THE MEXICAN HOLIDAYS HAD PREVENTED Eugene Dowd from checking the prearranged mail drop for three days now, and he resented it.
Mazatlán was a pretty town, but the concept of “silent night” was lost on the locals. The Christmas Eve street party had nearly deafened him. Live bands, fireworks, noisy crowds in the Mercado, after which everything shut up tight for Christmas Day. The mail drop was just an ordinary storefront mailbox service on a side street near the Centro Histórico, where Eugene was supposed to check a certain box number before proceeding to Antofagasta. But the business had been consistently closed, nothing to see but a locked door and a cardboard sign on which the words CERRADO POR NAVIDAD were printed in green crayon.
So he had been closeted in a three-story tourist hotel with Beth, Leo Beck, and what he continued to think of as the two kids, Cassie and Thomas. (Cassie wasn’t much younger than Beth, but her flat face and unimpressive figure made her look like a child to Eugene.) He shared his room with Beth, which helped pass the empty hours, but Beth’s charms had already begun to wear thin: she was clingy, easily frightened, and not half as smart as she liked to pretend.
Today Mazatlán was finally open for business. Eugene left the
hotel at ten in the morning and began walking toward the historical part of town, Leo Beck tagging along behind him. Eugene would have preferred to do this alone, but Leo, whose poorly-concealed hostility toward Eugene probably reflected the haste with which he had been dumped by Beth, had insisted on coming with him. And since Leo was Werner Beck’s son—it would be a mistake to forget that—Eugene had grudgingly agreed.
The street was crowded with the local golf-cart taxis called pulmonias, most of them ferrying tourists to and from the Zona Dorada. The sky was faultlessly blue above the brick-and-stucco storefronts, the temperature 70 degrees Fahrenheit and gliding steadily higher. The sheer pleasantness of the day was an invitation to relax, which Eugene was careful to decline. Everything he had seen and done in the Atacama, plus Werner Beck’s lectures on the nature of what he called the hypercolony, had been Eugene’s education in the operating principles of the world. All the pious high-school bullshit about the Century of Peace had been revealed for what it was: as artificial as a plastic nativity scene and as hollow as a split piñata. The world was peaceful the way a drunken coed passed out at a frat party was peacefuclass="underline" it was the peace that facilitated the fucking. These kids he was traveling with, they claimed to know that; but did they? No. Not the way he knew it.
They were within a block of the mail drop when Leo grabbed Eugene’s arm and said, “Wait, hold on….”
“What is it?”
Leo had come to a full stop and was squinting back down the avenue at the traffic of tourists and locals. Eugene hated being made conspicuous, especially in a strange place when he was in a state of high vigilance, and passing pedestrians were already craning their necks in an instinctive effort to see what ever this excitable turista was gawking at. He wished Leo had inherited even a fraction of his father’s sensible caution.
“Thought I saw someone,” Leo said, sounding a little sheepish now.
“Yeah? Who?”
“I don’t know. A face. A familiar face.”
“Familiar how? Someone you recognize?”
“No. I guess not.” Leo shrugged with obvious embarrassment. “Nobody I could name. Just a feeling, like, you know, I’ve seen that guy somewhere before….”
“A guy?”
“If I had to guess, I’d say an American. Not much of a tan. Forty or fifty years old.”
“Okay,” Eugene said. “I’ll take that under advisement.” Probably it meant nothing. Probably Leo was just nervous. But Eugene was carrying a pistol—the same pistol he had taken from Leo before they crossed the border, and which Eugene had brought into Mexico in a concealed compartment built into the dash of the van. It was tucked into a sling he had made from torn pieces of an old shirt attached to his belt, hidden under the XL tee he had worn to obscure its presence, and he was conscious of its weight.
Eugene’s father had taught him to shoot. The Dowds were farmers from way back, well-acquainted with long guns, but Eugene’s father had also been fascinated by pistols and he’d been an experienced target-shooter. He had owned a fully-registered antique Colt revolver, which he had treasured and which he had eventually used to take his own life after Eugene’s mother lost her fight with pancreatic cancer. Eugene blamed his father’s grief for the suicide, not the weapon. Eugene felt a sentimental attachment to the gun and wished he had inherited it; but he had been in Chile when his father used it to blow a half-dollar-sized hole in his left temple, and the Colt had been handed over to the police for lawful disposal. At the moment Eugene didn’t even have a license to carry. He had applied back in Amarillo, but by that time there were too many DUIs on his record. The laws around gun possession were annoyingly strict even in Texas.
The fact was, Eugene had come back from the Atacama kind of fucked up. How do you process an experience like the one he’d had in the Chilean desert? Finding both his parents dead, his mother of cancer and his father of .45-caliber self-administered euthanasia, had only compounded the problem. For a while it had seemed to Eugene that he was fated to end up a chronic drunk, pissing away his dole money in a secondhand Fleetwood trailer home, and that had been unsettlingly okay with him. The unexpected advent of Werner Beck was what changed everything. Or, no, not Beck himself, though Beck’s can-do attitude was bracing—it was the prospect of taking action, of recalibrating the mysteries of the Atacama as a personal attack and bending himself in the direction of revenge. Of going back to Chile, not as a victim but as a soldier. With other soldiers beside him and a suitable weapon in his hand. That was another promise Beck had made: there would be a weapon, one to which the green-on-the-inside-men and the spiders-with-faces were uniquely vulnerable.
He turned the corner from the avenida into the narrower calle where the mail drop was located. The stores here were doing brisk business, clothes racks and laden tables crowding the sidewalk, catering to tourists who had missed the dense knot of such establishments in the Zona Dorada. Eugene was still rattled by what Leo had said about a familiar face, and he moved cautiously, peering into shop windows as if he were debating the purchase of a seashell necklace or a picture postcard. Windows were useful because their reflections let him scan the passing crowd without being noticed. Leo shifted impatiently from foot to foot as Eugene conducted this methodical surveillance, but that was okay, it was plausible behavior for a young guy who had been, say, dragooned into a shopping expedition when he’d rather be down at the beach. Across the street and half a block away, the CERRADO sign had vanished from the door of the mail drop.
Eugene was about to turn away from the shop-window reflection when he caught sight of someone moving through the throng of tourists with suspicious directness and determination.
The man wore jeans, a denim shirt with the sleeves turned up, a sweat-stained DIABLOS ROJOS baseball cap, and a pair of black-rimmed glasses. None of that distinguished him in any meaningful way from the other locals Eugene had seen. It was his trajectory—a straight line aimed at Leo Beck—and his body language that set off Eugene’s alarms. Not least, the way the man held his right arm stiff at his side. “Leo,” Eugene said.
“What?”
“Leo, you might want to—oh, shit!”
The object the man had been concealing under his right arm was a long-bladed knife. He brought it out and broke into a sprint, closing the distance between them with alarming speed. Eugene whirled, fumbling under his shirt for his pistol.
Meanwhile Leo was still staring at him. Eugene used his free hand to give the kid a shove. Leo stumbled to the left, which was good, because the assailant was within cutting range now and had started a slashing movement that would otherwise have opened Leo’s belly. Eugene managed to haul the handgun out of his trousers and disable the safety just as the man in the baseball cap turned toward him. The tip of the knife found him, a glancing slash that rebounded from his hip bone and felt like the touch of a frigid finger. Eugene leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger.