I think I may have grinned. I had handled the three men back at the bar—rather well, I thought—and now the little Subaru and I had bested a couple of big lowriders. And without killing anybody, I was fairly sure. Getting the two cars back up onto the road might take a bit of grunting, but it seemed unlikely that anyone inside had been badly hurt; the slope down from the roadway wasn’t steep enough. Maybe a broken arm or two, a bloody nose. So what. Dumb bastards had asked for it, right?
Not a bad day’s work.
Hubris. I rounded a bend in the road and saw another two lowriders parked across it, blocking both lanes.
I eased up on the gas.
They had arranged it well. The road dipped down here toward a small bridge crossing an arroyo. They were on my side of the bridge and I couldn’t go around them without winding up in the arroyo, which was filling up now with the rush of run-off water. And I couldn’t ram them head on. When you’re driving a Subaru, you don’t ram any stationary object that weighs over ten pounds.
Not much choice. They were sixty yards away and I was down to forty-five miles an hour. I used my left hand to turn the wheel slightly to the left, used my right to jerk up the emergency brake. The front wheels seized and the rear end of the car began a quick swoop out from under me. Before the wagon swung a half circle, I slapped down the emergency brake-stick, grabbed the wheel with both hands, floored the gas peddle.
No dice. A bootlegger’s turn needs more traction than the slippery road could give me. Suddenly I was in an uncontrolled spin, thrown back against the seat.
I don’t know how many times the Subaru whirled around itself while the world whipped by. I was too busy holding onto the steering wheel to count.
The carousel finally stopped with a sudden sickening jolt that slammed my teeth together and hurled me to the right, against the safety belt, and then a jolt to the left as the car rocked on its suspension. I was off the road, in the sandy soil, and the engine had stalled. I smelled gasoline fumes, piercing and sweet. I looked out the rain-streaked window and saw the lowriders twenty yards away to my left. Three or four men were standing behind the cars in the rain, but none seemed to be doing anything. They were probably all too stunned by the display of precision driving they’d just witnessed.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. Didn’t really succeed. I shifted into neutral, switched the ignition off, then on again. The engine caught. I turned the wheel to the right, uphill, toward the road, shifted into first, and hit the gas. The wagon lurched forward about a foot, then stopped abruptly and shuddered, its wheels racing. I shifted into reverse, floored the peddle. A lot of noise, no movement. The front wheels were in muck and the rear wheels were off the ground, suspended above a ditch.
I looked back at the lowriders. One of the men had come around from the left and begun walking toward me.
I unsnapped my seat belt, reached for the gun. Couldn’t find it. I groped around, discovered it stuck between the seat and the passenger door. I opened that door and pushed myself out into the rain, remembering that I had only two shots left.
Soaking wet all at once, crouching behind the car, I pulled back the hammer of the pistol and poked my head up over the hood to take a look.
The man had stopped maybe thirty feet away. He was wearing a black plastic raincoat and a black cowboy hat with a flat crown. He had his hands up.
“We mean you no harm, Mr. Croft,” he called out to me.
I had the pistol’s sights centered on his belly. “Don’t move,” I told him.
How the hell did he know my name?
I remembered. The card I’d left back at La Cantina.
He called out, “Mr. Montoya would like to talk with you.”
“Keep your hands up and tell your friends to come around the front of the cars and lean against them. They probably know the position.”
He nodded. “Very good.” Hands still in the air, he turned and shouted back toward the lowriders. Three men, all wearing black raincoats, emerged from behind the cars and walked around to the front, turned and leaned against them, hands outstretched. In the rain, I couldn’t see their hands very well, and any one of the men could’ve been holding a snub-nose. But at that distance a snub-nose, mine included, didn’t represent much of a threat.
I stood up, covering him. “Okay. Get over here. This side of the car.”
“We mean you no harm,” he said again, coming toward me. Medium height, slender build, mestizo face, about thirty years old.
“Yeah?” I said, backing up as he came around the Subaru. “Two of you just tried to run me off the road. Okay, stop. Turn around. Feet spread, hands against the car.”
“They are idiots,” he said, shrugging. “They were supposed to follow you here. Nothing more.” He had no real accent, none of the New Mexican lilt, but he spoke the kind of formal English you hear in people who have been very well educated in another language.
“Lean against the car,” I said.
He did as I said, rainwater spilling from the brim of his hat and splashing against the window of the wagon. I frisked him. Very carefully. He was clean. I stood back.
“Okay,” I said. “Stay against the car. What’s the story?”
He twisted his head over his shoulder to look at me. “Mr. Montoya wishes to speak with you.”
“I’ve got a telephone.”
“He prefers to speak face to face. He says it will be to your advantage. He gives you his word you will not be harmed in any way.”
“Great.”
“Mr Croft, we have deer rifles in the car, with scopes. If we wanted to kill you, we could have.”
If they did have rifles, he was right.
He shook his head, more rainwater sloshing from his hat, and looked down at the ground. “This is unnecessary, Mr. Croft. I apologize for the stupidity of the two fools who followed you. Mr. Montoya only wishes to speak with you about your investigating business. He does not wish to harm you. He says it will take only a half an hour of your time.” He looked up at me and smiled. “I am getting very wet, Mr. Croft,” he said.
