The Lawless Kind (22 page)

‘No. I meant that they’d figure we were trying to draw them away from the others. There aren’t that many direct routes from Hermosillo back to the border. Maybe they’ll send most of their guns to cut off those roads instead of chasing us.’

‘I got that. But I think after what happened at his house, Molina has to try to catch us; otherwise he’s going to lose face with other cartel bosses. He’ll be determined to make an example of us, to prove he’s got the steel balls to hold his own against them. He’ll send everything he’s got after us, and concentrate on getting his son back later. Way he sees things, if he kills us there’ll be no one left to stop him from taking Benjamin back from Kirstie whenever he likes.’

‘I guess we have to factor in Marshall and his goon squad.’ It was regrettable that it had come to this, but the lure of money could make enemies of the best of friends. Marshall hadn’t been a friend the way Rink and Harvey were to me now, but he had been someone I’d have risked my life for when we fought side by side. He’d been a good soldier back then, a tough and resourceful bastard, and even missing an eye and twenty years older, he was no doubt still equally tough and resourceful. Pity he had grown to be more of a bastard.Back on that hillside the only reason he hadn’t drawn on us was because there was nothing in it for him. Why fight, and possibly die, for no reward? But I was wise enough to believe he was after us now. Howell Regis – the Grim Reaper – would have made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

When I was with 1 Para there was a lot of competition among the lads. Who could run the furthest? Who could carry the heaviest weight for longest? Who was the fittest? Who was the best shot on the range? All banter, and an integral part of the job to ensure you continuously pushed to be the best of the best. One question that often came up: who was the hardest in the regiment? There was a time when James Lee Marshall held that title hands down.

Then a brash youngster called Joe Hunter entered the running, and the lads were of a split opinion. If I hadn’t been flown to other theatres of war then, sooner or later, Marshall and I would have been pressed into proving the issue. I was on the way up; people would assume that I’d something to prove by beating him. But the opposite was true. He was the old champion and it was for him to protect his position as alpha male.

When I was chosen over him to represent 1 Para as their delegate to Arrowsake, it must have hurt. Sounds egotistical, but they were only looking for the very best of the best, and they’d found Marshall wanting. Wonder if the rejection had stuck with him all these years? I hadn’t thought about Marshall in the best part of two decades, yet the moment I’d recognised his face in the glare of lights on the highway, something had stirred in me. It was the emotion that old boxers must feel when they proclaim they could have been a contender for the title belt. I admit to telling myself that I could take him. Part of me was even looking forward to him showing up again.

‘Let them come.’ Rink was obviously of a similar opinion.

He’d been acting out of character since back at the abandoned mine. His misgivings were all to do with his mistrust of Walter, as we’d already established, but now we were in the thick of things his mindset had adapted to the problem at hand. His blood was up, and he was ready for the challenge. Now that enemy combatants were pursuing us, he was in the zone where it was the two of us against the world. Nothing mattered to him now but defeating all comers. Faced with the number of enemies we must have, there was no one I’d rather have at my side than Rink; after all, he had been the very best that the US Army Rangers could field to Arrowsake. But, I had to remind myself, this wasn’t about us two versus an army of bad guys; this was about safely returning a woman and child home. We couldn’t fight this war on our terms. Where we both preferred to take the battle to Marshall, Regis and Molina, we were forced to play fox to their hounds. We had to run, lead them astray, split their forces, and then – where it was unavoidable – mount a defence.

Back at the gas station at Oasis Carbo, next to a fleapit stretch of rundown houses and derelict businesses, we’d spotted a guy taking far too much interest in us to be coincidence. He was in his mid-twenties, but his sunken, cadaverous features spoke of a tough life and meagre nourishment, and made him look two decades older. He was sitting in a rusted Impala that looked as old and infirm as he did, and had hunched down behind the wheel as we’d drawn up at the gas pumps next to him. His eyes had grown saucer-wide when he’d spotted us in the cab of the Dodge and it wasn’t out of jealousy of our ride. Without pumping gasoline, he pulled away but completed a U-turn a couple of hundred yards further along the highway, where he sat watching us fill our tank. Apparently he wasn’t as poor as he first appeared, as he had enough money to furnish himself with a cell phone.

