Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  “Then you know more than I do.”

  At last our shoes crunched off the desert, scraped on the stone patio. The door on the other side was locked, but I did a bit of magic with some spring steel and a nut-picker, and it snapped open easily enough. It’s surprising what skills arise from youth and hunger, as many scratched-up Belfast locks could attest.

  Inside, there were no lights in the hallway—an economy measure, no doubt—but I plucked a tiny electric torch from my jacket pocket and held it low in my left hand as we turned left and crept along. I had the layout of the place in my mind, and a theory about where we should be going. Down the hallway, through a laundry room flowery with detergent and fabric softener, through the darkened kitchen, with its pots and pans shining from hooks and the cutting knives sheathed in wooden blocks, and out into another hallway, at the top of a stairway that drove into the earth. I jabbed a finger toward the closed door of the clinic below.

  At that moment, a great smash took me on the back of the head.

  My skull vibrated, stars stung my eyes, and my scalp contracted. It was only a fist, but a bloody hard one. God bless those who overestimate themselves, for I weathered this pretty well. I staggered, hearing Daly’s yelp of dismay. No matter. I curled my forequarters to ready myself for the second blow. And I caught this one on my right forearm. I pivoted and arced a right-fist backhand at my attacker, flashing on his raw face and battered features.

  Bracknall, the bastard, all gussied up in black like a Ninja.

  My knuckles stung delightfully as they caromed off his dome. Now I brought my fists low and shifted my weight. Education time, in the matter of close quarters bashing. But a gun leaped into his left hand—a Ruger Single-Six .357 Magnum—and he speared me with it underneath the ribs. That took half my wind and settled me a bit. I had a notion of going for the Colt under my left armpit, jamming a little firepower up his nostrils and exploring his thinking processes with a round-nosed bullet. But that would have taken too long, and I didn’t want to turn this waltz into a gunfight. Guns make a horrid noise, and I still hoped to surprise the rest of the mob. I swung my body deep inside the Ruger, spinning and snapping my left hand right onto his left wrist and squeezing like a vise. And I drove my right elbow into his gut, trying to force it all the way through his spine and two feet beyond. Bracknall chuffed like a dirigible taking a Cruise missile amidships. He fell, whimpering. I had just time to wrench the Single-Six from his hand before he splashed on the carpet. He lay there snuffling, one hand shielding the bandaged ear I’d ripped up earlier.

  “You aren’t right for the security work,” I told him. “You need someone quicker on his feet. Someone younger. Diego, perhaps.”

  “Occupied elsewhere,” he wheezed.

  “Up and let’s go, then,” I said. “We’re eager to see where you are holding your prayer meeting tonight. I’m sure it’s a rousing one.”

  The action had me gasping, or perhaps it was the excitement, and I neglected to use the wire to whisper a few reassuring words in Robles’ shell-like ear. That omission proved crucial, but I was on the move, and it’s best to keep rolling when you are rolling. I aligned the muzzle of the Ruger on Bracknall’s sweating forehead, then directed the barrel down the stairs. He understood. We shuffled down the steps, the three of us close as if we’d been in a phone booth. We reached the metal door. I twisted Bracknall’s right hand against his wrist in a punishing hold that lacked only quick pressure for permanent damage. That did it. He hit on the correct script instantly, tapping out a coded knock.

  The door swung to, and I put him through in a rush, going for the Mexican who’d opened it. On the fly, I saw the guard was trouble. He’d a Remington 870 pump shotgun slung barrel floorward in the South African carry. An expert.

  He caught Bracknall’s left elbow, flung him sprawling away, ignored the Ruger, flashed the Remington off his shoulder and slashed it upward. The butt kicked my face, doing in my nose with a blaze of pain, throwing me backward. My blood sprayed. I licked at it as I went down, reacting like an animal, trying to get some of the coppery juice back inside my body. My hand cramped on the butt of the Ruger as I rolled, tumbling into his legs and clubbing at a knee. Steel on the patella. That’s hellish pain, but he simply stifled a grunt and pivoted with the blow. That unbalanced me totally. I collapsed forward, feeling the hard coolness of polished concrete slap my left palm, crunching the knuckles of my right hand between the gun and the floor. That unhinged my grip. The Ruger whished across the floor, beyond diving range. Bracknall righted himself and scooped it up. My jacket was hanging open and he saw my shoulder-holstered Colt. He took that, too, stuck it in his belt. I stayed where I was, puffing like a dog, staring down a dark hole where twelve-gauge buckshot waited, eager for me whenever the Mexican wanted.

