BAD TRIP SOUTH (27 page)

“
Is he...?”

Heddy said nothing. She lowered the gun and finally dropped it to the floor. Crow could now hear the little girl crying from somewhere across the room. He saw shadows entering a doorway from the back of the house. Jay said, “Is it over? Heddy? Heddy, are you all right?”

#

DADDY was the one who got the flashlight and found the dead man. The other man was hurt, but not dead. He was shot twice, once in the stomach and once in his arm. Daddy moved the flashlight beam over his body, the blood showing up like black spots against the man’s clothes. He was sprawled on the floor like a baby, holding both hands over his stomach and crying now. He’d been shot in the same place as the boy at the motel days before. In his stomach.

“
Help me, I’m dying,” he said to Daddy.

Swinging the light away from him, Daddy rested it on Crow. Heddy was helping him to sit up. There was blood coming from his leg, staining the floor black. “You’re shot,” Daddy said.

“
Yeah, he was hit in the leg,” Heddy said. She pulled her bag over to her and drew out a tee shirt. She took it by the neck and ripped it down the center, jerking at the material and cursing when it failed to give the first couple of tries.

“
I’m dying!” The man said again.

Daddy kept the light on Crow’s upper leg while Heddy wrapped the shirt around it twice and tied it in a knot.

“
How are you going to cross the border like that?” Daddy asked.

“
Are you always so goddamn practical?” Heddy yelled.

“
I’m a cop.” He shrugged as if to say it was expected of cops to make practical remarks and to think ahead.

“
If you’re a cop, man, do something for me,” the dying man said. “I’m losing too much blood.”

Daddy turned back to him and stooped nearby, playing the light over his midsection. I could see how the blood had coated his hands, the slimy blood dripping off his knuckles to the floor. I cringed and turned away my face. I couldn’t watch it anymore.

Daddy said, “You’d die before anyone could get you to a doctor. It’s too late.”

The man clenched his teeth and moaned even louder.

“
Shut up!” Heddy had finished tending to Crow and now she stood up and stalked over to where the man was on the floor. “I’ll put a bullet in your head if you want me to. You want me to?”

“
No! Don’t let her near me, don’t let her do it!”

Then Heddy laughed and that was the weirdest thing to hear. There was the smell of blood everywhere and the lingering scent of the gun blasts. There was darkness except for the small pool from the flashlight that played over the man on the floor. Then Heddy’s crazy laughter took hold of the room and I thought this was probably what it was like in war when people had to kill; it made everything all wrong, all crazy. People laughed when they should cry, they bled and died and there was enough hate between them to raise the devil.

I heard a gurgling sound and even though Mama held me tight, one arm around my neck, I turned my head and looked over. Daddy had the light on the man’s face. He was dead. His eyes were open, but he was dead. His whole face had relaxed and gone slack. I thought dead people had closed eyes. I couldn’t stop staring at the man’s unblinking open eyes.

Mama hugged me to her and said softly, “Don’t look, don’t look, baby.” She was trembling and her teeth were chattering although it was a warm night.

I heard Daddy say; “The problem remains. How are you going to get Crow across the border hurt like that?”

“
You’ll help him,” Heddy said. “He can lean on you.”

“
With that bloody shirt tied around his leg? The border guards aren’t blind, you know.”

“
You’re not leaving me behind,” Crow said.

“
Of course not!” Heddy went to him and checked the tied shirt. She looked up at Daddy. “We’ll buy some stuff at a drug store and bandage it right. I’ll get him new jeans. You’ll help him cross the bridge.”

I didn’t hear Daddy answer, but I imagine that he nodded his head. He was part of this now. Like Crow, he did whatever Heddy said.

#

WHILE Frank Hawkins listened to what went on in the house on the outskirts of Brownsville that night, he remembered where he had been at the time. In a private plane with two FBI agents on their way to the border city.

After picking up Craig Walker’s trail south, they could see they were headed for Matamoras to cross. Early in the morning after their arrival hysterical calls came into the city’s police department. There was gunfire at an abandoned house not far from a small subdivision at the edge of town. A patrol car was sent to investigate and didn’t see anything out of order. No cars, no lights, nothing. They drove on past on the road without turning in. Within two hours more calls came in reporting a second round of gunfire coming from the same house.

This time Frank and the agents accompanied the locals in a car to check it out. They parked in the subdivision and went on foot across the pasture toward the house in the trees. Once close enough, they heard voices and knew the place needed to be staked out. They’d heard a child’s voice. They weren’t going to rush in during the middle of night, in the dark, and put her in harm’s way.

This called for careful work. It meant they needed to regroup and think it over. Leaving a patrolman at the subdivision’s edge with a radio, they returned downtown and made plans. They needed men. They needed a negotiator. They’d have to call in some help.

Before daybreak, they had it.

#

WITH dawn came the sound of a bullhorn commanding they come out with their hands raised.

Crow must have slept a bit because at the noise he fairly leaped out of his skin as if roused by shouts from a monstrous dream. “What?”

The others moved and came fully awake, everyone speaking at once.

Jay didn’t even look as if he had slept. He hurried to one of the windows. “It’s the police.”

“
What the fuck..?” Heddy struggled up, licking her bottom lip and looking pale and hung over.

The little girl said, “Daddy, will they shoot us?”

“
Oh god, they’ve surrounded the house,” Carrie said.

