The Creed of Violence (8 page)

They moved ahead again with the steady assurance of those who
had imperiled men before. He watched their stalk play out like a ritual.
There was a stark grace to their configured tactics, a calm John Lourdes
did not possess.

The meeting house stood against the night sky. Its hollowed windows and huge gaping frame that once housed double doors the epitome of emptiness.

John Lourdes scanned that rutted wash where Rawbone had gone.
He listened with dire intensity, but there was only the wind through dry
brush like flintstrikings. A vein in his temple pulsed vengefully.

When they reached the meeting house door the men fanned out.
They pressed in close to the adobe wall and near blended away. The
one from the roadhouse raised a hand to make ready and as he did John Lourdes also reached out his hand where it hovered in dead space just
above a detonator. He could feel the hand trembling all the way up into
the sinew of his neck.

Even though John Lourdes was waiting and ready, their charge
into the hollows happened so fast he froze. The walls flashed with the
thunder light of their weapons. Arterials of smoke and powdered cloth
leapt from the bedrolls. But there was not a cry, not a breath of movement that declared life was being taken.

The bedrolls lay there like the lifeless bait they were. The men understood immediately and scattered. It was only then, at the last, before
all advantage had been lost, that John Lourdes found himself. With the
flat of his hand he drove down the plunger.

OHN LOURDES HAD set the charge by the meeting house wall, burrowing dynamite into the sand, while Rawbone used a clump of
sage to brush away any signs of that long run of wire to the detonator.

There was a momentary harnessing of raw power. The front of the
building was torn asunder and disappeared in an avalanche of smoke.
The concussion echoed far out into the hills. The men were flung like
paltry cloth dolls and from the sky a storm of adobe and rock hailed
across that plat.

John Lourdes rose now with his rifle ready and started into that
smoky destruction, when far to his right there came the rapid action of
an automatic. He came about and knelt, the rifle anchored up on his
shoulder. Through the settling dust came a man running. He held his
back and was calling in desperation to his friends. He stumbled and his
boots dragged up a rising trail of dust. He collapsed to his knees and that is where Rawbone ran him down. He came out of the dark leaping
from the rocks and put two more shots into the sagging body, which
lurched forward at the last.

He sprinted past the son, yelling, "Make sure they're all dead!" He
kept on through the haze. "I'll take it to the road and introduce myself
to any fool they might have left with the horses."

John Lourdes walked the destruction. It was otherworldly. He
could not fathom truly being there. The smell of charred clothes and
flesh tainted the air and he worried it might poison him in some unknown way. He came upon the first, who lay on his side. There was
nothing below the upper lip but a bloody shirt collar. Then he noted
what he thought to be an odd necklace dangling down the man's face
before he realized it was an eye loosed of its socket and hanging by a
long thread of muscle.

The next man lay on his stomach. John Lourdes knelt and eased
the body over. The dark and lifeless face he came to see belonged to
the man who'd faced him down in Juarez, the father of the girl Teresa.
He stood. He stared down at this stranger on the other side of death.
Questions abounded.

Pilings of wood on the meeting house floor had caught fire. The air
was singed with windblown ash. John Lourdes had to cover his face as
he turned toward the last man, the one from the roadhouse.

He sat against a backdrop of adobe and rotted timber beams. He
was not dead, though he should have been as the shape of his head was
hideously altered.

From up the cart path came a headway of trampling hooves.
Riderless mounts plunged headlong from the shadows hounded by gunshots and the gritty musculature of a motorcycle engine. Rawbone had
herded up the horses. He yelled out as he wheeled in the motorcycle,
"There was a last one down by the main road."

Cinders from the fire were now a burning rain everywhere and
Rawbone took to using his derby to swipe them from his eyes as he
joined up with John Lourdes. "We better board up and be on with it. If
any of these sparks find their way to-"

The man from the roadhouse sat staring up at them. The father
squatted. The man was gibbering away, yet there looked to be in his
eyes a degree of consciousness and understanding. In his hand was the
flashlight. Rawbone slipped it loose. He switched on the light and put it
to the man's face. It mooned out of the dark. Blood seeped from a crack
in the skull along the forehead. A bit of brain matter protruded from
the wound, looking like the marbled head of a snail.

"He's leaking oil, Mr. Lourdes."

Rawbone stood.

"It's your watch, Mr. Lourdes."

The son understood. It was either finish him or forget him, as he
was for the wolves. The father waited. He held his derby against the
onslaught of scorched ash and heat.

"The fire, Mr. Lourdes. One spark could send us off."

He saw something pass over John Lourdes's face. A brief moment
of the soul perhaps, of what had to be. It was not a look of indecision, but rather something more reflective of true human reluctance, or
even a tragic pity. It mattered none. Rawbone had no place for either
and hated each equally. He reached for his belted automatic, but John
Lourdes grabbed his wrist and restrained him. Now, the father prided
himself on strong arms, all the more so for a man his size, and he felt in
the son's grip the same pure hard strength.

"Strip each body of everything in their pockets," said John
Lourdes. "Wallets, any scrap of paper. Leave nothing. Collect it for
me. Saddlebags too."

