Killing Castro - Lawrence Block [44]
But Taco Sardo forgot the order, or else ignored it. His Sten gun belched bullets over the formation of rock and the Jeep halted, a tire gone. The soldiers came out with automatic rifles in their hands, and they had to be killed at once. They could not be allowed to escape, could not be permitted to pass the word to the garrison that rebels lay in ambush along the road to Santiago.
It had been a short, desperate fight. One of the new recruits had died, a Castrista rifle bullet tearing half his face away. Garth got one of the soldiers with a Sten gun blast but the other was back in the Jeep suddenly, ready to ride to Santiago on the rims if he had to.
Two of the rebels had stopped the Jeep. Manuel shot out another tire and Taco Sardo, who had started all the trouble in the first place, quickly raced into the road to put a pistol bullet into the driver’s throat.
The Jeep would not run. Four of them together managed to push it down the road a short distance. Then, with two others to assist, they lifted the crippled vehicle and carried it from the road, hiding it in the brush. They lifted the two dead soldiers and carried them far into the hills, leaving their bodies to rot. Maria scrubbed blood from the road, Fenton picked up shards of broken glass. When they were done, no evidence of the scramble remained. The road was clear again, empty.
That had been trouble enough. That alone had swelled the tension, had drawn everyone’s nerves back like a bowstring.
There was more Tuesday evening. Fenton was not sure what had happened, but while he sat among the rocks and kept a lonely vigil over the road, there was a sharp scream, curses in Spanish, a roar of pain. And later that evening he saw Garth with deep scratches across his face. And Maria wore a deep frown, and her eyes were pools of bitterness.
Now Fenton drank his coffee and smoked another cigarette. It was a moot point, he thought, whether Castro’s convoy would arrive before the rebels succeeded in killing each other off. Matt Garth obviously didn’t learn from experience; he was going to go on until someone put a bullet in him. Taco, blood-hungry after being wounded in the leg, would shoot at anything that came within range. Manuel sat lost in thought, still the leader but now gripped by his dream of power and glory. Maria burned with fear and anger. And Earl Fenton, the quiet man, the refugee of a teller’s cage in the Metropolitan Bank of Lynbrook, the man with cancer in his lungs, drank bitter coffee and smoked strong cigarettes and waited for Fidel to come and meet his death.
Late in the afternoon.
Or early in the evening.
Matt Garth liked things simple and direct. If you made things too complicated you just loused them up. When you wanted a woman, you took her. When you were killing someone for a price, you went ahead and killed him. And when you had a burn on for some son-of-a-bitch who had been giving you a hard time, well, you belted him one.
Which was what he was going to do.
He had just finished his session as lookout. He had crouched between rocks as mute and massive as Garth himself, his Sten gun perched along a rock ledge with a fresh clip in its breech. And four soldiers came rolling along in a battered Jeep, peering into the brush in a hunt for rebels. One of them, a beardless kid, had focused a pair of binoculars upon the precise spot where Garth was sitting. And Garth’s finger was poised on the trigger. One burst of the Sten gun would have sent the four rat bastards to hell. But the kid with the glasses had seen nothing, and the soldiers were gone now.
So to hell with being lookout. One of the Cubans had taken over, a guy named Jiminez, and Garth didn’t have to play lookout like a goddamn kid playing cops and robbers. He had better things to do.
The first thing to do was find Fenton. Fenton had it coming, all right. There was Maria, flat on her back and ready to take it and there was Garth ready to give