Luke had begun to feel pride about how stoically Little Red had endured prison. A lot of pampered rich kids couldn’t have stood up to the abuse Little Red had suffered.
The kid was out. Free.
But cancer?
The kid needed doctors—fast.
“McKade, have you heard a damn thing I’ve said? He’s got a gun,” Baines repeated.
“And he knows how to use it. Stay out of his sight. I’ll be there as quick as I can.”
“Look, I’ve got another big problem that can’t wait. A woman…”
“Hold tight.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Give the kid a target he can’t resist—me.”
“This is good.”
Luke slammed the phone down, his gut churning. He waited a minute, grabbed his cell phone to call his pilot.
No! He’d drive.
He didn’t bother to pack. He was out the door, running.
The smell of raw sewage hung in the air, no doubt, vapors from the Rio Grande. Heat glued Luke’s white collar to his neck. His long-sleeved, cotton shirt felt heavy and wet against his armpits. He wore jeans, boots, and a black Stetson. Three blocks shy of the posh, tourist zone of Nuevo Laredo with fancy restaurants like his favorite, El Rancho, and glitzy silver and leather shops, Luke stomped through paper cups, papaya peels, plastic bags, broken bottles, not to mention the human debris—beggars and pimps.
Familiar territory to a man with his past.
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico was an old city with a crumbling infrastructure. Like all poor places it was noisy, hot and dirty. It was in-your-face, gutsy, colorful and alive.
A shiny, low-riding American sedan cruised up to Luke, its radio blaring. A skinny, Mexican punk with a silver crucifix dangling from his glistening brown neck got out. The boy rushed him from the darkness, flipping pictures of naked girls.
Gleaming white smiles in pretty brown faces. Iridescent straight black hair. Breasts. Thighs.
Girls who didn’t look a day over fifteen. Girls willing to do whatever perversion a man could pay for. There were illustrations of those perversions.
Unsure of Luke’s nationality, the boy switched back and forth from English to Spanish.
“Meester…pretty girls.…Putas.…Muy baratas.… Cheap! They do anything.”
Luke shook his head, waving him off, only to have a dozen more swarm him.
“¡Vayate!” Luke growled, knowing but not caring that he probably botched the grammar.
“Chinga…”
The boys made vile hand gestures, such gestures having a rich obscene vocabulary all their own in Mexico. Aloud, they cursed him with a virulent stream of Mexican profanity. Then on the next breath, they sauntered jauntily across the street to cajole a fat-stomached tourist in Bermuda shorts who was smoking a cigar. Rap music pulsed from the low-slung sedan as the gringo leered at their pictures and then pulled out a fat wallet.
“Putas. Very pretty.”
Fun and games? In Mexico? Tonight?
They do anything.
It had been a while since Luke had had a woman. Sucker that he was, he’d been true to Marcie. It struck him he’d been waiting for her call and not her lawyers. His pride, his stupid pride had killed her.
I’m sorry. Why had that been so hard to say?
Sweat dripped from Luke’s brow. The heat. The damned desert heat. In July, even at night, Nuevo Laredo was like a furnace, baking him from above and below.
Why the hell hadn’t Baines done what Luke had told him? Why couldn’t he have stayed put in the good old U.S. of A.? But, no. Baines, like a lot of lawyers, had a penchant for drama. He was up ahead, leading this caravan of fools through the dense NAFTA traffic.
Little Red was not far behind.
Baines had gotten a green light when he’d crossed the border. His companions were a gorilla in a jogging suit, a small, skinny guy with greasy, black hair and a goatee, and a yellow-haired whore in red polka dots who was so pretty she made Luke’s stomach knot.
The Americans had stopped Little Red. But the paunchy-gutted idiots in their tight uniforms had let him go. When Luke got across the traffic-clogged border, which was bumper to bumper with eighteen-wheelers, he found Baines’s and Little Red’s cars two blocks from the main drag, their doors open in a dirt lot as if the occupants had scrambled out of them and taken off running. The radios had been ripped out. In another hour, the tires would be gone, too.
Beside Baines’s car, Luke had found his brother’s wallet, all the money gone and a high-heeled, red pump. Was the shoe the whore’s?
So where were they? He’d asked questions. Paid people. So far, he’d come up with zip.
Suddenly something that looked like bright red hair shimmered under blue neon a few blocks ahead. When Luke sprinted, a beggar with a mouthful of black teeth grabbed his ankle. Stumbling, he threw a fistful of pesos at the woman. Pushing himself free of her, he raced toward blue neon.
The redhead had vanished. Luke ran until he was thoroughly out of breath and thoroughly lost. When he stopped, he was on some dusty, rutted lane that wound in an indefinite course through a warren of shabby, graffiti-splashed buildings. Breathing hard, Luke rocked back on his heels.
Buildings? The houses were crude shacks made of sticks, adobe and cinder block. They leaned against one another like a row of dominoes ready to fall.
Hell on earth had to be junked cars lining a road like this. Hell was dirty, mean-looking, starving cats and dogs, half-naked kids with big brown eyes and ragged clothes. For an instant Luke was back at the pueblo. Then he stopped himself, not letting himself go there.
A lone rooster wandered in circles in the middle of the road. What was the use? Little Red could be anywhere. Luke might as well find a bar, have a tequila, the good kind, and pray for a break. But as he was scanning the houses for a familiar landmark so he could retrace his steps, a woman screamed.
Harsh slaps quieted her.
Then a gun popped, and she screamed again.
“Get off her, so I can kill myself a lawyer!”
Luke knew that voice.
The kid!
Another low-throated cry. This time Luke placed it as coming from the cinder block shack two houses down.
The silence that followed unnerved him. A brown bottle in the gutter caught Luke’s eye. He needed a weapon. Crouching, he swiped his sweaty hands on his jeans and then grabbed it by its long neck.
When the girl screamed again,
