After America (41 page)

Miguel heard a strangled, gurgling sound and spun around to see Adam vomiting into a clump of grass. The boy waved him away as if to say it was nothing. The vaquero tried to keep track of the number of agents as they went down, counting out each dull, chopping thud he heard, but it was impossible.

And then one of the camp whores woke up and screamed.

Her ululating cry was cut off by another muffled blow, and Miguel had his signal.

“Get up, boy. Our time has arrived.”

The whey-faced youngster, still dry heaving, nodded and took up position behind Miguel, covering him with an M16 as he went to work on the padlock securing the heavy security door. The first blow rang out like a discordant cathedral bell over the huge graveyard that was the town of Crockett. Miguel’s heart tried to leap out of his chest with the huge, jarring boom, but he ignored his galloping fears and swung again, striking the padlock squarely. It disintegrated with a shower of sparks and a metallic crash. He heard screams inside—women’s screams—as he wrenched open the door.

“Get out, get out now,” he ordered as the door flew back with a wrenching screech of stiff, tortured steel in an ill-fitting door frame.

Adam moved up just behind his shoulder.

“Come on, it’s us. Get out of there, you ladies; we have to go now.”

Other voices were shouting: deep male voices, angry and confused.

The first gunshot cracked open the night as a woman appeared from within the gloom of the prison at the back of the club. Miguel recognized her as the woman he had seen humiliated by the camp whores earlier in the evening. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyes dark sunken pits. She was shivering with fear and shock and seemed not to recognize Adam when she saw him.

“Come, Sister Jenny. This way, quickly.”

The boy took her by the arm and virtually dragged her from the room as the percussive trip-hammer of automatic weapons fire began around the front of the building. More screams followed and then the boom of a heavy single-shot weapon. Miguel almost stopped in midstride.

That couldn’t be the Remington
, he thought. He had told her to stay behind.

There was no time for that. Sofia would do as she was told.

“Ladies,” he said urgently. “It really is time to go now. Quickly. With young Adam here. My name is Miguel, Miguel Pieraro, and I will be rescuing you tonight. But only if you step this way.”

Sofia almost lost her meager dinner when Ben brought the sledge down on his first victim’s skull. Choking it down, she brought out her Remington and waited for a target to present itself. In the excitement, she nearly opened fire on the first target that resolved in her scope, bracketed against the fires and torchlight of the camp. That would have meant shooting Orin and giving herself away. Sneakiness was the watchword of the evening, she reminded herself. Sneakiness and not shooting the wrong people. She forced herself to wait.

When the first camp whore screamed, Sofia pivoted toward her, but a sledge silenced the woman before she could fire. The woman’s boyfriend struggled to rise off the couch, a bearded, shaggy-haired, potbellied maggot with a red bandanna tied over his head. Ben and the other Mormons were distracted by gunfire from the front of the Hy Top.

Sofia brought the crosshairs of her Remington up to the bandanna boy’s unibrow, took a deep breath, and let it out.

As she exhaled, she kept the muzzle of the gun on target until her finger completed the pull of the trigger. Bucking in her arms, the rifle put a single round through the agent’s unibrow, disintegrating the top half of his skull in a spectacular shower of bloody gruel, dropping the corpse back onto the couch. She felt a surge of anger and … something else. It was a feeling she did not recognize, but it was powerful. No, it was … power itself. She felt her power over the man whom she had shot, whose life she had taken. It was a good feeling. Sofia forced herself to work the bolt mechanically, spitting out the spent .30-06 casing and sliding a fresh round into the chamber. The Mormon men, having discarded their sledgehammers for their M16s, took cover behind the couch and exchanged fire with those who tried to run back into the Hy Top.

Sofia tracked two more agents sprinting for the door, dispatching one with a clean torso shot that spun him off his feet and into a dry wall facade with a crash that shook the entire front of the club building. The other man she drilled in the ass, slowing him down long enough for the Mormons to pour a stream of tracer fire into his back. So intense was the fire that it disassembled him from the hip to shoulder height.

She had expected this to be hard, yet she felt nothing but a deep sense of satisfaction as she scanned the windows of the Hy Top for more targets.

