Do They Know I'm Running

again. The chamber already held a round. Don’t plug yourself, he thought, Glock leg, they called it, the safety in the trigger, so touchy even cops shot themselves.

Godo slid the Smith and Wesson.357 after, nodding for Happy to take it, then stuck the Beretta 9mm into his own waistband. Searching the duffel for an extra mag for the AK, he found it, banged it against the floor, then tossed it to Samir. “You’ll have more firepower than the two of us combined. Otherwise I’d offer you a pistol too.”

“It’s okay,” Samir said, jamming the magazine into his trousers at the small of his back. “Pistols are for officers.”

Godo smiled. “You left-handed or right?”

Samir lifted his right hand, jiggled it.

“Okay, I’ll go first. I’ll circle left, draw fire. You circle right, aim for the muzzle flashes. Happy? From the sound of things, I’d guess the guy who’s talking out there, El Recio, he’s almost a straight shot from the door, maybe twenty yards. You focus on him. Take him out, maybe the others will call it a day. If all goes well, we’ll meet back at the pickup.”

“Godo-”

“There is no plan B.”

A canister tumbled in through the door, spinning once or twice as it spit a billowing plume of blue smoke. Godo rose into a crouch, bounced twice. “Everybody good?” He lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. “Honor, gentlemen. Think like a killer. Act like you’re already dead.”

HE WAS HIT TWICE BEFORE HE WAS THROUGH THE DOOR BUT HE’D expected that. You measure a warrior by the damage he inflicts, yes, but also by what he withstands. Gunny Benedict taught him that, just as he taught him that pain is illusion, it’s only there to fool you, hold you back. One round caught him in the ribs, the other the thigh. Adrenalin kept him upright, moving to contact. He spotted for muzzle flash, fired, pumped, fired, trying to stay out of the headlights’ center but always moving, arcing left. He saw a man spin down, another cover his face and drop his weapon, silhouettes cowering by their SUVs. The battle distortion he’d known before returned, the disconnect between sight and sound, feeling like a promise, harkening back to Al Gharraf, Diwaniyah, Fallujah, and in the sudden stillness he heard the plucking of guitar strings, “Cancion de Cuna,” Roque’s Cuban lullaby. It gave him heart, even as machine-gun fire raked his knees and he twisted down into powdery dirt and razor-sharp rocks, struggled to rise, caught another round in the neck and one more in his skull. Blinding, the last. He rolled onto his side, racked, fired, racked again, aiming into the silence until there were no more rounds in the magazine and he dragged the Beretta from his waistband, tried again to sight a target, taking fire like a pincushion and unable to feel the trigger against his finger or the hand at the end of his arm, unable to hold up his head while his throat filled with blood and the headlight glow swelled like an incoming wave. Once the wave crested he saw it, suspecting it had been there all along, suspended in the young girl’s hand. The bright red blossom of the fire tree.

SAMIR DOVE OUT THE DOORWAY FIRING ON FULL AUTO, THE HEAVY AK rounds splintering glass, carving up metal. Targeting on muzzle flash in the drifting smoke, he spotted one gunman, fired, took him down, sighted on another, fired, resisting the upward pull of the barrel. Another kill. He caught them by surprise, all eyes focused on Godo. We’ll meet back at the pickup, he thought, daring to picture the off-campus cottage, brickwork and vines, the woman kneeling in her garden, the girl practicing clarinet inside, the library shelves lined with Don Quixote, Ulysses, Life on the Mississippi, Yo el Supremo, then a spray of bullets, like a sudden cloud of wasps, encircling, tightening, closing. He felt the slash of pain across his back even as he fired and took down one more gunman but the weakness came right after, legs jibbing, no strength. He fought to right himself and just that pause left him open. Another blistering stripe, this one up his chest and into his face, he spun backward. What he feared became what he knew-Fatima, Shatha, forgive me my lies, my weakness, my failure-even as he drew himself up, hefted the rifle above his head like an ax and charged the faceless invader before him.

Inshallah…

***

HAPPY GAGGED AS THE BLUE SMOKE THICKENED, REMINDING HIMSELF that all he’d wanted was to be a better son. Rising to his feet, he firmed his grip on the Glock in his right hand, then with his left drew the Smithy from under his belt. He felt a sudden terror that no one would remember him-mother, father, both dead-he would not be missed by any living thing. Roque, maybe. Run, he thought, run fucker, you and your woman, make it across and remember me.

He dove out the door and headed as best he could tell straight for El Recio, guessing the spot where his voice had come from. Sure enough, there he stood, taking cover behind the door of one of the SUVs, watching Godo convulsing on the ground. Samir was off to the right somewhere. Was Osvaldo there? Kiki? Hilario? Were there ghosts to account for? Happy charged, firing two-handed, making half the distance before the gaunt bald asthmatic even knew he was there. I’ve never loved anything, he realized, as much as this fuckface loves his damn snake. The rest of the distance collapsed and he was pounding with the pistol butts, bashing the face, erasing that smile, crushing the throat, fighting off the hands of the other men trying to drag him off and remembering the song the bastard had sung that night, in the cop’s kitchen, as they forced the parents to watch their little boy get burned alive:

Hoy es mi dia

Voy a alegrar toda el alma mia

Today is my day

I’m going to fill my soul with joy

Forty-Four

THEY FLAGGED DOWN A BUS ABOUT A MILE NORTH OF THE HOUSE. Lupe, sensing the opportunity in the gunfight, had slipped off during the worst of it, when Godo went down. Roque didn’t follow, not then, he couldn’t. Instead, jumping up idiotically, he’d called out or screamed, made some sort of sound, no memory now exactly of what; his throat still felt scorched. He might as well have stayed quiet for all the good it had done; no one heard him over the gunfire. At some point he turned, scrambled after Lupe, remembering none of that, either. But on the bus his memory revived, seeking its vengeance. Images clapped and hammered inside his brain, flashes of the bloodshed, his brother, his cousin, the maddening Arab, then wave after wave of shame and guilt, panic attacks, stabbing blame: You ran. You survived.

They stepped off the bus at the turnoff to Naco, then thumbed a ride from a fat-bellied trucker in a Stetson who turned out to be an evangelico, witnessing them gustily during the drive then dropping them off at his storefront church. They stayed long enough to justify a fistful of cookies chased with scalding coffee, then muddled their way to the bus terminal, knowing they’d find phones there. Reading the number off the torn corner of a paper bag, Roque dialed Pingo’s uncle, the cop from Naco.

His name was Melchior. At the invocation of his nephew’s name he agreed to meet at a taqueria near a small park three blocks from the port of entry but he couldn’t get free until late the next day.-I’m sorry, he said, I have work, my family. But tomorrow, yes, we’ll get together.

The storefront church had closed up by the time they returned so they found a place to hide for the night in the alley around back, Lupe’s head in Roque’s lap. Neither slept.

Come dawn they bought coffee and pan dulce at a nearby panaderia and breakfasted standing beneath the awning of a pawnshop catering to those needing cash to cross over. The store didn’t open until eight but already people were coming up alone or in groups, peering in through the ironwork.

Once the church opened its doors they sat near the back in folding chairs, suffering the heated exhortations of the preacher from his lectern or indulging the quieter testimonials of the churchwomen, offering sweets, bestowing unsolicited advice, reading at length out loud from their Bibles. Finally, come four o’clock, they made their way to the taqueria and waited.