Hands ripped my shirt, tearing off the buttons. I heard a match struck and smelled cigarette smoke.
“You sure about this?” said the voice I could almost recognize.
“Burn him,” whispered the third voice.
I tensed, trying to prepare myself, but the sear of the cigarette ember was more painful than I’d imagined. I cried out.
“Tape his mouth,” the familiar voice said.
“He can’t talk with tape over his mouth,” said the whispery voice, definitely female.
“He screams like that again, the neighbors’ll come running.” The gravelly voice.
“We’re going to burn you until you talk, O’Connor,” said the whispery voice. “We can do this all night.”
No idle threat, I knew. I steeled myself.
Then I heard the shatter of window glass, and a deep cry of pain.
“Jesus!” The gravelly voice. “I’m hit.”
“Out of here. Now.” The woman’s voice.
I heard a furious scrambling, and the front door was thrown open. A moment later, a big engine turned over and tires squealed, painting the street, I imagined, with black lines of rubber.
I waited in the dark behind the blindfold. My head hurt. My chest and ribs hurt. My stomach hurt. I was as confused as I’d ever been.
I heard the back door cautiously open, felt the air stir as someone moved past me. I held my breath.
Then Mondragón said, “It’s clear, Rainy.”
And she was all over me.
CHAPTER 21
* * *
“No talking,” I whispered, as Rainy removed the blindfold.
Mondragón had a pocketknife in his hand and bent to cut the duct tape that bound me to the kitchen chair. He opened his mouth to speak, but I shook my head furiously and made a shushing sound to silence him. His response was an angry look. But he said nothing.
Rainy stared at my face in horror. She touched my gouged cheek, then put her fingertips near the cigarette burn on my chest.
“Oh, sweetheart,” she whispered.
I laid a finger to my lips. When Mondragón had cut me completely free, I stood up and signaled for them to follow. I went to the living room and from the bookshelf pulled the book that hid the bug. I gave Mondragón a pointed look. He shook his head.
I mouthed Outside, and put the book back.
I snatched the rolled map from the coffee table. Jocko’s Winchester was on the kitchen table, where my assailants must have laid it, and I grabbed that as well. We left quietly by the back door. I trailed Rainy and Mondragón to the next street, where he’d parked his SUV.
“Do you have anything for first aid, Berto?” Rainy asked.
“Glove box,” Mondragón said.
He’d been carrying a rifle, the one he must have used to put the bullet through the kitchen window and into the gravelly voiced man who’d been torturing me. Probably the one he’d used to kill Rainy’s assailant as well. It was fitted with a suppressor, which explained why I hadn’t heard a shot. He laid it in the back of the SUV and hurried into the driver’s seat.
Rainy spent a moment rummaging in the glove box, then slipped into the backseat with me, and Mondragón took off. In the first aid kit, she found a small tube of antiseptic ointment, which she applied to the burn on my chest and the cut on my face.
“You should have stitches,” she said, but she settled on a sterile adhesive bandage, huge on my cheek.
“What happened back there?” I asked.
From the front, Mondragón replied, “We agreed twenty minutes. You didn’t show. I figured trouble. How did you bumble your way into that situation?”
“They jumped me as soon as I walked into the parsonage.”
“Who were they?”
“My best guess is White Horse.”
“The vigilante group,” Rainy said. “What did they want?”
“Peter.”
“Why?”
“Same reason the Rodriguezes want him. To stop what he’s doing. And probably to get the names of the other Desert Angels.”
Mondragón said, “Did you get a look at them?”
“Just heard their voices.”
“Recognize any of them?”
“Not sure. But give me some time and maybe it’ll come to me.”
We left Cadiz and drove north into the night.
Any landscape under moonlight is a beautiful mystery. The high desert of southern Arizona, with its hills and black mountains silhouetted against a star-salted sky, was no exception. I stared out the window thinking that in the great Northwoods of Minnesota the roads were walled with thick forest in a way that made you feel as if you were passing through one long, verdant tunnel. Here, the land was wide open, and in the far distance I could see the little embers of yard lights that glowed outside the isolated ranch houses of Coronado County. In the dark, too, were snakes and lizards and spiders that could kill you with poison. And cacti just waiting to pierce your skin. In the washes, sometimes, crept men with guns and drugs who might shoot you without thinking twice. And also, there were women and children lost in so many ways, desperate to be led to safety. I thought about Peter and how much I admired what he was attempting to do. And I wondered, if I were in his place, would I have the courage to do what he did?
Mondragón, as if reading my mind, said, “When I find Peter, I’m going to make sure I put an end to this stupidity.”
“Not stupidity, Berto,” Rainy said. “I’m scared for Peter, and I don’t like at all the idea that he’s put himself in danger this way. But, oh, God, I do admire our son for it.”
“What’s the point, Rainy?” Mondragón shot back. “The people he helps, more often than not, get picked up later by Border Patrol or ICE and end up right back where they began, but only worse because now they have nothing. Hell, less than nothing. What good does that do them?”
“You don’t know that, Berto.” She was quiet a moment. “There was a time when you would have understood. Maybe even have helped him.”
“You stick your neck out only for family, Rainy. Everyone else is on their own.”
“Your world is so small, Berto,” Rainy said. “You must be so afraid inside it.”
“I’m afraid of no one,” Mondragón snapped. “As for my world, it’s a very comfortable place. Not like that hovel you lived in out there in Who Gives a Fuck, Minnesota. If I’d raised our son, he’d be a man feared and respected.”
Rainy said, “Better, I believe, to be loved.”
“You think he doesn’t love me? That I don’t love him? Then what the hell am I doing here?”
Squabbling like an old married couple, I thought, but held my tongue.
We pulled into a truck stop outside Tucson that sold everything: CBs, cell phones, audiobooks, clothing, knives, souvenirs, medicines, an array of drinks and snack foods. While Mondragón filled the gas tank, Rainy and I went inside. I needed to replace the shirt my tormentors had ripped, and I picked out a long-sleeved T-shirt with a big coiled rattlesnake on the front. Rainy gathered some medical supplies: sterile gauze, bandages, adhesive tape, antiseptic.
“When we find Peter and the people with him, they may need tending,” she explained.