Across the room, a tarp lay in a shapeless form, tucked into the corner. She’d found herself staring at it off and on, ever since the Mexicans had locked her inside the room alone. The tarp was filthy, encrusted with smears of paint and oil. The only thing in the room except the mattress and the crucifix, it spooked her. That’s going to be your shroud, she thought. Then claim it, she told herself. Claim it for your own, wrap yourself in the thing and let them find you like that. Let them know you see right through them, you’re scared but not weak. Show them.
She scuttled across the floor, drew the tarp away from the wall and recoiled screaming.
Underneath the tarp, wrapped in clear stiff plastic, lay the naked body of Snuff Akers. His hands and ankles were bound with wire, a wad of filthy cloth jammed deep into his mouth. A bloody scald the size of a tennis ball blackened his temple. His eyes gazed vacantly. A needle and syringe lay with him inside the plastic sheath.
Shel sat there shaking in the middle of the room. Sobs chirped unbidden in her throat and she told herself, You’re losing it, girl. Hang in there.
She heard the sound of an approaching motor, then tires on gravel. Doors opened and closed. Men brayed in Spanish and laughed.
She crawled back to the mattress, wiped her face and pressed her back against the wall. Heavy footfalls resounded on the wood plank steps into the cellar, then softer ones across the flagstones and mud. A key rattled in the door lock.
The first one through the door was the wiry one, with the birthmark, the one who spoke English. In a glance he saw the tarp had been pulled away, Snuff’s body exposed.
“Takes a sick mind,” she told him, “to do a thing like that.”
He chuckled, not to suggest contempt or mockery, but almost sadly. “Tell that to Gaspar Arevalo and his brothers,” he said. “Only problem, they’re dead.”
One of the huge ones she remembered from the night before followed him in, carrying over his shoulder the sagging form of a semiconscious man, the head obscured by a black cloth hood. His hands and ankles were bound with wire like Snuff’s. The huge Mexican dipped through the small doorway, ignoring Shel, focusing instead on his load, which he promptly dropped like a sack of cement on the hard floor. The cloth hood muffled the ensuing scream. Despite the invisibility of the face, Shel knew by the clothes who it was.
Lonnie Dayball.
He reeked of vomit and urine. His clothes were rank with it and stained with blood. His whole body twitched, as though from shock. The second huge one wandered in, carrying a baseball bat over his shoulder like an ax. Seeing the tarp drawn away from Snuff’s body, he chortled, “Senor Snuffito.
“Snuffito-Bufito,” the other big one chimed.
The smaller one with the birthmark approached the mattress where Shel sat. He gestured with his hand for her to get up.
“Time for a little walk,” he told her. “Some air will be nice, no?”
Behind him, the one with the ball bat swung it back, then cracked it ferociously against the base of Dayball’s spine. Dayball convulsed, screaming into the hood. The two large men yipped and clapped. Home run.
“Please,” the smaller one said, taking Shel’s hand.
He helped her to her feet. Wrapping her arm across his shoulder, he braced half her weight as she walked. As they ducked through the low doorway, one of the two big ones made kissing sounds from behind. A whispered voice in singsong lilted, “Ce-sar-io.”
The little one turned, shooting a hateful glance back at the two of them.
The kissing sounds returned. The little one murmured something to himself that Shel didn’t catch, then he turned back to lead her away.
The dirt walls of the root cellar oozed with seeping rainwater. The floors were a slick mess except for the path of flagstones crossing to the far side. The path was flanked by empty wood shelves thick with cobwebs. A scent of old decay lingered. The little one allowed Shel to walk on the flagstones as he trod beside her in the mud. He drew her up the wood plank steps through a pair of hurricane doors just as a second car approached down a long gravel road.
“Quick,” he said. “Around the house.”
He hustled her along as the headlights approached. They turned the corner just as the car, a Mercedes with tinted windows, pulled to a stop outside the root cellar. Behind her, Shel heard two doors open and close.
He let go of her after a moment, to see if she could stand on her own. She tottered but didn’t fall. Smiling, she said, “Thank you.” After a moment she decided to risk his name.
“They called you Cesario. Can I call you that?”
He shot her a look of such intense and immediate hostility she almost felt her legs give way. This traffic in names, she realized, it foretold death, but she couldn’t suppress the need to talk, to know this man, at least a little, given the likelihood it would be his duty to kill her. In time he said, “Cesar.” Shrugging, he looked away. “What can it matter?”
“My name’s Shel,” she told him.
“I know.”
Shel smiled. “You do.”
“It’s written on the back of the picture I have.”
“The one you had at the house.”
He reached into his coat pocket, withdrew a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. As he scratched the flint to create a flame, Shel thought of the bloody black scald at Snuff’s temple.
“Where’d you get that picture?”
“From Francisco Fregado.” Cesar grinned. “That’s what we called him. Frank the Mess.”
She felt light-headed suddenly and searched around for a place to sit. A rock jutted out of the grass not far away. She aimed for it, took two lunging steps, and came within falling distance. She hit the ground in a heap then pulled herself onto the rock. Cesar walked up behind.
“You all right?”
“Haven’t had my Wheaties.”
“You mean your pills.” He sounded angry.
“I would’ve taken more if you hadn’t stopped me.”
She drew up on her haunch, pulling her legs up beneath her and sitting stiffly on the rock. She chafed her arms. He offered her his cigarette.
“Thank you,” she said.
She took a shallow drag, coughed despite herself, and handed the cigarette back. He waved it off. “I’ll light another.”
It was a cool and blustery morning, the air clear and sharp and scented with rain. Threads of cloud, propelled by an easterly wind, seethed across a crackling, dawn-lit sky.
The house was a two-story farmhouse that seemed to have sat empty for some time. It stood alone on a grassy plane surrounded by low-lying hills. The terrain was lush from recent rain, the air smelled of mud. The road down which the cars had come ran parallel behind a windbreak of eucalyptus trees that flanked an irrigation canal choked with weeds.
To the north a barrier ridge of taller hills gave Shel her bearings. We’re on the north side of the strait, she thought. Not far from the mouth of the Sacramento, near Bird’s Landing, somewhere between Montezuma Hills and Grizzly Bay. Windmills sat atop the nearest easterly hills and that clinched it. She remembered reading something about them, how they’d been built by a consortium hoping to supply cheap electricity to the nearby farms. Funding had backfired, bureaucrats descended, the investors got strangled in red tape. Now the windmills stood there, skeletons of metal, transforming the wind into nothing but sound.
About a hundred yards beyond the eucalyptus trees, vans and trucks filled with squatters crowded a small clearing. The women in the camp were cooking by wood fires beneath canvas awnings attached to the vans. Pozole and nixtamal from the night before simmered for the tortillas the women were roasting now on their stone comals. Children sucking on sticks of rock candy clung to their mothers’ skirts, warmed by the fires. Grizzled men wearing sweat-stained hats sat in folding chairs, waiting for breakfast. A makeshift pen for chickens stood at the edge of the clearing. A group of older children taunted the birds, throwing acorns through the wire.
