Dead South (A Bryson Wilde Thriller / Read in Any Order) (12 page)

35

Day Eight

August 10, 1952

Saturday Night

On the bed was a rattlesnake tethered to a hatchet. A thin leather cord was wrapped around the snake’s body several times and then tied off. The other end was fixed to the hatchet, with three or four feet of separation.

Jori-Rey wasn’t in the bed, under it, in the closet or in the bathroom.

She was utterly and absolutely gone.

The briefcase was gone.

So was the gun.

Wilde approached the bed.

The snake was coiled, bobbing its head in a death trance and shaking its tail to a demonic beat. Its cold lifeless eyes stared into Wilde’s soul with an evil intent.

Blood was on the pillow, not a lot but enough to jack an image into Wilde’s brain, an image of Jori-Rey fast asleep and then waking when someone entered the room, at first thinking it was Wilde, then realizing it was a stranger with hurt in his eyes. Before she could even sit up the blow came, it came hard, it came with a force that made colors explode in her head before it sucked her into darkness.

Rojo!

This was his sick little work.

Wilde’s chest pounded.

What to do?

What to do?

What to do?

He couldn’t concentrate, not with the viper the way it was. He pinned the snake’s head under a pillow and kept it immobile while he untied the cord from the body. Then he sandwiched it in the pillow, carried it out behind the hotel far enough into the wild to where it wouldn’t be a bother and let it go.

Then he headed to Rio’s in the truck, with the hatchet on the seat next to him and a smoke wedged overly tight in his mouth.

The woman was asleep and not wanting to respond to the pounding, not until it got too loud and too long to ignore. She opened the door, saw it was Wilde and put him in a tight hug.

Wilde pulled her inside and closed the door.

He showed her the hatchet and said, “This was in my hotel room when I got back, tied to a rattlesnake.”

The woman’s face etched with fear.

“Rojo,” she said. “He’s a hatchet man. That’s his favorite way to kill people. He’s been doing it since he was fourteen; at least that’s the rumor. He does it slow. He chops off this and chops off that. It’s sick, sick stuff.”

Wilde exhaled.

“Where does he live?”

The woman shook her head.

“No,” she said.

“What do you mean, no?”

“No, forget about him. What you need to do is get out of town and you need to do it right now, otherwise you’re dead and not in a pretty way,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

Wilde hardened his face.

“He took a friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“A woman,” he said. “Where does he live, do you know?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone who does?”

“No, not tonight.”

Wilde twisted the hatchet in his hand and slumped on the couch. The weight of the day was suddenly on him, the endless driving, the drumming, the eyes constantly open, not closing for even a brief rest, not once in over twenty hours.

The exhaustion was palpable.

Rio rubbed his shoulders.

“You’re a mess. Come to bed.”

36

Day Nine

August 11, 1952

Sunday Morning

Wilde woke Sunday morning with a bad, bad, really bad feeling in his gut. Jori-Rey was gone. Wilde would die later today, or if not today soon, chopped to death one piece at a time by a madman with a hatchet. It wouldn’t even be important. It would be a ripple from a pebble, hardly noticeable to anyone in the universe, at least this part of it.

Destiny was unfolding.

He could squirm against it but in the end it would consume him. He’d never seen it before—not this close; not even in the war—and now that he had he realized just how real it was.

It was 10:30, long past what he wanted.

He got off the couch and checked on Rio.

She was in the bed, naked on top of the covers, passed out and breathing with a deep, hard rhythm. He showered, got dressed, lit a cigarette and then shook Rio until her mocha body woke up and rolled over.

“Morning,” he said.

She focused and then reached for his cigarette and took a long drag, then another before handing it back.

“It’s too early.”

Wilde kissed her forehead.

“I’m heading out. I wanted to thank you first for letting me stay here last night.”

She stretched.

Then she grabbed his hair, pulled his head down and kissed him hard on the lips.

“When will you be back?”

“I won’t.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s better for you if I don’t. The middle’s not a good place to be, not on this one.”

“Screw the middle,” she said. “Come back this afternoon. That will give me time to ask around and find out where Rojo lives. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes but don’t.”

“Too late, I already am. Promise you’ll come back.”

Promise.

Promise
.

He’d made a promise yesterday, a promise to wake Jori-Rey up when he got back.

“I’ll come back but only to make sure you’re okay,” he said. “In the meantime stay out of it. Don’t talk to anybody. Do we have a deal?”

She wrapped her arms around his neck, pulled his chest to hers and whispered in his ear, “Whatever you want. Be careful.”

Lester Trench, the El Paso lawyer Wilde was supposed to deliver the briefcase to, wasn’t hard to track down. He lived in modest standalone adobe on the outskirts of town a half mile from the river, at the end of a quiet gravel lane that backed to rabbit brush and dead prairie.

He was surprised when Wilde knocked on the door here at home, but only to a point, and turned out to be a skinny man in his mid-thirties with a shifty face. Behind him, in the kitchen, was a small Mexican wife and two half-breed kids.

