She stared at me.
Running through my high school Spanish, I searched for the word, finally coming up with one for the wrong type of oil but hoped it might get the meaning across. “Petróleo?”
Looking up at me, she pushed on the lid of the manger just a little, and I could see that it was hinged in the back.
“Gracias.”
I readjusted a few things and lifted the heavy top, revealing a compartment with more rags, and a cleaning kit with small hammer and sickle emblems pressed into the tin, along with two AK-47 type III assault rifles.
“Well, maybe Zapata was here after all.”
7
I let Adan lead with the assumption that he knew where he was going, which might’ve been an exercise in hopeful thinking. “Are we lost?”
He paused on the trail leading up from the rustic bridge at the river, just long enough to push his perfectly white hat back on his head and glance at me. “There is only one trail—why?”
“You didn’t look certain.”
“I’m on a mule, that alone makes me uncertain.”
The river was below us, the trail no more than two feet wide, and I watched as the mules carefully picked their way, sometimes crossing their hooves to stay on the narrow path. “And this is the good way, huh?”
He shrugged. “The best way to not get shot.”
Alonzo had elected discretion over valor and had decided to stay at the Orfanato with the others. “But the fastest way down is where the missing bridge is, near your place north of here?”
“Yes, but as you say, there is no bridge—at least not one you would want to cross.”
“Can you ford the stream up there?”
“It is dangerous this time of year.”
“But it can be done?”
He turned in the saddle to look at me. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, if things go as badly as I’m anticipating then we’re going to be looking for the fastest way out of there, and I just want to know if that’s it.”
“It is, but it’s dangerous.” We climbed up the steep trail to a switchback. “Can I ask you something, Sheriff?”
“Sure.”
“Why did it take you so long to load the mules?”
I thought about whether I wanted to tell him, whether I wanted to tell anyone, but figured that since he was the only one risking his life by coming along with me on this harebrained scheme, he had a right. “I’ll show you when we get to the rim of the canyon.”
It took another forty minutes, but we finally made the top, and I reined up the two mules beside him on the hard-packed dirt, then draping the lead over a dying white pine, I dismounted.
I moved to the pack mule, folded the canvas cloth aside, pulled one of the AKs out, and showed it to him. “Romanian MD-65 with the underfolder stock and thirty-round mags—there are two of them.”
He took one, holding it up and examining it. “Cuerno de Chivo, Horn of the Goat, that’s what the narcos call these things. It refers to the curve of the magazine.” He shook his head. “Now, what is she doing with something like this?”
“I thought maybe you might know.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Proximity.”
He shook his head. “I’ve never met her before.”
“Your sister referred to it as the Orfanato, the orphanage?”
He nodded. “The place is well known as a depository for unwanted children and has been since long before I was born.”
“Maybe the old woman doesn’t know these things were there. Who else do you know that has access to that place?”
“Difficult to say. Traffickers roam this area, as you saw.” He handed the assault rifle back to me. “They could belong to anyone.”
“You don’t think this is how she makes her money then?”
“No, I don’t think so, but these days who knows?”
I placed the weapon back in the pack bag, careful to cover it up. “There were also Spam cans of ammo, 122-grain, full metal jacket, 20 rounds a box/32 boxes/640 rounds per can—1,920 rounds.”
“You brought all of them?”
“He did.” I patted the pack mule, stroking his rump. “Do you know how to operate an AK?”
“Yes, do you?” He smiled as I resecured the pack with a few knots. “Then this is a windfall.”
“I suppose.” I looked at him. “When I was heading down here, a friend gave me some advice. He said to not trust anybody—the police, military, anybody.”
Adan swung a leg up on the horn and turned completely toward me. “Good advice.”
I studied him long enough to enforce the question. “So I’m going to ask you once, just once . . . Can I trust you?”
A smile crept onto his lips, and he waited before answering. “Let me ask you a question in return. You saw the way the man Culpepper was looking at me in Torero when you distracted him by disassembling his weapon?” He leaned forward, still smiling. “If you hadn’t done that, do you think he would have killed me?”
I gave it actual thought. “Yep, I do.”
“When he attacked you later, do you think he would have killed you if my sister had not intervened?”
“Yep, I do.”
He turned back in the saddle and started off. “Then you have your answer.”
I supposed I did.
I climbed back on my mule, gigged her, and we were off. The terrain wasn’t getting any easier, and I was pretty glad to have the mules. We appeared to be above the tree line where only a few scrub pines and cactus pushed their way through the rocky rubble that rose in a straight incline toward the dark mountains on the horizon, chest-high creosote bushes stretching in front of us like a stunted and dead forest.
The sky was clear and the temperature hot as the sun rose above us, and I slipped my Ray-Bans over my eyes and settled in for the ride, thinking about what Culpepper had told us and about how I wanted to use that information.
