Wall of Glass (18 page)

H
EADBAND LOOKED
for a moment at the gun. Then he smiled, straightened up, and tossed the knife casually to the floor. From the way he shrugged, he might've been making a comment on the weather. “
Otra vez
,” he said. Another time.

I nodded. “
Otra vez.
”

Bookend Number Two was out for the count, slumped in a fetal ball on the floor, but Number One was pulling himself to his feet, and from the anger in his face I knew he was going to try a rush at me.

I said to Headband, “Tell him to lie down. Face to the ground.”

“
Calma te
,” Headband told him. Bookend hesitated, and Headband snapped, “
Acostado de suelo.
” Bookend lay down.

I heard the floorboards creak behind me, on the other side of the bar. Still watching Headband, I called out in Spanish over my shoulder, “Do not even think about it, Jose. I will shoot your friend and then I will shoot you. Does your insurance cover such situations?”

Silence.

I said, “Come out here, José.”

After a moment, he shuffled around the bar, his hands wringing at his apron. “It is not a good thing,” he said in Spanish, and nodded nervously to the gun, “to bring that in here.”

“It is not a good thing,” I said, “to charge five dollars for a glass of beer. Lie down.”

He looked down with distaste. After all, he knew better than anyone what had been on that floor over the years.

“Lie down,” I said again. Muttering to himself, grimacing, he got down onto the floor. I turned to Headband. “You, too.”

Headband shrugged again, and then slowly, eyes never leaving mine, lowered himself to the floor. I crossed over to Bookend Number One and told him, “Hands out. Straight above your head, palms along the deck.”

“
Maricon
,” he said.

Gently, silently, I released the hammer on the pistol. I didn't particularly care for the guy; but the revolver, cocked, has a very light trigger pull, and I didn't want to turn him into a mess that Jose would have to clean up. I bent over and put the snout of the barrel against the back of his neck. “Hands out.”

He slid his hands out.

Holding the gun to his neck, keeping an eye on Headband, I squatted down and reached into his back pocket, slipped out his wallet. I flipped it open. The driver's license was behind the plastic window. The photograph was a good likeness.

I stood up and tossed the wallet to the floor. “Well, Benito,” I said, “I don't suppose there's anything you want to tell me about Frank Biddle.”

He hissed a few colorful unpleasantries about my mother.

“I didn't think so,” I said. “
Otra vez
, maybe.”

I turned to Headband. “I think it'd be a good idea if the three of you stayed where you are for a while. Don't get up. Don't go outside. You understand?”

He nodded.

“Good.
Adios.
”

I backed across the room and out of it, punching the screen door open with my elbow. The door swung shut and I turned and sprinted off the porch, down the steps, and across the parking lot, the gravel clicking and clittering beneath me. At the lowriders, I raised the.38 and fired at all four front tires. Three hits, a miss, another hit. Splendid shooting. But the tires were blown and the front ends were sagging.

I ripped open the door to the Subaru and jumped in, tossing the gun to the passenger side. Found the keys, jammed them in the ignition, started the car, slammed it into reverse, backed out, slammed it into forward, hit the gas, took off with a rattle of pebbles.

My hands were shaking. Adrenaline buzz. No wonder I'd missed.

The shaking didn't stop until I was far below the town, until I was past the village of Truchas. It stopped right about the time I spotted the two new lowriders behind me.

F
OR A FEW MINUTES
after I noticed them, they maintained their speed, keeping the distance between us to about a hundred yards. They could've been kids or a pair of young couples, out for an afternoon spin. On the other hand, the three men back at the bar could've used a telephone or a C.B. radio to call in reinforcements.

Below Truchas the road goes downhill almost all the way to Santa Fe, coiling and uncoiling, turning and winding through the high desert. It's a good road with a firm solid surface, except when the winds dump drifts of sand across the tarmac, or when a storm slicks it up with rain. There was no sand today, but the storm that'd been threatening all morning looked ready to deliver. Far ahead of me, to the south and just about the location of Santa Fe, I could see where the black rolling cloud cover ended; shafts of bright yellow light hit the mountains aslant and made them gleam with green and gold. I was wondering if I'd make it there without getting drenched when I glanced into the rear-view mirror and saw that the lowriders were moving up.

