And Leave Her Lay Dying (19 page)

McGuire said nothing. He picked up his beer to take a sip but changed his mind.

“They used an axe,” Snyder said in a voice dry of emotion. “First he told me why he was doing it. Then he showed me the towels they had brought. So I wouldn't bleed to death. He said he didn't want to kill me and he would even give me a job when I recovered. But I had to learn a lesson.”

“How could you handle that?” McGuire whispered. “Sitting there, knowing what was going to happen?”

Snyder shook his head. “I wasn't there. Sometimes . . .” He looked away, then back down at his drink. “I met a girl once who had been raped in San Francisco. Over and over again, for hours, by a motorcycle gang. I asked her the same question. She told me ‘I wasn't there. My body was there but me, my mind and me, we went somewhere else.' And that's all I can say about it.”

Snyder told of being driven to the hospital in Nuevo Laredo, the towels wrapped around the stumps of his arms to staunch the bleeding. He described staggering into the hospital unable to speak, welcoming the fog of the anesthetic, and waking with the hope that it had all been a nightmare until he saw the drab grey walls, smelled the aroma of the sick and dying, and felt the pain like glowing coals filling the space where his hands had been.

In the afternoon, a Mexican police officer arrived to cluck over Snyder's misfortune and suggest that people be more careful when working with hay balers.

“So Bledsoe bought off the police?” McGuire asked.

Snyder fixed him with a cold smile. “They've been bought off for years. You go over there now, to the police station, and ask to see my accident report. If you can read Spanish, it will tell you I lost my hands in a hay baler on a farm south of town.” He snorted, a short sarcastic laugh. “Which shows how arrogant they are.”

“Why?”

“Nobody bales hay around here. There's not a hay baler between here and San Antonio.”

McGuire nodded. “Why are you still here? How can you associate with a man who would do this to you?”

Snyder bit his bottom lip. “It's the best deal I can get. I run the place. Make a good profit too. Bledsoe pays me well and I only see him four, five times a year. He acts like nothing happened. Puts his arm around my shoulder, asks how my girlfriend is, how her family's keeping. She's Mexican. She's very pretty, very sweet. I love her and support her family. Without me, they would be begging in the streets. And . . .” He studied the sawdust on the floor. “I don't want to go home like this.” He gestured with his hooks. “I couldn't if I wanted to.”

“Why can't you?”

“Because Bledsoe would have me killed. He promised if I ever cross the border, he'll kill me. I believe him.”

“So tell the Border Patrol,” McGuire began, before seeing the expression in Snyder's eyes.

“Come on, McGuire,” Snyder said with contempt. “How do you think a man like Bledsoe moves a hundred kilos of coke across the border every month? You think he's just lucky?”

“He can't buy off the entire Border Patrol.”

“He doesn't have to!” Snyder snapped. “All he needs is . . .” He glanced around and lowered his voice. “Look, I could tell you . . .” he began and faltered again. “There's a car that belongs to one of the guys at the bridge. The way he parks it in the morning, nose in or nose out, tells Bledsoe something. A blind lowered in an office window tells him something else. There's never any contact. Never any direct payoff. Just some deposits made in bank accounts in Juarez. Ten seconds after I blew the whistle on Bledsoe, he would know about it. He would get rid of the evidence. Then he would get rid of me. In jail, in a safe house, wherever.” He shrugged. “I'm better off here. I'm safe. I'm as happy as a man without hands can be.”

“You said he owns a lot of property over here. What does he do with it? Use it to launder money?”

Snyder nodded. “But it's not as easy as it used to be. Time was, he could come over here and buy up a block of property with cash. But soon every property owner here knew what he was doing. They inflated their prices and offered him peanuts when he was ready to sell. I heard the last deal cost him sixty cents on the dollar. And now there's a glut on the market. Everybody's in the business. The price on the street is maybe a third of what it used to be,” Snyder explained. “He's cancelled shipments for a few months until the price goes up. Meanwhile, he just sits on his cash.”

“How much?”

“I heard ten million. I believe it.”

“Where?”

“In that dumpy office apartment over the warehouse on San Bernardo. Probably under the floorboards.” Snyder grinned and shook his head. “He can't spend it over here because the locals will rip him off. He can't take it to the bank because they have to report deposits that big to the Feds. He even lives alone up there, over that junkyard he calls a business, because he can't trust having anybody in the same room with him and his money. So there he is, stuffing it between the rafters like insulation.”

“Nice to know money still can't buy happiness,” McGuire smiled.

“Did you see the dogs?” Snyder asked suddenly.

“The Rottweilers? Good guard dogs.”

