“Tell you what,” he said to Rachel. “Let’s you and me go outside and discuss this. Too many ears in here. We’ll work something out. We won’t shanghai anybody. We’re soldados not hombres malos [bad men].”
Apprehensive but still wanting to hear what he said, Rachel followed Mateo out the side door and into the alley.
“Those hombres back there, they aren’t as simpático as me,” Mateo said. “They get ahold of you, they’ll drag you into this alley and rape you so malo-duro you’ll never fuck again. Not me. I’m uno mucho bueno hombre.”
“And I’m una mucha buena mujer [a very good woman]. But you take my brother, and I won’t stop till I kill you. You die, and I’ll carve my name on your tombstone. I’ll harrow hell for your excremento-stinking soul.”
Suddenly, Rachel saw a blur, and Mateo’s big right hand slapped her temple hard enough to ring temple bells and hang stars. Slamming her head against the adobe wall behind her, Mateo grabbed her throat and whispered:
“You watch your mouth, puta. I’ll drag you out of here in shackles and leg irons. I’ll sell your gringa ass into a casa de puta dura bruta [a rough whorehouse]. You’ll die there turning muchos tortuosos tricks [many torturous tricks].”
But Rachel wouldn’t back down. Shaking loose from Mateo’s grip, she began beating on his chest with her fists, ripping his cheeks with her fingernails, kicking his shins with her heavy boots. She about to shout her mother’s name—she was so angry she didn’t care what happened.
“We have connections!” she shouted. “We’re not nobodies. Our mother is one of the most powerful people in North America! We’ll come after you with police, politicians, whatever it takes. Our mother will—”
But she never got it out. In a blind, red-eyed rage, Mateo thundered:
“PU-TA!!!”
Then he hit her in the left temple, not with his fist but with the shot-loaded, whip-spring buttstock of his wrist-quirt—a makeshift blackjack.
She didn’t pass out immediately. She stared at him in what seemed to be wide-eyed wonder.
“What the fuck?” was all she said.
Then her eyes slowly closed. Passing out, she slid down the cantina wall. Rubbing his torn cheek, Mateo stared in shock at her, at what he’d done.
“Lo siento, chiquita,” [“I’m sorry, baby”] he said to her sadly. “I think I maybe killed you, but you got me muy loco.” He studied her for one more long, hard moment. “Aw, fuck it,” he finally said with a head-shaking shrug. “Así es como sucede a veces.” [ “That’s the way it happens sometimes.”]
Heading back into the cantina, he grabbed Richard and dragged him out to their mounts, which were tied to the cantina’s hitchrack. When his men came out with his hat and jacket, he commandeered one of the cantina patron’s horses and told Richard to mount up. Instead Richard started to turn around and look for his sister, but before Richard could go into the alley and find her, Mateo laid the quirt’s leaded stock over the top of his head. Catching Richard on the way down, Mateo hoisted him up face-first and belly-down across the saddle of the confiscated bay. Using a coiled saddle rope to secure Richard, Mateo grabbed the horse’s mecate and swung onto his big horse. Dallying the mecate around his pummel, he led his men and Richard—trussed up, unconscious, and belly-down over the mount—toward the army fort.
“Amigo,” Mateo said to the unconscious Richard, “welcome to the Sonoran rurales.”
PART II
What’s more important?
Pesos in your saddlebags or notches on your pistola?
—LUIS MORENO, outlaw
Chapter 5
Lady Dolorosa and her new capitán watched the four novitiates drag the Lady’s ex-lover up the temple’s stepped slope. She was giving him a shy, demure wave.
“Yes, I shall almost miss you, whatever your name was. We did have some fine times. We must have. I kept you around for over a month.” She looked at her new prospect. “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember much about any of my lovers. When I try to recall their faces and features, it’s as if their memories seem to vanish without a trace. In my head they all blur into a single, generic, composite male.”
She turned to her “prospect.” “But every day is a new beginning, and now I have you. Any questions?” she asked, giving him her most endearing smile.
“I was curious why we’re here,” he said nervously.
“Think of this as motivation. That’s what I try to instill in all my eager young boys: the passion to serve and excel.”
“To serve and excel in the service of Madre Méjico?” he asked, confused.
Lady Dolorosa broke into a series of mocking, mean-spirited giggles.
“No, silly. I’m talking about fealty to my bed and body, of course! I thought you knew. I can’t sleep nights and one of the few things that distracts me in those dreadful nocturnal hours is really good . . . sex. You able to excel in that department? You better be.”
“Of course, My Lady. You’re the most beautiful, irresistible woman I’ve ever seen, and you’re my ruler.”
“Funny, that’s just what who’s-it up there on the pyramid used to say. Flattering words, however, are no substitute for action and endurance. Stamina—that’s what I require from my willing young men—juggernaut stamina. I do hope you’re up to the task—unlike what’s-his-face.”
An almost preternaturally shrill and piercing scream ripped through their conversation like a thunderbolt.
“Ah, the pièce de résistance!” Lady Dolorosa shouted to her new capitán above the crowd’s ear-cracking cheers.
Her former lover—up on the altar—was still alive, and the Señorita’s head priest was covered with the man’s gore as he stabbed and hacked his way into his chest cavity. Reaching deep into it, the priest slashed the aortas and yanked out his victim’s still-throbbing heart. After shoving it straight into the man’s hysterically screaming face, he lifted it high overhead for the crazed congregation to see. He then tossed it into a huge ceramic crock filled with the hearts of those previously immolated.
His assistants hung her ex-lover by the heels over a nearby edge, along which a gutter ran all the way down into a ground trough. As thoroughly as any slaughtered steer, the man was finally exsanguinated, his blood filling a huge ceramic crock below.
When she looked back up at the summit, the head priest was hacking at the man’s neck with a black, razor-sharp obsidian blade. When he cut through, the man’s head slipped off the altar and hit the stone summit with a sickening crack! The priest picked up the head by the hair and flung it down the terraced slope. It hit every one of the hundreds upon hundreds of steps on the way down.
“Good-bye, Pancho,” she muttered half aloud, “or whatever the hell your name was.”
“Do
