Three motorcycles buzzed the Hyundai, riders kicking the doors and slapping the hood, surging in front of the car, speeding ahead, braking, speeding ahead again. They slowed, fell back, then ripped past like guided missiles, engines screaming and then whining almost dolefully as they shot by and into the scant cross traffic. They wound through parked cars and utility poles and the few unfortunate pedestrians. Red lights, green lights, it didn’t matter, they were heedless of wreckage or death.
Harbaugh gripped the wheel, tried to keep the car moving. But she knew these men would soon kill them. These men would not give up.
Gustavo had climbed over and now slouched in the passenger seat, melting into the door. A stopped motorcycle waited for them to pass and then fired into the street and pulled alongside. Two men on the bike, making Halloween faces. The driver kept them upright when Harbaugh swerved to miss what turned out to be a plastic bag. The man in back reached inside his jacket for a garish silver pistol. The filigree shone in the moonlight as he tapped it on the window. Gustavo scarcely moved. He would not budge. She braked. The pair zoomed ahead.
“Where do we go?” she asked.
“Ahead,” he said.
“To where?”
He just waved his hand vaguely onward. As though he’d heard this story before, seen this part of the episode.
“You gotta do a little better than that, asshole.”
She swerved again, testing the new pair of riders, but they simply swept onto a sidewalk, their engine noise blasting in intervals from behind the parked cars like horns.
She dialed Childs. Straight to voice mail. She shoved the phone back under her thigh.
Think. You’re still alive. You still have some kind of a chance—
Another motorcyclist appeared at Harbaugh’s window, scraping the side of the car with something. He shouted. He spat. He smiled at her.
They headed south in the Hyundai, traveling out of the Zona Industrial to the airport and the city proper. Screaming through the night. The three bikes kept them in this lane of the roadway, a hellish motorcade, a fury of popped clutches and backfires, swerving in mad helixes in front of the car, sideswiping in delight. It was a wonder none had crashed. They dodged her lurches right and left, her accelerations and brakings. She couldn’t turn or stop. She sensed a dead end. A trap. She didn’t dare be too evasive for fear of the same. No unforced errors, no mistakes.
There were two more bikes trailing behind, five total by her count. A Toyota pickup with a deep purring engine and a jacked-up Ford F-150 that bellowed and brapped on a set of giant off-road tires. Farther back, she clocked a white van that had to be part of the convoy, the caboose of the train. Ten, maybe, twelve guys.
“There’s about a dozen of them,” she said. “We can’t . . . I don’t think we can . . .”
Gustavo watched out the window as she trailed off. In the intermittent streetlights he looked old, almost senile, disinterested. Like it didn’t matter what was happening outside. Which was right, she realized. It didn’t make any difference how many men were trying to kill them.
Run, idiot.
She slowed at an intersection, scanned right then left and sped through.
“We gotta think of—” she started. A loud crack startled her. And then another. “The fuck’s that?”
The thwacks continued, like a hatchet or axe. She didn’t want to take her eyes off the road, the motorcycles veering and converging ahead of them but she glanced into the rearview. A bright headlight sent hard coronas of shine into her eyes. She blinked, tried to train her eyes on the roadway. Thwack. Thwack.
“Es un antena del carro,” Gustavo said as the motorcycle pulled alongside him. As though it were a mere curiosity, this rider on the motorcycle striking the car. The next blow actually broke the sideview mirror, and Gustavo patted his shirt pockets. The rider kept at it till all the glass fell out.
“Chingao,” Gustavo said.
“What?”
“I had cigarettes,” he said sadly.
“Jesus Christ, you motherfucker. Cigarettes? We need a plan to get out of this!”
The bike jerked forward a bit, and the driver jammed the antenna into the hood’s air vent. It twanged back and forth, right in front of Gustavo. Yet there he sat, inert. In a bray of exhaust the bike spun ahead, swerving right in front of the Hyundai and then on up the road, quickly out of sight. The palm trees were painted white at their bases, and the headlights gleamed off them. She jumped a bit whenever they leapt out.
A lull for a dozen panicked thoughts. Where they could go. What they could do. Run. But where? To who? She glanced down at her phone, wedged between her legs. She wished she’d gotten Carver’s number.
They were gonna have to run and shoot their way out. She glanced over at Gustavo. First to see if he had his gun and then to just silently rage at him. His fault. All his fault. This man just staring straight ahead.
“Slow down,” he said.
Carrizo Springs, Texas. Martinez Auto Works. Fuck, she still remembered. This asshole—
“Slow down! Stop!”
