Titus could almost hear Macias thinking. The headlights of the Navigator panned over the cliffs and hillsides as they twisted their way through the hills toward the city. To their left they could see the lights of the houses close and high above them on the dark hillsides. To their right they caught glimpses of the river far below them and the lights of the homes on the broad, upward-sloping valley on the other side, where Titus lived and Rita waited anxiously for him.
Following Macias's directions, they turned off and slipped down into the escarpment that led to a lower level of cliffs above the river. The dark streets twisted back upon themselves and were crowded with houses set close together and nestled into dense woods. Macias directed Titus back and forth on the streets while Macias and the bodyguard kept up a staccato exchange in Spanish. They seemed to be evaluating the feasibility of stopping at one of the houses, which Titus realized they must have driven past several times now. He could see from glimpsing between the houses that these homes were on the cliff high above the river.
Was this where Luquin had been staying?
“Do you know anything about how they were going to deal with Luquin? ”Macias asked. “Don't lie to me.”
“I have no idea.”
“Shit! ”Pause. “Pull over.”
Titus stopped. They were looking at the house two houses up and on the right.
“Luquin is in there, ”Macias said. “I've left a computer notebook in there. I might as well be dead now if I have to leave without it. ”He thought a moment. “They were going to kill him.”
“Yes.”
“And then what?”
“I have no idea.”
“Shit shit shitshitshit, ”Macias was muttering.
“Look, ”Titus said, “I do know that… well, this guy, Lender, his big deal is, you know, leaving no trace… that anything had ever happened. If Luquin is killed, I doubt they would do it in there if they could help it. They're going to want to leave the house clean, without any sign of anything having gone wrong.”
Silence.
“What's this guy's name again?”
“Lender.”
Macias said nothing, but he was thinking about this. He said something in Spanish to the bodyguard. They talked. More silence. “Vamos a ver, ” Macias said, and then to Titus, “We're going in.”
Titus put the Navigator in gear, and they eased along the street and pulled into the driveway. The driveway to the garage was protected from the street by a high hedge, and when they rounded the corner they saw the black Navigator in the driveway.
Macias swore. “Stop!”
He and the bodyguard talked in Spanish some more, now whispering illogically.
“Go on in and park, ”Macias said.
Titus pulled up beside the other Navigator and cut the motor.
“Get out, ”Macias said.
They left the doors ajar, and the bodyguard started toward the front porch with his pistol ready at his side. They passed a knee-high privet hedge with Titus in between the two men.
Suddenly the bodyguard hissed loudly. He looked back at Macias. “Lo hicieron, ” he whispered, and gestured at a lawn chair where a man was sprawled awkwardly, his head hanging back over the chair. “Rulfo, ”he said.
Titus began to feel that strange, unreal humming sensation again. He couldn't believe he was doing this. He wondered what Burden and the others were thinking as they watched his mole sensor at Luquin's clifftop house. Were they sending help? Was there going to be a shoot-out after all, despite everyone's elaborate efforts to maintain silence?
The bodyguard put his hand on the doorknob of the front door and twisted it slowly. He pushed carefully. The door eased open, and he followed it in as if he were part of it. Macias nudged Titus forward with his pistol. The bodyguard looked toward the pale flickering light that came from the room just off the main hallway. Television. Lots of light, big screen. The moment Macias cleared the front door, the bodyguard stopped again. He turned around and looked past Titus at Macias behind him and pointed to the hallway floor. Another dead man. Instinctively all three of them waited, listening.
Nothing. Apparently the volume was off on the television.
Wait. From the far side of the family room, water started running. The kitchen. The sound of the water in the sink would create a kind of white noise for the person standing there, so the bodyguard made a quick move to get across the opening into the family room, past the body in the hallway, and to the next opening that came into the back of the family room, nearer the kitchen.
Titus's underarms were slick with perspiration, and suddenly he caught the odor of feces. Feces? He looked at Macias, whose eyes were fixed on his bodyguard as if he were the canary in the coal mine. The bodyguard motioned: One man.
With that information, Macias urged Titus forward into the first opening at the same moment that the bodyguard stepped into the other one. At that instant, both Titus and Macias looked toward the bodyguard for another cue, but the man was stone still, looking around frantically. When he'd turned back after motioning to Macias, he'd lost his man.
Fear defined him in that moment, and Titus knew that he knew that he was going to die. The only sound was the dull smack! of the slug hitting his forehead and blowing out the back of his skull, a sound weirdly soft and out of proportion to the sight of his head being flung back violently with a neckpopping velocity that knocked him off his feet. And because his head seemed to recoil at an angle, it was difficult to tell which direction the shot had come from.
Titus went cold. The inexplicable physics of what he'd just seen added to the weirdness of the fact that he was even there.
Then a figure like a demon stood up from behind the sofa, naked, his body smeared with muddy brown and fecal green (a stunning confusion with reality), his hair spiky wild. Titus didn't really understand what he was looking at, and he didn't understand the compression of time, but before either he or Macias could react, the man was holding a small gun to Macias's forehead as he took his automatic away from him and tossed it aside on the floor.
“Who are you? ”he asked Titus. Hispanic accent. His eyes were calm but tortured, red rimmed. The whites were very white.
Titus couldn't speak. He smelled the body paint now. And something else, too. There was blood all over the demon, and the odor of it was thick and sweet. Titus could hardly believe his senses. This man-thing wasn't big, but the intensity of its presence was scintillating.
“Who are you? ”he asked Macias. He reached around with his left arm and cradled the back of Macias's head with his hand so that his right hand could press the barrel of his strange-looking pistol to Macias's forehead with what must have been a painful force.
“Jorge Macias.”
“We're supposed to be alone here, ”the demon said. “Why are you here?”
“I came to get a computer, ”Macias said with an honesty that seemed childishly absurd.
“Is that all you want?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
Macias carefully raised a hand and pointed to the dining room table a few feet from Titus.
“Get it, ”the demon said to Titus. “Yes. Yes. Go get it.”
Titus went to the table and closed the notebook. It was plugged in. As he was unplugging it, he looked down and saw photographs scattered on the table. They were of various sizes, some in black and white, some in color, some yellowed and limp with age. The images were horrific; a little girl of ten or eleven in various acts of sexual intercourse with men, sometimes several men. Bruises were clearly visible on her little body, which hadn't yet begun to take on the contours of puberty.
Titus struggled with a memory, a recognition. A child… what did he know about a child? Jesus Christ! He remembered… Burden had told him a harrowing story about Luquin… and a little girl… and her father. Artemio. Ospina.
He looked around at the man, who was still holding Macias's head wedged between his gun barrel and his hand, and he was looking at Titus. What the hell was going on here?
Something else caught Titus's eye. A cell phone on the table was ringing. The sound was turned off, but a red light stuttered… stuttered… stuttered.
“Is this your phone?”
The man said nothing.
“It's ringing, ”Titus said.
“Yes, I know.”
Titus's phone rang in Macias's pocket.
“Let me get that, ”Titus said. “That's my phone. This guy's kidnapped me…”
“No, ”Macias said, his eyes walled as he rolled them at the man holding him. Then he spoke to him in Spanish, and the man cut his eyes again at Titus.
“I don't know what he's saying, ”Titus said, suddenly terrified at Macias's ploy, “but he and Luquin had been extorting money from me, and they've killed my friends… Wait… wait. I know, you work for Garcia Burden, don't you?”
At the mention of Burden's name, he saw recognition in the demon's eyes. And there was no mistaking the recognition in Macias's eyes, either. Though Titus was actually out of his field of vision, Macias's eyes were rolled in his direction, wide with stunned discovery, as if those two words dazzled with revelation in the shadowy room, like the visionary writing on Belshazzar's wall.
“I hired Garcia to get me out of this thing with Luquin and Macias. Maybe he hired you-”
This wasn't working fast enough, wasn't advancing his argument fast enough.
“These pictures, ”he said quickly, “I know about those pictures. Just a few days ago, in San Miguel, Garcia told me. She's the daughter of a guy Garcia knows. Garcia was explaining to me what kind of a man Luquin was, wanted me to know what I was up against.”
Everything froze. No sound. No one spoke. This information had done something to the demon that nearly sucked the air out of the room.
And then Titus heard a single, faint snick.
The little pistol had misfired.
Macias and the man both realized what had happened a millisecond before Titus did, and in a flash Macias's right fist drove one, two, three times into the man's upper thigh near his naked groin as Macias charged in a powerful burst of energy, carrying the man backward, both of them falling over the coffee table and onto the floor. Macias dropped the small switchblade as he scrambled for his gun and came up with the gun before the man could recover and just as Titus hurled the laptop across the sofa, catching Macias flat in the chest, knocking him into a backward stagger. He fell back against the giant television screen but kept his balance and came up with the automatic leveled at Titus, who had barreled across the room to within a few feet of him.
Again everything stopped. Everybody was breathing hard, wired, adrenaline pumping.
“Okay, ”Macias said. “Pick up the laptop. ”He only had to move the automatic inches to cover both men. “Try to throw it again, and I'll kill you. I've got nothing to lose now. ”To the naked man: “Is Luquin dead?”
“Almost. ”He was holding his thigh, blood all over the sofa.
Macias motioned to Titus to move toward the front door. “We're leaving, ”Macias said to the man. “You finish what you came here to do. Don't leave that son of a bitch alive.”
Clutching his wounds, the man watched them as they made their way through the entry hall to the front door. Before Titus opened the door, with Macias's automatic again jammed into his kidneys, he glanced back. The pale light from the television flickered on the bloody sofa. The man was gone.