It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page A

just the rep. And not in particularly good shape, either.
    I breathed a laugh out through my nose, looked to the empty warehouse behind him. We were in the sister of the place in Piedras Negras, right down to the wire rolls in the abandoned yard.
    The reason I had to look away to laugh was that the rep’s polyester suit was sweated through, and he was wearing an iced-down towel across the back of his neck. It was rolled up, white, from some hotel or another.
    “Should have turned your collar up,” I said.
    “What?”
    “Your sunburn there. You were walking east and north in the late afternoon and there weren’t any clouds yesterday. The burn’ll probably bubble up. Wet some tea bags down, they’ll draw the heat out.”
    He rubbed his mouth, shook his head.
    “Was wondering if I’d beat you out of town or not,” he said.
    I shrugged. What he’d just told me was that I hadn’t been followed, that my stash out in the desert was safe. Either that, or he didn’t want me to know I’d been followed, so was playing dumb. The way he was hurting, though, I doubted it.
    “So you gonna go back, collect the Caddy?”
    He waved it off, turned to the case, the reason we were here.
    “I think it was this Mexican water,” he said, clicking the case open. “Minerals clogged the radiator up. Either that or God hates me.”
    “It overheated?”
    “What, are you a mechanic too?”
    “Sometimes you have to be.”
    “Yeah, well,” he said, spinning the open case around to me. “I got other rats to be killing today than that damn car, know what I mean?”
    Fifty thousand in his front pocket, more like.
    I looked down to the case. It was the same as in Piedras Negras.
    “Smile,” the rep said then, and I looked up into his Polaroid, flashing. He peeled the film out, set it aside to develop.
    “What’s that?” I said.
    “It’ll be waiting for you in Uvalde,” he said. “Only copy. Just to confirm that there are twelve containers here. These twelve.”
    “Who you been working with, to get this paranoid?”
    “You think it’s me?” he said, pushing his blunt tongue through his teeth in some gesture that was lost on me.
    I closed the case, let him lock it with the key, then tuck the key into his pocket.
    “You’re serious?” I asked, about the key, the lock.
    “Like a woman in a shoe store.”
    “How am I supposed to ... What if I get —?”
    “Don’t.”
    Now we were just staring each other down.
    “Say I need to, like, bluff my way through something. I mean, cops’ panties get all wadded the hell up, they can’t look into some briefcase I’ve just told them doesn’t have anything in it they’d be interested in.”
    “Like I said. Don’t involve the law.”
    “I wouldn’t really be doing it on purpose, see.”
    “One more thing,” he said then.
    “What? Want me to go barefoot? I’m supposed to wear a safety vest? Carry a red balloon?”
    “Nothing like that,” he shrugged, then leaned forward — with the key, I thought. It was the only reason I didn’t flinch away in time. That and that his hands were quicker than his belly or his suit suggested.
    What he had was a pair of cuffs. They snapped around my right wrist, and he clicked them down tight. On the other end of them, a thick cable, maybe three feet long.
    “Bullshit,” I told him, but he was already cuffing the other end of the cable to the handle of the case.
    We were just staring at each other again.
    “I can get this cut,” I said.
    “If you think that’s worthy use of your time,” he said back. “You are on something of a schedule, I believe.”
    I studied the case. Closed my eyes, opened them slow, to the pistol I knew he was going to have leveled on me, to keep me from strangling him with this new cable, beating his face in with the case.
    “Who are these people?” I asked, finally.
    “You don’t want to know,” the rep said, already backing away, rubbing his neck with the towel one last time then slinging the towel