"I leave it to your good judgment, sir. But either way, the clock is about to expire on the quiet around here."

THE PLAT WHERE the settlement had been was akin to a darkened lake that night. Father and son crouched on elbows. Men appeared in slow and hunched silence from the foothills. The father rose three fingers and the son agreed.

They approached low behind their guns, totally unaware their souls might well be swallowed up. A wind sprang from nowhere and sent dust across the broken terrain. The father whispered to the son, "How well do you hear?"

"Why?"

The father touched his ear and held up one finger and pointed toward the rocks beyond the meeting house. The son understood.

"I'll give that one a h.e.l.lo for you." Then Rawbone snaked up the ravine from where they lay in wait till there was only the faint movement of loose shale where he had just been.

John Lourdes now stayed rigid against the earth. He had never killed before and this would be something else altogether. Those figures of the night reached the adobe foundations. They must not be thought of as men. They are just vestments really. Blackish shapes there to extinguish life. They started their slow and deadly trek up that once-upon-atime street. The night had not grown colder, yet John Lourdes was shivering. The wind moved through his clothes like the ghost of something insidious and horrible.

These men will kill without so much as a reckoning. They will fire down till you're not even one whittled breath. One of the men put out a hand for the others to stop. He took a few cautious steps forward and John Lourdes recognized the bowed and partly lame stride as belonging to the gent at the roadhouse with the stiff mustache and cheery smile. He had seen something. John Lourdes hoped it was the bedrolls laid out like sleeping men within the meeting house walls.

They moved ahead again with the steady a.s.surance of those who had imperiled men before. He watched their stalk play out like a ritual. There was a stark grace to their configured tactics, a calm John Lourdes did not possess.

The meeting house stood against the night sky. Its hollowed windows and huge gaping frame that once housed double doors the epitome of emptiness.

John Lourdes scanned that rutted wash where Rawbone had gone. He listened with dire intensity, but there was only the wind through dry brush like flintstrikings. A vein in his temple pulsed vengefully.

When they reached the meeting house door the men fanned out. They pressed in close to the adobe wall and near blended away. The one from the roadhouse raised a hand to make ready and as he did John Lourdes also reached out his hand where it hovered in dead s.p.a.ce just above a detonator. He could feel the hand trembling all the way up into the sinew of his neck.

Even though John Lourdes was waiting and ready, their charge into the hollows happened so fast he froze. The walls flashed with the thunder light of their weapons. Arterials of smoke and powdered cloth leapt from the bedrolls. But there was not a cry, not a breath of movement that declared life was being taken.

The bedrolls lay there like the lifeless bait they were. The men understood immediately and scattered. It was only then, at the last, before all advantage had been lost, that John Lourdes found himself. With the flat of his hand he drove down the plunger.

ELEVEN.

-OHN LOURDES HAD set the charge by the meeting house wall, burrowing dynamite into the sand, while Rawbone used a clump of sage to brush away any signs of that long run of wire to the detonator.

There was a momentary harnessing of raw power. The front of the building was torn asunder and disappeared in an avalanche of smoke. The concussion echoed far out into the hills. The men were flung like paltry cloth dolls and from the sky a storm of adobe and rock hailed across that plat.

John Lourdes rose now with his rifle ready and started into that smoky destruction, when far to his right there came the rapid action of an automatic. He came about and knelt, the rifle anch.o.r.ed up on his shoulder. Through the settling dust came a man running. He held his back and was calling in desperation to his friends. He stumbled and his boots dragged up a rising trail of dust. He collapsed to his knees and that is where Rawbone ran him down. He came out of the dark leaping from the rocks and put two more shots into the sagging body, which lurched forward at the last.

He sprinted past the son, yelling, "Make sure they're all dead!" He kept on through the haze. "I'll take it to the road and introduce myself to any fool they might have left with the horses."

John Lourdes walked the destruction. It was otherworldly. He could not fathom truly being there. The smell of charred clothes and flesh tainted the air and he worried it might poison him in some unknown way. He came upon the first, who lay on his side. There was nothing below the upper lip but a b.l.o.o.d.y shirt collar. Then he noted what he thought to be an odd necklace dangling down the man's face before he realized it was an eye loosed of its socket and hanging by a long thread of muscle.

The next man lay on his stomach. John Lourdes knelt and eased the body over. The dark and lifeless face he came to see belonged to the man who'd faced him down in Juarez, the father of the girl Teresa. He stood. He stared down at this stranger on the other side of death. Questions abounded.

Pilings of wood on the meeting house floor had caught fire. The air was singed with windblown ash. John Lourdes had to cover his face as he turned toward the last man, the one from the roadhouse.

He sat against a backdrop of adobe and rotted timber beams. He was not dead, though he should have been as the shape of his head was hideously altered.

