The Border Lords (33 page)

“I want to write a new story,” he said.

“You want a happy ending.”

“It doesn’t have to be happy. Just one where the characters get what they deserve.”

“We don’t live in fairy tales, Charlie.”

Ozburn watched the safe house
blur and disappear under
Betty
’s nose. His eyes had started doing funny things to him—bright green tracers and extreme perspectives—but he could still make out the red-tile roof of the safe house and the red gravel yard in front.
Later, little amigos
, he thought,
if you haven’t all run away yet.

He eased the aircraft into a gentle climb as he pictured the black Ford ATF Explorer parked under the row of greasewood trees back behind him, shiny as a mirror. He thought bitterly of their foolishness and the treachery of Don August. There was probably more ATF near the house itself, he guessed, waiting to intercept the mad-man Ozburn. A curse on them all.

An hour later he was circling the strip near Jacumba for the third time, seeing nothing but the red pickup truck he’d been told to look for. A few minutes after that Ozburn was touching down
Betty
to the flat, hard runway.

It was an old smuggler’s strip, not a hundred yards from the un-fenced border, and he remembered the night, just a couple of years ago, when he and his Blowdown brethren had nailed two gringos with a Beechcraft filled with cash and thirty guns with the serial numbers gouged roughly from their frames. The smugglers were sitting around a small fire on a freezing windy night, smoking dope and waiting for their partners to cross the border with the shipment. Armed with a tip from a good informant, Ozburn and his team had run their vehicles hard through the darkness and rough desert like beings launched from hell, toward the flames of that little fire. The smugglers had simply stood and raised their hands like bad guys in a Western, plumes of breath hanging on their faces. And later Ozburn had entered the strip coordinates on his GPS, for the day when he or one of the Desert Flyers might want to visit Jacumba without paying airport fees or suffering FAA supervision.
Good days
, thought Ozburn.
Days when I believed and acted well. Will there be any more like that?

He taxied in a wide circle that brought
Betty
to a stop downwind near the red Dodge Ram king cab. He shut down the engine and climbed out and stood unsteadily. It was like his feet were only half there, like the toes had frozen and fallen off. He marshalled his strength and lifted Daisy from her seat to the ground.

She ran to Father Joe Leftwich, who sat on the lowered tailgate of the pickup truck, his priest’s clothes traded out for Wranglers and a red yoked cowboy shirt with mother-of-pearl snaps. His cowboy hat was black and broad. He sat with one boot up on the gate while the other dangled well short of the ground, and he leaned an arm on the upraised knee. He had a toothpick in his mouth. He reached into his pocket and tossed Daisy a small biscuit shaped like a bone.

“You just see
Brokeback Mountain
?” asked Ozburn.

“You try wearing the same clothes every day for thirty years.”

Leftwich helped Ozburn tie down
Betty
and he stowed Ozburn’s heavy duffel across the backseats of the extended truck cab. Ozburn squeezed into the driver’s seat and found the control and slid it back. He remembered one of the hundreds of ways in and out of Jacumba, a onetime smuggler’s Mecca. DEA pressure had slowed it down for now, but Ozburn knew Jacumba would get hot again just as soon as law enforcement focused on someplace else.

Daisy sat in back, upright and alert. Leftwich offered Ozburn a nip from his ancient battered flask, then took one for himself. Ozburn was pleased as always by its flavor and cool temperature. It hit him hard and fast. It wasn’t like other drinks, Ozburn thought. It brought energy and clear thinking and confidence.

“Nice truck,” said Ozburn.

“I’m happy to help. And I have a table for us at Amigos, just as you asked. How is Seliah?”

Ozburn looked over Daisy’s snout at Father Joe. The priest’s face gave off green tracers. “We’ll talk about that later.”

“But is everything okay?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I don’t like the sound of this, Sean.”

They sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, Daisy allowed to join them after Ozburn growled at the manager and Father Joe gave him a fifty-dollar bill. She lay under the table, next to Ozburn’s duffel.

