"Well. This I"ve gotta think about," Aguilar replied, a jaunty sort of amus.e.m.e.nt coming into his eyes.
He turned and shot Aaron Monteforte in the head with his own gun.
Screams burst from the herded pipers as Aaron crumpled to the ground. Zeke flinched, but somehow he found it within himself not to cry out or run back into the cl.u.s.ter of familiar faces. Unlike his father and grandfather, he"d never been to war, but those men had taught him a thing or two about fear and cowardice. Fear was the real enemy, the one foe that had to be defeated. For himself-for his own safety-Zeke could do that.
It was his fear for Savannah that he could not overcome.
"Ah, d.a.m.n it," Aguilar said, looking down in dismay at the spots of blood on his expensive white shirt. "Messy. But . . . if we"re going to make some kind of deal, we couldn"t have him around. A man who will betray his friends cannot be trusted. His sister died that night in your town, you know? She wasn"t supposed to be there. He thought she had gone to Hidalgo to visit friends. My men murdered his sister, and he still called to tell me what you were all planning. What a pal."
Aguilar spit on Aaron"s ruined face, the second time he"d been spit on in mere minutes. Zeke saw that Aaron had fallen on his left side, baring the Reaper tattoo on his right bicep and burying the angel on his left, and that seemed only right.
"He used to work on my ranch," Zeke said, gazed fixed on Aguilar. "I was fond of him back then, but as of this moment, I can"t say as I"m sorry the son of a b.i.t.c.h is dead."
Aguilar began to walk, gun pointed at the ground as he circled the cl.u.s.ter of prisoners.There were more than forty of them and half that number of cartel killers, but the gunmen were ranged about them in a circle like a pack of wolves. Aguilar moved through the open s.p.a.ce that separated the wolves from their prey.
"I"m not going to lie to you, Ezekiel," Aguilar said, his voice carried on the desert wind though Zeke couldn"t see him from the other side of the circle. "I"ve just been having a little fun with you. We spend so much time on business that when we get an opportunity to play, it"s hard to resist.You of course know that if word got out that we let even one of you live . . ."
Prayers went up from the group, and curses followed in equal measure.
"Listen to me, Carlos," Zeke said. "If you"re worried about how it"ll look, what kind of message you"d be sending, think about how it will look when word gets out that you"ve staked a claim in Hidalgo County, that you"ve got an open pipeline into the U.S. Or how it"ll look that you turned such a thing down."
Aguilar had made it three-quarters of the way around the circle and come back into view. Zeke glanced at the faces of his friends and neighbors and the vacant gazes of the dead and he held his breath.
"It would be an interesting experiment,"Aguilar admitted. Zeke exhaled, glanced over in search of Savannah"s face and did not see her. "But if we were to negotiate, there is only one place to start."
"Where"s that?"
Aguilar"s smile vanished and the amus.e.m.e.nt bled from his eyes, revealing only ice beneath. He turned to his prisoners with a snarl.
"Which one of you is Enoch Stroud?"
Zeke blinked several times and shook his head. It felt as if he"d just woken up from a dream in which Enoch had never existed. Until the moment Aguilar had mentioned his name, he had forgotten all about the little hoodoo man. Enoch had come to them, had raised their dead and dragged them all down here to Mexico, and yet for a few minutes it was as if he had been erased from Zeke"s mind.
A ripple of confusion went through the pipers and they began to shuffle aside, expanding the circle, nudging and guiding the blank-faced undead until a path had formed among them leading to a circle within the circle. At its center, alone, Enoch stood staring at Carlos Aguilar with murder in his eyes.
"How the h.e.l.l . . . ?" Harry Boyd said. "For a minute there I didn"t remember the little creep existed."
Aguilar aimed his gun at Enoch and the pipers and their dead scuttled farther away.The cartel killers raised the barrels of their weapons and barked orders in English and Spanish, making sure no one tried to make a run for it.
"You?"Aguilar scoffed. "You"re the great brujo? El nigromante?"
Enoch said nothing, but Aguilar walked toward him, pausing to look more closely at the resurrected dead. He glanced at Charlie Boyd and Big Tim, but when he got to Martha Vickers, he reached out and ran a finger over the strange new fontanel skin growing over her head wound.
"Oh, you"re going to teach me how to do this," Aguilar said, turning to stare at Enoch. "Whatever it is, I want to learn.When one of my people is killed, I want to be able to bring them back."
Enoch"s gaze glimmered with a familiar yellow light, but it was as if an eclipse were taking place in his eyes. They turned black and the little man seemed to darken, as if the moonlight could no longer find him.
"Chingate," Enoch muttered.
Aguilar sneered, pointing the gun at Enoch"s forehead. "f.u.c.k myself? f.u.c.k you, chilito.You want revenge because I killed your daughter? Big deal. I killed a lot of people"s daughters, and their sons, too.That"s what we do, a.s.shole.You get in the way and you get dead."
He gestured toward the people gathered around them.
"Maybe you got some black magic in you, brought these people back to life. But now you got a chance to keep them alive . . . them and the rest of the idiots you brought down here with you.You"ve got five seconds, man.You gonna teach me, or am I going to put a bullet in your heart?"
Zeke caught a glimpse of Savannah, standing behind Harry and Charlie Boyd. He mentally urged her to retreat, to hide herself more deeply among the others. For a second, he thought she had seen him, that she had returned his gaze, but then Aguilar started marching back and forth in the gap, counting.
"One.Two.Three."
Aguilar glanced over at Zeke and shrugged as if to say he was trying his best here.
"Enoch!" Zeke shouted. "For G.o.d"s sake-"
"Four!" Aguilar barked, turning on Enoch with a venomous glare. Then he sniffed, as if he couldn"t quite summon a laugh, and shook his head. "Ah, f.u.c.k it."