out of the metal parts of his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. Same principal.
Gold ingots. Made in Texas. Stolen from Mexico.
That was obvious the moment Grant saw the molten stream. What wasn’t clear was just what kind of gold they were smelting. It wasn’t body parts from a Rolls Royce, that was for sure. The broken crate was too far away for Grant to risk taking a look. The spillage was too indistinct to identify: small stuff, certainly, and some bigger pieces, all glittering in the overhead lights.
The furnace door was closed, but the next mouthful was waiting at the side. A sturdy wooden crate with the lid off, ready to be emptied. Grant checked the crowd. They were in the middle of the floor on the other side of the spillage. The forklift truck blocked Grant’s view. Good. That meant it blocked theirs as well. The furnace was in a darkened corner of the factory, a rough-hewn alcove of dirt and grime. The shadows highlighted the sparks and molten metal. The sparks didn’t light the corner Grant was hiding in or the crate he wanted to check.
One final glance, then Grant walked to the crate. Upright and steady. Not rushing, not crouching; looking for all the world like he belonged there. Nothing to draw attention to himself. He reached the crate in four easy strides, then bent to look inside.
The world spun again. Not because he felt dizzy but because of the brilliance of what he saw before him. Light danced off the contents, and he thought he understood the reason Humphrey Bogart had gone gold crazy in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He dipped a hand into the crate to make sure it was real. Then a door opened behind him and he heard the flush of a toilet.
The man was rubbing his hands together as he came out of the darkened corner. A stenciled sign above the door read restrooms. It didn’t specify gender. Judging from the workforce, this was an all-male environment. The man wore grease-stained overalls and heavy work boots. He paused mid wipe and performed a comedic double-take.
Grant held an intricate gold medallion in one hand and stood still. He felt like a naughty boy caught with his hands in the cookie jar. For a split second. Then he moved fast. Three strides towards the restrooms as he dropped the medallion into his pocket. He walked right up to the worker and didn’t slow down, driving the heel of one hand into the man’s throat, then grabbing him under the arms as he collapsed, gasping for breath. He walked the man backwards under the stairs and laid him gently on the ground.
“Sshhh. Take it easy. Breathe slowly.”
He remembered that Doc Cruz hadn’t done anything apart from reassure the Mexican wife beater until he’d got his breathing regulated, and Grant hadn’t hit this fella anywhere near as hard. He was a factory worker, not a wife beater. Not one of the bad guys, just a bad guy’s employee. He patted him on the shoulder—“You’ll be fine in a couple of minutes”—then walked to the nearest fire exit before the other workers noticed their friend was taking a long time in the restroom. The ground floor fire door was open like the others for fresh air. Grant was through the door and scrambling down the dry creek bed before the strain caught up with him.
Lights blinked in his eyes again.
His head felt like it didn’t belong to him.
His stomach most definitely did. It cramped fit to cut him in two. Despite having nothing on his stomach, he doubled over and threw up. Dry heaves brought acid phlegm up his throat. Sweat stung his eyes and ran down his neck. His entire body shivered despite the heat. His face felt like it was burning up.
There was no time for this. He forced himself to keep moving even though he couldn’t stand upright. That was a good thing because the gully wasn’t deep enough for him to stand up straight and remain hidden. He shuffled and walked past the bottom of the inverted L. Past the enclosed yard where the trucks had parked. He could smell petrol fumes and almost threw up again.
He risked a quick look over the top of the embankment. Both jeeps were still at the pumps, but only one was being refueled. The last patch of sunlight from the hillside lit the filling station and the guard hut. A golden haze to end the day. The rest of the factory was in shade. Nobody came running out. Not yet.
Grant kept low and crabbed his way along the gully. The first driver was still arguing with the security gu
ard while he struggled with the filler cap. Fumes drifted around him like a heat haze on the highway. The second driver ignored the discussion and simply worked the pump. The soft ding, ding, ding came down the embankment. Grant was level with the filling station. He kept going. Fifty yards ahead, the gully swung to the right around the bottom of the hill. Not far to go before he could collapse into Doc Cruz’s car and listen to his “I told you so.”
