The Border Lords (11 page)

Ozburn called a taxi and paid for dinner and Daisy lead the way down the stairs, toenails clicking. He took three steps toward the second Suburban, then hooked hard right down an alley. Daisy scrambled to keep up with him. He walked fast, his boots heavy, the duffel in his left hand, straddling the trickle of wastewater that crawled toward the sea and sounded to Ozburn like a child thrashing in a swimming pool. He heard cars on unseen streets, a hundred televisions in a hundred unseen rooms. The invisible ocean battered the rocks with rhythmic fury. He unsnapped his windbreaker and loosened the strap of the Love 32 so that one jerk on the quick-release would let the weapon swing free.

At the last building the alley fed into a dirt road and Ozburn stopped and listened. Daisy sat and looked at him. From within the concurrent floods of sounds he concentrated very hard to isolate the tap-tap of footsteps—rapid footsteps—on the sidewalk. They came from his left, the direction of the white Suburban. Then another set, more sharp reports of running men, and these came from the opposite way.

He walked around the rear of this last building, the moonlight full upon him, and peered around its corner, looking up and down the main street. He saw that because of the slope of the small village and its few streets and its proximity to the ocean, he now stood in a place unavoidable to anyone looking for him. Unavoidable to anyone who knew the simple layout of this village. And absolutely unavoidable to two teams of hunters who had him caught between them like these had. Perfect. He released the gun and punched off the safety and felt in the windbreaker pocket for the spare magazines. He gave the sound suppressor a good turn for luck. He patted Daisy’s head.

Then he waited, listening. Riots of sound. Symphonies. Looking up beyond the lights of Puerto Nuevo, Ozburn saw the harvest moon tinged with orange. And the flicker of the North Star. Ozburn thought that this was not the same North Star that had guided the ancients. Their North Star had changed its position millennia ago. And he knew that this new North Star would change its position, too, someday, long after humankind had died out. On it would shine, a lighthouse for a shipless sea.

The footsteps closed from either side of him. Louder now, and faster. The beautiful lovers came down the street arm in arm, heads tilted toward each other, the woman’s laughter coming again to Ozburn like a rippling stream. They turned up the dirt road toward him. Ozburn glanced the other way and saw the shining car that was surely theirs. The footsteps to his right became three men, who spilled from an alley into the dirt road, and when they saw the lovers they halted and hunched like surprised coyotes; then, gun barrels flashing in the light of the harvest moon, they rushed the lovers and tore them away from each other. The woman yelped and the man tried to speak rationally but the cursing of the gunmen was louder. And again like animals they seemed to sense Ozburn’s position and they marched their hostages toward him, the young woman and man pushed before them as shields. Ozburn heard the second group to his left, closing faster, and when they turned from the alley into the road they were three men also, pistoleros, with their weapons drawn. Daisy growled and Ozburn kicked her smartly.

They slipped through the back door of a lobster restaurant. Like many of the buildings here, the ground floor was where the owners of the restaurants lived with their families. Ozburn came into a small mudroom with hats and jackets and the slickers of the fishermen hanging on the walls, and pairs of rubber boots lined neatly along another wall, and there were plastic buckets and hand nets and fishing poles and reels, and the reek of fish and shellfish and sea.

He walked down a short dark hallway, Daisy close behind him, passing two bedrooms and a bathroom and into a small kitchen, then into a larger room that wavered in television light and where on a couch sat three youngsters and an older girl of maybe twelve and they were all clearly terrified of man and beast. The smallest one broke away and ran up the stairs. Ozburn could hear the banging of pans and voices up in the restaurant kitchen, where the parents were shutting down the restaurant for another night. The other two little ones fled upstairs next and Ozburn heard the fearful cacophony of their voices and their parents’ voices. He told the girl not to be afraid. Daisy panted at the girl and wagged her tail. Ozburn stepped across the room for the front door and looked up the stairway to see a stout, aproned woman brandishing a tortilla press charging down the steps, followed by a man with an aluminum baseball bat.

He hustled through the front door, duffel first, and let Daisy out, then slammed it shut and walked quickly up the sidewalk toward the cantina and the wine-colored Suburban. He ducked into an alley and ran the alley to its end and here he stopped and listened and closed his eyes, and he was able to hear, through the roar of the village and the deafening panting of Daisy and the tremendous pounding of his own heart, the beautiful young woman sobbing and the young man pleading and offering money. He heard the
sicarios
, too, infuriated by Ozburn’s disappearance. He set down the duffel very softly. They were not ten feet from him, just around the dark corner. He motioned Daisy to stay.

