The Right Eye of God

by Bacon Thorn

  What happened just minutes later was as though a finger of lightning had reached out of the bright blue Mexican sky. Had Lazlo Peñas been six feet closer, and had he not thrown himself backward toward Navarre when he glimpsed the deadly “pineapples” in the air, he, too, would have been one of the casualties of the primed grenades. They exploded in the midst of the clustered agents and their twenty or so prisoners.

  Not all of them died, but those who did not perish from the blast were desperately injured. The survivors in handcuffs were afraid for their lives. And wearily, a shaken and white-faced Peñas had radioed Siempre Bombito to confirm that ambulances for the dead, copters to lift the wounded, and a heavily armed ground team to guard the trucks were on their way.

  Turning his dust-caked, sweating face to Navarre, Peñas, in a voice that was cold as ice, said, “Who threw those grenades? I want that mother—I want him badly. Whoever he is must have thrown from the corrals. He’s got to be in there. He can’t have gone far.”

  Hastily, Navarre reviewed in his mind the geography of the corrals that Colorado had explained to him earlier. He told Peñas what he was thinking.

  Peñas grasped the idea at once. With five of the bulls gone from their pens, a man could easily make his way through the empty stalls, skirt the corral end of the tunnel, slide over the outer stone wall, and disappear.

  “Just the two of us will go. I’ll take the plaza side,” Peñas whispered, “you take this one, and we’ll work toward the tunnel. Perhaps we can trap him between us. If you see him first, for God’s sake, be careful, Thomas. He may have another grenade. You can be damned sure he’s armed. Don’t forget the missing dogs. Shoot them on sight. I want a clean slate, no loose ends. Good luck! I’ll find you if we’re separated.”

  Navarre did not need to be warned by Peñas that the canine killers had to be eliminated. He was convinced that his new friend, the Mexican policeman, did not fully understand the savage capability of the surviving dogs. He underestimated how dangerous they were and how sharp was their intelligence. After all, had he not been exposed in the desert to their ferocious tenacity on the trail of human targets? Navarre was also quite sure the dogs, acting on some signal, would find their way into the bullring. There was another matter Navarre had not confided to Peñas. It was his strong feeling that among the runaway dogs there was one reincarnation of the black he had blinded in the desert and Yuma had killed with her captured rattler. Navarre still had vivid memories of the hound whose intense determination to kill him on the steps leading to the primitive desert cave had touched an ancient core of fear so deep and underlying that he’d almost lost the strength to move. He’d never mentioned his paralyzing moment to Yuma or, later, to Peñas. He had tried to pretend his weakness had not happened. But he recognized in himself the victims who had given in to the breathtaking terror of killer dogs that robbed them of the will to resist.

  He did not believe it was foolish or superstitious of him to think that a brother from the same litter or a prototype of the brute that had died from snake venom was one of the escaped dogs. With a sinking feeling and a haunting sense of despair, he was convinced his foreboding was like a prediction of violence. He was going to have to kill the monster again!

  Navarre had crept stealthily into a small, deserted stall and come to an upraised gate. Opposite the hanging gate was a square, black hole, one of the entrances to the bull’s tunnel. The gate should be closed, Navarre thought, for the fifth bull, now still lunging at the unfurled muleta in the arena, had exited into the darkness from his semilit chiquero. The four gates in the other chiqueros he had investigated had been firmly shut, blocking reentry.

  Had the grenade thrower heard him coming and ducked into the tunnel, taking temporary refuge, sure of being protected by the black gloom inside? As he stared into the darkness Navarre’s boots were rooted in the old straw, scattered dust, and hard clay. He remembered with a quick, sickening fright the words of his murdered friend, Colorado: “The sun does not warm the poor in heart.”

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  As he broke the phone connection with Peñas, Siempre Bombito was gratified to learn the Black Hawk had been destroyed and disturbed to learn a few attack dogs had escaped. The news stirred his recollection of his meeting with his chief two days earlier. So much had happened since then, and much of it had been predicted by the man whose solemn features always reminded him of Benito Juárez, the half Indian who had broken the rule of French imperialists in Mexico.

