Twenty-five

“Three-hundred and two push-ups nonstop,” Aragon said, in the dark woods with Lewis. Pine needles under her chin, Javier’s night-vision binoculars on the ground by her hip. In dim starlight she could see her Springfield on the folded towel in front of her. She didn’t want to be lying on it when she needed to release the holster. With the towel under the gun, she wouldn’t be grabbing up sticks and twigs if she had to move fast.

They lay under the trees by the straight section of road leading to the house. The sheriff’s deputies had left. They couldn’t wait around on the hunch that guys in a van for a Santa Fe waste disposal company presented a real and present danger to one of their citizens. They had a wingnut in his cabin outside Tecolote shooting at cars on the interstate.

Rivera said if they needed help, give Tucker a call. He’d come himself, but he had meetings running late, then a conference call with Peking, something about espionage at Los Alamos Labs, he couldn’t say more.

They talked to stay awake, another night without sleep but needing to be ready, alert.

“On the back of the hands?” Lewis adjusted his body to put the shotgun on a stump by his right shoulder. “That’s the top of the wrists.”

“That was another woman, three hundred eighty or something in fifteen minutes on the back of her hands. She has some kind of wrist problem, can you believe it? At two hundred she took a deep breath, then got back to it.”

“I couldn’t do that many push-ups in a day.”

“You can lift a mountain over your head, bench press a Mack truck.”

“The burn. I get it fast.”

“I reached 125,” Aragon said. “I was on fire. Drop me in a tub of ice cubes.”

“What’s the men’s record?”

“I heard it was over ten thousand.”

“No way.”

“Some meatless Japanese guy.”

“So he wasn’t pushing that much weight. But dang. How long did that take? Not fifteen minutes.”

Sometime later, the shadows different now that the stars and slivered moon had moved overhead, Lewis asked, “How far to the closest Blake’s? You nail it within a mile, I’ll buy breakfast. I’m thinking of their two-pound burritos right now and a hot coffee.”

He’d caught her nodding. “It would be the one on St. Michael’s.” She rubbed her eyes. “From here to I-25, twenty-two miles. I clocked it coming in. Down the highway, into town. Forty-four miles total. I’ll have the number one egg and bacon burrito, green chile.”

“No home fries?”

“They’re inside.”

When she caught herself nodding again, the moon now out of the sky completely, she said, “I’ve been thinking about going to Mexico.”

Lewis yawned and stood just to move. Branches broke as he circled their position. “I bet you’ve accumulated enough time to take a year off.”

She stood, her limbs stiff. She put her pistol in its holster on her hip. “These people who just up and disappear. Dolores Baca, Star Salazar, Fager’s client, the PCP pusher. That witness against Rigo Silva in the prostitution case. Those Jewish brothers buying real estate in Silva’s neck of the woods, back when south of Cerrillos was the frontier. I was in on the search when their wives called us to report their husbands missing. A realtor there to get keys said the place had been bought by locals. He said it was funny, two Jewish brothers switching places with two Hispanic brothers, twins, even. He’d heard the Jews decided to take their business to Mexico.”

“Without their worried wives.” Lewis groaned. She saw his dark shape bending forward, reaching for his toes. “You don’t believe any of those people ever crossed the border,” he said with his head by his knees.

She tried for her own toes and couldn’t reach them. Damn, was she stiff. She shook her legs, rolled her neck, swung her arms. She tried again and made it.

“Back when the Sureños were moving in.” Now she stood tall, stretching arms toward the stars. “A bunch of them on our radar suddenly disappeared. We thought they’d gone back to LA. That was when they were pushing up Agua Fria, into Benny’s neighborhood. That had never been gang territory. Not Mann Street, not West Side Locos. Just nice old Hispanic grandpas raking the gravel in their driveways, abuelas washing bird shit off the Virgin of Guadalupe in their yards.”

“In his lawsuit”—Lewis was out in the road, casting a shadow on silvery ground—“the watchman wasn’t available to testify. Defendants could never locate him to serve the subpoena. It was all Benny’s show, his story going to the jury without any inconvenient facts getting in the way. You hear that?”

They both stopped moving.

“An engine,” Aragon said. “But I don’t see anything.” She found the night-vision binoculars on the pine needles. Standing in the road next to Lewis, she looked to where the straight section started right after it climbed out of the arroyo. She wished she had the department’s military goggles that read heat signatures. These hunting goggles from Javier only enhanced dim light.