“They're killers. Sometimes he sends Warren and Colin out at night to pick up stray cats, bring them back to San Bernardo. The three of them sit on the porch and drop the cats into the kennel with the Rottweilers and watch the dogs tear them apart.” He sipped nervously at his drink. “Warren told me Bledsoe once had a guy killed by those dogs. Out near the mine site. I believe him.”

“Maybe you're better off over here after all.”

Snyder leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “I have a good life here. I take care of Bledsoe's investment. I run the bar well. There's no way I could get another job as good as this with these things,” he gestured with the steel hooks.

“And Bledsoe uses you to keep his people in line.”

“Something like that.”

“When did this happen? With your hands?”

Snyder dosed his eyes. “One year and two months ago. And ten days,” he added. “Think I can forget something like that?”

The two men sat and contemplated a shared horror, one attempting to wrap his imagination around it, the other striving to extinguish the memory. During the silence between them, the piano player slid back on his bench and began a Scott Joplin rag in a jagged rhythm. No one in the room seemed to notice; not a head turned, not a conversation paused.

In an almost conciliatory tone, McGuire asked: “Did you know Jennifer Cornell?”

Snyder raised a hook and scratched his right ear. “I know the name.”

“She was the daughter of your father's second wife Suzanne.”

“Jennifer. Yeah, I remember her now. I only met her once. No, twice. Second time at her mother's funeral.”

“What do you recall about her?”

“Not a lot. Let's see, the first time would have been just after Suzanne and Pop were married. Jennifer was talking about going to college or something. I remember she kept pumping me about California. She was thinking of going to school there. Lots of glamour, she thought. What's she up to now?”

“She's dead.” McGuire watched for a telltale response. “She was murdered last summer. In Boston.”

Snyder shook his head. “She was a bright girl. A little stuck on herself but kind of attractive.” He looked at McGuire with a crooked smile. “You think I had something to do with it?”

McGuire ignored the question. “Last summer, just before she died, someone was living with her and posing as you. She was showing him off. She introduced him as Andrew Cornell and said he had been living in California.”

“Hey, McGuire,” Snyder interrupted. “I spent a couple of hours with the woman once. We drank some beers and I listened to her talk about herself. She was one of those women, she'd talk about anything as long as it had something to do with Jennifer Cornell. I never saw her again until she came down for her mother's funeral.”

“Did you spend time with her then?”

“Not a lot. To tell you the truth, she was pretty angry at me because my father was driving the car when Suzanne was killed. Naturally, she grouped both of us together. I remember she made a point of not even helping me into the limo on the way to the cemetery.”

“Why would you need help?”

“Because I was on crutches. I was in the car when Pop rolled it. Broke my right ankle. Suzanne was thrown halfway out the window and the car rolled over on her.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

“We were all drunk. I was passing through town doing some . . . What the hell, I was dealing coke. Made a score in Philly. So I stopped off on my way back to California to see the old man, take him out to dinner. We all drank too much and I fell asleep in the back seat on the way home. Next thing I know, I'm lying on the grass and Pop, he's bent over Suzanne, trying to wake her up. Anybody could see she was dead. Pop, he came out of it without a scratch.”

McGuire drained the last of his beer. “Whoever was posing as you in Boston last summer,” he said, studying the empty bottle, “was the last to see her alive. And he disappeared the night she was murdered.”

“I've never been in Boston in my life,” Snyder said in an even voice, his eyes never wavering from McGuire's. “And even if I had been there last summer, I would have been wearing these,” he added, displaying the hooks. “How was she killed?”

“Struck from behind with a club and left to drown.”

“You think I could swing a club with these?”

McGuire shook his head solemnly and stood up to leave.

Walking across the room with McGuire, Snyder stopped to give instructions to a waiter, told a barman to bring up a fresh block of ice, and congratulated another waiter on the birth of his son.

“You run a tight ship,” McGuire said at the doorway.

They stepped outside. The night air smelled fresh and they both breathed deeply to clear their lungs of smoke and the aroma of stale beer.

“It's not a bad place,” Snyder said, looking up at the darkened sky. He grinned slyly at McGuire. “Be a hell of a lot nicer if we didn't have to put up with so many loud Yankee tourists.”

“Are you afraid of Bledsoe?” McGuire asked.

“No,” Snyder replied without hesitation. “He needs me. I'm valuable to him. George Bledsoe takes care of his valuables. As long as I keep doing well here and never cross the bridge, he'll take care of me. I like what I'm doing. I love my girlfriend. I even feel more Mexican than American sometimes.” He shrugged. “But I still want to kill him.”

