The Right Eye of God

by Bacon Thorn

  Navarre backed farther into the darkness of the tienda and came to a halt against a row of stacked wooden Coca-Cola cartons. He removed one of the empty bottles and hefted it in his hand. He felt stupid for leaving Hebrano’s handgun in his hotel, but a bottle had been effective on one cop. Maybe it would work on another. The cop and Yuma seemed to be arguing. Suddenly, she seemed to shrink away from the man, and then was yanked forward. The rear door of the Chevrolet opened, and she was forced into the car. The door slammed behind her, and the man who had pushed her resumed his own seat in the front. The interior light blinked off as he closed his door.

  Navarre hesitated no longer. Cursing softly to himself for the sense of responsibility he felt toward the strong-headed woman, he stepped off the curb. Gripping the Coke bottle firmly, he crossed the street swiftly at an angle that brought him behind the green Chevy. He approached the driver in the darkness from the rear. He heard Yuma’s voice as he stepped lightly to the open driver’s window. “You’ve no right to hold me . . . I . . . Oh, my God!”

  Navarre pressed the narrow top of the Coke bottle urgently against the neck of the driver below his left ear. He felt him stiffen and said harshly, “I’ll blow your head off if you move. You too, jodido,” he said, aiming his voice at the man’s partner.

  “Don’t move, Ricky. He means it. For God’s sake, don’t move.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “What do you want?” the driver pleaded.

  “First, your partner’s gun. Tell him to take it out slowly. With his thumb and finger. And drop it out of the window.”

  “You heard him. Do it. Do it.”

  Navarre watched as the second cop reached across his midriff with his right hand and lifted an automatic pistol from the left hip holster. He held it between his thumb and forefinger, rolled down his window partially, and slid the weapon out. It clattered on the pavement.

  “Now,” Navarre said, his throat dry, his voice husky, “you take your gun and hand it to me by the handle. Don’t think. Do it.”

  “I’m doing it. Please be careful.”

  Navarre took the gun, a revolver, reversed it in his left hand, dropped the Coke bottle, and pressed the barrel of the revolver against the driver’s neck.

  “What was that?”

  “A Coke bottle.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Without relenting on the pressure, Navarre said quietly, “Yuma, get out of the car and get behind the wheel of the Fiat.”

  “You,” he said, speaking to the driver again with an emphatic nudge of the revolver, “give me your keys. Quickly.”

  The back door swung open, the interior light flooding the strained faces of the detectives, as Yuma slipped out of the car and shut the door behind her, blotting out the yellow glare again. Navarre took the offered keys and stepped away from the Chevy with the warning, “Stay where you are until we’re out of sight.” He knew the warning was superfluous when he said it.

  As he moved to go around the front of the Fiat, he heard the driver’s companion say to his partner disgustedly, “Estúpido, que te dejes engañar! Stupid, you’ve been tricked!” Thank God the trick had worked. Navarre tossed the keys into the darkness and slid into the Fiat next to Yuma, who had the motor running. She threw the car into gear and screamed away from the curb with a snarling growl from the motor. She turned the corner seven seconds later and headed straight out on a wide, dark street.

  “That was some stunt you pulled back there,” Yuma said breathlessly. “Which way do you want me to head?”

  “Toward Torreón until I can think of something better. Head for the main highway.”

  Navarre turned to look through the rear window. There was no pursuing car. Unless they had spare keys, the chagrined and disgruntled detectives in the green Chevy were going to be stationary for a long while until they found the ones Navarre threw away—unlikely—or until a radio call from them brought replacements. The same radio call would alert other cops that Navarre was now an armed fugitive accompanied by a willing female who had aided him in avoiding apprehension.

  Terrific! he thought. Gone, absolutely, was any chance of slipping unobtrusively out of the city and into contact with Lazlo Peñas. Even if they were fortunate enough to avoid a dangerous confrontation with the Chihuahua police, who would be swarming after them like maddened hornets, there was still the Policía Federal de Caminos, the highway patrol, to think about. It was not a cheerful thought.

  “I guess you’re wondering what I was doing at the church?” Yuma said.

  “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Navarre said.

