Nightfire! (The Corvette Nightfire Prequel) (3 page)

The baby did survive in Luna's belly. Día
could see the bond developing between Luna and the kind rancher
woman even that first night. The woman struggled to communicate
with words of Spanish, and Luna, seeing the woman's comfort with
English, began to learn and repeat English words that very evening.
Luna's facility with languages and her cleverness were things that
made Día yearn for her. He had always been in awe of her
intelligence and quickness in learning. He often remembered
watching Luna with the woman that night and recalling the heat that
he had felt for Luna in his body. He had wished that he could be
alone with Luna in the ranchhouse. It made him smile to remember
that.

Very quickly, by the next afternoon as Día
recalled, it became settled among him, Luna, the woman and her
husband, that Día and Luna would move from the small apartment that
they had inside a rooming house in Presidio to a wooden bungalow in
the back of the farm that was presently vacant. The ranchers
offered that Luna could help the woman with the farm and household
duties, and the woman would be able to care for Luna as her
pregnancy came to term. The ranchers believed, as Día and Luna had
told them, that Día worked on cars and occasionally sold some which
he delivered to Mexico. Hearing that, the woman asserted that it
would be much safer for Luna and the baby not to travel with Día,
as she had been doing. Luna would assist her as compensation for
their new living quarters, she said.

The arrangement produced a brief period of
stability, at least for Luna, and the sense that they might have a
family after all. As Luna's belly grew in the months that followed,
she and the older woman strengthened in their friendship.The baby
was born in 1961. They considered Rarámuri names. Luna and the
rancher woman exhausted many conversations discussing
possibilities. Luna saw that the Rarámuri names were difficult for
the rancher woman, whom she had come to love. The woman kept
returning to the English name, Roger, but the Spanish name for
Roger, Rogelio, sounded close to a Rarámuri name that Día liked. So
the baby was named Rogelio. He came out of Luna flailing and
kicking, a beautiful boy in graceful motion, like he was dancing.
The boy loved to dance as he grew. Día saw in the next couple years
that noone could look at Rogelio without falling instantly in
love.

Día let himself become lulled into calmness
by feeling the domesticity of life on the ranch when he was at
home. But the work taking cars into Mexico gradually became
increasingly risky. There was constant turnover in the cartel, and
Día found himself repeatedly dealing with people whom he didn't
know. Certainly none of them were men to be trusted. He knew their
homicidal natures. And every new man appearing in his shop already
knew a lot about Día, where he lived, where he came from, his
skills, and that Luna worked with him. They mentioned this
information to him with painted smiles and murderous eyes. None had
mentioned the baby yet, but as Rogelio grew and Día loved him more
and more, he became increasingly aprehensive about his baby's
future. At night in bed, Luna also whispered her anxieties to him
that Rogelio was endangered by the lives of his own parents! She
told Día that always she felt the presence of cold, invisible
eyes.

Rogelio had been walking for about nine
months when the complicities of Día's work intruded. He and Luna
suddenly had to accept the inevitability of sudden life-or-death
choices to be made with no time to consider them. The finality of
things began with the theft of a fast silver car.

Día was about to go home late one January
evening when a pock-skinned cartel leader appeared with a couple of
his men. Día had dealt with him before, a rooster of a man who
strutted back and forth whereever he was, usually belittling those
with him. But this night he came with singleness of purpose.

"You are coming with us, cabrón. We have work
tonight," the man told Día. "El jefe, the big man, is coming from
Sinaloa to Ojinaga in a few days. He has business, but it is his
birthday, and he wants to have a special fiesta because he will
have fifty years of age. There is this singular gift that he wants
to show off at his party. It is a car is made in the United States,
a new model, very hard to get. It has caused me mucho fuego (a lot
of fire) in my stomach trying to find him one. Finally, I found one
not too far from here. You are the lucky hombre who is going to get
it ready for him. Serás muy jodido si metes la pata, cabrón! (You
will be very fucked if you screw this up, you idiot.) Vámonos,
let's go! Bring your tool kit."

They drove on nearly deserted highways about
ninety miles to a ranch on the outskirts of a small community named
Alpine. On the way, the man described the "gift" that Día was to
steal: a 1963 Corvette that had double rear windows caused by a
flow of the roofline passing down the center of the window. The car
would be in the detached equipment shed of a ranch house owned by
the prominent area farmer. "El jefe tiene huevos grandes por este
auto," he told Día: "The boss has big balls for this car. It is
fast. He wants the best."

Just before arriving at the ranch, a mid-size
moving truck pulled ahead of them onto the highway. It led a few
miles before pulling to the shoulder in the dark of the moonless
night. As they passed it, the man told Día, "You will get the car
started and drive it to this truck. Muy rápido. It is a straight
drive to here. Just be sure noone is on the road when you make the
short trip. Drive the car into the truck when you arrive, and then
get in the truck with the driver. We won't be far. But if anything
goes wrong, you are doing this all by yourself, chiquito. The truck
will take the car to a place and leave it to be painted. When that
is finished, it comes to your shop for the customizing that you
will do. We will instruct you at that time. But tonight, this is
your job alone, comprendes? (Do you understand?) Any word from you
about us to anyone, we go to find your wife. She will not be too
happy that you talked, I promise you that."

At the mention of Luna, Día felt his breath
catch. He forced a calm composure. "I understand," Día answered,
but inside he seethed with rage. In a flash, he determined that the
time for a new life had arrived.

The theft was easy in this trusting community
of rural Texas. Día had worried about dogs barking or the time
required to break into the shed, but the night was quiet and still.
There was no sign of dogs. The double door to the shed was not even
locked. Inside were the car, a couple of tractors, a big generator
and farm tools. The men had let Día out from the car just down the
road from the ranch and had driven away. With his tools, Día
skillfully unlocked the car. He observed that the Corvette had a
manual transmission. He broke the steering column lock. With his
body, he eased the car closer to the open shed door by pushing the
frame from beside the driver seat. When he hot-wired the ignition,
he got startled by a loud crack and a flame that shot from the
exhaust pipe.

Maldito!
he thought.
This
carburetor needs adjusting!
He worried that the sound might
have awakened the owners in the house, but in the seconds that
followed, he saw no sign that anyone in the house was stirring. He
hummed the engine as quietly as the Corvette would allow. The
engine was a small block and relatively calm at low rpms, but Día
worried that there would be more misfires creating explosive cracks
of thunder in the still night.

When he got to the road, he gunned it, and
the car's front end lifted. He had rolled the window down. The
gushing, roaring wind in his face and the growling acceleration of
the engine caused his heart to pound. He had never experienced
speed like this! It was that moment which validated for him that
the time had come for freedom for his family. He would pay close
attention to opportunities that would present themselves over the
next days.

He covered the two miles to the truck in no
time. When he decelerated, the brakes seemed woefully inadequate
for the Corvette's speed. He noted that the car had drum brakes. He
had studied the new disc brakes on a couple of the cars that had
passed under his modifications in his shop. He made a mental note
that these should be installed on the Corvette. The truck had
turned around and had its rear doors opened with ramps down for
entry. Día barely managed to stop the car in time because of the
brakes, but he did, and then he eased the Corvette up the ramp and
into the truck.

In the three days that passed before he saw
the car again, Día remembered something important: The car was
silver. The Chevrolet Corvette vehicle indentification numbering
system would include a number to indicate the car's color. If it
were to be repainted, a new vehicle number would have to reflect
the new color.

When the man who had taken him on his mission
reappeared with the car three nights later at his shop, the
surprise wasn't that the car was bright red. The shocker was the
special project that the man had for him to do: He had a box of
cash, U.S. currency, that he wanted hidden inside the liner of the
car's interior ceiling. Día was to tape the large denomination
dollars to the metal frame of the roof and then re-install the
liner so that noone would be able to tell that it had ever been
removed. The car, Día realized, was not only a birthday gift for
the leader of the Cartel of Sinaloa, but it would also serve the
purpose of transporting cash to him for drug sales that had taken
place in the United States. El Jefe would have double bragging
rights: for the car and the cash inside it.