McGuire turned to walk away. He had taken three paces when Snyder called his name suddenly and McGuire stopped to look back.

“You said you were at the mine today, right?” Snyder asked.

“For a few minutes,” McGuire said cautiously.

Snyder closed the space between them and lowered his voice. “Did you see anybody there? Guy with long blond hair and a hump on his nose? Stands six-two, six-three?”

“What about him?”

“Did you see him or not?”

“I saw somebody who looked like that.”

Snyder cursed. “Edwards,” he said, staring at the ground. “Billy Ray Edwards.”

McGuire said nothing.

“Remember I told you they used the axe on me?” Snyder said, avoiding McGuire's eyes. “Well, it wasn't Bledsoe. He got Billy Ray to do it. Didn't have to ask Billy Ray twice, either. He's an animal. He's so crazy, Bledsoe tries to keep Billy Ray at the mine. Afraid to have him in town too much. So he pays him to be a watchman and do the work Bledsoe and the others can't stomach.” Snyder shook his head violently. “Crazy. He's a crazy man.”

“Don't worry about Edwards anymore,” McGuire said softly.

“Why?”

“Just don't worry about him, that's all.”

“Is he dead?”

McGuire smiled silently and turned to walk away again.

“He's dead, isn't he?” Snyder said to McGuire's back.

“What difference does it make?” McGuire called over his shoulder.

“Because I wanted to ask him.”

McGuire stopped again and looked back at the man with hooks for hands standing silhouetted in the red and yellow lights of the bar sign. “Ask him what?”

“What he did with them. My hands. What did he do with my hands?”

By ten o'clock the town had been returned, as it was every evening, to its inhabitants. The souvenir shops, abandoned by the tourists, had closed their doors and darkened their lights; metal screening had been drawn across the liquor stores and the street vendors had trundled their carts off the avenue.

McGuire walked slowly back to the car, his shoulders slumped. He felt old; he felt weary. Most of all, he felt defeated.

As he walked, he passed men slouched on benches in a dusty space which had once been an elegant town square. A woman carrying a small baby papoose-style was bent almost double into a trash container, the upper half of her body hidden inside the barrel as she searched for food. On her back the baby wailed sadly, its tiny face creased with pain and hunger and anger. Adolescent boys, their faces so hardened that their eyes seemed to withdraw deeper into their sockets, offered McGuire drugs and women.

McGuire sat behind the wheel of his car collecting his thoughts. He wouldn't bother to confirm Snyder's story. Snyder didn't match the description of Andrew Cornell. McGuire was convinced he had never been in Boston. And he hadn't killed his stepsister. They were further from solving the murder of Jennifer Cornell than ever.

And nobody cares but me, McGuire reflected.

Anger and frustration began to boil in him.

In what he had always considered an unfair world, McGuire devoted his life to redressing the balance, tipping the scales in defiance of perpetual injustice. Suddenly, the unfairness seemed overwhelming to him.

He had gambled on discovering a new clue to the murder of Jennifer Cornell—not for an abstraction like justice, or even for practical gains like deterring crime. Or to satisfy a need for success and achievement.

He did it because it was his job. More important, it was his identity.

Now he had lost the gamble. The Cornell file would remain ignored and forgotten. No one would care except McGuire. And few people would even understand
why
McGuire cared. The little girl with the solemn face who had accepted his hand-out an hour earlier was doomed to the same unmourned, forgotten fate as Jennifer Cornell.

He started the car. You don't need to care, he told himself. Nobody ever told you to care, so nobody will give a damn if you stop caring.

From the moment he cleared US Customs and began driving north into Laredo, he knew he was being followed.

McGuire turned casually down one street, then another, watching the dark pickup truck trailing several car lengths behind him, two men inside.

On San Bernardo Avenue, he wheeled into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant and watched as the truck drove slowly past. McGuire recognized the driver and passenger as Bledsoe's men: Colin, wearing a fresh bandage across his cheek, and Warren, the muscular dark-haired man.

McGuire entered the restaurant, ordered a take-out coffee and emerged to see the truck parked at an abandoned service station across the street.

Leaning against the car, he sipped the coffee in full view of the men and considered what they might do. They could follow him north to San Antonio and simply ensure that he left town. Or watch him check into a motel and perhaps fire­bomb his room. Or sideswipe him on the interstate. Or fire a shotgun through his window as they passed him on the darkened highway . . .

Or McGuire could choose to do something—something for Andrew Snyder's hands and for the little girl across the bridge who begged for money while Bledsoe crammed his floorboards with it. It would be a way of pointing the finger, of redressing the balance.