Adan had listened as I’d questioned the man but had said nothing. I’d gotten a good idea of the place and even drawn up diagrams on a few sheets of thick paper from of all things, a Big Chief notebook. I thought about my friend Henry Standing Bear, and more than anything wished that he were here. This operation was his cup of tactical tea, the kind of thing he’d trained to do with the recon groups he’d worked with in Special Operations in Vietnam. But at the moment he was back on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation standing guard over Lola.
I contemplated dragging the notebook out, but until we got there and I saw the lay of the land myself, I didn’t see any reason to commit to a plan of action. It was frustrating, but if Culpepper was lying through his loosened teeth, then we were back to square one.
As Adan had said, the Kalashnikovs were a windfall, but I didn’t trust luck, good or bad—as the old Marine saying goes, luck can’t replace preparation and a good strategy.
All I wanted was Cady back.
The trail straightened up the shelf leading through a pass that looked like a blocked-in area, surrounded on three sides by mountain steeps, the perfect place for a monastery or a fortress. There was a fork, the first I’d seen, when we’d topped the chasm where the river flowed. “Where’s that go?”
It had been more than three hours since either of us had spoken, so it was only natural that Adan was slow turning in the saddle, finally cocking an elbow on his cantle. “Excuse me?”
I pointed to the right. “That trail there, where does it go?’
He turned the other way to look. “To my ranch, eventually.”
Glancing around, I wasn’t assured by the options. “If we beat a hasty retreat, there isn’t going to be much of an opportunity to cover our tracks.”
He laughed mirthlessly. “I wouldn’t worry about it. If we come back this way they will assume we’ve taken the trail back to t
he Orfanato we took to get here.”
I studied the road less traveled. “Why?”
“Because only a madman would go that way. I told you, we blew up the bridge, and the one that remains is barely passable and then you have to cross the desert.”
“If we return the way we came, and they’re following us—what will happen to the old woman and the children at the Orfanato?”
He reined in his mule and studied the ground as I pulled up beside him. “They will kill them all, which is why it is important to cut the head off the snake so that it can no longer bite.”
“Bidarte.”
“Yes.” His eyes came up to mine. “You may be here for your daughter, but I am here to kill a man before he kills my land. There used to be an unwritten law that if you were not part of the drug trade you were safe, but that is no longer the case.” He glanced around. “Sooner or later his people will come for me and mine, and that is something I cannot allow. With a man like this you have two options—you either leave him to do as he wishes, or you kill him.”
“Why are you telling me this again?”
“Because the Seer is right, you should have killed Culpepper—why didn’t you?”
“It’s difficult to explain. I mean if it had been during the fight I would’ve if I’d had to, but with him incapacitated it just didn’t seem right. I’ve spent most of my life making judgments and living a moral code as much as I am able. I won’t kill anybody I don’t have to.”
“Like me, you were a soldier.”
“That’s different.”
He studied me some more. “You may have to learn.”
“Your sister hasn’t. She had the opportunity to shoot Culpepper in the face, but she didn’t.”
“He was valuable at that point, and she knew it.” He turned his mule and started off. “If you think my sister will not kill outright, you are a very foolish man.”
I sat there for a moment more and then started after him. The trail rounded a hill to the right where I could see the mountain village about a quarter of a mile below.
There was a single, round stone building a little closer, then a hillside leading down to a cluster of red roof-tiled buildings and a plaza where the main road ended. There was a larger building at the rear, its back pressed hard against the cliffs, that I assumed was Monasterio del Corazón Ardiente. As I’d figured, Estante del Diablo was a dead end, surrounded by rock precipices that dove two thousand feet—one way in, one way out.
I could see that metal towers had been erected in the town with work lights attached and even speakers. “The place has electricity?”
Adan shook his head. “Generators.”
I reached in my pocket and pulled out the diagrams I’d made from the information we’d gleaned from Culpepper, studied the outline, and compared it to the scene below.
Adan climbed off his mule. “We should move back and find a place to stake the animals.”
I moved my own mule from the edge toward an open area and nudged her next to a rock outcropping that looked familiar. I pulled the postcard from my shirt pocket and held it up. “Gemelos de Roca—must be the place.”
He nodded.
“Do you think they have patrols?”
He followed me and as I climbed off, sorted through one of the pack bags and pulled out an impressive pair of M19 Bell & Howell binoculars. “No, the one thing we can rely on is their arrogance.”
While I unloaded the mules, he crept back to the edge overlooking Estante del Diablo. I glanced around, but this being the only area with any grass, I figured the mules wouldn’t wander far. I stacked the saddles near the rocks and began unpacking the large canvas bags, putting the contents into smaller piles.
When I finished, I brought a canteen over and joined Adan at the drop-off. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing. I see almost no movement. Things will pick up this evening when the festival begins.” He lowered the Vietnam-era binoculars and handed them to me. “That will be the time when we can approach, when there is cover.”
