The Return: A Novel (50 page)

And then someone shouted, and in a moment all of the men on the causeway side of the roof were yelling and pointing. Marder crossed to the other side of the roof and saw a large black object moving slowly down the coast road. He ran back to get the 20 mm and set it up on the eastern parapet. Through the scope he could see that it was an example of what Mexicans called a narco-tank. The cartels built them to overawe rivals, he’d heard, but rarely used them. This was apparently one of the rare times when they rolled one out.

The thing made its turn slowly and began to move up the causeway toward the house, speeding up as it did so. There was something light-colored tied to the front of the rig. Telescopic sights are not optimized for tracking moving objects, and Marder had a hard time keeping it in focus. When it got closer, he could see what they’d done, which was to build a cage of cyclone fencing around the steel plate protecting the front of the vehicle. Within this they had imprisoned Lourdes Almones. Her wrists and ankles had been tied to the fencing, so that she couldn’t shift her position, and her head was situated just rightward of the center of the narrow slit that let the driver see where he was going.

A difficult shot, Marder thought; not impossible. He would have only the one shot, because the truck was approaching too fast for a second. All he had to do was place his round into a slit about the size of the opening on an old-fashioned post-mounted letterbox, without hitting Lourdes’s head or the armor plate around it—all this made harder by his guilt, by his own terror, by the terror he could see on the girl’s tearstained face, by the thought of what would happen when the tank hit the gate. The girl was as good as dead already, and it was his fault. These were his thoughts in the three seconds that elapsed between the time he saw it was Lourdes and the time he would have to either squeeze the trigger or lose the house, unless he could get the crosshairs of his scope just on the—

He barely heard the shot, or so it seemed. He saw the bright flash in the blackness of the slit and saw that Lourdes still had a head, and then dirty yellow smoke gushed out of the slit and the tank veered left—lazily, like a hippo going for a wallow in the sea—off the road, down among the boulders, slamming into them with a mighty grinding crash, and turning over onto its side.

Before the monster had completed this evolution, Marder was down the stairs, and since everyone on the roof had seen what happened, he was followed by a dozen men. He dashed through the house, shouting for people to follow him; he had his pistol out; he was running out the front door, past the men in sandbagged bunkers guarding the gate, out the small side gate, and onto the causeway.

He heard heavy steps close behind him and snapped a look over his shoulder. It was a kid named … he couldn’t remember now, a former
ni-ni
, worked in the glass factory; he was wearing a Lakers basketball shirt and a red headband and was carrying a PKM machine gun.

Marder heard the roar of engines, distant pops, and the snap of bullets overhead. He looked down the causeway. A long column of vehicles, mainly large pickup trucks, was careening down the road; the men standing in the bed of the foremost were firing at him. He crouched and ran, stumbling off the roadway and down onto the boulders, jumping like a goat from one to another, heading for the careened tank.

She was lying still in a fold of fencing, her skin blackened with soot and dappled with splashes of blood. He forced his hand through a space in the fence, reached her wrist. A pulse. A scatter of bullets pinged and whined off the side of the tank and the rocks.

Marder turned to the kid. “What’s your name,
muchacho
?”

“Juan Benevista, Don Ricardo, from Delta platoon.”

“Okay, Juan Benevista, I want you to give me your weapon, and then I want you to run as fast as you can to the toolshed behind the house and come back here with a bolt cutter and stretcher bearers. Is your ammo box full?”

“I haven’t fired it yet, Señor,” he said, looking a little sad.

“Good. Now, you go wait behind those rocks until I start firing, and then run like the wind!”

Marder set up his machine gun in the shadow under the overhang of the capsized tank. He started firing when the lead pickup was barely a hundred feet from him, letting the green tracers walk up from the front grille to the windshield and onto the the men clustered in the back. He saw the windshield fall apart and the truck swerve violently to the left. Its wheel went off the roadway, struck a rock, and the truck overturned and continued down the road on its back for thirty yards, leaving a smear of blood and shattered men. The next truck in the convoy braked, skidding on the mire of blood and leaked fuel and oil. Marder sent a short burst into it, which was hardly necessary. It crashed into the wreck, scattering its passengers like discarded dolls. Marder shot down the few staggering survivors.

