Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  The shot whacked my ears and rang inside my head. Her smile hadn’t changed, but her eyes had shifted. And then my own eyes moved and my hearing returned and the room rushed back to me, and a load of muscle and bone was thumping on the floor, and heavy metal was clinking and clanging around down there. I looked. It was the Mexican, and the back of his head was gushing blood. His shotgun was tangled in his hands. His eyes were looking into the next world. Dead as earth.

  “What the hell?” exclaimed Bracknall.

  I knew the answer, and for some reason I wasn’t surprised.

  “Rhea’s a lover herself,” I told him. “It’s just the sentiment got to her.”

  Daly extended a hand in Rhea’s direction but Rhea stood still. The gauzy expression left her lips. She swung the Beretta, not covering Bracknall, but re-taking command.

  “Sgt. Robles,” she said, “You two have ten seconds to get into the supply closet behind me. There’ll be a gun on the door, you won’t know how long. I’m taking Callan with me. If I see anyone behind me, I’ll kill him.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I love an adventure.”

  Robles gave Rhea a look, but he hustled Daly around us and into the closet. Rhea gestured abruptly at Aguilara and a nearby chair, and he hopped to it, jamming the chair under the doorknob. Robles and Daly were locked in, and it was me and Rhea for the open spaces. Bracknall, too, more’s the pity. Up we went, through the hotel proper and the lobby and out the front. Rhea hadn’t been puffing smoke about her plan to escape—the SUV outside was gassed and packed with a pile of duffel bags for light traveling. We were in—Rhea at the wheel and me in the passenger seat, with Bracknall’s Ruger nuzzling my ear as he leaned over from the rear—when I noticed a discrepancy in the escapees.

  “Where’s Dr. Aguilara?” I asked.

  “Somebody’s got to get eaten,” Rhea said. “Of course, he doesn’t believe that. I told him it was better if we split up.”

  Now there was the Rhea I knew. She almost spoiled it by putting her hands on me, but just as I felt their warmth, I realized she was only feeling inside my shirt for the hidden microphone. She ripped it free.

  “Robles never had great timing before, and I didn’t figure he’d suddenly gotten it.” She flipped the bug out the window. “If back-up’s on the way, it’ll have to do without your help.”

  She smiled again, but the smile wasn’t as fine as it had been before.

  “Aren’t you the sweetheart, then?” I said. “And I thought you’d gone soft.”

  Bracknall kept tapping my ear with the Ruger, hard enough to bruise.

  “I hate the shit you say,” he said. “I’d better not hear any more, or you’ll be looking up at dirt.”

  I reached up and flicked his gun hand, and he shrank back as if I’d scorched it with a hot poker. Then he jammed the pistol in hard to my head, but I managed to twist my neck enough to smile at him over it. “You’re always talking about death,” I said. “That’s because you fear it. Don’t worry, I won’t kill you just yet. I’m going to let you bang my head a while with your gun. But you only get so many blows.”

  Rhea laughed, jammed the accelerator and sent us bucketing over the washboard road. Then Bracknall really clouted me, so hard my skull should have splintered.

  “One,” I said.

  I have that hard donkey head, but Bracknall didn’t know that. He’d taken my punches and kicks so he thought the fearful thing about me is that I can hand out punishment. It isn’t. It’s that I can take it. He struck me again, harder than before, and my blood spurted out and drenched his gun and his fingers.

  “Two,” I said, grinning. “Well, your maximum isn’t two, is it now? You’re still alive. Is it three? Would you like to find out?”

  I could feel his fury seething behind me, but the gun did not come again. I damped my blood-weeping head with the sleeve of my coat and dismissed him from my mind. Rhea was making for the main highway. That would be the key point for me. Once on the freeway, they’d want speed, and they’d have no need for a bleeding Irishman. I’d get the dump in a roadside ditch. With luck, someone would put up a shrine with a cross, as the Hispanics do for those who die alone on the road. Crucecitas, they call those crosses. And the places they mark, descansos. Resting places. A thought struck me funny. Rhea’s descanso was a fraud, but she’d be awarding a real one to me. Let that be a lesson to you, I thought. Don’t mock the dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  We plunged into a long gully between two humps of desiccated river bank, and banged along a passage dark as a tiger’s bowel. It seemed we were in that trough forever, not knowing where we’d emerge. Now we did a half-turn, jumped on an upgrade and popped out under the stars. And when we did, we were splashed by headlights from at least three SUVs leaping towards us. Robles’ army. The jack-booted thugs!

