Don't Look Back (27 page)

“Damn it,” he said as they approached. “Son of a
bitch.
”

Eve came up to the Jeep. “You’re angry because you didn’t explode?”

“No. I’m angry because he took the positive-terminal lead from the battery. It’s only yay big”—Will’s thumb and forefinger measured off a two-inch bite of air—“but without it nothing happens.”

Now that she was looking for it, the missing piece of the connection was clear. Will had pried up the rubber nipple of the battery. Before it a red cable rose to nothing, the nut clamp unfastened.

Will struck the Jeep with the heel of his hand. “We’re not gonna get a cough out of this engine.”

“Is there something else you could use to connect the cable?”

“I don’t know. I just— I don’t know.” He rested his elbows on the metal ledge, took a few deep breaths, his eyes squeezed shut against the pain. When he opened them again, his gaze was loose. “I’ll see … I’ll see if there’s anything else in here I can use.”

“I’ll check the van battery,” Eve said.

“Good luck there,” Claire said from behind.

Eve walked across to where the Chevy Express remained, slant-parked across the cantina floor. The veranda looked semi-stable, if charred, and she took the risk of walking under it to the van. The driver’s door was open but gave off no alert chime—not a promising sign. She reached through and popped the hood. Fortunato met her at the front with the refilled bucket, and when he threw water across the metal, it hissed, dancing in ever-shrinking beads. They went another two rounds with the water before she dared tap the hood with her palms. It had cooled sufficiently for her to raise, but still she felt the heat of the explosion preserved deep in the metal.

The engine was useless, the battery melted, the cables turned to charcoal.

She let the hood fall and caught a puff of acidic air in the face.

Across the way, Harry helped Will out from the stable, Claire and Sue trailing, and they all convened in the middle of the clearing.

“Nothing?” Eve asked.

Will said, “Nothing.”

The trees seemed to bow in over them. Their eyes shifted and their heads twitched, taking in every bobbing branch, each leaf spiraling to the ground.

Neto’s counting resurfaced in Eve’s awareness; he’d been going this whole time. His sleeves were cuffed, the fabric marked with fingerprints of ash and blood. He timed the compressions, shoving harder and harder on Lulu’s chest, her body giving up nothing.

“How long’s he been doing that?” Eve asked.

Claire checked her dive watch. “About twenty minutes now.”

Eve walked over, put her hand on his shoulder. He’d sweated clean through his shirt; it felt as though he’d just climbed out of a pool. “Lourdes,” he said. “Lourdes? Lulu.
Lulu.
Lourdes. Lourdes?” He kept on in a hoarse whisper, spittle accompanying each breath.

A muscle in his back shifted back and forth under Eve’s palm, heaving beneath the skin like a clenched fist. “Neto,” she said. “Come on.”

“Lourdes. Lourdes?
Lourdes.
”

“You need to leave her now.”

“I’m not leaving her. I’m not leaving her.”

“She’s gone. The van exploded, and it killed her, and she’s dead. She’s dead.”

He stopped, and she braced herself in case he swung at her, which had happened to her once before—a bereaved husband in an intensive-care unit. Neto’s arm tensed, and she feared he’d pivot around. If he did, there would be little she could do about it. But he just stayed that way, hunched over his dead wife, his muscles knotted. It seemed to Eve that if he unclenched, he would fly apart. He rotated slowly to face her. Big drops of sweat dangled from the tips of his black curls. She could smell the shock and grief on his breath—a bitter, emergency-room smell, all spent pheromones and frayed nerve endings.

With her hand she kept contact with his back, turning him toward the adobe hut and starting him walking.

“Come on,” she said to the others. “There’s nothing we can do out here right now. And it’s safer inside.”

Will sagged against Harry, his face wan. The bandage had spotted over his shin, fluids seeping through.

Eve said, “We need to get that foot up and then get you rebandaged.”

Will said, “Yes, please.”

With her palm pressed reassuringly to Neto’s back, she led them in.

*   *   *

Bashir’s thick hands held the blister pack of antibiotics. With the tip of his thumb, he punched through one pill and then another.
Pop. Pop.
Through a gap in the foliage, he watched the survivors file raggedly toward the abode hut. The viewing corridor so narrow that fronds brushed his temples. He was another set of eyes in a vast jungle filled with watchful creatures.

