Blood & Tacos #2 (2 page)

The Renaissance Men. Of course. Back before the Wall, there had been a border,
and that border had been patrolled by a group called the Civil Defense Corps.
These men and women good and true used to pack high-caliber hunting rifles into
their armored trucks and go looking for wetbacks to cap.

Good clean American fun.

When the Wall went up, the corps members lucky enough to have made it to Mexico
or the Upper States became Minutemen, Wall walkers. They were cowardly scum
to a man, smug and fat and safe behind the scope of their sniper rifles, and
Cruz had already burned a few on his travels, but they were saints compared
to The Renaissance Men. The Minutemen went home at night; The Renaissance Men
continued fighting their good fight and broadcasting their white power propaganda
to what was left of the nation. Captain Glenister must have been this chapter’s
leader. It wasn’t a name he knew, but he would soon enough. Because Glenister
had known his name, and that spelled trouble of a different sort.

"How many of us are there?"

"I do not know, señor. Hundreds, maybe a thousand. The men they
keep in barns down by the river, the women in dormitories by the big house.
The men work until they fall."

"And the women?"

"We are for play."

He returned to the bed and took Rita’s hand in his own. He touched something
rough and raised on the back of her hand. "What’s this?"

"They mark us, señor, they—"

He put a finger to her lips. She breathed warmly against his touch. He leaned
in to her. "Tell me everything you know about this place, Rita. And tell
me as quickly as you can."

He counted the steps from the cells to what Rita had called the big house.
Two armed guards flanked him. They were both taller than him and they didn’t
speak much. They smelled of good sleep, old sex and chewing gum.

Rita had spelled it out for him, every last inch of it, so he could almost
picture the journey he was on. He’d been in a cell down in an annex to
the whores’ dormitory. The cells were rarely used. "The men have
cattle prods," she’d said, and if the rebellion was any more serious
than that, the offending party would be shot in the head as an example to the
others.

Workers, and their lives, were cheap.

The stone corridors led to somewhere warmer and softer, and then outside, where
Cruz felt the wind on his face. The wind carried the sound of the workers from
down in the valley. It was all mechanical noise. No voices other than the odd
shout from one of the guard, who tagged their pep talks with racial slurs.

It was a short walk across open ground to the big house. This was where Glenister
and his men stayed. Cruz was taken up four steep wooden steps that led to a
porch and the front doors of the big house. The way Rita described it, the place
must have resembled something like a plantation house, a huge white palace on
a big brown hill. Inside, it was supposed to be decorated with scavenged luxury.
The floor under Cruz’s feet was marble and his steps echoed through the
large entrance hall as he was led to Glenister’s office.

Captain Troy Glenister was a man who wore his influences on his sleeve. Rita
had talked of a room draped with the stars and stripes and hung with paintings
of stern men in old-fashioned clothes. Glenister’s chair was leather,
large and heavy. It had to be, because Glenister himself was large and heavy.
His breathing was labored, but Cruz didn’t take that as a sign the man
was weak, just that he was overweight. The clicking sound that came from somewhere
near his lap meant that Glenister was playing with Cruz’s shikomizue,
sliding the sword from the cane and replacing it.

When he spoke, his voice was thick with butter and low like a Baptist preacher.
"I must say, Mr. Cruz, this toothpick of yours is quite the weapon. Doesn’t
look like much at first glance, and yet you used it to carve up my boys like
they were wet-eared grunts. Even more impressive considering your obvious handicap.
You are actually blind, aren’t you?"

Cruz nodded.

"Not so impressive that you couldn’t see a shocker coming, of course."
He chuckled. It was a throaty sound. "You’re not the only one around
here with a talent for customization."

"It won’t happen again," said Cruz.

"I’m sure it won’t." Another click, louder, Glenister
shutting the shikomizue unnecessarily hard. "Perhaps I should have shot
you. But the thing is, Mr. Cruz, I’m not a bad man, despite what that
little whore may have told you. If I was a bad man, I’d have my boys pop
a head every time someone looked weary. I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble
of providing them with the cattle prods." He cleared his throat. "A
chain boss don’t blow holes in his own damn gang just because they set
it down without permission. Hell, you’d never achieve anything that way.
Have one guy dragging six corpses, and besides, I’m well-versed in psychology,
Mr. Cruz. I know the beaner mind. If I had my boys use deadly force every time
your Pedro pals out there acted uppity, we’d have rivers of blood. A beaner
would rather die than work hard, am I right?"

Cruz smiled but said nothing.

"But you buzz the son of a bitch with a thousand volts, he’ll know
who holds his balls. And he’ll sure as hell think twice about resisting
the yoke again."

"Or he’ll learn to avoid the buzz," said Cruz.

"Nah, your average beaner don’t think like that."

"I do."

"I said average beaner." There was a smile in his voice. "You’re
Victor Cruz, boy. You’re the Dead Eye. Ain’t nothing average about
you."

"The price," said Cruz.

"You’re goddamn right, the price." There was a wet sound
as Glenister rolled his tongue around the inside of his mouth. It was the noise
of a hedonist. He ate too much, smoked too much, drank too much, and if Cruz
didn’t kill him, a venereal disease would.

"How much is it?"

"Six million."

"Old or new?"

"Old."

Getting up there. Add a couple of thousand for every uniform slashed to ribbons,
every milk-fed American mouth that bit the dust. It would be a lot more soon
enough.

