Hood put the vehicle into park, then he and Luna hoisted their weapons from the back and checked their ammunition and placed the combat shotgun and the automatic M16 between them, barrels down on either side of the transmission hump, the butts resting against their seats.
Around the next bend, four vultures raised their pink faces from a dead man on the side of the road. They looked at Hood irritably but didn’t move. Hood drove the Tahoe forward and they hopped away and managed to take flight. Hood and Luna got out and saw that the man was a soldier and he had been shot several times and beheaded, but they saw no head. Flies buzzed in the still heat, endlessly repositioning themselves on the man. One quarter mile closer to town they came upon two more soldiers similarly killed and mutilated. Still seated, Hood looked down at the bloating bodies, and their smell mixed with the sweet scent of the Batopilas River nearby, and these smells and the heat tried to sicken him.
He drove. Then there was a steep descent and another tight switchback that straightened to reveal the three heads on the left side of the road, the faces eaten by the birds but still with expressions somehow forlorn and regretful. The vultures stood blinking twenty feet away in the scant shade of an agave.
“There’s no excuse for this,” said Hood. “What does this signify? Who is it for?”
“Us.”
Just outside the village, another six soldiers lay dead and piled upon the road. The vultures stood atop them, fanning their wings in the heat. Hood saw that the men had been dragged and left there as a roadblock, and he wondered if the remaining five were blocking the road on the other side of Batopilas. They were abundantly shot but not mutilated.
Hood and Luna stepped from the Tahoe and together dragged three bodies to the side of the road so they could drive past. Hood thought his chances of dying in an ambush right there and then were very good. He was willing to strike a protective deal with any god or devil who would offer him one, but he heard no voices in this place or in his heart and he felt forsaken.
Two mules stared at them as they entered the village. In Batopilas plaza, two ancient men watched them from a bench. Their faces were dark and wrinkled and they squinted at the Tahoe as if facing a storm. One of the men lifted his hand and pointed them onward down the street of river stones. A woman in a bright-yellow-and-orange shawl refused to look at them, then scuttled quickly around a corner. There was a small store open and two Zetas with AK-47s stood on either side of the door and there were two more across the street outside a carnicería. They were young and dressed in uniforms of solid green, with black boots and black vests and helmets, and they had emblems of some kind on their shirt sleeves up by the shoulder. They bulged with ammunition. The Zetas stared at them with bored expressions, but their fingers were inside the trigger guards of their weapons. One gestured slightly with his gun and Hood drove. Outside the police office was a streetlamp and from it hung by his neck was a man with a badge pinned to his shirt pocket. His face was black and his eyes bulged on stems like a crab’s and his neck was stretched obscenely, and beneath his dangling boots a black straw cowboy hat sat upturned on the sidewalk. Another Zeta stood in the open doorway of the office and he pointed his gun at Hood’s face and tracked him in the sights as Hood drove by. He looked sixteen. He wore a pendant bearing the image of a bearded man, Jesus Malverde, Hood knew, patron saint of narcos.
“And he takes his bullets to Malverde shrines to get them blessed,” said Luna. “So they fly straight and kill his enemies. And Malverde blesses his shipments, too, for safe passage to the United States. Look how eager he is to kill. It is his passionate desire.”
Outside a cantina at the far end of town a slender, older Zeta waved Hood over and told him to park. Two more men came from the cantina with their guns lowered, and Hood now understood Luna’s amusement at the weapons they had brought. Faint music played from inside the cantina.
Hood stepped from the vehicle, and the Zetas pushed him against the car and took his weapons except the derringer in his boot heel. They took the cash from his pocket. They dragged the heavy packs from the back of the Tahoe, and Hood heard them crunch to the street next to him. They opened the packs and looked in but did not touch the money. Then one of the Zetas motioned with his gun, and Luna and Hood each knelt and hoisted the heavy packs to their shoulders. Then Hood felt a gun barrel poke the back of his head, aiming him down the road.
There were three Zetas ahead of him and three behind. Past town, they came to the five dead soldiers strewn across the road beheaded and they stepped over and around them while the vultures scattered into the brush. A hundred yards farther were the heads lying beside the road. After half a mile, they went left onto a trail through the palms by the river, and the trail narrowed, then it opened on a broad flat beach of brown sand and boulders along the thin, slow Batopilas River, and there were four men on horseback waiting. One of them was Jimmy. He sat on the horse hunched and wavering, and he stared blankly at Hood and Luna. His wrists were tethered to the pommel and the big bandaged mitts of his tortured hands rested on either side of it. They had dressed him in a gold-and-blue Mexican football jersey.
“Hi, Jimmy.”
Jimmy didn’t look at him.
Vascano was a big man with a heavy face and curly black hair, and he wore the same uniform and armored vest as the other Zetas. Hood could see that Vascano’s face was pale and sagging and dark around the eyes, and he could see that the teenaged boy on the horse beside him was a young version of his father, stout and alert and handsome. The son sat with an AK-47 ready across his saddle, and the fourth man brought his horse around and lowered the barrel of his shotgun at them.
Hood shrugged off the pack and let it drop to the ground and so did Luna. Two of the men on foot dragged the packs toward the horsemen and they opened the flaps and upended the packs and the one-pound bundles of drug money tumbled out into the sand. The men sifted through the packets, looking for dye and transponders.
Jimmy’s horse snorted and lowered his head in search of grass, and Hood saw that Holdstock was weak and his balance was bad. Jimmy looked down as if to help the horse find something.
“Jimmy, look at me,” he said.
After a moment he looked up, but Hood wasn’t sure if Jimmy recognized him or not.
“Luna,” said Vascano. He spoke Spanish, and Hood could follow his meaning if not all of his words. “I am pleased to meet you. When I heard your name, I decided to sell this man to you and not to Armenta. It wasn’t only the money. It was because of you. You run your enemies down like dogs. You kill with guns and a bow and arrow. You accept no bribes. You are loyal. You are an unusual man. Step forward.”
Luna stopped halfway to the horses.
“But you are poor as a peon and your family has nothing and your department is corrupt. Your government is corrupt. The soul of your country is corrupt. So what are you loyal to but your own foolishness? You are a dog chasing its tail. Come and work for me. I’ll pay you ten times what they pay you now.”
Luna looked up at Vascano but said nothing.
“Say something,” said Vascano.
“We choose. We decide and that is final.”
“Who says what is final?”
“Each man.”
“Prove to me that you profit from your loyalty.”
“There is no profit. There is want and need and humiliation at the hands of the weak. But that does not change things.”
“But your wife wears old clothes, and one of your sons needs surgery and your daughters have no prospects because they are thick and bullish and built for fighting, like you are. I know these things, Luna. They are facts.”
“My wife is still beautiful in old clothes and the bones of my son will heal. My daughters will marry warriors like themselves.”