He, at least, had a raincoat. I was wet to the skin, clothes clinging to me everywhere, hair slicked against my forehead, ice-cold rain pouring down my face, down my neck, and into the windbreaker.
“All right,” I said. “Tell one of your friends to get over here. Unarmed.”
He put up his head, called out, “Carlos! Come here!”
Carlos came at a run. He was shorter than the first man, and a lot younger. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and he kept his face in a squint, blinking his eyes against the rain. I put him up against the car and frisked him. Clean.
“Okay, Carlos,” I said. “Here’s the way it’s going down. You get in the car and drive it back onto the road. Your friend here will push.” I turned to the first man. “What’s your name?”
“George,” he said, twisting his head around again. He smiled wryly. “Very pleased to meet you.”
“George,” I said, “I’m going to stand behind you while all this is going on. I guess you can figure out what happens if Carlos here takes off with my car.”
He glanced at the gun. He smiled again. “I believe so, yes.”
I turned to the other. “Carlos, when the car is back on the road, you put it in neutral, set the emergency brake, and get out and go back to your friends. And then you all drive away. Back toward Santa Fe. When you get there, go to a movie, do some shopping. Whatever you want. But don’t come back this way until tonight. If I spot you, you’ll never see George again. You understand?”
Blinking, Carlos nodded.
“George,” I said. “How does that plan sound to you?”
George nodded, more rain spilling from his hatbrim. “Excellent. Do you think we could put it into action soon?”
“Go,” I said.
With George pushing, it took Carlos only a few minutes to haul the Subaru out of the ditch. George stood back, slapping his hands together, as it rolled onto the road. Carlos stopped
it, got out, and, without looking at either of us, walked back to the lowriders. He and the other two got inside. The cars backed up onto the shoulders, turned around, and headed south. I waited until they were out of sight.
The whole thing, from the time I spotted the roadblock till the time they drove away, hadn’t taken more than twenty minutes, and not a single other car had come along the road.
“Okay, George,” I said. “You drive.”
He turned to me, smiling. “Where to?”
“To see Mr. Montoya.”
THIRTEEN
As WE DROVE OFF, the windshield wipers swishing rhythmically, George turned to me and said, “You almost made it.”
“Made what?” Holding the pistol in my lap, I leaned forward and switched on the heater.
“The turn. Back there, when you saw us on the road. You did it well. If the road had been less slippery, you would have succeeded.”
“Yeah,” I said, using my palm to brush wet hair back over my scalp. “But if’s don’t count for much.”
He looked at me, smiled. “Truly,” he said, and nodded. Water fell from his hat and spattered onto his raincoat.
The car was crowded with the smell of damp clothing. I cracked the window open a bit and unzipped my wind-breaker, tugged the limp clammy shirt away from my chest. There have probably been times in my life when I was more uncomfortable, but I couldn’t remember them and I didn’t see any point in trying.
Two miles up the road the driver of the second lowrider was standing on the shoulder in the rain. He was wearing only jeans and a black T-shirt, his arms hugging his chest, his hands buried in his armpits, his long black hair plastered down his face. He looked even more miserable than I felt. He saw who was driving and began waving frantically at the Subaru.
George grinned and saluted him, index finger flicking the brim of his hat, then drove on without stopping.
“Where is the other car?” he asked me.
“Another mile or two up ahead.”
“Also off the road?”
“Yeah.”
“You knocked them both off the road with this?” Eyes wide in mock wonder, he opened his hands against the Subaru’s steering wheel.
“I keep an atomic cannon in the glove compartment.”
He smiled.
At the spot where the first lowrider had sailed off the road, a Ford Bronco was parked at the edge of the slope and a man in a yellow slicker was lowering a winch cable down over the side. Presumably the driver of the lowrider had used a C.B. to call for help.
I said, “You people have good communications.”
George nodded. “Mr. Montoya believes in them.”
I sat back and tried to remember everything I’d heard about Norman Montoya.
Over the years, there’d been a lot of stories, none of them substantiated, and a lot of charges, none of them proved. A descendant of one of the original Land Grant families, he was supposed to be a big-time drug dealer, running Mexican smack and Bolivian coke up through El Paso, then west to L.A. He was supposed to be a fence, the biggest around. He was also supposed to be the political honcho for the area. Although he’d never run for county office himself, he approved or selected, according to the stories, everyone who did. Those who ran without his approval usually disappeared suddenly, and ended up, according to the stories, feeding the rainbow trout at the bottom of Abique Lake.
So far as I knew, he’d never been tried for anything, or even been arrested. From time to time the state police or some branch of the federals brought him in for questioning, but invariably they let him go. A few years ago, a state attorney general swore, publicly, that before his term was up he’d see Norman Montoya rotting in the federal penitentiary. He resigned for undisclosed personal reasons three months later, with two years of his term unexpired.
Montoya was Big Time. I wasn’t, and I couldn’t imagine what he wanted with me.