Pop.

He read their body language: defeated. Grunts of anguish carried to him. The shade was cool and pleasing.

Pop.

The door closed behind them. His stare shifted, reading angles and movement, gauging the sun’s progress toward this treetop or that branch. He mapped where the shadows would fall, how they would creep along the ground.

Pop.

A shift of the wind brought the smell of burned flesh from the picnic table. A familiar scent. How many sheltered Americans had never seen the insides of another human?

Pop.

His eyes moved from porch to window to dipping sun. Again he assessed the shadows and what they offered him.

The last pill popped free, and he glanced down at the scattering of oblong white pills before his toes. With the ball of his foot, he ground them into the moist earth.

Then he slid from cover.

*   *   *

Fortunato stayed by the closed front door, knife in hand, as they tried to put themselves back together. Sue disappeared into the bathroom numerous times. In between they cleaned Neto up and Harry found him a fresh shirt. Neto sat in the corner, his face glazed and lifeless. It was beyond an expression; it was as if something had shifted physically in the tendons and sinews under his flesh.

Eve tended to Will’s ankle. Of course all his movement had aggravated the break. He winced as she checked the edges of the wound.

“We’re pretty much screwed, aren’t we?” Will asked.

“Pretty much,” Eve said.

“What do you think the odds are that the
alcalde
reached whatever city he was going to by now? And that help is on the way?” His hopeful expression was almost more than Eve could take.

“He was going to report Jay
missing,
” she said. “It wasn’t a murder yet, so that might make it a lower priority. On the other hand, Jay’s American, so that’ll carry some weight. But the request to the
federales
has to work its way from San Bellarmino to Oaxaca City and then who knows through what else. I put contact info for his family in the report, so if they apply pressure…” She shrugged.

“We’re fucked,” Claire said.

Eve nodded. “Yeah.”

She finished with the wound and squeezed Will’s toe. “Pins and needles?” she asked.

Will shook his head. “It’s getting a bit numb.” He read her face. “That’s bad?”

“We need to get you out of here.”

“That’s another nonanswer.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. We need to get you out of here.”

“Oh. Right.” He mustered a smile. “How you gonna do that?”

“I don’t know right now.”

He leaned back on the bed and blew a breath at the ceiling. His hands rose to cover his eyes, a fist gripping the opposite thumb. They rested across the bridge of his nose, tugging on each other, an equilibrium of frustration.

Eve fought the urge to say something comforting, because at the moment there wasn’t anything comforting to be said. She left him and headed into the bathroom. As the door pulled open, she started, realizing that someone was already in there.

Claire sat on the lip of the tub, legs splayed before her, rolled outward on the ankles so they looked vaguely froglike.

“You scared the hell out of me,” Eve said.

Claire dragged her legs in, first one, then the other, with a languid dreariness that suggested antipathy toward them. “Guess we don’t have the luxury of privacy. Not anymore.”

“Want me to leave?”

“It’s fine.” Still she wouldn’t look up. Her hands unclasped, and Eve saw in them Jay’s satellite phone.

“Signal?”

Claire shook her head once. Left, right.

She handed Eve the phone. The battery icon was red and blinking.

“No rain, but the clouds,” Claire said. “Electricity. That’s what screws with the signal. That battery’s pretty much done.”

Eve thumbed off the phone to preserve what little charge was left and slipped it into her pocket. “Neto’s in shock,” she said. “And Lulu…”

“Lulu?” Claire gave a little snort. “Lulu has it easy now.”

Sweat darkened her dirty-blond hair at the temples. It hung dead straight, framing her sharp, narrowed features. The expression she kept pointed at the floor was tough and ironic, but that didn’t fool Eve for a second. She waited, watching her.

Sure enough Claire’s mouth trembled wetly. “He’s still out there.” She pointed through the closed door in the direction of the cantina, then swept her hand to encompass the jungle as a whole. “Right now. Waiting. I can
sense
him.”

“Yeah,” Eve said. “Me, too.”

A banging on the door, and then Harry’s voice drifted through. “She needs the bathroom.”

