The Border Lords by T. Jefferson Parker Page B

toward their shiny car. He hurried them along like children, pushing them with the end of the duffel bag. When they were almost there he whistled sharply for Daisy and they ran back into the alley from which they had come. He stopped just around the corner. He popped out the partially spent magazine and traded it for a full one. Daisy looked up at him admiringly.
    He heard the second group of men conversing one alley over, voices puzzled. He had the advantage because they were the hunters and it was their job to act. But they had heard nothing other than the crying and the pleading of the lovers and this had confounded them, and Ozburn knew it and waited. He knelt in the dark behind a modified fifty-five-gallon fuel drum that would be used as an outdoor heater in the cooler winter months to come. It smelled of wood smoke and ashes. He patted Daisy’s head as he listened to the engine of the shiny car turn over and the tires chirp and the car speed toward the highway. The voices of the gunmen were close now as they came down the dirt road toward their three fallen comrades.
    “Miguelito! Jorge?”
    “Capitán? Capitán?”
    Where the alley ended, the moonlight began, and into this the two men stepped. Ozburn crouched, peering at them around the flank of the drum. One of them glanced into the darkness but did not see him. When the third man joined his fellows on the open ground, Ozburn rose from behind his cover and cut them down in a long, steady, back-and-forth burst. He braced the gun against the muzzle rise with his left hand. There was the clatter of the weapon and the whack of the bullets into the men and the pinging of the brass on the alley dirt, and blood and arms and blood and hands and blood and gasps thrown up into the night. In a moment Ozburn had stepped past them and into the dark alley, where he traded out for a fresh magazine, then secured his weapon close to his chest again and snapped the windbreaker shut.
    He walked to the main street and saw the people loping excitedly for the alleys that would lead them to the dead men. These people looked as if they were participants in some game they didn’t quite understand but were told would be fun. He realized they had little idea what had happened or what they might find in the dirt road behind the buildings of their village. They were hopeful. They were innocent. They were who he was doing this for.
    Ozburn walked the other way, stopped and set the duffel down and bought a pack of Chiclets from a vendor with a tray of confections and cigarettes slung over the back of his neck. He continued down the nearly empty street and back to Josefina’s, where the taxi was waiting for him, as requested. Same driver, and a brief smile for the big payday of hours ago. Ozburn heard frantic yelling from the direction of the massacre. He held the door open while Daisy jumped in and then he climbed in beside her.
     
     
    Twenty minutes later he was in the air, Daisy beside him, the few and scattered lights of Puerto Nuevo opening before him as the little airplane roared into the sky. What sound, what tremendous, singular sound! Ozburn buzzed above the village and he could see the tiny figures down in the dirt road in a ring of light, and they seemed to be coming and going with a purpose indiscernible.
    He guided Betty over the black Pacific and climbed the breeze as up a soft-runged ladder, higher and higher until he banked north by northeast and headed toward the border. Flying east, he could see jovial Ensenada to his left and the great, violent sprawl of Tijuana beyond it.
    Ozburn listened to the musical whine of the Piper engine, finally giving himself over to the sound. Melodies within melodies. He looked down at the lights of coastal Baja diminishing into the un-lighted blackness of the desert. At night his vision seemed to come alive. He saw none of the steady glare and the sharp reflections of daylight. He felt tears running down his face, tears of relief, tears sent by