You had to give the guy an A for effort, if an F for brains. The bullets impacted uselessly against the van’s exterior with a series of dull thumps. Then the back doors flew open, and a fusillade of automatic gunfire threw the True Native backward off his bike.
Though not so far as to escape being barbecued semi-alive when its fuel tank exploded, seconds later.
By the time Fuentes righted the van, the Beemer had reversed course and was beating a full-throttled retreat. The remaining True Natives buffered the fleeing car, their six bikes arrayed around it in a loose horseshoe. Sitting behind one of them, holding on for dear life, was a young brunette.
“Who the fuck’s that girl? Fuentes, we gotta get her outta there.”
The cop didn’t seem to hear a word. “Here comes the fun part,” he announced, a note of glee nudging his voice into a higher register. He dropped his foot onto the accelerator, and the van leapt forward.
Nichols clutched his armrests as the jolt threw him back against his seat, then looked up to see the bikers pull automatic weapons of their own, twist backward on their rides, and take aim.
“Get down!” Nichols bellowed.
He fumbled to undo his seat belt, dropping to the floor just as the staccato volley of gunfire tore through the air, then turned and scrabbled for Cantwell, tried to pull her to him as the barrage continued, furious and terrible.
It took a good five seconds for Nichols’s eardrums to separate the trill of artillery from the trill of laughter. He raised his head and saw Fuentes cackling, hands ten-and-twoed, looking for all the world like he was captaining a goddamn RV on a family vacation.
“Hey, I appreciate the thought, Sheriff, but this is no time to give me a blow job.” He gave another chortle, reached down, and clapped Nichols on the shoulder. “We’re one hundred percent bulletproof, cabrón. That includes the windshield. Get up off your knees.”
Nichols hauled himself back into the seat. The bikers hadn’t gotten the message, were still tearing through reams of ammo as if they’d never heard that the definition of crazy was doing the same shit over and over and expecting the results to be different.
Watching the bullets fly at him without flinching was no easy adjustment. Cognitive dissonance like a motherfucker.
“Okay,” Fuentes decided. “Let’s see what this baby can do. Everybody hold on to your culos.”
As he spoke, the van sprang forward, bearing down on the bikers. Within seconds, they were close enough for Nichols to read the panic on their faces. The indecision. It was go-down-with-the-ship or live-to-fight-another-day time, and the True Natives quickly revealed themselves as pragmatists. Knowles raised his arm, gave a retreat signal, and all at once they peeled out, like a wave rolling back to sea. In five seconds they were specks on the horizon, gone as suddenly as they’d appeared, and the BMW was all alone.
At least the girl was safe.
“Hey, what’s the matter?” Fuentes called after them, rocking back and forth against his seat. “The party’s just getting started! That all you bitch-made banditos got?”
His eyes narrowed, and his narration dropped in pitch and volume.
“Guess it’s just you and me then, Luis. Me recuerdas, pendejo? You ready for a blast from the past?”
The BMW jagged left, then right. Fuentes shadowed each feint with gritted teeth, his face drained of fun. This was it. The moment he’d been waiting for, scheming to bring about.
There was nowhere for the car to go—it lacked the horses to get away, the finesse to elude. Besides which, the wheelman was clearly an amateur, no imagination on him whatsoever, and not a day’s training in evasive maneuvers. Probably de la Mar’s chauffeur, more accustomed to idling by the curb with a newspaper spread out across the wheel than handling high-speed getaways.
Well, thought Nichols, at least this will be his last.
Fuentes’s battering ram of a front spoiler was only inches from the BMW’s rear bumper. Nichols’s body tensed for the impact that was surely coming, unsure why the Mexican was drawing this out.
Especially when the True Natives could decide to bust a U-turn at any moment and rejoin the fight. Or rally up a few friends to change the odds. Any biker gang that rode strapped with machine pistols probably had plenty of bigger, badder shit stashed away, too. Not to mention plenty of restless amigos hunkered down over brewskis at the nearest roadside shithouse.
