“Come again?” Rose said. “I pulled strings to help a guy who’s not even your friend? Hey, Kid, I aint in the habit of doing big-time favors for just anybody.”
“I know. Like I said, my friend’s grateful. Me too.”
“I get it,” Sam said. “This friend of yours…it’s a girl, right?”
If I said no, I’d have to invent some guy on the spot, and I wasn’t up to it. “How’d you guess?” I said, smiling big. But now I was going to have to give them some of it.
“When a guy does something for no good reason, there’s usually a girl,” Sam said.
“It’s kind of a rough story,” I said.
LQ and Brando had started for the door but paused and gave me a curious look at Rose’s mention of some guy in the hospital. On hearing about the girl, they exchanged a look and sat down on the small sofa. Sam lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. Rose tapped his fingers on the desktop.
Except for saying they were cousins and that I’d met them at a neighborhood party and taken a shine to them—especially her, I said, waggling my eyebrows to show what a casual thing it had been—I told it pretty much as Rocha had told it to me. Why not? But I didn’t clutter it up with a lot of detail. I said it turned out she’d been kidnapped in Mexico by some rich guy and finally got away from him and came to Galveston with Rocha. They were staying with friends of theirs named Avila. Last night a couple of goons who must’ve been the rich guy’s muscle busted into the house and grabbed her. They killed the Avilas—dead witnesses tell no tales—and tried to kill Rocha too but only left him in bad need of a doctor. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, he probably wouldn’t have made it. Or if Rose hadn’t got him in the hospital without the police getting involved.
LQ and Brando were watching me closely.
“I gave the cops a call,” I said. “They’re probably at the scene right now, but they won’t get much. It’s a neighborhood where nobody ever sees anything, even if they do. Anyway, I figure those two are over the border by now.”
“With the girl,” Rose said.
“I guess,” I said.
“Some story, Kid,” Sam said. “You weren’t kidding about rough. You knew the people who got it?”
“Yeah. Nice folk.”
“Jeez, tough break for them.”
“Goes to show you can’t be too careful who you take in under your roof,” LQ said. “Come on, Ramon, I could use a drink.” They got up and went out.
I started to get up too, but Rose said, “Hold on a sec, Kid,” and waved me back down in my chair.
“I better go press the flesh,” Sam said. “Make sure everybody’s drinking up and staying happy.” Then he was gone too.
Rose studied me over the flame of his lighter as he fired up a smoke. “This girl…she’s kind of special, huh?”
“I wouldn’t say that. We went out a coupla times.”
“How long you say you know her?”
“Not long. Didn’t really get to know her very well.”
“How long’s not long?”
“Well…a couple of days.” I grinned to show him how funny I thought it was.
He wasn’t buying it. “They say it don’t take long, sometimes—to get to know somebody pretty good, I mean.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.”
I stood up.
“So what you got in mind now?” he said.
“Do a little drinking with LQ and Brando, celebrate the bonus. Thanks a lot, by the way.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Kid. Only reason you aint already on the way to the border is you needed cash.”
I had made up my mind to go after her the minute Rocha told me what happened—but I’d wanted to avoid any talk about it. There wasn’t anything to talk about.
“I gotta get going,” I said.
“Let me tell you something about women, Jimmy.”
“I have to go,” I said. I felt like I had a snake twisting around inside me.
“A woman’s never the reason. It’s always something else. Always. The important thing is to know what it really is.”
“All I know is, he’s not gonna decide how it goes.”
He stared at me without expression for a second—and then showed that smile that was nothing but teeth.
“Well hell, Kid…now you’re making sense.”
L Q and Brando fell in beside me as I made my way through the Studio crowd and headed for the elevator. LQ had his hands in his pockets and was twirling a toothpick between his teeth. Mr. Nonchalance. Some guy not watching where he was going bumped hard into Brando and said “Hey Jack—” and started to turn. And then he caught Ray’s look and shut up and moved on.
We rode down in a packed elevator. When we got out on the street I said I’d see them later and started around to the parking lot to get my valise out of the Terraplane. The train station was close enough to walk to.
They came along behind me, LQ whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I asked where they thought they were going.
“Name it,” LQ said.
“I got something to tend to that’s nothing to do with business. See you guys later.”
“Sure enough will, because we’re coming,” LQ said. “Won’t take but a minute to get our bags.”
“I just told you it’s not a business thing. It doesn’t concern you guys.”
“Bullshit,” Brando said.
“Goddamn it, it’s personal, I’m telling you—”
“We’re partners,” Brando said.
“Business or personal,” LQ said around his toothpick. “In sunshine or in rain.”
A s soon as we got on the move the snake inside me settled down, but it felt coiled and ready. We left Galveston well before dawn, then grabbed the first westbound connection out of Houston. The day broke red behind us as we pulled out of the station. I’d called Rose from the Galveston depot and said LQ and Brando were going with me. He said he’d figured they would be and that their visas would be ready too when we got to the border.
