“Deputy Jones, this is not a certainty,” said Heriberto. “We are here to take your wife. You will see her again if you end your protection of Carlos Herredia and the North Baja Cartel in Los Angeles. And if you stop arresting the Gulf Cartel’s Salvadoran friends. And if you offer one million dollars to Benjamin Armenta as an apology for the trouble you have caused and the money you have cost him. These are to be your labors, gringo Hercules. We give you ten days to complete them and your esposa will be released without harm. If you fail, Deputy Jones, then Saturnino will skin her alive. He is the enforcer ultimo and this is one of his methods. All of the lovely white skin. Off. Si, mis amigos?”
The men remained silent and did not look directly at Erin. She tried to break away but the men yanked her back and her hair flashed red in the tube lights of the barn. Beyond them the big sliding door was open and Bradley could see the rain lightly falling outside. It was an unusual monsoonal storm from the southeast, brief and warm, but Bradley was trembling cold and bloodied. His ears rang badly. He wiped some blood off his face and looked at his wife.
“You have the wrong man, you sonsofbitches,” she said. “He’s a sheriff’s deputy for the County of Los Angeles. He was second in his class at the academy. He’s been awarded for bravery. Get off our property.”
Heriberto looked at her. His expression was incomplete because of the bandana but his eyes crinkled with amusement. He opened both hands and gestured at the spacious barn with its Porsche Cayenne and the lovingly restored Cyclone and Erin’s new Toureg hybrid turbo, and the tarped and trailered Boston Whaler and the gleaming quad runners and the John Deere and the profusion of tools and sporting gear. He nodded toward the big house and spread his hands in a gesture of inclusion, which included Erin. He laughed quietly and so did the men.
“All of this and a secret room with a motor? Why not a private jet? This is what the one-year policeman in los Yuniates earns? But the beginning pay is not forty-thousand dollars per year. All this? Where does all this come from, roja?”
“You’ve got the wrong guy, Heriberto,” said Bradley. “I am not who you think I am.”
Heriberto stared at him. “Tell your lies to the fools in your life. To your wife and your department.”
“I do not lie to my wife.”
Erin looked at Bradley with angry confusion. He saw the doubt on her face and, feeling judged by the one person he truly believed in, the doubt hit him harder than the gun butt. He gauged his chances of lunging out of the car and getting to her without being beaten or shot. But then what? He saw the movement of the gunmen toward him and held still.
“Erin,” he said. “I’ll take care of this. I’ll give them what they want. I’ll give them twice of what they ask, whether it’s in my power or not. You’ll be free again. You’ll see this home again and raise your children here and we’ll walk that meadow in the spring and be in love.”
She looked back at him through her tangle of hair but said nothing.
“If you fail us, Deputy Jones, we will send you her skin, rolled up in a small box,” said Heriberto. “We will be in touch with you. Many details are to be coming. The Gulf Cartel will crush your master Carlos Herredia like a small dog. This is only the beginning. You tell him Benjamin Armenta says hello.”
The two men pulled Erin toward the barn door just as four others stepped forward and pinned Bradley to the trunk bottom with their gun barrels. He looked up at their motley disguises and clothes and their vests with the military numbers stenciled in white. A moment later he heard a vehicle pull up outside the barn and one by one the gunmen backed away and disappeared.
He sat up and wiped blood from his face. Through the barn door he saw that the rain had ended and he heard Erin shout out to him: “Come to me by moonlight, sugar!/Let the moon be your guide!” These were words to a song she was writing and she’d been singing them in slightly varying melodies for the last week now. “I love you, Bradley!”
Love or loved? He sprang out of the trunk and ran to the door and saw the van heading down the dirt road toward the gate. He ran to the workbench, got the.357 Magnum revolver from a drawer, then to the all-terrain vehicles waiting side-by-side at the far end of the barn, gassed as always, keys in their ignitions. He chose the best one and jammed the gun into the holster strapped under the dash while turning the key.
He bounced through the barn and shot out the door, up on his hands and feet, head held low. Shirtless he shivered as he cut through the cool wind and found the road and gunned the quad runner through its gears. I will not fail you. He saw the taillights of the van as it cleared a rise, then he saw nothing but the pocked road.
Seconds later he was nearly upon the van. It was loaded heavily and the back tires slipped and spun in the fresh mud. The gate was not far away. He slid out the revolver and guided the whining quad with one hand and he raised the pistol and sighted down it. The van, big and easily hit, bounced along ahead of him but to fire was only folly and he knew they had beaten him this time. He backed off the accelerator and touched the brake and swung the ATV into a sideways slide that threw mud in a big rooster tail and finally brought it to a stop. He shivered with cold and his eyes filled with tears and blood as he watched the van leave his property not through the gate but through a large hole cut in the chain-link fence.
2
He showered and dressed and bandaged the scalp wounds then took the steps down into the bunker he’d built beneath the foundation of the barn. The vault was roomy and made of poured concrete with double rebar, heated and air conditioned, and the walls were painted white. The lights were recessed and low-voltage and bright. There was a desk and three standing safes, file cabinets and a long table covered by colorful Mexican blankets.
He knelt and spun the dial on one of the safes. He swung open the heavy door and pulled out one million dollars, weighed and shrink-wrapped in one-pound bundles. There were twenty pounds of one-hundred dollar bills; four pounds of twenties and sixteen loose hundreds to complete the amount. He took out another ten pounds of twenties-ninety six thousand dollars to sustain himself and whoever else might help him get Erin back. This all fit into a piece of lightweight rolling luggage.
He sat at his desk for a short while, staring straight ahead at the blank white wall. Fury and fear. How could he not have known? How could Herredia’s organization have no warning, no inside information? How could Armenta even attempt this? Erin, light of my life. Where are you and what are they doing to you? With the eyes of his mind he tried to picture her but all he saw were the most terrifying pictures he had ever imagined. Ten days. Ten.
He forced away these images but now his thoughts came heavy with shame. He’d loved her to the point of obsession but what was that but a young man’s foolishness, dwarfed in importance by his failure to protect her, his wife, sleeping, pregnant with their child, in their own home? If you fail, Deputy Jones, we will skin her alive. He knew this was not just a gruesome threat. Flayings had joined beheadings as statements of fact among the drug cartels.
Sitting in his vault, cold and hungry and assaulted by things he could not control, Bradley felt his former self step aside. She was gone; now he was gone. Into him flowed the rage and the shame, and they ran the miles from his heart to the narrow capillaries. He felt them turn into strength and will and he knew that only these could bring her back.
He went to the long wooden table that sat against one wall of the vault and carefully lifted the blankets that were spread upon it. Here were his mother’s journals and many framed pictures of her and of his brothers, and of her family back into the time when photography had just been invented. He put his hand on the journals and looked down at the pictures, which he dusted every month. There was also a fine Western saddle and a tooled-leather scabbard and a pair of six-guns in a two-holster rig that he cleaned and oiled once a year. The steel and leather were dark and shiny and smelled of the past. Beside the saddle was a forged steel mesh vest that had been dented by bullets, some fired nearly a century and a half ago, but some quite recently.