Afterward, Devoción had quickly settled down to life as usual. Its five hundred or so inhabitants now pledged allegiance to the Quiros family, who, like their predecessors, continued to put bread and butter on their tables in return. Streets were dusty, faces were resigned and suspicious, and the kids bouncing through the alleys at all hours wore clean white Nike sneakers come the holidays. At the south edge of town, the chop shop garage that was a pet operation of the Salazars — whose lawless careers had started out with their driving hot American cars down across sierra country to the ports of San Felipe and La Fonda, where they were crated and shipped overseas — remained as active as when Lucio had taken in multimillion-dollar profits from the cannibalized auto parts racket, perhaps more so since the garage had become a roof for other lucrative areas of criminal distribution.
A competent mechanic was rarely undervalued, and every man who had worked there for Lucio had retained his job.
The Navigator, boosted up north, had been headed to the chop shop for disassembly when things went crazy.
In its driver’s seat, his eyes throbbing in his skull, so wide open with fear and apprehension they felt ready to pop from their sockets, Raul Luiza suddenly recognized the tall, broad shape of Devoción’s Catholic church up ahead on his left. His hands moist around the steering wheel, he saw the church, saw the enormous cross atop its spire outlined darkly against the yellow moon, and realized with fresh dread that time was running out. La Iglesia de Jesus Christos, it was named. The Church of Jesus Christ. But it was the name of Quiros that the villagers had been calling on to answer their prayers for the past couple of years, the same as he’d done in his own way.
Tonight, though, Raul had started the long list of regrets he’d compiled in his mind wishing to Jesus, the Virgin Mother, and all the blessed saints that he’d never heard of it. From there he’d moved on to wishing he’d listened to his old lady for once, hung at Anna’s crib like she’d practically begged of him. Had he done that, stayed there with her, they could have stepped out to score some rock, put the kid to bed early, everything would have been different. But he’d ignored her, and instead hustled over to the car dealership, where it all turned bad for him, turned to absolute shit in a hurry—
Raul tightened his sweaty, trembling grip on the wheel. He could remember his cousins in Devoción wanting to parade through town with joy when the Quiros family moved in, remember them chirping like perequitos about how those dudes walked a young man’s walk, talked a young man’s talk, dudes were players who brought some San Diego street with them, a big city style that would open doors most people hadn’t even dreamed of knocking on when those old-school fat cats the Salazars were on top.
Even in his gaining despair, Raul thought that was kind of funny. In fact, he might have laughed aloud if he hadn’t suspected that was something the man in the backseat would want explained… and he’d already asked too many questions, following every answer Raul him gave with another.
Now Raul passed the rear of the church as the road swung off to his right along the foot of the low mesa west of town. He took a final glance at the cross staring down from high above him, then turned his attention back to the road even before the church vanished from sight behind the curve of the mesa’s slope.
Raul drove on, his tremors growing steadily worse… and it wasn’t all because of nerves. Goddamn, he thought. Goddamn. If his stem had been in his pocket, he’d have tried to talk the head case in back into letting him stop on the way down from Chula Vista, take a few pulls. Just a couple on his way down and he would’ve been okay. Or okay enough to keep his hands steady on the wheel. But the guy had stamped his kit into the sidewalk, dumped his vials and everything else down a sewer after frisking him clean—
“How long until we’re at the shop?”
Raul jerked at the sound of the voice behind him.
“I tol’ you,” he said without glancing over his shoulder. “Wasn’t five minutes ago I tol’ you…”
“Tell me again.”
Raul took a breath. He’d driven the entire distance from Chula trying to convince himself he’d make it through this jam, find a way to get out of it alive and whole if he could only manage to keep his cool.
“Two, three miles up, we gon’ see it,” he said. “Be onna left side th’ road.”
“Describe it to me.”
“Jus’ a garage, you know.”
“Describe it.”
Raul shrugged tensely.
“Place made ’a big cement blocks. Sorta square, got no windows. There a parkin’ lot goes aroun’ it…”
“A paved parking lot.”
“Uh-huh. Like I say before—”
“I want to hear more about the garage,” the guy behind him cut in. “How many entrances does it have for vehicles?”
“Two in front, two onna side.”
“The south side?”
“Yeah.”
“Means they’d be facing us when we pull up, that right?”
“Yeah, right.”
There was a beat of silence. The Navigator’s high-beams slid over the road.
“Tell me what else is nearby,” the guy in the backseat said.
“Lotta nothin’.”
“Describe ‘nothing’ to me.”
Raul took another breath. This was some kind of scary hombre he’d picked up, not that he’d done it by choice. Wore a black jacket and pants with all kinds of outside pouches and shit, besides having one of them SWAT cop masks, or hoods, or whatever it was called, pulled down around his neck. Except Raul was pretty convinced he wasn’t a cop.
“Ain’ no houses, no stores, nothin’,” he said. Then hesitated, thinking. “ ’Cept, you know, the junkyard.”
“What kind?”
“Huh?”
“What kind of junk gets dumped there?”
Raul grunted his understanding.
“All kinda parts for cars,” he said.
“You’re sure.”
“Right—”
“You have some reason for not mentioning this yard to me before?”
Raul shook his head. The motherfucker never got tired of grilling him, asking the same questions over and over in different ways…
“Wasn’t keepin’ no secrets, that what you mean,” he said. “Thought you was askin’ about buildings.”
The guy didn’t answer. Raul glanced at him in the rearview mirror, saw a look on his face that he’d already noticed more than once. He’d gone perfectly still, his head kind of tilted to the side, his upper lip curled back a little, his eyes far off and at the same time right there and honed in… the way a cat looked when it was waiting for some rodent to crawl out of a hole so it could pounce and tear it apart. It was like he was reading signs in the air Raul couldn’t see, or listening to sounds he couldn’t hear, scary as hell.
Raul wondered what he was thinking and planning, asked himself if he could have ever seen that face before tonight and somehow forgotten it. It was long, thin, pale. Black hair combed straight back from the forehead, eyes dark as the night outside. Still as could be when that weird, focused-on-his-own-thing look came over him. Not a face anybody could read. Or forget.
The guy was a stranger, Raul concluded. A total stranger.
He lowered his eyes from the mirror, afraid his passenger would notice the close scrutiny.
“Let’s get back to Armand Quiros,” the guy said barely a moment later. “What makes you so sure he’s going to be at the garage tonight?”
Raul chewed his bottom lip. He’d figured they’d come around to Armand again, wasn’t stupid enough to think the guy was finished asking about him. That hadn’t stopped Raul from hoping, but you had to expect it, know what was going down here.