Barely slowing the car’s speed, McGuire swung into the driveway, burst through the tired picket fence and rammed the dead tree supporting Snyder’s hammock with the front bumper of his rented Ford.
He flew out of the car and grabbed the dazed man—who had been knocked sprawling to the ground—by the shirt collar, with one hand. With his other hand, he thrust the muzzle of his revolver at the older man’s mouth.
“Open up, Ernie,” McGuire hissed. He rammed the gun barrel between Snyder’s thin lips and heard the blue steel clink against teeth.
Snyder’s eyes, wide and frightened when the impact tossed him out of the hammock, focused on McGuire and began to narrow.
“Now tell me the truth about your son,” McGuire whispered, trying to ignore the foul odour rising from Snyder, “or I’ll blow your tonsils out your ass.”
From behind the muzzle of the revolver, Snyder mumbled something.
“Let’s hear it,” McGuire said, withdrawing the gun from the man’s mouth.
“Fuck you,” Snyder said, his eyes mere slits in his weathered face. “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favour.”
Swinging the gun a few inches away from Snyder’s face, McGuire tilted it at a shallow angle to the ground and calmly pulled the trigger.
Snyder winced at the blast. Ten feet behind him, a clod of dusty-dry soil exploded into the air. Dogs began barking in neighbouring yards and somewhere a screen door was hastily shut.
“Don’t try to bluff me, Snyder,” McGuire said. “You’ve been a two-bit drunk and a coward all your life. You know it and I know it.” He ran the muzzle of the gun down the front of the man’s shirt and thrust it behind the top button of his trousers.
“Maybe you think you’re tough enough to suck this mother,” McGuire said. “I doubt it, but maybe you are. So how about this?” He forced the gun in between the waistband of the man’s pants and his stomach. “Every ten seconds or so I’ll send a copper-jacketed slug in the general direction of your balls until I hit something. You ever seen a man take a bullet in the crotch, Snyder?”
“What the hell do you want Andy for?” Snyder screamed. His eyes had widened again and he struggled briefly in McGuire’s grip.
“He left some dirty laundry in Boston.”
Snyder frowned and almost relaxed. “Boston?” he said. “Andy’s never been to Boston. Far as I know.”
“All of a sudden you know a lot about him,” McGuire said. The transistor radio was still playing, sounding louder in the strange near-silence of the neighbourhood that followed McGuire’s gunshot. “Just tell me where he is. Or I’ll leave you lying on the ground watching your pecker swing from a tree branch.”
“Laredo,” Snyder blurted. “He’s in Laredo.”
“For how long?”
“Two years. Maybe more.”
“You’re lying.”
Snyder shook his head violently. His eyes were steady and focused.
“Where in Laredo?”
“Don’t know. Works for a guy named Bledsoe.”
McGuire stared in silence at Snyder, spread on the ground beneath him. The radio announced a classic country song by “the late great Marty Robbins.”
“God’s truth,” Snyder said. His eyes were pleading.
McGuire slowly pulled the gun from inside the man’s trousers. “I’m going to believe you’re intelligent enough not to lie to me,” he said, standing up.
Snyder ran the back of his hand across his mouth and tried to swallow, his eyes swooping away from McGuire’s face and back again. “All . . . all the cops up in Boston like you?” he stuttered.
“No,” McGuire replied evenly. “Some of us are real crazy bastards.” He watched Snyder compose himself, keeping the revolver at his side. “What does your son do for this Bledsoe character?”
“Don’t know.” Snyder used the dead tree trunk as support and raised himself to a standing position. His hands were shaking violently. “Odd jobs.” He nudged one of the empty Lone Star bottles with his toes as Marty Robbins, dead ten years, sang “Mansion on the Hill” through the tinny speaker of the transistor radio. “Wrecked my hammock,” he said, nodding at the dead tree McGuire’s rented car had wrenched from the ground, its roots exposed by the impact. “What the hell do I lay on now?”
McGuire ignored the question. “Where do I find this Bledsoe? What’s he do?”
