I stay there another half hour, watching the street, making sure nobody else is watching the house, before I decide it’s time to head back to Gabriela’s. I’m exhausted, but I’m not sure yet I want to sleep. With the smell of those three charred bodies still fresh in my memory, I’m worried what nightmares will come.
Thirty-One
Just over one thousand kilometers south of Culiacán, in the southern region of Mexico known as Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Land, the morning sun had just begun to peek up over the horizon.
Horacio barely noticed. He kept his focus on the road illuminated by the SUV’s headlights, though what lay before him could barely be called a proper road. None of it was paved, and much of it was bumpy. He followed the SUV ahead of him, every couple seconds checking the rearview mirror to make sure the third SUV was behind them. The three vehicles had been driving now for nearly an hour. And they would keep driving if need be, all the way out of Tierra Caliente, all the way past Michoacán. That was their task, what they had been ordered to do.
The man beside him kept his focus out his window. Surveying the hills and trees on his side of the vehicle. Just as the two men in the back watched out their windows for any sign of danger.
The two men in the back held automatic rifles. So did the man beside Horacio.
Horacio, because he was driving, only had a pistol and knife holstered to his belt.
The men in the other SUVs were armed in much the same way. Just like Horacio, the drivers of those SUVs were also armed with pistols and knives.
The distance between each SUV was about one hundred yards.
Which meant Horacio had several seconds to react when an RPG hit the SUV ahead of him.
One second the SUV in front of him was just driving, the next second the tail end burst into flames, flipping the vehicle over onto its top.
The man beside Horacio shouted, “Watch out!”
Horacio’s foot hovered for an instant over the brake pedal but didn’t apply pressure. Instead, Horacio stomped on the gas and gripped the steering wheel tightly and swerved around the SUV in front of them, its bottom now in flames, and he was aware of one of the men in the back shouting something at him, and he was aware of the man beside him hefting the rifle, but Horacio’s focus was on getting them past the first SUV, and he swerved around it on the left-hand side, trying to give it as much breadth as he could, not wanting to drive entirely off the road, and his eyes darted everywhere, searching for their attacker, but the sun was barely up yet and the only light came from his headlights, and he spotted a figure off in the distance at the last second, a figure maybe two hundred yards away with an RPG launcher on its shoulder, and he shouted at the men in the SUV at the same moment the shadowy figure fired a second RPG.
“Hold on!”
He jerked the wheel as hard as he could, sending the SUV into a momentary tailspin. The RPG hit the SUV near the rear end. The sudden force was enough to send them careening off the dirt road into an embankment. Horacio tried to maintain control of the steering wheel, but the thing was completely out of his control, and a second later they hit the embankment at such an angle that it caused the SUV to tip over onto its side.
For a moment, there was complete silence, and then they heard another explosion, what was no doubt from the third SUV.
Horacio wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and had fallen into the passenger when the SUV tipped onto its side. The passenger pushed at him violently, like Horacio was trying to strangle him. Horacio shouted at him to calm down, that they needed to take a moment to regroup, but the man wasn’t having any of it. He even went so far as to punch Horacio in the face to make enough room to raise his rifle and send out several bursts at the SUV’s front windshield. Then he was leaning into the shattered glass, breaking through it, and the two men in the back scrambled over the seats past Horacio, one of them shouting that the thing was going to blow up, and it was then Horacio smelled the smoke in the air and he smelled gasoline and glanced back to see the vehicle was on fire.
He hurried out of the SUV, through the shattered windshield, following the three men who had left him to burn.
Two of the men raced up the embankment toward the road. One of the men was taller, and he was the first one killed when he crested the embankment.
Horacio heard a single gunshot and watched the tall man’s head snap back as he fell to the ground.
The other man raised his rifle, fired off several rounds, but then two heavy rounds punched into his chest sending him somersaulting down the embankment back toward the SUV.
“Psst!”
The last remaining man motioned Horacio behind some nearby rocks for cover.
Horacio started toward the man when an intense pain shot up his leg.
He fell to the ground, grabbing for his wounded knee, just as he heard the echo of the gunshot.
The other man ducked behind the rock, waited several seconds, then peeked up.
A volley of bullets peppered the rock behind which the man hid. There was a beat of silence, and the man peeked up over the rock again.
Like the man who’d been racing up the embankment, his head snapped back when the shooter released a single round.
Horacio lay on the ground, looking toward the rocks, then toward the SUV that was still in flames.
He grabbed for the pistol holstered to his belt. He tried to climb to his feet to run, but the pain was too intense and sent
