“Softly,” Tallgrass cautioned him. “Enjoy the day, amigo, with great simple cuisine, an old friend, a beautiful woman, and a loyal dog. What more could a man ask? The night will bring the closure you seek.”

“You? Talking about closure?” Ric teased Tallgrass. “Sounds like you’ve been powwowing with my foster mother.”

“Wouldn’t mind if I did.” Tallgrass winked at me as I lifted my bubble of a margarita glass in a toast to Ric. “Is her husband involved in the US side of tonight’s action?”

Ric shook his head. “Burnside is really and truly retired. It’s better that way. He never knew why I was enslaved by Torbellino. Discovering my dead-dowsing abilities—or even my civilian efforts to bring down the Torbellino cartel—would bring out the army mule in him.”

“Do you regret he never really knew you?” I asked Ric.

Now that I was starting to wonder who had sired me, I was realizing I needed to find that out as badly as Ric needed to stop his lifelong lethal enemy. My father might be someone I knew and would never suspect, or ever respect. He might already know me and not be willing to admit it.

Ric shook his head. “Why regret it? My foster dad’s a suck-it-up kind of guy. He wouldn’t have wanted any whining.”

I exchanged a glance with Tallgrass. This man was Ric’s soul-father. I could only hope to find one as wise and supportive as he was. I again recalled my brushes with the Perry Mason CinSim, and smiled. Couldn’t ever be for real, but I could always rely on Perry as paternal backup if my freewheeling investigation work got me into any tangles with the law.

I realized that Ric’s resting hand was warm over mine, the hot dappled sunshine sealing our mutual thoughts with the kiss of contact.

“I’ve had way more in the way of parents than you have, Del.” His smile was as healing as my lips and Quicksilver’s tongue could be at times. “Sometimes great, sometimes not so. Remember that.”

What struck me then, with surprise, was that Quick and I shared that oral healing thing. I’d never quite focused on that before. Poison dog lips? And mine? I stared into my dog’s blue eyes, blander and paler than my own.

He laid his snout on my knee and gave me his clearest mountain-lake gaze.

This tableside love fest was getting sweeter than tooth decay. I shook off my mood with Quick’s snout and Ric’s hand.

“What do we do next?” I asked.

“Shopping,” Ric said.

I didn’t think he and Tallgrass had silver and sombreros in mind. Besides drugs heading north and dead bodies, Juarez was most noted for being the busiest illegal weapons purveyor on the south banks of the Rio Grande.

“THIS PLACE IS called the Valle de Guadalupe?” I repeated to Tallgrass, stunned.

Night had returned to Juarez, eclipsing its sunny side.

I was back in Tallgrass’s loaned camos and we were back on the ridge where Quicksilver and I had intercepted him and Ric the previous night, smelling creosote bushes and tented by small cold stars and a moon so big it seemed blurry.

“You asked me where our party was gonna make our stand,” Tallgrass said. “All the military intelligence targeted this place southeast of Juarez as the most violent drug-war zone. You have something against the name Guadalupe?”

“No. I just hope that means we have the Virgin of Guadalupe on our side.”

“We all met up last night a bit farther north, but this is that same long ridge where Ric is sure Torbellino’s soldiers will hunker down, ready to mow down escapees from the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels clash up there.”

“And the Mexican-US forces will stay north to capture whoever survives the cartel war too, entirely unaware of this side of the contest farther south?” I wanted to get the combatants and the geography straight.

“Yup. Torbellino will form an unsuspected trap south of the action, offing any rival cartel men who escape the government trap. That’ll make him chief dog in the border smuggling trade.”

“So two guys, a gal, and a dog are going to take out Torbellino’s army?” I asked.

“It was supposed to have been just two guys,” Tallgrass reminded me sternly. “And Ric only wanted me along as backup.”

“Talk about a Lone Ranger. Maybe he has some secret weapon.”

“Maybe you.” Tallgrass chuckled.” I suppose you were too busy using your feminine wiles last night to get all the logistical details out of him.”

“Wiles take time. I prefer truth. I never thought Ric could or would keep something this big secret from me.”

