Marie came across the parking lot pushing a shopping cart. Items in the cart came up to the top rim. What had she purchased? I got out and checked around to see if anyone took particular notice. The cell in my pocket buzzed. I answered.
“Bruno?” Mack sounded peeved, as though speaking through clenched teeth to suppress his anger.
“Yeah, Mack, how’s it going?” As I spoke, I opened the back of the van and helped Marie pile in her purchases, which, besides what she’d gone in for, included an empty five-gallon bucket, some tie-down straps, white grocery bags filled with different types of snacks, and other not readily identifiable items.
“You took Drago?” asked Mack. “Why’d you take Drago, Bruno?”
Mack wanted me on the phone to keep me talking, to ping the signal and home in on us. “I wanted to talk to Drago. When I saw him on the surveillance video, he seemed like a man in need of rehabilitation, and I thought that with my background I could—”
“Cut the bullshit. Why’d you take him?”
I closed up the back of the van with Marie inside, moved to the front driver’s door and got in, scanning for cops the entire time. “I think you know why.”
Mack lowered his voice. “He doesn’t have the money anymore, and if he tells you he does, he’s running a scam. He’s making a chump out of you. Bring him back. It’s more important than you know. There are other things in play here, Bruno, trust me on this. Think about it, even if you had the money, you can’t trade it for the kids. It won’t work. You know better. I know you know better. You don’t have the resources to back your play. Come on in, Bruno, please.”
I started up and drove slowly to the exit, pulled out onto the street, and headed east back to the desert. Drago might be one of the lowest forms of animal, but he didn’t deserve to be staked out as bait and killed for no other purpose than to bring down a criminal organization. “I can’t do that and you know why,” I said.
“This is going to put us on the opposite sides of the fence.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I value you as a good friend.”
“As a friend, I’m telling you, you’re wrong going down this path. You’re putting too much at stake. Way too much.”
“What more can there be at stake than the lives of three children? I have to go, John, I know you’re trying to keep me on the phone.”
“No, not this time. This time was a free one.”
“Tell Barbara I’m sorry it has to be this way, that when all this goes down, I’ll try and call to give her a heads up. She’ll be my first call. Tell her that. Good-bye, John.” I handed the phone to Drago. He didn’t need instruction. He broke it in half, stuck his hand out the window, and let the pieces drop to the passing concrete, to be run over and over again by freeway cars and trucks.
From behind, Marie put her hand on my shoulder. I turned to look. She’d turned the white bucket upside down to sit on it. She’d taken a thick, nylon tie-down strap and hooked it from one side of the van wall across to the other, and held on to help stabilize her ride. Smart girl. I didn’t want her sitting in the back with all the garbage, but she’d said Drago couldn’t, not with his open wound, her medical background overpowering her disgust for him.
We rode in silence for another thirty minutes. Fatigue crept in—the thick, heavy kind—the kind with wispy apparitions that appeared and disappeared at random, my body telling me I needed to sleep or it would sleep without permission from control central. I took the Whitewater offramp, stopped at the bottom, made a right, and continued on into empty darkness. Out here, headlights could be seen for miles and miles. I watched the odometer. Asphalt turned to dirt. And still I continued on. I stopped at seven miles, exactly as directed, the terrain at the edge too rough to continue. This place looked a lot like the one I’d chosen in the foothills to speak first with Jonas, then with Drago. If something violent occurred, nobody would find our bodies for days, or maybe not at all with all the coyotes and other scavengers.
The desolation and darkness worked in our favor. We’d see Jonas coming a long way off.
Marie slid open the side door, got out with her Walmart bag, and opened the passenger door. “Swing around, let me fix that leg. Bruno, come around and hold this flashlight.” She’d also thought far enough ahead to purchase a flashlight. Drago and I both followed directions. For the last forty-five minutes of the drive, Drago had gone quiet. In the weak flashlight beam his skin reflected pale, pastier than before. His plain black tattoos were darker now in contrast, and more menacing. His eyelids drooped and his facial muscles didn’t have the strength to hold up any sort of expression.
Marie took a bottle of Pedialyte from the bag, opened it, and handed it to him. “Here, drink this.”
His hand came out of the dark in slow motion and took the bottle. “What is it?”
“Shut up and drink it.”
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
“Blood loss. Here, look.”
I shined the light on her hand and followed where she pointed. Drago’s gunshot wound had continued to leak. The bumpy road had not helped. Blood soaked the side of the seat and pooled at his feet in what might qualify as a small pond. She snapped on rubber gloves.
“He going to make it?”
She stopped and looked up at me. “What do you think? Wasn’t it you who told me that, with these guys, you had to cut the head off and bury it ten feet from the body in order to kill ’em?”
Drago’s ashen face cracked a smile. “Hey, that’s a good one.”
She took out a large bottle of hydrogen peroxide, screwed off the top, and punched a hole in the foil seal with her nail. She dumped some on the wound. Pink and red foamed up and rolled off down his calf. She looked up, waiting for his reaction. He didn’t move and stared at her. She waited until the foaming stopped, then did the same procedure again and again until the quart bottle emptied. Next, she took out a fat package of feminine sanitary napkins, daubed and dried, tossing the used ones into the back of the van. The wound looked like an angry eye socket minus the eye, with purple, puckered edges. I couldn’t help thinking I was glad that wasn’t on my leg.
Drago finished the electrolytes, burped, and tossed the bottle out on the ground. Marie stopped, went and picked up the bottle, and tossed it in the back of the van. “Pig.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“You two need to play nice,” I said.
She took out a large bottle of iodine. “This might sting a little.” In the dim light she poured the red-black liquid and jumped back.
“Yaaaaa. Jesus, Keeyrist!” Drago bounced and jumped around in the seat, his eyes wide, his mouth a cavernous O.
“You shouldn’t litter like that,” she said.
“You’re nothing but a cu—”
I leaned in and with one hand clamped his throat. “Don’t you say it.”
His words choked off. He gagged.
Marie and I jumped back as he projectile vomited all the liquid he’d just ingested. When finished, he groaned, put his head back on the seat, and closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Marie said. I put the light on her face, her expression one of true sorrow and pain. She took out a second bottle and opened it. “Here, drink this.”
Drago waved his hand. “Can’t, my stomach, I’m nauseous.”
“You’re going to have to sip this and keep it down, or we’re going to the hospital. You understand?”
“Try to get me into a hospital, lady, just try it.”
“It’ll be easy once you’re unconscious. And believe me when I say that I don’t know why you’re not already.”
He hesitated, glaring at her. The large bottle looked tiny in his huge paw. He put it to his lips and took a drink.
“This time sip it, and keep sipping it. Don’t stop.”
She took out two more napkins and put one on each side, at the entrance and the exit. “Here, press firmly.” Drago leaned over and would have kept going had I not put both hands on his shoulders and pushed him back in. He managed to hold onto the bottle and the napkin as Marie wrapped his leg again and again with a gauze roll. Next, she took out an elastic bandage, the kind for knee injuries, and tightly bound the wound. She handed him a bundle of bananas. “When you feel like it, eat these.”
“I ain’t no—”
She held up a gloved finger. He shut up. She took off the gloves and tossed them in the back. “We’re going to have to torch this van when we’re done. It’s turned into a hazardous waste nightmare.” She took something else out of her bag of tricks and handed the small package to Drago.
“What’s this?”
“Breath mints. Do me the favor, would you?”
He smiled.
Bright light lit up the van from the side, blinding us.
“What a touching scene,” Jonas Mabry said from afar.