In fact, Sofia was ashamed to admit as she dispatched another road agent firing from a second floor window, it was kind of fun.

Miguel kept up the banter as two more women emerged from the dark room. He had seen one of them earlier while scouting the building, but the other was unfamiliar, and he quickly noted that Adam did not recognize her, either. Another captive, then, most likely. She did not have the hardened aspect of the longtime camp whores, appearing every bit as traumatized as the Mormon ladies. Miguel moved into the locked bunkhouse and drew his sawed-off shotgun, keeping the internal door covered while Adam rousted the rest of the women out of there.

Sure enough, within a minute he heard somebody scrabbling at the lock on the other side, and within seconds the door flew inward and a road agent stood there, still groggy and half naked. He registered the presence of Miguel, and his bleary eyes had just enough time to go wide as they took in the huge, yawning muzzle of the Lupara, before the cowboy pulled the trigger and all but cut him in two. In the stark white flash of the muzzle blast Miguel caught a glimpse of a corridor behind the agent, stacked with boxes. The man’s body jackknifed around the molten comet of lead shot and flew backward, slamming into a tower of crates that toppled to the floor with the crashing tinkle of broken glass. Immediately Miguel smelled alcohol.

“Out now!” he roared, no longer concerned with stealth. He holstered the Lupara, with one chamber still loaded, and pointed his Winchester down the end of the hallway. “Is that all of them, Adam? Are all of your women out?”

The uproar of the gunfight was now so great, so overwhelming, that he wondered if he had missed the boy’s reply, but turning around, he saw he had not. Adam was frantically checking and rechecking his small frightened group of women, shaking his head ever more frantically.

“No! No!” he cried helplessly.

“Adam,” Pieraro yelled. “How many are missing?”

“It’s Sally, Mister Pieraro. Sally Gray.” And the raw anguish in his voice told Miguel that this Sally Gray was not just another captive. She was someone special to the boy.

Sofia would be disappointed.

“Take them out the way we came in,” he ordered. “Run and do not stop to look back or wait. We shall meet up again at the clearing. Go. Go! I will find your Sally.”

“Sir!” called out the woman he knew as Jenny. “I think she was in the storeroom. One of those men took her there not fifteen minutes ago.”

“Thank you, Jenny. Now go!”

He waved them off with a fierce gesture and took a moment to compose himself. Battle raged elsewhere in the building, a savage din of staccato weapons fire. Machine guns. Single shots. Men and women crying in fear and outrage. He checked the load on his Winchester. It was still good. He had not yet fired a shot with it. Crossing himself and imploring the help of the Blessed Virgin, he swallowed his fear, which was considerable, and swung into the hallway, covering its length with his rifle. He stepped over the ruptured body of the man he had slain and hastened down the corridor. It was poorly lit, with only a few shafts of lamplight poking in through gaps in the walls to illuminate his way. A door stood locked halfway up, and he considered how best to approach it for all of half a second before kicking it in and jumping out of the way of any return fire. None came, which was a small disappointment. He had been hoping not to have to push farther into the club. Another check of the room confirmed that it was little more than a closet filled with cleaning implements: brooms, mops, buckets, and so on.

Miguel ducked from the knees as a burst of gunfire suddenly tore through the wooden slats of the wall just ahead of him, allowing more light to spill through.

His legs quivering from the adrenaline rush, he cautiously edged up to the hole and took a peek. He seemed to be looking into what must have been the main bar area. It was chaos in there, with a small fire burning out of control in one corner where an oil lamp had been smashed or shot to pieces and had spilled its fuel onto the wooden floor, where spilled liquor and bedclothes had quickly caught alight. Bodies lay everywhere, some still, some twitching or trying to drag themselves away from the carnage, But he also counted at least five road agents still standing and able to give a good accounting for themselves. They were all hunkered down at the front of the building, firing out into the street. The shots that punched through the wall in front of him must have come from Aronson’s men out there.

Miguel furrowed his brow as he took in the scene.

