I recognized him as soon as I saw him sitting there at a rear table in the Juarez barroom. He was not only alone at the small table, but he also gave the impression that he was alone in the crowded room.
I don’t know exactly why. Something about the way he sat there drinking sotol out of a thick water glass, remote and withdrawn; the arrogant set of his wide shoulders that disdained the shabby clothes he wore; the cheapness of the rotgut he was drinking. It was in the cold, measuring quality of the blue eyes beneath shaggy brows.
They seemed to look through a man, past the confines of the room.
That’s what I remember about him now, as I look back on the scene, but at the moment I wasn’t very objective about his appearance. All I could think of was that he was alone. I remember thinking that it was destined to be like that with him always, that he had chosen a lonely path for himself so long as he lived.
Murder does set a man apart from his fellow-man.
I recognized him from his picture in the paper. He had strangled a girl named Lola in El Paso the night before, and the American police had a good description of him and were searching for him through the dark alleys of El Paso while he sat alone across the Border guzzling solo! in a Mexican dive.
That was back when extradition was more an empty word than a reality, and a man could leave a lot of fears behind him when he crossed the Rio Grande. But there was some law in Juarez even in those days, and you never could tell when a Mex cop might discover his conscience, or a couple of U.S. dicks might slip over in plain clothes and yank him back without due process of law.
Not that the killing had been important enough to arouse a lot of public indignation. Lola wasn’t the sort to get people excited about her murder. Just a crib girl on one of the dim side streets near the river. She’d been living with this guy for months, supporting him with money she earned from other men, and I suppose she finally got tired of it. But she made the mistake of telling him she was through while they were alone, and there was no one to stop him. So he strangled her and took a few dollars from the top of her stocking and beat it across the river before her body was found.
There were pictures of the dead girl in the paper, too. I’d known Lola for a long time, back when she hadn’t looked like that, and I’d been nagged all day by memories of her as she’d been then.
But that’s something just between Lola and me. Hell, I could remember the time when I was sore enough to kill her myself. Years back, when she first started down toward where she ended. I made a fool of myself that time. Lola had a nasty way of rubbing a man the wrong way.
That’s why I felt like I did about her killer sitting there in the saloon with a shoulder-holstered gun bulging his coat, probably without getaway money, and wondering how long Juarez would remain safe for him.
Remembering Lola, I knew I had to get him out of Juarez. The country south of the Border is a tough one without money or a job. I couldn’t just step up and offer him either. Not without overplaying my hand and maybe telling him what I knew about Lola and why I was making the offer.
Our train was pulling out at midnight. Just a couple of hours later. I had a feeling I’d regret it all my life if I left him sitting there like that, knowing what I did about the set-up.
Another thing I knew about the guy was the fact that he had once been a construction man. A good one, from all reports. A hightop rigger with all the savvy and nerve that job calls for. But you can’t handle sky-cables and a load of liquor at the same time, so he’d given up the cables.
It gave me a queer feeling way down in my belly to see him sitting there twiddling a water glass of sotol in his big, scarred hands, with a gun bulging his coat while he waited for whatever was going to happen. Hands that were muscled and calloused from cable work, and that had choked the life out of Lola just last night.
I suppose that had something to do with my feeling about him. Construction men have a personal pride in themselves and the men they work with. Maybe it sounds corny, but the real building stiff is like that underneath the hardboiled pose he shows to the world. It’s a tough, dangerous profession, and a man doesn’t stay in it long unless he has the absolute trust of his coworkers.
Take my gang — the three men drinking at the bar with me that night in Juarez: Larry Wheeler, Benny Arentz, and Walter Drake. We’d been together four years, and there had hardly been a day on any job that one of us hadn’t trusted his life to one of the others. Of course, we were a special sort of gang. I guess you’d call us trouble-shooters. Each one of us a specialist in his own line, and together we made a team that could whip any job flung at us.
Sure, that’s bragging, but we had a record to brag about. Larry Wheeler was past fifty, stringy as whipcord, bald and sarcastic. He knew more about concrete than Mr. Portland himself. He knew rock and water analysis, when to increase the water content to combat the solvency of aggregates, and tricks with reinforcing steel that let the rest of us forget all about waiting for the stuff to take an initial set.
My rigger was Benny Arentz. He had the shoulders of a Percheron on top of a short, grotesquely thin body. He had long arms, and the shoulder muscles flowed down into them and on to big hands that could reave a six-place block on the end of a steel cable while he hung by his knees from a strut three hundred feet above the ground and whipping thirty degrees each way in a tropical wind.
Benny had come up from the oil fields, and the only thing wrong with him was women. He was ugly enough to have to keep on proving to us and the world that he was irresistible to the ladies. On the job he was all right, but on a city street he was as hard to hold back as a stud horse.
Walter Drake was our powder man. He was a graduate of the Copper Queen in Bisbee, had worked all over the world, and had once lifted fifteen thousand tons of rock off one side of the Khyber Pass and deposited it where they wanted it down the slope. He knew all about rock formation and fissures and faults and bearing strata, and what three and a half sticks of forty percent would do in a drill hole.
Me? I was just the boss. I’ve got an engineering degree some place, but I managed to forget I had it twenty years ago. With Larry and Walter and Benny doing the work there wasn’t much bossing to be done. Every once in a while I got an idea, and generally it worked. More luck than anything else, and I always knew that some day I would run into one that was even too tough for me. Like the one we were headed south to look at when we stopped off in Juarez.
A rush job that had brought us up in a hurry from one of the Keys off Florida where we were fooling with a little problem of setting up hurricane-proof oil-drilling rigs. It was back in the days before the Elephant Butte dam above El Paso pulled all the flood water out of the Rio Grande, and in the spring the boundary river had a way of swelling to an unmanageable torrent through the big canyon below the Big Bend. There was an International Highway cutting across from Burnsville to Alixican that both Mexico and the United States had been pushing toward the river from both directions, and everything was set for big doings with speeches by both Presidents, and stuff like that, when the two countries were joined by the highway in just a month.
No one knew when the spring floods would come, but when they did it was a cinch there wouldn’t be much bridge building across that river until the waters subsided. No one had thought about that, apparently, until just a few days previously, when the water started rising.
Our job was to throw the bridge across before the floods got too high. Maybe in a day. Maybe a week. Or maybe not for a month. It was just chance that we stopped at Juarez between trains — a freak of fate that put us in the saloon for a few drinks that night with Lola’s murderer.