So let's do it, McGuire told himself. You want to give me a reason to care? he mused. Maybe you have. “Let's do it,” he said aloud, and tossed the empty cup into a waste container.

Back in the car, he drove north on San Bernardo, turning east and passing under the interstate a few blocks before Bledsoe's Mexican Bazaar, watching the pickup truck match his speed a hundred feet behind him. He passed shopping malls, trailer parks and baseball diamonds before the land opened up and a highway sign told him he was fifty-eight miles from Freer, Texas. The road was two lanes wide and empty of traffic—a thin ribbon through empty range.

“Let's do it,” McGuire repeated angrily, and he pushed the accelerator to the floor.

The engine came to life with a roar and the Ford lurched ahead into the darkness. He switched his headlights to high­beam, slipped the revolver from his pocket and watched the speedometer climb past sixty, seventy, eighty. In the rearview mirror, the pickup lagged behind momentarily before matching McGuire's pace.

His headlight beams revealed a rise in the road perhaps half a mile ahead. He measured the distance in his mind, fixed his eyes on the crest of the hill and quickly turned off his headlights, becoming all but invisible to the truck pursuing him.

His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and McGuire could make out deep ditches lining the road. The lights of the pickup bounced in his rearview mirror as he felt the car heave over the low hill. Beyond the crest, the truck's lights vanished in the mirror; McGuire steered the car across the dark road into the other lane, slowed his speed, then jammed down on the brake pedal while twisting the steering wheel sharply to the right.

The Ford's tires howled in protest as the rear of the car swung around in a smoothly executed hundred-and-eighty­degree manoeuvre and the vehicle slammed to a stop in its own lane again, facing back to Laredo and the oncoming truck, whose headlights were glowing like a corona just beyond the crest of the hill.

McGuire had the door open before the car ceased shuddering. He tugged at the headlight switch as he rolled out of the car onto the grassy shoulder and dropped into the dry ditch beside the highway.

At eighty miles an hour, the pickup crested the rise in the road to encounter McGuire's car in its own lane, the high­beam headlights shining brightly into the driver's eyes.

Momentarily blinded, the driver tried to brake his vehicle and swing into the other lane to avoid McGuire's car. But McGuire's manoeuvre had been practised, controlled and anticipated; the driver of the pickup relied on instinct and surrendered to panic.

From the ditch, McGuire watched as the truck swerved away from him into the darkness, suddenly lurching to the left before rising in the air and crashing into the open ditch on the other side of the highway in an explosion of twisted metal and shattered glass.

In the eerie silence that followed, the truck's horn blasted from the wreckage, steady and undying.

McGuire pocketed his revolver and began crawling from the dry run-off ditch just as a voice cut through the night air, crying in anger and pain.

“Where are you, you bastard?” the man screamed. “I want you, whoever you are!”

McGuire ducked below the edge of the ditch again as footsteps came running raggedly up the road to his car, its headlights still piercing the night.

A rifle fired, the bullet striking McGuire's car with a metallic whine.

“You sumbitch, I'll feed your liver to the dogs, I swear!” the voice screamed hysterically.

The man reached the door of McGuire's car and wrenched it open with one hand. In the crook of his other arm he carried an automatic rifle. The interior light of McGuire's car illuminated his face as he thrust his head into the empty car. McGuire could see a piece of the man's scalp was torn and crumpled like an orange peel; blood flowed freely down his face and into his thin beard.

“Colin,” McGuire called out from the shadows of the ditch.

A shot rang from the rifle, scattering dirt wildly behind McGuire, who ducked below the rim of the ditch and ran crab-wise several steps to his right.

“First you kill Billy Ray and now Warren's dead!” Colin screamed. Two more shots blasted in McGuire's direction.

McGuire moved further along the ditch as Colin stumbled away from the car, shouting curses. He fired another shot at the ditch where McGuire had been waiting, the muzzle blast flashing red in the blackness.

“Leave it be, Colin,” McGuire called, before ducking away as another shot from the rifle struck the wall of the ditch behind him.

To the other man, McGuire was a voice in the dark. But to McGuire, the muzzle flashes pinpointed Colin's location as though he were standing in the noonday sun.

Surrendering to instinct, McGuire raised his gun in a two­handed target stance, aimed at the location of the last muzzle flash and squeezed off three shots in rapid succession.

He heard the rifle clatter to the roadway. Something soft and yielding followed it to the pavement.

McGuire pocketed his gun and climbed out of the ditch, walking to where Colin lay face down on the shoulder of the road near McGuire's car. He nudged the man with his toe, then rolled him onto his back. In the spill from his car's headlights he could see three entry wounds in the man's chest. They bubbled with the last intake of breath before Colin shivered and relaxed a final time.