“Some kind of vehicle,” she said, interpreting the fuzzy green and black images at the limit of the binoculars’ range. “Two men walking on either side, approaching our position.” The images sharpened as they came closer. “Out of the road, Rick. They’re carrying rifles.”

“Was that a bear?’

Rigo Silva pushed his Army goggles hard against his face, trying to reclaim the blurred shape that had danced across his eyes.

“I saw it, too,” said Abel, walking on the other side of the road, also with night-vision, Junior at the wheel of the van, headlights out, following ten yards behind. “It went into the woods on the left.”

“I saw it on the right. There’s two.”

“Got it.” Abel pulled up and Junior stopped the van behind him. “Laying low. I can see its heat in there. It’s big.”

“Mother and cub.” Rigo scanned his side for a heat signature. “Shit. We’re between them. We have to drive past. I’m not walking into that.” He studied the thermal image on his lens. It wasn’t moving. Wouldn’t a bear run, climb a tree?

He saw something else. Last night, the maybe-cops, saying a tree blocked the road. They’d passed that spot a half mile back, all clear. Now a tree across their path when they were almost to the outfitter’s ranch. He could see the trailer straight ahead in a clearing, heat showing someone floating above the ground, probably on a porch.

There had been no tree here when they scouted earlier today.

The thermal image in the woods shifted, arms in front of a body, holding something long, a black line across a white and gray body.

“Bears don’t move like that.” He flipped the safety lever on his AK-47, the only thing left from the Sureños who’d tried to bother them once. “That lawyer put us in a trap.” Rigo leveled his sights on the person trying to hide, but their body heat was saying here I am.

Then he heard it.

Bears don’t rack shotguns.

She was close enough to see the black rifles in the men’s green hands, slung forward from the hip, a wide strap over their shoulders. Lewis must have seen it too, even without night-vision. The two men were on the road, starlight glinting off the windshield of the van behind them, dash lights showing the driver’s body, knuckles on the steering wheel.

Fire leaped from the rifles in Lewis’s direction. Fully automatic weapons, she couldn’t guess the number of shots. His shotgun boomed once. She took aim and emptied her magazine. One of the men went down, but the other swung his machine gun toward her. She saw the fire sweeping in an arc coming her way and threw herself behind a log. The goggles came off when she went down. Branches rained on her back as bullets tore the forest apart. The second machine gun started firing again. She had only wounded the man.

She ejected the spent magazine but was afraid to lift her hip to get at the spare strapped to her leg.

The curtain of bullets dropped lower, found the log and ripped it apart. She pushed harder into the earth, pressing a cheek into the ground, making herself flat. Something dug into her face, needles piercing skin, her flesh on fire. A goddamned cactus. She took it, eyes watering, chewing her tongue to keep from screaming.

A break in the clatter of machine guns, silence, the shower of twigs and branches stopped. Then magazines snapping into place. She rolled, snatched the extra clip on her thigh, and slapped it into place. She armed the pistol and lifted it above her head, the butt on the ruins of the log. She fired without looking. She got off she didn’t know, eight, ten rounds, and Lewis’s shotgun exploded twice—he was alive!—before the machine guns started again.

It sounded closer. One of them was walking toward her. She was sorry she’d given her position away wasting bullets.

She tilted the barrel at where the shooter would stand when he came to finish her. She might be able to fire once.

Behind her a rifle cracked. More shots. Breaking glass.

It was Serena with a hunting rifle.

The machine gun fire lifted, hitting branches higher on the trees. One gun stopped. Then the other. She heard the van’s doors opening and looked up to see a man pushing another man inside, then closing the door behind him. The van backed away fast, tail lights lighting the road and making trees glow red. A gun fired from the passenger window, two, three bursts. She dropped behind the remains of her log. When she lifted her head again the van was pulling a K-turn right before the arroyo. One knee bent, both hands on her pistol, she used her last rounds. Metal pinged down there. Glass cracked. Then the van was gone.

“Denise?” Lewis’s shadow stepped from the forest onto the starlit pan of the hard clay road.

“I’m good. You?”

“Standing and breathing. I think you hit one.”