Fearing he might be desperate enough to please his boss by attempting a hit on us, I readied my SIG as we drove towards him. Yet, if he had a gun, he wasn’t stupid enough to draw it. Either that or his cell phone bill meant he couldn’t also afford ammunition. I was glad not to have to kill him: the poor sap was probably forced into working for Molina in the vain hope of paying off some highly inflated debt. Allowing him to complete his job, we passed him by, and out of the corner of my eye I watched him hunker down so that only his eyes and tufts of unkempt black hair jutted above the window frame. After we were well past, he completed another U-turn and followed us far enough to be able to relate which direction we followed on the highway, then he pulled into the side of the road.

‘By the way that guy just pulled over he was ordered to back off,’ I said.‘My bet is that Molina or Regis are coordinating an attack further along the way and didn’t want him to alert us.’

‘Yup, that’s the way I’d play things, I was him,’ Rink said. When he’s preparing for combat, his southern drawl grows more pronounced.

When I’m facing battle I tend to grow monosyllabic, and nothing was about to change now. We had no idea where, when or how Molina’s men would come at us, so there was little point in debating it. We sank into silence for the next ten minutes or so. Once I caught a glance from Rink. He was smiling: probably because he noticed that the blood had drained from my features. I could feel the tell-tale coldness at the tip of my nose that said I’d adopted my killing face. Usually it perturbs Rink, but now he appeared to have recognised an old friend. His features didn’t look any less stern. He held his chin so rigid that the scar below his bottom lip nigh on glowed in the faint wash of light from the dashboard.

A signpost indicated that we were ten miles from the town of Benjamin Hill. The town’s name was ironic, seeing as we were planning on protecting a child of the same name. I searched the evening horizon for sight of hills, but the valley was wide here and all the landscape appeared to be of the same featureless formula as the sky. The earlier rain had stopped but the clouds still hung low, obscuring moon and stars alike. The only pinpricks of light were from one homestead way off to our right and the wan yellow lights of a train heading towards Hermosillo on our far left.

Actually that wasn’t the entire truth. When I checked the side mirror I caught the twinkle of headlights on high beam a couple miles behind us. I must have grunted or something because Rink said, ‘I saw them.’

‘Maybe you’d best put your foot down.’

‘I’ve already got the pedal to the metal. This is as fast as we get from this old gal.’

Checking the mirrors once more, I could tell that the lights were growing in size and brightness. ‘They’re coming at some rate. It’s a safe bet that it’s Molina’s lot.’

‘Well it sure ain’t Wile E. Coyote chasing Road Runner,’ Rink laughed. ‘Not unless Acme does a line of high-performance vehicles these days.’

‘We can’t outrun them. Likely they’ve seen our tail lights already, so not much hope of hiding from them either. Leaves only one option.’

‘Yup . . . we meet and greet the frog-giggers.’ Rink touched the butt of his gun, unsnapping the safety strap off his holster with a practised flick.

I began looking out for somewhere we could wait, a place that offered more cover than the undulating desert floor around us. Within a half-mile I saw a track running alongside the highway, leading across the desert to a cluster of agricultural sheds behind which towered electric pylons. ‘Can you make it over there?’

Rink made only a cursory inspection of the shoulder of land separating highway from farm track, then veered to the right. The Dodge handled the transition from asphalt to loose soil to hard-packed dirt with little complaint, and we were travelling parallel to our original route. Then the trail swung east and up a shallow incline towards the sheds. Turning so I could peer beneath the plastic shell on the back of the pick-up I saw that the speeding vehicle had covered half the distance between us now. It would be apparent to those inside that we had changed course. ‘We’ve only a couple minutes before they get here.’

‘Long enough,’ Rink reassured me.

The Dodge bounced over the rough terrain as Rink went off-road, cutting across a wedge of ground that doubled as an unofficial garbage dump. A barbed-wire fence marked the southern boundary of the agricultural site, but Rink merely ran right over the top of it and into a yard that fronted the buildings. There was no house evident, only sheds in which were parked various wagons, tractors and machines I didn’t recognise. The sheds were in differing levels of disrepair, some solid and sturdy, others almost rusted through. I took it the place was a shared compound where farmers stored their larger machinery. Chains and padlocks were strung across the entrances of the buildings. They would do little to hamper determined thieves, but judging by the decrepit nature of most of the vehicles it was unlikely a determined thief would bother with them.

Bringing the Dodge to a halt alongside a large tin structure that leaned precariously to one side, Rink baled out and I was only a second or two behind him. Rink made his way round the back of the pick-up and leaned inside, while I checked on the progress of the speeding vehicle. True to form, it too had bumped over the shoulder and on to the farm track: definitely some of Molina’s crew. Way back along the highway was a second set of lights, maybe more than one.

When I looked back, Rink had disappeared as silently as a dissipating spectre. For such a big man he could move with the stealth of a cat. I went for shelter inside the nearest off-kilter shed. As the approaching car bounced up the rutted road its headlights caught me in their glare, before I ducked into the deeper well of shadow inside the shed. As I retreated, the car swung my way. No way could they see me now, so I ran for the back of the shed where a fainter oblong of night marked an open hatch. I went out of it, and ran along the back wall, then kept low as I traversed a narrow strip of land sown with broken glass and indeterminate metal objects: it was apparent that the site was built on reclaimed landfill. Then I entered the next building along and raced for the front, having to swerve round a combine harvester that didn’t look as if it had seen much use in the past couple of decades. The air was full of dust motes and an overriding smell of rust, but I clamped down on the urge to cough. Making it to the front door, I placed myself behind a thick upright support beam. It would offer little protection if any of the men in the car came packing a high-powered rifle, but was better than the thin tin sheets to each side of it.

Remaining in the shadows, I sneaked a peek outside, just as the car – an SUV I recognised from earlier in the evening – powered through the yard and screeched to a dust-kicking halt. Doors sprang open on both sides and disgorged the passengers – three in total. In the next moment, the driver threw the vehicle into reverse and backed wildly away. Out of my line of sight I heard the SUV halt and the driver’s door come open. He was trying to set up a second arc of fire to pen me inside the sheds. Sadly for him, I wasn’t in the one they all assumed.

The three who’d decamped from the vehicle had strung out in a skirmish line, but from the glances they cast at each other, none was too eager to be first to enter the shed I’d recently fled from. They moved from foot to foot, aiming their guns like they were juggling hot rocks. Each was equipped with a handgun, I was happy to note, but I couldn’t see the driver so he might have been more heavily armed.

One of the three shouted a challenge, telling me in heavily accented English to come out. He didn’t sound Mexican though, more Eastern European: one of Marshall’s team of mercenaries. I neglected to reply. The men were nervous. They weren’t keen on the fact that they’d been ordered into a full frontal assault on the shed, leaving them open targets to counter-fire, but glances past my position said they were more afraid of retribution levied by their boss than being cut down by me. The driver must have given a wordless command, because the three suddenly steeled themselves and began blind-shooting at the shed. Their bullets clanged off the machinery inside.

‘Hey you . . . inside the shed. This is your last chance. Come out or we’ll be forced to come inside and kill you.’ It was the Eastern European who’d shouted the challenge. Did he actually expect a reply?

I watched as they moved forward to flank the open doorway: two on one side, one on the other. They were now obscured from view by the angle of the shed wall, but I guessed that a man on each side would triangulate their line of fire while the other entered the shed low. It would be a few seconds before they realised there was no return fire, and a few more after that before they figured that I was either dead from their first volley, hiding deeper inside, or that I’d fled the building and they were wasting their time in there. By the time they computed all that and formulated a new plan the best part of twenty seconds would have passed. It was enough time for me to sneak up behind them and cut them down as they came outside. I couldn’t do that with the driver covering their retreat, though. I had to get him before he got me.