He didn’t get fifty yards, just ten before the factory siren broke the silence. Three men came dashing out of the fire exit and around the side of the storage wing, shouting and screaming. They waved to catch the guard’s attention, then pointed along the gully.
Grant tried to move faster but that only made his head spin worse and his eyes go out of focus. Running blind and dizzy on a rock-strewn riverbed was a recipe for disaster. Disaster was coming for him anyway.
The guard saw him first and yelled for him to stop. He didn’t draw his gun. In that regard he showed more sense than the two drivers, who were also armed. The first man abandoned the filler cap and stepped into the cloud of vapors. The second left the pump nozzle in the side of his jeep and drew his weapon. Both took a two-handed firing stance like they must have seen Dirty Harry do.
Grant kept going.
The guard waved for the drivers to lower their weapons.
The first driver had had enough of the guard pulling rank. He racked the slide to chamber a round. His partner did the same. Grant wondered if Texas filling stations had warning signs at the pumps—the ones that said not to use your cell phone when filling up or the ones about not smoking. He was pretty sure there weren’t any signs about discharging a firearm while standing in a cloud of petrol fumes, it being the fumes that ignited more than the petrol itself.
Grant tried to zigzag to throw off their aim. It didn’t matter. The delay between petrol fumes igniting and the petrol catching fire became a moot point. Both drivers fired simultaneously; the muzzle flash was like striking a match. The ball of flame engulfed them, then immediately flashed back to the source: the gas pumps. The nearest pump blasted apart, sending a fireball and shrapnel flying into the air. The second pump took a second longer. A moot point because both drivers were out of action and the security guard was diving for cover.
The fireballs combined. The pumps disintegrated, leaving two holes in the ground gushing flames. The guard hut was a scorched remnant. The guard was afire, patting himself furiously to put out the flames. Nobody was interested in the intruder. Nobody was going to be driving through the only exit from the factory.
Grant slowed to catch his breath. He could barely see the bend in the river. He could hardly walk without falling over. He didn’t hear the car come round the corner or see it skid to a stop. His vision was so blurred by the time he got in the car he didn’t even know it wasn’t Eduardo Cruz picking him up. Five minutes later he didn’t know anything at all.
twenty-eight
The world was full of pain and fire. Again. Everything ached. Some parts felt like hot needles were being shoved into his joints. Fever cranked up the heat until he thought he was being boiled alive. The furnace bubbled and sparked in Grant’s mind. His eyes remained glued shut no matter how hard he tried to open them. The fact that he couldn’t see made his head spin even more. He was on his back, that much he could tell, but it felt like he was lying on a spinning top that was tilting and swerving so much his stomach felt seasick.
Fight it.
Stay awake.
Do not sleep under any circumstances.
Sleep equals death.
Grant forced his mind to evaluate the situation. Retrace his steps to the point where the movie went blank. He remembered the long drive out on Iron Mountain Road. Doc Cruz warning him to delay his insurgency until after dark. The climb down to the factory and the industrial accident.
For a moment Grant wasn’t sure if it was him or the man in overalls rubbing his hands who had been hit by the forklift truck. Was that why his body was racked with pain—because somebody had run him over when they’d caught him in the factory? His hand twitched and tried to reach in his pocket. What was he trying to get? A gun? No. Grant hated guns. That was a deep-rooted memory that no amount of pain could erase. A gold coin. That was it.
The movie restarted. The accident. The opportunity. Grant checking the wooden crate and the glittering reflection in the light from the furnace. Disabling the worker coming out of the restroom and his mad scramble along the riverbed. Even at that point the world was beginning to spin. The gunshots and the fireball were the last things he remembered. That and the vehicle skidding to a stop as its doors flew open and rough hands dragged him inside.
Grant’s eyes blinked open.
It wasn’t Doc Cruz’s car.
His eyelids felt heavy. They had been gummed shut so long it was a force of will to unstick them. He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. He didn’t know where he was. All he knew was that he couldn’t see any more with his eyes open than he’d been able to see with them shut. At least the spinning stopped, or most of it.