After he stole the Corvette, Día had prepared
Luna that there might come a hasty escape opportunity for them. In
the bed they whispered intimately, as if the baby could understand
what they were discussing if he heard them. Luna surprised Día with
unyielding anxiety about Rogelio:

Por Dios, Día, if we run, we can't take the
baby! Anything can happen. We could be killed! We will be on the
run forever! We can't take our baby all over Mexico! That is no
life for our son!"

"We can't stay here forever, either, Luna,"
Día answered. "I'm going to be caught one day by the gringo police,
or the cartel will kill us, or we will be deported and then sought
in Mexico by the cartel. We have to make a new life, with new
identities.

"I won't risk Rogelio's life in the transport
of this car," Luna said pointedly, talking about the Corvette. "If
I have to go with you, we have to come back!"

The discussion wore on through the night.
Finally, Día got Luna to agree on a plan that he didn't believe
would ever come to pass: that they would find a hiding place in
Mexico, and when the time was right, they would return for Rogelio.
Luna seemed uneasily to agree to this, but Día believed that she
also didn't think that they would be able to return.

The next night, Luna shocked Día with news
that she had spoken to the woman of the ranch that she would be
making the trip with him.

Luna said, "I began to tell her that we would
be back, but she interrupted me. She told me never to worry about
Rogelio, that she loved him as if he were her own grandson, and me
as if I were her daughter! If anything ever happened to us, she
said that she and her husband would raise Rogelio as if he were
their own!"

The night of the transport of the Corvette to
Mexico, Día and Luna sat tensely in their seats as they approached
the border. With so much cash being under the headliner of the car,
and the car being a special birthday gift for the boss of the
cartel, there were escorts for the young Rarámuri couple: A
heavy-duty pickup truck cruised ahead of them, and a Ford Galaxy
full of young Mexican men drove behind them.

"There should not be a problem going over the
river to Mexico," Día explained for the umpteenth time to Luna.
"They have made sure the border agents looking at the cars tonight
are the guys on their payroll." But he was nervous.

Luna sat quietly, staring out the passenger
window.

"So when it is time for us to get out of the
car, when everyone is making a big commotion about the car for El
Jefe, that is when we do what we always do."

Luna didn't say anything, so Día added, "We
run. We run into the night. You stay with me. They won't notice us
or care about us at first. They will just be interested in the
car."

The inspection at the U.S. gate was, indeed,
preemptory. The young man who looked at their papers did not even
look directly in their eyes. Día had seen him on the job before.
The truck was ahead on the bridge over the river. In the rear
mirror, Día saw that the Ford behind them also had passed through
quickly, as if it had been waved through. Día did not expect that
there would be anyone on the Mexican side stopping vehicles in the
"Nothing to Declare" lane. There seldom was. Sometimes a Mexican
Army troop-carrier sat nearby in the darkness with men watching and
pulling an occasional car over to question the driver, but this did
not happen often. Once over the bridge, they would drive through
the sleeping small town on the route to the city of Chihuahua, but
they would turn off shortly to a rural road that would lead them to
the place where El Jefe was staying.

It was precisely at that turn where some
Mexican Army jeeps and trucks had blocked the intersection! Día got
surprised suddenly by the cracks of gunfire ahead of him, and he
instinctively applied the brakes. Luna bolted upright in her seat,
and both of them stared ahead, trying to make sense of what they
were seeing.

"I think the guys in the truck are shooting
at the military!" Día shouted. He glanced in the mirror and saw
that the Ford was speeding toward them and catching up fast. When
he looked ahead again, he saw the pickup truck moving backwards and
then stop. His body tensed from the awareness that he would have to
make a split-second decision. Suddenly, the truck furiously began
spinning its tires, and it lurched forward, accelerating directly
towards two jeeps on the left side of the highway. Día glanced in
the rear mirror another time. The Ford was getting closer. When he
looked ahead again, to his amazement, the pickup truck rammed into
the fronts of both jeeps, and all three vehicles flew askew,
leaving an opening in the road.