The remaining attack force stopped some thirty meters away, swung a truck and an SUV across the road, and began a lively fusillade. At that point the spilled fuel from the wrecks ignited, sending dense clouds of black smoke across the scene, masking Marder’s position.

Men had arrived from the house, twenty or so, under the command of Luis Araiza, the Delta platoon leader. The man squatted down next to Marder and peered out at the enemy position. A bullet spanged off the steel above them. Araiza tried not to flinch, Marder observed, but flinched nonetheless.

“How’s it going, Luis? Are you having fun yet?”

“We haven’t done anything. We were in the house as the reserve. Is this a reserve situation,
jefe
?”

“It is. Here’s what I want you to do. Split your guys into two teams and send them to either side of the causeway. Make sure the narcos don’t send anyone up the sides—it’s dead ground from the front of the house and the roof. We need to keep them as far away from the house as we can. Do you have grenades?”

“Yes,
jefe
.”

“You hear that banging sound? That’s the guys in the tank trying to get out—there might be forty men in there. I want you to send someone to climb up on top and drop some grenades into that turret thing. Do it now, while it’s still smoky.”

Araiza looked doubtfully up at the black hulk. More bullets snapped by and ricocheted off the steel plates. He said, “I’ll do it myself.”

Marder laid down a base of fire with his PKM and the man scrambled up the side of the narco-tank. Three dull booms sounded, after which there was no more banging. Then, during one of those odd lulls that often occur in even the most violent firefights, Marder heard a thin shrill voice crying.

Juan Benevista appeared, sweaty but grinning, and handed Marder a bolt cutter. Marder gave him back his machine gun and ran down to the front of the tank. He snipped away at Lourdes’s bonds and the fencing until the girl was free of the cage. As he lifted her out, her hands fluttered at her face. She saw the blood, she plucked at her hair, she saw the black char, she howled in despair. He felt someone tugging at his arm. “Let us through, Don Ricardo, we’ll take her.”

It was Rosita Morales and another woman. He recalled that the women had decided that they would act as the medics of the defense force, and here they were, with a homemade stretcher on which they tenderly placed the girl, then covered her with a blanket and ran off with her, back to the house.

The smoke from the fire thinned out and the Templos launched several attacks along the boulders. These were ragged, uncoordinated, and easily stopped, which Marder found strange because, from what he could see, they must have had several hundred men on hand, all milling around behind the barrier of the vehicles across the road. It seemed that Skelly had been right: the
sicarios
of Playa Diamante had not signed on for assaulting a position defended by machine guns.

He pulled out his cell phone and pushed the speed dial for Bartolomeo Ortiz, the blacksmith and commander of Alpha platoon on the roof terrace.

“Ortiz, how are you doing? What’s happening on the beach?”

“I think they are defeated, Don Ricardo. Don Eskelly says they are just a few hiding in the bushes down there. Our men are shooting them like rabbits.”

“That’s good, then. Look, Ortiz, I need some heavy fire directed at that roadblock. Let’s get the 12.7 on it, and get Rubén on the twenty millimeter. Tell him to start some fires in those cars; tell him to light up the fuel tanks.”

“We have only one more box of rounds for the 12.7, Señor.”

“Yes, I know, but this could make them leave us alone. I think they might break if we push them now.”

Ortiz hesitated, and Marder could tell he was uneasy taking orders from anyone but Don Eskelly, but he didn’t like to argue with the
patrón
either. In a few minutes the big machine gun started sending fat green tracer into the SUV barrier, and then came the car-door sound of the 20 mm. Pieces flew off the vehicles of the enemy, a man ran away and was decapitated by one of the 12.7 rounds, and then the gas tanks went up and all of the men sheltering there ran down the road. The Felizistas cheered.

Marder walked back to the house. He felt like shit, the tension of combat having overridden the innumerable bruises and strains that accumulate when one is engaged in shooting and being shot at, which all gave notice now that Marder was no longer nineteen.