He said to the woman, “Just a little business,” and stepped outside. His eyes fell to the truck. “Someone said you had a little foreign car.”

Wilde hardened his face.

“I don’t have the briefcase.”

“I know.”

“Rojo has it.”

“I know,” the lawyer said. “He called me.”

“Just to be clear, the whole briefcase thing was just a way to lure me down here so Rojo could kill me, right?”

Trench spotted the pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of Wilde’s T and said, “Do you mind?”

Wilde tapped two out, lit Trench’s and then his own.

“You’re a hard man to kill,” Trench said. “Rojo got tired of handing the work to someone else and decided to do it himself.”

“By luring me down here—”

Trench nodded.

“When you delivered the briefcase to me, I was going to tell you to take it across the border into Paso del Norte for its final delivery.”

“Where Rojo would be waiting.”

“Yes.”

“Just to be clear, you were the man who hired the guys up in Denver to kill me. I found your business card in the first guy’s room.”

Trench frowned.

“Did I hire them? Technically yes but only as a conduit. I do things for Rojo and he shows his appreciation. If I didn’t do them someone else would.”

“So you’re not doing anything wrong, not in your mind—”

He blew smoke and said, “When Rojo’s men showed up at your hotel last night, it was to leave the hatchet there for you.”

“Why?”

“It’s for you to use later if you were brave enough to get it off the snake,” trench said. “That’s not what’s important here though. What’s important is that when Rojo’s men showed up, they didn’t know there was a woman in the room. But there was and now we all find out that Sudden Dance is actually alive. In hindsight the fact that you killed her has turned out to not be all that true after all.”

The words hit with the force of a brick to the brain.

Somehow Jori-Rey convinced Rojo that she was Sudden Dance.

She was alive but for how long?

“Unfortunately,” Trench added, “that doesn’t get you off the hook. Rojo is still going to kill you and I’m not talking about in a pretty way.”

Wilde took a deep drag.

“Why?”

“Don’t play dumb.” He shifted his face and added, “You’re by her side when you shouldn’t be. Let me ask you something. Did you sleep with her?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

The lawyer wrinkled his face.

A jackrabbit scampered through the brush.

“Personally, I don’t care one way or the other. Rojo’s going to ask the same question, though. If he sees the same answer on your face that I do, rest assured your death will be so long and painful that you’ll want it a hundred times over before he lets you have it. If I were you I’d hop in that big old rust-bucket of yours and run so hard and so fast and so far that even I wouldn’t know where I was anymore.”

Wilde dropped the butt to the ground and mashed it out with his foot.

“Where does he live?”

“Rojo?”

“Yes, Rojo.”

The lawyer chuckled.

“You really don’t understand what’s going on here, do you?”

37

Day Nine

August 11, 1952

Sunday Afternoon

The attorney’s office was on the main strip in downtown El Paso, on the second floor of an ornate gray building. A kid of ten or eleven picked at a guitar as he slowly strolled down the street. Wilde parked a block away, hoofed it down the alley behind the buildings and made entry by busting a window from a fire escape at the rear.

No one was inside.

It was Sunday afternoon.

The air was quiet and thick with heat.

Guitar strings chimed thinly, almost too faint to be heard. Wilde looked out the window and found the kid sitting on the stairs of the building next door, a bank.

“I do things for Rojo and he shows his appreciation.”

Those were the words that came from Trench’s twisty little lawyer-lips.

Those were the words now driving Wilde.

With any luck, one of the things that the lawyer did for Rojo was place Sudden Dance’s child, Maria, after Rojo killed the father. With even more luck, there was a file somewhere in this tomb that indicated where the child went.

It was a long shot but that’s what you took when all the short shots were in short supply.

The guts of the joint were spacious and broken into several rooms; a reception area, a meeting room with a long wooden table, a small kitchen, a file room, a bathroom and Trench’s main office. Expensive furnishings and heavily framed original oils, mostly western landscapes, indicated that a man of presence and taste habited the place.

Smoke permeated the air.

Ashtrays were replete, each stuffed with dead soldiers, some marked by red lipstick but most not.

Wilde lit a Camel.

The smoke was magic in his lungs.

The bits of tobacco that wiggled out of the end and stuck on his tongue were like old friends.

He searched the file room, putting everything back exactly as it was, nothing more than a ghost. He found nothing relating to Rojo.

He got the same result from the lawyer’s office.

Half an hour and four cigarettes had gone by.

All he had to show for it was a big fat zero-filled nothing.

There was nowhere else to look. None of the other rooms contained files of any sort, Rojo or otherwise. In hindsight the lawyer was too smart to leave a paper trail. Wilde should have known that from the beginning.

He lit a new butt, slumped down in the leather chair behind the desk and turned his thoughts to his own mortality.

He’d be dead soon.

Surprisingly he was getting used to the idea.

It had to happen sooner or later anyway.

He’d lived a good life.

He’d been more fortunate than most.

He had no right to complain.

Alabama would miss him.

That counted for something.

