“I don’t want to hear about it,” Mitch muttered, and fumbled twelve dollars into the blackened palm. He wheeled past the girls and said crankily, “Come on—come on.”
He rolled the car on west through the rocky desert hills, wondering how long the old grease-monkey’s patchwork job would hold the water pump together before it burst again. He kept it down to forty-five most of the time, except on the downhill slopes, hoping the water temperature wouldn’t rise high enough to blow another hole by steam pressure. In the back seat. Billie Jean said crankily, “Jesus H. Christ. I never been so sticky damn hot in my life.”
“Shut up.”
Terry touched his arm but he gave her a stony look and she withdrew her hand. They limped west in silence after that.
According to the map they had picked up at the gas station, Caborca was a smallish town (población 5,000-7,500) on the Rio Asunción. There was, however, no sign of a river anywhere in sight when they reached the sign which said HEROICA CABORCA. The appelation, Terry explained, commemorated the occasion in the 1850s when a hundred Yankee filibusters had invaded Sonora, planning to capture it and annex it to the United States; they had been besieged here by the local populace, abetted by several companies of militia, and finally forced to surrender, whereupon the Mexicans had lined them up against the wall and slaughtered them with rifle fire, after which the corpses were stripped of gold teeth and rings and left naked to the village pigs and goats. According to legend it had taken more than a year for the stench to dissipate. It had been the high point, if not the only memorable moment, in the town’s four-hundred-year history. The severed head of the filibuster leader had been pickled and placed on display in a jar. It was probably around somewhere, still. The walls of the old Franciscan church were still pocked with bullet holes.
The town clustered against the shoulders of several steep round hills, surrounded by scratch-poor country, all weathered clay and dry brittle clumps of brush. Here and there were painfully irrigated vegetable patches. Flocks of gaunt sheep drifted listlessly across the open desert. Dogs lay in the shade watching through bloodshot eyes when Mitch reached the outskirts of town and slowed to a crawl to make way, horn blasting, through a thickness of chickens clucking in the road.
Ahead on the right stood an apparition: a brand-new motel, complete with plastic, chrome, neon, and swimming pool. Mitch stopped in front of it and eyed the cars parked in the lot. None was Floyd’s Oldsmobile. Anyhow, he thought, Floyd wouldn’t be likely to stop at a conspicuous place like this.
He drove on into town. The streets were narrow, once paved but now holed and dusted. There were occasional cobbled sidewalks. The adobe structures, rammed together like city slum buildings, were painted ludicrous colors—pinks, yellows, greens. Poverty didn’t have to be soot-gray. Slow-moving women with black hair tied back in buns and dusty dresses with flowing long skirts stared at Mitch as if he were a movie director looking for extras to cast in a Pancho Villa film. Men in cowboy hats sat somnolent in shady doorways like characters in cartoons of Old Mexico. It was the siesta hour.
There were a few cars parked with two wheels on the sidewalk—mainly pickups and station wagons, the old ones with real wooden bodies. Mitch didn’t see the Olds anywhere; he hardly expected to. Floyd wouldn’t make it that easy.
He pulled up next to a young man in pachuco-tight Levi’s and stuck his head out the window; he spoke with care, drawing his lips back over his teeth in exaggerated enunciation:
“Por favor, amigo, dónde está la farmacia?”
The youth grinned and rattled off something, adding wild arm-and-hand signals like a ship’s semaphore signalman. Mitch flushed and heard Terry laugh at him: “He says it’s two blocks down and turn right and go across the plaza.”
“Okay,” Mitch said, “Gracias.”
“De nada,” the youth said, and stood grinning until they drove out of his sight.
Mitch said, “What’s so funny about us?”
“Maybe he just likes to smile,” Billie Jean said. “Man, those tight pants, you could sure see how he was hung.”
Mitch didn’t glance at Terry; he felt redness creep up his neck. Terry said, “You’ve got a way with words, Billie Jean.”
“Shit—you making fun of me? Maybe I don’t like your high-and-mighty, either, you ever think of that?”
The plaza enclosed a park with a dead lawn and two or three palm trees. Mitch drove around it and found a parking space in front of the pharmacy. A pulse began to thud in his throat. He got the .38 out of the glove compartment and shoved it in his pocket—it was empty but the whole world didn’t have to know that. I should’ve remembered to buy cartridges in Nogales. Maybe they’ve got some here.
It was just like the photograph, von Roon’s name painted on the sign. The door was closed and when he banged on it he got no response. He tried the knob but it was locked.
Terry said from the car window, “That’s why the kid was grinning. It’s siesta time—everything’s closed.”
Mitch backed down the three steps and came around the car and got in. “Great.”
Billie Jean said, “What now, smart guy?”
“We wait for them to open up.”
“Not here,” Billie Jean said immediately. “Not here. Too hot in this car. Man, what’s wrong with that place back there we passed with the swimming pool? I could use a jump in that pool right now.”
He glanced at Terry. “That place might not be too bad an idea at that. If we can afford it.”
Billie Jean said, “I got some money of my own. I’ll pay my own way. Just you drive me back to that pool.”
Drunk in his legs, Mitch opened the door and went in and looked around. His eyeballs seemed to scrape the sockets. The motel room was new, impersonal, sparsely filled with cheap blond furniture. It smelled stale. The drowsy desk clerk had explained with huge amusement how the motel, with its enormous carpeted lobby, had been built by gringo speculators who had assurances from the Mafia that Sonora was about to legalize gambling. The motel was to have been a gambling casino—only Sonora hadn’t passed the gambling law. That had been eight or nine years ago. The gringo speculators were still scheming and the Mafia were still making promises and the motel was still losing much money. The clerk had laughed uproariously. He had cast his wizened eye at Billie Jean (Terry had remained outside in the car) and at Mitch, and he had winked and handed over the keys to two rooms. They didn’t have enough money to take three rooms. Besides, it would have attracted attention.
He sat down on the bed and began to unlace his shoes. A shadow filled the door and he looked up to see Terry looking at him with an inquiring glance. He said, “You two take the other room.”
“If you think I’m going to stay in a room with that female Genghis Khan you’re mistaken.”
“Stay here, then. God knows I’m too fagged out to be dangerous.” He smiled weakly. “I feel like a two-dollar clock that somebody forgot to wind up. I don’t know about you but I’m going to wash off some of this dirt before I have to start paying real estate taxes on it.”
He shut himself in the bathroom, turned on the shower and let the water run until the rust cleared out of it, and scrubbed himself almost viciously. Blood on my hands, he thought sardonically, remembering the high-school production of Macbeth. “Is this a Floyd I see before me,” he muttered. He washed out his drip-dry shirt and underwear in the sink and hung them, wrung out and wrinkled, across the shower bar; and went back into the main room with a bath towel wrapped around his midriff. “I feel twenty pounds lighter.”
Terry sat in a rickety chair with loosely crossed legs, her hair standing out in wild disorder, looking rumpled and untidy and too tired to care. For the first time he realized she was as worn and ragged as he was; he had begun to think she was indestructible.