Under the Skin (34 page)

We were pushing deep into nowhere, just like it looked on the
map, and the road got worse. It was full of cracks and potholes and
the Hudson sometimes thumped into one so hard it was a wonder we
didn’t blow a tire. The gas-pump guy had said we were lucky to be
making this drive in the good weather of the year, that the heat of
summer was unbearable, but even now you could see heat waves
where the highway met the horizon.

We rolled through a vast pale desert of scraggly brush and rocky
outcrops and long red mesas. Far to the southwest black thunderheads sparked with silent lightning and dragged purple veils of rain
over the jagged ranges on the horizon. We saw no other living thing
but a pair of vultures circling high over the sunlit wasteland to the
north.

“Jesus,” Brando said. “Where the
hell
are we?”
“I believe we took a wrong turn and come to the moon,” LQ said.
He reached over to the front seat and got the hand-drawn map from
beside me and sat back and opened it.
“According to this,” he said, “that hacienda place is straight thataway”—he pointed south—“about thirty–forty miles.”
“I know it,” I said. “But there’s no way to get there except by way
of the Escalón road—and that’s . . . what... twice as long, all told?”
“At least that, according to this map. Fella sure lives out of the
way, don’t he? Say, what’s this here, where the river runs out?”
LQ leaned over the seat to point out the little clump of penciled
tufts labeled “ciénaga” just north of the hacienda.
“Sort of a swamp,” I said. “This close to the desert it’s probably
just a mud patch.”
I didn’t say much for a while after that—just smoked and stared
out at the passing landscape. I couldn’t have explained it, but there
was something about this country that pulled at me. In some inexplicable way it felt like a place I’d once known but had forgotten all
about.

The sun was almost down to the ridge of distant mountains in the
west and glaring hard against the windshield when the road angled
off to southward. The map showed the angle and we calculated that
we were less than forty miles from Escalón.

scalón was nothing but a tiny railstation and a
small rocky cemetery and a dozen scattered
houses along a single dirt street. No motor vehicles. No telephone or even a telegraph line.

The road ran north to Jiménez and south to Torreón,
which lay even farther away. The fat creamy moon had just
risen over the black mountains. A light wind kicked up
and carried the smell of charcoal cooking. A dog barked
and barked but hung back in the shadows beside the depot.
The station door was open and showed soft yellow light. A
man in a rail agent’s cap stepped into the doorway and
peered out at us.

“Cállate,” he said, and the dog shut up and slunk off.
“Buenas noches, señores. Les puedo ayudar?”
I told Brando to keep a lookout and LQ and I went into
the station. The agent stepped aside for us and then went
around behind the narrow counter. In the light of a pair of
kerosene lanterns I saw that his face was badly scarred, as
if it had been torn open in several places and then badly sutured. His left arm had been ruined too and he held it at
an awkward twist.

“Tres.”
“Tres?” His ruined mouth twisted and he shook his head.
“Go to hell, Jack,” LQ said as we started for the door. “Odds like

he road was about as wide as a big truck and went snaking
through high dense brush and tall stands of mesquite trees.
The hacienda’s pasturelands were somewhere far to the east. We drove
without headlights and very slowly, raising no dust, making our way
by the small patches of moonlight that filtered through the trees.
We’d been on the move for the better part of an hour when we went
around a long curve through the heavy scrub and saw the lights of the
hacienda in the distance ahead.

When we figured we were within a mile of the place, LQ and I got
out of the car. He carried the BAR and the shoulder bag of extra magazines; I had one of the shotguns and one coat pocket full of extra
shells for it, the other pocket full of .44 cartridges. The road was still
closely bounded and deeply shadowed by brush and mesquite. I
headed up the road with LQ ten yards behind me and Brando easing
the Hudson along behind LQ, far enough back that I couldn’t hear
the motor.

About eighty yards from the compound the trees and taller brush
abruptly ended. LQ came up beside me and we crouched in the road’s
last portion of darkness. We had a clear view of the compound gate
and the guard posted there, but between us and the compound it was
all moonlit open ground and there was no shadow at all on the long
front wall. Brando was still in the car, about thirty yards behind us.

The wooden gate was tall and double-doored, the left door open
inward, the right one shut. The guard sat in a straightback chair in
front of the closed door. We could see the red flarings of his cigarette
and it looked like there was some kind of long gun propped against

the gate beside him. The wall was about twelve feet high and we
could see the glitter of the broken bottles cemented along the top of
it, a safeguard common to every walled residence, large or small, we’d
seen in Mexico. The open gate door was dimly yellow with light from
the courtyard within.

We talked it over in a whisper and came up with a plan. I went
back down the road to tell it to Brando and then stood on the running board as he very gingerly brought the Hudson up to about fifteen yards from the shadowed end of the road and stopped. We could
see LQ’s crouched silhouette up ahead.

“Keep your eye on me,” I told Brando, then I hustled back up to LQ.
“Okay,” LQ said, handing me his hat and the BAR. “Here goes
nothing.” He slipped into the brush to the right of the road and vanished. I slung the BAR over one shoulder, the shotgun over the
other.

It took nearly half an hour for him to move around to the east side
of the compound. I kept watching the far end of the front wall and finally saw his blond head poke out from behind it.