  He’d been surprised two days ago at the pensión when he was drawn aside by Peñas and instructed tersely to make his way to a certain booth in a small restaurant unfrequented by members of the federal police. He was not to reveal his destination to his associates and never to disclose what he learned under any circumstances.

  Peñas was waiting when Bombito arrived and was silent for almost a minute after the man slid into the booth across from him. Then in a voice that seemed to promise a revelation of great wisdom, Peñas said, “There is a Spanish proverb I adjure you to remember: It is not wise to stir the rice though it sticks in the pot.”

  Having made this cryptic statement, Peñas spoke softly in a subdued voice. What he revealed was of such an astonishing nature that Bombito was struck with a bewildering sense of rage, betrayal, and disbelief. But he knew that Lazlo Peñas did not lie, nor dream up fabrications. Bombito was speechless, unable to ask his chief why he had divulged his terrible secret to him alone.

  Peñas waited; Bombito was still in shock. He needed a few moments to resign himself to the deceit he had learned about.

  Then, Peñas said finally, “I chose you because I do not think you will stir the rice.”

  Next, Peñas explained that when Leon Abruzza’s widow had asked him to come visit her he had complied, certain that the subject she wished to discuss was information vital to the plot to kill Felipe Calderón.

  Peñas halted, his face twisted in an expression of sour sympathy for the woman. “It’s hard,” he said “to hate a woman who is plain, insecure all of her life, clinging to a weak man who never challenged his illusions about himself. She is not a sturdy woman or very smart or even clever. She admitted that she was grateful for Leon’s forbearance—that was the word she used. Even though she was shrewd enough to understand his need to be important and how money could make him feel that way, she knew he’d betrayed us long before he paid with his life.”

  Peñas stared at his hands, clasped together like pale veined flowers. “I knew what she was going to offer in return for my guarantee of Leon’s pension and death benefits. She was like a child holding a found treasure that doesn’t belong to her. She was counting on my charity to make his black book the cost of the bargain. And I did. And dear God, I’m glad.

  “But poor fool, he could have used that book to save himself, or at least negotiated with it.

  “Someday I’ll let you read the names in that book. Some of them are men you and I have trusted for years. We can’t prove their complicity with Nuños, but we will get rid of them, and him. The last thing we need is a scandal to undermine the president if we save his life.

  “Now you’ve heard it all. But I have an idea how we can counteract the dogs if they do get into the arena, with minimum damage to the fans. Much of it depends on you.”

  Though his recollection of his conversation with the boss was still fresh on his mind, Bombito scrutinized the arena, the bleachers, the matador on the sands flirting with death, and the president and his party about four hundred feet away. When he swept the rows about twenty feet below him with his binoculars, he was startled to spot a wolflike dog ascending the concrete steps above the open tunnel where the horses entered the arena during the corrida. The dog was staring fixedly at somebody several steps above him. That was the moment when Bombito started running and jumping down the steps.

  There was a stark, controlled savageness about the animal, a quivering intensity and rigid concentration that frightened Bombit
o so deeply he was afraid he would be too late to act in time.

  The dog’s fur coat was gray and glossy, and his sharp black eyes were set in a patch of darker hair. His nose was long and his head molded in the classic modified triangle of ancient hunters that emphasized his intelligence. His long body narrowed from his broad shoulders to his hindquarters and bushy tail.

  The thrill of fear that had paled Bombito’s face and made him catch his breath suddenly sharpened when he realized there was a white imprint in bold letters on the dark green K-9 vest that covered the dog’s body. It spelled out the word policía. When the meaning of the word flashed in Bombito’s mind, he realized that probably nearly everybody in the bullring was aware that el presidente was sitting in his exclusive box among the spectators. Bullfight fans would not be alarmed, because guard dogs like the one ascending the steps would be on duty to protect the president from any of the crazies who occupied every crowd. The police and their dogs especially would be alert this day for any danger from the narcos who wanted Felipe Calderón dead. Everybody knew about the threat. Hell, it was in all the newspapers!