Suddenly a noise came from the adjacent room. A key twisted in a lock, a doorknob turned, a door sung open and then closed none too gently. Wilde ducked under the desk and mashed the butt out on the wood. Gray smoke circled up and accumulated under the drawer.

It didn’t take long to figure out who entered, it was man and a woman.

It also didn’t take long to figure out why they came.

They were already on the couch in the reception area, kissing and fondling and unbuttoning buttons and making those little noises that don’t exist anywhere in the universe except in places like this.

The man wasn’t the lawyer, Trench.

His voice was different.

It was deeper, less whiney.

Wilde’s best guess was that the woman—
Gina, baby
—worked in the office. Either she or the man or both of them were married. This was their safe haven, their temporary paradise, their walled refuge away from prying eyes.

Wilde settled in.

At the rate they were going, the whole thing would be over in fifteen minutes. With any luck they wouldn’t hang around for a smoke or, worse, round two.

Wilde had to admit, the woman sounded good.

She had an animalistic nature.

She wasn’t shy.

She knew what she wanted and the man was giving it to her, hard.

What did she look like?’

Wilde fought the urge to crawl out and sneak a peek. He forced himself to stay where he was. Every sound, every moan and every twist sent a new image into his brain. He could picture their exact positions and what each was doing to the other.

Then something unexpected happened.

He noticed a small wooden compartment in that narrow space between the side of the desk and the back end of a drawer, all in all about the size of a briefcase. On closer examination it had a hinged wooden door, hardly differentiable from the wood of the desk. To get anything in or out of the compartment, you’d have to crawl under the desk.

It had no lock.

He opened it.

Inside were a number of file folders.

He pulled one out.

It related to Rojo.

38

Day Nine

August 11, 1952

Sunday Afternoon

With the files on the seat next to him, the hatchet under the files and a storm in his veins, Wilde tipped south back across the river into Paso del Norte where he parked a block away from Rio’s place and closed the gap on foot.

He rapped on the door.

No one answered.

He tried the doorknob to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. He pushed the door open, heard the shower running and poked his head into the bathroom just far enough to make sure the woman wasn’t lying dead in a pool of blood.

She wasn’t; anything but.

She had her back to him with her arms up lathering her hair. The curves of her exotic mocha body came in and out of focus through a transparent shower curtain as she water splashed against it. A soft song came from her lips, something Mexican, something he’d never heard before, something hypnotic and sexy.

He lit a cigarette, slumped into a chair, and flipped through the files, all of which on closer examination related to projects Trench was doing or had done for Rojo.

It was the Rojo cache.

One was labeled Bryson Wilde.

Inside were Trench’s notes—getting contacted by Rojo to hire someone to kill Wilde, hiring the boxer first, who ended up dead, then hiring two other men afterwards, who also ended up dead; getting contacted by Rojo to come up with a plan to lure Wilde down into Mexico; contacting the Denver lawyer, Jack Strike, with instructions for him in turn to hire Wilde to deliver a briefcase to Trench; the whole sick scenario, it was all there, every stinking two-bit piece of it. There was nothing new, nothing Wilde didn’t already know.

The only thing new about it was the fact it was in writing. As evidence in a court of law, it was enough to sink Trench into a legal grave so deep and absolute that he’d never get out.

Trench wasn’t the problem, though; not the immediate one in any event.

Rojo was.

Wilde flipped deeper into the stack, hoping beyond hope to find what he was after.

Then, bingo!

He came to a file labeled Maria.

The notes inside indicated that Trench himself had been the one to physically transport the little soul to the custody of a Tijuana man named Poncho Pinch. A ledger indicated that Trench sent money to the man every month. The most striking part of the file was a photograph, a striking black-and-white photograph of Sudden Dance holding the little girl when she was just a tiny little thing.

The joy on Sudden Dance’s face belonged to a mother.

It was absolute.

It was nature itself.

Okay, so now he knew where to find the child. The window of opportunity, though, was short. Tomorrow was Monday and in the morning Trench would head to his office. He’d see the window Wilde had to break to get in. He’d look under his desk to make sure the Rojo files were still intact.

They wouldn’t be there.

Then he’d figure out what happened.

He’d call Rojo.

Either Rojo or Trench would make a frantic call to the man down in Tijuana, Poncho Pinch, who in turn would whisk the child to someplace new where she couldn’t be grabbed.

Thinking it through, there was only one good option.

The Rojo files needed to be intact under the desk when Trench checked for them.

The shower turned off.

“You have company,” Wilde shouted.

“Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“Give me a minute.”

Two minutes later she emerged from the bathroom with a white towel draped around her body, running a comb through long wet hair. She came to Wilde and straddled his lap. “I have something good for you,” she said. “I know where Rojo lives.”

“You do?”

She nibbled on his ear.

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t want to,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because then you’ll go there and then you’ll die.”

Wilde went to deny the last part of it.

No words came out.

“You were singing a song in the shower,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It was nice.”

“Do you want me to sing it to you?”

The answer surprised him.

“Yes.”