Ozburn ordered a Tecate and two shots of
reposado
, Leftwich the same. The waitress brought the drinks and a bowl of water for Daisy. They ordered dinner and when she was gone they toasted with the tequila shots. Ozburn dug two vitamin packs and five aspirin from his pocket and washed them down with beer. Anything to keep the feeling in his feet and the pain from his joints.

Leftwich watched him. “So you visited the Yuma safe house, did you?”

“Not quite. They were expecting me.”

Father Joe regarded Ozburn with his usual optimistic expression. He looked ridiculous in the cowboy hat. “You must have expected that, after your visits to the other two.”

Ozburn said nothing.

“Exactly who was expecting you—ATF or the baby assassins?”

Ozburn sipped the tequila and thought about Seliah. He felt his anger stir. His body was aching more now and he wondered if he should increase his vitamins and supplements again. “It was probably Hood. He’s the most durable of them.”

“Be very cautious if you try again, Sean. Blowdown will be expecting you, and the
sicarios
will either be gone or very jittery.”

“I didn’t ask you here for advice about Yuma.”

“No, of course not,” said Father Joe. “Just trying to catch up with your busy life, Sean.”

Ozburn waited until the food came and the waitress had left. He looked across the dining room through the bright green tracers at the scattered guests. Even with the sunglasses his eyes stung and watered. His fingertips tingled. He couldn’t feel his feet and he wondered if he could stand up right now. He was thirsty but just the sight of the red plastic tumbler of ice water made him nauseous. For the first time in all of this he was feeling the scouts of defeat, stealing up on him for a look into his empty soul. He finished the tequila.

“Father Joe, Seliah is sick and I am, too.”

“Sick?”

“Body and soul. Deeply.”

“But you look young and strong, Sean.”

“Tell me about the bat in your room at the Volcano View, Joe. Tell me the truth or I will become very angry.”

Father’s Joe’s face went stone serious. He lifted off his hat and set it on the padded leather bench beside him. He ran a hand through his short dark hair.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The maid found a bat in your room the morning after I fell asleep in your bed. In the bathroom wastebasket. It was a vampire bat and it was alive.”

“A maid claimed this?”

“Itixa, the head of housekeeping. Hood went down there. He talked to her.”

“There was no bat in my wastebasket unless she herself put it there. I know what I put into my own wastebasket, Sean. Don’t you? Rest assured, there was no bat. And I can tell you that Itixa has a passion for beer. She swills the stuff. I saw her unable to walk because of it. And she’s widely known around Arenal as a storyteller and a gossip and a woman who has visions.”

Ozburn looked at Leftwich, thinking how easy it would be to snap his neck. The priest’s face dissolved in a shower of green tracers. “Seliah saw the bat, too.”

Leftwich cut into his steak, looking at Ozburn with a questioning expression. “Oh?”

“Yeah,
oh.
She looked through your window screen and you were sitting at the foot of the bed. When I was conked out. You were leaning forward, doing something to my feet with your hands.”

“And she’s certainly right about that, Sean. But good gracious, I was simply fanning a fly off your toes. Remember what happened to Eduardo? I explained this to Seliah that night. It was an almost absentminded reflex to the bothersome fly. My larger concern was how to wake you up and get you back to your own room so I could get some sleep.”

“And when she came into the room you stood up and something dropped into the bedspread that was on the floor. You saw it, too. Remember? You saw it, Father Leftwich. Seliah said you both looked but couldn’t find it.”

Father Joe swallowed a bite of his steak, nodding, pointing his fork at Ozburn. “I do remember. That part of Seliah’s story is accurate also. We found nothing in the bedspread. Nothing under the bed. Nothing at all.” Apparently satisfied with this conclusion, Leftwich cut another piece of meat.

“Seliah says that what dropped from your hands was a bat,” said Ozburn.

“That’s strange, because she said nothing at all about a bat that night. While we searched, we speculated what it could have been and where it could have gone. But it’s absolutely impossible that it was a bat. I’ll tell you why—because I would never touch a bat with my bare hands. Not in a million years. I fear them.”

“Seliah thinks you trapped it in the bedspread, probably crushed it right then and there, and hid it from her.”

“But
why
?
For what reason?
”

“Just a little sleight of hand is all it would have taken—late, poor light, Seliah still half-drunk.”

