working a kitchen towel, shaking her head.
'No here. Nobody here.'
'We have a report of a prowler in this neighborhood,' said Vega. She said it again in Spanish. 'Can we come in?'
'Nobody here.' She had high cheekbones and a flat nose and black eyes. Her teeth were very white. She wore a shapeless gray smock and her hair was bunched into a shiny black ponytail. She was barefoot.
She closed the door and locked it. Bradley heard her walk away.
Vega rapped again. And again. The latch slid and the woman swung open the door and the dish towel was still in one hand.
'Nobody is here.'
'There is a report of a prowler in this neighborhood,' said Vega. 'A prowler in this location. Can we come in, please?'
'No. No persona.' Then the woman rattled off a paragraph in Spanish. Bradley got the gist: There is nobody here I'm cooking my dinner I am from El Salvador I have a green card I work in a factory in the garment district I am skilled and legal. I make the high fashions. You can go away and I will be very much okay.
She closed the door in their faces again and locked it again. Bradley heard her move into the house.
'I wonder exactly who isn't here,' said Bradley.
'I do, too.'
'I smell the yerba, very strong.'
'I smell it, too.'
'Next time she opens that door I'm going to get my foot inside.'
'I'll ask her one more time if we can come in.'
'Be really careful, Caroline.'
Vega rapped on the door and waited, then rapped again. It was quiet for a long moment; then Bradley heard the muffled thud of feet on the floor. The latch slid and the door opened and Bradley opened the screen and placed his foot against the door frame.
'No here, please. No here. Legal. Fashion.'
'Do I have your permission to come in?' he asked.
'No permiso.'
'I smell marijuana. Do you smell it?'
'I smell marijuana,' said Vega.
'No marijuana. No here, nothing… You go. You go.'
Bradley eased his shoulder into the doorway and the woman backed up. Vega followed him in. The living room was small. To the right was a hallway leading back to the bedrooms and to the left was a dining room that opened to the kitchen by a pass-through and an open doorway. In the living room was a small brown sofa and a large TV cabinet with shelves of pottery and paper flowers and figurines carved of onyx and glass and wood. Bradley saw the dust on the glass figures and he saw the black stains inside the white clamshell inverted as an ashtray. He looked down the right hallway and saw that the bedroom doors were closed and there was no light coming around them. He stepped to the threshold of the dining room, and beyond the pass-through he saw the stove with the skillet heaped with onions and chilies cooking down, and the pot of peeled potatoes boiling, and the pan that held a pork roast recently removed from the oven, enough meat to feed several adults.
'You go!' She made as if to slap him with the dish towel but apparently realized the uselessness of it.
'Smells good,' he said, smiling. He drew his gun and moved quickly back into the living room so he could see down the hallway to the bedrooms.
'You go! No one!'
'No one what, lady? No one who?'
The woman unleashed a string of curses and hit him with the dish towel very hard, and when the towel fell to the floor the potato peeler was planted high up into the left side of Bradley's chest. The first gunman came not from the hallway but up into the pass-through from the kitchen where he had been crouching, and Bradley shot him in the middle and the man collapsed just as the second sicario came down the hallway with a machine pistol blazing, trying to control the muzzle rise with his left hand, and Caroline shot him twice and the man stopped but kept firing and the muzzle of his machine gun rose up spitting bullets into the wall, then the ceiling, then into his own face. The gunfire was deafening in the small home and the air filled quickly with smoke. When the machine gunner fell, a very small man sprung up from behind him swinging his pistol on Caroline, and Bradley shot him in the temple and the man pitched forward with his face to the floor tile and his gun still clutched in one hand. The woman came from the kitchen with a sawed-off shotgun, and Bradley took two steps and launched himself. Midair he dropped his gun. He clamped both hands to the shotgun and rammed her chest with his face like he used to as a linebacker and he felt her feet leave the floor and his airborne momentum carry them backward into the little kitchen where they crashed into the refrigerator and sank to the floor. He wrenched away the gun and dumped it into the dining room and stood over her with a boot on her wrist, panting. He wiggled the potato peeler very slightly to see how deep in it was. He'd driven it in farther when he tackled the woman, and now it hardly moved. The pain was breathtaking and the blood poured forth through the groove of the peeler as from a tiny bayonet. He thought of his wife, Erin, and vowed that he would not be forced to say good-bye to her by a potato peeler.
He backed off the woman and handcuffed her to the refrigerator door. Then he took up his autoloader and followed Caroline Vega as she burst into the first bedroom, then the next. There on the floor they found him, his mouth gagged and taped and his eyes looking up at them in terror and his hands bound behind him with plastic ties.
'Hi, Stevie,' said Bradley. ' 'Sup? You're okay now, little man.'
They cut the cuffs and unwrapped the tape and Stevie Carrasco cried without making a sound. Tough as Rocky, thought Bradley.
'That's bad, Bradley,' said Vega, inspecting the potato peeler. 'It's almost to the handle. Those sharp edges are cutting you up.'
'Feels like a cherry bomb went off in there. Let's get him out of here.'
'You don't move until I get paramedics.' She called dispatch for medics and the coroner team.
Bradley stood the boy up and he and Caroline Vega walked him onto the front porch. It took just a few seconds for Theresa Brewer and Erik to arrive, Erik already shooting away with the shoulder camera and Theresa stepping in with her microphone raised. Clovis and Klotz came from the backyard. Bradley hefted the boy up into the crook of his right arm and smiled at Theresa. When he looked down, there was more blood than he thought there was. He handed the boy over to Caroline and tried to understand Theresa Brewer's question but it made no sense to him at all. He smiled at the camera again and sat down on the porch with his feet on the steps and sighed and listened to the approaching sirens. Theresa Brewer pressed the mike toward him, an uncertain expression on her face. He sensed the world letting go of him, and then it did.
9
Ozburn circled the landing strip south of Puertecitos for his lucky third time, then tipped Betty into her descent. He looked out at her yellow wing afloat in the blue morning sky. Poetry in motion, he thought with a smile.
Betty was a 1947 J3 Piper Cub and Oz had bought her nearly eight years ago, swept up every dollar he could find and borrowed the rest from his father. She'd run him $26,750, and he had felt guilty buying the gifts of flight and freedom for so little.
Betty had been a pampered little princess of a plane. She still was. She was delightful and loyal and calm. She was a prop-start, and to Ozburn there was nothing like that transfer of power from his body to hers when he threw her prop and the engine buzzed to life. Like she was taking his energy and his passion, and would soon turn them into flight. Her modified, updated engine put out seventy-five wild horses, could cruise at eighty miles an hour for almost two hundred eighty miles on a tank. She could take off from a nickel and land on a dime.
Her tires bit the gravel and bounced twice, then settled as Ozburn eased the tail to the ground. Ozburn loved