It was one hunch Nichols had no desire to confirm.
“What are you waiting for?” the sheriff demanded. “Force him off the road, already.”
Or don’t, he added mentally, reminding himself that this vigilante shit was nothing he approved of. Though the fact that he felt the need to point that out to himself certainly seemed to—
“Paciencia,” Fuentes replied stonily, disrupting an inner monologue Nichols was more than happy to consign to the trash heap. “I gotta do it careful, or I’ll flip his pinche car, and he’ll never know it was me.”
Nichols opened his mouth, but there was nothing to say. This whole thing was too far gone.
At least he was among the executioners now, and not the executees.
There was surprisingly little comfort to be found in that.
With supreme care, Fuentes edged up along the Beemer’s right side and gave it a slight nudge, spoiler-corner to taillight. But nothing was slight at this velocity, this weight. The smaller car yawed wildly, back half fishtailing until the front grille was nearly perpendicular to the van. The tinted windshield left everything to the imagination; Nichols could only picture the river of sweat pouring down the driver’s face as he tried to correct his course.
Very few motorists knew how to regain control of a vehicle in this situation. Nichols had scraped plenty who didn’t off the blacktop in his time on the force. The impulse was to overcorrect, to try to pull your ass back into line by jerking the wheel as far as possible in the other direction.
That impulse was dead wrong. Emphasis on the dead. It was how 90 percent of rollovers happened. A forensics guy named Kaplan, in town to write up a fatality report for some insurance company, had explained it all to him once over about twelve beers. Made Nichols swear never to set foot inside a Ford Explorer, come hell or high water.
This wasn’t exactly a textbook case, of course. When de la Mar’s driver overcorrected, Fuentes was right there, trying to impart another bump. Dude was no dynamics expert himself; he seemed to think a second tap would straighten the careening sedan, edge it off the road with a minimum of drama, and set up the face-to-face scenario he’d been jerking himself off to all these years.
When the second tap sent the BMW flipping through the air like a breeching whale instead, Fuentes looked as surprised as anybody.
Nichols watched it turn over once, twice, and suddenly an awful thought occurred to him.
The murderous Federale might not have been alone.
The world was full of innocents, and any one of them could have been inside that car.
CHAPTER 39
It was what they called a fever dream, more like an eyes-closed hallucination than a somnolent lacuna. Galvan hadn’t pulled the comforter up to his chin and doused the bedside reading lamp; his body had shut down in agony while some white-supremacist scumbag propane-torched his arm stump until the blood bubbled so he wouldn’t bleed to death.
Your unconscious mind functioned differently, under circumstances like that.
Jess was back in Ojos. Back under Ojos. He knew it instinctively, though his surroundings were indistinct, wreathed in murk and shadow. It was the smell. Death and decay invaded his nostrils with each breath, but they were cut with something else, something even more stomach-turning because it was so out of place.
Young life, vivid and vibrant. Fresh hot blood, coursing through supple flesh.
Young life, soon to be extinguished. Crimson spattering the ash-gray world.
/> Jess saw and smelled and felt it all at once, as if his senses had intensified and merged, and time had folded over on itself.
There was a girl here somewhere, and he had to save her. It was the why. It always had been.
For better or for worse.
Mostly worse.
He was walking, slowly and easily, through a narrow tunnel. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. He let his body lead the way.
There was no pain, no dehydration. No blistered skin, no loss of limb. In fact, Jess felt fantastic—full of strength, overbrimming with vitality, light and free.
After a moment, his consciousness expanded by a few degrees, like the rib cage when you inhaled deeply, and Jess took stock of himself and understood that it was a matter of addition by subtraction. The fear that had gripped him for every moment of the last year was gone. The ceaseless vigilance it demanded had disappeared, too; he was no less alert now, but that alertness was centered instead of jittery. Calm as the eye of a storm.