“I know I did. Did you hear what they said right before they fired?”

“‘The lawyer put us in a trap.’”

“I told Marcy Thornton if they came out here again they’d find me. She must have forgot to pass that along.”

Serena showed them the bullet holes through Hunter Hayes and Kellie Pickler posters in her girls’ bedroom at the end of the trailer, the last room down the hall from the kitchen. She tugged a mattress off the box spring and put her finger in a tear, a bullet inside.

“Javier may feel guilty for what happened to you, Denise. It makes no more sense than blaming yourself for not saving Miguel. Javier was two hundred miles away. If he’d been there, you would have watched your brother dying next to your boyfriend.” She ripped off the posters, revealing the holes in the home’s metal wall, the pink insulation inside. “But my daughters don’t owe you anything. What do I tell them about why someone shot up where they sleep?”

“I’m sorry, Serena.”

“Javier’s even now, comprende?” Her looks softened. “You’ve got cactus in your face. Follow me.”

In a bathroom, Serena ordered Aragon to hold still as she used a tweezer to pull cactus spines from her cheek. Then she told them to leave, she’d clean up, get new posters from town, lie to the girls she’d redecorated their room as a surprise. She’d plug the walls with extra insulation and find something for a patch.

But it wouldn’t work. The girls would want their own posters and take down Mom’s. They’d see the holes and ask and she’d have nothing to say.

Aragon used the house’s landline to report the shooting to her sergeant, then the Sheriff’s Office. There was only one way out of the canyon, the interstate. Travelling east or west, a van with the windshield shot out should be easy to find. She asked her sergeant to get someone at the gate to Silva Enterprises just in case the van got through.

Next she called Rivera’s cell. She needed help she couldn’t get elsewhere. He didn’t answer. She called twice more and settled for voicemail. As she was leaving a message, his number showed as an incoming call.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I was sleeping. I left my phone in the living room. Sorry it took so long to answer.”

She told him about the fire fight. “Machine guns, Tomas. We don’t have anything to match that.”

“We do. But we don’t have a SWAT team on standby. It’s a volunteer crew in the Santa Fe office. I’ll call them out and get over to Silva’s place. Can you meet me there? We’re getting the forensics on Cassandra Baca. Some things we really must consider.”

“I’m in the truck. Lewis is heading to the office. Our sergeant wants him to brief the chief in person.”

“But you’re okay? Nobody hurt?”

“One of them is wounded. My sister-in-law is pissed. Lewis is talking to his wife, asking about his girls. I’m still shaking. A machine gun is a very scary thing, Tomas. There’s nothing you can do but wait to die.”

They found more holes in the mobile home. All the lights on now, even in the barns and bunkhouses. In the wooden deck and stairs at the front door, bullets had splintered steps and railings. The picture window had almost been blown out, three holes near the bottom left corner. An inch higher and Serena would have had shattered glass all over her living room.

With her back to the house, Aragon looked down the straight stretch of road to where the van had been close to two hundred yards away. Serena had fired from the porch. The sound of breaking glass, she’d hit the windshield, the scope worthless at night, using starlight to aim.

“We should stay,” Lewis said. “Down around the bend where she won’t see. At least till dawn.”

“We should stay until Javier gets back. But she won’t let us.”

The damn steering wheel had been slippery with blood. Now the blood was sticky and messed up his phone’s screen.

He didn’t like using his personal cell phone so soon after a job. Bullshit there were no records somewhere that would put him close just by turning on the phone. And somebody, somewhere was listening, recording everything said. You talked about these things with only people you trusted, face to face, no one else around, with lots of machinery screaming or deep in the woods.

Nothing like this had happened before. Benny needed to know.

Rigo said, “I’m an hour out. Junior’s dead. Abel just died next to me. I’ll be driving my Olds. The van’s shot to shit.” The phone slipped from his hand. He found it in his lap, blood pooled under his balls: Junior’s from when he got killed driving the van slowly behind him and Abel. One rifle shot through the windshield. Going in at his Adam’s apple, tearing all those veins and arteries when it blew out the back of his neck.

Benny’s voice down there with the blood, asking, “Junior and Abel?” Rigo brought the wet phone to his ear, hoping it wouldn’t short out. “Yeah, both of them. That lawyer, she’s dead next. Make sure the gate’s open.”