back at her, had a brief staring battle, then raised the shotgun and made a golf swing with the barrel against the kid's face hard enough to roll him over. Erainya jogged over to me.
Her hair was a mess. She had red lines on her arms like junkie tracks. Her face was made up even gaunter and darker than usual. She was dressed in an old T-shirt and jeans. She passed very effectively for a strung-out user, a washed-up prostitute maybe, a woman like a hundred others who might visit this spot regularly.
She crooned, "Oh, honey." I'd never heard her sound so kind.
Then she got her arms around me and lifted me up. I was maybe seventy-five pounds heavier than she, but Erainya dragged me all the way back to the car. I could see Ralph, training his shotgun lazily on the wounded second man. The gang-banger's face looked like a rust-eaten car hood - most of his left cheek scoured to blood, his left eye ruptured and the irreplaceable fluid dribbling down his cheek.
Ralph's helper, the man with the .45, was busy stripping the dead young dealer of his heroin.
Erainya got me in the car. Within seconds I was wedged between her and the man with the .45 and Ralph was in the driver's seat, speeding us silently away from the West Side. We heard a siren behind us, a long way off.
When Ralph spoke his voice was so taut with anger I hardly recognized it. He said, "Mi pendejo rife. Y que?"
Chapter 46
"Nobody passes a boosted red Barracuda in S.A. without me knowing about it."
Ralph spoke somewhere in the darkness. "Fuck Chich, he thinks he can pull that shit in my town."
"I suppose I had nothing to do with this operation," Erainya griped.
"No offense, senora. You handled it pretty good for a gringa."
Erainya called Ralph some names in Greek. Ralph defended himself in Spanish. I knew neither could understand the other. That was probably just as well.
"I love you both," I mumbled. "Now shut up."
Astoundingly, they did.
I drifted to sleep to the sound of the Impala engine. Sometime during the ride, I think I recalled the mysterious .45 man, whom Ralph called Freeze, being dropped off. Freeze patted me on the shoulder and told me that for another hundred, he'd be happy to drill anybody for me any day.
The next time I woke up I was lying flat, staring at bare cedar rafters and an old ceiling fan. When I tried to move, cot springs clinked and clunked like a broken music box. The fan wobbled precariously.
A thickly accented woman's voice said, "Hol' still, damn it."
Dr. Janice Farn hovered over me, giving me a view of curly white hair and bifocals and the Calvin Klein fedora that Aileen the cow had once driven her hoof through.
I started to say something, but Farn cut me off. "Hol' still and shut up."
I had no recollection of arriving where I obviously was - the Navarre family ranch in Sabinal - but I held still. And shut up. Dr. Farn's hand dabbed at my face.
"Had to cut a little to get at the infection in your cheek." Her breath smelled distinctly of Jack Daniel's - not surprising, knowing Farn, but not a smell you wanted on someone who was giving you urgent medical attention.
Farn must've been past eighty, tough as beef jerky, a widow and a large-animal vet who'd leased most of her neighboring wheat fields to the Navarre family for as many years as I could remember. Now in her retirement, Farn no longer made house calls unless it was for a sick cow she really cared about. I supposed I should feel honored.
We were on the back gallery of the ranch. The early morning air was bleeding through the screens. Outside, ground fog was turning the yellow huisache trees into hazy sketches. Charolais cows drifted across the pasture. The old white water tank rose in the distance. The hay shed. Past that, a hundred acres of stunted Texas wheat just turning from green to gold. Pastoral.
Farn finished stitching me up, then checked the dilation of my eyes and the IV that she had attached to my arm. She yelled into the next room, "Arguello!" Ralph came in, holding a snifter with my father's name, JACK, printed on the side. Ralph's hair was freshly washed and unbraided. It fell in a loose fan of gray and black. With his huge white shirt untucked