Firechild (32 page)

Yet dark forebodings haunted him. He had done the best he knew for
la niñita,
but it was not enough. She was not healing. Even with all her holy gifts, she could not live forever. He longed for help, but there was none. He wished for
El Doctor
Belcraft, the
medico
whose spirit she had called to help her heal him, but they had left him in the prison.

She had begged
El Escorpión
to bring him, so Frankie had said, speaking in whatever manner she had been able to speak from her torture cell. But
El Escorpión
refused, always saying the escape was already risky enough. There would be no help from Belcraft now—not unless
la niñita
could call him again, however she called from far away.

Walking back into the tunnel, he found that she had moved. Her wasting body had stretched and stiffened. Her eyes were wide open, dark and blindly staring. Her bloodless lips yawned wide, her pale face frozen into a grimace of agony and terror.

“Ay, chiquita!”
He tried to rub the stiffness from her icy hands. “What have you seen?”

She stayed cold and hard as a wooden doll.

“No hay peligro!”
He kissed her frozen face and tried to comfort her. “There’s no danger. I’m here to care for you.
Estamos
okay.”

But she was not at all okay. He felt no pulse when he tried her wrist and her throat, heard no beat when he listened for her heart. He thought she must be dead.

He stayed with her all that night, holding her bone-hard body in his arms, singing her the lullabies his mother had crooned to him so long ago in San Rosario, trying to work warmth and life back into her sticklike limbs.

Slowly she relaxed. A faint pulse returned. He laid her down at last and slept beside her on the fragrant juniper. The tunnel grew cold at night. He had spread all the blankets over her, and he woke shivering in a narrow ray of sunlight that struck far down the tunnel.

She had turned golden in it, her silk-fine hair still a shining halo. Her staring eyes had closed. That fixed grimace of dread and pain was gone. Her golden lips moved a little as he watched, parting into a happy-seeming smile.

She was alive, dreaming.

37

Hunter

Harris

M
ickey’s mother had been pure Tarascan Indian, a moody beauty from central Mexico. Though his father used to call her a “black spic slut,” his skin was darker than hers. He married her out of a Nuevo Laredo brothel. Sometimes, in spite of himself, Mickey found her living in his memory.

He recalled a time when she’d been happy. Glad to escape the pimps and the madams and men more brutal than Blackie, she had loved their home in the Laredo trailer park, loved the strong perfumes and gaudy jewelry she found in dime stores, loved listening to the wailing Mexican records she used to play on the scratchy phonograph. At first she must have loved her big gringo husband.

Mickey never forgot the ripe scent of her, the yielding feel of her breasts and the salt taste of her skin and the sweetness of her milk. That last ugly night was branded on his brain, the night when she stabbed his father with his own bowie knife and escaped across the line. He had been going on four years old.

Blackie Harris was an alcoholic border lawman, once a Texas ranger. He was drunk and threatening to carve his name into Carmelita’s yellow belly when she got the knife and cut him with it. The long blade had gone into the gut, and he nearly died of peritonitis. Never entirely well again, he cherished his hatreds and taught them to his son.

The rest of his life he lived along the line, a cop or a town marshall or a sheriff’s deputy when he was sober and fit enough to be employed at anything. Drunk, he sometimes searched the slums and dives for Carmelita, threatening to slice the stinkin‘ liver out of her stinkin‘ carcass if he ever found her. He never did. Hating her, hating every Mexican, he still spent his weekends in Mexican bars and brothels when he could find the money.

Growing up in those border towns, Mickey went with him into those same bars and brothels and shared the same passions. He had loved his mother once, and cried when his father beat her, but what festered through his boyhood was the way she had abandoned them both, hurting him more than his father. Searching for her as his father did, he found her again in the smell and taste and feel of the Mexican whores, and he avenged himself when he could.

The revenge went best after he became another lawman, first in the border patrol and then whenever he could find the right sort of job after the patrol discharged him. With experience enough, he began calling himself a special investigator, undertaking private undercover missions across the line.