  “Yeah, well, the friend I told you I was staying with is getting married. She asked me to be her bridesmaid. I was at the church earlier. I overheard one of the cops talking with Father Higinio. Asking about you. Higinio told the man that if you asked for sanctuary, the church would give it. That didn’t go down too well with the cop. That’s when my curiosity got the better of me. I went back to the church about an hour before you showed up like the Lone Ranger with your Coke bottle. That took some nerve.

  “The cop who pushed me in the car got suspicious when he saw me with Higinio on my second visit. I didn’t answer his questions the way he wanted. I guess I’d be in the hoosegow if it weren’t for you.”

  “You’d be better off there,” Navarre said impatiently. “You don’t know what kind of a mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “Why don’t you tell me,” Yuma said, expertly swinging the Fiat onto the bypass route that connected Highway 45 to Mexico City.

  Navarre started to tell her to take the first side road she came to when they both heard the sudden whoop de whoop of a siren, then flinched as the twin headlights of a police car swept the interior and glared past them. In a frenzy of darting, whirling, red-and-blue flashing blazes from its roof fixture, the vehicle swerved up on the highway from the shoulder of the road and roared after the Fiat.

  “Oh, shit!” Yuma said. “What’ll we do?”

  “Floor it,” Navarre ordered. “If we get caught, there’s no telling what’ll happen.”

  Yuma tromped on the accelerator, and the needle on the speedometer jumped from seventy to eighty-five, then moved to the one hundred mark and climbed higher. She braked carefully, the Fiat rocking slightly, as they saw the sudden car-light beams crisscrossing the highway ahead and, vaguely, the figures of grouped men with flashlights.

  The Fiat trembled as Yuma braked harder, the speed dropping to fifty, then forty. “What do we do, Thomas?” she asked and shivered.

  “Pull over. We can’t get through this, Yuma. I’m sorry . . . I . . .”

  “Oh, shut up, Thomas. I knew you were in trouble. It’s my fault I’m here. I’m sorry I was so stupid when we were together before.”

  The first man to reach the Fiat came on the run, a revolver held high in his right hand with the muzzle pointing upward. As Navarre got out of the car and waited with his hands raised, the revolver he had taken from the detective at his feet, he saw the man’s familiar face briefly—the pouched eyes in a gaunt frame, the bruise on his chin, the pencil-line mustache a thin smudge above the lips stretched tight with anger. Wordlessly, the lanky cop swung his gun fist at Navarre. Navarre moved to escape the wicked swing, but not fast enough. The barrel and trigger guard caught him, a heavy, glancing blow high on the forehead above his right eye. His knees crumpled. He reached out for something substantial to hold on to; there was nothing to support him and he fell.

  -

  * * *

  -

  When Navarre regained consciousness, he awoke to a splitting headache, a dry, cottony mouth, and a disturbing feeling of disorientation. It required a few moments for him to realize that he was imprisoned in a small, dingy room slightly below ground level. The one small, barred window looked out at a pleasant garden area. At that moment, he heard barking, deep-chested, fulsome sounds that came from large, mature dogs, and he knew that he must be at the farm in Duelos.

  The dir
ty cubicle in which he found himself, with its small cot, tiny sink, and medicine cabinet with a mirror insert, must be situated, he thought, in the basement of the main house. Disconcerting was the fact that the bright daylight outside the window indicated that several hours had passed. When Yuma stopped the car and he had been struck by the tall, mean-faced policeman, it had been midnight.

  Navarre pulled himself up from the cot and peered in the mirror at the wound in his forehead. The effort of standing made him slightly dizzy. He steadied himself and squinted at his bruised face. A square of gauze had been applied crookedly to the cut in his forehead where the policeman’s gun barrel had broken the skin. The wound, when he peeled back the bandage, was about an inch long, swollen, discolored, angry looking. He probed it gently with the tip of his finger and was grateful to discover that the break in the skin was shallow; it didn’t extend to the bone.

