They were having a drink or three in the bar at LAX waiting for their connecting flight to Dallas when two young coed types waltzed in wearing aquamarine shorts and deep equatorial tans followed by two boys just as dark wearing sombreros on which was stitched "Acapulco."

Jack Crow, about to climb aboard his fifth jet in less than twenty-four hours, zonked by in-flight sleep and in-flight food and three or four drinks ahead of the Planet Earth, found this an inspiration.

"That's what we oughta do," he announced. "Go to Acapulco! Or better, Cancun or Isla de Mujeres! It'll take a coupla weeks to get settled into the new shack anyway."

"We've already checked our bags on through to Dallas," Cat pointed out.

Jack frowned at Cat's lack of enthusiasm. "So we leave from Dallas."

"Naw," said Carl, burping softly. "I gotta get all our bullet stuff ready."

Jack looked at him. "Yeah. Well... But the rest of us can go. Annabelle?"

Annabelle barely smiled. "Who's going to do all that 'settling in'?"

"But the rest of you can go ahead," offered Annabelle in her very best martyred tone.

Jack stared at his drink. "Naw."

Annabelle smiled. "You may as well, Jack. You never do any unpacking anyway."

Jack grinned back at her. "Doesn't mean I don't want to be near you while you do it."

"How near?"

"I thought I'd stay at the Adolphus Hotel downtown." He looked at the others. "I thought we all would the first couple of days."

Annabelle sipped and smiled. "If you like."

Carl had his hands clasped across his great belly and was mumbling to himself. Adam, seated beside him, leaned closer.

"What's the matter?" he asked, concerned.

Carl looked at him. "I don't unnerstand it, padre!"

"What, Mr. Joplin?"

"Call me Carl."

"Okay, Carl. What is it?"

"My drink." He pointed to the glass before him.

"It's empty," Adam noticed.

"That's what I don't unnerstand! It was full only minutes ago."

Adam stared, comprehended, grinned.

"Oh my God!" Cat all but shrieked, shoving his empty glass away from him across the table in mock tenor. "It's happened to mine, too!"

And then Carl and Cat looked at one another and began humming the theme from The Twilight Zone.

While the others laughed, Jack held his face in his hands and shook it mournfully. "My Team," he muttered. "Nurse!" he called to the young waitress scurrying by. "An Emergency Round."

On the plane they gathered together in the first-class lounge to hide from the food. One more airline meal, Jack felt certain, would make him left-handed. So they sat and drank and played cards and chatted. Jack brought up the subject of Mexico again but in an odd way and with an odd look on his face.

"I used to work in Mexico," he dropped briefly and then blatantly waited for someone else to urge him to continue. Davette complied and Team Crow wondered if she could possibly have known him well enough this soon to feel the oddness his eyes could shed.

Cat curled up in his seat like his namesake and prepared not to miss a single word.

What's going on? he wondered, but said nothing out loud.

He didn't have to, for all who knew Jack Crow were thinking the same.

And as for Jack himself.

They are going to have to know this. They won't understand him otherwise. They might not understand him even then. Or me, for bringing him along.

But they're going to have to know.

And maybe if I tell them the good part first.

He smiled and turned to the others. "It was during the initial phase of my government career."

Cat frowned, said nothing. Annabelle spoke up. "You mean before you joined the army."

"Nope. Afterward."

"But you said the first part of..

"No," he corrected with a smile. "I said during the initial part of my government career."

"Which means?" asked Carl sounding as bored as he knew how.

"Which means I was under deep cover for the NSA on assignment to the CIA working as an agent for the DEA."

"What the hell is all this supposed to mean?" Carl wanted to know.

"Well, my job was to check out the Cuban connection into raw brown Mexican heroin, so I was along the Texas border trying to find out if all the rumors about a big-time purging of the hippie smugglers was true."

"Was it?" somebody asked.

"It was. They were wiping out all the amateurs to get ready for the big money they were monopolizing."

"So what did you do?" somebody else asked.

Jack shrugged, grinned. "Got in the way mostly. It was a dumb assignment and a dumb idea to send me along. I liked the NSA but they didn't trust me. I liked the CIA but they didn't even trust each other. I was scared of the DEA and they hated me but had to take me because of orders from upstairs.

"It was a mess."

He paused, looked around, and grinned easily. "But I did have an interesting couple of weeks."