I was going a little over sixty on the straights, in direct violation of the national speed limit. Coming at me that quickly, the two cars had to be violating it by at least thirty miles an hour.

If these two were after me, there was no way I could outrun them. The little Subaru engine, game as it might be, was no match for even a small-block Chevy eight.

When they both got within thirty yards of me, the rear lowrider dropped back, and at that point I was pretty sure they weren't just a couple of kids out for a ride. And it was just then that the rain started, fat round drops splatting against the windshield.

One eye on the mirror, I flipped the wipers on. Magically, this made the rain fall harder.

It was a nifty situation. Chased by two big Chevies, either of which could run rings around the Subaru, at exactly the time when the rain was starting to lift the embedded oils up off the road surface, turning it into a skating rink.

The rain was drumming against the windshield and, despite the frantic thrashing of the wipers, smearing away the landscape. But ahead of me, barely, I could make out a sharp leftward curve coming up in about half a mile. I kept my speed steady at sixty as the lowrider behind me moved into the other lane and began sailing up alongside. There were two men in the front seat.

The driver was cocky. He'd seen car chases at the drive-in, and thought I was dead meat. He and his passenger were both grinning as he swung the massive bulk of the Chevy toward the Subaru. I braked and let him shoot past me.

He was almost at the curve, where the road dropped off on both sides, when I flipped the Subaru into four-wheel drive and floored the gas pedal. The little wagon surged forward. I was braced, fingers tight around the wheel, elbows locked, when it smacked into the left side of the Chevy's rear fender.

Suddenly propelled faster than his wheels were moving, the driver lost his rolling traction, and then, only a moment later, he lost the road. He went over the side and down the slope.

I didn't have time to congratulate myself. Going into the curve too quickly, I could feel the tires sliding away beneath me. I let up on the gas, countersteered, ignored the brakes, and felt the tires bite into the road again. I steered back onto track, and let out my breath. Okay.

Now if the second lowrider stayed to help the first get his machine back onto the road, I was safe for a while.

No. He had slowed down, maybe, but not stopped. He was right behind me, and coming up fast. If he had any imagination, he could do the same thing to me that I'd just done to his friend.

Either he didn't have any imagination, or he was trying to prove something that didn't require it. He began moving up on my left. I glanced in the side mirror, saw the silhouette of his head behind the swishing windshield wipers.

When he was nearly level with me, I tapped the brake, dropped back a few feet, then jerked the steering wheel to the left, held it firm, and hit the gas. The Subaru's bumper smashed into the Chevy's right front fender, crumpling it and jamming it up against the tire. With his front wheels suddenly locked in place, he went into a skid.

Accelerating past, I watched in the rearview mirror as he tried to ride it out. There wasn't much he could do—his steering wheel was useless. He stayed on the road for fifty or sixty yards, and then the road made a gentle curve, sweeping off to the right, and, like his friends, he was gone.

I think I may have grinned. I had handled the three men back at the bar—rather well, I thought—and now the little Subaru and I had bested a couple of big lowriders. And without killing anybody, I was fairly sure. Getting the two cars back up onto the road might take a bit of grunting, but it seemed unlikely that anyone inside had been badly hurt; the slope down from the roadway wasn't steep enough. Maybe a broken arm or two, a bloody nose. So what. Dumb bastards had asked for it, right?

Not a bad day's work.

Hubris. I rounded a bend in the road and saw another two lowriders parked across it, blocking both lanes.

I eased up on the gas.

They had arranged it well. The road dipped down here toward a small bridge crossing an arroyo. They were on my side of the bridge and I couldn't go around them without winding up in the arroyo, which was filling up now with the rush of run-off water. And I couldn't ram them head on. When you're driving a Subaru, you don't ram any stationary object that weighs over ten pounds.

