53

In the early afternoon he departs the ranch in a dark green Dakota pickup with custom lighting—roof lights, front bumper lights, a tailgate light bar. The vehicle has valid plates and registration, but the owner of record is a fabrication. In the extended cab behind the front seats is a plastic cooler with bottled water and ginger ale on ice, plus some sandwiches. He wears a black T-shirt, dark jeans, black running shoes. He carries his passport on Quino’s advice to take it with him whenever he leaves the ranch. Because it’s the rainiest time of year in the delta, there’s a lightweight rain jacket back there, too, also black, with a roll of duct tape in one zippered pocket and a half-dozen flex cuffs in the other. Just in case. He is again armed with the silencer-fitted .45, is again carrying two extra magazines in the holster pouches. He cranks up the AC, then flips through the CDs in the console, finds a collection of Willie Nelson, slides it into the player, and starts tapping the wheel in time to “Nothing I Can Do About It Now.” At the border highway he turns right and heads downriver and stays just under the speed limit. The idea is to get to Matamoros right around sundown.

It’s on account of I got no money, I know that’s why.

He’d never have enough money to satisfy her daddy, Billy had said on the night of the graduation dance. Never enough for him.

Well, he damn sure had some money after he split from Duro. Three quarters of a mil. At the time of the bond robbery it had been three years since the graduation dance. Raquel would still have been in college. In Austin. Would he have gone to her? And if he had, would she still have felt the same way about him? And if she did, would the money have been enough to sway daddy to let her marry him? And if it was, would they have settled somewhere near her parents, maybe even with her parents? And if they did, was Billy Capp still alive and still there? And if they lived somewhere else, was Billy still alive and still there? Lots of ifs. Lots of questions.

But the only ones that really matter are whether he’s alive and, if so, where? The first thing to find out is whether he’s at the Calderas house, and the best way to do that is go there and see.

Be a damn shame if he’s dead. You can’t get even with a dead man.

But if he is there … imagine his look when you put the pistol in his face.

He’d been to Raquel’s family home only once. Near the end of their senior year and a week before the graduation dance at which she turned down Billy’s proposal, she had hosted a pre-commencement party and invited all her friends. She’d asked Billy to be her date and he had accompanied Axel and his date, a girl named Violeta whom Raquel had introduced to him as her best friend and doubles partner on the school tennis team. The estate was fifteen miles east of Matamoros, out in “el campo,” as the countryside was called by locals. The property encompassed eight hundred acres and its south boundary abutted the border highway.

They turned off onto a junction road that went snaking for almost a mile through stands of hardwoods and palms and wild scrub before coming to a gated entrance at a white stone wall a dozen feet high that completely encompassed the forty-acre residential grounds of the estate. The top of the wall was lined with large glass shards cemented into the masonry. The spiked, iron-barred gate stood open to the coming guests, and a brick guard hut was unoccupied. The guard hut, Raquel would inform them, dated to the estate’s original owner, an old-time cotton merchant, but her father posted an attendant there only at night.

She had said she would be happy to show them around the estate if they arrived ahead of the other guests, so they’d made it a point to get there early, passing through the open gate and following a winding, smoothly paved lane for almost a mile through heavy stands of trees before arriving at the house, a large two-story structure with a wide verandah. She greeted them at the front steps and introduced them to her parents—her mother a lovely woman of charm and poise, her black-bearded father tall and imposing in a white linen suit, his manner courteous, his dark eyes intense as a hawk’s.

After giving them a tour of the house she drove them around the grounds in her open Jeep, showing them the stables and corrals and horse pastures, the magnificent horses of various breeds, the scattering of oak-shaded gazebos and fountains and lily ponds, the swimming hole at the east end of the estate. Coyotes and wildcats still roamed the property outside the walls, she told them, and she had often seen deer carcasses when she’d gone hiking out there with her father. The nights abounded with owls calling to each other through the shadows of the trees. She was just a child when her father had acquired the place, and he’d bought guard dogs to patrol the walled grounds at night, but after several weeks of their crazed barkings at every animal sound or feral scent, and realizing there was little actual danger of robbers intruding onto the grounds, he’d sold them in order to grant everyone a decent night’s sleep.

The residential grounds’ main lane ended at the rear wall, where deliveries were brought by way of a side trail to the only other entry to the residential area, a barred gate like the front one except that its spikes were longer. This gate was chained and padlocked every night and in no need of an attendant. Axel had noted the side trail she spoke of. It branched off the estate road about halfway to the front gate, well before the gate came into view.

When they returned to the house, other guests had arrived and were being entertained by Señor and Señora Calderas. The house was lavishly appointed and the evening was loud with laughter and music and dancing. Axel had very much enjoyed his date with Violeta, who during a slow dance whispered to him, “Look how our friends are entranced by each other,” and directed his gaze to Billy and Raquel as they swayed close by. And then he’d noticed Señor Calderas off to the side and watching them too, his hawk eyes narrowed.