Snyder turned from the ruined hammock to look at McGuire with a changed expression, neither fear nor defiance in his eyes. “Make you a deal. I give you an address, you give me ten dollars for a couple cases of Lone Star. Whaddaya say?”
The man looked pathetic. Snyder, McGuire knew, was destined to do nothing more with the rest of his life than lie on his back, sip beer and listen to dead country singers. He peeled ten dollars from his wallet and handed it to the other man, who crumpled it quickly into his pocket.
“It’s inside,” Snyder said. “Wait here. I’ll bring it out.”
McGuire watched him shuffle across the baked earth to the rear of the house, where an aluminum door leaned on one hinge. Amazing what the eyes can tell, he reflected. Your whole body can believe you’re telling the truth but your eyes can’t lie for you. It’s all in the way they widen, the way they shift, the way they move. Windows of the soul. Who said that? Who cares?
The rental company will probably care about the dent in the front bumper, he grinned, walking to his car. The driver’s door hung open and the engine was still running. He collapsed behind the wheel, feeling the familiar lethargy he always felt when the first sudden rush of adrenalin had dissolved.
The sound of a cupboard door being slammed echoed from inside Snyder’s house. McGuire tossed his revolver on the passenger’s seat.
His energy level was low. He could feel it. In the middle of the confrontation with Snyder just minutes earlier, there hadn’t been the same burst of strength he remembered from earlier years. He wondered if his body was producing less adrenalin as it grew older. Lately, it seemed to be producing smaller quantities of other vital fluids, he mused . . .
The screen door creaked open and clattered shut. Then he heard another metallic sound that was more precise, more emphatic . . . more familiar.
McGuire cursed and exploded into action, slamming the car door. He shoved the transmission lever into reverse and pushed the accelerator to the floor, spinning the wheels in the dirt driveway just as Ernest Snyder, his face twisted in rage, rounded the corner and raised the shotgun to his shoulder.
A shotgun in every kitchen, Pernfus had said.
The car’s tires squealed in protest as they bumped over the sidewalk and began gripping the crude asphalt surface of the street. McGuire swung the car hard to the left. The motion threw him across the passenger seat as Snyder fired and a cloud of smoke appeared and dissipated above the hood of the car.
Dogs began barking furiously from unseen yards. McGuire sat upright again, jamming the car into drive while still moving backwards, and the vehicle shuddered forward as an ominous hammering noise clattered from inside the transmission.
Snyder stumbled down the driveway, the gun still at shoulder level. He stopped for another shot at the fleeing car. The blast sent curious neighbours back from their doors and into their houses, launched another symphony of hound cries and made a sound like scattered gravel against the rear of the Ford.
McGuire roared through blocks of tract housing, pounding the wheel in anger at his own stupidity. This wouldn’t have happened in Boston, he told himself, wheeling onto the road leading back to the freeway. Yes it would, he reflected. And it’ll happen again if you grow older and more reckless instead of older and smarter.
Goddamn, he almost laughed. But the adrenalin got turned on after all, didn’t it? he grinned. You old fool. You can still move your ass when somebody has it in their sights.
At the intersection with the freeway he frowned. Laredo? he asked himself when he had joined the flow of traffic on Highway 410 circling the city.
Where the hell is Laredo?
“South of here,” said the waitress in the doughnut shop. She wiped the counter with a grey, greasy rag. “About a hundred and fifty miles. Just keep going south down Highway 81 until there’s no place else to go except Laredo. What the hell you want to go there for? Waste of good Texas gasoline, you ask me.”
McGuire ordered a large black coffee and a sack of iced doughnuts.
“Not much down there?” he asked as he paid her.
“You got that right, mister.”
Beyond San Antonio the highway ran through prosperous ranch land dotted with new housing developments. McGuire nibbled at the doughnuts and sipped the coffee, keeping the car’s speed at the limit.
An hour out of the city the landscape began to change, growing rugged and craggy. Ranches and farms were smaller and less prosperous. In the empty pastures bordering the road, cactus competed with massive boulders for soil and space.
Even the vehicles on the road changed. He saw as many pickup trucks as ever, but they were older and moved more slowly, looking sad and tired with their dented fenders and cracked windshields. Most of the drivers were Mexican, their complexions as brown and their expressions as bleak as the landscape they drove through.
