The report was received by Cochran and Amador with only momentary puzzlement and then it became obvious. Amador said there were only three nunneries in the area. Cochran was electrified and ran to the bedroom where he strapped on the .44 in its shoulder holster. He kissed his private rosary and hung it around his neck. Amador followed him pinning him to the door.
Cochran struggled, but Amador held him firmly. He said that they had to plan carefully or neither the woman nor he who had become close to him would leave the country alive. Tiburón had to be confronted or they would be hunted down instantly. Now that they knew of the nun any fool could find Miryea but the point was to find her and not die. Amador led him down the hall and into the kitchen where he poured drinks and told his mother to prepare a pot of strong coffee. He called in his nephew and told him to give Cochran a change of clothes and not to leave his mother's side. Amador rehearsed plans while cleaning their weapons laid out upon the table. He put ham and bread and beer in a canvas bag. They left as the actress pulled up after her day's work. She began to comment on Cochran's costume, then looked at their eyes and stopped talking. Cochran kissed her on the forehead and they left.
Up in the mountains at Tepehuanes Tibey had dispatched a plane for Mexico City to pick up a society doctor who owed him a fortune in gambling debts. He had become sickened with his revenge to the extent that he planned to move to the top floor of his hotel in Cozumel. He had given up his notion, held for three days, of going into Durango and shooting Cochran. He was tired of love and death and wanted a particular Mayan girl he knew in Valladolid. She was a schoolteacher and not an inappropriate woman to take to Paris when the weather became bad in Cozumel. Now he wanted Miryea to live or he would surely go to hell, or at the very least, continue to live in hell. He seriously considered shooting his man as he talked to him, freeing everyone from the psychopath's threat. He knew that this wave of generosity might pass when he became drunk again so he avoided liquor and went hunting until it became dark. He roasted the quail in the fireplace as he had as a young man. And ate them with his hands squatting before the fireplace.
The ride up to Tepehuanes took several hours. They pulled up behind a small cantina around midnight and went into a tin shed kitchen lit by an oil lamp. They ate some supper and spoke to the cook, an old man, who was Amador's contact and mostly Indian. Tiburón had been going hunting every morning early. Surely Amador remembered the valley. His henchman, referred to as The Crazy One, had arrived and would probably be with him. Tiburón had become crazy himself and even had got drunk in this same cantina with the campesinos who feared him. The old man laughed saying that Tiburón was so deranged that he was trying to find out if "who he is understands who he is," at which point a man becomes what he remembers as best. The old man said he had become a cook after a lifetime as a caballero because he remembered how he enjoyed cooking for his brothers and sisters when their mother died. Amador nodded saying that in between those times the man had been a wonderful bandit and whoremonger. The old man laughed and jumped around, then offered them a drink from his bottle of mescal. Amador refused saying they were on business of a very grave nature.
Amador drove up a mountain two-track, stopping when the trail became too treacherous for the car. They sat in silence for an hour with Cochran lighting one cigarette with another, listening to the ticking of the heat fading from the motor. Amador turned on the car radio and they were amused to pick up in the high altitude a New Orleans country music station aimed at truckers. It made Cochran homesick until he realized he had no home. Next to Miryea he missed his daughter terribly and he doubted his emergence from the gaps, the holes that he tore, or had been torn in the fabric of his life. But then his heart lifted as he thought of Miryea hidden in some country nunnery patiently waiting for him to take her away to Seville. His mind fixed on seeing the old Roman aqueduct in the moonlight with her. Maybe his daughter could come spend the weeks around Christmas with them.
Amador interrupted his thoughts by saying that they had to make a long walk a few hours before dawn. There was a good position to intercept Tiburón in a place where the valley narrowed into a gorge and the trail ran along a creek. They had to assume that Tibey would make no variance in his recent habits. It was up to Cochran to make what peace he could with the man, a long shot at best. He, Amador, would be hiding with his 30.06. The negotiations should be far easier when they had the drop on the enemy. Amador jerked his head around and Cochran flicked off the radio thinking that he too had heard something. They rolled the windows down and heard the sharp barks, yelps and short quavering howls of the coyotes talking to one another. Amador told a story of how, when he was young, he had found an old, dying coyote lying by a stream. He raised his gun to shoot it out of pity then lowered the gun not wanting to interrupt the coyote's last hours of life.
"It's sad that you can't simply shoot the man. It would be so simple. And get us all killed."
"I figure it's far past killing him unless it's necessary. I'd like to think he knows when he's beat."
"Neither of us knows when we are beat. How can we expect it of him? Losing a woman isn't being beat, it's losing a woman. It happens to everyone." Amador paused. "I lost my wife when I was a young man but I was a fool. She was less a fool than me and walked away."
"Same thing with me. The business of killing doesn't make good husbands. I miss my daughter but my wife is now married to my brother. I was her father by accident and now he's her true father." Cochran paused to listen to the coyotes, then fingered the teeth around his neck. He felt the ache of a man who had followed his passion far into the nether reaches of human activity with the full understanding that a return was improbable. Any number of men would go to the moon on a rocket designed for a one-way trip. It was stupidly enough in the genes, either as a molecular mishap or a simple throwback to a time when a knight would go off to the Thirty Years War and be surprised when no one recognized him when he walked back in the door. That was why he revered the year at Torrejón though he had seemed anxious and hearth-bound teaching young pilots. But as the year receded into the past it provided the single total grace note of his adult life: his wife as a country person loved walking too, and they covered the old districts of Madrid, and Barcelona and Seville too when he had taken a few days' leave. Once they had gone to Málaga for a week and lived in a seaside pensióne, spending the days watching their daughter swim and their nights talking about the future, deciding to invest all their substantial savings in his father's tuna boat that badly needed new engines. Then he would have a full share in the business when he left the service. The debt had long been repaid but he had let it lie fallow in the bank in San Diego.
Amador shook him awake and offered a cup of coffee from a Thermos. Music full of night laments and broken hearts and busted guts came from the radio and for a moment he thought himself back at Diller's mission with the grand fat man checking his pulse through the night, muttering his prayers and humming to the first shrill bird-song of dawn.