  I smelled antiseptic and alcohol. It took me back to the hospital room where my mother had died. To the narrow ceiling, to the sweat-blotted bed sheets, to the Irish wind beating at the windows. To the tobacco smell of my father’s clothes as he sat there impatiently, waiting for the event so he could go get a glass and a cigarette. Beyond the shotgun muzzle, Rhea’s voice spoke, aimed at the space behind me and vibrating with good cheer.

  “Daly, it’s so great to see you.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  We were too late for Diego, though in any case we weren’t much of a rescue party. When I made it to my feet, the shotgun following me, I could see three people—Rhea, Dr. Aguilara, and a nurse—scattered around two hospital beds, and Diego on one of those beds. His centuries-old Indian face poked above his stark sheet, and his eyes were already glazing as death began to overtake him. Aguilara was done with him.

  The man in the next bed had been rolled on his side to expose his back to Aguilara’s surgical touch. A clean rip, cross-hatched with stitching, cut the skin above the man’s hip. A bit of blood dripped from the rip, but most of it had been wiped away. That was Dr. Aguilara all over. An efficient physician, he had no difficulty disposing of blood, of cleaning up. Given time, he would clean up after Diego’s body, too, but right now he was most concerned with his real patient. And I could see why. The man’s face, slack from anesthetic sleep, was turned toward me, and I recognized it from the surveillance photos I’d seen when the Border Narcotics Force was in full swing. Carlos Hurtado-Montez, drug trafficker.

  The good doctor’s kind eyes were tired, and his latex-covered hands were covered with scarlet dew. The nurse—the old Hispanic lady from Rhea’s funeral—dabbed at his forehead with a sponge. Even at six paces, I noted his sweat was spiced with cologne. His shoulders sat low with the effects of his work. Hard work, but rewarding. Or at least it would be if Hurtado-Montez had access to his fat narco-wallet in Mexico. As drug runners go, he wasn’t widely known, but he was vicious, given to burying informers to the neck and running wild dogs at their heads. The doctor and nurse wore surgical masks, but Rhea hadn’t bothered. Rank has its privileges, I thought.

  I could feel Daly at my elbow, sense her tension. A bloody lot of good her space aliens would do her now, or her trust, or her efforts to show Rhea was a lovely human. I suppose Diego, as he slid down to his final sleep, was better off. They’d banged some anesthetic into him along with the killer drugs, so he was going off innocent of what was happening. Not so Daly.

  Rhea wasn’t going to admit anything, though. It wasn’t like her. She swept around the table, made straight for Daly and hugged her.

  “What a mess,” Rhea whispered into Daly’s ear, as if she’d left a dress on the floor. “I didn’t want it to be this way with us, after all this time. When I met you, I wanted it to be perfect. Can you forgive me?”

  “Ricki, Ricki, Ricki,” Daly mumbled, reverting to the name she’d known, to the person she’d known—the long-lost sister who was warm and helpful and wild enough to be everything Daly would never be. “What’s happening, Ricki? What’s this?”

  I could see Rhea�
�s face glowing over her shoulder with that peculiar sympathy she could call on when needed.

  “Just an operation.” Rhea patted her. “We do them sometimes, and I was assisting Dr. Aguilara. There were some difficulties, and we had to rush, but it’s over now. Let’s go and talk.”

  Rhea began to urge Daly toward the door, and looked at me with moist eyes. What a tragedy. Things hadn’t worked out. She’d wanted things perfect for me, too. A clean getaway for her, an empty bag for me. Now she was going to have to leave me to the tender mercies of the shotgun. Tears for poor Callan. What a dashing rascal he was before the twelve-gauge redecorated him. What a joke. A great laugh rose in me, shook my shoulders and roared out of my mouth. I bent to slap my thighs as if I couldn’t control myself, and got my mouth next to the hidden microphone on my chest.

  “One murder tonight, and I’m on the menu, too,” I said, gasping in an agony of hilarity, broadcasting to Robles out on his desert knoll. “Give me a few last words. Say a Rosary, or just a Hail Mary.” I was babbling, not giving a damn. “If you’ve got it, give me the Extreme Unction. Oil and prayer, that’s what I need. Give me the Catholic pay-off for a lifetime of guilt. I’ve earned it, haven’t I?”

