'Repent for what?'
'The faith you have abandoned. The lives you have taken.'
'How can you find faith where there is none?'
'In your heart.'
'It's empty. And what can my repentance do for the lives I have taken?'
'It can save your wife.'
'You know nothing of Seliah.'
'She is in the hospital in California. Don't doubt us. Don't make yourself smaller to us. You spit on the face of God. His mercies are small and easily withdrawn. Ours are even smaller.'
'Who are you?'
'Representatives.'
'What guarantee do I have that Seliah will survive?'
'There is no power higher than the word.'
'Pull down the hoods. All three of you.'
'If you repent, Seliah will live.'
'Let me see your faces!' None of the three moved so Ozburn pulled the trigger and swept the Love 32 across them but only one shot fired. He heard the round spit and felt the recoil and saw the quick dimple form on the sweatshirt of the man on the left. A stomach shot. The man didn't so much as flinch. Rather he tilted his head down as if for a look at it, then turned his face back up at Ozburn. Ozburn felt for the extended fifty-shot magazine but it was gone. He looked back to where he had dropped the gun and saw the magazine, faintly green and luminescent, shining upon the rocks.
When he turned back the men were gone and Daisy was crisscrossing the ground where they had stood, nose lowered for scent, tail wagging hopefully. Ozburn labored up the nearest rise and from here he looked out on the vast, barren desert, unpeopled and motionless. He folded to his knees and sat slumped amidst the rocks and asked God to return his faith but he felt no return of it, just the ocean of dark urges moving inside him. And he repented to God his several murders but even as he did this there was a voice inside him, speaking more quietly than the voice with which he called to God, and it said, The brutes deserved it, the brutes deserved it, they deserved to be exterminated.
Backtracking to the Imuris airstrip, Ozburn parked short of a hillock and left Daisy in the car and climbed to the top. In the wavering green distance he could see the airstrip and the building and the black SUV parked nearby and the huge one-eared enforcer sitting in the shade just has he had done. Teodoro, Ozburn remembered. Teodoro 'El Gigante' Caborca. Another sicario stood beside him, eyeing the landscape, a weapon slung over one shoulder. The door that Ozburn had kicked in swung in and out with the breeze. Ozburn slid down the hillside to his car and made sure the two Love 32s had full magazines; then he locked the car and hiked around to the south side of the cinder-block building, which was tucked against the rocky hills.
It took almost an hour. The feeling in his legs came and went. The numbness was climbing him now, almost to his hips. He was sweating hard. Daisy panted and stayed a few yards behind, never venturing ahead. She seemed to know the difference between playing and working, and Ozburn was impressed by her intuitions.
When Ozburn finally settled behind a boulder for a concealed look he could see that the enforcer's SUV was still parked where it had been. He could hear music spilling out from the building, then laughter. When he had caught his breath Ozburn picked his way down the hill on a game trail and soon he was pressed up against the back of the building, Daisy at his feet, a machine pistol ready in each hand.
He quietly picked his way along the perimeter. The music was a narcocorrido and the voices were of three men. He heard a beer can spit open. When he came to a window he motioned Daisy to stay, then ducked beneath it and sidled past. Rising to a crouch he hustled around the corner, then snuck beneath another window and stopped just short of the open front doorway. Laughter and an accordion. Laughter and profanities. Another can popping open. Daisy had broken her stay and now came crawling around the corner on her stomach, ears down in penance and an apologetic look on her face. Repentance, thought Ozburn. You want repentance-watch this.
Ozburn motioned her again to stay; then, guns up, he burst through the door for the second time that day.
All three men stared at him in disbelief. Two had beers in their hands instead of weapons. El Gigante sat hugely on one of the battered old couches and Ozburn knew that he could shoot both of the beer-drinking bad guys before their leader could get off the couch, and he saw that Teodoro knew it, too.
He ordered the two men to their knees and they took their positions with doomed expressions on their faces. One bowed his head and prayed. Ozburn ordered Teodoro to join them and he tracked the big man's slow movements with one of the Love 32s. Teodoro finally righted himself and lumbered toward Ozburn. When the big man came abreast of his comrades he did not kneel but instead lunged forward at Ozburn. Ozburn stepped aside deftly and let the gun in his right hand swing free on the shoulder sling. He hit Teodoro's jaw with an uppercut so hard the big man stopped and straightened, then dropped to the floor. When Teodoro managed to get to his knees Ozburn leveled a machine pistol at his forehead.
Daisy sat in the doorway wagging her tail.
— Do you repent, Ozburn asked in Spanish.
— I repent.
— I repent.
— I'll find you in hell and kill you, said Teodoro.
Ozburn looked down at the big man's quivering face, the dark, searching eyes, the jagged edge where the ear had been.
— Who has the vehicle keys?
Teodoro nodded toward the TV and Ozburn saw the fob and keys sitting beside the rabbit-ear antenna. He retrieved the keys and stuffed them into a vest pocket without taking his eyes off the men.
— Touch your faces to the floor, all of you.
ATF training was to never get on the ground on orders from an armed opponent: You will almost certainly be executed. Stay on your feet. Stay on your feet. Ozburn knew that trained or not, the cartel men understood this. The two smaller men lowered their heads to the concrete. One began to sob. He offered five thousand U.S. dollars for his life. Then ten thousand. Then ten million. Teodoro stared down at the floor muttering words that Ozburn couldn't understand. He caught the word Malverde, patron saint of the narcos, and that was all.
— I've bet the life of my wife on this moment. Her name is Seliah.
With that, Ozburn let go of the left gun and brought the last three crucifixes from his vest pocket. He moved from man to man, left to right, working the leather necklaces over their heads with his left hand and the barrel of the machine pistol he held in his right. Teodoro's head was too big so Ozburn dropped the crucifix to the floor in front of him where it landed with a clear tap.
— The god I no longer know has asked me to spare your lives. He says he can save Seliah. We'll see about that, won't we? Stay where you are until I'm safely away or I'll certainly kill you all. Ozburn drove back to his car and shot flat the tires of the SUV, then took the Mercury to the spring near Atil and stayed in the wilderness three days. He ate the bread and pastries and forced himself to drink the water he'd bought at the panaderia. There was a blanket and a heavy jacket in his duffel on top of the bricks of tightly wrapped cash. He had enough kibble in the bag for Daisy, who seemed perfectly content to sleep under the stars, her back to him for warmth. Ozburn's body was alternatingly numb or pain-riddled. Hours were minutes and seconds stretched to days. He hallucinated and wailed and sobbed when the pain was upon him, and he slept through the numbness. He slept for what seemed like a lifetime. He awakened to music, terrifying music so loud his eardrums pounded in pain. His visions were of violence and beasts that he knew did not exist, then of Seliah, whose beauty burst away the ugliness but when he could no longer hold her image the terrors returned and were worse.
The evening of his second day he lit a fire against the chill and just before dusk he saw the black SUV roll to a stop in the distance and Teodoro and his two associates climb out of it. Ozburn and Daisy sat side by side on a hillock and watched them come across the desert toward them. They carried weapons and made no effort to conceal themselves. When they were a few hundred yards away Ozburn saw the three men in the hooded sweatshirts walking across the moraine toward them. Ozburn watched the Mexicans slow down their steady march and the hooded men approach. Teodoro and his narcos stopped uncertainly but the men continued toward them.