  Spots of dried blood decorated his face, and his right eyebrow was crusted over with blood that leaked from his wound and dried in the thick hairs. Replacing the gauze, Navarre turned on the faucet in the enameled sink and bathed his face with water from his cupped hands. He drank deeply from the faucet stream, feeling revived; the throbbing in his head was more tolerable. He dried his face on his shirtsleeves, and at that moment a noise outside the door to his room made him step back cautiously. He heard a key in the lock, and the man who entered with a drawn revolver was the same lanky cop, now in a dun-colored uniform, who had struck him the night before. The expression of malice on his long, sallow face when he took in the bruise on Navarre’s forehead was clear evidence that he was pleased with the effect of the blow he had delivered.

  “Hey, does the yanqui pendejo have a headache? Tough shit.”

  Curtly, he motioned Navarre with his revolver to step into the hall. He followed a menacing, silent guard who prodded Navarre viciously with the revolver up a half flight of stairs.

  The room he entered was a library. Leaning against the desk, Pappe Nuños waited until Navarre had been pushed into a chair facing him. A ponderous, bearish man, heavy in the shoulders, with a belly that bulged over the thick gun belt strapped around his middle, he was dressed in the same uniform he wore day after day, as if his unchanging attire was a direct expression of the steadfastness of his police authority: khaki pants, stuffed into calf-length rawhide boots, and a matching khaki shirt, with the dull gold police badge clipped to a reinforced breast pocket.

  Nuños was perched on the edge of a massive mahogany desk, behind which was a large portrait of a glowering mestizo. In the painting Navarre saw a younger version of the man facing him. As an angry youth, his mouth was partially hidden beneath the drooping black mustache. It was drawn up at the corners in a scowl. Aging had given more authority to the face and had settled deeper the lines of subtle cruelty. And faintly about Nuños, about his pudgy corpulence, there was an aura of secret sexuality. It was visible as a subtle, feminine flair in his long, thick eyelashes and in the tapered slimness of the fingers on his large hands.

  Navarre felt a familiar sick rising in him, the same vague and disturbing nostalgia, whenever he recalled the accident that had taken his wife from him. The menace in the man was as real and as palpable as the musky shaving lotion he used on his dark jowls.

  Though he took a thorough inventory of the American’s appearance—from his blood-flecked shirt front and crumpled jacket, to his drawn, bruised face, lopsided looking from the dirty, puffy bandage coming loose from the hair above his right eyebrow—the fat man said nothing. From the top of his desk he picked up a thin stack of four-by-five-inch photos, the kind taken with an ordinary cell phone, and dropped them into Navarre’s lap.

  His voice was casual, without accusation, almost cheerful, when he said, “You know, we’re not stupid, Navarre. Predicting where you’d go after you left the priest was not difficult. Doesn’t take a lot of imagination that you’d visit the whore. I’ll bet the priest told you where to find her. You’re careless with your money. You left a lot of it in her room. She repeated every word she could remember about your questions to her. So there’s nothing to hide. I’ve arranged the photos in sequence. They’re more effective that way.”

  Nuños fell silent, observing the change of expression in Navarre’s face as he examined the small photos.

  In a head and shoulders pose, Gracia Esparza was pictured naked, her breasts exposed. Her eyes stared out of the photos with heart-wrenching despair, imploringly, hopelessly, seeking relief from terror she knew would never end. In the first picture, Navarre could see the bruising along her jawline. In the second, the injury to her face was more visible, an alarming purple that spread from her right collarbone and ascended like a dark stain up her neck and into her chin. In the third photo, the young prostitute’s eyes were swollen shut and her nose was broken and flattened against her face; strings of blood ran into the corners of her mouth.

  Despite the sickness and guilt he felt, Navarre made himself examine the last photo, which showed Gracia Esparza with her head thrown back, exposing the gaping wound in her throat, a terrible semicircular cut from ear to ear that resembled a bizarre and bloody smile. The prophetic voice of the Zopilote shrieked in Navarre’s brain: “A woman with two mouths will speak for a dead one . . .”

  Never in his life had he been as sickened and revolted as he was by the punishment of Gracia Esparza. There were no words for his despair. He dropped the photos on the carpet at his feet, waiting for what he knew was coming.

  “You anticipate me,” Nuños said genially. “We’re both thinking of Miss Haynes, aren’t we?”

