Several seconds passed before she grasped what he was talking about. Her ideal self would have come back at him in anger, in revulsion, crying out that whoever Salazar thought communicated to him through the medium of butterflies, it wasn’t God. That is what the ideal Lisette would have done. The real one was wordless.
“So, we know who you are, and you know who we are,” Enrique continued. “Our code is written in my friend’s book. I wish I had a copy with me for you to read. My Reflections, it is called. In it he writes, ‘It is for every man to fight a battle, to live an adventure, and to rescue a beauty.’ So, you see, we do not harm beauty, we rescue it.”
“I’m no beauty, and I don’t need to be rescued,” she said, as certain of the first statement as she was uncertain of the second.
“Oh, but you are beautiful.” Enrique’s grin, like his stare, belonged in a herpetarium. She prayed it wasn’t preamble to a rape. “My friend is a great man. He has been chosen to save Mexico from criminals and tyrants, and fate has chosen you for the honor of fixing him. That is what makes you beautiful. But where is your nurse with your things?”
“It’s a bad road in daylight and worse at night,” she said. “She should be here soon.”
“She had better be. We will be leaving after you have fixed him.”
“He has to go to a hospital. His arm may have to come off. He may have to sacrifice his arm to save his life.”
“No hospital. We told you that. We will require your truck … and you. You will be his hospital. You will be leaving with us to take care of him until he is better.”
Her breath caught as the terror that had been lurking in the back of her mind for the past couple of hours barged into her frontal lobe. Now she regretted her last instruction to Anna. She was to be kidnapped, hostage to Salazar’s recovery. She felt slightly nauseous. The villagers could not, would not help her. A few men owned old shotguns and hunting rifles, but they would be no match for a professional like Enrique. Besides, too many, like Javier, worked for the Brotherhood. Field hands in the marijuana and poppy plantations, meth cookers, lookouts.
“What if he doesn’t recover?” she asked timidly. “What then?”
“Oh, he will. La Santa Muerte looks out for him.”
Long minutes passed in silence, Enrique fighting sleep. At last, worn to the bone after spending three days in flight from police and army patrols, he succumbed, nodding off in the confidence that she wouldn’t try to escape—where could she escape to?—or do something desperate, like steal one of his pistols. Tingling from nervous and physical exhaustion, she stretched out on the floor mat and closed her eyes, but she couldn’t sleep, her mind flitting from thought to thought. She mentally rehearsed how she would remove the bullet and debride Salazar’s gangrenous arm. She wished she could speak to her son. What was Pamela doing at this moment? In bed, probably—it was early morning in Philadelphia. Nearly ten p.m. here. What the hell was holding up Anna? She’d been gone nearly twice as long as Lisette had anticipated. Dreadful visions teased her: Anna waylaid by a gang, the vaquero taking a turn too fast, the truck plummeting into some black canyon. Ten or fifteen minutes later, she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle, saw headlights piercing the darkness.
His chin on his chest, Enrique stirred but did not awaken. The pickup—hers! hers!—stopped on the road directly below. Lisette’s relief turned to joy as she rose and hurried toward it. But before she got there, the Tarahumara and the boy jumped out, ran to their pickup, and sped off.
Anna opened the rear door, the interior light winking on.
“Thank God you’re all right,” Lisette said to her. “I was so very worried. Did you have trouble?”
“I have brought everything,” the nurse replied evasively. “And these, too.” She produced an LED lantern and a fleece-lined jacket from a tote bag. Lisette was grateful for both, especially the jacket; she was shivering. She ducked her head inside and did a quick survey. Scalpel. Forceps. Probe. Surgical needle and thread. Bandages and tape. Disposable syringes. Antiseptic. Lidocaine. A proper sling. And a battery-operated surgical saw, in case she had to amputate. It looked as new as when she’d bought it. She’d never had to use it, and hoped she would not have to now. A wild thought flew into her mind—deliberately botch the procedure, for its success would ensure her captivity—but she dismissed this notion immediately: the consequences of failure would be worse.
“You certainly did think of everything,” she said to Anna, who made no reply. “Are you ready?”
