love that is much bigger than the two people involved, and in some way more fragile. After five minutes outside the restaurant the driver became nervous and asked that he be paid. Ozburn caught the man's eyes in the rearview and growled at him softly. The driver nodded emphatically, then jumped out of the car and onto the wide, uneven sidewalk linking restaurant to restaurant, and disappeared around a corner.
Ozburn waited another five minutes, petting Daisy's head. No Suburban. Five minutes more. He saw the cabbie peering at him from up the street. He dropped way too many bills into the driver's seat, grabbed his duffel and got out. Daisy sprung after him and he strode up the narrow street, a large man with flowing blond hair and a Chargers windbreaker buttoned against the Pacific cool and a light-footed black dog in the lead. He sat on the upstairs deck of Josefina's restaurant in Puerto Nuevo, Daisy at his feet. It was late and the street outside was nearly empty of the tourists.
The young couple he'd seen crossing the street earlier happened to share the deck with him. They spent most of the time looking into each other's eyes, speaking softly, sipping their wine. Ozburn could see the woman's face and she was flush with love. Her eyes shone and her earrings sparkled and her laughter rippled toward him like a stream.
Ozburn smiled; then her laughter was joined by the sounds of the restaurant owners back in the kitchen, and by a corrido on a distant radio, and the surge of the ocean against the rough rock shore, and even by the voice of a man that Ozburn could see on the street, nearly two blocks away, standing in a pay phone booth while he talked excitedly to someone about a car he was hoping to buy. Ozburn knew he shouldn't be able to hear the man, but what was new? Usually it was at night that the sounds became unbearably loud, and this night was shaping up to be one of his worst. He closed his eyes briefly and the sounds converged toward melody.
He finished his dinner and some beers and was now enjoying a clear, bright tequila. The lovers touched their wineglasses with a sharp ping and the man set his hand on her leg. Ummm, she said, to no one in the world but her lover, and Ozburn. The man in the phone booth swore and slammed down the receiver. Daisy ate her scraps loudly. The white Suburban wobbled up the street toward the restaurant, tires grating sharply on the gravel, fan belt screeching, the AC condenser groaning. The woman laughed like a stream again.
Ozburn leaned back from the light cast by the Josefina's sign and watched the SUV pass. He ordered another tequila and his check. The lovers paid and left in an uproar of chair legs on tile, a draft of perfume, her laughter as they pounded down the wooden stairs. Ozburn leaned very slightly over the balcony rail and looked left, in the direction of the Suburban. The driver had U-turned and parked facing him, lights out. He sat back in the darkness. A moment later a second Suburban came toward him from his right. It was wine-colored in the faint light coming through the screen door of a cantina, where it parked. Dust rose into the headlights; then the headlights went out.
Ozburn called a taxi and paid for dinner and Daisy lead the way down the stairs, toenails clicking. He took three steps toward the second Suburban, then hooked hard right down an alley. Daisy scrambled to keep up with him. He walked fast, his boots heavy, the duffel in his left hand, straddling the trickle of wastewater that crawled toward the sea and sounded to Ozburn like a child thrashing in a swimming pool. He heard cars on unseen streets, a hundred televisions in a hundred unseen rooms. The invisible ocean battered the rocks with rhythmic fury. He unsnapped his windbreaker and loosened the strap of the Love 32 so that one jerk on the quick-release would let the weapon swing free.
At the last building the alley fed into a dirt road and Ozburn stopped and listened. Daisy sat and looked at him. From within the concurrent floods of sounds he concentrated very hard to isolate the tap-tap of footsteps-rapid footsteps-on the sidewalk. They came from his left, the direction of the white Suburban. Then another set, more sharp reports of running men, and these came from the opposite way.
He walked around the rear of this last building, the moonlight full upon him, and peered around its corner, looking up and down the main street. He saw that because of the slope of the small village and its few streets and its proximity to the ocean, he now stood in a place unavoidable to anyone looking for him. Unavoidable to anyone who knew the simple layout of this village. And absolutely unavoidable to two teams of hunters who had him caught between them like these had. Perfect. He released the gun and punched off the safety and felt in the windbreaker pocket for the spare magazines. He gave the sound suppressor a good turn for luck. He patted Daisy's head.