Not much choice. They were sixty yards away and I was down to forty-five miles an hour. I used my left hand to turn the wheel slightly to the left, used my right to jerk up the emergency brake. The front wheels seized and the rear end of the car began a quick swoop out from under me. Before the wagon swung a half circle, I slapped down the emergency brake-stick, grabbed the wheel with both hands, floored the gas peddle.

No dice. A bootlegger's turn needs more traction than the slippery road could give me. Suddenly I was in an uncontrolled spin, thrown back against the seat.

I don't know how many times the Subaru whirled around itself while the world whipped by. I was too busy holding onto the steering wheel to count.

The carousel finally stopped with a sudden sickening jolt that slammed my teeth together and hurled me to the right, against the safety belt, and then a jolt to the left as the car rocked on its suspension. I was off the road, in the sandy soil, and the engine had stalled. I smelled gasoline fumes, piercing and sweet. I looked out the rain-streaked window and saw the lowriders twenty yards away to my left. Three or four men were standing behind the cars in the rain, but none seemed to be doing anything. They were probably all too stunned by the display of precision driving they'd just witnessed.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. Didn't really succeed. I shifted into neutral, switched the ignition off, then on again. The engine caught. I turned the wheel to the right, uphill, toward the road, shifted into first, and hit the gas. The wagon lurched forward about a foot, then stopped abruptly and shuddered, its wheels racing. I shifted into reverse, floored the peddle. A lot of noise, no movement. The front wheels were in muck and the rear wheels were off the ground, suspended above a ditch.

I looked back at the lowriders. One of the men had come around from the left and begun walking toward me.

I unsnapped my seat belt, reached for the gun. Couldn't find it. I groped around, discovered it stuck between the seat and the passenger door. I opened that door and pushed myself out into the rain, remembering that I had only two shots left.

Soaking wet all at once, crouching behind the car, I pulled back the hammer of the pistol and poked my head up over the hood to take a look.

The man had stopped maybe thirty feet away. He was wearing a black plastic raincoat and a black cowboy hat with a flat crown. He had his hands up.

“We mean you no harm, Mr. Croft,” he called out to me.

I had the pistol's sights centered on his belly. “Don't move,” I told him.

How the hell did he know my name?

I remembered. The card I'd left back at La Cantina.

He called out, “Mr. Montoya would like to talk with you.”

“Keep your hands up and tell your friends to come around the front of the cars and lean against them. They probably know the position.”

He nodded. “Very good.” Hands still in the air, he turned and shouted back toward the lowriders. Three men, all wearing black raincoats, emerged from behind the cars and walked around to the front, turned and leaned against them, hands outstretched. In the rain, I couldn't see their hands very well, and any one of the men could've been holding a snub-nose. But at that distance a snub-nose, mine included, didn't represent much of a threat.

I stood up, covering him. “Okay. Get over here. This side of the car.”

“We mean you no harm,” he said again, coming toward me. Medium height, slender build, mestizo face, about thirty years old.

“Yeah?” I said, backing up as he came around the Subaru. “Two of you just tried to run me off the road. Okay, stop. Turn around. Feet spread, hands against the car.”

“They are idiots,” he said, shrugging. “They were supposed to follow you here. Nothing more.” He had no real accent, none of the New Mexican lilt, but he spoke the kind of formal English you hear in people who have been very well educated in another language.

“Lean against the car,” I said.

He did as I said, rainwater spilling from the brim of his hat and splashing against the window of the wagon. I frisked him. Very carefully. He was clean. I stood back.

“Okay,” I said. “Stay against the car. What's the story?”

He twisted his head over his shoulder to look at me. “Mr. Montoya wishes to speak with you.”

“I've got a telephone.”

“He prefers to speak face to face. He says it will be to your advantage. He gives you his word you will not be harmed in any way.”

“Great.”

“Mr Croft, we have deer rifles in the car, with scopes. If we wanted to kill you, we could have.”

If they did have rifles, he was right.