Within the house, it felt like a locker room after the victory in the big game—a women’s team perhaps, because most of those who greeted Marder with cheers and hugs were women. Marder smiled his way through these and went to the dressing station. According to Hilda Salinas, the nurse, casualties were fairly light: six wounded, only one dead—a kid named Jesús, an ironworker. Marder could not recall the fellow’s face. He asked about Lourdes.

The nurse’s lips tightened into a wrong smile and she looked away, in the way that people around here used when they were embarrassed before someone in authority.

“He took her.”

“Who took her?”

“Don Eskelly. He came up from the beach with one of his wounded men and saw her, and they spoke and then he picked her up and went out.”

“I see. And how are you doing, Señora? Do you have everything you need?”

She laughed harshly. “I have nothing I need. I would like a doctor, and some people who had more than a first-aid course, and morphine and an x-ray machine and more plasma. Some of these people are going to die if this doesn’t stop before we can get them to a proper hospital.”

She took a deep breath and arranged her face into a more professional mask. “I’m sorry, Don Ricardo, I shouldn’t complain, but we are not set up for a war here. In the clinic, the
sicarios
walk right in and finish what they have started and no one stops them. They take people right out of the beds, witnesses and rivals and whoever, and they end up on the road, chopped to pieces. That’s why I came to you.”

“I understand,” said Marder. “We’ll try to make sure that it doesn’t happen here. What about Lourdes—was she badly hurt?”

“Not physically, no. Some cuts, scrapes, and burns, but she was concussed in the crash. She should go to a proper hospital for head shots. He said he was going to take her to one.” She looked over Marder’s shoulder. “Oh, there he is now.”

Marder turned, and Skelly walked up to him and, without a word, socked him in the jaw.

*   *   *

A woman brought Carmel dinner at seven-ten. She’d been a captive for more than six hours and was feeling odd, not because of the captivity so much but because this period was the first time in a long while that she had been disconnected from the Internet for more than a few minutes. She was designing, she had to look things up, she had to make calculations, and she couldn’t; she kept reaching for a smartphone that wasn’t there, like a quitting smoker patting pockets. Not having the data was like not having oxygen, she thought; it dulled her thinking, and she had to draw everything up from memory, and who used memory anymore?

She was running out of paper too. The little notebook (itself an anachronism) was filling with calculations about Colonia Feliz—wattage per square meter, flow rates through pipes of different sizes driven by pumps of different designs—that she would’ve done on a screen if she had one. She had tried using the walls as a scratch pad, but the rough stucco was hard to write on and she didn’t want to screw up her pen. And did it really matter? That was a thought that kept coming up. Maybe this was the first symptom of a breakdown, like the guys in the movies
Pi
or
A Beautiful Mind
—obsessive calculation.

Or maybe it was a talisman against death. If she had all these plans, if she was going to do something really good for a lot of people, maybe she wouldn’t be killed. But this thought was very deeply buried indeed and barely registered in her consciousness, except as a tone of sadness that made her issue long sighs from time to time.

The meal was fresh hot tortillas and spicy shredded meat, the famous
carnitas
of the region, and green rice and beans, served with a big tin cup of black coffee. Statch tried to engage the woman in comversation, but she pointed to her mouth and ear and shook her head: a deaf mute. There was a man waiting out in the corridor when the woman came in, a big man with a dull, hostile expression and a head that got narrower at the top, a feature exaggerated by the faded buzz-cut hairdo that seemed to be the official Templo look.

She ate the food, which was excellent Michoacán country cooking, the food on which she had been raised, and thought about her mother and tried not to completely break down, but still she wept a little. She used the bucket and washed her face and sat on the bed. They were treating her pretty well, she thought, which was good news. If they were feeding her and leaving her alone and hadn’t searched her thoroughly or taken her watch and other items, it meant they were planning to release her. With this thought, she spent her evening comfortably enough. The room had no lamp, and when it become too dark to write, she took her boots off and lay on the bed.

Sleep came to her quickly and she slept soundly until, at about four the next morning, two men burst into the room, dragged her from her bed, tied her hands behind her, taped her mouth, yanked her pants off, found the pistol, laughed, slapped her across the mouth, dropped a sack over her head, frog-marched her shoeless out into the cool of the night, and threw her into the trunk of a car. Okay, she thought,
now
I’m in trouble.