The Devil's Redhead (47 page)

Shel tried to get up. Seeing her move, he pulled the gun from his belt and charged over, pulling back the hammer with his thumb.

“What did you tell them?” he said.

To the gun, Shel said, “Tell who?”

“Don't fucking play games with me,” he shouted. Saliva dripped from his mouth. He was shaking.

“There was a doctor,” she said. “He came in with him.” She nodded toward Humberto's corpse. “The doctor called you romantic. He wanted to know what you told me.”

Sweat beaded across his forehead and upper lip. “What did you say?”

“I said we talked about the squatter children. About the rain. The trees.”

He wagged the gun at her, grimacing. “They tried to kill me,” he said, and began to weep. Eyes clenched shut, he lifted the gun to his face as if to hide behind it. “Motherfuckers. Stupid fucking cocksuckers. And Pepe, of all people, they choose Pepe. The fool. Started reaching for his gun while he drove, like I wouldn't see. I jumped on it, pressed the barrel into his belly and shot him with his own fucking gun, the asshole. He tried to crash the car. Went into a spin, almost went over, he got off a round.…” He inspected his arm, tugging at the blood-soaked fabric of his shirt, wincing. “Left him there by the road. Sorry piece of shit.”

He turned so that his wounded arm lay between him and the wall. Using his legs, he pressed his upper body against the lifeless arm to stem the blood or at least dull the pain. He grimaced, eyes shut.

“I said nothing that would make them want to kill you,” Shel told him. “You're the last person I wanted dead. We had an agreement, remember?”

He laughed, and when his eyes opened they regarded her with terrifying bitterness. “Stop lying to me.”

“I don't have the strength to lie.”

He turned toward her, pointing the gun. “Walk,” he said.

“I can't.”

He stumbled toward her. “Walk, or I kill you here.”

Shel found herself staring into the gun barrel again. He pressed it to her forehead.

“Get the fuck up,” he hissed.

She lowered her eyes. Her glance settled on the picture of her in the newspaper clipping. Danny, she thought. He was trying to find her. Frank was dead, she'd have to deal with that sometime, but Danny was alive and doing everything he could. He'd come out here hunting, risking his life, and all that was asked of her in return this minute was to stand up. Walk.

She rolled onto one haunch, put her hands to the floor and tried to pull her legs up beneath her. With effort she squared them under her body, but the moment she tried to apply weight and rise they toppled beneath her like sand.

Cesar grabbed her hair, pulling her up. “Stop acting.” She flailed at his hand and his grip on her hair broke. He tottered back and in the same moment she found herself possessed of the rage and terror she needed and she rose, half on her feet, leaning against the wall.

They stared at each other.

He tucked the gun into his belt again and reached out his arm. He grabbed Shel's arm and wrapped it around his shoulder. She tried to get her legs to work, but they wobbled beneath her and every two steps she fell. Without the help of the wall she couldn't support her weight.

“I'm going to carry you,” he said.

He bent at the knees, leaned his shoulder into Shel's waist and rose up under till her torso leaned across his back. He spread his legs, the better to bear her weight, and lifted her off the ground. It was like she'd drowned; he was carrying her from the river. Her weakness made her body all the heavier and he lunged sideways for the wall so they wouldn't tumble to the floor. “Let me down, I can walk,” Shel said, but with a howl of determination he shoved off from the wall again. Extending his free hand toward the door, he adjusted her weight on his shoulder and staggered toward the opening.

They made it through, then toppled headlong into the mud of the root cellar, floundering there in a tangled sprawl of arms and legs, trying to get traction in the muck. Using one of the cobwebbed shelves, Shel clawed her way to her feet. “I'll pull myself along, just give me your shoulder,” she said. He got to his feet, came up beside her and she reached her arm across his body as before. With the other arm she dragged herself shelf to shelf, hopping on the stronger of her legs. They fell twice again before reaching the wood plank stairs. She stared up through the hurricane doors at the dark sky. When he put his good arm around her waist, she told him, “No,” gently, preferring to drag herself up the stairs on her own, out into the drizzling night.

The wind swept through the marigolds, the eucalyptus and the oak trees, combining with the rain to create a gentle, constant hiss. The car stood idling twenty feet away, headlights forming a corridor of light in the rain. A bullet hole had punctured the windshield just to the right of the steering wheel. A spray of blood marbled the shattered glass. Another bullet had shattered the driver's side window, leaving behind a webwork of fissures circling out from a jagged hole.

She pulled herself to her feet, standing erect on her own for the first time in hours. Cesar came up beside her, offered his shoulder. She reached her arm across it, and together they made it to the car.

In the easterly distance, perhaps a mile away, a searchlight scoured the low winter clouds. Closer at hand, just beyond the eucalyptus trees, wood fires burned beneath the awnings in the squatter camp. The rust-eaten vans and trucks formed an arc around the fires to form a shelter against the storm. The children were out of sight, and Shel guessed someone had seen the bullet-ridden car pull up, or heard the gunfire from within the house. Only the adults remained outside. The women tended the fires, feeding them with scrapwood. The men, wearing straw Stetsons and ragged coats, sat in their folding chairs beneath the awnings, motionless as stones.

