Chapter Thirty-Six – Hunter

 

Kris was almost as silent as I was as we made our way down the back alleyways of Del Noche. She moved like a slight shadow and made less sound than a lover’s breath as we stalked through the darkened streets of the small Mexican town. Even her gear, all buckled down and secured in place, didn’t make a sound as we came to a stop behind an old, reeking trash pile.

All around us, the town seemed to hold itself in a moment of restless suspense. Almost as if we were in a house, and everyone had gone to bed, but we could tell that they were all just tossing and turning in some desperate attempt to get some relief.

The smell of the refuse in front of us seemed to push into every pore of my body. Thank God it wasn’t as hot here as it had been in Mexico City, or else I don’t know how much longer I’d have been able to spend standing in this narrow chute between the buildings. It didn’t matter how dark it was, or how much it shielded us from the moon’s overhead radiance, I would have been throwing myself at the feet of the nearest White Feather member.

Kris pointed to herself with two fingers, then to me, then moved them like walking legs down the direction of the alley. I nodded, and she slipped out into the darkness of the shadows. I came out right behind her, my body tucked down into a low crouch.

Up ahead, on the street proper, two men wearing dark coats and carrying AK-47s came to meet from opposite sides, stopping at the mouth of our alley.

Kris stopped in her tracks and dropped lower into a crouch, her hand forming a fist at her back. I dropped right with her, trying to control my breathing as the two men ahead of us lit cigarettes and began to bullshit about their day. This was the third set of guards we’d seen, but only the first to exchange anything more than manly, grunted pleasantries.

“Marquez still awake?” one of the men said in English lightly tinged with a Mexican accent.

“’Course,” said the other, a hint of revulsion entering his voice. He spoke in English, too, but his accent was German. “Well, I think so. Can never tell. Simmons did a fucking number on him. Still hanging out in front of that cantina where they had him the other night. Telling the kids to throw their Chiclets and toasted corn at him. Probably has chiccarones sticking to him. Poor bastard.”

“Poor bastard? Man, fuck that. This is about more than just him. You fucking rat, you fucking turn on us, you get what you fucking deserve. You know that shit.”

“Jah,” the German speaker said, nodding as he took another drag, the cherry at the end of his cigarette brightening his face with its orange glow as if he were bent low over a birthday cake in a darkened room, “but did it have to be so medieval?”

“Medieval?” the other asked, chuckling. “Medieval. Man, you ain’t been outside the state or watched the fucking news in the last couple decades, have you? Simmons learned this shit from the cartels, not from the fucking Spanish Inquisition, or nothing. He got it from the Zetas and the Gulf, not no fucking History Channel documentary. This shit’s real.”

“That much, though? And with silver?”

“Like I said, man, snitching is bad for your health.”

“So’s smoking.”

“Yeah, and look what cancer patients go through, bro. Maybe if chemo was as bad as what Simmons did to Marquez, we’d stop smoking this shit, am I right?”

A chuckle as the German-sounding one shook his head. “True. Me, I’d definitely reconsider.”

“You could put his face right on the side of the pack, kill sales damn quick.”

“Oh, they do it in Europe, too. ‘This is your lungs after smoking half a cigarette.’ ‘This is the dead fetus because you smoked a cigarette.’”

“Here’s the family of four you killed because you dropped your cigarette while driving,” the Mexican-accented guard added.

Both men laughed, and the subject gradually began to change to the parameters of their watch, how much longer they had till dawn. The German one eventually crushed out his cigarette beneath the toe of his boot, nodded to the other, and the two separated, continuing in the directions they’d originally been heading.

“Marquez?” I asked silently, only mouthing the words. “Silver?”

“Shifter,” Kris replied, nodding. Together, we ducked into a nearby alcove, and Kris pulled out her satellite shots of the town that Imogen Smith had given her. Huddled together, with a black stretch of tarp thrown over us, she pulled out a flashlight and shone it down at the image. At least ten different locations were marked in yellow, with tiny printed lettering detailing each.