And Cat thought, Here it comes. He glanced around at the others in the lounge and wondered how they were gonna take whatever it was that Jack was trying to sneak up on them.

And then he thought, He's trying to sneak it up on me, too. First time ever. Of course, there's a first time for everything, so...

So why am I so scared?

And once more Jack Crow began to speak.



Second Interlude: Felix

Raw brown heroin changed everything. Those little doper camps used to be so cute, like a piece of the Wild Frontier. They'd camp out in the weeds somewhere in their motor-homes and the Mexicans would spring up a village out of tarpaper shacks to be close to the loose change spilling off. And there was quite a bit of that to be had. Life was pretty good.

I remember they used to string Coleman lanterns on poles for streetlights.

Playing undercover G-man, I left my weapons in the motel and parked my truck off the road before walking into a camp that night. It was one of the last really big ones and I could hear lots of shouting as I got close. But when I stepped through into the clearing there were only two guys there, both Mexicans, both drunk. I walked up beside one of them and said: "Qu�� pasa, hombre?"

He hit me.

Smacked me good right across the chops, my lip bleeding, then swings at me again and misses and the guy beside him starts yelling out, "Another one! Here's another one!" And then he jumps at me, too.

They were both too drunk to do any more damage but that yelling brought reinforcements amazingly fast. More Mexicans started spilling out of the darkness from all directions, all drunk and all angry and all coming at me.

I ran like hell.

The wrong way, of course, that being the kind of night it was. Toward the river, away from my truck. I was lost in about two seconds, stumbling through the brush with Spanish obscenities echoing from behind. I had no idea what was going on except the basics: I was in deep shit.

But I was old enough. Old enough means I was too smart to try to stop and moralize with a meat-eating mob. There really are people out there who, while you're trying to explain it's not your fault, will pound you into putty.

I found the river when I fell into it. Well, stepped into it. The Rio Grande isn't much but thirty feet across around those parts. So anyway, I step back and start shaking my boots dry and I hear this smartass voice pop through the night with "Hey, gringo! Where're ya goin'?"

I probably didn't jump over a mile or two. And I had already started to run when I realized the voice had sounded out in English, not Spanish. I spun around and first laid eyes on William Charles Felix, lounging in the door of an abandoned boxcar with a cigarette in his mouth, a bottle of tequila in his hand, and the biggest shit-eating grin you ever saw in your whole life. Had a World War II leather flying jacket, a faded blue navy work shirt, jeans, cowboy boots, and a Humphrey Bogart hat.

I found myself grinning back. Couldn't help it.

I walked over and took the bottle from his hand and had a swig and asked him who the hell he was and he told me and invited me inside. So I propped a squishing boot on a strut and climbed up into the boxcar. It was even darker in there than outside.

"What are you doing in this thing?"

I could barely see his grin. "Same as you, Yankee pig. Hiding."

"How'd it get down here by the river?" I asked him. I hadn't seen any tracks.

"Got me," he said, taking back his bottle. "Ask her."

He struck a match and held the flame high. The boxcar had everything it needed to go from being a moving crate to a first-rate hovel, from rug scraps and cardboard furniture to a bleeding Jesus on the wall. Sitting in the midst of it all was a woman.

Just about the most aggressively ugly woman I'd ever seen.

Felix had lit a candle with the match after carefully pulling a battered blanket-something across the opening to shield the outside from the glow.

"Who is this?" I asked him.

He grinned again. "I'm not sure." He sat down on another box, sent the grin at her, and patted a spot on the floor beside him. "I think this is her place."

He made a gesture for me to sit down on another box across from him. I did. He offered me another sip. I took it. The woman came over and sat down on the spot Felix had indicated.

"What's your name?" I asked her, unthinking, in English.

She said: "Twenty-five dollars American," and wiggled her chest.

Lord.

Felix took the bottle back and sipped through his grin. "Interesting name, don't you think?"

And we both laughed. So did the woman.

I lit a cigarette and leaned forward with my elbows on my knees.

"What the hell is going on?"

Felix was enjoying this. "What do you mean?" he asked innocently.

"Why are we hiding?"

He lit a cigarette of his own. "Well, I'm hiding to keep from having the living shit beat outta me by the locals." He took a puff. "And you?"

"C'mon, dammit! What's going on? Why are they so pissed?"