Ozburn swung around the corner and quietly placed a full-auto burst into the man without a hostage. Then another into the man who had forced the woman to her knees. His blood struck her face. Her young lover saw his moment and elbowed his captor sharply in the nose and Ozburn blew the gunman back into the dirt road. All of this happened in near silence—faint puffs followed by meaty slaps. He stepped into the chaos and the thank-yous of the woman, and the young man offered him a fist to knock. Ozburn ignored them and shot the men once each in the head, then shushed the lovers with a finger to his lips and shooed them toward their shiny car. He hurried them along like children, pushing them with the end of the duffel bag. When they were almost there he whistled sharply for Daisy and they ran back into the alley from which they had come. He stopped just around the corner. He popped out the partially spent magazine and traded it for a full one. Daisy looked up at him admiringly.

He heard the second group of men conversing one alley over, voices puzzled. He had the advantage because they were the hunters and it was their job to act. But they had heard nothing other than the crying and the pleading of the lovers and this had confounded them, and Ozburn knew it and waited. He knelt in the dark behind a modified fifty-five-gallon fuel drum that would be used as an outdoor heater in the cooler winter months to come. It smelled of wood smoke and ashes. He patted Daisy’s head as he listened to the engine of the shiny car turn over and the tires chirp and the car speed toward the highway. The voices of the gunmen were close now as they came down the dirt road toward their three fallen comrades.

“Miguelito! Jorge?”

Where the alley ended, the moonlight began, and into this the two men stepped. Ozburn crouched, peering at them around the flank of the drum. One of them glanced into the darkness but did not see him. When the third man joined his fellows on the open ground, Ozburn rose from behind his cover and cut them down in a long, steady, back-and-forth burst. He braced the gun against the muzzle rise with his left hand. There was the clatter of the weapon and the whack of the bullets into the men and the pinging of the brass on the alley dirt, and blood and arms and blood and hands and blood and gasps thrown up into the night. In a moment Ozburn had stepped past them and into the dark alley, where he traded out for a fresh magazine, then secured his weapon close to his chest again and snapped the windbreaker shut.

He walked to the main street and saw the people loping excitedly for the alleys that would lead them to the dead men. These people looked as if they were participants in some game they didn’t quite understand but were told would be fun. He realized they had little idea what had happened or what they might find in the dirt road behind the buildings of their village. They were hopeful. They were innocent. They were who he was doing this for.

Ozburn walked the other way, stopped and set the duffel down and bought a pack of Chiclets from a vendor with a tray of confections and cigarettes slung over the back of his neck. He continued down the nearly empty street and back to Josefina’s, where the taxi was waiting for him, as requested. Same driver, and a brief smile for the big payday of hours ago. Ozburn heard frantic yelling from the direction of the massacre. He held the door open while Daisy jumped in and then he climbed in beside her.

 

 

Twenty minutes later he was in the air,
Daisy beside him, the few and scattered lights of Puerto Nuevo opening before him as the little airplane roared into the sky. What sound, what tremendous, singular sound! Ozburn buzzed above the village and he could see the tiny figures down in the dirt road in a ring of light, and they seemed to be coming and going with a purpose indiscernible.

He guided
Betty
over the black Pacific and climbed the breeze as up a soft-runged ladder, higher and higher until he banked north by northeast and headed toward the border. Flying east, he could see jovial Ensenada to his left and the great, violent sprawl of Tijuana beyond it.

Ozburn listened to the musical whine of the Piper engine, finally giving himself over to the sound. Melodies within melodies. He looked down at the lights of coastal Baja diminishing into the un-lighted blackness of the desert. At night his vision seemed to come alive. He saw none of the steady glare and the sharp reflections of daylight. He felt tears running down his face, tears of relief, tears sent by God to clear his eyes for the work ahead. He felt the return of the pains that had beset him for the last four weeks. They came upon him suddenly, like pigeons returning to their roost. Substantial, undeniable pain—the arches of his feet, joints, muscles, glands, teeth, even skin. And the ferocious ache for sexual release. He breathed twice, deeply, then held in the third breath for a count of three. Twice more. Better. Maybe.

He steered north toward Lake Arrowhead in California.

 

 

He circled three times,
then landed
Betty
in a meadow between stands of lodgepole pine and spruce. He taxied under a metal cover and tied down the plane. His feet and knees quaked in pain but the air was cool and clean and smelled of conifers. He walked to the Red Squirrel Lodge, where he had stayed with Seliah last spring for a wonderful weekend. They had neat little cabins with Wi-Fi and a free breakfast.

He asked for cabin eight because that was where he had stayed with her. When he let himself in and turned on the light their stolen hours came surging back on him like a rogue wave. He steadied himself on the door frame. Daisy flew past him and jumped on the couch. Ozburn went back to the porch and got the duffel and lugged it inside. He found his health supplements and vitamins and shook out a stronger dose than usual. Unwilling to drink or even look at a glass of water, he saved up his spit and swallowed them down. He was amazed how much saliva he could produce in just a few seconds. He chased the pills with a good, big shot of tequila.

He kicked off his boots and set the Love 32 beside him on the bed while the e-mails downloaded to his laptop.

There it was: