June 1968

Los Angeles

Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

And the giant is enchanting to Jack,

And the lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

And Jill goes down on her back.

- W.H. Auden

Prologue

They killed the parish priest on the altar at St. Michael’s during the hours of darkness. A radiant gold medallion was central to the ritual his killers called a sacrifice and communion. His death was prolonged and intricate and left the scattered white roses spotted red. While the priest was in agony and being separated from his body the young senator was murdered with a few shots from a small caliber revolver.

The old priest had been much loved and was mourned by his parishioners, and by his fellow soldiers in an ancient secret society, only they knew the reason behind his horrifying death. The police and the public were mystified. The method of the senator’s death was simple and obvious, but the motive obscure, hidden behind layers of lies, curtains of deceit, a mountain of disinformation. Millions mourned the young senator.

No one mourned the third man who died that night. In life the three men had not known each other. In death they were bound together, their lives taken at the direction of a man who believed he was a god.

*   *   *

I’m in a shabby room in a cheap motel on lower La Cienega. The television was on when I slipped the lock and slid inside, commercials, a stupid game show. The light from the bathroom spills onto the orange shag carpet. The windows are open. Hot summer night, a raspy desert wind, moths battering themselves on the screens, smell of Lysol. The phone rings once, stops. I pick it up the next time it rings and wait.

“Priest?” Covington asks.

“Yeah.”

“They stopped in a bar. Hang tight.”

Taylor Covington likes to sound like a tough guy. He isn’t one. He is a world-class liar, a professional requirement for a case officer.

The noise level on the television goes up, a roomful of panicked people crying, shoving. An interviewer shoves a microphone in a young woman’s face.

“She was wearing a dress with polka dots and he was in a double breasted suit.”

“What did she say,” the TV guy asks.

“She was laughing. She said, ‘We got him.’ ”

My chest goes hollow, as if the unseen hand of a thief had suddenly stolen my heart. The mission had felt wrong from the beginning. The phone rings three times and stops. A big-engined car rumbles into the parking lot. Well, here I am, wrong or right.

I move to the side of a window. The Shelby Mustang swings into the parking space in front of the room. Streetlight falls on a broad-leafed palm and throws jagged shadows across the hood. A lush looking woman gets out on the passenger side. The skirt of her polka dotted dress slides up revealing smooth white thighs.

She walks towards the door of the room where I stand in the shadows with my handgun held down along my leg, her spike heels tapping, pulling a grinning man by the hand. A key turns the lock. The door swings open and the man in the double-breasted suit follows the woman into the room. They’re laughing.

He sees me and pulls her in front of him and comes out with a small revolver and everything is moving and it’s too late for talk and I drop him with two rounds to the bridge of his nose and he goes down like water poured from a glass. The new silencer works fine.

The woman freezes, looks at me, at the man on the floor behind her, at the television still on the scene at the Ambassador. She doesn’t scream or start flapping around.

“We…”

“Don’t speak. Drop your purse on the floor. Go to the corner. Put your hands on the wall. Don’t turn around.”

One handed I open the cylinder of his revolver dump the ammo on the floor and toss the handgun under the bed. No gun in her purse. I don’t want to get shot in the back. I go to her.

“Stand still. I’m not going to violate you.”

I run my left hand everywhere over her body keeping my automatic pointed at the back of her head. She’s sweating and trembling, breathing hard, smells of whiskey and cigarette smoke. No gun.

“Touch the corner with your nose. Stay there until I’m gone. You move I drop you.”

They’re out there now. I can feel them and their intention. One of them could have a sight picture on the door, maybe a shooter with a rifle and a spotter in the office building across the street. Anyone in the unit could make that shot. Could be a team covering the entire area. Maybe two guys with Swedish Ks out back. A dry rattling sound comes from outside the window. Is someone there? No. It’s only wind in the palms, or rats. I read that the palm trees in L.A. have rats living in them. Figures.

No reason to wait. It’s not going to get any better. She has her face in the corner, her hands making sweat marks on the wall. I get the keys to the Shelby out of his jacket, the carpet now changing colors where it’s wet. I go out fast and low and in through the driver’s door slinging my shoulder bag to the side and jamming the key in and the Shelby’s engine roars and I’m in the street running hard.

The edge of my eye catches a young prostitute on the corner, wig like a Santa Monica sunset, chrome yellow skirt so short it barely covers her bottom, long chocolate legs, big injured eyes trying to believe it’s somehow going to be all right. She too was once a virgin, maybe is one still, in her heart.

Four of them are in a sedan near the corner and I’m firing out the window before they can get started, screeching tires, yelling, my slide locks back, blood on their windshield. I turn off the wide boulevard and head north through a neighborhood of small bungalows, televisions flickering through screen doors, screaming down the residential street at seventy and hating myself for the speed. Innocents could be strolling in the dimly lighted streets. In my mirror flames illuminate the sky. Night air rushes through the open window carrying traces of half burned hydrocarbons, scorched rubber and cordite.

I hit the curved onramp doing eighty, tires howling and the Mustang fighting me like a wild animal until I burst out onto the 10 heading west. Below the freeway, city lights twinkle with empty promise. I kick the beast up to a hundred and watch my mirror, blowing by a few long haul truckers and a scattering of slow moving cars. No tags. I slow to seventy scan for cops and swing onto the 405 south. Clear. For now.

*   *   *

I crossed into Mexico a few hours after midnight. On maps the border between Mexico and the United States is drawn by the Rio Grande. I didn’t see any water when I crossed over, only concrete barriers washed in harsh light and men with guns.

Tijuana’s night streets were jammed with reeling gringo drunks and predatory cops. I cruised slowly away from the raucous crowds and through poorly lighted streets until I found a small industrial zone and parked in the shadows behind a rundown body shop. I dozed in the Mustang for a couple of jittery hours. When the shop opened I had the Mustang painted flat grey, covering the distinctive white paint job and blue racing stripes. The guys who painted it sold me some Mexican license plates from a wreck. When they finished it looked like an ordinary Mustang, unless you looked closely at the wheels and the hood latches.  South of TJ and past the last frontier check I punched the pedal to the floor and flew along a blacktop ribbon at a hundred and thirty.

I didn’t know where I was going. I was just running. I dropped a couple of black beauties and let the road take me, flying through frigid desert nights and scorched days, stopping only for gas and coffee, then speeding on fueled by caffeine and amphetamine. Hermosillo, Guaymas, Mazatlan, and a hundred dusty villages blurred by my windows, images from a fever dream. In the middle of one high-velocity night the radio caught an atmospheric skip, one of those megawatt stations pumping out the Stones:

I see a red door and I want it painted black

No colors anymore I want them to turn black

I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes

I have to turn my head until my darkness goes

Got that right. I slowed when the drugs started wearing off and I saw things jumping into my headlights.  The road pulled me into the pine-shrouded mountains of Michoacan, a hidden fastness of cold lakes and silent Indians. I stopped at a small hotel near Lake Pasquero, white walls, winding stairs, red tile floors.

My hands were trembling and my mouth full of cotton. I’d been awake for four or five days and had the shakes bad. Shadows were moving in on me. The desk clerk watched me from the corners of his eyes. Was he Covington’s? Covington had people in place from L.A. to Tierra del Fuego. Should I drop him before he could make his move? Paranoia striking deep. I dumped the rest of the black beauties Covington had given me for the mission down the drain. I had enough real enemies.

The nights brought fragmented dreams: his suddenly empty eyes and boneless drop, the mortal fear in the woman’s face. They were the bringers of death and she had thought they were therefore inviolate.

I sweated it out for three days. No new guests checked in. They couldn’t possibly know where I was. I relaxed a little. The hotel reminded me of an inn in the Spanish Pyrenees where I had lived a month with a dark eyed girl who said she loved me. My room had a small fireplace and each night I shaved kindling for the evening fire with a horn handled French pocketknife. The knife had a slender blade and a corkscrew on the back. When I used it I remembered a night in the Spanish hills when I pulled the cork from a bottle of red, red wine and my dark eyed girl laughed and hugged me when the cork made a tiny pop.

