The Creed of Violence - Boston Teran [70]
THE SIGNAL WAS to be a lantern placed high on a stake where the Laguna and the channel merged. The shoregrass was near high as a man and they hid there with the truck.
Because he meant to return to Texas, John Lourdes had written the address of Wadsworth Burr and the BOI headquarters so Teresa could let him know where she could be found.
Teresa was sixteen, going into the wilds with nothing. He felt a severe apprehension touched with farewell. He clutched her hand and what she felt there and saw in his face made her lean over and kiss him.
Rawbone called out through the dark, "Boats are coming!"
You could not see them; there was only this slow metronomic poling somewhere in the mist. John Lourdes put a finger to his ears and his eyes and pointed to the laguna. She understood and stretched up a bit to see. He still had her hand and she cupped the other over his and they remained like that until the boats appeared, flat and square, ferrying out of a deathly gray. She asked for his pencil and wrote: / will F nd my way, as you will yours.
While Rawbone walked to the shore to get a jump on explaining what they'd hidden there in the weeds, John Lourdes pulled out his wallet and took from it the crucifix. He put the gold memory in Teresa's hand and she was reminded of that first night in Juarez at the church when she wrote in his notebook. The moments to express anything more were vanishing as the chalans touched shore.
AT THE AGUA Negra compound Doctor Stallings received a report by phone of a derrick fire along the north shore of Tampico. A sudden foreboding came over him even as he asked where. He called together a squad of men under Jack B and they sped in touring cars to the site.
The house was near consumed, the derricks gone, the rusting truck in the backyard glowed with heat. Walls of flame turned and flagged as they breathed up air. The doctor was given a report by one of the derrick hands who'd been run off. He described a man with a shotgun and a derby whose description left little room for doubt.
Doctor Stallings had Jack B and part of the crew sweep the grounds and laguna looking for bodies. On the far side of the collapsing house was the carriage barn. It alone had been saved as the wind kept the flames from having at it. With faces hidden behind bandanas Stallings and a few men kicked open the latch doors. The barn was dark and gritted with smoke and Doctor Stallings could hear Rawbone in his head, "Let's talk finality."
THIRTY-FIVE
HEY HAD WATCHED the two flatboats disappear across a night sea and into a nacre mist with their cargo of munitions and women and a disheveled half-dressed mayor and his valet. "Yesterday he'd have staked out those campesinos if it meant survival. Tonight he's one of them. That ... is a practical application of strategy. Mr. Lourdes ... the mayor reminds me of me. Except for the noble parts."
John Lourdes waited and listened until the last whisper of those poling oars. He took the wheel now. Their destination, darkness and escape. They were justified in believing the advantage of time was on their side of the ledger, but a little bad luck and an ill wind had put them in play.
Doctor Stallings was already on the hunt. He called the field garrison and ordered crews of men in vehicles and on horseback to search the roads around Tampico for a three-ton truck with AMERICAN PARTHENON painted on the side. Outlying pipeline stations and warehouse depots were alerted by telegraph to be on the lookout for two suspects in an act of possible murder and sabotage. As for the Mexican authorities, these Stallings waited to inform till he was certain of political advantage.
Son and father struck inland toward San Luis Potosi. A river of night stars appeared wondrously through the failing mist. In the bare light of a building along the pipeline the shifting truck gears drew a watchman's