Sherwyn stood and backed toward Donnally.
“Come on Jago,” Sherwyn said. “I’ll protect you. Everybody knows Donnally is crazy.”
Jago shook his head.
Donnally pointed skyward. “He needs a story that matches the video, or at least close enough for the Mexican press. He has to make it look like he rescued Janie from you, then failed in rescuing me. He knows that once I’m dead, Janie will keep her mouth shut to protect Corazon.” Donnally smiled. “But that means I need to be dead first.”
Donnally glanced around the office.
“What do you say we make it look like even more of a fight?” Donnally asked. “Maybe throw some things around?”
He reached behind him and began pulling books off the shelf and spilling them to floor.
“You really are crazy.” Sherwyn’s voice turned desperate. “What are you doing?”
Donnally grabbed Sherwyn by his collar and shoulder and threw him toward Jago, then grabbed the book he’d hollowed out the day before.
He ripped it open and reached inside.
It wasn’t the tape recorder Lalo’s friend had thought he’d smuggled in, but the. 32 cal revolver Donnally had bought from Beto.
Donnally fired once, hitting Jago in the shoulder. Jago fell backward, pulling Sherwyn with him.
The cop’s gun discharged, the explosion muffled by Sherwyn’s body.
Donnally ducked behind the desk. He raised his head in time to see Jago push Sherwyn away, then point his gun not at Donnally’s forehead, but at the thin panel covering the leg space. Donnally dived to the side. Jago’s shots punctured the desk and blew out the window behind it. Donnally rolled, fixed the gun in a double-handed grip, and kept firing until Jago stopped moving.
The helicopter’s motor whined as it spun away.
Only then, in the silence that followed, did Donnally feel his hip joint raging. He clenched his teeth and pushed himself to his feet.
A groan came from Sherwyn.
Donnally limped over and kicked the gun out of Jago’s hand.
Sherwyn looked up, his palm pressed against the wound in his chest. His face was pale, draining of blood.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Donnally lied. “Unless you bleed out.”
Panic twisted Sherwyn’s face.
Donnally poked at Sherwyn’s ribs with his shoe.
“Maybe I’ll keep you conscious for as long as I can so you can watch it happen.”
Sherwyn grimaced, then squeezed out, “What do you want?”
Donnally retrieved the tape recorder from his backpack in the closet.
“I want a confession.” He then pulled out his cell phone, punched in 066, the Mexican version of 911, and showed Sherwyn the screen. “As soon as I’m satisfied, I’ll press ‘send’ and an ambulance will come to take you to the hospital.”
Donnally thought for a moment. He needed a way for Sherwyn’s words to live on in the world he would soon leave behind.
“How about you call it your dying declaration so you can’t retract it later?”
He then kneeled down and switched on the recorder, knowing that the last sound on the tape wouldn’t be the siren of a rescue, but Sherwyn’s death rattle.
“After that, explain who El Mandamas is and how he fits in.”
For the next three minutes, Donnally focused more on his questions than on the content of Sherwyn’s answers, for he’d already played his last card: He’d threatened the absolute.
At the same time, he knew from the terror in Sherwyn’s eyes that he was a man who feared death more than shame, so Donnally knew he’d get at least some of the truth.
The whump-whump of the helicopter increased in volume as it once again approached the hacienda.
Donnally glanced toward the window, then looked back. Sherwyn had fallen silent. Dead. Donnally felt the satisfaction of knowing he’d called it right. Sherwyn wouldn’t have lived long enough for an ambulance to have arrived anyway.
Donnally flicked off the tape recorder, then walked to the window and squinted into the rising sun to try to see into the cockpit.
He realized what was wrong. He’d never seen a CNN helicopter before. They always got their news feeds from local stations.
The machine rotated and the passenger side came into view. The camera operator lowered the video camera. Donnally recognized the flowing white hair before he recognized the face, then felt the thrill of weightless flight, as if the floor beneath his feet had fallen away, leaving him hovering, light-headed.
His father grinned and waved.
It was all an illusion, a substitute for a real world that wouldn’t or couldn’t act.
Donnally smiled back.
For the first time in both their lives, the old man really had shot the dawn.
Chapter 63
Janie ran toward Donnally when he arrived at the front gate. He embraced her, then pointed at Corazon crossing the street and held up his palm, telling her to keep the gathering crowd outside the hacienda.
He grabbed Janie’s arm and they raced back up to Sherwyn’s office.
Janie gasped and covered her mouth as she stood in the doorway staring at the bodies, the blood of the dead now intermingled in a dark pool between them.
Donnally retrieved his 9mm from the floor, then wiped off the. 32 and put it into Sherwyn’s hand. It was better to leave a confusing crime scene than one that pointed to Donnally.
He crouched down and rubbed Sherwyn’s gun hand against Jago’s to transfer some powder residue, then flopped it into the blood.
He straightened up and looked around the office.
“Let’s grab whatever we can before the police get here.”
They searched Sherwyn’s desk, filling Donnally’s backpack and a cardboard box he found in the closet with the doctor’s laptop and every piece of paper they could find. Phone records. Bank records. Anything they thought might expose the network of men who sought the services of White Sands.
Janie picked up the hollowed-out book lying on the floor.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“I had Lalo arrange to smuggle in an extra gun in case I got caught breaking in. It’s got my fingerprints on it. Take it.”
After they searched the file cabinet, Donnally called his father’s cell phone. The helicopter rumbled in the background.
“Where are you?” Donnally asked.
“Are you okay?”
“I guess you could say that I’m healthy as a sunrise.”
“A what?”
“I’ll explain it later.”
“We’re on our way to land,” his father said, “so we can strip the lettering off this thing before we return it to the rental company. And then we’ll catch a charter flight back to the States before anyone figures out who we are.”
Donnally heard the scream of police sirens, rising in volume like incoming mortar.
“How soon can you get back here?” Donnally asked.
“What do you need?”
“I’m going to leave my backpack and a box of documents on the roof, on top of the air conditioner. Can you get close enough to snag them?”
Donnally heard a quick interchange between his father and the pilot, then his father’s voice.
“We’ll figure it out. How soon?”
“Two minutes.”
“I’ll have them waiting for you when you get back to California.”
Chapter 64
But the twisted expression on the angular face of Captain Joaquin Felix sitting in his office an hour later told Donnally that their going home might not happen for a very long time.
Or it would happen by sunset.
Donnally had recognized the captain’s name when he’d introduced himself in the doorway of Sherwyn’s office at White Sands. He was one of the government officials whom Corazon had accused in the press of protecting sex traffickers.
Felix folded his arms on his desk and looked first at Janie, then at Donnally.
“Officer Cruz was not the self-sacrificing type. I can’t imagine him risking his skin to rescue anyone.” Felix’s face relaxed. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Picking bodies clean of valuables afterwards, now that’s something Cruz would do. It is not by chance that his nickname was La Buitre. The Vulture.”