Those missions were seldom legal but often successful. He had grown up at ease in Spanish and Tex-Mex and Spanglish. He was dark enough to pass himself as a native Mexican, and deadly enough with weapons. When Mexican officials were slow to act on gringo requests or sometimes suspected of corruption, he went across the line to recover stolen property and even to kidnap absconders who were hiding or defying extradition, sometimes even to kill them. Men came to call him Hunter Harris.

Though he earned good fees, his real rewards came from another sort of hunt. The habit of that had begun when he was still with the border patrol, picking up
mojados.
“Wetbacks.” The first had been a girl, perhaps twelve years old, who had become separated from her family when they ran away from the river in the dark. With her long black hair and her thin red dress and her strong perfume, she recalled his mother.

She sobbed with gratitude when he offered to carry her back to her friends in Piedras Negras instead of throwing her in the
calabozo.
He took her back across the river hidden in the trunk of his car and drove on to a lonely place he had found. Her taste and her smell and her feel were like his mother’s. Even her screams recalled his mother’s screams, when his father was teaching her how to love him. He used his own bowie knife, and buried what was left when he was done.

That was the sort of hunt he loved. While it lasted, the job on the border patrol brought him all the game he dared to catch. The hunting was harder for a time after his discharge, until he found that new career as undercover investigator. Often across the border, with contacts enough in the underworld, he was able to stalk his Mexican meat again.

Those good times lasted until a young girl he had snatched off a school playground turned out to have been the wrong man’s daughter. Rounded up, some of his underworld associates confessed what they knew or suspected about him. Better evidence lacking, he was robbed and beaten up and warned to stay out of Mexico.

That was when he came to Enfield.

His summons to see General Clegg came as a painful jolt. He asked the sergeant what was up. Claiming not to know, the sergeant marched him into the general’s office, almost as if he had been under arrest, and left him sweating in front of the wide glass desk.

Leafing through a thick manila folder, the general didn’t look up. The big nose and jutting jaw and heavy thick black brows reminded Mickey of his father. Standing there, wondering what the general wanted, he felt sick at his stomach, the way he had always felt when his father was going to whip him. Behind him, he heard the sergeant walk out of the room and shut the door. He had to stand rigid to stop his trembling knees.

“So you are Hunter Harris?”

The question startled him. He wanted to sit but he found no chair. The general’s eyes were on him, hard and cold as his father’s, peering from deep caves beneath the jutting brows. He gulped and got his breath.

“I guess so, sir.”

“We needn’t guess.” The general pushed the folder aside and paused to stare accusingly, the way Blackie used to stop and stare and make him wonder what the punishment would be. “I have a new report from the FBI. They inform me that you got the name from your expeditions into Mexico, hunting fugitives.”

“Yes, sir.” Nervous, he spoke too fast. “You see, sir, the Mex cops are all out for what they call
la mordita.
The bite. A lot of crooks were paying them off, hiding out in Mexico. My business was bringing them back to American justice.”

Not impressed, the general laid a rawboned hand on the folder.

“The report also says you gave up that career after you were suspected of sex crimes—”

“Sir—” His voice was a squeak, and he had to try again. “Sir, please! I was up against desperate enemies. Crooked cops and rotten judges were taking bribes to shelter criminals. Trying to get rid of me, they invented crazy accusations, with no evidence whatever. No charges were ever pressed, but I finally had too much—”

“Calm yourself, Harris.” The general waved that big-boned hand. “We’re not here to drag skeletons out of your closet. Not yet, anyhow. Our only concern is to establish your special fitness for a very important assignment.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Your record seems to fit the mission we have in mind.” The general nodded, narrowed eyes still hard. “I believe you know the creature—the demon thing— that survived in the ruins of Enfield?”

“I do.” Recollection brought a small thrill of pleasure. “I interrogated her.”

“Nearly killed her, I believe.”

“I didn’t mean to, sir.” He talked fast again, the way he used to talk to Blackie, trying to delay the bullwhip. “She ain’t human, sir. Her body’s all different. It was hard to tell what she could take—”

“Never mind the alibis.” The general waved them away. “I’m sorry now that Kalenka had you stopped. At the time, we were still hoping to make the little demon confess her crimes. We were hoping for information about the weapon that devastated Enfield. We got nothing useful. Now she has escaped.

