Chapter 13
The cantina in San Vicente was a single room with a low ceiling and four tables and a bar made from two planks laid across a pair of barrels.
A man behind it was wiping the same spot on the plank in the way of men who wipe bars when they don't have anything else to do.
Two vaqueros at the far table looked up when Isum came in and then looked back down at their cards without particular interest, which was about the best reception an American could expect in a cantina in Chihuahua.
Isum ordered a beer and paid for it and stood at the bar and drank it slowly and watched the room. He was not in a hurry.
The man behind the bar was called Reyes. Isum learned this from the vaqueros, who called across to him twice for refills and used his name both times. Reyes was about forty, heavyset, with the particular wariness of a man who has survived in a place controlled by someone else for a long time.
After his second beer, Isum asked in Spanish, whether there was a man in the district named Esteban Ruiz.
Reyes stopped wiping. "Who wants to know?"
"Someone who might have work for him," Isum said.
Reyes looked at the door. He looked back at Isum.
"He comes in most evenings," Reyes said. "He'll be here."
Isum ordered a third beer and did not drink it and waited.
Esteban Ruiz came in just after dark. He was a compact man in his fifties, brown and weathered as the country itself, with the particular walk of someone who has spent decades covering ground on foot and knows how to place a step without sound.
He took in the room in one sweep when he entered, noted Isum the way a man notes something unexpected in familiar territory, and went to the bar and ordered mescal without saying anything to anyone.
Isum let him drink half of it before he moved down the bar.
"Esteban Ruiz," he said. Not a question.
Ruiz looked at him. "Who are you?"
"Isaac Jones. Can I buy you supper?"
Ruiz considered this. He had the eyes of a man who has learned that offers of supper always have a price and the question is whether the price is one he can afford.
"What kind of supper?" he asked.
"Whatever Reyes has in the back."
Ruiz set down his drink. "Alright."
Reyes brought them hot beans and goat meat with tortillas and salsa and more mescal and beer. He left them to it. The vaqueros at the far table finished their cards and left. The cantina was quiet.
Isum told it straight. A Texan was in the jail at Ciénega del Norte on a false charge arranged by Fuentes at Vega's direction.
The deputy's wife and young son are at the hacienda.
My partner and I are trying to get all three of them out before the man is transferred to Chihuahua City for a trial that was going to go the way Vega wanted it to go.
Ruiz ate while Isum talked. When Isum finished Ruiz wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the table.
"Why come to me?" he said.
"Padre Morales knows you. He described you well enough. Former army scout. Knows this district better than anyone. Has a reason to want Fuentes and Vega to have a rotten week."
Ruiz's jaw tightened slightly. "My brother's farm," he said.
"Morales mentioned a foreclosure."
"Two years ago. Vega's lawyers found a problem with the title. There was no problem with the title. My brother had worked that land for twenty years." He picked up his mescal and set it down again without drinking. "What do you need?"
"The priest gave us the shape of the jail and the general layout out back. What I need is the part a priest wouldn't know. How the building actually works. Guard habits, not just schedules. The kind of thing you learn by watching, not by walking past on Sunday."
Ruiz turned his cup on the table and thought about that.
"The back door," he said. "Adobe frame, old timber door.
The bar is on the inside, iron, set in two brackets.
But the frame has warped from the wet season.
There is a gap at the top of the door, finger-wide.
You can work a knife blade through, angle it up, and walk the bar out of the near bracket.
One bracket is enough. The door swings free. "
"How do you know that?"
"Because I built that jail," he said. "Fifteen years ago, before Fuentes. Fuentes knows nothing about how this building was made."
Isum let that settle. "What about the guard?"
"Pacheco sleeps, the priest told you that much.
What the priest doesn't know is that Pacheco sleeps in the chair closest to the front door, on the left side when you come in from the street.
His rifle leans on the wall to his right.
Between eleven and two he is as good as dead to the world.
After two he gets restless." Ruiz paused.
"The cells face the back wall. The prisoner in the far right cell can hear the back door if it opens.
Your man will know someone is coming before Pacheco does. "
"Fuentes?"
"Goes home at six. Lives four blocks north, the house with the blue shutters. He does not come back before six in the morning unless someone brings him a reason to."
"So we have roughly a three-hour window."
Ruiz nodded. "Midnight to three. After that the risk goes up."
"What's your price?"
Ruiz named a figure in pesos. It was fair. Isum paid half of it from his coat without haggling.
"The other half when we're across the arroyo with the prisoner," Isum said.
Ruiz pocketed the money. "There is one more thing," he said. "I heard this morning from a man who works at the jail. They are moving the prisoner to Chihuahua City. Four days from now."
Isum was very still for a moment. "Four days."
"Four days. After that, getting him out is a different problem altogether."
Isum stood up and put money on the table for the meal. "We move in two," he said. "That gives us a day if something goes wrong."
"I'll be ready," Ruiz said.
Isum walked back through the dark to the rectory to tell Will.