Bloody Martini (eBook)

1

The Mexican sun was fierce. My robe and straw sombrero cast a shadow that looked like a malevolent entity of the desert with pointed head and wide, floppy wings. Given my violent past, it seemed a good likeness.

Only two young girls were sharing the mountain with me, and they were steering clear of my shadow. I caught sight of them now and then as they tugged at the roots of a plant, bending their slender bodies to the task, their thin arms strong. The wax of the plant would bring their mother money enough for flour and rice and a handful of beans. They didn’t know that through my abbot, I sent money to their mother and to the other mothers of the village so they might buy something for themselves—a dress, a mirror, some new sandals. The local drug lord did the same, so both God and the Devil were working the same street.

I shook out a plant, relieving it of little stones and weeds, then put it into my sack. Through the exhausting heat, I could feel the power of that hillside, which housed rattlesnakes and lizards whose bite is like hot lava in the veins. A Gila monster can smell an egg buried six inches under desert sand, and I knew they were around me, feeling my footsteps in their bellies. It was an atmosphere that tuned the spirit. Venomous reptiles give you a picture of the world as it really is, and you are a fool not to know that. The young girls on this hillside held that picture in their mind. They might be children, but they weren’t fools. They knew that men and poisonous reptiles had something in common and that confrontation was always a mistake. They stayed away from me as they stayed away from all men. You can sell a bag of cocaine only once, but you can sell a girl many times a day.

Whenever I glanced their way, I could see they were ready to make a run for it. What a childhood . . . and what would they be as young women? I couldn’t see their future. As for my own, monasteries around the world are the refuge of hunted men. So far as I knew, no one was hunting me at the moment. I’d inherited a significant amount of money, and money can draw an impenetrable veil over one’s actions. It had been drawn over mine, so I picked my plants—plants that gave wax for candles, healed scar tissue, and were used by local villagers to treat venereal disease. Undoubtedly, it had other uses, for everything that grew around here had its secret chemistry, in league with the sun and the rocky soil and therefore magically inclined. I was a monk in the Sonoran Desert because I enjoyed having that faint, dry scent of mystery around me, and there was as much of it here as within the dark walls of the monastery.

And then the girls were running away, having sensed a vibration in the ground that I’d missed. But I felt it now, the approach of tires that were causing a rumble in the earth. I watched an expensive pickup truck nose into view, ford in big block letters across the nose, glamorous running lamps on, aluminum running boards gleaming in the sunlight. It was a brand-new Raptor with some nice, aggressive tires that made it a real rock crawler. Above the windshield was a rack of spotlights that gave it the look of a giant spider hunting for prey. Because I’d worked in my father’s auto-repair shop as a kid, I was a Benedictine with cars in my bloodstream and could appreciate the blue accent package on the body, as well as the sound of its high-output twin turbo engine. But even with all this road romance in front of me, I was only momentarily distracted. The truck was out of its natural habitat. Hunting in these hills was poor—unless, of course, you were hunting little girls.

Then I remembered that the government had decided to help the candelilla pickers, which meant that some university-trained team of scientists would interfere with centuries-old techniques that worked. Maybe this truck was a government vehicle. So I glanced at the license plates, also remembering that cartel money lined government pockets, bought government protection, and ran drugs in government vehicles. But the plates weren’t government, just the usual kind announcing that Chihuahua, Mexico, was the Land of Encounters.

It was an encounter the girls didn’t want. But they weren’t fast enough, and the truck slammed to a stop beside them. Two men jumped out and grabbed the girls. Laughing, they held their light bodies in the air as the girls kicked and screamed curses at them. The young men wore shiny body-fitting shirts, expensive skinny jeans, and aviator sunglasses. Their dark hair was neatly trimmed. They wore gold neck chains.

I called down to them. “Caballeros, what are you doing?”

They turned, seemingly indifferent to my presence. The two girls were still squirming at the ends of their arms. I couldn’t see the expression behind the sunglasses, but I saw a cheesy smile forming on the lips of the one who’d been driving. “Father, forgive us for disturbing your prayers.”