I could see a few people moving about but not many. “The building to the right is a sale barn?”
“Yes, the monastery used to be famous for their goats that produced milk and cheeses. Buyers used to come from all over the provinces.”
“I wonder what they use it for now?”
“I don’t know.” He studied the layout. “But I am sure your daughter will be in the monastery at the back.”
“Yep. It looks like the only way there would be to go behind the sale barn and along the cliffs at the rear.”
“There are walls.”
“Some, but that’s better than the main road and the plaza where we’re bound to get spotted before we can get in there.” I lowered the binoculars. “When will people be arriving for the festival?”
“All through the afternoon, I would imagine.”
I handed him the M19s and after one last glance at the mules, who were loitering and munching the strawlike grass, I lay back and pulled my hat over my face. “Let me know when things start hopping.”
* * *
—
“Does that look like a patrol to you?” I was pretty much awake before, but I was fully awake now that Adan had spoken.
“Where?” I snatched the hat from my face, rolled over, and looked in the direction he indicated; there were three armed men who had rounded the sale barn and then had stopped in an opening by the wall to smoke. The light was just beginning to fade, and there was a great deal more activity in the village, where vehicles of all stripes lined the sides of the approach road.
There was an older man in a cowboy hat and two younger men, practically teenagers, who were following what most certainly was the trail that led to the right and up the hillside toward us.
I glanced around at the lack of cover and realized that the precipice where we’d made the climb was at least a half mile away. “Well, hell.”
Adan followed my eyes. “Where can we go?”
“You can just continue on toward the monastery, but I’m going to be hard to explain.” I glanced at our pack animals. “And if there’s shooting, those mules are going to scatter like magpies.”
Adan followed me as I began gathering up the animals and pulling them in a line toward the trail about twenty yards from the rock outcropping. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to hobble them and then half cover myself over by those rocks with my hat over my face. When they get up here, you tell them that I started celebrating a little early and that you’re just waiting for me to sober up enough so that we can keep going.”
“What about the guns on the pack mule?”
“I’ll hide them behind the rocks.”
He glanced back down the trail where they would be coming. “And if they find them?”
I pulled Henry’s Bowie from the small of my back.
He nodded and began unloading the AKs from the inside canvas packs as I drew out a cotton blanket from the other side and draped it over my shoulders. “I’m thinking if they figure out I’m Anglo, they’re probably not going to go for the Bob Lilly thing up here, so don’t even try it.”
He nodded, carefully placing the rifles nearby in a small opening behind the rocks where they wouldn’t be seen. “I won’t, but what do we do if you have to shoot them?”
I settled in and took a seat amid the rocks in what shade there was, pulled the blanket up around my face and settled my hat, the big knife held loosely. “We’ll cross that bridge after we burn it.” As an afterthought, I leaned forward and stuck a few fingers down my throat, heaving, but bringing nothing up.
Adan stood over me. “What are you doing?” Repeating the procedure, I brought up the breakfast the old woman had made for us, and the Doc jumped back.
Clearing my throat, I spat on the ground beside me. “One thing I
’ve learned in almost a half century in law enforcement—drunks puke, and it disinclines closer inspection.”
“Are you going to piss your pants next?”
I nodded, pulling my hat back over my face. “If need be.”
I listened as he joined the mules, pulled some personal items from the packs, and laid them on the ground with his own blanket.
We waited longer than I would’ve thought to hear their voices on the trail. Arguing as they approached, it was pretty obvious that stealth wasn’t part of their program, until they saw Adan and the mules and became silent.
“Hola.” Adan sounded annoyed, and I figured that was a good play. He commented on the weather as near as I could tell and asked them about their day. The older one did the talking, and he didn’t seem too suspicious until one of the younger men pointed at me.
Adan let loose with a stream of curses and then began complaining about his drunken companion, and even though I didn’t understand that much of it, I could tell the performance was at an Academy Award level.
The younger men stepped in closer and commented on the puke, whereupon Adan cursed again and the two began laughing.
The older one barked at them and then went back to asking Adan questions, which the Doc passed off pretty easily until one exchange that sounded a little sharp.
I tightened my grip on the stag-handled knife.
One of the teenagers had drifted over toward me and said something, and even with my limited vocabulary, I could tell he wanted to wake me up so he could watch me suffer. The older man approached, and it seemed as though the three of them were no more than ten feet away.
Adan said something again, but the response was dismissive. There was a brief conversation about hats among the three, and I saw the muzzle of an AK dip under the brim of mine.
Slowly lifting the knife under the blanket, I was getting ready to move just as a burst of automatic fire ripped the air like a thick sheet of satin being torn. Brushing my hat aside, I looked up as two of them fell, the third scrambling backward and tripping over me as I brought the butt of the Bowie against the back of his head.
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