He turned left and saw a faint light, licking at the damp wall from within an unseen chamber. The smell of flesh, of life, radiated from it, and Jess followed.
That fear had governed him for far longer than the term of his imprisonment, Jess thought now, the epiphany blooming inside him like some dark flower. That fear had put him in prison, in deserts and border towns, in constant risk. It had been with him for as long as he could remember. He’d been throwing blind punches at it since he was a kid, enacting a series of rituals he didn’t even understand in an elaborate, instinctual attempt to keep it at bay. Moving so fast and so recklessly that nobody—not the fear, not his wife, not even Jess himself—could possibly catch up.
Wherever you go, there you are.
Now Jess reached the corridor’s end and turned to face the glow. Through a low, rounded doorway was a spider’s lair of a room, stacked high with books and lit by scores of candles. In the center of the web sat El Cucuy, his scarifying visage bent low over a leather-bound volume, his pure-white hair nearly touching the pages.
The girl was everywhere and nowhere at once—her presence suffusing the room, her form invisible. At first, he thought it was his daughter, but no. This energy could not be hers. It was older and deeper, suffused with misery and alive with fury.
An image of her filled Galvan’s mind’s eye, nudging all else aside. She was devastatingly gorgeous. Shockingly young. Clad in a floor-length dress that shimmered with jewels. A terrible wisdom played in a pair of eyes as bright and green as emeralds. As if she knew what fate awaited her.
As if she’d died a thousand times already, was resigned to die a thousand more.
Her hands moved to her chest, covered her heart.
Her lips moved, formed words, Galvan straining to hear. Unable. The message was for him—he knew it, the dream-logic unassailable. He reached out to her, not with his hands but with his consciousness. Tried to gather her in.
And watched her fade away.
Whether it was her sadness that washed over him or Jess’s own, he couldn’t be sure.
Maybe it was neither. Maybe it was Cucuy’s.
The room came back, everything sharpened now. Cucuy still pored over his book. Jess stood and breathed and waited to be seen, the recognition inevitable, as if time itself was rushing toward the moment.
He felt neither fear nor rage; all desire was distant and pale, tamped down and muted. No fight-or-flight flood of epinephrine was swirling into his bloodstream. He was taking his orders from some higher version of himself, here in this fever dreamscape.
He could only hope that Jess Galvan knew what the fuck he was doing.
Cucuy, impossibly, continued to be unaware of his presence—the priest’s energy flowing, almost visibly, into the pages of the book. Perhaps his abilities, like Jess’s own, were different here.
Perhaps here, Jess could win.
He heard himself say the priest’s name.
The piercing black eyes swept up and met his own, and suddenly Jess and Cucuy were bound. Connected. As if somebody had run a cable between them—right down to the low thrum of electricity behind Jess’s eyes.
Connected.
The word, the notion, spread slowly across the plane of Jess’s consciousness, until it coated everything.
Somehow . . . we are connected.
Perhaps the thought originated with Cucuy, or perhaps Jess volleyed it to him, across their invisible communicative wire.
How it had happened, what it meant, Jess had no idea. Of more importance was the manner in which it was met—the information that ricocheted back to him.
It was not a thought, not something that could be distilled into words. It was information in its rawest form, a message conveyed straight from one sympathetic nervous system to another.
It was fear.
Cucuy is afraid of me.
How? Why?
Before Jess could get any farther than that, the floor began to tremble. Fissure lines snaked between his feet; he looked up at the ceiling and a handful of dirt fell into his eyes.
An earthquake? Jess thought dizzily, retreating into the doorway for refuge, the constant preparation drills of a California childhood still embedded deep within. Here?
He cast around for Cucuy, but all he caught was a flash of white and a glint of amulets as the priest vanished into an antechamber, the book clutched to his chest.
