By ten o’clock the town had been returned, as it was every evening, to its inhabitants. The souvenir shops, abandoned by the tourists, had closed their doors and darkened their lights; metal screening had been drawn across the liquor stores and the street vendors had trundled their carts off the avenue.
McGuire walked slowly back to the car, his shoulders slumped. He felt old; he felt weary. Most of all, he felt defeated.
As he walked, he passed men slouched on benches in a dusty space which had once been an elegant town square. A woman carrying a small baby papoose-style was bent almost double into a trash container, the upper half of her body hidden inside the barrel as she searched for food. On her back the baby wailed sadly, its tiny face creased with pain and hunger and anger. Adolescent boys, their faces so hardened that their eyes seemed to withdraw deeper into their sockets, offered McGuire drugs and women.
McGuire sat behind the wheel of his car collecting his thoughts. He wouldn’t bother to confirm Snyder’s story. Snyder didn’t match the description of Andrew Cornell. McGuire was convinced he had never been in Boston. And he hadn’t killed his stepsister. They were further from solving the murder of Jennifer Cornell than ever.
And nobody cares but me, McGuire reflected.
Anger and frustration began to boil in him.
In what he had always considered an unfair world, McGuire devoted his life to redressing the balance, tipping the scales in defiance of perpetual injustice. Suddenly, the unfairness seemed overwhelming to him.
He had gambled on discovering a new clue to the murder of Jennifer Cornell—not for an abstraction like justice, or even for practical gains like deterring crime. Or to satisfy a need for success and achievement.
He did it because it was his job. More important, it was his identity.
Now he had lost the gamble. The Cornell file would remain ignored and forgotten. No one would care except McGuire. And few people would even understand why McGuire cared. The little girl with the solemn face who had accepted his hand-out an hour earlier was doomed to the same unmourned, forgotten fate as Jennifer Cornell.
He started the car. You don’t need to care, he told himself. Nobody ever told you to care, so nobody will give a damn if you stop caring.
From the moment he cleared US Customs and began driving north into Laredo, he knew he was being followed.
McGuire turned casually down one street, then another, watching the dark pickup truck trailing several car lengths behind him, two men inside.
On San Bernardo Avenue, he wheeled into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant and watched as the truck drove slowly past. McGuire recognized the driver and passenger as Bledsoe’s men: Colin, wearing a fresh bandage across his cheek, and Warren, the muscular dark-haired man.
McGuire entered the restaurant, ordered a take-out coffee and emerged to see the truck parked at an abandoned service station across the street.
Leaning against the car, he sipped the coffee in full view of the men and considered what they might do. They could follow him north to San Antonio and simply ensure that he left town. Or watch him check into a motel and perhaps firebomb his room. Or sideswipe him on the interstate. Or fire a shotgun through his window as they passed him on the darkened highway . . .
Or McGuire could choose to do something—something for Andrew Snyder’s hands and for the little girl across the bridge who begged for money while Bledsoe crammed his floorboards with it. It would be a way of pointing the finger, of redressing the balance.
So let’s do it, McGuire told himself. You want to give me a reason to care? he mused. Maybe you have. “Let’s do it,” he said aloud, and tossed the empty cup into a waste container.
Back in the car, he drove north on San Bernardo, turning east and passing under the interstate a few blocks before Bledsoe’s Mexican Bazaar, watching the pickup truck match his speed a hundred feet behind him. He passed shopping malls, trailer parks and baseball diamonds before the land opened up and a highway sign told him he was fifty-eight miles from Freer, Texas. The road was two lanes wide and empty of traffic—a thin ribbon through empty range.
“Let’s do it,” McGuire repeated angrily, and he pushed the accelerator to the floor.
The engine came to life with a roar and the Ford lurched ahead into the darkness. He switched his headlights to highbeam, slipped the revolver from his pocket and watched the speedometer climb past sixty, seventy, eighty. In the rearview mirror, the pickup lagged behind momentarily before matching McGuire’s pace.
His headlight beams revealed a rise in the road perhaps half a mile ahead. He measured the distance in his mind, fixed his eyes on the crest of the hill and quickly turned off his headlights, becoming all but invisible to the truck pursuing him.
His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and McGuire could make out deep ditches lining the road. The lights of the pickup bounced in his rearview mirror as he felt the car heave over the low hill. Beyond the crest, the truck’s lights vanished in the mirror; McGuire steered the car across the dark road into the other lane, slowed his speed, then jammed down on the brake pedal while twisting the steering wheel sharply to the right.
The Ford’s tires howled in protest as the rear of the car swung around in a smoothly executed hundred-and-eightydegree manoeuvre and the vehicle slammed to a stop in its own lane again, facing back to Laredo and the oncoming truck, whose headlights were glowing like a corona just beyond the crest of the hill.
McGuire had the door open before the car ceased shuddering. He tugged at the headlight switch as he rolled out of the car onto the grassy shoulder and dropped into the dry ditch beside the highway.