"I don’t see how you’re worth it," said Glenister.
"But then I didn’t see the beauty in this here sword stick, either."

"You want me to show you?"

Another throaty laugh. "You’re unarmed and blind, and you don’t
know what I have pointed at you."

He did. It was a Colt Anaconda, stainless steel finish and a walnut grip. Rita
had remembered the name of the gun because it was the same nickname Glenister
gave his dick. The Anaconda held six and because Glenister was lazy, it would
be held at hip height as he lounged in his chair. Unless he was a crack shot
or incredibly lucky, a sudden movement from Cruz would mean three or four wild
panic shots and a throbbing wrist that would make him pause long enough for
Cruz to grab his meaty hand, shove the barrel up against his chins and press
on his trigger finger until the gun clicked empty.

But that wouldn’t do. That wasn’t the plan.

"You’re calling in the bounty," said Cruz.

"Already done it. They’ll be here Sunday morning."

"I see. In that case, I have a few requests."

"Requests? You don’t get to request nothing, Cruz."

"For six million, they’ll want me pristine. They won’t pay
full price for damaged goods. You look after me, you’ll look after your
money."

"Six million’s a lot of money, Cruz. I could stand to lose a little
bit of it."

"But you don’t want to. You’re a grasping asshole. You’d
never forgive yourself if you lost a single dime of that bounty. If I’m
the six million dollar man, I refuse to live like a pig."

He didn’t say anything. Cruz guessed he was thinking it over.

Finally Glenister said, "What do you want?"

"I want a room here."

"Very well."

"I want the same meals as you and the guards. Otherwise, I want to be
left alone."

"Why?"

"Because I want the whore you sent me. When I’m finished with her,
she can go back, but otherwise she’s mine."

"Okay. That’s fine. Was there anything else?"

"No. I’d like to be shown to my room now."

The room was only fit for a blind man. It was comfortable, but according to
Rita, every stick of furniture in here was old, dirty and ugly. It didn’t
matter. The only thing that mattered was that he and Rita had privacy to practice.
The girl was trustworthy and had already proven herself a quick learner with
a good memory. Cruz only hoped that she was as good a teacher as she was a student.

The first night she spent with him, they practiced disarm and destroy techniques
designed to bring down the bigger assailant. He concentrated on a few quick
and dirty moves—the girls didn’t have time to learn much more than
that, and they had to do it right. Everything else would be easy just as long
as that first strike hit home. Because tomorrow was Saturday, and that night
would be the only clean opportunity they’d have. Saturday night was when
the house guards laid down their arms and commenced to drinking and screwing
their brains out. Only Glenister and Cruz were allowed to have whores in their
own rooms, and so the guards had to stagger across to the dormitory, where,
of course, the girls would be waiting for them. Only this time their smiles
would be genuine.

Cruz ate his afternoon meal, but refused his dinner. He preferred to stay hungry.
It would give him an edge. At eight o’clock, the guard outside his door
knocked off for the night. Cruz lit a cigarette. By the time the ash reached
the filter, he heard the guards carousing downstairs. According to Rita, they
would continue like that for a few hours before they left the big house.

He waited. He heard the guards moving downstairs. Heard footsteps on the marble
floor of the hall. Heard the front doors open and close. He saw them in his
mind’s eye, moving out across the moon-drenched countryside in a slow
zig-zag towards the dormitory. He moved his head, stretched his neck. He saw
them bursting through, drunken grins, shoving each other as they picked their
favorites and dragged them off to their respective rooms.

Midnight was the agreed time. It was the only time Cruz could hear. On the
stroke of midnight, the church clock in the middle of Fort Johnson would chime
twelve times. On the first chime, the girls disarmed their johns with a chop
to the Adam’s apple, a well-placed fist to the balls, or a pointed hand
in the eye. By the third, they had the guards’ sidearms. By the sixth,
the guards were dead or incapacitated, and those puritan assholes who had stayed
away from temptation would be next as the crackle of gunfire that had originated
in the dormitory moved towards the big house.

Cruz stood and opened the door. Rita had gummed the lock so it wouldn’t
secure, but until now it would have been suicide to attempt an escape. He moved
quickly and silently into the hall. Counted his steps once again, skimming a
wall with one hand. He walked with his head down, listening. The rooms were
empty on this floor, but there was the sound of laughter and music downstairs.
A door opened and the laughter grew louder. Cruz counted three or four. He touched
the wall until he found a door and pushed inside as the laughing merc climbed
the stairs. Cruz left the door open, disappeared into the shadows. The merc
stopped on the landing and then crossed in front of the open door, a breeze
and whiff of cheap bourbon like an olfactory tracer. The merc opened a door,
closed it. Then Cruz heard the sound of water on water, hitting it from a height.

The merc was taking a leak.

Cruz kicked open the bathroom door. He felt the air shift in front of him and
planted the heel of his hand in the merc’s throat. He grabbed a fistful
of ear and hair and slammed the merc’s head into the nearest solid object.
Something crashed off its fixtures. Cruz grabbed at the merc’s belt, found
the cattle prod, and forced it past the merc’s teeth before he flicked
the switch. The merc went rigid, there was the smell of burnt hair, and he tumbled
backwards into what sounded like a tub where he kicked the sides in an off-beat
jig before he passed out.