Under the Skin

burst.

A tommy gun. Jesus.

The tommy and the Browning fired at the same time, long bursts…and then nothing. I stood waiting, and there came a few pistolshots, and then no more gunfire. Nothing but the muted crying and wailing of wounded men and terrified women.

But Daniela was somewhere up here—and the thing to do right now was find her.

The first room I tried was an empty bedroom. In the next one a young maid was huddled in a corner and crying.

“Donde esta Daniela Zarate?”

Gone, she said. The patron took her—just a few minutes ago. There was a private stairway in his chambers.

I grabbed her and shoved her into the hall and told her to show me the way to Calveras’ room. She looked down the hall and her eyes went large and I stepped out into the hall and pointed the Colt at a guy dressed like some dandy from another age. He wore a sharp little beard in the old gachupin style and his hair was tied back in a ponytail. He’d been about to descend the staircase but now put his hands up slightly and said he wished me no harm and was surrendering without conditions. He lowered his hands to his side and turned the palms outward in a show of capitulation and asked how he could be of service. I asked where the patron’s chambers were. He pointed past me and even as I turned to look I sensed my mistake and I whirled back around to see him raising a pocket revolver and we both fired. I hit him in the heart and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

I felt a burning in the muscle between my neck and shoulder and found that he’d nicked me through it. It burned but the blood flow wasn’t too bad. I stuffed a handkerchief against it up under my shirt and coat. The maid was pressed back against the wall with her hands at her mouth.

“Ensename la escalera,” I said, and she led me to the patron’s chambers and showed me the secret stairway. It was a narrow winding thing, tight as a corkscrew. I followed it down to a little door that opened into a patio at the rear corner of the house, next to a narrow driveway that curved around from the courtyard.

There was only one way out of the compound—so if LQ was still holding the gate, Calveras was still inside the walls. I hustled back around to the driveway in front of the house, the Colt in my hand. The wailing was louder out here. LQ had done plenty of damage with the Browning. A group of house servants caught sight of me and ran back into the casa grande. The courtyard was deserted, the bodies already removed except for the dead guy in the hedge. Brando was gone too, but the torchlight was sufficient to show the dark bloodstains where he’d fallen.

As I hurried down the drive, others saw me coming and fled into the darkness to either side of the hedges. They did the smart thing. I was ready to shoot anybody who even looked at me wrong. The moaning and crying was scattered in the darkness to my left, but much of it was concentrated over where a cast of light showed above the trees. According to the hacienda map the bunkhouse was over there, and I supposed that was where the wounded had been taken, the dead too, probably. I wondered if Brando was among them—and figured I’d know soon enough.

I could see the gate up ahead. Somebody was sitting there with his back against the open door. If it wasn’t LQ I hoped it was somebody dead or too shot-up to shoot me.

The west side of the compound, where the worker quarters were, was all dark. As soon as the shooting started, the peons had probably shut their doors and blown out their lamps. They didn’t need to know what was going on to know it was no business of theirs.

The torchlights were bright on me, but even as I got closer to the gate I still couldn’t make out who was sitting there in the shadows. And now I noticed that the open gate-door was slightly askew, its lower hinge twisted almost free of the wall. Then LQ’s voice said, “Who goes there, friend or foe?”—and he chuckled.

“How you doing, man?”

“Could be worse. Where’s Ray?”

“I don’t know. I saw him get hit but I don’t know how bad. I thought he might’ve come back here.”

“Nah he aint,” he said. “Think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think we done for of all of them who wanted to make a fight of it. I’d say the rest are just waiting for us to go away.”

He had the BAR across his lap. The .380 and an extra magazine for it were on the ground beside him. He was hatless and coatless and both his shirtsleeves had been ripped off and I could see he’d used them to bandage his left arm.

I squatted beside him and lit a cigarette and handed it to him. “How bad?”

“I got the bleeding pretty well stopped. Armbone’s busted.” His voice was tight with pain. “You find her?”

“No. But I saw him, and a maid said he’s got her. As long as we’re on the gate, he’s not taking her anywhere. Soon as it’s light I’ll start looking.”

“Ah hell, Jimmy, he’s gone, man. I can’t say if she was with him, but if you didn’t find her she mighta been with—”

I grabbed his good arm. “What the hell you talking about, he’s gone…if she was with him?…When?”

“Hey, man.” He jerked his arm and I let go of it.

“Fucken Cadillac. Who else it gonna be but him? It come tearing out of that hedge. I give it a burst, but this gorilla leans out the window and opens up on me with a goddamn Thompson. I about shit. I hunkered down outside the wall and wham, they clip the door and go skidding by with a fender peeled back and the bastard gave me some more of the tommy gun and nailed me in the arm. But I sureshit nailed him better. The Caddy had to cut a sharp turn on account of we blocked the road and the shooter come tumbling out. That’s him yonder. I put a coupla .380s in his head to be sure he wasn’t just resting up.”

He was pointing at a big man lying a dozen yards beyond the gate, faceup, his arms flung out, his legs in an awkward twist. The tommy gun lay close by.

“I couldn’t see in the car all that good,” LQ said, “but I guess she mighta been in there.”

She was—I knew she was. She would’ve told him I was coming. She would’ve kicked at him and said James Rudolph Youngblood was coming. As soon as he heard the shooting he would’ve known who it was and he would’ve taken her with him. I stood up, telling myself to stay cool, to think.

“We blocked the only road. Where’d he go?”

“Thataway, around the corner.” He waved toward the east end of the compound wall.

The moon was high and bright as a gaslamp. My wound burned and I checked it with my fingertips. It was swollen but the bloodflow had slowed to nothing and was already clotting. I went over to the dead guy. He had a big droopy mustache and there was enough moonlight to show the white scar at the edge of his eye. More good news for Rocha.

Then I remembered the river. The map showed a river running past the hacienda a couple of miles east of it, running all the way out to the cienaga. I picked up the Thompson and went back to LQ.

“I’m betting there’s a road that goes over to the river. From there he’ll try to make it to the Monclova road.”

“Shitfire,” LQ said. “There’s nothing between here and there but desert, all rocky ground for…what’d we figure, forty miles? He aint making it to that road, not without a pair of wings.”

I detached the tommy gun’s magazine and checked the load, then snapped it back in place and handed LQ the weapon and he tested a one-hand grip on it, bracing the butt against his hip and swinging the muzzle from side to side. He grinned and cradled the gun under his arm.

“I’m gonna go get her.”

“That’s why we come,” he said.

“Got enough smokes?”

“Yep. Could do with some handy water.”

I went over to the Hudson and had to duck under the dash and hot-wire the ignition, since Brando had the keys. I cranked up the engine and backed the car around and drove up beside the gate. I took the water can out of the back and filled a couple of empty beer bottles for myself and jammed them between the backseat and the door