From up the cart path came a headway of trampling hooves. Riderless mounts plunged headlong from the shadows hounded by gunshots and the gritty musculature of a motorcycle engine. Rawbone had herded up the horses. He yelled out as he wheeled in the motorcycle, "There was a last one down by the main road."

Cinders from the fire were now a burning rain everywhere and Rawbone took to using his derby to swipe them from his eyes as he joined up with John Lourdes. "We better board up and be on with it. If any of these sparks find their way to-"

The man from the roadhouse sat staring up at them. The father squatted. The man was gibbering away, yet there looked to be in his eyes a degree of consciousness and understanding. In his hand was the flashlight. Rawbone slipped it loose. He switched on the light and put it to the man's face. It mooned out of the dark. Blood seeped from a crack in the skull along the forehead. A bit of brain matter protruded from the wound, looking like the marbled head of a snail.

"He's leaking oil, Mr. Lourdes."

Rawbone stood.

"It's your watch, Mr. Lourdes."

The son understood. It was either finish him or forget him, as he was for the wolves. The father waited. He held his derby against the onslaught of scorched ash and heat.

"The fire, Mr. Lourdes. One spark could send us off."

He saw something pa.s.s over John Lourdes's face. A brief moment of the soul perhaps, of what had to be. It was not a look of indecision, but rather something more reflective of true human reluctance, or even a tragic pity. It mattered none. Rawbone had no place for either and hated each equally. He reached for his belted automatic, but John Lourdes grabbed his wrist and restrained him. Now, the father prided himself on strong arms, all the more so for a man his size, and he felt in the son's grip the same pure hard strength.

"Strip each body of everything in their pockets," said John Lourdes. "Wallets, any sc.r.a.p of paper. Leave nothing. Collect it for me. Saddlebags too."

"Mr. Lourdes ..."

The son ordered him again in no uncertain terms and the father walked off. "Why don't I do that, Mr. Lourdes. That'll give you some time to negotiate the matter at hand with your conscience."

A moment later there was a gunshot that caused the horses to startle and scatter. The father turned. The impact had driven the man to the earth, where charred cinders blew over him. With a streak of pure mean Rawbone mocked what the dead man had said down at the roadhouse. "The way I see you by that truck, looking off to the hills ... you're a real climber, son."

TWELVE.

-FEW LAST SCATTERED sparks blew from that barren upland as the truck descended to the road. They had it rigged up and strapped down with the trappings of war. They'd even lashed the motorcycle, like some trophy from a battle of yore, to the truckbed.

It was a matter now of the crossing into Mexico. The main bridges over the Rio Grande with their immigration agents and customs officers posed too much of a threat and so were out of the question. And finding shallows you would gamble a truck might navigate would be a marvel of stupidity. But Rawbone knew of a rope ferry south of El Paso near the old Socorro Mission. The river had changed course there near a half-century before, and was a place of isolated sandbars and lonely stretches of sh.o.r.eline.

They drove through the chilly hours before dawn. A smoky oil lamp hung from the roof frame above the son's head. The father's upturned derby rested on the cab seat between both men. It was filled to the brim with what Rawbone had scavenged from the dead as John Lourdes had ordered. Rawbone watched as John Lourdes meticulously studied each personal item, every bit of identification, holding them up to the trundling light, eyes squinting from the grainy smoke to better read ink that had faded with wear. He would then write certain details down in a pocket notebook he carried. His concentration stayed exact and his hand steady even as the truck pitched and rose on that worthless road.

It seemed to Rawbone he himself did not even exist during these hours. He was, in fact, left to his own private maelstroms and outside the fitted plan. This fed a sense of disadvantage and that always left him uncertain and wary. "Why all the looking and writing, Mr. Lourdes?"

He glanced up from his notebook. "I noticed," he said, "there's no paper money in that derby of yours."

"You didn't order me to grub the dead for your salary."

"I suppose you left it to the buzzards as a charitable donation."

"As a matter of fact, my notion was to buy you something when we're done. In memorial of our time together."

John Lourdes went back to his notebook.

"You didn't answer me, Mr. Lourdes."

"I didn't answer."

"That much I know."

John Lourdes looked up again. He slipped the pencil behind his ear, set the notebook in his lap. He began with the girl at the fumigation building, then following her into Mexico and sketching in a series of strange incidents that took him to that morning at the Mills Building.

Rawbone leaned back and scratched at his cheek with the edge of a thumb. "If I ever meet her, I'll have to remember to thank her for the introduction."

"One of the dead back on that mountain. The Mexican. That was her father."

That detail was like a stone dropped into a pond of still water and the ripples it sent through Rawbone's mind. He said, "I see now."

"Do you?"

"If you want to get to the heart of something, cut away."

