The tiniest of movements caused him to look in the cenizo. The jackrabbit’s ears twitched as it listened to the approaching men, but it still would not move.
Miguel chanced another look at the men. There were three, with one of them, the gringo with the beard that he remembered at Sam Kinney’s, walking slightly ahead of the others, but farthest from his hiding place. They were steadily coming closer, and would not miss him.
Miguel felt underneath his body and found a slender stick, maybe five feet long. It was black and lightweight, but stiff. The first man was ten feet from him when Miguel turned with the stick and touched it to the jackrabbit.
The rabbit jumped high into the air, clearing the cenizo like it was tossed by a catapult, and hit the ground running. It went through the first man’s legs as he yelled and shot a round into the dirt, then it was gone.
The men started laughing, and Riffey called Holland, “It’s a damn jackrabbit. Scared the crap out of me.”
Holland said, “Get going.” He motioned the pilot to resume their flight, and the helicopter tilted forward to accelerate as it gained altitude.
Miguel was close enough to hear Riffey say, “One of these days, you asshole.” Riffey started down the hill and motioned for the others to return to the Bronco. They drove away a minute later.
Miguel lay in the gulley another ten minutes until his heart slowed enough for his hands to stop shaking.
Rolling on his side, and still careful not to make any noise if someone was nearby, Miguel pushed his torso upward with one arm and eased his eyes above the brush. No one was there. He rose to his feet, and stayed in the brush line as he hurried from the hillside.
CHAPTER 4
Holland joined Riffey in the Bronco when they reached Chihuahua City, and Riffey drove up Federal Highway 45 until it reached Highway 7, then he took that road northwest until the dark range of mountains loomed on his left. They made steady progress, but Riffey didn’t speed because they saw police vehicles every ten or twelve miles, observing the passing cars and occasionally pulling one to the side of the road.
Ninety minutes after leaving Chihuahua City, they turned on a barely discernable dirt road and followed it into the foothills. The road became progressively rougher, and Riffey kept the vehicle in permanent 4-wheel drive. As they climbed, he stopped often so the passengers could exit and move rocks and boulders from the path. Soon they were in junipers and scattered pinon pines, with occasional mule deer bounding across the slopes. The trees made it even harder going, and it seemed to Riffey that they moved a dead tree trunk or boulder every five minutes on the ascent.
One long, particularly rough section of the trail climbed the mountain shoulders for two miles, and was comprised of thick layers of stone shaped like stairs.
The Bronco bounced and lurched upward a foot at a time, with the frame and body slamming down hard with each gain. Riffey’s ribs ached and his hands cramped from the tight grip on the wheel. One of the men in the back, Guereca, gasped, “Hijo de la chingada, I think my kidneys are ruptured.”
Holland said, “How much further before this smooths out?”
Riffey almost smiled. Even the machine-like Holland suffered. “Another hour, I figure.”
“And to the village?”
“Another hour after that, but on a better road.”
Guereca said, “Road? We haven’t been on a road since we left the pavement. I’ll be pissing blood for a week after this.”
Riffey gave an extra nudge to the gas and the Bronco bounced high and slammed down so hard that fine dust drifted down out of the old headliner. Guereca groaned, as did Lopez, the second man in the back seat. Holland was silent, but gripped the dash and the door for support. Riffey smiled.
“What are you smiling about?” Holland asked.
“Because it’s not much farther and we’ll be off these ledges.” It was a lie, but only a little one.
***
The village of La Sombra sat in a small, U-shaped valley midway up the mountain range. The entire valley was slightly less than a mile in length and a quarter-mile wide. It was named because of the higher west side of the valley, which provided pleasant shade during the hot summers.
It was picturesque. A nice small river ran down the center of the valley and through the town, with handmade wooden bridges of pine and pinon logs over it in a number of places, because river was too deep to wade. It meandered slightly on the valley floor before becoming less deep and plummeting to the lower elevations in a fifty-foot waterfall that splashed into a small pool before continuing in ripples and rapids off the mountain.
Small, hand irrigated fields of vegetables and corn patch-worked the valley, and a green, one-acre field of marijuana grew across the river from the plaza. Pines sprouted from the rocky sides of the valley walls, along with scattered grasses and cacti. Goats grazed at the upper end of the valley from the village.
Cicadas sounded constantly throughout the valley, and chickens were everywhere, as were dozens of dogs, ranging from fat puppies playing beside females with milk-swollen dugs to the half-grown adolescents and the oldest of the canines, dozing in the shade of the buildings.
When Floyd Riffey drove into town on the cart trail, a dozen of the townspeople awaited them in the central plaza, which was a small, circular cleared area with crude log benches around the perimeter. The people were suspicious until Riffey emerged, then the men recognized him and everyone came to greet him. They smiled and touched him as Riffey told them in his middling Spanish that the other men with him were friends. The villagers wore the bright colors of the Tarahumara, except for three or four plain-dressed young men in tee shirts with symbols of rock and roll on the fronts, like the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Pink Floyd’s Dark of the Moon. The four youths also wore new Wal-Mart jeans and cheap jogging shoes, which, with the tee shirts signified they were veterans of the jornada, the journey north. Their clothes were badges to show they found work in the Estados Unidos.
The children came to them, grinning and touching, except for the shy ones who held back and covered their mouths when they smiled. Lopez and Guereca spoke Spanish to several of the older men and they nodded, then left the group.
Guereca said, “No sense leaving here empty handed.” The men returned several minutes later with a small paper s