He didn't think Ozburn would change his mind and try something, but Hood wanted Beth Petty in his sight. He watched the rearview attentively and took an elaborate route before rolling to a stop inside her garage and waiting for the garage door to close behind them. When it clunked into silence Hood felt a flutter of relief.
Hood hugged her but did not close his eyes as he wanted to, and he kept his ears tuned to the sounds of the night around him.
'It's okay, Charlie. He's gone.'
33
Ozburn woke up in a motel room with disjointed memories of how he got there. He remembered Hood's house. Wind and a pretty woman. Flying Betty through the cool, clear night. A young Mexican man who would watch over Betty for a modest price. A beaten, once-silver Mercury courtesy of Father Joe. Meeting Paco in a bar and collecting the remaining eighty-seven thousand, five hundred dollars for final payment on the Love 32s and later giving him the first ten guns right here in this motel room. No wonder I'm exhausted, he thought. He propped himself up against the headboard and took stock.
Daisy was curled up at the foot of his bed, eyes on him, tail thumping against the spread. His duffel was on the floor, brimming with money, right where he had put it. His vision was clear and not colored with green. He showered and put on clean clothes and left a disappointed Daisy to guard the fort.
He stepped out of the lobby and into the tourist zone of Nogales, Mexico. He recognized it immediately. Just across the border from Arizona, the narrow streets jammed with cars and pedestrians, bars and restaurants, curio vendors presiding over acres of wood carvings and colorful pottery and leather purses and boots and belts and blankets hanging brightly in the sunlight.
He took some video on his Flip, then had the proprietor shoot him as he picked out a dozen wooden flutes painted in scintillant pinks and yellows and purples, twelve leather purses, twelve pairs of huaraches with soles made of old car tires, like numbers of assorted earrings and necklaces possibly containing turquoise, and a dozen tooled leather wallets. He examined the many small wooden crucifixes arranged neatly in a display case, remembering the surge of strength he used to feel at such a sight and comparing it with the blankness he now felt. But he bought twelve anyway, each with its leather necklace. He overpaid the woman and thanked her effusively for taking the video.
He bought breakfast burritos and sopadillas from a street cart and ate them standing up outside an art gallery, looking through the window at the paintings inside-Madonnas and calla lilies and peasants done in the style of Rivera. His feet began to tingle then lose feeling so he ate faster. When he was done he hoisted up his plastic bags and walked back across to the cart and got Daisy carnitas wrapped to go in tinfoil.
An hour later they set off in the old Mercury heading south on Highway 15. Near Cibuta he pulled off the road where a group of schoolchildren waited for their bus. He covered the machine guns on his front seat with the bags of curios, then got out and gave the children the flutes. They accepted the gifts happily and Ozburn tried to say a prayer for them but he couldn't think of anything to say and they seemed puzzled by his words. When he pulled away he heard musical notes and laughter rising up behind the car in spirited chaos and he believed he had touched the children in some good way.
He drove through the rough country, his mind fixed on Seliah, trying to find her in the depths of her unconsciousness. Was she thinking? Did she feel? He imagined her in the hospital bed, nurses and doctors hovering above her, her pale beauty arrested in sleep, Seliah an object to them, a hope, a possibility given certain odds. What could he do?
In Imuris he stopped and approached the group of old men who were sitting in the meager shade offered by the eaves of the mini-super that stood adjacent to the dirt town square. They squinted wordlessly at him but when Ozburn struck up a conversation in decent Spanish they were happy to tell him that no, they knew of no airstrip; no, they had not seen any narco activity at all lately; no, there was almost no rain last season but the government said maybe more this year. He said he might go check the airstrip himself, the one they didn't know of. They laughed. He gave them the huaraches and wallets and they smiled, some toothlessly, others with the great white teeth that seemed to follow so many Mexican men into old age.
At the bakery he found some women and girls but they were suspicious of him and hardly answered his Spanish. He bought some pastries and bottled water and gave them some of the purses and jewelry and some of the crucifixes.
Outside of Imuris he turned east on a dirt road. He had driven it six months before on an undercover meth buy that had strengthened his standing with some low-level players in Carlos Herredia's North Baja Cartel. Ozburn had been treated disrespectfully by a gigantic one-eared cartel enforcer and it was last night's dream of this man that brought him here now. The road was rough and narrow but firm enough to buoy the heavy, low-slung car. Rounding a curve he could see the airstrip and the cinder-block building with the tin roof and the window frames with the glass long smashed out and the smugglers' trailers baking in the sun. There were no vehicles in sight and Ozburn scanned the rocky peaks of the hills for lookouts but he saw no movement except for three vultures circling in the thermals high above.
He kicked in the door of the cinder-block building and lowered both Love 32s but the place was empty. There were old sofas and folding chairs and a television with rabbit ears tipped in tinfoil. The fireplace was black and there were food cans tossed on the floor among the mattresses and old blankets and mouse turds. Daisy investigated. Ozburn stood approximately where he had been searched by the enforcer's men and he remembered the roughness of it and their insults and the terrible serrated edge of flesh where the man's ear had been detached. He looked over at the slouching plywood countertop where he had laid out five thousand dollars in ATF buy money to cover the methamphetamine. He stood in the doorway and watched the road and the rocky hills for approaching narcos but saw none. He hoped that his dangerous questions to the old men would result in a quick phone call as soon as he left them, so he sat with his machine guns crossed on his lap on a rickety wooden chair outside in the shade and waited.
By midafternoon no one had arrived so Ozburn drove south, then west to Atil where he found a two-track that he had also once traveled on a quad vehicle with a college buddy, ostensibly on a quest for a hot spring they had been told attracted beautiful Mexican girls who bathed naked and were sexually loose. They never found the hot spring or any girls at all, but Ozburn did remember an oasis where clear, cool water flowed up from the rocks and formed a pool beneath a cluster of greasewood trees and fan palms.
Here he spread a blanket in the shade and sat with Daisy beside him. He faced away from the pool because the sight of water would cause his muscles to cramp as if hit with an electrical charge. He began to get hungry and with the hunger came the aches in his body and the cursed green tint to his vision and the frightening numbness to his feet. He ate some of the pastries, oddly flavorless, then removed his bandana and dipped it in the cold water without looking at the pool and lay back on the blanket and covered his eyes, sunglasses and all.
He listened to the thumping of his heart and felt the downward pull of sleep and when he awakened and peeled off the almost-dry bandana, three men stood across from him on the other side of the small pool. A green sun hovered behind them. They wore jeans and hoodies and he couldn't see their faces. Daisy growled and Ozburn growled, too. He found the Love 32 with one hand and swung it up and at them. The tallest one, in the middle, raised a hand, as if calming Ozburn.
'Can I help you?' Ozburn asked. His voice sounded to him like a croak.
The middle man nodded to the west. Then he turned and walked away in that direction, one fellow on either side.
Ozburn clambered around the pool after them, his feet dead and clumsy. He dropped the machine pistol and it landed hard on the rocks but he picked it up and slung the strap over his shoulder. Daisy easily caught them, touching her sensitive black nose to their legs, tail down and not wagging. They stopped and let Ozburn approach. He came to within a few yards and studied them. The sun was still at their backs and their faces were lost in the folds of the hoods and he couldn't tell who they were-Mexicans, Americans-they might have been Inuits or Swedes for all he could see.
'If you repent, Seliah will live,' said the tallest one.
Ozburn felt his anger spike. He was long past trying to suppress it. He felt the trigger against his finger.
