Clark took a deep breath, bracing himself lest the memories overwhelm him, allowing the anger just enough of a foothold to focus his actions into a white-hot beam of fury. A lock of dirty-blond hair clung to the dead girl’s broken neck. Clark touched it to make sure it wasn’t a wig, then, out of pity, brushed away the loose soil and smoothed it into place. He blinked away a tear, then rolled onto his back, looking skyward, barely able to see the surrounding sorghum stalks from the bottom of the grave.
Knowing what he did about technology, he was sure some Keyhole satellite was up there, watching him, tough-as-nails John Clark, as he grew weepy beside a dead girl he’d never met. He shook it off and looked at the body again. He had never met Magdalena—and she certainly had no more value than the one lying dead in this shallow grave—but he found himself relieved to find out the body wasn’t hers. It was always possible that the Rojas girl was buried beneath this one, but Clark pushed that thought from his mind, chiding himself even as he did so for clinging to hope rather than cold, hard facts.
A telephone rang in the distance. A female voice muttered something Clark took for a curse but could not quite make out. Moments later, there was another splash. The call had ended and the woman was back in the pool. A tractor fired up and the female voice yelled something in Spanish. Then the tone of the engine changed as the tractor was shifted into gear and the putt-chug sound began to grow louder.
Someone was making another run to the grave.
Clark scrambled to his feet, peeking over the lip of dirt to see the top of a man’s head as the tractor rolled steadily toward him. The higher angle of the driver’s vantage point would put him in full view if he tried to climb out now. He dropped immediately, rolling onto his back, staying tight against the dirt wall nearest the house and pulling a layer of clods on top of him to help him stay hidden as long as possible.
With the tractor getting closer by the second, he drew the Glock 19 and hastily screwed the Gemtech suppressor onto its threaded barrel. “Press checks are free,” he muttered under his breath as he slid the slide back a scant quarter-inch to assure himself that there was a round in the chamber. He hadn’t lived to be an old man by taking things for granted.
The suppressed Glock wouldn’t exactly be silent, but Clark had taken steps to close the gap between kaboom and a mouse fart. A slightly-heavier-than-stock recoil spring would slow down the action just enough to channel most of the escaping gasses down the suppressor instead of out the chamber. Subsonic ammunition would go a long way toward dampening the noise.
Stalks of grain rustled against the side of the chugging tractor as it broke into the clearing. The thought occurred to Clark that it might be a backhoe or some other kind of small ’dozer that could simply cover him up with dirt before he could crawl out. But the engine sounded smaller, like the little tractor he kept on his own farm. The tractor stopped. Above, and out of the line of sight, the driver switched it off. Clark could hear the man groan, as if overweight, when he climbed down from the tractor. Plastic sheeting rustled. Clark tensed as dirt rained over the edge. He was close. Very close. Any moment he would look over the edge, as people did when they neared a deep hole. Clark heard another sound that he couldn’t quite make out. He’d just decided it was probably a shovel blade being driven into the dirt, followed by the scrape and subsequent ignition of a match.
The smell of cigarette smoke drifted down into the pit. Clark listened as the man unzipped his trousers and—smoking and singing a narcocorrido, or narco ballad, called “Cuerno de Chivo”—relieved himself less than ten feet away. The song’s title literally meant “horn of the goat,” but that was a euphemism for an AK-47 rifle. Singing around the cigarette clenched in his lips, the man did up his zipper while he droned on about blowing the heads off his enemies with the horn of a goat.
Clark took a deep, relaxing breath. Pissing beside the grave of a dead girl, happily singing about bloody murder—two strikes against this guy being an innocent bystander.
More grunting and groans came from above, and then a heavy thud as the man dragged something into the dirt from the back of a trailer or cart. He sang with gusto about the joys of killing and then dumped another young woman into the hole. Clark ignored the falling body, focusing on the edge, waiting.
Clark fired twice when the man looked over to admire his handiwork. The nine-millimeter rounds took the man low, angling up through a distended belly to tear through his diaphragm, blow out a lung, and then bisect his heart from bottom to top before lodging in the back fat near his left shoulder blade. Blinking stupidly, he tried to swallow but could muster only a ragged cough. The cigarette dropped from his lips, followed by a stream of frothy blood that cascaded down his chin like something from a Quentin Tarantino movie. A half-second later his knees buckled and he toppled over the edge, landing on top of the other bodies with a heavy thud.
The dirt walls of the grave had absorbed much of the noise the Gemtech didn’t suppress. Clark doubted anyone at the house had heard a thing. Even so, he stayed focused on the lip of the hole above for a full minute, just in case the fat Mexican had any friends he hadn’t heard.
He took a moment to check the new female body. Another young woman, perhaps fifteen or sixteen. This one had dark hair, but like the first girl, she looked larger than the description of Magdalena. This one, too, had been strangled before she’d been dumped naked into this dirt hole. Clark choked back the hatred in his gut. The dead man faced him, eyes glazed, mouth open and full of dirt and blood. This fat singer of grisly ballads was an evil bastard to be sure, but he was a gravedigger, a gofer, not a ringleader.
Clark was not one to keep count of the people he killed—the dead took care of that for him. He’d told himself early on when coming to grips with his chosen path in life that if killing ever became commonplace, it would be time to step away. That never happened—though he had to admit that, emotionally, some people were easier to kill than others.
Satisfied that it was safe to climb out of the grave, Clark left the Gemtech attached to the Glock and stowed it on his belt in a small leather scabbard called a Yaqui slide. It was open at the bottom to accommodate the suppressor. It seemed cruel to leave the girls exposed to the heat of the coming day, but he didn’t have time to do anything about it. Instead, he scooped up the two spent casings he’d fired and dropped them into his pocket before climbing out of the hole.
Matarife was smart enough to keep the brush and weeds mowed short in a full fifty-meter swath around his house, but there were a few old pickup trucks that provided just enough cover and concealment that, if Clark moved quickly, he could cross from the edge of the field to a brick pool house without being spotted.