The train made stops at several small stations along the way and finally pulled into San Antonio a little before noon. It stopped there long enough for us to get out and have a café lunch rather than eat in the dining car. It was the first time I’d been to San Antone since the night two years before when Rose and I had gone speeding out of it in the Cadillac, leaving dead men in the street.
We hadn’t talked much on the train, every man pretty much keeping to his own thoughts, but once the waitress served us our steak sandwiches and slaw, Brando said, “So how long we got to wait before hearing about this girl?”
I said she was Mexican and her name was Daniela, she was damn pretty and spoke good English. I told about meeting her at the Avilas’ after the fight with Rocha but said I’d first seen her on New Year’s Eve when she went by in front of us in a beat-to-hell Model T.
“Hellfire, I remember that!” LQ said. “She was a finelooking chiquita. You young rascal—you track her down or what?”
“No. Just luck.”
Brando wanted to know what chiquita we were talking about, how come he didn’t know about her.
“If you’d pull your head out of your ass every once in a while,” LQ said, “you might catch some of what’s going on.”
“Catch this,” Brando said.
I told about having breakfast with her at the Steam Whistle and then about our swim in the gulf that night. The part about the hammerhead knocked them for a loop.
“I’ve heard tell about Black Tom since I was a kid,” LQ said, “but I never believed he was no damn twenty-foot long. I still don’t.”
“Well I didn’t put a measuring tape on it but it was like a train going by.”
“Goddamn, man!” Brando said. “She saved your ass.”
“I’m not ashamed to admit it.”
LQ said, “She took a kick at that thing, no lie?”
“No lie.”
“That’s some girl.”
“Yeah.”
“Then what?”
“I took her home.”
“Well now,” LQ said, cutting a look at Brando, “what I can’t help but wonder is, did you and this ladyfriend have the pleasure of, ah, doing the deed, shall we say?”
“Yeah,” Brando said. “That’s what I can’t help but wonder too.”
“None of your goddamn business, either of you.”
They grinned right back at me. “Thought so,” LQ said.
We got back aboard and the train rolled out of San Antone. For a while we just stared out the window at the changing landscape. The grass thinned out and the trees got scrubbier and there was more dust and rock. The sky enlarged as the country opened up.
Then LQ said, “So what’s the plan, Kid? I mean, we just gonna go knock on his door and ask him to hand her over, or what?”
“I’m not asking him a damn thing,” I said.
They both smiled.
“So? What’s the plan then?” LQ said.
“Don’t know yet. A guy’s meeting us at the border with the kind of information we need for a plan.”
“This rich guy,” Brando said, “he’s bound to have some muscle on the payroll, right? Maybe more guys like the two he sent to snatch her?”
I said I didn’t know, but Daniela had told Rocha the place had cattle, so the guy had plenty of ranch hands for sure.
“Cowboys, shit,” LQ said. “If all he’s got is cowboys, I don’t care if he got a hundred. I never met a cowboy any damn good with a gun.”
“Jimmy here’s a cowboy,” Brando said.
“Not since we known him he aint,” LQ said.
T hat afternoon we reached the border at Del Rio. A dapper and neatly barbered Mexican named Lalo Calderón was at the station to greet us. He spoke good English and wore a white suit, dark sunglasses, and a mustache as thin as a line of ink. He smelled strongly of a flowery perfume. My face had healed up pretty well except for the shiner, and he gave it a look but made no remark on it. The only thing Rose had told me about him was that he was “a former associate” and very efficient. He now owned an import company with offices in Del Rio, Laredo, and San Antonio. I figured Rose hadn’t told him anything more than necessary about us.
We went into a café and took a table in a front corner by the window and ordered a round of beers. Calderón handed me our passports—mine in the name of Michael Chavez, LQ’s and Brando’s identifying them as George Thompson and Leon Buscar. He also provided a roadmap with a route marked for us in red ink all the way from Villa Acuña to a small town called Escalón, and a folded sheet of paper with a hand-drawn map of the way from Escalón to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, a distance noted in pencil as about twenty miles. He said the estate was deeded to one César Calveras Dogal. On another sheet of paper was a diagram of the hacienda itself, with several notations in Spanish.
“What about police?” I said.
“The nearest station of police is in Jiménez. That is fifty miles from Escalón. At Las Cadenas, Calveras is the police.”
He gave us directions to Sanchez’s filling station across the river in Villa Acuña and said a car would be waiting for us there. He stood up and apologized that he could not stay longer but he had another pressing engagement. He hadn’t touched his beer except to toast our health.
“Good luck with your business, gentlemen.”
He went out and crossed the street to an idling Chrysler waiting at the curb and got into the backseat and the car took him away.
“You get a good whiff of that fella?” Brando said. “About like a whorehouse parlor.”
I t was an altogether different smell when we walked over the bridge and caught the Rio Grande’s ripe stink of shit and dead things.
“Fall in there and you’re like to die of poisoning or some godawful disease before you can even drown,” LQ said.
The town was a tangle of rutted dirt streets flanking a large plaza. Dogs and chickens dodged rattling burro carts and honking jalopies and grinding trucks. We went past an open marketplace full of hagglers and snarling with flies, hung with the butchered carcasses of calves and pigs and what Brando was absolutely sure was a dog. One stall held a row of skinned cowheads. The air was hazed with the smoke of cooking fires. Street vendors hawked sticks of meatstrips roasted on charcoal braziers. The sidewalks were full of squatting old women beggars in black rebozos.
