Depth of Winter

by Craig Johnson

  I ignored the remark concerning me. “So the cartels know him?”

  “He knew them in a professional sense when he worked with the Intelligence Operation Center, but he is also the best doctor in the entire state, and in their business they sometimes have needed his skills. Lately they take care of their own with the twenty-cent cure.” She pointed her finger at me like a pistol, pulling the trigger finger before dropping the imaginary weapon. “Now they simply fear him. If he no longer has the power of life, he and his Rural Defensas have the power of death. We have lost many, yes, but they too have paid a terrible price. That is what I have learned over the years—there is no safety, there is only retribution.” She turned back to the sink. “And there is no end to that.”

  With deference for her words, I stood there a moment more and then walked toward the door, turning the knob and exiting into the long hallway that separated the rooms in the old hotel.

  I looked out the archways as I walked toward my room and could see someone smoking, standing in the street. It was Adan, and I decided to have a word with him. “Tell the sniper not to shoot, it’s only me.”

  “He knows that.” I joined him, and he pulled another cigar from his vest pocket and offered it to me.

  “I don’t smoke.” I took a few more steps forward, looking at the pig’s head. “I’m afraid I’ve upset your sister.”

  “Bianca is easily upset.”

  “She seems to think I’m here to lure you into helping me.”

  He shrugged.

  “I just want my daughter back.”

  He gestured toward the forbidding mountains. “And what do you suppose he wants?”

  “Me.”

  “And are you willing to make that sacrifice?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sound certain.”

  “I am.”

  He nodded and walked past me toward the macabre decoration at the center of the street. “They don’t start out that way.”

  I glanced at the boar. “Dead?”

  “Man-eaters.” He stuffed a hand in the pocket of his trousers and exhaled a thick cloud into the street. “I began my medical career going after a jaguar that was killing the people of my village south of here.”

  “Your medical career started with hunting jaguars?”

  “A man-eater is an animal that is compelled through stress of circumstance beyond its control to adopt a diet alien to it.”

  “We’re talking about jaguars?”

  “Among other things.” He took another puff. “The jaguar in question was a female and relatively young, but she was unfortunate enough to have encountered a porcupine that cost her an eye and fifty or so subcutaneous wounds in her muzzle and forearm. To the best of my surmise, she was lying in the high grass attempting to remove the quills with her teeth when a village woman decided to choose that particular patch of grass to gather fodder for her cows. The woman reached the area right beside the jaguar and the great cat reached out and struck her, breaking her neck in one swipe.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “Other than the blow to the head she was unmarked, still holding a sickle in one hand and a thicket of grass in the other.” He walked toward the center of the abandoned village and motioned for me to follow as he strolled and smoked. “This jaguar limped away almost two miles before finding a hollow on the underside of a fallen tree. Two days later, a man was cutting firewood from this log when she attacked again and killed him. She struck him in the back, and this time since she was starving, she decided to at least taste him. Now, human beings are not the jaguar’s normal diet, but she was able to sate her hunger. The next day she killed again, this time deliberately and without provocation, and went on to kill twenty more people—before I accounted for her.”

  “You said your medical career started with killing this jaguar?”

  “I cut her open to see if I could find the source of the evil, but there was nothing there.” He puffed on the cigar to keep it lit. “As I said, I was young, but I became an expert in killing killers, a difficult task in that the hunted are most usually hunters themselves and develop acute skills, which can make them formidable.”

  “And men?”

  He turned and looked at me. “Are the worst, for they sometimes kill for no other reason than they can. I have never seen one like the one you are hunting. When the marijuana crops crashed, he made them make the white rocks from chemicals.”

  “Crack.”

  “It makes them crazier, if that’s possible. Your enemy, he was bad when he arrived here but the competition to be the worst has overtaken him, and he has become a monster among monsters.” Adan glanced around. “Sooner or later he will come for my home, simply because he wishes to take it, and that I cannot allow.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Kill him, just as I have killed so many killers before.” He held the cigar out, blowing away the ash, and then puffed life into the ember at the end of the cigar. “I have developed my own police force in the area, a group called the Rural Defensas, which enables me to hold these men in check.”

  “Your sister mentioned them.”

  “A militia, part-time, I arm and train them myself.” He gestured toward the lonely road. “Our first action was to dynamite the remains of the old bridge between us and the mountains. They have nothing there we want, and we have nothing here we wish to give them.”

  “A Mexican standoff?”

  He smiled. “If you will.”

  “Well, that would be your fight and not mine. I can’t allow you to—”

  “Allow me?”

  I thought about many of the things his sister had said. “I don’t mean any offense, but I wouldn’t want you to confuse the issues and attempt to do my work for me.”

  He nodded and smoked some more as we stood there with the boar’s head between us like he was a member of the party. “If this man Bidarte’s death satisfies both of our issues, who is to say that we shouldn’t work together?”

  “I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else.”