We drove through Truchas, and then up into the mountains, the windshield wipers fighting a steady losing battle against the rain. We drove through most of Las Mujeres, turning off just past the general store onto a dirt road that wound up through the dark ponderosa pines. Signs nailed to the trees at about fifty-yard intervals kept reminding us that this was private property and that trespassers would be prosecuted.
After a mile or so the trees fell away and the road leveled out to cross a few acres of green pasture. Then it climbed again, up the flank of a large grassy hill, and I could see the house at the top.
It was a big place, very imposing against the storm-blackened sky, a modified A-frame with cedar and redwood wings rambling from the main structure. As the Subaru swept around the curve leading to the driveway, I saw that from the rear of the house, on a clear day, you’d have a view all the way down the valley, and beyond it to the Sandias and faraway Albuquerque.
George parked the car and we got out, heads ducked against the pelting rain. Holding the gun at my side, I followed him up the broad slatted wooden stairway to the front door. He thumbed the doorbell.
It opened immediately, as though someone had been standing behind it.
Someone had. Headband, the man from La Cantina.
He wasn’t carrying the knife, and if he were tickled to see me, or disappointed, or miffed, he didn’t show it. His face remained neutral as he stepped back to let us in. Ignoring me, he turned to George and said, in English, “He’s downstairs, in the spa.”
George nodded and turned to me. “Come.”
I shook my head. “First,” I said, “I make a telephone call.”
George smiled. “Of course. This way.”
I wiped my feet on the doormat. Then smiled at myself—two of his people had tried to kill me, and here I was being careful not to track mud into Montoya’s house. Screw it. He could afford the cleaning bill. I followed George from the entrance hall into the living room.
It was an enormous room, maybe forty feet square with a high ceiling and white wall-to-wall carpeting. But what I noticed first wasn’t the room itself, nor its furniture, which was all handsome enough, white leather sectionals and chairs, walnut coffee tables and bookcases crammed with books. What I noticed was the valley spread out beneath me, beyond the wall of glass that took up the entire opposite side of the room. Gray clouds were moving down between the black stands of pine, slowly whirling and swirling, and then as they neared the silver ribbon of river at the valley bottom, slowly unraveling and fraying, wisping away like wood smoke. The view stretched on for miles, until both sides of the dark valley became lost in rolling white mist.
“Formidable, no?” said George.
“Not bad,” I admitted.
Smiling, he handed me a cordless phone.
I kept the gun in my right hand, punching in Rita’s number with my middle finger. She answered on the third ring.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m at the home of Norman Montoya in Las Mujeres. I’m here voluntarily, more or less, and right now everything is just ducky.” I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock. “But if I don’t call you back in thirty minutes, then you should give some serious thought to springing into action.”
Rita said, “Give me the phone number there.”
There was no number on the phone. I turned to George, asked him. He told me and I gave it to Rita.
“Hang up,” she said. “I’ll call right back. I want a record of an outgoing call from here to there.”
“Right,” I said, and hung up.
All of New Mexico shares one area code, and to call anywhere in the state from Santa Fe, you merely dial one before the number. Naturally, the phone company’s computers keep track of all these calls, so they know exactly how exorbitant to make your bill. With a record of a call to this number, if anything did happen to me, Rita could at least verify that she’d been in contact with the Montoya house.
It gave me some leverage. Not much, but maybe enough to keep me from providing protein to the rainbow trout.
George smiled at me. “Mrs. Mondragón?”
“Yeah.”
He nodded. “I understand she is a most impressive woman.”
“Most impressive,” I said.
The phone rang. I spoke into it, “Hello.”
“All right,” Rita said. “Half an hour from now, or I call Hector.”
“Right,” I said. “And look, let’s get together, the two of us, and have lunch sometime. I’m in the book.”
She hung up.
I handed the phone back to George. “It was unnecessary,” he said, “but you are wise to take precautions. Now, please, follow me.”
I looked back at Headband. He had sat down in a leather chair in the entranceway, and he was reading a magazine as though there was nobody else around.
“Right,” I said to George.
WE WENT THROUGH the living room, down a wooden stairway, and along a narrow hallway carpeted in white, both of us leaving a trail of dampness, like a pair of snails. Faintly, I could smell chlorine. We passed two doors, both closed, and when we came to the third, also closed, George stopped and turned to me. He nodded to the gun. “I’m sorry, but I must take that.”
I frowned.
“It is a rule,” he said. “Mr. Montoya does not permit them in his presence. You are quite safe, I assure you.” He smiled. “And besides, if we wanted to keep you here, or to harm you, the gun would not help you.”
I nodded and handed it to him. He held it loosely at his side.
“One thing more,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“You must strip.”
“Strip,” I said.
He shrugged, smiling. “Your clothing. All of it. Another of the rules. And it will allow us to dry it for you.”
“Strip,” I said.
“Strip,” George nodded. He had the grace not to point the gun at me, but both of us knew he could have.
I stripped, letting my soggy clothes fall to the carpeting, and then stood there feeling very naked and trying to look extremely casual about it. I think that Man invented clothing so that no one would know how tiny his penis can get in a good breeze.
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