“We damn sure aint in Galveston no more,” LQ said. “Sweet Baby Jesus, look at this goddamn place.”
“Wish all I had to do was look at it and not smell it,” Brando said.
The Sanchez filling station consisted of a small tin-roofed garage and two gasoline pumps. The ground all around the building was black and pungent with drained motor oil, littered with torn tires and rusted car frames and half-gutted engine blocks. Sanchez was a little guy in filthy overalls. I told him my name was Chavez and he said yes, yes, he had been expecting us. We followed him around to the back of the garage and there stood a black Hudson sedan. Gleaming from a fresh washing, it was the cleanest-looking thing in town.
Sanchez beckoned us to the rear of the car, saying, “Hay una sorpresa para ustedes en el portaequipaje.”
He worked the key in the trunk lock and took a squinting look all around, then raised the lid and gestured grandly into the trunk. It contained a pair of lever-action Winchester ten-gauge shotguns and a huge rifle of a sort I’d never seen.
“Son of a bitch,” LQ said. “That’s a BAR.” He took out the weapon—and Sanchez had another nervous look around.
A Browning Automatic Rifle, LQ said, U.S. Army issue, .30-06 caliber, with a magazine holding twenty rounds. He said he’d fired one many a time during his army days. He detached the loaded magazine and showed us how the weapon’s action operated, then snapped the magazine back in place and worked the slide to chamber a round and then set the safety.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said, patting the rifle, “this here’s about half of any plan a man will ever need.”
There was also a shoulder-strap canvas packet holding five more loaded BAR magazines and a couple of cartons of ten-gauge shells.
I asked Sanchez who provided the weapons. He didn’t know, but Don Lalo had instructed him to be sure to show it to us. I told LQ and Brando what Sanchez said and LQ wondered how come Calderone would do us such a kindness.
“Rose is how come,” I said.
W e went into a restaurant and had chicken enchiladas and beer and fought off the flies while we ate our supper and studied the roadmap. La Hacienda de Las Cadenas wasn’t on the map but its approximate locale had been marked with an X and we figured its distance from Villa Acuña at roughly 400 road miles. The only town of size on our route was Monclova, which lay almost due south about 200 miles. The map showed only a few scattered placenames along the way—all of them little villages, the waiter had told us, and none with electricity. At Monclova we’d turn west into what looked like even rougher country.
“It’s nothing but desert for at least a hundred miles to either side of the damn road,” Brando said.
“I bet this here says ‘Middle of Nowhere,’” LQ said, tapping his finger on a blank portion of the map labeled BOLSON DE MAPIMÍ. Back on the YB I’d always heard that the Mapimí was one of the meanest deserts anywhere, but I didn’t see any reason to mention it just now. The last fifty miles or so of our route would take us through the south end of it.
We then studied the diagram of the rectangular hacienda compound. It was enclosed by high walls and marked as 250 yards deep and a quarter-mile wide, its length running east-west. Its only entryway was a double-doored gate in the center of the south wall. Directly under the gate description was a penciled note in Spanish saying that the gate was always open and posted with an armed guard. The driveway into the compound ran straight for about seventy-five yards to a big courtyard. The casa grande was on the far side of the courtyard and faced south toward the gate. Another notation said the servants’ quarters were on the lower floor, the family’s rooms on the
upper. There were various patios and small gardens all about the house, and a large garden directly behind it. Just past the big garden were a corral and a riding track, and, beyond them, a mesquite thicket that ran the length of the compound’s rear wall. An unbroken row of tiny penciled squares along the west wall was labeled as the peon living quarters. Over against the east wall, adjacent to the woods, a small square indicated the stable. A square at the southeast corner of the compound was the garage. Between them was the vaquero bunkhouse.
The way I saw it, everything depended on getting past the gate. If they were able to shut us out, the whole business could get pretty bitchy. Once we were inside the compound, all we had to do was get to the house, get Daniela, and then get out again.
“Sounds so damn simple,” LQ said, “I can see why you were ready to do it by yourself.”
“Unless the guy’s got a bunch of pistoleros, I figure there won’t be that much to it,” I said.
“That’s the thing,” Brando said. “What if he does have a bunch of pistoleros?”
“They might be smart enough not to argue with a BAR.”
“And if they aint smart enough?”
“Then we’ll play it any way we have to.”
They stared at me. Then Brando said, “That’s the plan?”
“You don’t have to have any part of it, either of you. You can cross back over the bridge and catch a train to Galveston.”
“You say that again I’m liable to take you up on it,” LQ said.
“You don’t have to have—”
“Go to hell, wiseguy,” LQ said.
“If anybody’s got a better plan,” I said, “I’m ready to hear it—as long as it doesn’t mean waiting. I’m not waiting.”
Brando blew out a breath and threw up his hands.
“The best plans are always simple,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”
Under the Skin Page 25