  He smiled, reaching out and touching the grisly prize. “This is not some movie, my friend. Bidarte has an army—a well-trained, well-armed battalion of killers who will do everything they can to stop you. If you face them alone, you will surely die or worse, and even though you are prepared for that, I doubt it will do your daughter any good.”

  “Nonetheless . . .”

  His hand stayed on the head between us. “This boar, I captured and raised him from his infancy. He was fifteen years old and weighed almost seven hundred pounds. He used to follow me everywhere I went. He was like family, but last week I knew it was time for him to go and I had to kill him. It was like that with the jaguar too, and will be like that with Bidarte. I have the feeling that with your arrival, his time has come, and he must now go.” He took one last puff on the cigar and then flicked it away a surprising distance, and I watched as it landed in the road where a small, red dot played over the thing before disappearing.

  Martínez turned and looked at me and smiled. “One of my men—we play this game every night.”

  4

  “I want to be a lawyer.”

  I paused with my fork halfway to my mouth. “Why?”

  My teenage daughter glanced at my wife, seated at the dining room table of the tiny rented house where we lived on my meager deputy’s salary. “I want to make a difference.”

  Martha studied me as I put the food in my mouth and chewed. They were ganging up on me, like they always did. “I thought you wanted to teach?”

  “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?”

  “You.” She smiled at my confusion. “You help people every day and that’s what I want to do. I could teach, but I’m not much of a nurturer.”

  I rested my fork on the blue willow dinnerware that had belon
ged to Martha’s mother. “Then what are you?”

  She continued smiling. “I’m a fighter, and that’s your fault.”

  I stared at the rough adobe interior and thought about how the Seer had said that I would probably hear things falling from the crack in the ceiling. He said there were two hundred and twenty-one species of scorpion in Mexico but only eight are poisonous enough to kill a man, but he wasn’t sure which ones they were or whether they were native to the area.

  Alonzo had suggested I sleep with my mouth shut.

  I lay there and saw at least three of the critters fall from the ceiling, but they disappeared into the shadows at the corners of the room. I thought about getting up, but then what? Break open the mescal and maybe steal the Cadillac? I felt a smug sense of satisfaction in that I hadn’t yet sunk to the point of drunken driving or grand theft auto.

  I rolled over thinking about my daughter and entertaining the option of running across the desert toward the destroyed bridge in my underwear, swimming the river, climbing the cliffs, finding Tomás Bidarte, and strangling him to death with my bare hands.

  Kicking off a scorpion that had fallen and hit the foot of my bed, I sat up when I heard voices outside. Creeping over to the French windows, I was careful not to make any noise, all the while attentive to what I was stepping on. I could see a group of men talking to Alonzo, all of them standing in the street near the ever-present boar head.

  He gestured in my direction and when the other men turned, I could see they were armed, one of them cradling a flashy-looking Kalashnikov rifle. Standing there holding the flimsy red curtain just slightly aside, I wished I’d continued studying Spanish in college as they talked and I only caught every fifteenth word.

  Alonzo pointed again, and the group began moving my way.

  I let go of the curtain, quickly shook the sheet, and slipping my hand under my pillow around my 1911, crawled back into bed.

  My cataract-ridden grandmother on my mother’s side had slept with an 1847 Colt Walker .44 revolver under her pillow. Back in the dirty thirties, a drifter had shown up looking for work. She had him pull some weeds and had fed him and had even allowed him to sleep in the barn, but when he’d shown up later that night at the foot of her bed with a butcher knife in his hand, she’d blown a .454-inch-diameter hole through him at over a thousand feet per second. My father, one of the bravest men I’ve ever known, said he wouldn’t go anywhere near their place after dark, even on a bet.

  Punching the safety off, I closed my eyes just enough so that I could appear asleep but still see the shadow of the terrace doors that led onto the portico.

  After a moment, one of the doors opened about a foot, and Alonzo looked in.

  I didn’t move, and he disappeared. I clutched the .45, ready to bring it out if need be, just as another individual poked his head in to look at me, then another, and finally the man with the Kalashnikov. I figured that if anybody was going to be doing the shooting it was going to be him, but the automatic rifle hung limp in his hand as he stood there and watched me sleep.

  Another scorpion fell from the ceiling—it landed on its back on the mattress about four inches from my arm. Unmoving, I watched as it flipped itself over. I still didn’t move and just lay there watching the man in the doorway watching me. After a moment, he gestured to his friends.

  After a few moments, I assume the activity lost its compelling qualities and the door quietly shut behind them. With my fist still wrapped around the Colt, I expected them to kick the door in at any minute and open fire, but they never did and I just lay there, waiting for nothing.

  The scorpion finally moved a quarter of an inch toward me. He was about two inches long, light brown, and held his wicked little tail at the ready.

  Quickly moving my arm, I used the barrel of the Colt to brush my bedmate from the mattress and listened as he hit the stone floor and skittered away. I punched the safety back on the 1911, and hoping to keep my mouth closed, I must’ve half fallen asleep.