“Estoy aterrrado,” Anna answered.
“So am I. We must try not to be. Or try not to show it. We are both going to need to be steady.”
“They have followed me, I think,” Anna said in an undertone. “Soldiers. Federales.”
“What!” Lisette rasped. “But I told you not to—”
“It was not me,” the nurse pleaded. “The Indian man. On our way back, we were stopped at a police reteno—”
“Oye! Señora Médico! What’s going on down there? Get to work! He’s awake.”
It was Enrique, also risen from his slumbers. She looked up at the house and saw him standing outside, silhouetted against the wavering lamplight.
“How far behind you are they?” she asked Anna.
“No lo se. Oh, Lisette, I don’t know what will happen now.”
Of course, neither did Lisette. Nor did she know what to think, her brain whirling as she tried to sort through the possibilities in a matter of seconds. If she and Anna were going to try to escape, now was the moment: jump in the truck and speed away as the Tarahumara had. Would Enrique fire at them? Could he hit anything in the dark? What if, cornered by the police, he took Cornelia and her family hostage?
“Be brave,” she told Anna. “You must not let on that anything is wrong.”
The nurse gave a jerky nod, and they trudged uphill to the house.
Enrique cast a serpent’s eye on Anna.“What took you so long?”
Visibly trembling, the nurse answered that it was the darkness, the condition of the road.
“Where is that Indian and his kid?”
Lisette stepped in before he could grill Anna any further. “If you want me to fix your friend, Don Enrique, we must start right away,” she said, summoning up her best authoritative tone. She reached into the tote bag and shoved an IV drip bag into his hand. “Hold this, please, and do what I tell you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Professor was experiencing one of the spectacles synesthesia produced in times of stress or excitement. This being a time for both, the show was a fantastic display of sound and light. The landscape, bathed in the spectral glow of his night-vision goggles, sang a tremulous note in his mind, like a bow scraping a single-string instrument; Valencia’s voice as he gave a final briefing to his troops lowered shimmering white curtains into the goggles’ greenish, luminescent pools. I want the son of a bitch alive. We do not move in until she’s finished. No firing except on express command. Do you understand? No firing unless I order it. We don’t want another fuckup. Someone murmured, Sí, mi capitán. Others followed, each hushed response creating a kaleidoscopic sparkle before the Professor’s eyes.
They were twelve, as many as could be mustered on short notice: Valencia with seven paratroopers, the Professor with three federal policemen. They shouldn’t need any more to arrest two men, only one of whom was capable of offering resistance. Assuming, that is, that the information they’d pried out of the nurse and those two Indians at the roadblock was accurate. No reason to think it wasn’t.
They would approach San Tomás on foot; it was about half a kilometer distant. To draw any closer in the SandCats would give them away. Both vehicles had been backed into an oak grove a few meters off the road and hastily camouflaged with netting and branches. The Professor thought that was unnecessary—it was a moonless night, so the chances of anyone spotting the SandCats under the trees were nil—but the army had its own way of doing things. Leaving the drivers behind to g
uard the troop carriers, the remaining ten men set off, every loose piece of equipment secured with tape or Velcro straps to dampen the noise. The Professor’s sensory spectacle had ended. He was glad; it was becoming a distraction. He heard only the soft crunch of boots, and saw only what was there: the tree-bordered road ahead, looking in his goggles like a tunnel illuminated by faint green lamps.
Valencia halted the column to check his GPS. Two hundred fifty meters, he whispered. There was tension in his hushed voice, a mixture of anxiety, impatience, and a restrained eagerness. This operation was more to his liking, everyone properly equipped and attired—the paratroopers in cammies, the federales in black—for his moment of final triumph. If they captured Salazar, Valencia wanted full credit to go to the army, with the Federal Police cast as supporting actors. The Professor agreed. He had no interest in glory, which was nothing more than a word. Maybe the capitán would invite him to the ceremony when they pinned a major’s star on his shoulders.
