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Oakley was still absorbing it. She’s alive. His contradictory feelings made him react sluggishly but finally he said, “We’ll handle it ourselves. The less your men know, the better. We’ll drive down there and follow their route—if we catch up we’ll deal with them and if they go on to Rocky Point then your men can keep tabs on them until you and I get there. I don’t want outsiders or police involved.”
“It’s your party,” Orozco said, and unlatched the door.
Oakley said, “Tell your people in Nogales to have things ready for us in an hour. We’ll need guns and a radio direction-finder to zero in on the suitcase.”
“Okay,” Orozco said. If he was displeased he didn’t give much indication, but he didn’t look overjoyed. He got out of the car and tramped to the phone booth. Oakley settled back in the seat. Whatever the outcome now, there was at least a measure of relief in the prospect of action.
C H A P T E R Fifteen
In the heat Billie Jean sat with her legs wide apart, fa
Sleeplessness laid a semitransparent glaze over Mitch’s eyes; he had to keep blinking. Wracked by bruises and sore muscles, he contained his irritability badly. They had been stuck in this woebegone gas station seven hours.
The grease monkey came up out of the pit under the car wiping his hands on a filthy rag. He was a diminutive old man with the high-cheeked face of a pureblood Indian, the jet-black hair and old-copper skin. A broad grin showed the gaps in his teeth. “Oll ehfeexed,” he said happily. “Jew go
“Dollars.” Mitch’s hand plunged into his trouser side-pocket and crumpled a bill. “How much?”
“Eh?”
“Cuanto?”
“Oh. Sí. Cómo, cómo—” The mechanic counted on his grease-black fingers, his lips moving. “Cuarenta … dos … catorce … por ocho.” He frowned and shook his head, and suddenly threw his head back, beaming. “Doce dolares, por favor. Ees twelve dollars.” He added with an apologetic shrug, “Would be maybe not so mahch, bot hod to ehfeex the calceta and the pompa too, jew know? The, ah, the—chingadera, I do
“I don’t want to hear about it,” Mitch muttered, and fumbled twelve dollars into the blackened palm. He wheeled past the girls and said crankily, “Come on—come on.”
He rolled the car on west through the rocky desert hills, wondering how long the old grease-monkey’s patchwork job would hold the water pump together before it burst again. He kept it down to forty-five most of the time, except on the downhill slopes, hoping the water temperature wouldn’t rise high enough to blow another hole by steam pressure. In the back seat. Billie Jean said crankily, “Jesus H. Christ. I never been so sticky damn hot in my life.”
“Shut up.”
Terry touched his arm but he gave her a stony look and she withdrew her hand. They limped west in silence after that.
According to the map they had picked up at the gas station, Caborca was a smallish town (población 5,000-7,500) on the Rio Asunción. There was, however, no sign of a river anywhere in sight when they reached the sign which said HEROICA CABORCA. The appelation, Terry explained, commemorated the occasion in the 1850s when a hundred Yankee filibusters had invaded Sonora, pla
The town clustered against the shoulders of several steep round hills, surrounded by scratch-poor country, all weathered clay and dry brittle clumps of brush. Here and there were painfully irrigated vegetable patches. Flocks of gaunt sheep drifted listlessly across the open desert. Dogs lay in the shade watching through bloodshot eyes when Mitch reached the outskirts of town and slowed to a crawl to make way, horn blasting, through a thickness of chickens clucking in the road.
Ahead on the right stood an apparition: a brand-new motel, complete with plastic, chrome, neon, and swimming pool. Mitch stopped in front of it and eyed the cars parked in the lot. None was Floyd’s Oldsmobile. Anyhow, he thought, Floyd wouldn’t be likely to stop at a conspicuous place like this.
He drove on into town. The streets were narrow, once paved but now holed and dusted. There were occasional cobbled sidewalks. The adobe structures, rammed together like city slum buildings, were painted ludicrous colors—pinks, yellows, greens. Poverty didn’t have to be soot-gray. Slow-moving women with black hair tied back in buns and dusty dresses with flowing long skirts stared at Mitch as if he were a movie director looking for extras to cast in a Pancho Villa film. Men in cowboy hats sat somnolent in shady doorways like characters in cartoons of Old Mexico. It was the siesta hour.
There were a few cars parked with two wheels on the sidewalk—mainly pickups and station wagons, the old ones with real wooden bodies. Mitch didn’t see the Olds anywhere; he hardly expected to. Floyd wouldn’t make it that easy.
He pulled up next to a young man in pachuco-tight Levi’s and stuck his head out the window; he spoke with care, drawing his lips back over his teeth in exaggerated enunciation:
“Por favor, amigo, dónde está la farmacia?”
The youth gri
“Okay,” Mitch said, “Gracias.”
“De nada,” the youth said, and stood gri
Mitch said, “What’s so fu
“Maybe he just likes to smile,” Billie Jean said. “Man, those tight pants, you could sure see how he was hung.”
Mitch didn’t glance at Terry; he felt redness creep up his neck. Terry said, “You’ve got a way with words, Billie Jean.”
“Shit—you making fun of me? Maybe I don’t like your high-and-mighty, either, you ever think of that?”
The plaza enclosed a park with a dead lawn and two or three palm trees. Mitch drove around it and found a parking space in front of the pharmacy. A pulse began to thud in his throat. He got the .38 out of the glove compartment and shoved it in his pocket—it was empty but the whole world didn’t have to know that. I should’ve remembered to buy cartridges in Nogales. Maybe they’ve got some here.
It was just like the photograph, von Roon’s name painted on the sign. The door was closed and when he banged on it he got no response. He tried the knob but it was locked.
Terry said from the car window, “That’s why the kid was gri
Mitch backed down the three steps and came around the car and got in. “Great.”
Billie Jean said, “What now, smart guy?”
“We wait for them to open up.”
“Not here,” Billie Jean said immediately. “Not here. Too hot in this car. Man, what’s wrong with that place back there we passed with the swimming pool? I could use a jump in that pool right now.”