Red lights suddenly reared up in front of them. She slammed on the brakes, braced herself with rigid arms against the wheel. Gustavo’s head hit the dash before he flopped back into place. There was no time to savor that. An accident or roadblock. Flashing lights.
She looked in the rearview. The F-150 pulled up behind the smaller Toyota. Both vehicles flipped off their mounted roof lights. The cars in front of her moved forward, slowly. She could see a cop up ahead, palm up, halting the cars ahead of them.
“Did one of the bikes wreck?” she asked, before she realized that was impossible. An ambulance wouldn’t be on the scene already, all these dark blue police cars—
Of course. The cops. She began to power down her window. Gustavo gripped her leg.
“No.”
She stopped the window halfway down.
“Why?”
“You talk to him, they kill him.”
“You actually want me to roll by like nothing’s wrong?”
“They will kill him. And all these other cars, la gente estará muerto tambíen. All the people.” She looked over at him. He gazed ahead. “Don’t say nothing.”
In the rearview, she watched the shapes in the cab of the Toyota. Just shapes of men. No intentions to read save general menace.
“So where are we going?”
“We just go,” he said.
“Fantastic.” She turned her head around. “What happened to the bikes?”
“Why you think I know?”
“Goddamnit! You caused all of this!”
The cars were stopped for the ambulance to pull out. She remembered the way in, a straight shot back the way she’d come. It was a small airport, not much in the way of security, but maybe enough.
“They aren’t shooting up the cops,” she said, “maybe they won’t shoot up the airport security either.”
“They will take us to a little room.”
“Good. Better than being out here.”
“No, the policía will come.”
“Good.”
“No good! It is them will give us to the Golfos.”
Traffic wasn’t moving at all. Neither were the shapes in the Toyota. No motorcycles. Eerie stillness. This was madness.
“We’re not gonna outrun them, no way,” she said. “And we can’t just go till the gas gives out.”
“Claro.”
“Fuck you. I’m trying to talk it out.”
“The airport will not be what you think it is.”
“All right, all right,” she said. “You have any ideas?”
Gustavo clucked his tongue. “No tengo más. Never. Nothing. No more.”
Throw him out of the car right now. Feed the beasts. Maybe somehow get away.
He just shook his head, eyes still closed, skin squeaking against the window.
She scrolled through the contacts on her BlackBerry. Dufresne. Held her thumb above the green phone icon. She did not expect him to answer, but at every ring she let herself hope.
His voice mail clicked on. She hung up.
The bridge had burned. She was out here alone.
The traffic started moving, the cop circling his arm. They rolled past him and the scene of the accident. Two ambulances. Three cars. Gnarled metal. Smithereens of glass. She navigated between the deep pink flares, feeling a sudden rich unreality that recalled a fundamentalist Christian haunted house she’d gone to. The tableaus of abortions and drug addictions and one for drunk driving. Except this was worse for being so very actual. The Toyota purred, the F-150 growled.
She took a moment to consider leaping out. Run. But she stayed at the wheel.
This is the fastest way to run right now.
The traffic around the accident thinned out and they gathered speed, passing shuttered shops and gas stations. Darkened billboards. Palms serried in the medians. Parallel to the road a canal with little footbridges. They could have been puttering along any Gulf Coast thoroughfare in the States. Concrete buildings, bright paint, American fast food joints. The breeze, the humidity, the familiar smell of ocean. She could not imagine anywhere they could go.
Because there isn’t anywhere.
In the sky a small twin-engine plane taking off. They weren’t far. The airport couldn’t be more than five minutes away now. She scanned for the tower. She didn’t want to miss the turn.
The airport is all we have.
Two motorcycles had pulled alongside them now, one on each side. One in front. She could hear the Toyota rumbling close by. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gustavo raise his pistol toward her. She instinctively leaned back, grabbed the barrel, and as the motorcycles raced ahead again, saw his wild and bewildered expression and realized he’d been aiming out the window.
He threw open his door.
“What are you doing!”
He seemed to consider the roadway blurring beneath him, the pistol in his hand.
“Jump out if you want to end it!” She let off gas. The Toyota was on her bumper. “Do it!”
He raised the pistol to his head.
She swerved the car suddenly to the right and caused the passenger door to swing shut, not out of a desire to save his life or even to avoid something in the roadway. She had simply felt something. A startle from nowhere that made her yank the wheel before she realized that it came from between her legs: the phone. When it vibrated a second time, she picked it up and held it in front of her face. An unknown number.
