“Boy was as dumb as you like,” Beau said. “He wouldn’t have found his way to the kitchen for a taco in his own one-room hut.” He sipped his coffee; it was foul. “Alright,” Beau crossed his legs, the hem of his right trouser riding up a little to show more of his snakeskin cowboy boot. “Now then. You wanna tell me what in God’s name has been going down round here?”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning what? Which sumbitch shot you up, Hank?”

“Ever heard of Ordell Leonard?”

Beau shook his head. “Can’t say I have.”

“Big, black brother from ‘Bama. Quiet fella until he gets on the drink then you never know what you’re gonna get. They had him for driving under the influence and resisting arrest. All he was looking at was a couple of months but he reckons they’re prejudiced against black men from the South round here and so he decides he’s gonna take his chances and takes off. I ended up in Arkansas before I could catch him. Fucking Little Rock, can you believe that shit? Two thousand miles, man. It took me three days there and three days back although, course, he was in the back coming home and so I had to listen to his goddamn problems the whole way. The whole experience made me think I ain’t getting a good enough shake out of this here thing we got going on.”

He was grinning as he said it; Beau knew he was fooling around.

“And then?”

“And then I got lazy, I guess. We was right back up at the store when I let him out. I was going to put him in the cell until I could transfer him to the courthouse. He’d been on best behaviour for the whole trip and I’d taken off his cuffs. Clean forgot. Dude cold-cocks me, knocks me down, then gets my shotgun from the front and fires off a load. I’m not sure how he missed, to be honest with you. Ended up catching me in the shoulder but it could’ve been a helluva lot worse.”

“Know where he’s headed?”

“Got a brother in Vallejo. I’d bet you a dime to a doughnut that’s where he’s gone.”

“Alright, then. You can leave that one to me.”

“You sure? Not much money in it, Beau.”

Beau looked at Hank again. He was getting on. Couldn’t have that many years left in him doing what they were doing. A shotgun, at close range? He’d got lucky. Maybe it was time Beau suggested Hank took it easy. Maybe it was a message. “Ain’t about money all the time, partner. Dude shot you all up. I can’t stand for that. Bad for our reputation.”

“Ah, shit — I’ll be fine. I was gonna enjoy seeing him again.”

“How long they going to keep you in?”

“Couple more days.”

“By which time he’ll be long gone. Nah, Hank, don’t worry about it. Leave him to me.”

Hank sucked his teeth and, eventually, nodded his assent. “Shit,” he said. “I remembered something: you had a call back at the office. Jeanette took the details down and told me about it.”

Jeanette was the secretary who kept things ticking over. “Who from?”

“She said he called himself Smith. Sounded like he was English, she said, he had that whole accent going on. She says you weren’t around and could she take a message for you and he says yes, she could, and he tells her that he wants you to call him pronto. He gave her a number — I’ve got it written down in my pants pocket.”

“He say what he wanted to speak to me about?”

“Nope,” Hank said, shaking his head, “except it was urgent.”

27

Beau drove north. It took him eight hours on the I-5, a touch under five hundred miles. He could have flown, or caught a northbound Amtrak from San Diego, but he liked the drive and it gave him some time to listen to some music and think.

He spent a lot of time thinking about duties and obligations. He had always lived his life by a code. It wasn’t a moral code because he couldn’t claim to be a particularly moral man; that would be fatuous, given the profession he had latterly chosen for himself. It was more a set of rules that he tried to live his life by and one of those rules insisted that he would always pay his debts. It was a matter of integrity. Beau’s father had always said that was something you either had or you didn’t have, and he prided himself that he did; he was made of integrity from the guts out. Getting the Mexican journalist away to safety had been the right thing to do, but he couldn’t in all honesty say that he thought it had completely squared the ledger between them. He figured the Englishman had done him two solids down in Mexico: he had saved him from Santa Muerta and then drew the fire of whoever it was who hit El Patrón’s mansion so that he and the girl could get away. Helping the girl had paid back only half of the debt. At the very least, he could drive up to San Francisco and hear what the Englishman had to say. If it wasn’t something he could help him with then he would book into a nice hotel for a couple of nights and enjoy the city. He really had nothing to lose.

And, if nothing else, he could find out how on earth Smith had gotten out of Mexico. It hadn’t looked so good for him when Beau and the girl had made tracks. That guy, though; he was something else. He could fall into a tub of shit and come out smelling like a rose every time.

Beau could mix in a spot of business, too. Ordell Leonard was up there and there was no way on God’s green Earth Beau was going to let him have even an extra second of liberty. He would never have admitted it to another person, but seeing Hank in the hospital like that, old and shot up, it had reminded him of his own advancing years. He had been thinking about his own mortality a lot recently. He was sixty-two years old. Every morning he seemed to wake up with another ache. Everyone came to the end of the road eventually, that was the one shared inevitability, but Beau was determined that he wasn’t there yet. The more he thought about it, the more he understood his own reaction: Ordell Leonard was a bad man, a dangerous man, and he would have been a challenge to collar ten years ago, when he and Hank were fitter and meaner than they were now. Bringing him in now would be his way of thumbing his nose at the notion that he was ready to retire.

Ordell would be the proof that Beau wasn’t ready to hang it up just yet.

* * *

He booked a suite at the Drisco and, five minutes before the time that they had agreed to meet, he was waiting in the bar downstairs.

John Smith was right on time.

“Beau,” he said, sitting down opposite him.

“Alright, English,” Beau said. “Didn’t think I’d ever be seeing you again.”

“I guess you never know what’s around the corner.”

“I guess you don’t.”

“What happened to the girl?” Smith asked.

“As far as I know, she’s safe and sound.”

“As far as you know?”

“That’s all I can say. The man who makes people disappear, this guy my employers use when they need to send someone out of harm’s way? — the arrangement is strictly between him and the client. No-one else gets to know anything about it. She could be in Alaska for all I know. She could be back in Mexico, although I hope for her sake she ain’t. But what I can say for sure is that I got her into the country like I said that I would and she was just fine and dandy when I dropped her off.”

Smith nodded at that. “You get paid for the job?”

“Sure did,” Beau said.

He had delivered the body of Adolpho González to the Lucianos three months ago. The job had been to bring him in dead or alive and yet there had been consternation that it was in the latter condition that Santa Muerta was delivered. Beau had explained what happened — that the girl journalist from Juárez had put a bullet in the Mexican’s head while he was outside their motel room getting ice — but his honesty had led to recriminations. The awkwardness had been underscored by the requirement, stipulated by Beau, that the girl was to be given a new identity and kept hidden from the cartels. There had been a moment when Beau had been unsure that they were going to let her leave in one piece but he had stuck to his guns and, eventually, they had conceded. Beau didn’t necessarily care about her either way — she wasn’t his problem, after all — but he had promised Smith that he would get her out of Mexico and set up in the States and Beau wasn’t the sort of man who went back on his word. Doing the right thing had eventually lightened his payment by fifteen grand: the Italians docked ten from his bounty for spoiling the fun they had planned for González and the other five went to pay the fee of the professional who made people disappear.