"Mr. Lourdes ..."

The son ordered him again in no uncertain terms and the father
walked off. "Why don't I do that, Mr. Lourdes. That'll give you some
time to negotiate the matter at hand with your conscience."

A moment later there was a gunshot that caused the horses to startle and scatter. The father turned. The impact had driven the man to the
earth, where charred cinders blew over him. With a streak of pure mean
Rawbone mocked what the dead man had said down at the roadhouse.
"The way I see you by that truck, looking off to the hills ... you're a
real climber, son."

FEW LAST SCATTERED sparks blew from that barren upland
as the truck descended to the road. They had it rigged up and
strapped down with the trappings of war. They'd even lashed the motorcycle, like some trophy from a battle of yore, to the truckbed.

It was a matter now of the crossing into Mexico. The main bridges
over the Rio Grande with their immigration agents and customs officers posed too much of a threat and so were out of the question. And
finding shallows you would gamble a truck might navigate would be a
marvel of stupidity. But Rawbone knew of a rope ferry south of El Paso
near the old Socorro Mission. The river had changed course there near
a half-century before, and was a place of isolated sandbars and lonely
stretches of shoreline.

They drove through the chilly hours before dawn. A smoky oil
lamp hung from the roof frame above the son's head. The father's upturned derby rested on the cab seat between both men. It was filled
to the brim with what Rawbone had scavenged from the dead as John
Lourdes had ordered. Rawbone watched as John Lourdes meticulously
studied each personal item, every bit of identification, holding them up
to the trundling light, eyes squinting from the grainy smoke to better
read ink that had faded with wear. He would then write certain details
down in a pocket notebook he carried. His concentration stayed exact
and his hand steady even as the truck pitched and rose on that worthless road.

It seemed to Rawbone he himself did not even exist during these
hours. He was, in fact, left to his own private maelstroms and outside
the fitted plan. This fed a sense of disadvantage and that always left him
uncertain and wary. "Why all the looking and writing, Mr. Lourdes?"

He glanced up from his notebook. "I noticed," he said, "there's no
paper money in that derby of yours."

"You didn't order me to grub the dead for your salary."

"I suppose you left it to the buzzards as a charitable donation."

"As a matter of fact, my notion was to buy you something when
we're done. In memorial of our time together."

John Lourdes went back to his notebook.

"You didn't answer me, Mr. Lourdes."

"I didn't answer."

"That much I know."

John Lourdes looked up again. He slipped the pencil behind his
ear, set the notebook in his lap. He began with the girl at the fumigation
building, then following her into Mexico and sketching in a series of
strange incidents that took him to that morning at the Mills Building.

Rawbone leaned back and scratched at his cheek with the edge of
a thumb. "If I ever meet her, I'll have to remember to thank her for the
introduction."

"One of the dead back on that mountain. The Mexican. That was
her father."

That detail was like a stone dropped into a pond of still water and
the ripples it sent through Rawbone's mind. He said, "I see now."

"Do you?"

"If you want to get to the heart of something, cut away."

John Lourdes had been thinking out how the dead back up on that
mountain came to know about him and the truck. It seemed apparent. Mr. Simic and his associates had come upon an alternate way to
resolve their unfortunate problem-they notified the people they were
supplying that the truck and its cache of munitions had been taken.
Rawbone leaned into the steering wheel and listened with unsettling
intensity. They had to know the truck had been taken somewhere between Carlsbad and El Paso, so it was likely the munitions were hidden
away somewhere not so easily discovered. With only one road between
the two cities, how difficult would it be to watch for a truck painted up
with lettering like the top of a birthday cake, well—

He was staring toward the dark mesas that stood between him and
his immunity when John Lourdes said, "There's something else that
you ... we ... need to consider."

"Have at it, Mr. Lourdes."

"Any advantage you ... we ... had is gone. When some of theirs
don't return and you come driving up with that truck-"

"It will sure make for conversation, won't it?"

"You know where we're going in Juarez and who we're to talk
to. That was part of the deal. Alright. But my responsibility is to discover the names and/or identities of anyone and everyone involved or
connected to this criminal enterprise. That's why I had you grab up
all those men's personals." He held up the notebook. "That's what
I'm writing here. That's why I'm telling you all this now. Those dead back up there in the mountains will have some say on what is going to
happen when we reach Juarez."

When John Lourdes had his say, he went back to his work without
so much as another word, leaving Rawbone with a reality for which
there was no apparent solution. He took a cigarette from its pack. He
struck a match on the steering column. His mind was being drawn into
the unseen ahead, and the survivor in him began to coolly plot what
would best serve him.

"Are you a schooled man, Mr. Lourdes?"

John Lourdes finished what he was noting and then looked up. The
question went to the flashpoint of his life. "Oil boy in the roundhouses
at thirteen. Railroad detective for the Santa Fe at twenty. Then the BOI.
A few night classes in between."

"All that with only a notepad and some native instinct."

"You're never at a loss, are you?"

"I've misfired a time or two."

"But you're always right there and ready to help someone
drown."