Father Joe’s face flushed and Ozburn saw the anger in his eyes. The priest set down his knife and fork on the plate and looked at Ozburn. “What does she imagine I did with this alleged bat?”

“She believes you used it to give me rabies. She believes I gave it to her a few weeks later when we made love.”

“
Rabies
? You two have rabies, and I caused it? Sean. Sean, what have I ever done to Seliah to give her such a low opinion of me? What have I done to you? Ever?”

“She tested positive for it, Joe. She’s in a hospital right now, in a therapeutic coma. They knocked her out and they’re hoping she can outlive the virus. She’s got just a very small chance of waking up again.”

Leftwich leaned back into the booth. His ruddy face went pale. A moment later a tear ran down his face. “This is all wrong. It’s terribly and hugely wrong. There was no bat in my room. Did you hear me?
No bat.
Thus, there is
no rabies
.”

Leftwich stared at Ozburn as the tears came. “Sean. You don’t know this about me—how could you—but I studied medicine at Trinity College in Dublin before I decided on the priesthood. I did not graduate, but I came close. So I must ask you—who are these doctors? Did you know that very few doctors have even
seen
a case of human rabies? Now, look at you, Sean. You don’t look to me like a man with rabies. Rabies tests are complicated and best done postmortem. The presence of antigens is not always conclusive. What if this is just a simple misdiagnosis by inexperienced physicians? Down through the centuries rabies has been one of the most misdiagnosed of human diseases.”

Ozburn looked at the priest’s face, suspended in a pool of bright green light. Ozburn’s legs were numb to his knees and he wondered if it was his posture. With great effort he was able to move his feet apart and he felt a tingle of feeling down in his toes. He felt Daisy next through his boot. What a feeling to have feeling.

“These last seven weeks have been a living hell for us,” said Ozburn. “Pain. Anger. Agitation. Fear of water, fear of light. Insane thoughts, insane sensation. How do you diagnose that, Father Joe?”

“Well, let’s think it through. I can surmise by your vitamins and aspirins that you’re not feeling well. You wear your sunglasses even at night, so I know that you’re sensitive to light. What if you and Seliah contracted an unusual strain of influenza down there in the cloud forest? A strain that, as Americans, your immune systems were unprepared to fight off? A good strong influenza infection could certainly explain those symptoms, right? In this country alone flu kills scores of thousands of people every year. And certainly you could have given it to Seliah with something as innocent as a goodnight kiss. Yes?”

Ozburn looked at the priest and resisted the urge to bite him.

“Or, what if . . .” Leftwich sat forward, looked hard at Ozburn and lowered his voice. “What if this rabies tale was
invented
by Hood and Blowdown, to lure you to Seliah’s bedside? Remember, Sean, you and Seliah never talked to this maid. Hood claims to have talked to her. And it was Hood who also forced Seliah to the hospital, correct? Where a doctor sympathetic to ATF could easily have manipulated and convinced her. As she has convinced you. Which was easy because you love her.”

Ozburn thought he recognized the tapping of truth on the door of his heart. “But Eduardo said you wanted to see the vampire bats.”

“That’s a lie from Charlie Hood, Sean. I swear to the god of your choosing that I have never seen a vampire bat. I feel faintly amused at hearing myself deliver that line.”

Ozburn thought that the rabies story really did sound like something Hood would come up with. “Eduardo took you to a cave to see them.”

“That’s another lie from Charlie Hood. And again I will swear that I was not shown a cave.”

“You could have captured one in the cave and brought it back to the Volcano View.”

“Except that I am too cowardly—and too prudent—a man, to ever dream of touching a vampire bat with my bare flesh. Except that I love you and Seliah and I still believe now what I believed in Costa Rica. I believe you two will do great and wonderful deeds on earth.”

“No!”
Ozburn swept his arm across the table, knocking the plates and glasses and silverware to the floor in a clattering, shattering symphony. Daisy bolted from under the table, then stopped and watched her master from a distance. Everyone was looking over. The bartender stood with his hands on his hips and the waitress looked up from her order pad and one of the busboys ducked into the kitchen and came right back out with a rolling rack of bus trays.