Then he waited, listening. Riots of sound. Symphonies. Looking up beyond the lights of Puerto Nuevo, Ozburn saw the harvest moon tinged with orange. And the flicker of the North Star. Ozburn thought that this was not the same North Star that had guided the ancients. Their North Star had changed its position millennia ago. And he knew that this new North Star would change its position, too, someday, long after humankind had died out. On it would shine, a lighthouse for a shipless sea.
The footsteps closed from either side of him. Louder now, and faster. The beautiful lovers came down the street arm in arm, heads tilted toward each other, the woman's laughter coming again to Ozburn like a rippling stream. They turned up the dirt road toward him. Ozburn glanced the other way and saw the shining car that was surely theirs. The footsteps to his right became three men, who spilled from an alley into the dirt road, and when they saw the lovers they halted and hunched like surprised coyotes; then, gun barrels flashing in the light of the harvest moon, they rushed the lovers and tore them away from each other. The woman yelped and the man tried to speak rationally but the cursing of the gunmen was louder. And again like animals they seemed to sense Ozburn's position and they marched their hostages toward him, the young woman and man pushed before them as shields. Ozburn heard the second group to his left, closing faster, and when they turned from the alley into the road they were three men also, pistoleros, with their weapons drawn. Daisy growled and Ozburn kicked her smartly.
They slipped through the back door of a lobster restaurant. Like many of the buildings here, the ground floor was where the owners of the restaurants lived with their families. Ozburn came into a small mudroom with hats and jackets and the slickers of the fishermen hanging on the walls, and pairs of rubber boots lined neatly along another wall, and there were plastic buckets and hand nets and fishing poles and reels, and the reek of fish and shellfish and sea.
He walked down a short dark hallway, Daisy close behind him, passing two bedrooms and a bathroom and into a small kitchen, then into a larger room that wavered in television light and where on a couch sat three youngsters and an older girl of maybe twelve and they were all clearly terrified of man and beast. The smallest one broke away and ran up the stairs. Ozburn could hear the banging of pans and voices up in the restaurant kitchen, where the parents were shutting down the restaurant for another night. The other two little ones fled upstairs next and Ozburn heard the fearful cacophony of their voices and their parents' voices. He told the girl not to be afraid. Daisy panted at the girl and wagged her tail. Ozburn stepped across the room for the front door and looked up the stairway to see a stout, aproned woman brandishing a tortilla press charging down the steps, followed by a man with an aluminum baseball bat.
He hustled through the front door, duffel first, and let Daisy out, then slammed it shut and walked quickly up the sidewalk toward the cantina and the wine-colored Suburban. He ducked into an alley and ran the alley to its end and here he stopped and listened and closed his eyes, and he was able to hear, through the roar of the village and the deafening panting of Daisy and the tremendous pounding of his own heart, the beautiful young woman sobbing and the young man pleading and offering money. He heard the sicarios, too, infuriated by Ozburn's disappearance. He set down the duffel very softly. They were not ten feet from him, just around the dark corner. He motioned Daisy to stay.
Ozburn swung around the corner and quietly placed a full-auto burst into the man without a hostage. Then another into the man who had forced the woman to her knees. His blood struck her face. Her young lover saw his moment and elbowed his captor sharply in the nose and Ozburn blew the gunman back into the dirt road. All of this happened in near silence-faint puffs followed by meaty slaps. He stepped into the chaos and the thank-yous of the woman, and the young man offered him a fist to knock. Ozburn ignored them and shot the men once each in the head, then shushed the lovers with a finger to his lips and shooed them toward their shiny car. He hurried them along like children, pushing them with the end of the duffel bag. When they were almost there he whistled sharply for Daisy and they ran back into the alley from which they had come. He stopped just around the corner. He popped out the partially spent magazine and traded it for a full one. Daisy looked up at him admiringly.
He heard the second group of men conversing one alley over, voices puzzled. He had the advantage because they were the hunters and it was their job to act. But they had heard nothing other than the crying and the pleading of the lovers and this had confounded them, and Ozburn knew it and waited. He knelt in the dark behind a modified fifty-five-gallon fuel drum that would be used as an outdoor heater in the cooler winter months to come. It smelled of wood smoke and ashes. He patted Daisy's head as he listened to the engine of the shiny car turn over and the