He eyed me strangely. "You mean you haven't heard about the Garcia sisters?"

I sighed. "Who the hick are the Garcia sisters?"

He laughed. "Well, let's have another little drink and I'll tell you."

He gave me another sip, took one himself. As an afterthought, he offered one to the woman.

She damn near took his arm off grabbing for it. Then she started chugging.

"Don't worry," said Felix, watching along with me. "I've got two more bottles." He stopped, looked uncertain. The woman was still chugging. "It's probably enough."

At last he took the bottle after about a fourth of it was gone and told me all about the Garcia sisters.

Sixteen and seventeen, respectively, beautiful, sweet-tempered, and, most important, virgins, which means a hell of a lot more in Mexico than it does in Texas. They were the pride of the area. A ray of hope in a place where the future looked too much like the past. Everyone loved and bragged on them.

And then they ran off to Houston with two gringo drug dealers.

"But don't worry too much," Felix assured me. "Tomorrow morning nobody will be after us or even remember why they were mad tonight."

I wasn't convinced. "What makes you so sure?"

He shrugged. "It's happened before."

There was a sound from outside. Felix had the candle blown out, his cigarette coal hidden, and the blanket-thing shoved out of the way in one motion. He peered out into the darkness, listening intently.

They were out there. You could hear their unmistakable mob clamor. They sounded pretty close. I began to feel a little claustrophobic in that boxcar. I got down next to Felix by the door.

"I've got an idea," I whispered.

"Love to hear it," he whispered back over his shoulder.

"Let's run away."

He leaned back in, smiling. "Normally, I would consider that a brilliant move. My first reaction, come to think of it. But where do we run?"

"How about across the river? We could bide out in Big Bend until morning."

He sat back on his heels, picked up the bottle. "I can think of at least six reasons why that's a bad plan," he replied taking a sip. He wiped his mouth. "And all of them are snakes."

I laughed. "Then what do you suggest."

"Well," he replied, closing the blanket-thing back across the gap, "if we stay here I figure we got a fifty-fifty chance."

I frowned. "You mean they'll either find us or they won't."

We had another drink. The woman had two more. We talked. The woman said nothing at all until, some five or twelve drinks later, she decided to change her name to "Fifteen dollar American."

We drank and talked some more, about another half hour, before she decided to change it to "Five dollar American."

Fickle.

Somewhere into the second bottle, after the third and closest wave of mob rustling occurred just outside, we, Felix and me, decided to make ourselves a pact.

We were clearly doomed, we decided. So the thing to do was to tell each other, in these the last moments of existence, the Major Truths About Our Lives, like passengers on a falling airliner.

Which is how I found out he was a drug smuggler and he found out I was a narc.

It's funny now but at the time I was pissed as hell. Well, grumpy, anyway. Felix laughed, knowing, as per the pact, that I couldn't do anything about what he told me. Until I pointed out to him that neither could he tell anyone else about me and then we were both quiet. And then we both had another drink.

And then we both said, "Fuck it!" in unison, and laughed.

It was fun.

What was strange about it was me being so surprised in the first place. I mean, what the hell else did I expect Felix to be, way out there like that? It's just that he wasn't at all the type or something.

Something.

Anyway, about then two bad things happened in a hurry. The first was that horrible woman deciding to change her name to "Free" and leaning back and pulling up her dress and spreading her legs so wide you could see her liver.

I swear to God it gave me vertigo.

The second bad thing was her husband showing up through the other door.

I'd figured the other door was rusted shut or something. The rest of the place looked like it should be, anyhow. And maybe it was, but ol' Hubby just slid it open with a flick of his wrist and there he stood, all six and a half feet and two hundred plus pounds with a headless chicken in one hand and a bloody machete in the other.

Next to his wife he was the ugliest human I'd ever seen.

"I think I know how the boxcar got down here by the river," whispered Felix from beside me.

I whispered back without taking my eyes off Hubby. "He carried it down here on his back."

And then the woman, the wife, screamed and Hubby roared and Felix and I were scrambling around and that machete was slashing through the air flinging drops of bright red chicken blood and the candle got turned over onto the cardboard furniture and flames rose up and the woman jumped between us and the giant to protect her furnishings and Felix and I used that moment to basically run screaming into the night.

