They came back out. Inside, candles had been knocked over, probably by Patricio in his mad flight. Now a blaze had started — that old wooden floor and anything else that would burn. One of the men stood guard a dozen feet from the door with a pistol in his hand. The other took a foldup cellular phone from his pocket and extended the antenna. Soon he was talking into it in low tones.
The fire spread. The interior of the church became a mass of flames. The one on guard put away his pistol and took out a cigar. He made a rude joke and the one with the cellular phone laughed.
She rose to her feet, not caring whether she was seen or not. She was trembling in every limb and tears of anger and despair coursed down her face. He was in there. He was dying — and there was nothing she could do about it.
Then a hand grabbed her wrist and pulled her back down into the shadow, and another hand closed over her mouth so she wouldn’t cry out.
“It’s me,” a familiar voice whispered. “Did you think I didn’t have a plan?”
Then added: “I just wasn’t sure it would work.”
She saw the madrinas one last time. It was in the side mirror of a bus idling away in the Plaza Municipal. They were seated halfway back, her in a scarf that hid her hair and him in a funny hat that made him look like a turisto.
The madrinas had just come out of an expensive restaurant and were hitching up their pants and lighting cigars. They’d done their job — hey? Now it was time to enjoy themselves.
From where Patricio was seated he couldn’t see them, and she didn’t tell him that they were there. On the hike into town he’d explained about the business of the church. How he’d deliberately slashed the palm of his left hand — it had a white bandage on it now — so he could leave splotches of blood where they’d see them. “So they’d think they’d wounded me,” he’d said. Then he’d huddled like a man in pain at the top of the broken basement steps, waiting for them.
“Those big-caliber pistols — they’ve got a kick. It’s very hard to hit anything with them more than a few feet away. So I took a chance and didn’t roll backward till they fired. And at the same time I banged down the steps I yanked a line I’d rigged and the candles went over like ninepins. I’d poured paraffin from my camp stove all over the wooden floor and right away there was a terrific blaze. Those damned madrinas didn’t know what happened. They thought they’d put hot lead in me and that if I wasn’t dead yet the flames would soon make me that way. But the Zapatistas had made an escape shaft and I used it to get out of there. I did to them what my father had done to me and my mother. Made myself look dead and then walked off in my own shoes.”
He showed her something else that related to his father. “The damned fool signed his name to my birth certificate. He must have been drunk at the time because he surely never meant to acknowledge me. And a year ago, thanks to that, I obtained this thing.” An Irish passport with his real name in it — the name that father he despised had given him. Patrick O’Hearn — the same as his own.
“We can go anywhere with this.” He laughed. “Even Ireland itself.”
“But what would we do there?”
“We’d do something. Isn’t that enough?”
The bus began moving. She glanced a final time into the outside mirror. The madrinas were still standing on the sidewalk with their cigars. One of them had removed his sunglasses, and his eyes were narrowed against the glare. He looked like a well-groomed rat blinded by the sun.
The Safest Little Town in Texas
by Jeremiah Healy
© 1998 by Jeremiah Healy
A former professor at The New England School of Law, Jeremiah Healy is also the author of the long-running series of novels featuring private eye John Francis Cuddy. Readers who want to keep up with the Cuddy series won’t want to miss The Only Good Lawyer (Pocket 3/98). Mr. Healy will also be making a departure from his usual form this summer with the release of his legal thriller The Stalking of Sheilah Quinn. (St. Martin’s Press).
Alone in the stolen ’92 Ford, Polk Greshen checked the rearview mirror. No cars behind him, period, much less one with bubble-lights on its roof. First good omen since he’d killed that gas-station attendant over the Oklahoma line.
“Damn-fool beaner,” thought Polk, focusing back on the road in front of him. “I tell him, ‘All right, I’ll be needing your cash,’ and he makes like, ‘Señor, no hablo the English.’ Only the beaner’d have to be blind not to see the nine-millimeter in my hand, me waving it at the register. What’d he think I meant? But no, the man has to be a hero, try for the | tire iron he had on a shelf behind some oil cans. Well, now he ain’t never gonna ‘hablo the English.’ ” Or anything else, far as that goes.
Polk had boosted the Ford from a movie-house parking lot five miles J from the station, so he figured it was still a pretty safe vehicle in terms of being connected to the killing. Radio didn’t work, but the air did — praise the Lord. Also, he’d found a set of keys under the driver’s seat that fit. “Damn-fool owner, might’s well leave them sticking in the ignition.” Only thing was, the Oklahoma police could have the license plate on their hot list by now, and Polk was pretty sure those computer things could run the tags on any car they stopped.
So after killing the attendant, Polk had driven real conservative-like, getting on U.S. 283 south and crossing the Red River into Texas north of Vernon. Maybe an Oklahoma stolen car wouldn’t get onto the hot list for Texas, and he could always hole up with a cousin lived just outside Hobbs, New Mexico, which should be due southwest from where he was right now. “About got enough money from the beaner’s till to see me through gas and food, long’s I don’t go hog-wild on things.” Polk also figured it was smart to stick to the smaller roads, and so far he’d been right.
Until the Ford’s goddamn oil light came on.
Polk used the heel of his hand to wham at the light, but that didn’t do any good. Pulling over to the side of the road, he got out. The heat was like standing on top of a griddle, but Polk didn’t plan to be in it long. He went to the trunk of the car, using the key that didn’t fit the ignition to open the lid. A rat-eared blanket, two wrenches, and... a bird cage? Would you look at that.
But no oil. Figures.
Polk slammed down the lid. “Should of stole some from that beaner back at the gas station. It was an omen, for sure, him having that tire iron by the cans there.”
The air frying his lungs, Polk tried to guestimate where he was at. Hour or more east of Lubbock, probably. But he hadn’t seen a soul along the road, not a house, nothing for quite a while. Looking west, there seemed to be some kind of signpost only half a mile on.