'Explain what you did.'
'If you mean to kill something, do it on the first shot.'
John Lourdes faced an unrelenting stare. 'Pointed advice ... that may well point also in your own direction.'
'Understood,' said John Lourdes.
Attention was then turned to Rawbone. 'You hustled Mr. Hecht. And you didn't get the truck the way you claim you did.'
'That's the bureaucrat in you talking.'
'You're the type that lies even when the truth sounds better.'
'Now, that's the professor in you talking?'
'I'm not challenging you over this. The truck is here. And, yes ... there are casualties. And there'll be more.'
He pointed at the two horses just yards away and near saddled. 'You notice there are two horses.' The map was brought to him, as were the signal pistol and flares. He set them on the flatcar.
He stood very close to Rawbone, who leaned against the flatcar. 'I was a professor, as you seem to know, at some of the finest colleges in America. Teaching is what I would call an unchallenging pastime. Nothing ultimately critical happens in a classroom. The setting lacks grandeur and, more important, finality.'
He reached out and took the Savage automatic from Rawbone's belt. He looked the weapon over carefully, handling it with a profes- sional's interest. 'There is a book, and you could have walked right out of its pages. It is about murder. There is a devil and a Grand Inquisitor. And there is one idea in the book that repeats itself. An idea that would appeal to you as it does to me . . . `All things are lawful.''
Doctor Stallings replaced the weapon in Rawbone's belt.
Rawbone then reached out and brushed away bits of sand from the shoulder of the commander's gray suit coat. 'The story doesn't exactly spark of Horatio Alger, does it?'
The mounts were brought over. Doctor Stallings handed the signal gun and bandoleer of flares to John Lourdes. 'You both will earn your money today,' he said, spreading the map on the flatbed floor.
THE FATHER AND son proceeded from the train with the sun hard against their shoulders, watched by the commander and his company of guards. Even the girl Teresa, from window after window, followed the slow climb of their mounts upon an eroded hill face.
From the map it seemed the vultures marked a military garrison, sited to protect a junction where the lines divorced into parallel tracks, both running to Tampico and the oil fields.
'The doctor knows how to frame a warning,' said the son.
'You thought his little speech a warning. I hoped it was a compliment, or at least an insult.'
'He didn't have the authority for what he did, no matter. He even ordered a picture, no matter.'
'Who did El Presidente have build those tracks? Who financed them? America and the Brits. They own the rails like they own the oil fields. That gives him the authority. And the Mexican, he's heir to the fuckin' sand.'
They heard the heavy breathing of a mount and the chinging of bridle metal and came about to see Tuerto chugging a mule forward to try and catch up.
'Where are you going?' asked John Lourdes.
Tuerto pointed to the vultures.
'On whose authority?'
He held up his camera.
'Another fuckin' genius,' said the father.
Through a dry and sweeping wind the mule followed in the horses' tracks. Rawbone spoke out to the world around him, 'Three wise men tramping to Bethlehem.'
The garrison was a quadrangle of mud buildings connected by a palisade of sharpened stakes where sat an army of hunched and drowsy-faced vultures. A loosely roped gate hung slightly open. They dismounted and John Lourdes fired his shotgun into the air. The creatures flushed skyward and hung momentarily on the dead air and then descended to the rooftops.
The men went forward and Rawbone pushed the gate with his rifle and before them opened a small amphitheatre of death. They covered their noses and mouths with bandanas. They entered the compound. Flies everywhere, and the stench. A dozen soldiers bloating in the sun. The buildings had been ransacked and personal possessions lay strewn
