Big Red had glared at him. Then he’d looked away. Finally the old man had broken the silence.
“Baines says he’s too busy to see me.”
“That’s too bad.”
Luke knew, as he’d known that day, a whole lot more about the kid than he had ever let on. Oh, yes he knew a lot. He’d been keeping tabs for years. Even then he’d had a secret filing cabinet bulging with information about the kid.
Not that Luke had personally set foot in New Mexico to get that information. He hated that state, the people and the culture—what they’d done to him; what they’d done to his mother. Most of all what the old man had done to her.
Still, Luke knew the exact day, the exact minute, the exact place Little Red had been born. He had every school picture stapled to a single sheet of typing paper. He knew every basketball game the kid had ever won, knew every grade he’d ever made, knew the kid could add like a computer the same as he could. The kid was lousy in English the same as he was, too. Knew the kid had had a complex in high school because he’d been skinny and unattractive to girls.
Luke even knew the name of the first girl Little Red had screwed in college, knew they’d gotten high on pot and done it in the back seat of the brand-new, red Chevy the old man had given Little Red so he could make a splash in college.
Luke hadn’t had a car in college or law school. He’d had jobs. He hadn’t gotten to screw girls. At least not as often as he’d wanted. He’d had to work too damn hard.
Every time Luke had read a report he had visualized the boy and his charmed life, trying to get into his head the experiences he’d only dreamed about. He had wanted to know what it was like to be beloved and legitimate—to be the pure-white son.
Luke knew the brand of the first cigarette the kid had smoked. Just as he knew when the kid had taken the first false step, made the first bad friend that had led toward his dealing dope for Spook. Luke could have called the old man, could have warned him long before the kid went bad. Big Red had cut the free-spending kid off when he’d flunked out. The kid had been desperate. Instead of getting a real job, he’d started selling dope to friends.
He’d been a natural salesman. Girls had been easy to get after that. His life and travels had made fascinating reading. And the ritzy Longworths had been fooled by the lies the kid told them, believing he was a whiz in the computer business and had a real job.
Will Sanders, a private detective in Albuquerque, still made his monthly visits to Austin to update Luke’s files. Sanders had even had contacts in prison, so Luke knew everything that had happened to Little Red during the past five years, too. He knew about that night seven guys had held the kid down in his cell and nearly killed him.
Luke had taken steps then, used connections to get the kid moved. Gradually, Luke had begun to feel pride about how stoically Little Red had endured prison. A lot of pampered rich kids couldn’t have stood up to the abuse Little Red had suffered.
The kid was out. Free.
But cancer?
The kid needed doctors—fast.
“McKade, have you heard a damn thing I’ve said? He’s got a gun,” Baines repeated.
“And he knows how to use it. Stay out of his sight. I’ll be there as quick as I can.”
“Look, I’ve got another big problem that can’t wait. A woman…”
“Hold tight.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Give the kid a target he can’t resist—me.”
“This is good.”
Luke slammed the phone down, his gut churning. He waited a minute, grabbed his cell phone to call his pilot.
No! He’d drive.
He didn’t bother to pack. He was out the door, running.
The smell of raw sewage hung in the air, no doubt, vapors from the Rio Grande. Heat glued Luke’s white collar to his neck. His long-sleeved, cotton shirt felt heavy and wet against his armpits. He wore jeans, boots, and a black Stetson. Three blocks shy of the posh, tourist zone of Nuevo Laredo with fancy restaurants like his favorite, El Rancho, and glitzy silver and leather shops, Luke stomped through paper cups, papaya peels, plastic bags, broken bottles, not to mention the human debris—beggars and pimps.
Familiar territory to a man with his past.
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico was an old city with a crumbling infrastructure. Like all poor places it was noisy, hot and dirty. It was in-your-face, gutsy, colorful and alive.
A shiny, low-riding American sedan cruised up to Luke, its radio blaring. A skinny, Mexican punk with a silver crucifix dangling from his glistening brown neck got out. The boy rushed him from the darkness, flipping pictures of naked girls.
Gleaming white smiles in pretty brown faces. Iridescent straight black hair. Breasts. Thighs.
Girls who didn’t look a day over fifteen. Girls willing to do whatever perversion a man could pay for. There were illustrations of those perversions.
Unsure of Luke’s nationality, the boy switched back and forth from English to Spanish.
“Meester…pretty girls.…Putas.…Muy baratas.… Cheap! They do anything.”
Luke shook his head, waving him off, only to have a dozen more swarm him.
“¡Vayate!” Luke growled, knowing but not caring that he probably botched the grammar.
“Chinga…”
The boys made vile hand gestures, such gestures having a rich obscene vocabulary all their own in Mexico. Aloud, they cursed him with a virulent stream of Mexican profanity. Then on the next breath, they sauntered jauntily across the street to cajole a fat-stomached tourist in Bermuda shorts who was smoking a cigar. Rap music pulsed from the low-slung sedan as the gringo leered at their pictures and then pulled out a fat wallet.
“Putas. Very pretty.”
Fun and games? In Mexico? Tonight?
They do anything.
It had been a while since Luke had had a woman. Sucker that he was, he’d been true to Marcie. It struck him he’d been waiting for her call and not her lawyers. His pride, his stupid pride had killed her.
I’m sorry. Why had that been so hard to say?
Sweat dripped from Luke’s brow. The heat. The damned desert heat. In July, even at night, Nuevo Laredo was like a furnace, baking him from above and below.
Why the hell hadn’t Baines done what Luke had told him? Why couldn’t he have stayed put in the good old U.S. of A.? But, no. Baines, like a lot of lawyers, had a penchant for drama. He was up ahead, leading this caravan of fools through the dense NAFTA traffic.
Little Red was not far behind.
Baines had gotten a green light when he’d crossed the border. His companions were a gorilla in a jogging suit, a small, skinny guy with greasy, black hair and a goatee, and a yellow-haired whore in red polka dots who was so pretty she made Luke’s stomach knot.
The Americans had stopped Little Red. But the paunchy-gutted idiots in their tight uniforms had let him go. When Luke got across the traffic-clogged border, which was bumper to bumper with eighteen-wheelers, he found Baines’s and Little Red’s cars two blocks from the main drag, their doors open in a dirt lot as if the occupants had scrambled out of them and taken off running. The radios had been ripped out. In another hour, the tires would be gone, too.
Beside Baines’s car, Luke had found his brother’s wallet, all the money gone and a high-heeled, red pump. Was the shoe the whore’s?
So where were they? He’d asked questions. Paid people. So