Money to Burn Read Online Free PDF Page A

that Gaucho Dorda, not because the policeman posed a threat but just because. He killed him because he loathed the police more than anything else in the world and he imagined, in some irrational fashion, that each and every cop he killed would somehow not be replaced. 'One less', was the Gaucho's byword, as if he were reducing the number of troops possessed by an enemy army whose forces would never be renewed. If they carried on killing policemen as a matter of course, at once, without malice, like someone popping off sparrows, those condemned shits of policemen (born with the souls of policemen, souls of hicks), then they'd have to think twice before letting themselves be carried away by their vocation as public executioners, they'd become afraid of getting bumped off in their turn, and thus (he concluded) every day the army of slugs would have fewer troops. So he reasoned, but in a more muddled and lyrical style, as if he were killing cops in a dream, as if he'd been let loose in open countryside with a shotgun; this was the line of thought the Blond Gaucho would follow in his one-man war against the army of slugs.
    To kill like that, in cold blood, just because, signified just the opposite (to the police): that these characters would never respect any of the implicit agreements governing the unwritten law between the law and the lawless, that the latter were poisonous, they were thugs, ex-cons, ugly-mug convicts who'd be only too pleased to see the entire police force in Buenos Aires province lined up against a firing squad.
    The indescribable confusion produced by this perfidious attack did not make it possible, in the ensuing seconds, to establish precisely what had happened (or so said the daily papers). It was a burst of brutal violence, a blind explosion. An intense battle, lasting just as long as it took for the traffic lights to change. It was over in moments, and afterwards the street was suddenly strewn with corpses.
    The shooting at pointblank range caused the death of police agent Otero and fatally wounded the cashier Martinez Tobar in the thorax, also injuring the security guard Balacco in the right leg, before he was dispatched in cold blood by one of the armed men. As for the bank-clerk Spector, stunned and confused, he ran to the Bank to beg for assistance.
    Later on it could be confirmed (according to the information given by police officer Silva) that the agent Otero would have been equally unable, even had he emerged unscathed from the attack, to have used his regulation pistol given that one of the bullets fired by the gunmen had lodged in it, putting it out of action. As for the submachine-gun they carried to protect the money while in transit, somebody had put it on a high shelf inside the lorry and nobody could manage to reach it down.
    Those who had witnessed the shooting came and went through the place like sleepwalkers, happy to have come through unscathed and horrified at what they had seen. All of a sudden that tranquil afternoon had shown how it could rapidly be transformed into a nightmare.
    The burst of bullets unleashed by the assailants also caught Diego Garcia, who was leaving a bar in the immediate neighbourhood of the firing. He was taken to hospital where he died shortly afterwards. He was known to live in Haedo and to have travelled to San Fernando in response to an advert asking for carpenters and cabinet-makers. He had paused at the bar on the square to knock back a glass of gin, and when he left to go and present himself at the sawmill, he was killed by a stray bullet. He was twenty-three years old, and in his pocket were found twelve pesos and a train ticket.
    According to one version, armed guards in a building opposite the Town Hall managed to exchange fire with the gunmen, but this remained unconfirmed.
    It was noted that one of the assailants was assisted in getting into the car, giving rise to the assumption (according to the police report) that he was wounded. They saw the guy