But Michoacan was not Spain and there was no laughing girl. There were only dark hills hinting at hidden violence and occult ceremonies, and a young Indian woman who came each evening with fresh cut pine for the fire and cut her eyes slantways at me as she slipped out of the room. She never spoke, not even to tell me her name. Not even when she returned in the night, tapped at my door and slipped into my bed, all hot smooth skin and firelight casting moving shadows on her face.

One night drifting and dreaming in front of the fire I remembered Raphael, a friend who lived in Mexico City. And so, without much thought, I left the misty hills and dropped down into the brassy light of Mexico City. There, unwittingly, I laid the foundation for the tragedy yet to come.

But maybe it didn’t start in Mexico City. Maybe it started in a café in Paris, or a Special Forces training camp in Guatemala, or a cheap motel in Los Angeles. Maybe it started when I crossed the border, an invisible line on the earth but one marked in blood.

The happy rich people and their parties with flowing champagne and beautiful music were part of it. Kate and Elizabeth and the passions that bound us together became part of it. The gold medallion Raphael and I found in a temple undisturbed for centuries in the Yucatan jungle was certainly part of it, the part that led us on in search of ancient mysteries and to the discovery of true evil and the purposes of the cursed and obscene soul catchers. Maybe it started in Oaxaca. After Oaxaca there was no turning back.

Part One

September 1968

Estado de Oaxaca

De tanto andar una region

Que no figuraba en los libros

Me acostumbre a las tierras tercas

From so often traveling in a region

Not charted in books

I grew accustomed to stubborn lands

- Pablo Neruda

Chapter One

It glowed with the radiance of pure gold and smelled of death. A jolt of electricity ran through my arm when I took the medallion from its carved cavity under the capstone of the small pyramid. I heard screams and smelled smoke, felt waves of pain and terror and saw a man with golden skin, a fantastic feathered headdress and an obsidian dagger. And another man stretched naked over a stone altar. Then it was again simply a gold medallion and I was kneeling on the pyramid with my diggers.

“Que maravilloso,” Emeliano said, weighing the gold piece in his hand. His face fell and he tossed the gold piece back to me as if it was on fire.

“What?” I asked.

“Put it back.” Emeliano moved away from me.

“Did you see something too?”

Emeliano looked at me as if I was possessed, “See what? You saw something?”

Terrific. Now I was in a movie: the intrepid explorer finds a treasure and his faithful Indian guide freaks out. Except that Emiliano wasn’t a faithful guide. He was a levelheaded Zapotec businessman and my excavation partner. And I was more flipped out than he was. That vision, or whatever it was, took me too close to the edge.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Emiliano calmed down and got his guys back to work. He was a serious man with black inquisitive eyes, sharp features, and a quiet, confident way of dealing with people. His men, three other Zapotecs, followed his direction without dissention. They levered the capstone back in place, working quickly, looking over their shoulders. I wrapped the gold piece in an old denim shirt and stuffed it in the bottom of my rucksack cushioned by a tattered paperback copy of Beowulf.

Dusk was creeping up from the valleys below and we wanted to be on our way before they came. Someone, or something, had been stalking us since I had found the overgrown pyramid three days ago in this hidden fold in a range of rugged dry mountains. Nights had been filled with moving shadows and rustling sounds in the sparse brush. Each night I had let our tiny fire die out, and while the others slept wrapped in their serapes I silently patrolled the area around our excavation. I saw nothing. Each morning I examined the ground for tracks. I found only our own.

Sometimes I dream true dreams. Dreams that, in a shadowy fragmented way, foretell. Last night I had dreamed of a snake the size of a giant python with glittering anthracite scales, slithering at the edge of vision, disappearing when I turned to see it more clearly, reappearing at the corner of my eye when I looked away. The creature circled the pyramid, coiling its way from the base to the top. On the peak it rose up in the classic pose of the striking serpent with curved neck and forked tongue. Its eyes shone like poisoned rubies and trapped me with hypnotic terror, a gopher before a rattlesnake.

Then I was awake, heart pounding. The night was still, first light a pallid glow on far mountaintops. Nothing menaced us in our little circle around a burnt out fire, nothing that could be seen. There was something loathsome about the dream serpent. It sent bone deep shivers of fear through my dream self. I had no idea what the dream foretold; only that it had the resonance of reality.

Emeliano and his men had tossed and muttered in their sleep and during the day cast furtive glances over their shoulders. The men had wanted to abandon the site. But Emeliano cajoled and shamed them into continuing. I had been drawn to this place. I had felt that there was another gold medallion under that capstone and I wanted it. Now I had it and it was time to go.

I snapped a few final photos of the excavation grid and the pyramid. Professor Mendoza would be pleased. We packed our gear as the sun sank into serrated ridges falling away to the horizon. With one of the men leading the donkey we walked through the moonlit night, down narrow rocky trails to lower country. Emeliano believed we were being watched by a brujo, a sorcerer.

According to the Indians there were sorcerers in these mountains who could fly on night winds, leave their bodies and travel through the underworld and cast spells to take a man’s life. After the past few days I couldn’t say the Indians were wrong.

Before I found the pyramid we had spent two nights in a small adobe village whose alcalde – mayor – extended his hospitality with manners as refined as any Washington D.C. diplomat. Don Cornelio was no more than five feet tall, with a narrow wrinkled face and a mischievous smile. His white shirt and shiny black shoes marked a man of means among the Zapotec and Mixtec.

The second day at dusk I had seen Don Cornelio leap from a cliff and fall a hundred feet into a canyon before disappearing behind treetops. Moments later an enormous raven flew cawing from the trees. At least I think that’s what I saw. I had refused the mushrooms the Indians offered. I smoked no dope whatever and had only one cup of what the Indians said was mescal, a thin green tasting local brew. According to Emeliano, Don Cornelio was a feared brujo and had killed over a dozen people with sorcery.

Until the past week I had blissfully wandered through open markets in mountaintop villages surrounded by crowds of Indians who had been trading in these markets for a thousand years, small people no taller than my shoulder. I became part of the color, and the resiny smell of burning copal incense, the smoke from meat cooking on open fires, the music of wooden flutes, thin notes drifting on mountain winds. I imagined that I could have settled down with one of the young women and forgotten how to speak English. These villages were all but forgotten by the Mexican government. Perhaps my own government would forget about me.

The moon rose full and pale as we wound our way down. The feeling of oppression lifted with each mile. We reached Emiliano’s village in one of those chill night hours when sounds carry, soft footsteps of a mouse in the cactus fence bordering Emiliano’s property, skittering leaves blown by dry winds, an owl’s wings making that fluttering sound that terrifies the small creatures of the night. I rolled out my serape and using my rucksack as a pillow made my bed against an adobe wall.

Emeliano had thought I was insane the first time I had insisted on sleeping outside. The night was filled with roaming spirits seeking to steal the souls of the unwary. He finally accepted that I preferred fresh air to be being closed up in a house with the shutters and door barred and that the night held no fears for me.

The serpent came again in my dreams, his coils encircling me, squeezing the breath from my chest. I awakened gasping for air and grabbing for my handgun. There was no serpent I could see. It was the last hour before dawn and nothing moved in Emeliano’s dusty yard. In the distance a coyote howled, the sky blue black, a single star hanging over a lone pine on a distant ridge.

Chapter Two

We ate breakfast quickly, beans eggs and tortillas. Emiliano wanted the gold piece out of his house. I wandered down the dusty main street. Cool morning air carried the smells of a Mexican village: donkeys, tortillas, wood smoke.

The pickup truck stopped at the end of the dirt road, or the beginning, depending on your direction of travel and state of mind. Four people were crammed in the cab. I tossed my rucksack on the back and climbed on. The truck was old and battered and the springs had long ago collapsed. I stood holding a rail behind the cab and used my legs as shock absorbers to soften the jolts from potholes and rocks as the truck bounced and crashed along the road.

It came to me then, one of those perfect moments when all things hang suspended in crystalline perfection, like the lingering vibration of a struck bell after its sound has faded away. At the far borders of the Oaxaca valley the dun hills came down to the green and fertile valley floor, nopal cactus grew in clumps by the road. A flight of swallows swooped and wheeled. A hawk spiraled upwards and crickets scritched in the stubbled fields. The air was clean and sharp, the sky a vast inverted bowl of purest lapis.

I slipped free of my body and rose up into the sky and looked down at the tiny truck making a dust plume and myself swaying with the truck’s motion and flying along in perfect balance and harmony with all things. My serape streamed in the wind. My hat hung down my back on a braided leather thong, and my blue steel Walther was snugged flat in its thin leather holster against my right hip. All was as it should be.

The beauty of the moment and the freedom from my past combined in one fragile instant and I almost believed it could last forever. It was the last perfect moment before everything went bad, before I saw blood flowing freely over broken stone like a mountain stream in spring.

The old truck flew along the road and I flew with it, surfing all of creation from the back of a rusty pick-up truck and holding fast to the moment, to this life, all I now had of a life once dedicated to a higher purpose.

The truck turned onto another dirt track and stopped to let me off. I waved to the driver and started the two-mile walk towards the Pan American Highway, that long, ambitious ribbon of asphalt connecting air-conditioned America with Mexico and Central America. I intended to catch a bus or hitch a ride into La Ciudad de Oaxaca.

About a half-mile from the highway a coyote loped into the road, stopped, sat on his haunches and stared directly at me. I halted in mid stride and held perfectly still. Coyotes are elusive animals, a long howl in the night, shadows slipping between shadows.

The lean animal cocked his head and grinned at me, a wise knowing grin, his mouth open wide, tongue lolling out to one side. He stalked closer, holding my eyes with an intense stare. Then he turned and walked to the edge of the road, looking over his shoulder at me as if he wanted me to follow him. He spun in a full circle and in two bounds disappeared into the brush.

Indians believe the coyote is a trickster, or a harbinger of disaster, or an agent of warning. Indians have many and varied stories about coyotes, but they all agree that a sighting such as this was ominous. What you believe in a warm well lighted room with ice clinking in your glass while discussing native folkways with a group of friends can be very different from what you believe when you’re alone on an empty road in the center of a valley soaked for centuries in the blood of human sacrifice, and after living for weeks among people whose lives are ruled by belief in the supernatural.

I bent down to examine the coyote’s tracks, real tracks made by a flesh and blood animal, not an apparition. A handful of dust from the road sifting through my fingers sent a tiny frisson of fear through me. I settled my rucksack on my shoulders and walked on.

Near the highway an abandoned shack slumped in the shade of a cottonwood tree. As I neared the tumbledown building I saw a bright red Chevrolet convertible with the top down parked behind it. Anastacio Lagarto was sitting on the hood.

I knew Lagarto as a drug dealer who hung out around the zocolo-the town center of the city of Oaxaca. Lagarto was whip thin, with a narrow face, a backward sloping forehead, a receding chin, and narrow slanted eyes. He gave the impression of a long, skinny lizard anticipating its next fly. A thick gold chain glinted around his neck. He wore what he always wore: a black rancher’s hat, a shiny western shirt with pearl snaps, tight pants and cowboy boots.

One of his hangers on, a stocky Indio in jeans a straw hat and a cowboy shirt, leaned against the front fender on the far side of the car. The Indian held his right hand low, out of sight behind the fender.

“Buenos Dias, Senor Browning,” Lagarto said. “How you doing this nice day Mr. Roberto?”

Lagarto always spoke in a smarmy, supercilious manner, as if he had a secret that made him superior to everyone else. I stopped in the road and let my rucksack slip to the ground.

“Nice car,” I said.

“I bought it from those kids, got a bill of sale and everything. They needed more money for their mota deal. Lucky I can help them.”

“Too bad about what happened to them.”

“Some scary brujos around here.”

I suspected Lagarto had a hand in the deaths of two surfers from one of the beach towns near Los Angeles who had come to Oaxaca to score some weed. Due to the way kids were killed, and because their bodies were found at a Pre-Columbian site, talk was that they had been killed by a brujo.

“You’re a long way from the zocolo,” I said

“I waiting for you. I thinking you might want to do some business.”

“I’m not in your business Lagarto.”

“What, you don’t like money? You can’t make no money from those blankets.”

“Just blankets. That’s all.”

“You want five thousand dollars? Not pesos, dollars. I give you five thousand dollars for any old stuff you got with you. That’s good, yes?”

“Old stuff?”

“We know you been digging in the old places. I take a chance. Maybe what you got is worth something, maybe not.”

“What makes you think I have anything worth that much money?”

“Maybe you got lucky. Maybe you got some little gold thing I might like.”

Gold thing? That wasn’t a guess. My grandfather told me that if you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. My grandfather was right about most things.

“I don’t have anything for you.”

Lagarto slid off the hood and faced me. He wore a smirk that said he knew something I didn’t.

“You sure? Nothing you want to sell?”

“You want a nice Zapotec blanket, hand woven, natural dyes?”

Lagarto turned and walked towards the driver’s door, his intention in the set of his shoulders, the lines at the edge of his mouth, his cocky stride. The Indio moved around to the front of the car and stopped by the chrome grille. He had an unsheathed machete in his right hand. Lagarto reached in the car and started to pull out a double-barreled shotgun.

My Walther is in my hand and aimed at Lagarto’s head before he gets the gun out of the car.

“Put it down!”

Lagarto freezes.

“Do it now!”

The Indio shuffles forward.

“Y tu!” I say to the Indio, watching him with peripheral vision, eyes still on Lagarto.

“Drop the machete!”

The muscles in the Indio’s right forearm flex. His knuckles whiten around the grip. He sets his left foot. He pushes off leaping towards me. I shoot his trailing foot. The small caliber weapon makes a flat SNAP. I see the bullet enter the top of his boot and swing back to Lagarto before he can react, my sightline on his left eye.

The Indian drops the machete, falls and curls onto his side holding his foot, grunting, “Uh, uh, uh.”

“Put down the gun Lagarto!”

Lagarto hesitates. I consider shooting off his left earlobe off to encourage him. He doesn’t need that earlobe, blood spraying, yelling. Beautiful. Probably teach him some humility. I resist the temptation.

“Is today the day?” I ask.

“What you mean? What day?”

“The day you’ve chosen to die.”

Lagarto lets the shotgun slide onto the car seat.

“Move away from the car.”

Lagarto moves slowly, his eyes shiny marbles, nothing behind them. He tries a smile, a reptile peeling back its thin lips. He licks his lips. For a second his tongue looks forked.

“Man, why you shoot Manuel? We were…”

“On your knees,” I say.

“Come on man, my pants get dirty.”

“This can be the day.”

“OK, OK,” going to his knees in the dirt.

“Hands on your head, move towards me.”

His shiny black pants scuff on the rough ground. The Indian stays curled on his side holding his foot and whimpering. I don’t see or feel anyone else in the area. I step behind Lagarto and run my left hand over him, checking his waistband, patting his pockets. I find a seven-inch Tijuana switchblade in his boot and slip it behind my belt.

“You use this on those kids?”

“I don’t hurt nobody.”

I leave Lagarto kneeling in the dirt, go to the Indian and quickly search him. No weapons. I tell him to take his boot off. The hollow point bullet made a small entry hole at the top of his arch and ripped a half-dollar sized exit hole underneath. A small crimson pool forms in the dust and soaks into the dry and thirsty earth. I toss a handkerchief in his face.

“Put some pressure on that wound.”

The keys are in the ignition. The shotgun is an old Stevens sixteen gauge, the blue worn away and a coat of rust on the receiver.

“Help your buddy,” I say to Lagarto. “Bring him to the car.”

I lay the shotgun on the ground away from the car, grab the keys with my left hand and pop the trunk. Lagarto comes to the car with Manuel leaning on his shoulder. I move back, my handgun still on Lagarto.

“Get in the trunk.”

Lagarto’s face goes pale. “What you doing man? You acting like a crazy guy.”

“You offered me a ride to town. I’m driving and you’re riding where I don’t have to watch you.”

He licks his lips, that forked tongue again, my imagination running away with me.

“What’s the matter Lagarto? Macho guy like you, not afraid of small spaces are you?”

“You really taking…?”

“I wanted you dead I wouldn’t have to take you anywhere. Right? I’m the guy with the gun. You’re the guy with empty hands.”

After some mumbled cursing Lagarto climbs into the trunk. The Indian follows him.

“Keep pressure on that foot. Use your shirt if the handkerchief doesn’t stop the bleeding.”