“Shit,” I breathed, realizing that most of them were restaurants, bars, or barracks spread out more or less evenly around the town.

Kris’s finger, undeterred by my foul language, traced our progress on the map. Up from the small farmhouse we’d passed within a football field of, across the land, and down through the myriad twists and turns down the alleys as we’d passed our first landmark of a statue in the town square less than a block away. “We’re here,” she said.

I nodded. “Right.”

“Here,” she said, pointing to a spot on the map, which read “Rosa’s Cantina” in tight little digital writing. It was in the northeast corner of town, maybe fifteen blocks away.

It seemed reasonable. Especially when you considered that it was the only structure on the map with the word “cantina” actually in the name. But, still, something didn’t seem right.

I stared down at the map for a moment, letting my mind try to decide what it was that I was missing.

“Everything here’s a cantina,” I whispered. “At least to a German.”

“What?” Kris whispered. She looked down at the map, stabbed Rosa’s again with her finger. “Look, right here.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. To a German, he probably thinks every Mexican bar is a cantina.” I put the tip of my finger back down where we were, tracking in the direction the guard we’d just seen had come from. About six blocks down, I found another yellow spot, this one marked with “Omar’s.” I pointed to it. “There it is. That exactly.”

She looked up at me, her eyes shining in the reflecting light of her handheld. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. “Trust me. He came from that direction. He’d seen Marquez, but the other guy hadn’t. Unless their guard duty took them all over town, which maybe it had, the German wouldn’t have seen him recently in the western part of town.”

She bit her lower lip as she looked back down at the map. Slowly, she began to nod. “Okay,” she whispered. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s go.”

We inspected the map for a few moments more, turned off the light, then unshrouded ourselves and looked around the alley. Kris nodded towards a turnoff between two buildings we’d passed about twenty feet prior, and we both set off in our crouched movement.

We took our turn down the alley, our bodies pressed against the walls as we came to a stop, our boots squelching in the muck. Up ahead, we saw a building’s back door with an exposed yellow bulb over the threshold. The lamp threw a pool of urine-colored light on the muddy floor.

Kris brought her rifle up to her shoulder, sighted down its length. She raised her left hand like a flat blade, motioning me to move forward first.

Head down, I scrambled forward past her. I rose a little and moved faster through the yellow of the light, coming to a stop behind a set of ancient aluminum trashcans.

A momentary bit of wistfulness passed over my soul as I hunched down there, bringing up the rifle to cover Kris’s approach. I’d had a set of trashcans almost exactly like them behind my warehouse home, but they hadn’t lasted more than a couple of days. I’d come outside to toss out a dying fern one morning, only to find the cans gone and all my trash spread across the floor.

Apparently, aluminum fetched a decent price at recyclers.

I pushed away the thoughts of ferns and old garbage cans as Kris came up, a miniscule spot of darkness in the yellow light before melting quickly and silently back into the nearby shadows.

We moved like this for the next several blocks. Quietly. Efficiently. As a team. A single unit of two, covering each other, keeping an eye on one another, all as we moved closer and closer to Omar’s.

Finally, we were at the alley that led down to the cantina. We crept forward together. My legs were sore from the movement, aching with every step. Who would have ever thought this would be so exhausting?

Kris moved farther up the alley and took a knee, her breathing heavy.

I came up behind her, looking over her head and out across the dusty road lined with old, rusted cars. The bone white of the moon’s light shone down over everything, bathing us all in a certain kind of mystical feeling.

But then my eyes caught sight of Marquez dangling from the pole by his cuffed wrists, and my stomach seized. I brought up my fist, pressing it to my lips in an attempt to keep the contents of my stomach in my stomach.

“My God,” Kris whispered.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with religion,” I whispered, my mouth salivating as I tried to maintain my composure. “Or any god. This is man, pure and simple.”

If Marquez, or what was left of him, was the informant we were looking for, we were going to be hard-pressed to get anything but a hoarse scream from him.