There was no sign of any woman who might be Sally Gray. Jenny had said she was in a storeroom, but there was no such area off this corridor. He could see three camp whores from his vantage point, easily discerned by their sluttish mode of dress. Two were dead, and one was firing a carbine out into the street. Indeed, the agents were putting out such a volume of fire that he had to worry about Aronson and the others. Had they found cover before coming under fire?

How many were alive?

Was it even worth continuing the search for Miss Gray?

Papa should be out of there by now
, Sofia thought. She had given up any pretense of hiding at the edge of the battle, crossing the street a block up from the Hy Top. Rifle fire popped around her, but she did not pay it any mind. The adrenaline was flowing through her, giving her a rush that was far more intense than the flush of deer hunting. She worked around to the back of the Hy Top.

“Don’t shoot me, please!”

The Mormon girl, about the same age as Sofia, fell down in front of her. She ran up to the young woman and knelt down. Adam caught up with them seconds later, his weapon leveled on Sofia until realization took hold.

“Holy hell, Sofia! Your father is going to be furious with you,” he said.

“Where is he?” she asked. “He should be out by now.”

“Still in the Hy Top,” Adam said, bringing her up to speed.

“Anything left in that rifle?” she asked, pointing at the M16 Adam carried.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ve not even fired it yet.”

“Give it to me,” she said.

“I think not,” he said, trying to summon up all the dignity his few months of added maturity might lend him—without any luck. “Your father—”

Adam didn’t complete the sentence. She butt swiped him across the face with the flat of her rifle stock. It made a pretty good club.

“Here.” Sofia handed her Remington to the crying woman. “What’s your name?”

“Jenny,” she said.

“I’m not going to kill you. Do you know how to use this?”

Jenny nodded.

“Fine,” Sofia said, collecting Adam’s M16. “Stay here. I’m going after my father.”

Miguel dismissed the unworthy option of cutting and running without a second thought. He had promised Adam that he would do his best to rescue the girl, and even if he hadn’t, that did not change the fact that she was a good woman—he assumed—being held captive by the worst sort of men. Were it his daughter and another man had turned away from a chance to save her, what would he think of such a worthless cur?

Not much, after killing him.

Miguel settled on what he had to do and determined to see it through, no matter what. He took a moment to examine the room again, taking care this time to commit to memory as much detail as he could: the positions of the agents firing into the street and those of the dead and the wounded, the cover he might use, the paths he might take through the chaos. He did not have perfect vision of the room, far from it. But life was not perfect, and God expected his children to be about his business anyway.

He checked the Winchester one last time as he walked on a few paces to a door that would surely have to give on to the barroom.

Seven rounds of 30.30 smokeless in the tube.

He made the sign of the cross.

Kissed the small locket hanging around his neck.

Jacked a round into the chamber and stepped into the room.

Working from left to right, Miguel punched 170 grains of 30.30 deer killer through the back of the first man’s neck at 2,227 feet per second. The agent crouched next to him lost the top of his head as he turned slightly to see what had happened to his comrade. Miguel worked the lever action and put his third round into the back of the next man in line, who was taking cover behind a structural beam as he fired out into the street. The woman, the camp whore, who had been firing her carbine blindly over the window ledge reacted with catlike speed and managed to turn toward him, cry out a warning over the clamor and tumult, and even squeeze off a couple of rounds. But they hit the ceiling, bringing down a shower of dust and particleboard before her face exploded when hit by his fourth shot. Blood and gray matter spattered the face of the man next to her.

“Dixie!” he cried out, turning on Miguel. “Fucker, you ki—”

Dixie’s boyfriend died of a bullet through the heart, and before Miguel could finish the last of them, the final agent, an older man, threw his weapon down and put his hands up.

“Whoa, pardner, don’t shoot me! I fucking surrender!” the graybeard said.

Miguel covered him with the rifle, advancing cautiously through the room, still hunched over slightly and flinching as fire from the Mormons outside continued to smash into the building. All of his senses were singing; light and sound and the reek of gunpowder and death flooded in as time seemed to stretch out forever—as though he might walk across this room, surrounded by the dead and dying, from this moment until the ending of the world.