Except Felix stopped long enough to grab the tequila and I got my metal wristwatch stuck in the blanket-curtain over the doorway and ripped it off when I jumped through into the weeds.

Outside, the mob was waiting.

Not close enough to see us. Not yet. But close enough that they were about to and close enough that there was no way to get around them and close enough for them to see the flickering light from the boxcar almost immediately and start toward it.

Too damn close, in other words.

"C'mon, Felix!" I hissed. "The river!"

"Hell, no!" he hissed back. "The snakes!"

We were running out of time. I grabbed him. "Fuck the snakes!"

And then he grabbed me back, all calm for a moment, looked me right in the eye, and said, "That's really sick!"

I just had to laugh. He was just too weird.

But in the meantime we were in a bad spot, stuck between two groups anxious to pound on us, and we needed a plan.

To this day I still don't know how we got up that tree, as drunk as we were, and as scared, and the whole time giggling insanely. It was pure Looney Tunes, but we did it. It cost me a lot of skin on the bark, but Felix shinnied right up using only one hand.

He carried the tequila in the other. Incredible.

So we sat up there and watched as the mob and the monster came together. Reminded me a lot of Frankenstein, with all those lanterns bobbing and that huge Hubby roaring. I don't think he was much smarter than he looked because he thought they were us for a while, hammering on a half-dozen or so before they calmed him down. Then they got about halfway organized and all of them started searching for us.

Never looked up, though, and never came near us, though I think they may have heard us giggling once.

They were very persistent. Kept us up there all night long. Felix and I spent the time swapping sips from the bottle and gabbing more about ourselves like we had before. It was dumb as hell, I guess. But it was also our tree.

I told him a lot more about Viet Nam than I'd ever told anyone else and was frankly amazed at his considerable knowledge and understanding of that war, coming as he did from the sixties generation. He told me a lot about what he did and I listened to all of it and couldn't make sense of any of it. Felix only smuggled marijuana, though he had been offered fortunes to run heavier dope. He didn't seem to make very much money at all, in fact.

He didn't even smoke the stuff. Hated it.

I was about to ask him what the hell he was doing there when we got onto the subject of brown heroin and the Cuban connection and the rest of it. He confirmed everything we'd heard, including the danger for his brand of amateur along the border. His own supplier, he said, regularly used Cuban ports and Cuban radar assistance to cross the Caribbean. Or had, until Fidel had started going into business for himself.

At first I thought he was just being upfront and straight about our pact when he went into such elaborate detail concerning his trade. But then I realized that he was also taking advantage of it. Every time I would later run across this info I would have to toss it out and he damn well knew I would stick to it.

How? How does anybody know about anybody? Sometimes you just do. I told him about me. He told me about him. Nobody else's business.

Our tree.

He was getting out that month. He wanted to live. He didn't want to join and he didn't want to fight. He was worried about his partners, though.

"They're young and greedy and stupid and they think that kind of craving makes them tough," he said once, cupping his cigarette coal against a sighting from the now-scattered posse. He sighed. "And they know all the excuses."

I asked him what he was going to do and he said, "Nothing," and I knew he meant it. As long as they didn't involve him, it was their choice and their life.

It got very quiet there for a long time. Dawn was coming and the searchers had given up and it was a bit chilly until the wind died down. The last thing I remember was our finishing the bottle at last telling elephant jokes. Felix knew a thousand elephant jokes.

And then I woke up in the Rio Grande.

It was the sound, more than the water, that scared me at first. Splashing in from several stories up makes quite a racket. And then the water was in my scream and my ears and cold and moving but the sun was there somewhere and then I was awake enough to realize where I was and pretty soon after that awake enough to remember what swimming was and that I could do it. I lived.

But barely, dragging myself back into Mexico about thirty feet downstream, gasping and whimpering and shivering from the cold. I got on my knees on the bank and searched around for the tree and when I found it I started laughing again immediately.

Felix, dead asleep and drooping from the branches sunk deep into his leather jacket, was still holding the empty tequila bottle. And then I saw something else that made me stare. And think.

Underneath that jacket, my smuggler had a very professional-looking shoulder holster and inside it a nine-millimeter Browning. A couple of times during the raucous night before I had thought longingly of the arsenal back in my motel room and knew damn well I might have used it if I had had it - if only to warn them off.

But Felix had been armed all along and had never, I knew instinctively, thought to use it.

Not once.