The girl’s presence returned, pulsing more strongly with each moment that passed. She, too, was afraid. If only he could find her. Comfort her. If only—
And then the world was spinning, the entire maze of caverns flipping end-over-end and Galvan tumbling with it, mind stripped of thought, no time even to contemplate what the fuck was happening, what this could be, because the only thing that mattered now was drawing the next breath, escaping pulverization, staying whole—
CHAPTER 40
Galvan’s eyes opened onto a reality that trumped his nightmare a thousandfold. A slot-machine blur of sky and dirt flashed past the windows as the car rolled—though rolled did the situation little justice; rolled sounded controlled and smooth, and this was the opposite, a high-speed cacophony of crumpling metal and ungiving ground, vulnerable tissue and flying glass.
Galvan’s body fell toward the floor, the wall, the ceiling, the other wall; if the laws of physics demanded that this vehicle slow down, they certainly weren’t demanding it very loudly. Pescador fell with and on and against him, their bodies bouncing and ricocheting like fresh kernels in a popcorn popper.
Gustavo, behind the wheel, was dead or unconscious, a fat slumped-over sack of a man, head lolling as the vehicle banged its way toward oblivion or inertia, whichever came first. The girl in the front seat wailed in terror, seat belt holding her in place. And the last person in the world Galvan wanted lying in his lap was basically lying in his lap.
Also, Galvan was left-handed now, his half-arm hurt like a motherfucker, and he was probably a couple pints short of a full tank, blood-wise.
Consciousness might turn out be a real short trip, a commuter flight between blackouts, even if the Beemer stuck a gold-medal-worthy landing.
Better make the most of it.
On the next washing-machine spin, he pulled Pescador to him—the Federale sported a gash across the forehead, crimson dribbling into his left eye, and when he saw it Galvan intuited the source of the wound, remembered the whole fucking reason they were here, realized the box had to be in the car somewhere, then put all that aside and focused on the task on hand, which was to push the cocksucker down far enough to clamp both legs around his neck and squeeze until the man’s windpipe collapsed.
Which was going to be tricky, given gravity’s current propensity to switch directions with each blink of the eye. To say nothing of the redundancy of killing a man when the both of you would likely be dead before the little hand completed its
next spin around the clock face.
Then again, thoroughness had always been one of Galvan’s virtues.
He locked both legs around the Federale’s thick torso as the churning car tossed them again and managed to maintain the grip as they were thrown onto the floor. Pescador pinwheeled his arms and gasped, broke free on the next dump-down.
Things were slowing, Galvan realized; the car was teetering on its side, momentarily stable. Pescador acted on the shift first, scrabbled toward the up-facing door and kicked Galvan in the chest as he tried to follow, knocking him against the opposite window and robbing him of breath.
Then the car fell onto its back, a dead cockroach, and erased Galvan’s disadvantage—one of them, leastways. He and Pescador were on their stomachs now, like men crawling through a tunnel, and doing any damage to each other was damn near impossible. The girl—it was the blonde, Betty—was yelling for help, the seat belt holding her upside down and hostage. Galvan reached across himself, managed to press the release button and send her toppling onto the floor with the rest of the worms.
It was hot and still in here now, except for the grunts and the breath, and it was all about exit strategy. Who could open a window or a door and climb back into the world. Galvan flipped himself over and jabbed at the window button. No dice; all systems down. Opposite him, Pescador was yanking at a door handle, to no avail—too much damage to the Beemer’s body, Galvan guessed. Galvan pulled on his own handle, but it wouldn’t budge, either.
It would have to be a window. And if the buttons didn’t work, it would have to be brute force. Galvan cast around for something that could break the glass—which had to be the laminated kind, normally reserved for windshields, to have survived the crash—and remembered the box. He found it wedged against the rear windshield and pushed off against the useless door like a swimmer making the turn at the end of a lap, managed to grab it and gather it in.
There wasn’t enough space for a good strong swing, and Galvan couldn’t grasp the thing with just one hand, anyway. Instead, he pressed it against the door with his stump, wincing as arrows of pain shot up the length of what remained of his arm, and prepared to throw as much body weight into it as he could.
The Dead Run Page 24