  Startled, Rhea jerked the wheel, threw us into a power slide down a rock-studded arroyo. Even as I snatched the dashboard and held on for dear life, the amazement coursed through me. So Robles really had his compadres at his beck and call, and they’d made the rush. There was something to having friends, after all. I must try it some time. First, though, I had to keep my head from cracking the windshield. The night rushed past, our lights thrashed about on the landscape, my teeth snapped against each other like popping corn. We hopped from one bumped-up boulder to the next, the engine snarling and protesting, the undercarriage screeching. The right fender scooped a rip from the right bank. We half-pivoted as Rhea fought the wheel. The left front tire exploded and died, and we tipped that way, seesawing back and forth as Rhea gasped. In the mad show of brush, rock and tumbleweed flashing in our headlights, I searched wildly for a small tree, something strong enough to catch us, frail enough to rip apart and not destroy us. But all control left us just as a hulking paloverde squared on our front bumper. I closed my eyes as we went smash.

  I awoke in another world filled with the smell of oil and penetrated by pain. I shook my head and the aching between my ears went nuclear, my eyeballs bulged. Acid surged up my throat, carrying my dinner with it, but I choked it down again. I licked my lips, tried to make my insides settle. I seemed to be trapped in a metal closet with two moaning duffel bags. Dead silence outside, except I heard a hiss of steam. Then it came to me. A shattered vehicle, hissing from a fractured radiator.

  In the darkness I located Rhea’s cheek, caressed her hair. She was still issuing wounded, half-conscious sounds, but her face came alive at my touch, and I could feel her breath warming my fingers. I made to kiss her in the darkness, but my lips only grazed her forehead. Then Bracknall stirred in the back. I couldn’t see his gun, but it would be his first option. I fumbled for my door, slashed my hand on broken glass, jerked it away. I worked my feet up from under the crumpled dashboard, twisted my body around, kicked out with both feet. On the first try, I crashed glass. On the next, the door. It slapped open.

  I came out on uneven ground and staggered about. A few moments of that, as I tried to clear my head. Then, one after the other, I heard broken doors cranked out, feet shuffling on earth. My brain was giddy with the knocks I had taken, floating away on the spilt blood and the close encounter with Rhea. My head could handle a hard fist, but not a soft woman, and now I could hardly make my body work. I got my hands to my knees, braced myself and looked around. Two shapes in the darkness were limping about. Bracknall and Rhea. Both out. Both dazed. I began to think again, and looked back toward the highway. Where were the soldiers?

  I expected to see three sets of headlights tunneling the darkness up there but there were none, and the voices scratching the silence hundreds of yards away sounded hesitant and indistinct. Something was wrong. The incoming coppers should have considered this a horrid accident with injured victims who needed quick rescue, but they were holding their position, and suddenly I knew why. Robles had bashed his way out of the closet, made it to his radio, and put the wind up the
incoming troops. Hang and wait for me, he’d said. I’ll bring my sniper rifle.

  * * * *

  Bracknall came around first, of course. There was a mean resilience in him you had to admire. In the moonlight he loomed up beside me big as a locomotive.

  “You bastard,” he said. “You’ll never get another chance at me.”

  I leaned on my knees and laughed.

  “What the hell are you spouting?” I said. “You think I put us all in the ditch to erase your bloody existence? You’ve got a very high opinion of me. And of yourself. You ought to stick that gun up your ass and probe for your brain. Rhea lost control, that’s all.”

  I felt sick again, but not so sick I couldn’t think of words to keep him from shooting.