“I wasn’t praying; I was picking herbs.” I walked slowly toward them. Several times in the past, the sight of my monk’s robe had reminded local criminals of their ties to the church, to the priests who had guided them through childhood and blessed their families. It might not work today, but it was worth a try; I didn’t want to hurt them. I’d hurt enough people in my life.

My robe was tied with a rope; a small metal crucifix dangled from it. With any sort of luck, they might decide God had sent me. I’d appeared out of nowhere, and they were superstitious like a lot of people raised in the Catholic faith of Mexico.

The girls stopped their squirming, became vigilant, waiting their chance to break free if my distraction gave them an opening. I continued slowly toward the men. The driver spoke again. “We’re from the Child Rescue. A relative of these girls contacted us. Some kind of abuse is going on in their home.”

He talked very smoothly. He’d given this little speech before.

“I’m sorry, señor, but they’re under my care.” I was closer now.

“Father, I think you must have gotten too much sun. You should avoid dehydration. Better still, you should avoid me.”

So that’s the way it was going to be.

They were armed, semiautomatics in their belts. This one even had a hand grenade clipped to his belt. It looked like an old Soviet-era model, and I figured it was strictly for show; it added to his swagger. Though I had at least fifty pounds on him, he wasn’t the slightest bit concerned when I stepped even closer. In his eyes, I was a neutered male. He couldn’t know that I was calculating how best to take him and his partner out with one quick move—not an impossibility. In my time as a clean-cut college boy, I’d been a varsity wrestler. At two hundred pounds, I’d won all my matches. In my time as a not-so-clean barroom bouncer, I’d killed a man with a single punch. And in my last leave of absence from the monastery, I’d won two professional martial arts bouts in Las Vegas. It’s a long story and I won’t go into it here, but let’s say I felt the odds were in my favor as long as these traffickers didn’t get the guns out of their belts.

As it happens, I didn’t have to do anything. One of the girls got a finger into the pin of the grenade. She pulled instinctively, but nothing happened. The abductor holding her had been laughing, but he wasn’t laughing now. He frantically grabbed her wrist to pull her off the grenade. Not a good move, because her wrist twisted under his grip, and with that twist the pin came free. A grenade is a simple mechanism really; when you pull the pin it releases a tiny spring under the safety lever, lifting the lever up with enough force to send it flying. And it flew now, into the air, and dropped on the desert floor with a little ka-chink. There was a terrible promise in that sound, and both abductors heard it. They immediately dropped the girls. Both girls dove under the truck, and I threw myself after them. Four seconds elapsed, during which the grenade’s internal fuse was burning and the trafficker was fumbling to get it off his belt. I was shielding the girls with my body when it went off, sending fragments of metal in all directions. The blast deafened me momentarily, but then I heard brief cries of mortal agony. I crawled out slowly and saw the would-be traffickers on the ground, one with his guts hanging out and the other staring sightless at the sky. His aviator sunglasses had been blown away and his forehead was torn open to the bone, brain matter shimmering like jelly in the sunlight. The one with his guts hanging out and part of his ass blown off reached up to me for help, but he was beyond anything I could do. He toppled slowly backward, twitched a few times, and died, his blood staining the sand. The girls scrambled out from under the truck and took off like rabbits. The truck itself had been caught in the blast, the passenger side windows shattered and the doors studded with grenade fragments.

I looked down at the two bodies. The shirts were drenched with blood. It had been idiotic to carry a grenade around. Where would they have had occasion to use it? Maybe it had been a boyhood dream, to be armed with a grenade. Wrong dream. Macho posturing had blown them out of this world.

I found a shovel in the back of the Raptor and dug in the sandy soil. The young men weren’t large. They fit in a shallow hole. Maybe their own childhood had lacked sufficient nourishment. I threw their guns in after them, then gathered the biggest rocks I...