She answered.
“It’s Carver.”
“Holy shit, what?”
“I’ve got eyes on you. You need to listen closely, and we’ll get you out of this.”
“Good god, roger that,” she said. “How’d you—No, sorry, I don’t care. What’s the plan?”
“Are you the one driving?”
“Yeah. Gustavo’s with me.”
“Who is that?” Gustavo asked.
“Shut up.” She couldn’t hear Carver talking. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I said I got you.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“Just keep going like you are.”
The Toyota truck motor was rumbling like the sound of a battalion behind them. The F-150. She couldn’t see any of the bikes.
“Can you see the bikes?” she asked.
Carver didn’t answer. Neither did Gustavo.
She thought she heard shouting, even over the traffic and the Toyota engine, and the sound of the F-150 peeling. The Toyota pulled to her right bumper.
“Who you talking with?” Gustavo asked again.
The Ford pulled up onto her right. She knew immediately that it was going to force her into the Toyota, edge her into the grill guard, and the two trucks would send the little sedan into a sideways skid. She set the phone on the seat and gunned the gutless engine, but the Toyota matched her speed, stayed on her corner. The Ford squeezed over.
“Fuck.”
The Ford a few feet from her shoulder, her face. The Toyota on her ass. She tapped the brakes, the Toyota clipped her, braked and skidded. She wrenched the wheel right, swerved free and in front of the Toyota, and sped on. The Ford hung up behind an old pickup in the right lane, the Toyota raced up on her rear. She reached over and grabbed the phone.
The bikes had appeared again, veering ahead and behind, not doing anything yet, waiting.
She looked down. Unknown. She toggled to speaker, hit it.
“I’m here,” she said. “Forgot to put you on speaker. They were gonna run us off the road.”
“I saw. Nice driving.”
“I missed the turn.”
“It’s okay. Stand by.”
They were coming up on a slow-moving van now.
“On my signal, pass this van on the right side,” Carver said. “Now.”
She accelerated in the non-lane between the van and the sidewalk, heard the whoosh of a motorbike’s evasion, and wished she’d knocked the motherfucker over. Tilting the wheel to the left, she cut in front of the van with very little to spare, the antenna in the air vent whipping around like trash in a tornado.
“It’s open. Gun it.”
She pushed down the gas and the Hyundai did what it could, not much, but something.
“Go all the way to the left lane.”
She drifted over, smooth and swift.
“When I say, you brake hard. We’re gonna pop you over the median.”
“Really?”
“You’ll head back the other way.”
“Shit, shit. Okay.”
“Not quite yet, though. Get past these cars.”
Three vehicles in this lane. She caught and veered around them, and then cut back quickly. Behind her, squeal of tires, honking. The Toyota swerved. A horn. The Ford maybe. She sped up.
“Now what?”
Gustavo had turned around, was looking out the back window.
“They gonna shoot,” he said.
“Hold it, hold it . . . ,” Carver said.
Gustavo was blocking the rearview. She shoved him out of the way. She could make out the passenger in the Toyota leaning out his window, the unreal shape of a submachine gun. There was another car in the lane. She was heading straight for it.
“Hold it . . . don’t slow yet . . .”
Gustavo said something she couldn’t hear. She kept on right ahead, heading straight for the car less than fifty meters away.
“And . . . NOW! CUT! NOW!”
She braked hard, spun the wheel, and the car lurched up onto the grassy median, clipping a palm but bouncing through and across, skidding all the way into the far right north lane, facing back in the direction they’d just come from. Stopped. She watched in awe as the Toyota driver locked eyes with her going the other direction.
“Punch it!”
She shoved her foot on the gas, making sure not to hold the wheel too tight, let it find its own high-speed equilibrium.
“Las motociclistas,” Gustavo said.
The bikes leapt over the median in front of them, jarred their riders, swerved. Some stalled as the sedan passed through them. And then already there was one outside Gustavo’s window, another buzzing around next to her, yet another right behind them. But she wasn’t scared anymore.
“Keep going,” Carver said. “You’re all clear ahead for the next little bit.”
“What about the bikes?”
“You’re gonna make the turn this time. Get ready.”
Holding the car steady, she slipped around two cars and then got the car up to 110 kmh. When she heard the Toyota’s engine loud and getting louder very quickly, she gripped the wheel tighter.