A coyote sent up a long call, and the pack answered with what sounded like cackling in a madhouse, raising howls from the village dogs. All to the good. The racket would muffle the raiders’ movements. They went on at a brisk walk, until Valencia halted them again. San Tomás appeared ahead. It was as if the lime-colored light of the night-vision goggles had conjured it out of the blackness, a ramshackle Brigadoon, mud-brick huts and shanties scattered across two shallow hills divided by the road. The whole village was dark, except for lanterns glimmering from atop the hill on the right. The house where the gringa doctor was repairing Julián Menéndez, a.k.a. Ernesto Salazar. Valencia deployed his troops, sending two men down the road to block its use as an escape route, two more to circle around to the rear of the house, keeping enough distance between them and it to avoid detection. The Professor overcame, temporarily, his dislike of all things military; he admired the way the men moved—quickly, each one silent as smoke. In a while, three crisp clicks came over Valencia’s radio, followed by three more. The blocking teams were in position. Then Valencia, the Professor, and the remaining men, a paratrooper sergeant and the trio of federales, sprinted in a crouch to hunker down behind the doctor’s truck and wait. The coyotes had ceased their demented warbling, the dogs their howling.
* * *
She had shot Salazar’s arm full of lidocaine and fed him an oral meperidine. He lay flat on the table, semiconscious, his feet dangling over the edge. The bullet had come out more easily than she’d expected, the tip flattened and peeled back so that it looked like a small flower with wilted petals. Mata policías. Cop killer. What a lovely term. The round had chewed through his shoulder muscle but had not smashed the bone, the armored vest having slowed its terrible velocity. After cleansing and suturing the puncture, she began to debride his upper arm, which had gone from dark red to purple; it resembled an elongated eggplant. Her scalpel sliced off thin layers of necrotic flesh bit by bit, Anna lifting the strips with the forceps, dropping them into a pail. The two women wore surgical masks to cloak the stench of pus and rot. Enrique muffled his nose and mouth with a bandanna, giving him even more of an outlaw look. Lisette had turned him into an operating-room assistant; he held the drip bag containing flucloxacillin over the prostrate Salazar. For a narco tough guy, he’d proved to be squeamish and whiny, shutting his eyes as Lisette cut, complaining that his arm was getting tired from holding the bag. “Switch hands, then,” Lisette snapped. She assumed he wanted to keep the right one free to draw a pistol if he had to.
Her fervent hope was, of course, that he wouldn’t have the time, that the cops and soldiers who had followed Anna would swoop in and arrest him and the “great man” without a shot being fired. If, that is, they had followed her nurse. Focused on her task, she’d evicted all thoughts of what might happen to her if she were shanghaied into the role of Salazar’s personal physician. Yet an exhilaration ran beneath her fear, the two emotions parts of the same stream, current and undercurrent in seamless friction.
Salazar’s eyes were glazed; if not for their occasional blinking, they could have been mistaken for a dead man’s. In the light cast by the LED lamp and the kerosene lanterns hung overhead, she sliced and snipped, sliced and snipped. His bicep had a shallow but distinct concavity before she found healthy tissue. There was no discoloration below the elbow; she might have arrested the gangrene’s spread. Looking at the bullet wound, stitched up neat as a button, and at the smooth, red scoop in his upper arm brought a sense of accomplishment, of pride in skills she hadn’t known she had. Her first surgery, and under conditions a Civil War surgeon would have found familiar. Some baptism. Pulling her mask down, she swiped the back of her hand across her damp forehead, peered into Salazar’s face, and said, “It’s done.”
He rolled his head, mumbling something.
“He will keep his arm?” asked Enrique as he untied the bandanna. Spittle glistened on his mustache. “He must not lose his arm.”
“We will see,” Lisette said, shocked by the thought that sprang into her mind: Well, he’s got another one. She told Anna to swab and pack the wound bed with dry gauze.
The nurse delved into the tote bag and said, “We do not have enough. There is more in the truck,” in the stilted manner of a kid auditioning for a high school play. She flicked her eyebrows at Lisette, then glanced sidelong, toward the pickup parked at the roadside below.