  Bombito saw one of the fans, Francisco Alvarez, touch his wife on her shoulder and point to the dog. Her eyes widened; she had never seen a police dog before. To her he looked mean and vicious.

  Not two minutes later Martha Alvarez screamed and her eyes bulged as she heard the dog snarl and saw him spring into the air with his front paws extended and his mouth open, the skin pulled back exposing his sharp teeth. He smashed into a man with a shotgun and ripped open his throat before he could raise his weapon.

  Barely hesitating, the gray jumped over the fallen man and rushed up the steps. He got no more than thirty feet when his front legs were blown out from under him by Bombito, who fired point blank at the dog with his .12-gauge repeating shotgun that delivered heavy slugs in a narrow spray. Bombito was amazed to see the wounded animal, incredibly, pushing himself forward on his bloody stumps and chest with his powerful hind legs. From ten feet away Bombito blew the dog’s head apart. Then he ordered the three agents who had come rushing down behind him to cover the dead agent with a blanket, call for an emergency team to carry him away, remove the carcass of the dog, and finally, to sand the steps to soak up the blood.

  Bombito turned to the men and women who had risen to their feet, gaping, shocked, and uncertain, and said to them calmly and cheerfully, waving them down, “It’s all over. The dog made a mistake. There’s no danger to you. There’s cold beer on the house for anybody who wants some.”

  As he ran up the steps to his position above the horse’s tunnel, Bombito knew his promise that the danger was past was not true. How many other dogs were on their way to infiltrate the arena? He had learned only briefly from Peñas twenty minutes earlier about the escape of a few survivors from the football field.

  The canine counterforce held in a room off the horse tunnel below Bombito was a last-minute idea proposed by Peñas to Bombito during their secret meeting.

  Bombito had arranged for the dogs through a close friend, Frank Menendez, who was a true animal trainer. He had never trusted Major Girado Gil, describing him as “a lying fraud” whose job in the army had been arranged by friends of his wife’s father, a sly and prosperous Mexican businessman. Gil’s chief asset was influence peddling for the benefit of his father-in-law and his cronies with army buyers. His boastful knowledge of the tactical and practical advantage of guard dogs was exaggerated. He had never once been out on a tracking hunt for wanted men with a K-9 crew.

  When Bombito reached Menendez by phone and explained how he’d killed the dog that attacked one of his agents, Menendez was eager to release his own dogs into the horse tunnel, where they’d spring into action against any intruders. There were about thirty of them.

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  The pageantry of the cavalry and the sticks had passed in the great arena and now the closing drama of the matador and his blade was drawing thunderous ovations from the crowd as Thomas Navarre crept stealthily through the maze of feedlots into a small, deserted stall where a few cows munched stolidly. They were there to gentle vicious bulls. There were piles of bundled hay, bins to hold grain, and a small lot where soiled hay was gathered from pens in a smelly mound to be picked up and hauled away. There were gates to be opened and closed; stalls for horses that pulled the heavy rakes that smoothed the footprints and furrows in the sand after each bullfight. A blacksmith’s cold fire, heavy anvil, and walls hanging with horseshoes were deserted now. Next to them was a shed with a harness maker’s bench and wall with shelves holding all the tools and leather paraphernalia needed to mend saddles and equine necessities.

  Navarre hesitated in front of the door into the black corridor. Had the grenade thrower heard him coming and ducked into the tunnel, taking temporary refuge, sure of being protected by the thick gloom inside? Standing outside with the Beretta in his hand, he was reluctant to expose himself momentarily against the light that penetrated the opening. It made a pool of brightness on the straw-matted floor in the surrounding black of the long, silent tunnel. Some instinct told him that his sudden hunch was right—in the blind maw lurked the desperate fugitive who must have killed Colorado and the others with the grenades. He was trapped in the safety of darkness, hiding and waiting for the opportunity to break out. Was he at this moment holding another grenade, ready to jerk the pin and throw it at the figure who stepped into the swath of light piercing the gloom?

