Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [91]
He felt the car dip off the edge of the road and bounce heavily down an incline until it was on a flat surface again. Then he heard scrub brush raking thickly under the car frame, small rocks pinging under the fenders. R.C. strained against the duct tape, trying to stretch it to the point where he could slip one wrist free or work it over a boot heel so he could extend his legs and tear the tape off his wrists, even if he had to strip the skin from his thumbs.
Negrito was playing the radio, listening to a Mexican station that blared with horns and mariachi guitars. The car veered sharply, thudding off what was probably an embankment into a dry riverbed, jolting R.C. into the air, knocking his head against the spare tire. The gas-guzzler rumbled over rocks and tangles of brush while tree branches scraped against the fenders and doors and oil smoke from the broken muffler leaked through the trunk floor. The car swerved again, fishtailing this time, and came to a stop that caused the car body to rock on the springs.
Negrito waited until the song had ended, then turned off the radio and cut the engine. The night was completely silent except for the ticking of the heat in the car’s metal. The driver’s door opened with a screech like fingernails on a blackboard, and R.C. heard the tinkling of Negrito’s roweled spurs approaching the trunk.
When Negrito popped the hatch, the sweet, cool, nocturnal smell of the desert flooded the inside of the trunk. But R.C.’s sense of relief was short-lived. Negrito’s outline was silhouetted against the stars, a .45 auto strapped on his hip. “You okay, Tejano boy?” he asked. “I was worried about the way you was bouncing around in there. Here, I’m gonna get you out and explain our situation.”
Negrito grabbed R.C. by one arm and the back of his belt and slid him over the bumper, letting him drop to the ground. “See, my friend Krill has got his head up his ass about a lot of things and don’t know what’s good for himself and others lots of the time. So I got to make decisions for him.”
For no apparent reason, Negrito stopped talking and looked over his shoulder. From where he lay on the ground, R.C. could see that the car had ended up in a sandy wash, like a cul-de-sac, at the bottom of a giant hill that looked compacted of waste from a foundry. Negrito was staring into the darkness, turning his head from one side to the other. He picked up a rock and flung it up the incline and listened to it clatter back through the thinly spaced mesquite. “Maybe we got a cougar up there,” he said to R.C. “But more likely a coyote. They come around, I’m gonna shoot them. They eat carrion and carry diseases. Like some of my girlfriends in Durango. What you think of that?”
Between Negrito’s booted feet, R.C. saw an image that made his heart sink. On a level spot at the edge of the wash were at least five depressions, each of them roughly six feet long and three feet wide, the top of the depressions composed of a mixture of soil and dirt and sand and charcoal from old wildfires, all of it obviously spaded up and shaped and packed down by the blade of a shovel.
“See, I got to leave you here for a while and make some contacts,” Negrito said. “You’re gonna be safe till I get back. I like you, Tejano boy, but I got to make money and take care of my family. There’s only one question I got to ask you. When I was a little boy working on this turista ranch in Jalisco, there was a gringo