“She’s been in here practically the whole time,” Claire said.

“And she needs to be in there again.”

“Just…”
Claire raised her hands toward her ears, made fists. “Give us a second.”

“Hurry up.” His footsteps retreated.

“God.” Claire shook her head. “When’d he get so assertive?”

Eve shrugged.

“How’s Will doing?” Claire asked.

“His ankle’s broken, and we have no pain meds or antibiotics. So about as can be expected.” Eve pointed at the sink. “Mind if I…?”

Claire shook her head in a manner that suggested that this intrusion was hardly a drop in the bucket of the things she minded.

Eve wet her hands and tried to work the mud out of her hair.

“He’s frustrated now,” Claire said. “Angry. It’s sinking in that he’ll probably die here because of what his body can no longer do.”

“Claire. Claire?
Claire.
”

Finally she looked up. The women’s eyes met in the mirror.

Eve said, “We’re not gonna leave you behind.”

“The only way out now is by foot.”

“By
foot
? There’s no getting out by foot. We are miles from civilization. In this terrain? Crossing a single ridge could take half a day.”

“It’ll still be a ridge between you and
him.
”

Eve said, “We’re
not
gonna leave you behind.”

Claire gave a skeptical nod and rose. She walked out, pulling the door gently closed after her.

Eve paused a moment, then went back to working the clumps of mud from her hair. Quickly, she realized the pointlessness and gave up. She’d get clean when she was safe.

She leaned on the sink and stared at her reflection. Her face creased and weary and smudged with dirt.
What are you gonna do now?

Her reflection had little to offer.

She closed her eyes, pictured Lulu laid out on the picnic table just yards away in the clearing. The same pretty face, but inside the parts were all jumbled together, the pilot light snuffed. It didn’t take much to cross a body over from one side to the other. And Bashir Ahmat al-Gilani certainly knew all the shortcuts.

An image bobbed up through the darkness—Nicolas. His mussed blond hair, his inquisitive eyes, the slender curve of his neck when he bowed his head to focus on some action figure he’d invested with mythical importance. Eve felt herself softening, weakening, sensed an erosion beneath the flesh like the erosion that had robbed Neto’s face of vitality. Her thoughts narrowed to a single point: She would stay alive for her son.

She would stay alive for Sunday
Lord of the Rings
marathons with microwave popcorn and Nicolas close enough to hide under her arm when the Orcs showed up. She would stay alive for morning swim practices and for bedtime stories that he pretended he had outgrown. She would stay alive for dozens of banal reasons that a man like Bashir Ahmat al-Gilani probably could not grasp, for the innumerable commonplaces that fly by unnoticed until you’re languishing on your deathbed or trapped in a jungle hut and you take stock and realize that, added up and mashed together, they form your life—they form
who you are.

And if she was going to do that, if she was going to stay alive, it meant she would have to think about nothing except prevailing and outlasting. It meant she would have to think like Bashir Ahmat al-Gilani.

Every item had to be divested of its meaning. Mezcal was a drink, sure, but today it was an explosive. Today a Chevy Express van was a death trap. And the ATV quads with the slashed tires were repositories for limited quantities of gas and oil and—

The quads.

Already she was moving for the door, the others bolting upright as she banged into the main room. “The ATVs,” she said. “Have batteries.”

Will pushed himself up on the bed. “Which means they have positive-terminal leads.”

Eve rewrapped his ankle and helped him up onto his good foot. His arm, slung across her neck, was slick with sweat, and she could sense the pain radiating off him. They gathered at the front door, Neto in the rear, swaying even more than Sue. Harry nodded to Fortunato, who tentatively cracked the door. They regarded the slice of destruction from the safety of the hut. There was the Jeep across the clearing, pulled into the stable. The view opened as Fortunato leaned forward, holding the knife before him like an antique candle holder he needed to light the way.

Everything was as it had been.

“Everyone together,” Will said. “As in
touching.
”

They held their shape as they moved through the clearing, a tight phalanx, and reached the edge of the stables. Grimacing, Will ventured a few hops beneath the roof and leaned over the outermost mud-flecked quad. He peered at the battery, prying back the rubber cap over the terminal lead. “Damn it. No, it won’t fit. Good idea, though.”