  That was the moment when Navarre saw in his mind the dead Zopilote, grease on his face, crouching in the sand like an evil, dried-up toad and pointing at Navarre with a black, long-nailed finger: “I see you, man. By the balls you have lost, I swear a truth on you. A woman with two mouths will speak for a dead one. You will straddle a mountain and dance in the air. In a black tunnel you will meet death.”

  He couldn’t deny that every word of the curse of the Zopilote had come true. And now he was facing the last prediction like a man being drawn by his own fear toward the edge of the precipice that terrified him. He stood for a moment longer, knowing what his decision was going to be and hating himself for not having the courage to overrule the idea that it would be cowardice for him to turn away. He didn’t have a choice.

  Navarre could feel little beads of moisture on the palms of his hands and his heartbeat quickened as he sucked in his stomach and plunged, diving and twisting, toward the floor of the tunnel, rolling once and coming to a jarring stop against the opposite wall. Shakily, he crouched, then pushed himself erect and moved quickly from the partial light of the entryway into the thicker blackness.

  There was an ancient odor of rotted straw and old manure in the tunnel, and a trapped, sweet-sour smell of animal sweat mingled with the rank, dry dust of unlighted years, moldering and seeping like yellowed whispers through the heavy planks of the horn-scarred walls. The dirt floor was hard as rock beneath his feet from the trampling hooves of a thousand toros. As he crept forward, hugging the rough, gouged walls, he stepped into fresh bull droppings; the sharp, musty odor stung his nostrils.

  He froze as he sensed more than saw the large shape of a man crouching in the thicker darkness near the floor of the tunnel some thirty feet away. And suddenly—call it a hunch or an evil warning—he knew with a high, cold singing in his heart that the man who waited in the darkness was Pappe Nuños. He stood rigidly, holding his breath and listening for any regular sound of inhaling and exhaling.

  For almost a full minute he kept the air in his lungs, and then let it out slowly, almost soundlessly. He tried to recall exactly how wide the tunnel was, and estimated eight feet. He heard then an almost inaudible sigh and knew infallibly that it was Nuños who shared the tunnel with him. And he knew the stocky Mexican could not have missed seeing him tumble through the patch of light. He had moved too quickly to be identified or for Nuños to get a shot off. The man was helpless to roll a grenade, if he had one, for the concussion area was too small for his own safety.

>   When Navarre decided what he must do, he realized the best and the worst of his life was over, and he didn’t care. Now, all the hate he had stored up for Nuños had arrived at a final reckoning in a dirty black tunnel half a block long. And he felt a primitive kind of terrible joy knowing that this was going to end here in darkness and in evil.

  When he whispered, “Nuños,” the tunnel made a hollow mockery of his challenge, and he stepped quickly across the floor, flattening his back against the opposite wall.

  “Navarre?” came back the reply, louder, incredulous, and shaken. And before the distorted echo of Nuños’s uncertainty died, Navarre heard a quick scrabbling movement away from him, and then the tunnel rang with a sharp ka-rang. Navarre saw the redness flash and heard the bullet rip splinters in the wooden planks where he had stood and whiz off with an angry, waspish sound.

  For a moment only, he hesitated, then, aiming the barrel of his gun so that it pointed like an extension of his straightened arm, he fired three times in a close pattern into the stinking darkness where Nuños’s shot had blossomed light. Below the sounds came back rapid fat slaps on wet skin, and he heard a sharp grunt, a convulsive gasp, and a sucking of air.

  Shaking from the intensity of his flooding anger, Navarre inched down the tunnel, pressing against the wall opposite Nuños. When he reached the point across from where Nuños should have been, he could distinguish nothing. Too late, he heard the quick shuffling in front of him, and, before he could lift the gun, Nuños, like a crouching, blacker shadow cleaving from the darkness, pounced. The gun was knocked away, and Navarre felt the man’s strong hands close on his throat.

  He tried to wrench away, smelling rancid dung in the slippery grip of the fingers, curdling the vestigial odor of some heavy cologne on his prickly jowls. The breathing close to his ear was labored, urgent, desperate. But there was strength and an odd, high, lilting sound in Nuños’s throaty voice. “I’m glad it was you who came after me, Navarre.”