that threw mud in a big rooster tail and finally brought it to a stop. He shivered with cold and his eyes filled with tears and blood as he watched the van leave his property not through the gate but through a large hole cut in the chain-link fence.
2
H E SHOWERED AND DRESSED AND bandaged the scalp wounds then took the steps down into the bunker he’d built beneath the foundation of the barn. The vault was roomy and made of poured concrete with double rebar, heated and air conditioned, and the walls were painted white. The lights were recessed and low-voltage and bright. There was a desk and three standing safes, file cabinets and a long table covered by colorful Mexican blankets.
He knelt and spun the dial on one of the safes. He swung open the heavy door and pulled out one million dollars, weighed and shrink-wrapped in one-pound bundles. There were twenty pounds of one-hundred dollar bills; four pounds of twenties and sixteen loose hundreds to complete the amount. He took out another ten pounds of twenties—ninety six thousand dollars to sustain himself and whoever else might help him get Erin back. This all fit into a piece of lightweight rolling luggage.
He sat at his desk for a short while, staring straight ahead at the blank white wall. Fury and fear. How could he not have known? How could Herredia’s organization have no warning, no inside information? How could Armenta even
attempt
this? Erin, light of my life. Where are you and what are they doing to you? With the eyes of his mind he tried to picture her but all he saw were the most terrifying pictures he had ever imagined. Ten days. Ten.
He forced away these images but now his thoughts came heavy with shame. He’d loved her to the point of obsession but what was that but a young man’s foolishness, dwarfed in importance by his failure to protect her, his wife, sleeping, pregnant with their child, in their own home?
If you fail, Deputy Jones, we will skin her alive.
He knew this was not just a gruesome threat. Flayings had joined beheadings as statements of fact among the drug cartels.
Sitting in his vault, cold and hungry and assaulted by things he could not control, Bradley felt his former self step aside. She was gone; now he was gone. Into him flowed the rage and the shame, and they ran the miles from his heart to the narrow capillaries. He felt them turn into strength and will and he knew that only these could bring her back.
He went to the long wooden table that sat against one wall of the vault and carefully lifted the blankets that were spread upon it. Here were his mother’s journals and many framed pictures of her and of his brothers, and of her family back into the time when photography had just been invented. He put his hand on the journals and looked down at the pictures, which he dusted every month. There was also a fine Western saddle and a tooled-leather scabbard and a pair of six-guns in a two-holster rig that he cleaned and oiled once a year. The steel and leather were dark and shiny and smelled of the past. Beside the saddle was a forged steel mesh vest that had been dented by bullets, some fired nearly a century and a half ago, but some quite recently.
In the middle of all this stood the glass jar containing the head of Bradley’s ancestor, the great outlaw, El Famoso, Joaquin Murrieta, 1830-1853. The blanched face was handsome as in legend but Joaquin’s famed mane of black hair had fallen to the bottom of the alcohol and it rose slightly and lilted when Bradley picked up the jar in orderto speak to his great–great–great–great–great–great–great–grandfather face–to–face.
“Give me your blessings,” Bradley said quietly. “I need every last one of them that you can spare. Don’t let them do to Erin what they did to Rosa. Or to me what they did to you.”
The head bobbed gently as if in agreement. It looked forlorn. Bradley set the jar back on the table and wiped it clean with a cotton towel kept there for this