I closed the lid on them. Using the slide mounted safety I dropped the hammer on my automatic and holstered it, then broke open the shotgun and removed the shells. Buckshot. I pocketed the shells and leaned the old double barrel and the machete against a tree for a campesino to find and put to better use. The cheap switchblade went in a ditch with dirt scuffed over it. I tossed my hat and serape on the floor of the car settled into the soft seat and started the engine. The softly sprung convertible bumped down the dirt road to the pavement. I headed north towards La Ciudad de Oaxaca.

Chapter Three

It had been self indulgent to shoot the Indio in the foot. He could have gotten to me and split my head open with his machete in less than two seconds. But I didn’t want to take another man’s life. Besides, two seconds is a very long time and the shot was nothing. If a hit to the foot didn’t drop him, I would have had plenty of time for the headshot, for two headshots.

Still, Dillon’s words after my first mission came back to me. He had been my team leader and used my code name to let me know he was serious,  “Priest, you can’t shoot a man a little bit. You have to put them down. You’re the finest natural shot I’ve ever known. But lad, your soft heart and over confidence will get you killed one day.”

Maybe so. Maybe one day. But not today.

Now I had problems. I had been living quietly and keeping a low profile. Now Lagarto knew I carried a gun and was willing to use it, not the usual behavior of a blanket trader, or a dealer in antiquities. He would talk. Word would get around. Suspicions would be raised. The situation with Lagarto added to the shifting atmosphere I had felt around Oaxaca lately. The deaths of the L.A. surfers had seemed to trigger a sea change. An undefined looming presence was gathering, like charged air before a tropical storm.

Had a brujo killed those kids? I couldn’t see a connection between an Indian sorcerer and a couple of surfers on a weed buying expedition. Brujos were concerned with darker matters than hustling a few of pounds of weed. It seemed more likely that a drug dealer had killed the surfers, Lagarto being the primary possibility. I had seen him talking to the fresh-faced kids parked in the zocolo in their new Chevy convertible when they first came to Oaxaca.

That same day I had seen one of Lagarto’s customers, stoned out of her mind on God only knows what, walking along the yellow stripe in the center of the street around the zocolo, carefully putting one foot in front of the other as if balanced on a high wire, her only clothing a pair of red lacy bikini panties. One of the ladies who sold rebozos on the zocolo covered her with a large shawl and led her away, docile as a kitten.

Half of my generation was smoking weed or hash, dropping acid, eating mushrooms and cactus buds, trying to break on through to the other side, or just get stoned. The other half were trying to figure out what was going down. But acid soaked sugar cubes weren’t getting anyone to the place they thought they were looking for. Mick Jagger wasn’t getting any satisfaction and neither was anyone else.

Early in the year someone had hit a button marked CRAZY and was holding it down. John Lennon was singing about a bloodless revolution and the Russians were rolling tanks in Prague, steel treads chewing up ancient cobblestones and the people who ran before them. In Paris students barricaded the streets and fought pitched battles with police. The crash and rattle of gunfire continued in a small Asian country where some of my former comrades were reported to have destroyed a village in order to save it.

In Alabama blood ran red on brown skin and crosses burned in churchyards at night. On a spring day that year, in a leafy Southern city, we killed a King, sending cities into flames and bodies hitting the sidewalks from sea to shining sea. And on a summer night in a city without a soul we murdered a prince, sending most of a generation into despair and me into exile. How many degrees of separation are required for your hands to be free of stain? I think for some sins no degree of separation is enough for us to be blameless. Are we not all our brother’s keepers?

The backbeat was hard and heavy, the drums were beating faster and the world was spinning out of control. Here, where the old ways still ruled, where life was lived closer to the bone, where the colors were richer and the air like wine, I thought I had found a way to get off. But the world was catching up to me.

It was easy to drift south on the Pan Am Highway. A few more American kids looking for drugged out bliss had arrived in Oaxaca during the past month. None of them I had met understood that they had left their comfortable world and had traveled back in time to a culture that was essentially medieval. The ones I had talked with seemed to think they were in some kind of Mexicoland, constructed by Disney for their enjoyment. They skated easily along smiling at the happy brown people not knowing how thin the ice was under them or what horrors lay beneath.