On the horizon, McGuire saw rusting water towers and lonely church steeples marking the locations of small towns abandoned by the interstate highway. Signs announced their passage: Pearsall, Dilley, Cotulia. He wondered what it was like to live in a sleepy Texas town called Dilley. Would it breed an Arthur Wilmer, so alienated and ignored by society that he would savagely murder a young woman just to prove he existed? Or a Marv Rosen, who once claimed he would have defended Adolf Hitler “if the retainer had been right”?
At Laredo the interstate sliced through an urban sprawl of gas stations, chain motels, fast food restaurants and shopping malls. He ignored the exit signs until one announced “Last Exit Before Bridge to Mexico,” where he turned and headed west through an almost deserted business section.
A narrow one-way street led him past empty stores whose whitewashed windows stared like blind eyes into the street; the abandoned parking lots grew neglected crops of weeds.
At the end of a street leading south he pulled over to the curb and left the car to walk to the riverbank, where he stood and felt the afternoon sun on his face.
There was nothing grand about the Rio Grande. It was a muddy near-stagnant stream at the bottom of a weedy embankment. To McGuire’s left, he could see the steel-and-concrete International Bridge clogged with traffic. Pedestrians moved across it faster than vehicles, which inched at a painfully slow pace, like the waters of the river far beneath them.
From Nuevo Laredo at the Mexican end of the bridge, mariachi music drifted back across the valley. Brightly lit bars lined the riverfront street and a sea of people swept up and down the main avenue leading south from the border. Nuevo Laredo seemed even poorer than Laredo, Texas, but much more alive.
McGuire nudged an empty beer can with his toe, watched it tumble down the eroded hillside and returned to the car.
The pimply-faced attendant at the Exxon station on the interstate stared back at him blankly.
“Bledsoe?” he repeated. “Only Bledsoe I know is Mister Bledsoe, owns the big place over on San Bernardo.”
“What big place?”
“The one that sells all the Mexican stuff. All them little statues and things.”
McGuire asked how to find it.
“Two blocks over and turn right.”
“What’s the name? How will I know it belongs to Bledsoe?”
The attendant slapped his faded jeans. “Shee-it, mister,” he sneered. “Can’t hardly miss it. Takes up a whole city block.”
Bledsoe’s Mexican Bazaar was indeed an entire block on what had once been the main north-south business avenue of Laredo, before the interstate highway carved a new path two blocks east. Now San Bernardo was a sad street, potholed and forlorn and lined with abandoned gas stations, dusty ice cream and doughnut shops and the uninviting rumps of motels flashing their glamorous fronts at the fast-moving interstate traffic.
McGuire parked across the street. “LAREDO’S BIGGEST IMPORTER OF MEXICAN ARTIFACTS” said a large hand-painted sign suspended on two massive steel towers, “WHOLESALE PRICES TO THE PUBLIC.” A high chain-link fence enclosed the area. Two large gates opened onto San Bernardo; he watched as a truck entered a second gate from a side street. Nearby, in a small enclosed kennel area, a pair of Rottweiler guard dogs dozed in the shade.
Occupying the rear half of the property was a large hangar-like structure with offices and living quarters on the second storey. Wooden stairs led down past the dog kennel to the side gate.
Except for the area opening onto San Bernardo, every square foot of ground seemed cloaked in brightly painted ornaments whose designs stretched the boundaries of imagination and taste. From across the street McGuire could see birdbaths, elves, garden benches, ornamental outdoor tables, statues, fountains, oversized decorative planters and more, all manufactured from plaster, wrought iron, stone and wood.
At least a hundred plaster elves, identical in their tasselled caps, beards, pipes and waistcoats, stood near the entrance like a petrified army awaiting its marching orders. Beyond them, thousands of cheap ornaments were stacked higher than a man’s head. Most were loose, perched precariously atop each other up to ten layers high; others sat on wooden shipping pallets, tightly enclosed in plastic shrink wrap.