At eighty miles an hour, the pickup crested the rise in the road to encounter McGuire’s car in its own lane, the highbeam headlights shining brightly into the driver’s eyes.
Momentarily blinded, the driver tried to brake his vehicle and swing into the other lane to avoid McGuire’s car. But McGuire’s manoeuvre had been practised, controlled and anticipated; the driver of the pickup relied on instinct and surrendered to panic.
From the ditch, McGuire watched as the truck swerved away from him into the darkness, suddenly lurching to the left before rising in the air and crashing into the open ditch on the other side of the highway in an explosion of twisted metal and shattered glass.
In the eerie silence that followed, the truck’s horn blasted from the wreckage, steady and undying.
McGuire pocketed his revolver and began crawling from the dry run-off ditch just as a voice cut through the night air, crying in anger and pain.
“Where are you, you bastard?” the man screamed. “I want you, whoever you are!”
McGuire ducked below the edge of the ditch again as footsteps came running raggedly up the road to his car, its headlights still piercing the night.
A rifle fired, the bullet striking McGuire’s car with a metallic whine.
“You sumbitch, I’ll feed your liver to the dogs, I swear!” the voice screamed hysterically.
The man reached the door of McGuire’s car and wrenched it open with one hand. In the crook of his other arm he carried an automatic rifle. The interior light of McGuire’s car illuminated his face as he thrust his head into the empty car. McGuire could see a piece of the man’s scalp was torn and crumpled like an orange peel; blood flowed freely down his face and into his thin beard.
“Colin,” McGuire called out from the shadows of the ditch.
A shot rang from the rifle, scattering dirt wildly behind McGuire, who ducked below the rim of the ditch and ran crab-wise several steps to his right.
“First you kill Billy Ray and now Warren’s dead!” Colin screamed. Two more shots blasted in McGuire’s direction.
McGuire moved further along the ditch as Colin stumbled away from the car, shouting curses. He fired another shot at the ditch where McGuire had been waiting, the muzzle blast flashing red in the blackness.
“Leave it be, Colin,” McGuire called, before ducking away as another shot from the rifle struck the wall of the ditch behind him.
To the other man, McGuire was a voice in the dark. But to McGuire, the muzzle flashes pinpointed Colin’s location as though he were standing in the noonday sun.
Surrendering to instinct, McGuire raised his gun in a twohanded target stance, aimed at the location of the last muzzle flash and squeezed off three shots in rapid succession.
He heard the rifle clatter to the roadway. Something soft and yielding followed it to the pavement.
McGuire pocketed his gun and climbed out of the ditch, walking to where Colin lay face down on the shoulder of the road near McGuire’s car. He nudged the man with his toe, then rolled him onto his back. In the spill from his car’s headlights he could see three entry wounds in the man’s chest. They bubbled with the last intake of breath before Colin shivered and relaxed a final time.
The motion dislodged something inside Colin’s denim jacket and McGuire reached down to withdraw a plastic bag of white powder.
Headlights flashed in the distance, somewhere to the east. McGuire moved quickly to his car, slipped it into gear and swung the vehicle to the other side of the road, heading west, back towards Laredo.
The sound of the pickup’s horn faded with the distance, an endless moan grieving for the two dead men he left behind.
“I seen more of you than I seen of the sun today.” The teenage gas station attendant slammed the trunk shut. “Looks of things, I won’t be seeing you again for a spell. You heading somewhere into open country?”
“Kind of,” McGuire replied, handing him money. “Know where I can get some hamburgers this time of night?”
“How you want ’em?”
“Thick and juicy.”
“Fat Frank’s. ’Bout a mile up on your right.”
McGuire slipped behind the wheel. “You’re a tribute to the Texas tourist board,” he smiled as he drove away.
Precisely at midnight, McGuire stood in a telephone booth directly across the street from Bledsoe’s Mexican Bazaar. He dropped a coin in the slot and dialled a number.
In the lighted living quarters above the rear of the warehouse, a shadow moved behind a drawn blind.
“Bledsoe,” a man’s voice growled in McGuire’s ear.
“I just killed your dogs,” McGuire said.
“Who the hell is this?”
“Your dogs, Bledsoe. They’re dead. At the front of your yard. Right at the fence. Haul ass out here and see for yourself.”
He hung up, dropped another coin in the slot and dialled 911.
“There’s a fire at Bledsoe’s warehouse on San Bernardo,” McGuire said to the woman who answered. He measured his words carefully, knowing they were being recorded—“Now,” he added, and hung up again.
Leaving the telephone booth, he walked casually across San Bernardo to stand in the darkness near his car, arriving just as Bledsoe emerged from his apartment carrying a rifle. His eyes sweeping the yard, Bledsoe reached out a hand and pulled a large electrical switch near the doorway.
Suddenly quartz lights flooded the open area in a harsh green glare. Gnomes, cartoon characters, flamingos, rusting armour, Venus de Milos—thousands of plaster creatures stood and pranced in the brilliance of the floodlights like denizens of a grotesque miniature world.