Lisette understood, or thought she did. A deep fatigue overtook her suddenly; resisting an urge to lie down, she grabbed the LED lantern, telling Enrique not to lower the drip bag. That, she thought, will keep one hand occupied—his right, it was to be hoped.
Outside, as they scurried to the truck, Anna said, under her breath, that she’d been told to vacate the ramada when the operation was over. The police and soldiers did not want to risk getting her or Lisette hurt when they made the arrest.
“The gauze—that’s all I could think of to get us out of there.”
“I figured,” Lisette said.
Prepared for a surprise, she made no sound when, as she stepped around to the driver’s side, someone crouching behind the pickup seized her wrist and pulled her down beside him. “Be quiet, stay right here,” he whispered in perfect American English. A DEA agent maybe? There were a few more men with him—black, almost shapeless forms pressed against the doors. One of them spoke briefly into a radio, but in a voice so subdued she could not make out what he said.
“Only the two? No one else?” the English speaker asked, his mouth to her ear.
“There’s a family inside the house.” Her arms and scalp prickled, her heart thudding against her rib cage. Not fear—a weird elation, rather. “Please, no shooting if you can help it.”
“We want them alive, don’t worry,” he assured her; then he and the others rose and started up the hill, jog-trotting in single file. Anna, right next to her, crossed herself, kissing the tips of her fingers.
* * *
The ramada jutted out from the back of the house. They moved up to the front to conceal their approach. Valencia with his sergeant crept toward one side of the ramada, while the Professor with his men went around to the other. Julián Menéndez had escaped him twice, the first time ten years ago, when he’d rescued the hostages seized by Julián’s mother. There would be no strike three. In deposing Carrasco, the skinny maricón had wrecked a good thing, a more or less orderly, highly profitable enterprise. And now Julián’s head was filled with dizzy ideas of revolution, of waging some sort of holy war on behalf of his mongrelized Christian-voodoo-narco creed. Braced against a wall of the house, the Professor felt an electric current pulsing up and down his backbone—the sensation of unfinished business about to be finished.
Then, voiding himself of all thought and emotion, he stepped around the corner, his H&K in a two-handed grip. In a nanosecond, his brain photographed Enrique Mora, El Serpiente, standing with a plastic bag in his hand, the bag attached to Julián Menéndez’s arm by a flexible tube, Julián supine on a picnic table.
“Policía F
ederal! No se mueva. Estás bajo arresto!”
Mora’s reaction to the shouted command was as swift and automatic as an eye blink. He whirled and flung the bag at the Professor with the accuracy of a pitcher unleashing a fastball. The long IV tube, torn from Julián’s arm, whipped the Professor’s face as the bag struck his hands, knocking his pistol from his grip. But in that instant, as Mora went for one of the guns in his waistband, Valencia leapt in from behind and delivered a crisp blow to the back of Mora’s skull with a rifle butt. Mora dropped to both knees, tottered, and then fell facedown. One of the federales jammed a knee into his spine, wrenched his arms behind his back, and cuffed him with plastic straps. Rivulets of blood webbed the nape of his neck, staining his shirt collar. The cop rolled him over and disarmed him. A matched pair of stainless steel, pearl-handled semiautos; one of the pistols must have been Julián’s. Collecting his own weapon, and himself, the Professor, along with two federales, lifted Mora to his feet—it took the three of them to do it, since Mora weighed a good one hundred kilos—then sat him on the table’s bench, clamped one end of a pair of plastic handcuffs to his, and bound the other end to the wrist of Julián’s good arm, streaked with blood leaking from the vein where the IV tube had been inserted. They maneuvered Julián off the table, onto the bench, and there the fugitive pair sat side by side. Julián, drugged and in pain, his lips compressed, stared in glassy bewilderment. And no wonder, with a stitched bullet hole in his shoulder and, below it, what looked like a salami sliced lengthwise.
“As I was saying, you’re under arrest,” the Professor noted with a mocking air that concealed a savage urge to pistol-whip Julián. But it wasn’t only the desire for revenge, or to punish, that bred the impulse. The Professor felt a bit cheated. The bust had been too easy, too quick; he would have liked a fiery climax.
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