McGuire tucked his revolver in his jacket and walked casually across San Bernardo and down a corridor between pallets of plaster figurines. Plaster frogs crouched on plaster lily pads. Crudely made suits of armour stood at rusting attention. Filigreed iron furniture rose in tiers like building blocks. Half-sized marble statues of full-busted women gazed skyward, each with one hand modestly cupping a naked breast.
McGuire approached a middle-aged Mexican man in immaculate white T-shirt and khaki trousers who was crating plaster statues of fairies posing beneath plaster daisies.
“I’m looking for a man named Snyder,” McGuire said quietly to the worker.
The Mexican glanced up, nodded his head towards the large open structure at the rear and resumed his work.
Entering the building, McGuire passed a chaotic world of smaller statues and papier-mâché decorations. Parrots, monkeys, reptiles and crude reproductions of cartoon characters were displayed on metal shelving under the harsh light of fluorescent lamps.
A man in his thirties with half-lidded eyes and a wispy beard watched McGuire enter. “What can I show you?” he called across the aisle.
McGuire studied him before replying. Like the Mexican, this man wore a T-shirt that shone brilliantly white. Unlike the Mexican, whose attitude was deferential, he carried himself with a swagger and a sense of authority, and he balanced himself on the balls of his feet as McGuire approached.
“Looking for Andrew Snyder,” McGuire said softly.
The other man grinned, but his eyes narrowed.
“Andrew Snyder,” McGuire said, taking another step closer. “He works here. Or he used to. Where is he?”
“I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about, mister!” The grin grew wider as he shook his head and wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans. “Ain’t nobody by that name working here.”
“Bullshit!’ McGuire said it quietly.
The man sized him up carefully, measuring the age, height and weight of the older, shorter and lighter McGuire. He turned away for a moment, grinned even wider, and glanced back at McGuire again. He seemed to be stifling a laugh. “Oh, that Snyder,” he said pleasantly. “Sure, he’s right over here.” He bounced away on the toes of his sneakers, gesturing to McGuire to follow.
Stopping at a scarred wooden door in the side of the building, he said, “Right in here, chief,” and removed an open padlock that had been swinging on its hasp.
“Open it,” McGuire said calmly.
His eyes still on McGuire, the younger man pushed the door inward. A dank, damp aroma wafted out of the windowless room.
“Now go in,” McGuire told him.
“Sure thing, chief.” The man walked past McGuire to enter the room before pivoting suddenly, his arm back and his fist clenched, legs spread to deliver the blow, just as McGuire’s pistol crashed backhandedly against his cheek. He grunted a sudden curse of surprise and fell against the wall of the room, both hands at his face. Before he could scream, McGuire drove the fist of his other hand into the man’s stomach, drew it back quickly and watched him fold at the waist to collapse, retching, on the dirt floor.
“Son, you’re younger, bigger and heavier than I am,” McGuire said to the prone figure. “But you’re also twice as dumb and half as mean. I could see it coming with my eyes shut.”
McGuire looked around. No one had seen or heard a thing. He stepped out of the storage room and closed the door behind him, slipping the padlock through the hasp again, locking the beaten man inside.
He walked back to the Mexican labourer, his hand in his jacket pocket, the fingers gripping the pistol. “Show me Bledsoe,” he said quietly. The Mexican looked up from his crouch and McGuire withdrew his pistol, letting his hand dangle at his side.
The Mexican blinked once before shrugging his shoulders and walking past McGuire to the main aisle leading to the street, with McGuire following a few cautious steps behind. On the way they passed two elderly women admiring a marble birdbath and a young couple arguing, with surprising passion, about whether to choose a green or a red papiermâché parrot.
Ahead of them, a tall overweight man in an open-necked shirt stood with a clipboard in his hand. His complexion was red and raw and his eyes were large behind thick, rimless glasses. Nearby, two Mexicans in identical white T-shirts were stacking plaster flamingos while a younger man in sleeveless shirt and jogging shorts stood nearby, his wellmuscled arms folded across his chest.
“Señor Bledsoe,” the man with McGuire called out as they approached.
“What you got, Nando?” Bledsoe continued writing on the clipboard.
