“Cállate,” he said, and the dog shut up and slunk off. “Buenas noches, señores. Les puedo ayudar?”
I told Brando to keep a lookout and LQ and I went into the station. The agent stepped aside for us and then went around behind the narrow counter. In the light of a pair of kerosene lanterns I saw that his face was badly scarred, as if it had been torn open in several places and then badly sutured. His left arm had been ruined too and he held it at an awkward twist.
“Christ amighty, amigo,” LQ said, “you look like you been in a hatchet fight and everybody had a hatchet but you.”
“Perdóname, señor,” the clerk said. “No hablo inglés.” His face twisted even more awfully and I supposed he was smiling in apology for his inability to speak English.
I told him my friend didn’t speak Spanish, and he gestured with his good arm in a manner to imply that life was full of complications.
I took out the map of the hacienda and spread it open on the counter between us. I asked if he could vouch for its accuracy, if there were any local roads that the map did not show.
He bent over it and considered for a minute and then said it looked correct to him.
So the road a couple of miles south was the only one connecting the Hacienda de Las Cadenas to the Jiménez-Torreón highway?
“Sí,” he said. “Es el único camino.” He asked if we were new employees of Don César. “O no más son amigos de el?”
There was no way he could warn Calveras of our coming and so I said no, we weren’t the man’s employees or his friends, either. I handed the map to LQ. “It’s jake. Just the one road.”
“Ah, pues, son enemigos,” the clerk said. He put his hand to a scarred cheek and smiled his awful smile. “Espero que lo castigan bastante bien. Mejor si lo matan.”
“What’s he yammering about?” LQ said.
“He hopes we kick Calveras’ ass but he’d be happier if we killed him. I don’t think he cares much for the man.”
“Bastard probably give him that face. Ask him does he know how many guns the place got.”
I asked, and he said, “De pistoleros? No estoy seguro. Como una dozena, yo creo.”
“He say a dozen?” LQ said.
“Maybe a dozen, he’s not sure.”
“Y cuantos son ustedes?”
“Tres.”
“Tres?” His ruined mouth twisted and he shook his head.
“Go to hell, Jack,” LQ said as we started for the door. “Odds like that, the sumbitch best send for more guys.”
The road was about as wide as a big truck and went snaking through high dense brush and tall stands of mesquite trees. The hacienda’s pasturelands were somewhere far to the east. We drove without headlights and very slowly, raising no dust, making our way by the small patches of moonlight that filtered through the trees. We’d been on the move for the better part of an hour when we went around a long curve through the heavy scrub and saw the lights of the hacienda in the distance ahead.
When we figured we were within a mile of the place, LQ and I got out of the car. He carried the BAR and the shoulder bag of extra magazines; I had one of the shotguns and one coat pocket full of extra shells for it, the other pocket full of .44 cartridges. The road was still closely bounded and deeply shadowed by brush and mesquite. I headed up the road with LQ ten yards behind me and Brando easing the Hudson along behind LQ, far enough back that I couldn’t hear the motor.
About eighty yards from the compound the trees and taller brush abruptly ended. LQ came up beside me and we crouched in the road’s last portion of darkness. We had a clear view of the compound gate and the guard posted there, but between us and the compound it was all moonlit open ground and there was no shadow at all on the long front wall. Brando was still in the car, about thirty yards behind us.
The wooden gate was tall and double-doored, the left door open inward, the right one shut. The guard sat in a straightback chair in front of the closed door. We could see the red flarings of his cigarette and it looked like there was some kind of long gun propped against the gate beside him. The wall was about twelve feet high and we could see the glitter of the broken bottles cemented along the top of it, a safeguard common to every walled residence, large or small, we’d seen in Mexico. The open gate door was dimly yellow with light from the courtyard within.
We talked it over in a whisper and came up with a plan. I went back down the road to tell it to Brando and then stood on the running board as he very gingerly brought the Hudson up to about fifteen yards from the shadowed end of the road and stopped. We could see LQ’s crouched silhouette up ahead.
“Keep your eye on me,” I told Brando, then I hustled back up to LQ.
“Okay,” LQ said, handing me his hat and the BAR. “Here goes nothing.” He slipped into the brush to the right of the road and vanished. I slung the BAR over one shoulder, the shotgun over the other.
It took nearly half an hour for him to move around to the east side of the compound. I kept watching the far end of the front wall and finally saw his blond head poke out from behind it.
The guard was sitting with his back to him. He’d been chain-smoking and he lit another cigarette as LQ started toward him, walking steadily and sticking close to the wall, his shadow short and leaning a little ahead of him. If the guard turned around and saw him coming LQ would probably have to shoot him—and the ones inside might get the gate shut on us.
LQ was almost to him when the guard jerked around in his chair—maybe he heard LQ’s footsteps. He jumped up and spun around to grab for the long gun but then LQ was on him, clubbing at him with his pistol. I heard the guy hollering—and figured they sure as hell heard him inside—and then LQ had him down and shut him up.
I was already running for the gate and beckoning Brando to come on. I heard the Hudson roaring behind me and I looked back as it shot out into the moonlight and swerved around in a tight circle and Brando gunned it back into the narrow mouth of the road and braked hard—the car now facing back the way we came and blocking the mouth of the road. The door flew open and Brando came on the run, shotgun in hand.
LQ was standing in the open gate pointing the .380 at somebody inside and yelling, “Put it down, man, put it down!” A pistolshot sounded from the courtyard and the round ricocheted off the stone wall. LQ crouched beside the closed door and opened fire with the .380, snapping off three or four rounds in a row, the muzzle flashing yellow, then took cover behind the door.
I ran up and gave LQ his hat and the BAR and whipped the shotgun off my shoulder. Somebody inside was crying in pain and praying to the Holy Mother.
“Map’s got it right,” LQ said. “Driveway goes straight to a pool fountain some seventy–eighty yards off and the house is just the other side of it.”
Brando ran up, grinning big. “Woooo.”
There was a lot of shouting in the compound, mostly unintelligible, some of it demanding to know what was going on, some of it informing that Julio had been shot and needed help. Somebody ordering somebody to shut the fucking gate and somebody yelling back for him to shut the fucking gate.
LQ peeked around the open door and jerked his head back quick as several pistols fired and bullets whacked the thick wood.
“There’s a bunch coming from the right,” he said. “Let’s do it if we’re gonna do it.”
I told him to cover us from the gate—we didn’t want them shutting the door and trapping us inside. “Keep behind me, Ray—straight for the house. I’ll go upstairs, you hold the front door. Shoot anything you aint sure of.”