Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [92]
Hy added, “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, too, you know.”
“That could take all night.”
“McCone, we’ve got the rest of our lives.”
The road was deserted, the gates to most of the villas closed. After a little way, the riverbed appeared—untamed nature infringing on a tenuous civilization. Hy showed me the rutted track through the sycamores and cacti; I followed it toward the firelight. He pointed to a dilapidated shack that stood some distance apart from the others, and I pulled the Tercel in next to it.
As we got out, two figures approached through the trees, a bobbing flashlight beam moving along the ground in front of them. My hand went to my gun, but Hy stayed it. He called out to them in Spanish, and they slowed their pace, their posture altering subtly. Two male voices spoke in response.
The men came up to us and stopped, rays from the flashlight reflecting upward and glinting off the rifle that the first man carried; a handgun was tucked into the belt of the second. Their faces were hard and weather-toughened, their eyes wary and knowing and as ancient as the mountains that form the peninsula’s backbone. The old dangerous realities of life in Baja had been banished from outposts of high-tech civilization like El Sueño, but they’d retreated only so far as the edge of the brush.
Hy put an arm around my shoulders and drew me forward, telling them my name. To me he added,“This is Juan.”
The man with the rifle nodded.
“And Tomás. Tomás didn’t want me to go after you alone, but I thought two of us might attract the wrong kind of attention. He offered to fetch you for me, but I was afraid of what you might do to him.” He translated the latter into Spanish, and both men laughed. Hy joined in, but unconvincingly; he’d been speaking the truth.
The three spoke for a while longer; I could follow the conversation well enough to know the men were questioning Hy about what was going on at Fontes’s villa. Then Tomás asked Hy something else, and he asked me, “Have you eaten?”
“No, but I’m not hungry.”
“Maybe you will be later. Tomás says his wife will bring us food; there’re some people down by the fires that it’s best don’t see us.”
“She doesn’t need to—”
“She wants to. And she also wants to rebandage my arm.” He spoke to the men again, thanking them for coming to greet us, and led me toward the shack.
It was a single room: rough board walls, an iron roof that in places didn’t quite meet them, a packed dirt floor. A sleeping bag lay in its center, Hy’s carryall beside it. He turned on a small flashlight, then dragged the bag toward the wall; stuck the carryall behind it like a bolster, removed his gun from his waistband, and tucked it underneath. “It’s not much, but have a seat,” he said.
I did, feeling aches in muscles that had been forced into an awkward position for hours. I looked at my watch; still stopped. I smacked it; the second hand began to move again. The flashlight’s rays illuminated only the center of the claustrophobic little shack, leaving the rest in strange, angled shadows.
“These people,” I said, “how come they’re helping you?”
“Because they’re generous, even though they have very little. They fish in ways that don’t unnecessarily destroy marine life. And they hate Gilbert Fontes as much as I do. It’s a bond, having that in common.”
Hy seemed charged with nervous energy now. He paced back and forth, into the light, back into the shadows. “In the past dozen years, Mexico’s doubled its fishing catch. There’s a lot of government pressure to export more in order to bring in foreign currency; they even license the right to take the lobsters and abalones and shrimp to certain co-ops. Trawlers make big sweeps with the nets, gather everything up, pick out what they want. Then they shovel tons of dead or dying fish off the decks into the sea. Escama, trash fish, they call it. But it’s perfectly good food that hungry people could eat.”
I watched him pace, only half listening to what he was saying. I’d never seen him so hyper before. This was