“And you—”

The general paused again to make him wait.

“Your new duty is to finish what you started.”

“Sir?” He shook his head. “Do you mean—”

“Kill her!” An odd red mark has begun to show through the gray makeup on the general’s forehead. “Kill her! Any way you can. The job may be difficult. As you say, she isn’t human. A she-demon, full of hell-given craft. That’s why I’m sending you. Your background suggests abilities that should match hers.”

“I—I see.” He shifted uneasily, still wishing for a chair. “Do you know where she is?”

“They stole my personal airplane.” A bitter rasp edged the general’s voice. “The wreckage has been located where it crashed in Mexico. They found two bodies in it. Bard, our own security man who sold us out, and a dead Mexican, evidently murdered when he came upon them. The survivors apparently left the scene in the Mexican’s vehicle.”

“That killer spic?”

“Torres? We believe he’s still with her.” The general nodded. “Along with this other conspirator, not yet identified. The man who blew up the power line and kidnapped the Grant girl to get through the gate.”

“The spic—” Mickey caught his breath, feeling better. “The spic would likely run her back to his drug-dealing pals. Maybe hiding out in some marijuana patch.”

“Could be.” The general grunted. “The Mexican authorities have been cooperative, rounding up a lot of known drug dealers. So far, that demon-bitch has been too clever for them, too smart for the CIA and military intelligence. That’s why we’re sending you—”

“Sir, them damn’ gizzard-lips—” Alarmed, Mickey scowled and licked his own thick lips. “They hate me. Lied about me and drove me off the border, just because I used to hunt their outlaw friends. They’d kill me—”

Impatiently, the general waved to stop him.

“You will be in western Mexico, where I don’t think your past adventures were ever well known. We will give you a new identity if you think you need it, with documents and funds.” A smile like Blackie’s, when he was summing up sins to justify the bullwhip. “If you get the job done.”

“Trust me, sir!” He had always promised to do better. “If you’ve located them.”

“Not yet. Tracing them was difficult. Impossible, in fact, until the demon-bitch gave herself away. She’s somehow able to contact Belcraft through sendings we don’t understand. You know Belcraft? Our prisoner here, the brother of the man—that apprentice of Satan who called her out of hell. We have an agent who has become intimate with him.”

“The tall blonde?” Harris licked his lips again. “Keri Grant? We had orders to let ‘em screw.”

“My orders.” He didn’t much like the general’s grin. “They screwed, as you put it. She’s got him conned. Now she reports that he’s had another sending.”

“You know where they are?”

“Somewhere in the mountains of western Mexico, hiding in a cave.”

“Somewhere?”

“Up to now, that’s all we know. The she-demon was hurt in the crash. Lying in that cave, in what Belcraft calls a coma. Conscious, but paralyzed and unable to speak—the devil knows how she sends the visions.”

“If she can do that—” Harris shivered. “What else—”

“We don’t know her powers.” The general’s face set harder. “That’s why she has to be killed—before she grows to be something worse. You were able to injure her here. If she can be hurt, she can be killed.”

“If—if I can find her.”

“We have a plan.” The general’s voice boomed louder again. “The bitch wants Belcraft with her. Grant says she loves him—if you can imagine a demon in love. Since the vision, he’s desperate to reach her. We’re planning to facilitate his escape. He seems to expect more sending, visions guiding him to wherever she is. Grant will go with him and keep us informed.”

“Can’t she—”

“You’re the killer.” A brittle rap. “Grant says she isn’t. Her assignment is simply to stay with him and guide you to the monster.

“Yours is to kill her, any way you can.”

“Ok—okay!” The word tried to stick in his throat.

“Get it done!” The voice of Blackie Harris. “We’re arranging support, and your nation will be grateful. Private sources have put up a reward for you. Five million tax-free dollars, waiting in secret bank accounts, when we know you’ve got it done.”