The motion dislodged something inside Colin's denim jacket and McGuire reached down to withdraw a plastic bag of white powder.

Headlights flashed in the distance, somewhere to the east. McGuire moved quickly to his car, slipped it into gear and swung the vehicle to the other side of the road, heading west, back towards Laredo.

The sound of the pickup's horn faded with the distance, an endless moan grieving for the two dead men he left behind.

“I seen more of you than I seen of the sun today.” The teenage gas station attendant slammed the trunk shut. “Looks of things, I won't be seeing you again for a spell. You heading somewhere into open country?”

“Kind of,” McGuire replied, handing him money. “Know where I can get some hamburgers this time of night?”

“How you want 'em?”

“Thick and juicy.”

“Fat Frank's. 'Bout a mile up on your right.”

McGuire slipped behind the wheel. “You're a tribute to the Texas tourist board,” he smiled as he drove away.

Precisely at midnight, McGuire stood in a telephone booth directly across the street from Bledsoe's Mexican Bazaar. He dropped a coin in the slot and dialled a number.

In the lighted living quarters above the rear of the warehouse, a shadow moved behind a drawn blind.

“Bledsoe,” a man's voice growled in McGuire's ear.

“I just killed your dogs,” McGuire said.

“Who the hell is this?”

“Your dogs, Bledsoe. They're dead. At the front of your yard. Right at the fence. Haul ass out here and see for yourself.”

He hung up, dropped another coin in the slot and dialled 911.

“There's a fire at Bledsoe's warehouse on San Bernardo,” McGuire said to the woman who answered. He measured his words carefully, knowing they were being recorded—“Now,” he added, and hung up again.

Leaving the telephone booth, he walked casually across San Bernardo to stand in the darkness near his car, arriving just as Bledsoe emerged from his apartment carrying a rifle. His eyes sweeping the yard, Bledsoe reached out a hand and pulled a large electrical switch near the doorway.

Suddenly quartz lights flooded the open area in a harsh green glare. Gnomes, cartoon characters, flamingos, rusting armour, Venus de Milos—thousands of plaster creatures stood and pranced in the brilliance of the floodlights like denizens of a grotesque miniature world.

Near the locked gates at the San Bernardo entrance lay the two dogs, the remains of several hamburgers in their stomachs, each heavily laced with the cocaine McGuire had taken from Colin's jacket.

At the sight of the dogs, Bledsoe looked furiously around him, stopping only once to smell the air and frown at the smell of gasoline drifting over the complex.

“Where you at, hoss?” Bledsoe shouted. “I find you, you're lizard shit, hear me?” He looked around again and clambered down the stairs, running to his dogs.

McGuire stepped from the shadows and crossed to the side gate. He stopped at the wet trail leading under Bledsoe's stairs through the hole in the wire fence he had forced with a tire iron as the Rottweilers lay dying.

Casually withdrawing a match, he lit it, watched it flare, and dropped it into the dampness at his feet.

The gasoline ignited into a path of fire which raced through the fence to the five-gallon can directly under Bledsoe's wooden stairway. With an explosion of flame that momentarily rivalled the glare from the floodlights, the fuel erupted into the air and began consuming the structure.

McGuire turned his back to the inferno. He could feel the heat through his jacket. He could hear Bledsoe running and screaming in panic through the yard, colliding with plaster gnomes and stumbling over ceramic birdbaths in his race to reach the stairs.

The Ford started easily. McGuire drove slowly, methodically away, without looking back.

He woke the next morning in a motel room on the edge of town. The air conditioner clattered at the window, its decorative grille cracked and dusty. He showered, dressed and stepped into the heat of the late morning.

In a coffee shop across the street he ate breakfast and eavesdropped on the conversation of men sitting astride chrome stools at the counter, men who pushed their greasy caps up from their foreheads before speaking and stirred sugar into their coffee with exaggerated arm motions. They all spoke in lazy drawls separated by long periods of silence, as though they were assembling their sentences in precise order before voicing them.

“You hear how much money they found up there?” The speaker was thin and wiry, dressed in a faded rodeo shirt with fancy stitching and silver trim on the collar and cuffs.

“Millions,” replied another. He was fat and balding with a black beard, thick and wild on his chin. “And that's what weren't all burnt to hell. Most of it's ashes now.”

“Fellow I know on the fire department, he says the floorboards were all stuffed with money like an old maid's mattress.” The speaker was out of McGuire's line of vision. “Thing I'd like to know is, where in hell did Mister Bledsoe get himself so much money anyhow?”