Near the locked gates at the San Bernardo entrance lay the two dogs, the remains of several hamburgers in their stomachs, each heavily laced with the cocaine McGuire had taken from Colin’s jacket.
At the sight of the dogs, Bledsoe looked furiously around him, stopping only once to smell the air and frown at the smell of gasoline drifting over the complex.
“Where you at, hoss?” Bledsoe shouted. “I find you, you’re lizard shit, hear me?” He looked around again and clambered down the stairs, running to his dogs.
McGuire stepped from the shadows and crossed to the side gate. He stopped at the wet trail leading under Bledsoe’s stairs through the hole in the wire fence he had forced with a tire iron as the Rottweilers lay dying.
Casually withdrawing a match, he lit it, watched it flare, and dropped it into the dampness at his feet.
The gasoline ignited into a path of fire which raced through the fence to the five-gallon can directly under Bledsoe’s wooden stairway. With an explosion of flame that momentarily rivalled the glare from the floodlights, the fuel erupted into the air and began consuming the structure.
McGuire turned his back to the inferno. He could feel the heat through his jacket. He could hear Bledsoe running and screaming in panic through the yard, colliding with plaster gnomes and stumbling over ceramic birdbaths in his race to reach the stairs.
The Ford started easily. McGuire drove slowly, methodically away, without looking back.
He woke the next morning in a motel room on the edge of town. The air conditioner clattered at the window, its decorative grille cracked and dusty. He showered, dressed and stepped into the heat of the late morning.
In a coffee shop across the street he ate breakfast and eavesdropped on the conversation of men sitting astride chrome stools at the counter, men who pushed their greasy caps up from their foreheads before speaking and stirred sugar into their coffee with exaggerated arm motions. They all spoke in lazy drawls separated by long periods of silence, as though they were assembling their sentences in precise order before voicing them.
“You hear how much money they found up there?” The speaker was thin and wiry, dressed in a faded rodeo shirt with fancy stitching and silver trim on the collar and cuffs.
“Millions,” replied another. He was fat and balding with a black beard, thick and wild on his chin. “And that’s what weren’t all burnt to hell. Most of it’s ashes now.”
“Fellow I know on the fire department, he says the floorboards were all stuffed with money like an old maid’s mattress.” The speaker was out of McGuire’s line of vision. “Thing I’d like to know is, where in hell did Mister Bledsoe get himself so much money anyhow?”
The fat bearded man laughed over his coffee. “Shee-it, Henley. What’d you do, get yourself raised by armadillos? Hell’s bells, everybody knows where he got that money. Just never knew he’d be such a damn fool to keep it all together up there.”
“I had that much money, I’d be gone,” said the man in the rodeo shirt sadly. “I’d just be gone to some place where I could sit by the ocean, watch people fish, and have young women bring me drinks all day. Wouldn’t stay in this dust bowl.”
“Hear he’s hurt bad,” someone offered.
“He’ll live,” another suggested.
“Guy on the fire department, he says it took three of ’em to keep Mister Bledsoe from going back in there. Said his shirt was near burnt off him and he was still trying to get upstairs.”
“It’s all tied in with those two dudes they found out on Highway 59,” the bearded man added. “Colin what’s-his-name and that Warren guy. You know, Booker’s cousin.”
“Couple of white trash,” someone said bitterly. “No loss.”
“Deputy Morrison, he’s telling everybody it was a settling of accounts,” the bearded man continued. “Drug stuff. Probably Mexicans or them crazy Colombians. Says Bledsoe probably didn’t pay for a shipment or something. Says it looks like that to him, and he don’t plan to break any speed records hunting down that scum. Probably halfway back to South America by now anyway.”
“Let ’em all kill each other off,” somebody observed. “Damn well shouldn’t waste taxpayers’ money chasing them,” he added amid a chorus of murmured agreement.
McGuire finished his coffee and left.
He took a side road north of Laredo, cruising slowly through dusty towns with names like Asherton, Carrizo Springs and Crystal City. In Uvalde he turned east to drive through Sabinal and Hondo and Castroville, where the highway became a four-lane expressway. McGuire almost regretted the disappearance of the brown desert wasteland replaced by strips of gas stations and billboards.
At the San Antonio airport, the rental car attendant questioned a bullet hole in the Ford’s rear fender.
“Drive through a lot of open country?” he asked, and when McGuire replied he had, the attendant nodded. “Probably deer hunters. Can’t find a buck to shoot at, they’ll bury a slug in a car fender for kicks. Looks like somebody dinged your front bumper too. Good thing you took the collision coverage.”
“Good thing,” McGuire agreed.
McGuire waited for his flight to Boston in the bar drinking beer and thinking of nothing, remembering everything.
Two hours later he watched the dry Texas landscape grow smaller beneath him as he flew home, north towards a cold sun.