“I’m looking for Andrew Snyder,” McGuire said before the Mexican could reply. He raised the gun to waist level. “And no jerking me around. Some other guy just tried it and now he’s drizzling down his shirt in a storeroom around the corner.”
Bledsoe looked up, adjusted his glasses, dropped his eyes to the gun in McGuire’s hand and smiled. “Hey, hoss,” he said, nodding at the revolver. “What’s this? Hell, you want a statue, you take a statue.”
“I want Andrew Snyder,” McGuire said evenly. “Just tell me where he is and I’m gone.”
The two Mexicans looked briefly in McGuire’s direction and, seeing the gun, quickly sat on their haunches, staring at the concrete floor. The young man in jogging shorts lowered his arms, watching McGuire.
Bledsoe stood, his mouth open in a broad smile, looking first at the muscular young man, then back at McGuire. He seemed to find the incident amusing. “What? You locked somebody in a storeroom? Who? What’d he look like? Must be Colin. Colin!” he called down the aisle of plaster figurines towards the street.
“The hell with him,” McGuire said. “I want Snyder. That’s all. Andrew Snyder. You Bledsoe?”
“Around here it’s Mister Bledsoe,” the younger man sneered.
“Where I come from, bullshit is bullshit,” McGuire said. “Even if it stands six feet tall and wears glasses.”
Bledsoe laughed aloud. “Ain’t he somethin’, Warren?” he said in admiration to his assistant. By his expression, it was clear Warren was unimpressed. “Hell, hoss, you can call me anything you want to.” He leaned casually against a post. “Name’s George Bledsoe, actually.” He thrust a large pink hand towards McGuire. “What they call you at home?”
Stepping away from the hand, McGuire hooked the toe of his shoe around a plaster flamingo on the bottom layer of a pallet being loaded by the Mexicans. With a sudden kick, he dislodged the corner figure, sending several layers crashing to the floor.
Warren swore. The two Mexicans jumped up and stood to one side, their eyes still downcast.
McGuire leaned against another pallet of figures and smiled coldly at Bledsoe. “Amazing how clumsy I get with a gun in my hand,” he said. “So before I start tripping over anything else, just tell me where I can find Andrew Snyder.” George Bledsoe looked at the broken statues at his feet. The smile faded, then reappeared. “Hoss,” he said, shaking his head. “I see that much shoot in a man’s eyes, I figure it’s time to start singing small.” He handed his clipboard to Warren. “You know where the Old Mine Road is?”
“You going to tell me, or do I visit the tourist bureau?”
“You go back up the interstate about five miles. Look for an exit to the left. Big power plant there. Can’t miss it. That’s Old Mine Road. You go west about twenty miles till you see the sign. Bledsoe Mines. That’s where old Andy works for me. Kind of a watchman. You go in there, you’ll see Andy.”
McGuire stared at Bledsoe for a moment. “If he’s not there, I’m liable to come back mad and very clumsy,” he said softly.
“Hell, hoss,” Bledsoe grinned, “I’d have to be about as sharp as a bag of wet mice, bring a mean dozer like you here twice when I didn’t want to see him once. You got business with Andy, that’s Andy’s lookout. Now, you mind if Warren and me get back to making a semi-honest dollar?”
McGuire angled his head towards the front of the building. “Go look after your customers,” he said. “All of you. After I’m gone you might want to rescue the punk who tried to sucker me into a locked storeroom. But that’s up to you.”
Bledsoe ambled by, his heavy stomach spilling over his belt. “Right nice of you to take over like that,” he drawled, avoiding McGuire’s eyes as he passed. “Come on, Warren.”
The other man followed, glaring at McGuire.
“You young ladies sure picked yourself a pretty birdbath there.” Bledsoe’s voice echoed through the building as he approached the elderly women. “God’s truth, I was kind of saving that one for myself.”
McGuire stepped quickly across the aisle and walked to the open gate facing the side street. He pocketed the revolver, circled the block and entered his car from the passenger side, keeping his eyes on the front gate.
Within the compound, Bledsoe watched him drive away. Then, his faced clouded and severe, he spoke a few sharp words in Warren’s ear and the younger man grinned before trotting to a telephone on the sales counter.