“
Take it easy, hold on,” Crow said. “Heddy, help me onto my feet. The rest of you move away from the door.”

Outside the sun poured brilliant splashes of light through the trees. Beyond the overgrown weedy yard stood a line of patrol cars, lights blinking obscenely in the new sunshine. Crow leaned on Heddy’s shoulder. They could see some kind of tactical team dressed in riot gear--helmets, jackets, and high-powered rifles--a whole force of men peeking from behind fenders and hoods.

Crow moved back and through the house, finding his way to the rear with Heddy’s help. The kitchen was in back and a bolted door to the outside. He peered through the dusty windows and didn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there somewhere.

“
See anyone?” Heddy asked, a tremor in her voice.

“
Nah. Nobody. Stay cool now.”

His mouth was dry and his stomach clenched into a knot. His leg burned like it was on fire. Every time he took a step, pain shot up into his groin.

Someone had heard the shooting and called in the cops. Maybe their friends from St. Louis, the two men lying dead on the floor in the front room, had won after all. It wouldn’t, by God, surprise him to learn that’s how they were trapped--trying to save their lives they had forfeited them.

He hurried to the front room again. Heddy let him lean against the wall near the window. She began nervously refilling her gun’s cartridge clip. She kept dropping shells and saying, “Oh shit, oh shit.”

“
What are we gonna do, Heddy?” It was as if his brain had skipped. There seemed to be two alternatives, give it up and walk out or take a stand, neither of which appeared to be actions he could indulge. Surrender his life into the state’s hands again? Or shoot it out with a squad that outnumbered them five to one? It was a fucking western, is what it was. It was high noon in Brownsville, Texas, the problem being he was no Gary Cooper.

“
I didn’t see anyone in the back,” she said.

“
No, but they might be hiding in the weeds or behind the trees out there.”

“
Okay, we tell them we have hostages. We have a kid in here.” She scowled at the girl. “We get them busy in the front and then we break for it out the back.”

He hadn’t wanted her to say that. “Hell, Heddy...”

“
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO?”

Her shout shocked him enough to make him flinch and hunker his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“
You don’t ever fucking know. Now take this gun and watch that window.” She pointed to the one right of the door. She moved quickly to the opposite window on the left.

“
Craig Walker! Harriet Arnold! You have five minutes to come out with your hands behind your head!” shouted the voice over the bullhorn.

“
Listen to them,” Jay said quietly. “I don’t see a way out of this.”

Heddy whirled around. “You better find a way out of it or you’re going to be just as dead as we are.”

“
If you’ll let Carrie and Emily go out, I’ll help you,” he said.

“
No fucking way.” She turned back to the window and suddenly smashed out a lower pane of glass with the gun. To Crow she looked like someone gone mad. There was a darkness in her eyes that meant real business this time. He’d seen her this way just before they took the lab house and if she’d not been on his team, it would have scared him to death.

“
We’ve got three hostages in here!” she shouted. “There’s a family. The kid’s ten years old. You want to talk to me about that, you want to negotiate this thing?”

Heddy waited, glancing over at Crow, and once back to Jay. Crow hugged the wall near the window, gun in hand, afraid to look out there, afraid a marksman would have him in his scope dead on.

“
Send out the child,” the man with the bullhorn yelled.

“
You must think we’re idiots!” Heddy pointed the gun out the broken pane and pulled the trigger carefully.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

#

CROW never would have believed a tack team would open fire on a house filled with hostages. As the gunfire was returned when Heddy pulled the trigger, all he could think was that some hothead on the team got out of control and started off the shooting.

Bullets riddled the walls so that they all had to hit the floor on their faces. Windows burst, shattering glass over them. Everyone was screaming, Heddy, Carrie, Emily. Even Jay was shouting furiously how they couldn’t do this,
they weren’t supposed to do this
!

Crow saw Jay crawl over to the window where Heddy lay. “Give me a gun,” he yelled. She brought out a gun one of the two men had been packing who caught them sleeping earlier.

Jay got to his knees to peek out the window. He said, “Carrie, Em, stay down.”

He said to Heddy, “C’mon, you wanted a fight, you’ve got one.”

She looked up at him as she might look at a hero and got to her knees, then to her feet. “Let’s do it,” she said. “Fuck it.”

Crow moved back to his own window and, trembling like a man with palsy, raised his gun to the frame.

#

IN the first barrage of gunfire I think I realized if I stayed in the house, I’d die. Oh, well, don’t apologize for those men, it wouldn’t have mattered what they did at that house, it was all going sour the minute they showed up. I guess I should say it all went bad when we stopped in at the Long Horn Caverns and got hooked up with Heddy and Crow.

“
It got out of hand,” Mr. Hawkins said sadly. “The hostage negotiator was on his way from Houston. Orders were not to fire because they knew you were in there, they knew there were hostages. But once Heddy starting firing, it was all over. A hothead riot cop who hadn’t been in the unit but two weeks lost it and started the whole thing.”

Well, I said, it was a terrible thing, but Heddy wouldn’t have let us come out without a fight. During the next session of gunfire, Mama was hit. We were holding one another, trying to stay down. I don’t know where the bullet came from or how it found her, but it did. I had my arms around her waist, my head buried in her lap when she was struck. She fell back, letting me go, trying to catch herself. She must have cried out, but with all the noise I didn’t hear her.