“The small pickup’s coming up behind,” Carver said. “Hang on. Don’t decelerate—”
A sudden crash threw them forward, her shoulder smashing into the wheel, the phone flying onto the floorboard. The car swerved, she regained control, righted it. In the rearview the Toyota. Fucker had rammed her. She yanked her seat belt on. As did Gustavo. A wonder they hadn’t done so yet.
“The phone,” she said to Gustavo.
“What?”
“The floor. The phone! We gotta make a turn. I need to know when!”
He unlatched his seat belt and bent to find it.
“It’s down near my feet!” she shouted. In the mirror she saw the truck coming hard. “Shit, get up!”
She shoved herself back into the seat again and braced as much as she could.
The blow pulled her into the seat belt, tight against her breastbone. She could feel her organs bouncing as her head flew forward. The car wobbled and careened. Her vision blurred. She blinked and pressed the gas. Gustavo was gone.
“Take it!” he said from the floor, handing up the phone. He climbed back into his seat, pulling on the seat belt.
“I’m back. I dropped the phone,” she said.
She jammed the phone into her bra strap.
“You still hear me?” she said, turning her chin to the side.
“Keep driving. Stay in this lane. It’s not far.”
The Hyundai was still handling okay, but in the side mirror she could see a panel of the car’s tail razoring in the wind like a flame.
“We lost one of the bikes,” Gustavo said. “And the Ford, tambíen, I dunno.”
“This car can’t take more hits like that,” she said.
“Just listen to me and drive,” Carver said.
“I am.”
“Truck,” Carver said.
She looked in the rearview. It was urging up on them again.
“Don’t lose speed. Let it come.”
“I just said we can’t take a hit!”
She braced—for nothing. The truck lunged, and then it dropped back. A few seconds later, did the same thing. Sped up, got right on her tail, backed off.
“He’s trying to make you lose control. Don’t.”
“Okay, sure, no fucking problem.”
“Don’t brake until I tell you. Pass this car.”
She cut around the slow vehicle in front of her. She glided back into the center lane and accelerated. They were coming up on a light, changing, yellow, now red. She let off the gas.
“Can I go thr—”
“Go! Go! Go!”
She hit the gas and raced through the light and felt her belly surge with the car. She looked in the rearview to see the Toyota and Ford and motorcycles all ignore the same light.
“We didn’t lose them.”
“That’s fine.”
“Why?”
“Turn right when I say.”
“Then what?”
“One thing at a time.”
The phone was slipping a little under her bra strap. She was sweating. She worried it would fall, but she was going too fast to take her hand off the wheel and adjust it.
“You’re about to take a hard right into an alley.”
“Okay.
“There’s a car dealership and then some kind of store. You see?”
The phone slipped, she felt it slide down under her armpit. She had to let go of the wheel with one hand to get it, pull it out of the bottom of her shirt, yank it up to her ear.
“Don’t slow down! Why are you slowing down?”
“I lost the phone,” she said, loudly, but trying not to panic or yell. She had the sudden stupid thought that she didn’t want him to think she was scared or out of control.
“Do you see the store?”
She squinted. It was all just buildings blurring at her.
“Yeah, I think,” she lied. Scanning the road. “You said paint store?”
“Roger, the paint store. A hard right.”
She got ready. Trying not to grip the wheel too tight. She had no idea what the paint store looked like.
“Is it this one—?”
“Now! Turn!”
She cut hard right, fishtailing into an empty dirt and gravel lot. The car momentarily slid, the headlights panned across the alley and onto the corrugated fencing before she passed the wheel hand under hand leftward and gunned it down the pitted dirt road. Fences of different sizes. Barrels, garbage cans, flashed by. An orange cat shot across the road in the headlights. The car dipped and bounded over the uneven broken asphalt, the pure dirt and sand.
She heard the motorcycles and looked to see their headlights emerging from the dust cloud, two right behind, one farther back with the Toyota truck, its roof lights flipped on, a huge iridescent cloud in the dust. She kept looking for the F-150 in the juddering mirrors, and then it finally popped up in the rearview too. A strange counterintuitive relief at that. To know what was coming after you.
“Your seat belt on?” Carver asked.
“Yeah.”
“Take it off.”
“Off?”
“Yes.”
“On my mark, I want you to slam on the brakes.”
“They’re right on top of us.”
“You’re among friends now.”
“What?”
“When you come to a halt, shut off the car, duck down. Count to ten. And then get out and run left. Stick to the wall. Got it?”
“Count to ten. Run left.”
“The narco hear this?”
She glanced over. He was wedged against the door in the corner of his seat. He nodded. Winced as the car jounced over a pothole.