  At my words, Daly seized Rhea’s elbow, saying, “They’re not going to kill him, are they?”

  Daly still thought it was “they” doing the job, and not Rhea. Good. Perhaps that would save her.

  “Can’t you abandon the dramatics for once?” Rhea said to me, aggrieved. “You’re frightening Daly.”

  How long would it take for the cavalry to arrive? I wasn’t hopeful. Even if Robles had put out the shout, it would be a half hour before the Pinal County Sheriff’s flying squad could assemble, and the first responders would take time to negotiate the highway and the desert, then they’d chew things over before making a rush. Long distances and rough ground: to those who wanted to live a long time, Arizona offered difficulties. Well, I could at least tell Robles what we were facing.

  “I’m frightening myself, love,” I said. “Here you’ve slaughtered this young man. Carved a kidney out of him. And packed it into this narco-killer, who no doubt was diseased in the urinary department. It puts me in mind of the hacked-up corpses that recently began littering the land. You’ve been making the organs dance, with villains paying the piper. Roughly $125,000 for a kidney on the international black market, I’ve heard. But the marketers don’t murder to get one. That’s bad behavior.”

  Rhea looked upset as my oration hit the mark.

  “You were sailing smoothly for a while, but Mauricio Valdez would have sunk the mother ship. Slaughtered as spookily as all the others, so ignorant people might think he was dissected by aliens or gobbled by a chupacabra. But the cops don’t believe in such things. They came around asking about him, didn’t they? They hadn’t connected you to organ robbing, but I would have. He was the link I needed to firm up the story, to rocket it out to the readers of the Phoenix Scribe. That would have put the Maricopa County Attorney on the jump and assured you of a good long stretch. Or a date with a needle. So you had to die, and damn quick.”

  Rhea couldn’t know I was arguing to a one-man jury out there on the wind-swept desert. But she produced an impromptu defense anyway, brushing aside Mauricio Valdez and going straight to the cockeyed justification.

  “You ignorant bastard,” she said. “This is a clinic. We don’t kill people, we save them. And we need money to keep a clinic going, to serve the needs of undocumented people. If we do a few extraordinary surgeries to keep us funded, what’s the harm?”

  I could tell a better story than that with a weasel in my throat.

  “Oh, and you give wonderful service, too,” I said. “What do you tell these south-of-the-border slime crawlers? That you’ll smuggle them in for high-tech hospital care? Exactly, for I know you. They expect lab tests, the best instruments, real doctors and nurses. And what do they get? A dash of chloroform, a kitchen knife, a washed-up surgeon and an old woman without a sniff of a nursing degree. A bloody charade.”

  Rhea couldn’t resist a good fight. Fighting had been our favorite pastime when we’d been together, it made the love better.

  “Dr. Aguilara is a fine surgeon,” she said, rapping out the words. “And we get all the prep work done in Phoenix. It’s underground service, but it’s excellent. For people who can’t come here legally, we offer the best.”

  A lovely commercial. I started chuckling again. How could I not? The criminal mind doesn’t know itself. How can you stand arse-deep in blood and prate about saving humanity? My guffaws blatted the air and my eyes blurred with tears of mirth. I wiped my eyes. And I recalled a laugh Rhea and I once had together, when we’d watched a black-and-white terrier chasing its tail. Round and round he went on the green grass of a Scottsdale park, deadly serious, just like us. We’d roared until the tears came. And then we’d wiped each other’s eyes and made sweet love.

  Did Rhea remember? Oh, I doubted it. But never count out the sentiment. Suddenly she issued a smile, just a small one: a slight twist of the mouth, a glow in the eyes. It hardly touched her face, but it was full-on charming. Don’t talk to me about the Mona Lisa. I thought of awaking in the fresh Arizona morning before the heat comes up, and that smile hovering in the air before me like a blessing. I stood stock still, my laughter over without the noticing, and my brain ready for whatever came next. Then Rhea’s smile passed and it was time to get back to work. She didn’t have to say a word. Her change of mood was enough. The shotgun man raised his instrument and caressed the trigger. He and Rhea weren’t going to wait for Daly to leave. That meant Daly would have to be leaving, too.