John Lourdes had been thinking out how the dead back up on that mountain came to know about him and the truck. It seemed apparent. Mr. Simic and his a.s.sociates had come upon an alternate way to resolve their unfortunate problem-they notified the people they were supplying that the truck and its cache of munitions had been taken. Rawbone leaned into the steering wheel and listened with unsettling intensity. They had to know the truck had been taken somewhere between Carlsbad and El Paso, so it was likely the munitions were hidden away somewhere not so easily discovered. With only one road between the two cities, how difficult would it be to watch for a truck painted up with lettering like the top of a birthday cake, well- He was staring toward the dark mesas that stood between him and his immunity when John Lourdes said, "There's something else that you ... we ... need to consider."

"Have at it, Mr. Lourdes."

"Any advantage you ... we ... had is gone. When some of theirs don't return and you come driving up with that truck-"

"It will sure make for conversation, won't it?"

"You know where we're going in Juarez and who we're to talk to. That was part of the deal. Alright. But my responsibility is to discover the names and/or ident.i.ties of anyone and everyone involved or connected to this criminal enterprise. That's why I had you grab up all those men's personals." He held up the notebook. "That's what I'm writing here. That's why I'm telling you all this now. Those dead back up there in the mountains will have some say on what is going to happen when we reach Juarez."

When John Lourdes had his say, he went back to his work without so much as another word, leaving Rawbone with a reality for which there was no apparent solution. He took a cigarette from its pack. He struck a match on the steering column. His mind was being drawn into the unseen ahead, and the survivor in him began to coolly plot what would best serve him.

"Are you a schooled man, Mr. Lourdes?"

John Lourdes finished what he was noting and then looked up. The question went to the flashpoint of his life. "Oil boy in the roundhouses at thirteen. Railroad detective for the Santa Fe at twenty. Then the BOI. A few night cla.s.ses in between."

"All that with only a notepad and some native instinct."

"You're never at a loss, are you?"

"I've misfired a time or two."

"But you're always right there and ready to help someone drown."

"With a smile and good cheer."

"We'll have this done in another day, so let's not stumble-f.u.c.k over each other. Then you can get on with your miserable existence as a free man."

"I couldn't have said it better myself."

John Lourdes returned to his notebook. He took up the last wallet from the derby.

"I think you misunderstood me," said Rawbone.

"Did I?"

"I only meant you've a clear mind, and it's carried you well."

Even before the sun, came the heat. It was going to be that kind of day. The shadows fell away behind them as the sun rose over the rim of the world and bore light down upon their road.

The last wallet belonged to the man who'd spoken to John Lourdes at the roadhouse. His name was James Merrill. In a side pouch was a tiny print of him in uniform standing before a harbored warship with other members of his squad.

"The one from the roadhouse," said John Lourdes, "must have served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War."

Rawbone leaned back to try and get a look. He asked for the photo. He held it against the steering wheel. The dun-colored print was badly beaten at the edges and deeply faded. It was a moment caught bare. Soldiers laughing and at the ready. Serve a cause, change the world. It was not worth spit now. That's what death had to say about it all. There is only the ever selfish present to consider. Yet even so- He handed back the photo. "That warship is the China," said the father, "and that's not Cuba, but Manila harbor."

His gaze returned to the road. It was an impossible leap for the son to imagine the father anywhere people embark upon a cause. Yet how else could he have known so quickly?

He went back to the wallet. In another pocket he found a cache of business cards all neatly printed and fairly new. What was written there was sobering to a fault.

They were driving in a region where the earth had been thrust up through the faults of time and the ragged line of rocks the road divided looked as if they had been shaped by a hostile blade saw. The son turned the business cards over and over in his hand.

"There's something here that falls short."

Rawbone glanced at John Lourdes, who handed him the business card. The father held it up and read: JAMES MERRILL.

STANDARD OIL COMPANY.

MEXICO.

THIRTEEN.

-HE SOCORRO MISSION was on the El Camino de Tierra Adentro just southeast of the ford where the ferry crossed the Rio Grande. Constructed on a sandy incline, the church was a simple structure with a stepped parapet above the front door on which sat the bell tower.

It was late afternoon when the truck labored up to the low mud brick wall that flanked the nave and from where they could view the ferry. The church was quiet. A few gulls sat atop the bell tower with its cross. There was no shade save for one manzanita alongside the adobe wall. The men rested there in the stifling heat and studied the ferry.

It was docked on the Texas side. There was a customs shack on each sh.o.r.eline. On this side of the river, the shack stood within a small grotto of trees. The one on the opposing sh.o.r.e stood bare in a landscape that looked like the unfinished country of G.o.d's hand. It was still as a painting down there.

"Keep the truck company," said Rawbone. "I'll go to the river to get the feel of things. See what all we have to deal with."

John Lourdes walked to the truck and removed his shoulder holster and set it on the cab seat. He couldn't help but keep looking at the mission. From the moment they'd driven up to this lonely spot he felt as if voices from the other world were talking to him.