“We got it,” she said.
“All right. Get ready.”
She kept the phone in her hand. The motorcycles were in a train behind her, the lead jolting forward as if to get by, but it couldn’t in the narrows of the alley.
“When do we stop?”
Nothing. Silence on the line. The ping and punch of gravel.
“Carver?”
She looked at the phone, then at the corrugated fencing sliding by in a blur behind Gustavo, at the off-road lights of the pickups filling the mirrors. Flash and racket. Engines rumbling in chorus in these rusted and concrete confines. She smelled their yellow dust, watched the cloud of roar and chug bearing down on them. The narrow alley ahead lifeless as a moonscape in the naked headlights.
“Carver!”
She worried that the phone wasn’t working and then suddenly Carver yelled “Stop now STOP!” and she hit the brakes and the phone dropped away or she let it go as in a dream and the braking car turned slightly like a person turning her head at the sound of her name.
A motorcycle clipped the front bumper. The rider ragdolled over the headlights in front of them, the bike careering riderless into the wall they were facing quarterwise. A second bike skidded past the same left side, avoiding the car and wall, but then he flew off his bike too in a loud pink mist.
In the skidding din of the bikes and pickups behind them, she saw moving shadows, two, then three, then more in black fatigues and helmets and ballistics masks, parting like matadors for the second riderless motorcycle to fly past. Red laser sights hitting the windshield as they jogged forward, one of their number pausing to execute the first rider, still motionless on the ground. They converged around the car.
“Duck!” the phone shouted from the floor.
There was so much noise and light, she did not need to be told.
In the sustained gunfire she heard bootsteps on the hood. Then a suction and a whoosh and an explosion, the interior of the car inundated with light. She could see Gustavo’s face, his wide eyes, his gritting teeth, the veins on his temple and neck. And then new darkness, the heavy quiet that is having gone deaf. In the ensuing moments a steady clattering. Like fingernails on a Formica table. Like falling poker chips. This is more gunfire. A person went steadily past the driver’s-side window, casings casting dark butterfly shadows in the light flash of the barrel. The fight was moving behind the car.
Within her it was quiet right then. It was still. She wasn’t running anymore.
Gustavo opened her door. She looked behind her, expecting him to be on the floor where she left him, but his door was open and he was saying “Ten, remember?” and her ears rang, flooded with more percussive pops. He pulled her out and they were running along a wall, they were stepping over something—was that an RPG launcher?—and then they were stopped. She stepped in place, tingling all over.
Gustavo was looking within an empty building behind them, a darkened auto shop from the smell of it. More men in black assault gear, firing into the alley. They peeked through a broken window. The Toyota was blackened. A burst from one of the large-calibers. The Ford bouncing up, the last of the roof lights going out.
A full silence.
She could hear Carver’s voice—his deep rapid cadence, almost joyful—and three men talking about thirty feet away. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. She could hear their voices, though. She didn’t understand why she didn’t understand. Her head felt heavy, like someone had dumped sand into her brainpan and then watered it down. Her heart raced yet.
“No es inglés o español,” Gustavo said.
She looked at him.
“They not Americans,” he said.
“Or Mexicans?”
“What I said. That ain’t no Spanish.” He shook his head. “No lo sé.”
He stood away from the wall and walked back out to the car.
“Where are you going?” she demanded. She looked into the building, where Carver and these men still conferred, then went after Gustavo. The alley was lit by the fire of the burning Toyota, and nothing else. And then the lights mounted on their weapons flickered on, and she could see the dark figures, almost ghosts, moving along the alley walls. The lights aimed at the ground. The men crouching. Gathering.
“Well done,” Carver said, sweeping by them to the Hyundai. He flipped on his own gun light and inspected the back of the vehicle. Satisfied, he opened the back door and began to undress, pitching his helmet, face mask, goggles, and gloves in the back seat. He slammed the back door shut and stood over the opened front door.
“They didn’t even get off a fucking round. This car, minus whatever you did to the chassis, should be good to go.”
The men were still at their task in the alley.
“What are they doing?” she asked.
“The fellas? Gathering up casings. We like to keep it neat.”
She watched them working their way up the alley. Pinching the ground and putting the casings into sacks on their belts like sharecroppers, like a new kind of migrant farmer. It felt like a dream.
“Keys?” Carver asked from behind the driver’s-side door.
“What?”
“The keys,” he said.
“In the ignition,” she said, looking around. The smoke and dust. The silence.
“Guys, let’s go.”
They got in the immaculate sedan and left the scene.