  “We’ve got a bit of hiking to do. Unless you’re ready to explain how you dressed out Diego like a slaughter steer. That would go over well with the Chamber of Commerce, now, wouldn’t it?”

  He spat. I was getting quite weary of his balls-up expressions. Where I came from you didn’t go around snorting before you shot a man. You did him quick and got your snout down into a pint of beer to start the forgetting process. All Bracknall was doing was giving me a chance to clear my head. If he thought I was going to let him perforate me without taking immediate action, he’d be greatly surprised. I leaned down to clutch some dirt to fling in his eyes, but before my fingers touched earth, Rhea came down on us.

  “Let’s go,” she said, getting more menace into those words than Bracknall could have injected into reciting the Malleus Maleficarum. He hesitated, flicking his gun at me, but she let him have the no-no. “They won’t worry about shooting you, but they won’t take a chance of shooting Callan. So he’s coming. You . . . I can take or leave.”

  She didn’t move the Beretta, but it showed Bracknall how he would be left. He shifted and started to walk. Then we were all scrambling down the long gully and out the end, over the night landscape clotted with the skeletons of spiny trees, predatory bushes and knife-carrying cactuses. In the superheated night, you could smell the desert primeval, the dryness of the place, its willingness to draw you down and mummify you as you sank.

  I couldn’t imagine what Rhea’s plan might be. Perhaps she had no real plan at all. An action player is like that. Just keep gunning, hope something will come up. We were still a half mile from the highway, so the immediate task was to get there, to give the deputies the slip. In fact, that might not prove difficult. There were probably no more than six deputies—not a lot to cover a patch of dark desert where guns are hiding. I glanced back at the skyline and saw lights bouncing along the road from the hotel. That would be Robles. Rhea’s head popped over her shoulder. She saw the lights, too. And she knew. Robles had the long, high-caliber reach. He was the one to fear.

  * * * *

  I was sweating right down to the ground, and I found it hard to run. My slick-soled shoes slipped on the hard pan, and my head was thundering and light at the same time, with the headache and the blood. The interstate slashed past us, still far enough away so the headlights winked like fireflies and the engines buzzed like wasps trapped under glass. Rhea was leading us at an angle. Trying, I supposed, to strike the highway to the south. The moon was yellow and heavy and the darkness clung to the ground about us, though you could look far off to the southeast and see Picacho Peak lit bright as Christmas.

  We rattled down a dry wash where the soft earth boiled up, slopping dust into my shoes. Over a rocky ridge, where cat’s claw bit into my pants. Through a cleft in an arroyo, with some sort of night creature bustling ahead, upset at our passage. Rhea was running on ahead like a champion—she’d always been sleek-muscled, a great one for loping off at speed in the early mornings, to build up the stamina and keep her breathing apparatus clean and supple. Always preparing for a good run, or for keeping one step ahead. Sharply tuned. Bracknall, on the other hand, was groaning behind me like a steam engine with a burst boiler. Too many corned beef sandwiches with Russian dressing late at night. Too many cigars. Always gassing his bowels with beer. He went ass-over-teakettle more than once, his Ruger clanging off the rocks when he fell, cursing like he was spitting out his lungs.

  Under a huge saguaro, Rhea stopped abruptly, her breath singing. Bracknall and I hit a hard skid and stopped, too, to see what she was about. We huffed, hands on our thighs, trying to control our lungs. When my ears stopped ringing and my brain cleared, I looked back, aligning my eyes with hers, and took note of what had caused her to stop. I heard a high canine yipping, muted by distance. Tracking dog. The deputies had come prepared. They wouldn’t be able to move fast in the darkness, but they would be able to move certainly.

  “Shit!” said Bracknall.

  We stood in a depression. The shapes of men moved about far off and above. The moon touched one of them, cut a sliver of brightness on the long instrument he held in his hands. He was only a tiny phantom a long way off, and I couldn’t see the set of the jaw, the polished smoothness of the movements, or hear the crackle of the starch in his uniform, but the gun told me what I needed to know. Robles was setting up cover for the dog handler and for the deputies coming after us. Darkness? No problem. The Starlight Scope would handle that. A chill twitched my spine. He wouldn’t take me, if he could avoid it, but bullets sometimes make no distinction.