  So I took it, at least. But just at that moment there was a great clattering on the stairway, the door bashed back, and there stood “Handsome Dan” Robles. The flush of concern was washing across his face and he was clutching his Glock semiautomatic pistol and thrusting it out as if it meant something. Our hero. Pitiful. The shotgun man leveled at him, Bracknall drew down on him with his .357, and Rhea uncorked a Beretta from the region of her fine waist.

  My preference was for Robles to instantly go down shooting. At least that would give us a chance. And he might have, he had guts. But he didn’t get the chance. Daly ran for him and clutched him like a life preserver. Suddenly, he had one arm around her, the other trying to control his gun, his face down in her hair. It was hopeless. I sighed and looked around for the rescue party. Perhaps those other deputies had defied the laws of time and space and were already here. Not a bit of it. Robles had abandoned strategy, rushed in without back-up. Excellent. Now we could all cancel our balance of days and eat a late dinner of buckshot.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I suppose I shouldn’t have expected better. I’d constructed this mad plan, and it was my fault if I had no real help. For one thing, I hadn’t put the newspaper in the picture. I know, I know. Halvorson would have torpedoed my escapade and Frye would have gone round-eyed. But there are ways of getting the word out so you have some protection. Newspapers still have plenty of cowboys in the rank-and-file who are willing to “accidentally” stumble across a situation to bail a reporter’s bottom out of boiling water. Photographers, the shock troops, have been known to carry guns. I could have put those shooters on call. I could have alerted the police reporters, who have the ear of the garda. I could have clued the copy desk.

  But I hadn’t done any of it. Instead, I’d placed all my faith on a lovesick deputy.

  God bless him, he was trying to be professional.

  “Lay down your weapons!” he commanded.

  This had no effect at all on the shotgun man, Rhea or Bracknall.

  “Drop them!”

  But Rhea slid to her right, causing a distraction. The shotgun man leaned into his weapon as if readying a blast. And Bracknall sidestepped past me, roared down on Robles, and whacked his gun wrist with a blow that must have numbed it to the core.
The deputy’s Glock popped from his hand. It bumped and jiggled on the floor, came to rest. Game, set and match.

  Robles now had nothing to prevent him from giving Daly a two-arm clutch to reassure her, and this he did.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Back-up’s on the way. We’ll be drinking coffee in Florence in an hour.”

  Back-up’s on the way. Good luck, given the distance they’d have to cover and the time that would take, but Daly gave Handsome Dan a scorching look of absolute trust.

  Now it was up to the people with the guns, and they all were on the prod. The dynamics of these situations are interesting. The agenda’s right there, as if God had pinned it on a corkboard, but someone has to make the first move. Who would do so? The Mexican took a step and aligned on Robles, who was wearing the uniform. Bracknall thumbed back the hammer of his Ruger with that crack-crack that puts the piece on the single-action hair-trigger. Rhea stayed where she was, with a Beretta coddled in her delicate hand. The execution order was hers by right, but now that she had things under control, she looked distracted. Her eyes were on Daly and Robles. She seemed . . . not troubled . . . but fascinated. I thought of her Giaconda-plus smile.

  “So, Daly,” she said. “You’ve found a man.” Her tone was curious. “You always said, ‘a good man.’ Is that what he is?”

  “Yes,” said Daly, her head against Robles’ chest. “The kind we talked about.”

  “I didn’t talk about it.”

  “Because you’d been hurt. But I knew what you wanted. Just like me.”

  “You think we’re alike.”

  “We’re sisters.”

  This, against the gun muzzles and blood and death. Rhea seemed to hesitate.

  “A long way from Chicago.”

  “Not that far,” Daly said, her eyes closed.

  Perhaps Rhea was flying around inside Daly’s head with angel wings, gripping a scepter or a peacock feather instead of a Beretta. But my eyes were open, and what I saw was the Mexican. His right elbow was lifting the shotgun and the muscles in the back of his right hand were drawing up. In microseconds, he was going to take out Daly and Robles. And what was Rhea doing? God is my witness, she was now looking at me. And in the ironic perking of her lips I could see a return engagement of that Mona Lisa moment. My own lips twitched in a smile to meet hers, and I was looking so hard that all my other senses faded away, the room disappeared and all I knew were Rhea’s eyes and Rhea’s lips and Rhea’s smile.