  There was no mistaking the intent behind the threat. Clear also to Navarre was the futility of attempting to overcome Nuños, or trying to escape. Esquivel, with his revolver drawn, lounged against a wall of the library. A silent, smaller man, who stood with a sort of inelegant swagger and a smirk of anticipation, supported a gun belt around his trim waist, and his fingers rested on the butt of the revolver. Any opportunity to break away would have to come after Nuños ended his interrogation. It was crucial now, absolutely imperative if he and Yuma were to survive to escape later, for him to submit. That meant swallowing the awful anger that almost made him choke, that threatened to rise and leap out of his eyes like daggers of hate.

  Deliberately, he gained time by working his throat, forcing down his bitterness, breathing purposely, deeply, to calm the adrenaline in his blood.

  He hoped, with his head bowed to hide his rage over the murder of Gracia, his attitude would be mistaken for surrender. But Nuños’s next words forced him to raise his eyes. “I like to see a person’s eyes when I’m talking to him. There, that’s better, Navarre.” Nuños smiled in an indulgent manner as if it was all right by him that Navarre had tried to hide his true feelings about the terrorized prostitute and the threat to Yuma.

  “Actually, you’re taking this a lot better than I thought you would, Navarre. The whore was pretty scared, and, of course, I think we captured her fright in the photos, don’t you?”

  Nuños didn’t pause for a comment from Navarre; he plunged ahead almost cheerfully, nodding his head in affirmation of his compliment to Navarre.

  “I really do respect courage, Navarre,” Nuños said with a serious frown. “Here you are up shit creek without a paddle, your canoe’s sinking, your future’s hopeless, and you’re trying to hide your feelings so you won’t give away how much you hate me and how scared you are deep down. But disguising your feelings is better than blubbering for mercy like your friend de la Garza did when we started on him with the cigarettes.”

  Navarre lifted his eyes, stared straight at Nuños, and said, unemotionally, “You’re a liar.”

  Nuños chuckled. “Yes, by God, I am. But you just confirmed your relationship to de la Garza, and that tells me a lot about why you came to Duelos.”

  Navarre shrugged. He had underestimated Nuños. He promised himself he would never make the same mistake again.

  “What is it you want to know?” Navarre
asked.

  In the next few minutes, Navarre tonelessly described what he knew about Maria Montrero, his meeting with Harry Abbeglen in New York, his decision to accept a blind assignment to return to Mexico and meet with Raldon de la Garza. For a moment Navarre fell silent, and when he spoke again, he said flatly with an authority he hoped was convincing, “Día de los Muertos is no longer a secret. Hebrano’s bishop has by now notified Lazlo Peñas of the murder of de la Garza. My failure to turn up at the church and the murder of a harmless prostitute will not escape investigation. Neither will the terrorizing of a harmless people. I think your assassination plan has raised suspicions. Too many people know about it and will connect it to you. Hiring a brujo to frighten the people in a small village to leave their homes will be discovered and traced to you. You can’t hide forever what’s going on here. I think you’ve miscalculated, and when they catch up with you, you’ll be hanged.”

  Uncertain if he had borrowed any time for Yuma Haynes and himself, Navarre stopped talking. Clear to him, however, was the fatal intention of Nuños. He was going to make absolutely certain that he and Yuma disappeared. If the desert, a big, lonely place, was his choice of where to murder two people and hide their bodies, then they might have a chance.

  Nuños smiled placidly at Navarre. He laced his fingers together across his belly and said, “You know absolutely nothing about Día de los Muertos. You’re bluffing, trying to elicit information you will never get or be in a position to pass on. As for your observation that Peñas may trace de la Garza to Duelos or learn about the old brujo, it is probably true, but unimportant. As for the whore, brutality is an occupational hazard. Within a few hours, Navarre, this place will be gone, burned to ashes, and the ashes burned. Not a trace of it nor any reminder of you or the woman, or Rodriguez, who is already dead, will remain. The assassination will happen, and Peñas can sift the soil till doomsday but he won’t find any answers here.” Nuños was falsely jovial when he stared directly at Navarre, held his eyes unwaveringly for a long moment, and said, “You should never have returned to Mexico, amigo.”