  Eventually I gave up and yanked the sheets completely away, shook out my clothes and pulled up my jeans, shrugged on my shirt, and pulled on my socks, careful to empty out my boots as Martínez had instructed.

  I jammed the .45 into the holster at my back and picked up my book. The early morning light brightened the tops of the hills in the east, and I was thankful for the leftover cool of the night that I knew wouldn’t last.

  Stepping into the street, I felt like there should’ve been an Ennio Morricone soundtrack playing. This was a strange land for me—I was used to high desert, but this was the real thing and strangely enough I liked it.

  At least until the sun came up.

  I walked west, toward the crumbling mission and the adobe buildings that dotted the immediate vicinity and tried to think of what kind of town this must’ve been. Mining, probably, back when there was a bridge leading to the mountains. Lord knows you couldn’t grow much of anything around here with the exception of cactus.

  I heard music coming from the ruins of the mission—it was tinny and most likely from a radio. Angling in that direction, I could see the entire back of the building had collapsed and the only thing left was a tiled section that must’ve been part of the church’s interior.

  There was a large cable spool on which was a vintage, battery-powered radio playing heart-felt music, spare with one guitar and a man’s voice pleading Madre Mía. There were a few brightly painted folding chairs around the table and on one of them sat Bianca Martínez, smoking a cigarette and sipping coffee out of a mug she refilled from a carafe.

  “Hola.”

  She turned to glance at me. “Howdy.”

  Unsure of her response after last night, I stayed on my side of the broken wall. “This your morning spot?”

  She nodded. “Me and Radio Cañón, XEROK radio, one of the border-blaster stations in Juárez. Back in the day they used to advertise Car Collins Crazy Water Crystals, and baby chicks by mail, and would try to get their listeners to send in five dollars for a free autographed picture of Jesus Christ with eyes that glowed in the dark.”

  “Sounds lively.”

  “I listen religiously.” She stubbed out the cigarette on the corner of the table and then deposited the butt in an ashtray in the shape of a ceramic sombrero. “I like watching the sun hitting the top of the mountains. Besides, if I hang around the hotel everybody expects me to make them breakfast.”

  “I’d hide, too.”

  She gestured behind her. “The girls will be here in an hour or so, and they will be happy to make you something.”

  I looked toward the mountains where the rays were tickling the summits. “Not hungry.”

  She studied me and then nudged one of the other chairs with a sandaled foot. “Want some coffee?”

  I moved toward the lower section of the wall and stepped across, pulling out the chair and sitting alongside her so that I could also take in the view; I put the book on the table. She shoved her mug toward me, lifted the ceramic carafe, and poured me a steaming cup. I took a sip of the burnt but delicious brew. “I want to apologize for last night.”

  “No, I want to apologize. It is a very noble thing you are doing, and I was being selfish.”

  “Look, just so you know, I don’t have any intention of getting anyone hurt.”

  She took the mug back from me and shared a sip. “Besides yourself?”

  “Oh, there are a few others I want hurt, but that has nothing to do with you and yours.”

  She handed me back the mug. “How did you sleep?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Scorpions?”

  I nodded and sipped the coffee.

  “I don’t know why they put you in one of the lower rooms—I must’ve killed a hundred of those things in there.”

  “There were other dangerous things that showed up, too.” She turned to look at me. “Men
with weapons; Alonzo was speaking with them.”

  She thought about it. “A lot of people pass through and most of them are armed. Were they in a vehicle?”

  I continued to sip, thankful for the coffee. “I didn’t see or hear one, and there were no tracks in the road this morning.”

  “I will ask Alonzo when he gets up.” Her eyes landed on my book. “You are reading this?”

  “Off and on.”

  She smiled, placing an elbow on the makeshift table. “I miss books—tell me about it.”

  I thumbed the spine. “It’s a biography of a journalist and writer by the name of Ambrose Bierce. He wrote The Devil’s Dictionary and a famous short story, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.’” I glanced around. “He traveled here in Mexico during the big revolution and disappeared—no one ever heard from him again.”

  I sipped the last of the coffee. “He was a soldier in the Union Army’s Ninth Indiana Infantry in our Civil War, and he told about a battle at Brown’s Ferry. The Confederate forces attempted a counterattack at a railroad depot in a small town. Things didn’t go well for the Northern forces and they had to retreat, along with the Union teamsters who decided to abandon their wagon and their mule teams. Well, with all the cannon fire and explosions, the mules became terrified and stampeded through the Confederate lines. It was dark, and the Southerners, figuring they were being charged by a large number of enemy cavalry, broke and ran.” Unable to help myself, I began chuckling. “I guess Bierce wrote a report to Washington that recommended the heroic mules be promoted to horses—which might have signaled the end of his military career.”

  She laughed along with me, and then her eyes went back to the mountains and mine followed. The peaks carried a golden light that crept down on the ridges above the canyons like the wax from a melting candle, and it was hard to believe the place was a harbinger of evil.