The Creed of Violence - Boston Teran [9]
Then something, call it superstition if you will, took hold of John Lourdes. He glanced back into the park down a shadowy walkway. He had come here many times as a boy with his father. There was a pond with a stone wall around it where lived half a dozen alligators. How they'd come to be there was uncertain. But one winter night his father had persuaded a few drunken wilds to go down to the park and sack up those creatures and get them out of the cold to keep them from freezing.
So there he'd been watching as his father and a band of drunks wrestled one prehistoric monstrosity after another into canvas gunnies. They carried them back to that dingy saloon and kept them warm by the stove while the boy sat on the bar cross-legged and watched his old man resting in a chair amongst them. He had a cigarette in one hand and with the other flicked mescal from a bottle onto each sacked gator.
"I baptize you," he said, "in the name of the father and the son . .
John Lourdes needed to remember, nothing was beyond his father's unpredictability.
Justice Knox arrived with another agent named Howell. Knox was a plain, soft-spoken man. He had poor vision and wore spectacles and was singularly obsessed with the security represented by the bureaucracy. His core belief: People's central need and desire was for bureaucracy, not freedom, not rebellion, not individuality. Man longed for effective bureaucracy, and its ultimate expression was order.
Knox was never swayed by anger or revenge. He was in that respect heartless, and it made him, in turn, beyond the reach of sympathy or compassion. He had no personal attachment to his agents, no interest in their private welfare, and he demanded their attitude toward the job be precisely the same as his.
"The girl?" he asked.
"She's still up in 509."
Knox put his hands on his hips and looked at the building, and while he considered a plan John Lourdes gathered himself and said, "Sir, there's something else-"
WHEN RAWBONE LEFT the Mills Building he crossed the street and cut straight through San Jacinto Park. His hands were in his pant pockets and he wore the derby at a cocky angle. Yet he was wary enough to keep glancing back.
At the pond tourists leaned their kids over the stone wall to see the alligators moving through the still and mosquito-laden waters. He was not much beyond it when the memory of a winter night back in '92 washed over him. He could see the boy there in that grimy saloon, the kerosene lamp above him curtained with smoke. His son ... he'd just turned seven.
There was no time now; the present had the upper hand. He jumped a trolley. He rode it half a dozen blocks till he came to an empty lot where he'd parked Burr's Cadillac. He geared it up and gunned it and said goodbye to downtown in a sweep of dust.
Rawbone drank and loosed his tie as he explained to Burr his hour with that jury of strangers in the fifth-floor office. One thing Burr would swear to about his friend, he could elevate a simple act of criminality into a moment of personal splendor.
He told Burr he was jacking it out of El Paso that night. Then, as he toasted the air and said, "Mexico or bust," Burr saw him hesitate, saw those agate eyes pare away everything around him except the halfcaught sound of tires breaking in front of the house, then the scruff cutting of boots across gravel. He had the curtain open quick and saw Justice Knox and two men sprinting up the walkway and spreading around the house with weapons drawn.
"Goddamn," he said, scrambling across the den past Burr and through the kitchen, frightening the cook so she gasped, only to be met by gunfire as he made the screened-in porch.
He dropped down to the floor, gun drawn, and huddled up behind the porch wall. He sat there out of breath, and as he was ordered to surrender he yelled back, "You're either good Christians or bad shots. Either way it doesn't speak well of you."
Then Rawbone heard scattershot voices moving through the house. He could make out justice Knox shouting to his men, who answered they had him pinned down on the porch.