  It was then that the plan occurred to me. I couldn’t wait for the situation to develop, I needed to set it up. Bracknall was my problem, had been all along. Once I’d dealt with him, I’d talk Rhea out of her gun. She’d made a concession, hadn’t she, letting Robles and Daly live, giving me the eye to know that she favored me still? An Irishman must not lose faith in his charm. If he does that, he might as well slide into the ground and pull the earth over him.

  “Let’s go,” I hissed at the both of them. “The dog will be on us before you know it. We must make it to the highway.”

  And I took off up the battered slope to my left, weaving in and out among the sandpaper bush and the desert scrub. I’d leaped at an opportune time. Rhea was still eyeing the distant search party, biting her lip. Bracknall was grunting with exertion. But he cursed me with all he could summon and crashed through a whipping paloverde. Coming after me, dead on. I zigged left, past a cholla cactus, giving it just enough room, knowing Bracknall wouldn’t. The jumping cholla stabbed him hard with its needles, springing loose a scream of rage. His keening cry split the night air, leaped out across the desert, a perfect guide for Robles’ sharp ears. I kept scrambling for the high ground, hearing Rhea’s feet whisking off to my right as she circled to intercept me, catch me between her and her compadre. Not that Bracknall was thinking strategy. No, he was furious now. And Robles was pricked to the alert. There was only one piece of the plan left for me to put in place.

  I jumped to the top of the ridge, looked wildly around as if considering what to do next, and Bracknall came on, cracking and popping brush. I looked down at the freeway, now only a hundred yards off, the wash of headlights down there throwing an intermittent but helpful backdrop to anyone with a slight advantage of rising ground. I knew Robles had that advantage. Enough for him, a former Marine sniper, though he’d need an excuse. I turned to Bracknall, stumbling as if I’d gone stupid from my blood loss, holding up a hand. He was gasping. His gun bobbed as he tried to line it up.

  “Got you now, piss bucket,” I said. “You’re all done. I’m on the jump, and you’ll never be able to catch me. They’ll drag your button-down ass to jail, slam your mug on the Local News page with your hair in your eyes. You’ll not make Businessman of the Year. More likely, Asshole of the Month.”

  Pride is a terrible thing. His breath whistled as the gun aligned, and his muscles shook, his lungs squeezing his chest in and out like a bellows. I laughed at him, and pivoted left. Gave him a chance anyway, but the bastard was a rotten shot.

  His bullet sparked out at me, jerked hard at the flying tail of my coat, scorched a hole thr
ough it. But there was no second shot, not from him. Far off, I heard a report, like a tin roof denting under a heavy foot. I was spinning, so I didn’t see the flash wink on the skyline, but I saw the result. As I came back around, Bracknall shook like a marionette in a giant’s grip. His limbs fluttered, his extremities flew all about, his gun sailed away. He made a half-turn, as if trying to maintain his balance, to keep himself on the earth. But he crumpled, robbed of breath and life and spirit. He fell, his head struck a bit of brush and stuck, and his body lay there contorted, like an illegal immigrant dealt a bad hand.

  I moved to him, turned him over. From his belt, I took my Colt.

  Then I looked around for Rhea, but couldn’t see her. She was gone, as if she had known my plan, had taken advantage of it. I set off at a lope, believing I knew the direction she’d taken. I couldn’t bear to think I didn’t.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  I made not for the highway, but for the rail tracks sweeping by only a few hundred yards away. I’d heard a train whistle far off, and instantly I’d known her intention. When that whistle thrilled through me, it was as if Daly were speaking in my ear, telling me once again that Rhea knew how to hop freights. I recognized the truth, saw a pattern in Rhea’s wild dash. I’d roamed this country enough with Robles, night and day, to note the movement of the trains. During the dark hours on certain grades, at desert crossings for the wild horses that roamed the country, the trains slowed for a look-out.