From one of the vehicles, a radio blared. As Cesar eased Shel down into the passenger seat, he stopped, listening to the tune. An ugly grin appeared.
“Conjunto,”
he said, as though it were a newfound insult. “Do you know what the words mean?” He stared through the trees at the squatter camp. “It's about the ghost of some
loca
, a crazy woman, who killed her family. The woman wanders the river, the Rio Huixtla, looking for them.” He slammed the door and shambled around the front of the car through the headlights to the driver side. As he opened the door, the overhead light revealed the blood spattered across the door and smeared across on the seat. He sat down as though it weren't there. When the door closed he said, “Spooks,” gesturing his head back toward the squatter camp. “We Mejicanos, we love our freaks and spooks.”

He turned the car around and headed out the gravel road flanked by the eucalyptus trees. The fires of the squatter camp faded behind them. Around the first bend a man's body appeared, facedown in the road. Cesar put the car in park and removed a pearl-handled
navaja
from his pocket, flicking the blade open.

“I'd like to leave a message,” he said, as though speaking into a phone.

He opened the door, tottered out into the rain and knelt down beside the body in the mud. Resting one knee on the dead man's arm, he began to saw at the wrist with his knife, cutting through the muscle and digging at the bone until the hand came away. He struggled to his feet, spat at the body, and tramped back to the car.

He was drenched when he collapsed again behind the wheel, his wet hair dripping in his eyes. He wiped his face and placed the severed hand on the dash above the steering wheel. It was flecked with mud. The skin was a yellowish-gray color, with a knot of bloody bone and tendon congealed with nerve endings coiled in the gore. It lay there on the dash like a freshly butchered oxtail, except with fingers.

“I know a back way out of here,” Cesar said, putting the car in gear again.

A half mile on he turned into a private road. It was slick with mud and grass. Twice the car's rear end slid sideways, edging toward the culvert running parallel to the road. Cesar slowed down then, more so than he wanted, and Shel watched as he checked the rearview mirror every few seconds, whispering to himself in Spanish.

“Where are we going?” she ventured as they rounded a stand of pear trees.

Abatangelo drove Waxman to the Vallejo waterfront. As they waited for the San Francisco–bound ferry's final call for boarding, Abatangelo asked for pen and paper, then began to print out instructions to the coroner's people or whoever else might find his body that night. When he noticed Waxman staring in puzzlement, he explained, “I don't want anything I shoot disappearing if it all goes wrong.” He handed the note to Waxman. “Read it.”

The note instructed anyone who discovered Abatangelo's remains to hand over the cameras, the film, anything found on or near him, to Bert Waxman, care of the newspaper. Waxman nodded, handed the note back and said, “Thank you.”

Abatangelo put the note inside an envelope which he marked,
IMPORTANT
, then sealed it shut. He then perforated one end of the envelope with his pen tip, unlaced his scapular, threaded the lace through the hole in the envelope, knotted the lace back together again and hung the envelope around his neck. It lay flat against his chest beside the image of the dying St. Dismas.

“What I said back at the hotel,” Abatangelo said, “about Shel, if she isn't dead already, you killed her? That was unfair.”

Waxman shrugged. “I suppose,” he replied, “when all is said and done, there will be blame enough to go around for everybody.” He chafed his hands between his knees, trying to warm them. “I still maintain it would be best if the authorities were notified.”

“No, Wax, no authorities. I lack your confidence there.”

“Confidence has nothing to do with it. People like Moreira and Facio wouldn't exist if it weren't for the authorities.”

“Nicely put.”

“But we're talking about a crime.”

“I don't know about it,” Abatangelo said. “I heard some garbled trash from a suicidal tweak. You don't know anything, either, Wax. Everything Frank spewed out is just stuff. Until I come back with the goods, you'd be a fool to believe him. Besides which, if the boys in Homicide didn't believe you when you told them what I said, I hardly think your credibility will get better when the source is Frank.”

Waxman made a helpless gesture of acceptance. With difficulty, he confessed, “I'm afraid for you.”

Abatangelo smiled at the thoughtfulness. He'd put Waxman through a lot these past two days, manipulating him, cajoling him, accusing him of falsity and begging off when it came time to need him all over again. And in the face of all that, Waxman, for all his faults, had demonstrated a mindful persistence that, in light of his obvious fear, spoke of real courage. Now, Abatangelo thought, he's saying he fears for me.

“I won't be any safer if you call the law, Wax,” he said. “I'd probably end up getting tagged with everybody else, and in jail I'm obscenely easy to kill. Besides which, if this trade really is going down, and the cops walk into the middle of it, things'll go crazy. And in that kind of chaos, with people like this and the heat I'm sure they're going to bring, Shel's life won't be worth the breath it takes to talk about it.”

The ferry for San Francisco began boarding. Waxman glanced at it, then asked, sensing time was short, “Do you honestly think she'll be there?”

Abatangelo smiled despondently and looked away. “Yes. I honestly do.”

“Alive?”

He remembered the article Waxman had recited to Facio, about the woman left bleeding in the jungle for the insects, the women hung from trees with their dead babies tied to their backs. “No,” he confessed. “But if her body's there, I want to be the one to claim it.” The ferry sounded three short blasts from its whistle. “Thanks for all you've done, Wax. I mean that. Do the story proud, you tweedy motherfucker. No matter what I bring back. Or don't bring back.”

Waxman blushed and adjusted his glasses. “Yes, sir. Good luck.” He exited the car and waved like a man trying to convince himself the farewell was not final. Then he turned away and hurried through drizzle up the slick gangplank and onto the ferry.