'For your benefit.'
'Absolute. It's a means of holding you to the cross. I don't think your justice Knox would care to see one of his own standing trial in a foreign country for a murder committed because of an order the BOI issued. That doesn't seem to me ... a practical application of strategy.'
There was a grim flicker of dark accomplishment.
'How did you come to exist?' said John Lourdes.
'I came to exist in the same manner as Cain and Abel. Then I was baptized pure American for good measure.'
THE LIGHTS OF Juarez stood out upon the plain. The road they were on followed the trackline. The way was lit by intermittent campfires with small groups of raggletag peons brandishing weapons. Soldiers in the making. An army of insurrection rising up out of the evening land. Their voices wild and bitter and ready to war.
'Mr. Lourdes, if they knew what we were carting ... the bad news for you, we'd spend eternity like some married couple in a common grave.'
They had been riding in silence since the river. Until that moment. John Lourdes now said, 'I want to know now who you are to meet, and where.'
Rawbone considered. 'By tomorrow you'll be sleeping in your own bed and maybe supping at the Modern Cafe there in the lobby of the Mills Building.'
'I want to know.'
There was gunfire and the footfalls of men. John Lourdes came about quickly, his hand going to the shoulder holster. Rawbone stayed to the wheel. Men rushed past the truck to a fight that had flared there by the roadside.
The son turned his attention back to the father, who'd still not even once looked away from the road. 'Who and where?'
'Is this a test of wills?'
'If something should happen to you.'
'Haven't you even heard the rumor that just thinking it can bring down bad luck? You wouldn't want that.'
'My job is to see this through.'
'As is mine.'
'But I chose to be here. Grant me the information.'
Rawbone did not answer. John Lourdes was left to wait, and wait. Then, as if an afterthought, the father said, 'Alliance for Progress. Just up from the Customs House on September 16 Avenue. Hecht is the man Simic told me to address.'
John Lourdes wrote all this down in his notebook. As he did, from one of the campfires came a boy in near rags running with hat in hand up alongside the truck and begging for money. The father reached into his pocket and asked the son, 'The man's name from the roadhouse?'
The son scanned his notes. 'James Merrill.'
The father tossed the boy a crumpled buck and told him in Spanish, 'Courtesy of Mr. James Merrill.'
The boy took the money and swung his hat in thanks.
'Before we confront this Hecht fellow,' said John Lourdes, 'we have to deal with protecting the truck.'
'We?'
'Where you go-I go. Where I go-you go.'
'With that in mind, Mr. Lourdes. I have a place you'll find particularly fitting.'
THEY DROVE THROUGH a neighborhood of blistered hovels and empty lots along the shore. Laundry hung from lines in the starlight. The smell of meals cooking in greased pans scented the air. Somewhere a mother tried to calm a crying child; somewhere there was music and laughter. It was a mirror of the barrio they could see across the streaming quiet of the river, where they'd existed once upon a time with a woman one married and the other called mother. A moment fell through time. A moment they shared without knowing because of the flaw in their existence.
At the end of that long, filthy street was factory row. There the truck pulled up to a drab squat building with a rotting sign on the roof: RODRIGUEZ FUNERARIA.
A funeral parlor.
John Lourdes asked, 'You're not trying to politely tell me something, are you?'
In the gray dark Rawbone only grinned and stepped from the cab.