How could Lagarto have known I would be on that road at that time? How did he know I had found a gold piece? No one knew my schedule except Raphael. Could Lagarto have bribed one of the men on my excavation crew? I knew how to get the answers. I had attended the interrogation classes and had seen it done. But I didn’t have the heart for it, then or now. Torture is a filthy business regardless of what you call it.

Nor was I sure how much I should care about any of it. The surfers were someone else’s problem. I could deal with the problems Lagarto represented as I had dealt with the problem in Los Angeles. I could run. I didn’t want to get involved in local intrigue, or come to the attention of my former organization.

But where would I go? I didn’t have any paper that would allow me to get on an international flight without popping up on the U.S. government’s radar. The only passport I carried was in my true name, Jesse J. Rideout, an easy name to remember, a name that was in U.S. government computers, and one that cost me many skinned and bloody knuckles as a kid. I had been named by my grandfather, who was born in 1863, lived to be 97, and failed to understand why my name was cause for fights at each new school.

I had two blank tourist cards. But Mexican tourist cards were no good outside of Mexico. I could easily slip across the border to the north or to the south. But returning to the U.S. was not an option and I couldn’t go to Guatemala without running the risk of recognition by former teammates.

Well, I could worry about all that later. Mexico was a big country. Robert Browning could disappear from Oaxaca as easily as he had appeared at the border. For a man on the run to use a poet’s name seemed whimsical. But I had been reading Browning while staging in L.A. and it was the first name that popped into mind when the Mexican immigration officer who sold me the tourist cards asked me what name I wanted typed on the first one. The name hadn’t drawn attention and I supposed William Blake, or George Bryon, could easily appear in the Yucatan or on the Gulf Coast. Vera Cruz might be a good town.

Something was giving me that prickling, icy feeling between the shoulder blades you get when someone is watching you. The coyote, the vision, or whatever it was I had seen when I took the gold medallion from its resting place, the hollow people, all were part of the heavy foreboding atmosphere. Maybe I should move on.

I stopped on a quiet street lined with the stone walls of inward turned houses, opened the trunk and stood back to let Lagarto and Manuel crawl out blinking into the late afternoon sunlight.

“Manuel,” I said.

Manuel leaned on the side of the car favoring his wounded foot. The handkerchief was soaked through but the bleeding seemed to have stopped.

“Get some penicillin and iodine at the farmacia. Clean that wound and bandage it. If you have to go to a medico tell him you shot yourself while cleaning your gun. Entiendes-you understand?”

“The fuck you care man?” Lagarto asked. “You the one shot him. Now you a fucking nurse or something?”

I ignored Lagarto and his vulgarity.

“Manuel, you understand? Take care of yourself and don’t come at me again. Next time I won’t shoot your foot. Talk to me Manuel. Tell me you understand.”

Manuel nodded, “Si, claro.”

I tossed the keys to Lagarto and he slid behind the wheel.

“Lagarto, I don’t want to hear any more about this. Forget about doing business with me. Forget this afternoon.”

Lagarto slouched behind the wheel of the Chevy, big car, tough guy.

“You shoot my friend. Fuck I’m supposed to do? Forget about it?”

“Manuel is going to forget about it. Right Manuel?”

The Indian nodded his head.

Largarto stared at me without blinking. I could almost see scales forming on his flat cheeks, growing forward from his ears and covering his face. “You sticking your nose in places it don’t belong, hanging out in villages, talking to Indians. Maybe you heard of Sangre de Dios.”

Blood of God? What was he talking about, some church thing?

“You taking communion? You an altar boy?’

“Don’t laugh gringo. You don’t do business with me, somebody else gonna have some business with you. Your pistola won’t help with him. Better for you, sell me that little gold thing. I give you another thousand, six thousand dollars.”

“It’s not happening.”

“You don’t know about Sangre de Dios too bad for you.”

“Adios Lagarto.”

I stepped away and slapped the side of the car and watched them drive off in the long convertible, a car made for fun, for cruising the beach and picking up girls on summer nights, a car that had carried its previous owner to an early death. I didn’t think this bright red Chevy would bring much fun to its new owner.