Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [163]
“Once again you have shown your great wisdom,” Krill said. “But now you must be quiet.”
“I am operating as your loyal lieutenant and adviser, my jefe.”
“Yes, yes, I know. But you talk like a bat flapping its wings in a cave, filling the air with sound that means nothing. You must cease this constant talking. It’s like glass in my ears.”
Negrito’s BB eyes seemed to grow closer to the bridge of his nose. “I’m here to serve you, nothing more. I worry about this mission. We are killing the Russian because he killed the minister who baptized your children. But this all has it origins with La Magdalena. If she had baptized them as you asked, we would not be having these problems. The Russians are dangerous. If you kill one of them, you kill them all. They come out of prisons worse than Mexico’s. They fuck their mothers and kill their children. Many of them were in insane asylums.”
“Where do you get these ideas, hombre?”
“You don’t listen to the new music, the narcocorridas. The narcocorridas tell us all about these guys. That’s why our people have to be vicious and show no mercy.”
“Look up there on the hillsides, above the stone house. Those two men are Sholokoff’s guards. Let your actions replace your words, Negrito. Take Lupa and Mimo with you and do your job.”
“Stay here and I’ll bring you back their ears. I don’t need Mimo and Lupa to do it, either.”
Krill waved a finger back and forth. “No, you don’t bring back ears.”
“You took the scalp of the DEA agent.”
“Because he killed my brother. Because I had to bring an offering to my brother’s grave so he could rest. You do not bring back trophies from these men. They are only doing what they are told.”
“Wait and see,” Negrito said.
“Everything with you is an argument.” Krill pulled Negrito’s leather hat off his head and started to hit him with it but instead simply shook his head and handed the hat back. He waited several seconds before he spoke, the heat dying in his chest. “The moon is going behind the mountain. As soon as the shadow falls on the house, kill Sholokoff’s guards and come back to me. You are very good at what you do, Negrito. Do not fail me.”
“I will never fail you. When the rooster crows and the sun rises, you will see me at your side and know I have been your loyal servant and follower.”
The moon slipped behind the crest of the mountain, dropping the valley into black shadow. Negrito and the two other men filed down a game trail and climbed silently over a table rock and disappeared into a thicket that was rife with thorns, never hanging their clothes on one of them, never rustling a branch. Krill unslung his assault rifle and knelt in the grass and waited, his gaze roaming over the lighted stone house and the swimming pool steaming behind it and a children’s swing set whose chains made a tinkling sound in the wind.
His M16 had been stolen from an armory in Mexico, along with crates of ammunition and United States Army .45 automatics and bayonets and grenades and flak vests and other forms of military ordnance that Krill considered of no value. But the M16 was indeed a wondrous product of American manufacturing genius. It was lightweight, simple in design, easy to disassemble, rapid-firing, and soft on the shoulder. In semiauto mode, it could snap off shots individually with lethal accuracy or, on auto mode, hose down an entire room in seconds. The newer ones seldom jammed, and in the dark, the shooter could easily drop an empty magazine and replace it with a fresh one. Krill had jungle-clipped a twenty-round and thirty-round magazine together, so when his bolt locked open on an empty chamber, he could invert the two