The guard was sitting with his back to him. He’d been chainsmoking and he lit another cigarette as LQ started toward him, walking steadily and sticking close to the wall, his shadow short and
leaning a little ahead of him. If the guard turned around and saw him
coming LQ would probably have to shoot him—and the ones inside
might get the gate shut on us.

LQ was almost to him when the guard jerked around in his
chair—maybe he heard LQ’s footsteps. He jumped up and spun
around to grab for the long gun but then LQ was on him, clubbing
at him with his pistol. I heard the guy hollering—and figured they
sure as hell heard him inside—and then LQ had him down and shut
him up.

shot out into the moonlight and swerved around in a tight circle and
Brando gunned it back into the narrow mouth of the road and braked
hard—the car now facing back the way we came and blocking the
mouth of the road. The door flew open and Brando came on the run,
shotgun in hand.

LQ was standing in the open gate pointing the .380 at somebody
inside and yelling, “Put it down, man, put it down!” A pistolshot
sounded from the courtyard and the round ricocheted off the stone
wall. LQ crouched beside the closed door and opened fire with the
.380, snapping off three or four rounds in a row, the muzzle flashing
yellow, then took cover behind the door.

I ran up and gave LQ his hat and the BAR and whipped the shotgun off my shoulder. Somebody inside was crying in pain and praying to the Holy Mother.

“Map’s got it right,” LQ said. “Driveway goes straight to a pool
fountain some seventy–eighty yards off and the house is just the other
side of it.”

Brando ran up, grinning big.
“Woooo.”
There was a lot of shouting in the compound, mostly unintelligible, some of it demanding to know what was going on, some of it informing that Julio had been shot and needed help. Somebody
ordering somebody to shut the fucking gate and somebody yelling
back for
him
to shut the fucking gate.
LQ peeked around the open door and jerked his head back quick
as several pistols fired and bullets whacked the thick wood.
“There’s a bunch coming from the right,” he said. “Let’s do it if
we’re gonna do it.”
I told him to cover us from the gate—we didn’t want them shutting the door and trapping us inside. “Keep behind me, Ray—
straight for the house. I’ll go upstairs, you hold the front door. Shoot
anything you aint sure of.”
I slapped LQ on the shoulder and said, “Do it.”

He stood up and leaned around the door and fired a long sweeping burst of the BAR, the rifle pumping out rounds in
bam-bam-bam
fashion, flaring bright and cracking loud. I’d never heard one before
and it was pretty impressive.

Brando and I ran up the driveway. It was wide and cobbled and
flanked on either side by torchlights and low hedges, stone benches,
various statues. The diagram hadn’t mentioned all the trees on the
place. The courtyard was straight ahead, a circular stone fountain in
the middle of it with some kind of sculpture spouting water in the
center of the pool. The house just beyond it was blazing with light.
From the shadowy area off to our right voices shouted, “Por allá! Allá
están! Por allá!”

I ran in a crouch as gunshots cracked. A bullet struck a statue close
to my head and stone fragments pecked my cheek. Rounds hummed
through the hedges. Then LQ’s BAR was hammering again and there
was screaming and it sounded like LQ shot up an entire magazine before he stopped firing. There were anguished cries, shriekings for
help.

The courtyard hedge was higher than the one along the driveway
and as I ran around the fountain a man came rushing out of a hedge
pathway with a pistol in his hand and seemed astonished to see me. I
blasted him in the chest with the ten-gauge and he flew backward
into the hedge and hung there in a bloody tangle.

“Right side!” Brando yelled, and I turned and saw two more with
rifles coming out of the other hedge. Brando’s shotgun took half the
head off one of them. The other fired at me from the hip and I heard
the bullet pass me. I gave him a load in the belly and he bounced off
the base of a horse statue and left a red mess on the stone.

The BAR was rapping again and there was more screaming—and
then Brando cried out. I turned and saw him on the ground, clutching his side and cussing a blue streak.

and I fired at them and one spun around and went down and the other
ducked behind the fountain. Brando sat up and pulled his revolver
and the guy never knew Ray was there until he peeked around that
side of the fountain and his hair jumped when Brando shot him in the
head.

I started for the house and spotted a man looking down from the
balcony—a guy with long white hair and a black eyepatch. I raised
the shotgun and he darted away just as I blew fragments off the stone
rail where he’d been standing. I thought I heard a woman scream up
there. Daniela.

The shotgun lever seized and I flung the weapon away and drew
the Mexican Colt and ran up the front steps. A man in an apron and
gripping a meat cleaver came at me from a side door—brave but stupid. I shot him and he fell down, blood spurting from his neck. I ran
into the main parlor and damn near shot a pair of terrified maids hugging tight to each other.

I raced up the wide stairway, taking the steps two at a time, but as
I reached the middle landing a large man suddenly appeared at the top
of the stairs and shot at me and my right foot kicked out from under
me and I fell sideways on the steps. His next bullet gouged a hole in
the carpet under my nose. Then we fired at the same time and my cheek
burned and he flinched and his gun hand drooped. He started to raise
the revolver again and I shot him in the chest and he discharged a
round into the wall and dropped the gun and came tumbling down the
steps to the landing and lay on his back without moving.

I sat up and checked my foot and saw that the heel of my boot had
been shot off. I raised my other foot and whacked the heel with the
Colt barrel a half-dozen times before it broke off. I wiped blood from
my right cheek, then stood up and looked down at the guy and saw
that he was still alive and staring at me. He had a pencil mustache
and a bandaged ear.