The room was dark; no light whatsoever. In his experience, lying in a darkened room either meant the curtains were drawn or it was night. Even with blackout curtains there was no way to keep all the daylight out, so he reckoned it must be after dark. He checked the movie in his head. It had been just before sunset when he’d climbed down the hillside. The last shafts of sunlight had illuminated the security guard and the drivers. He didn’t feel like he’d been unconscious for days, although he wasn’t sure how you could tell, so that would make it the night of the same day.
That still didn’t explain where he was or who had brought him here. His eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and he realized it wasn’t pitch black after all. There was a sliver of light coming under the door to his right. He focused on that until the light spread into the room. It picked out the doorframe and a wooden chair and something that could have been a desk or a table. Everything else was too far from the light source to be of much help.
The strip of light blinked. No, it didn’t blink—a shadow moved across the gap beneath the door, from one side to the other, then disappeared. There was a murmuring of voices in the other room. The shadow crossed the light in the opposite direction, then came back. It was joined by another. The door handle rattled.
Grant held his breath. The world stopped spinning. Light glinted off the handle as it turned and the latch clicked free. The sliver of light across the bottom was joined by a longer slit up the side as the door opened a crack. The voices stopped. The door opened all the way, and light flooded the room.
Then the Mexican wife beater stepped through the door.
“Hey, amigo. You remember me?”
Grant tried to sit up, but his ribs were a band of fire across his chest. He couldn’t summon the energy to push up on his elbows. The Mexican was a giant silhouette in the doorway. Behind him, two more shadows stood in the background. His friends from the Kosmic Kowgirl Kafe. The wife beater leaned against the doorframe and crossed one leg, aiming for cool and succeeding. He was in control of the situation.
“You a hard man to find.”
Grant tried to reply, but his voice was harsh and silent. His vision drifted in and out of focus. The queasy feeling in his stomach threatened to crawl up his throat. He croaked it back down. His mouth opened and shut like a beached goldfish. The wife beater put his own interpretation on that.
“Agua?” He lifted one hand to his mouth and jiggled it as if holding a glass of water. “Thirsty?”
The interpretation was correct. Grant’s throat was dry and painful. He gave a cautious nod. The Mexican seemed unimpressed.
“You should have thought of that before messing in another man’s business.”
The wife beater didn’t move from the door. He clicked his fingers, and one of the other shadows came into the room and disappeared behind G
rant. There was a clink of glass. A faucet was turned on. Moments later, a glass of cold water was held to Grant’s lips. He drank slowly. Too much too fast wasn’t good. The water cooled the fire in his throat and moistened his lips.
“Where am I?”
“Somewhere you don’t got no right to be.”
Grant remembered the wife beater’s use of double negatives at Terlingua. He didn’t think this was the time to educate him.
“We’re not in Mexico, are we?”
The big man pushed away from the doorframe and flexed his shoulders.
“The place that’s full of small greasy ratfuck Mexicans? That’s what you called us, isn’t it?”
The glass was taken away. Grant finally managed to push himself up onto his elbows.
“I was trying to distract you.”
“That so? Well, now it’s you who got distracted. All the way here.”
The wife beater stepped towards Grant. “And guess what? I’m one angry, distracted muthafucka.”
Grant gauged angles and distances. Even though he was leaning up on his elbows, his legs were pointing roughly towards the big man. Three feet off the ground, probably on a table or a bed. His police training back in Yorkshire had included what to do if you were on the ground in a public order situation. Always keep your feet towards the danger. Kicking was the first line of defense. He prepared to swivel on his back and use the leverage to kick out. His personal mantra was to delay offensive action as long as possible. Best way to do that was to keep talking and try to diffuse the situation.
“You know who you sound like?”
The wife beater tilted his head to one side, a default pose to aid his concentration.
Grant took that as permission to carry on.
“Samuel L. Jackson. If he was playing a Mexican.”
He smiled to show he wasn’t being offensive and continued. “I didn’t know Mexicans said mother fucker.”
The Mexican got into the swing of things. “After Bruce Willis in Die Hard, everybody says muthafucka.”
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