I walked between the woods and parked car and looked through the car window. In the moonlight I could see the ignition wires hanging below the dashboard. From behind the house I heard a metallic, screeching sound like a board with rusted nails in it being pried loose from a joist.
I walked to the right of the house, through a side yard that was strewn with plaster and broken laths that looked like they had been ripped from the interior walls and thrown outside. A Coleman lantern as bright as a phosphorous flare hissed on the ground in the center of the backyard. Farther on, a blue van was parked by a barn with a tractor shed built onto one side, and through a dirty window in the shed a second lantern burned inside and the shadows of at least two men moved back and forth across it.
I crossed the yard, outside the perimeter of light. My foot went out into a pool of shadow, where there should have been level ground, but instead I stepped into a hole at least a foot deep, my ankle twisting sideways inside my boot, a pain as bright as the sting of a jellyfish wrapping around the tendons in my lower back.
The shadows beyond the window froze against the light.
Then I thought I heard L.Q. Navarro's voice say, 'The dice are out of the cup. Make 'em religious, bud.'
I limped forward and flung the door back on its hinges and pointed L.Q.'s revolver into the room.
Felix Ringo and a second man stood just beyond a worktable where Garland T. Moon was wrapped fast against the wood planks with chains that were clamped and boomed down on his chest and thighs. Moon's face was turned away from me, as though he were napping. The clothes of Ringo and the second man were streaked with soot and bits of hay and dried horse manure. Behind them, the flooring in the barn had been ripped up, the plaster board gouged out of a bunk area, a rusty hot water tank split open with an ax.
The room was hotter than it should have been, filled with a hot smell that at first I thought came from the lantern.
'You don't look too good, man,' Ringo said.
I could feel the muscles constrict across my back, just like someone had taken pliers to my spine. I propped one arm against the doorjamb and held the pistol level with the other.
The second man clutched a plastic bag full of credit cards in his hand. He had the scarred eyebrows of a prizefighter and small ears and hair so blond it was almost white.
'Both you boys put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees,' I said.
The second man studied my face, his tongue moving across his bottom lip. 'Fuck you, buddy,' he said, and bolted into the barn, crashing out the door into the yard.
But I didn't fire. Instead, I kept the. 45 pointed at Ringo's face, my other hand holding on to the doorjamb for balance. When I took a step forward, the pain caused my jaw to drop open. I heard the van start up outside and drive out of the yard.
'You want to go to a hospital? I can do that for you, man,' Ringo said.
I eased my hand onto the worktable, inches from the JOX running shoe on Moon's foot, stiffening my arm for support. An odor like the smell of burned scrapings from a butchered hog rose into my face.
'Last chance, Ringo. Get on the floor,' I said.
'You're all mixed up. This is DEA. You don't got no business here.'
I pulled back the hammer on the revolver.
'Okay, man. My friend gonna come back with some local law. They gonna jam you up, man,' Ringo said, and knelt on the floor and laced his fingers behind his neck. He crinkled his nose, his mustache wiggling on his lip, as though he were about to sneeze.
I worked my way around the other side of the table. Moon's eyes were staring at nothing. The skin of his face looked shrunken on the bone, puckered and red like a rubber Halloween mask. The cloth of his flowered shirt was crisscrossed with scorch marks, and inside the scorch marks were lesions that looked like they had been cut into the skin with a laser.
The blowtorch was turned on its side by the far wall.
'I'll take a guess. Crystal coming in, counterfeit credit cards going out,' I said.
'Hey, the guapa you was in the sack with? Ask her. This is a federal operation, man. She gonna fuck you again, except this time you ain't gonna enjoy it.'
'If y'all were looking for some of your stash, you tortured the wrong guy. It was probably Darl Vanzandt and his friends who ripped you off.'
'You want to take me in? That's good, man. 'Cause I'm gonna be on a plane back to Mexico City tomorrow morning. So let's go do that, man.'
'I don't think so.'
His eyes studied my shirt front.
'What's that you got in your pocket?' he asked.
'This? It's funny you ask. A friend of mine dropped it down in Coahuila.'
A dark and fearful recognition grew in his face, like smoke rising in a glass jar.
I moved toward him, my hand sliding along the table for support. Inches away from my forearm, a viscous tear was glued in the corner of Moon's receded blue eye.
'I bet ole Moon spit in your face,' I said.
Felix Ringo rose to his feet and began running toward the back of the barn, his head twisted back toward me. He grabbed onto a stall door and pulled an automatic from an ankle holster and fired three times, the rounds slapping into the front wall, then he began running again. He passed a tack room and flung the plywood door open in his wake, his arms waving almost simultaneously, as though hornets were about to torment his flesh.
I held on to a wood post by a stall and fired one round after another, the powder flashes splintering from the cylinder and the barrel. The explosions were deafening, the recoil knocking my wrist high in the air. Each round blew divots out of the tack room door that yawned open in the passageway, tore even larger holes in the outside door, whined away into the woods with a sound like piano wire snapping.
Dust and lint and smoke drifted in the light from the Coleman lantern. My right ear was numb, as though frigid water had been poured inside it. I put the hammer on half-cock and shucked out the empty shell casings on the floor and rotated the cylinder and inserted six fresh rounds in the loading gate, then lowered the hammer again and locked the cylinder into place.
I limped slowly past the stalls and closed the splintered door of the tack room. Felix Ringo lay on the floor, the slide on his automatic jammed open by a partially ejected shell casing. Blood welled from a wound that looked like a crushed purple rose inserted inside the torn cloth on his hip.
'My friend L.Q. Navarro used to say ankle hideaways are mighty cool, but the problem is they only work for midgets,' I said, and sat down heavily on a hay bale that puffed dust and lint into the air.
'I got to have a doctor,' Ringo said.
I felt weak all over. Gray threadworms floated in front of my eyes. I touched my upper chest and my hand came away coated with something that was warm and damp and sticky.
'Looks like we both got a problem here, Felix.' I breathed slowly and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. From my shirt pocket I pulled the playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers and marked with the date of L.Q.'s death. 'You remember the rules down in Coahuila. When you lose, you get one of these stuck in your mouth.'
'I'm hurt bad. Look, man, I die here, I gotta have a priest.'
'You killed Roseanne Hazlitt, didn't you?'
'Yeah, okay, we done that.' He breathed hard through his nose.
'And set up Lucas Smothers?'
'Yeah, that, too.'
'All that grief, just to protect Jack Vanzandt.'
'There was a lot at stake, things you don't know about, man. Ask the guapa, the DEA woman, it's like a war, man, there's casualties. Hey, man, I work for your fucking government. That's what you ain't hearing.'
He stared at me for a long time, waiting, his eyes lustrous with hate and apprehension.
'What you gonna do, man?' he said, his voice climbing into a higher register.
'I guess you're just up shit's creek, bud,' I replied.
His face was gray from loss of blood, beaded with sweat. He closed his eyes, his mouth trembling.
'No, you got it all wrong, Felix,' I said. 'L.Q. Navarro used to own this card. I wouldn't soil it by putting it on your body. But you parked one in my chest. So the medics won't be coming for either one of us tonight.'