Tallgrass shook his head at Ric’s solo act. “The gal and dog weren’t in our original plans, but we four did pretty well against Torbellino’s Wichita posse. All I know is Ric wanted to wait and take El Demonio down on their common ground where he’d once been a helpless child.”

“Ric’s personal crusade is the source of his greatest personal danger,” I told Tallgrass. “He’ll never allow anyone else to be enslaved as he was, and he’s absolutely fierce and fearless in going after the exploiters. That’s why I had to follow him here. By the way, I love the new accessory you guys got me during your spending spree in town. It really looks cool with my camouflage jammies.”

I saluted the night vision goggles casually stationed atop my head where California women wore sunglasses 24/7.

Then I lowered the goggles to focus first on the heat lightning doing a war dance on the night horizon, then far closer and below, on Ric and Quicksilver. Funny, Ric hadn’t been upset about the dog’s presence here, in the heart of battle, I couldn’t help grumbling mentally.

Together the hunting pair had reassembled the panicking desert reptile and insect life of last night into a thin silver line down in the sand canyon’s crease. Together, they were belly-crawling up the next ridge, which was the only cover between here and the Valley of Guadalupe.

There the sagebrush stations of hidden weaponry were now shaking with the emergence of a low-profile army of drug-and-zombie smuggling gangs and hitmen.

The silent night was abruptly interrupted by distant automatic gunfire chattering amid the spectacular fireworks of exploding grenades and shoulder-launched missiles. Out of sight to the north the warring cartels were fully engaged and clashing like an electric storm, harried into mowing each other down to escape a pincer operation of combined government forces.

The rumbling north of this valley obscured the vibrating chirrs and humming and scale-scrapings of the agitated and silver-armed insect and reptile foot soldiers Ric and Quick had gathered until they were poised like the top curl of a gigantic surfing wave about to wash over El Demonio’s forces.

“Let’s bring up the rear here and put Torbellino’s ass in a silver sling,” Tallgrass hissed in my ear.

A rear in a silver sling. Nicely put.

Tallgrass grinned up at the fading northern fireworks in the sky above one last time.

Then we turned sideways to crest the ridge behind the one Ric held now and maneuver down the steep sides of the earthen gash, our booted feet moving fast to catch up to the advance party of two. We knew that Ric’s showdown with his childhood enslaver had to put him first and foremost in the confrontation and that Quicksilver was the best scout in the party.

Soon we were approaching the quivering and broadening silver band making a do-or-die border like the Rio Grande. The maraca racket of all those metal scales and wings, feelers and legs, quieted and stopped. Like an ice-frozen river, the living shimmer of creatures stopped.

Tallgrass and I hastened to reach Ric’s back, Quicksilver sitting beside him.

The lightning on the horizon ahead of us grew bigger and snapped like a chupacabra twitching its tail. Yet we faced a vastly different scene from last night.

Across the wide valley massed the forces of hell.

Talk about a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. Row upon row of feral zombies, a standing army, twitched and writhed like giant maggots, all white bone and bared red muscle in the moonlight. Only then did I see the black iron shackles that made them into chain gangs.

Any remaining flesh gleamed in the moonlight, reflecting the actual maggots burrowing through what was left, ready to drop off on living prey.

“They’re . . . dancing?” I wondered aloud. Then I got it.

We were confronting an entire army of the new-generation zombies El Demonio Torbellino had created, hop-heads jived on crystal meth, a perfect meshing of the drug and the zombie trades.

“I’m going down,” Ric announced, turning so I could see the lightning flashes reflected in his exposed silver iris. “You two hold the high ground here until I get something going down there. Proceed at your own discretion. Be advised I don’t intend to be heavily into discretion tonight.”

He started down the incline to the Valley of Guadalupe, his every step pushing the silver wave of desert vermin at his feet ahead of him.

I lowered the high-tech binos that read bones, not heat, to my eyes for an ugly, close-up view.

“That’s it?” I asked Tallgrass. “Those are our only marching orders?”

“It’s mano-a-mano now. Our boys are both in the ring.”

Now I could see El Demonio had arrived at the jitterbugging zombies’ forefront. He sat on his traveling throne, the trunk of a black sixties Lincoln Continental convertible, his feet planted on the backseat. He was riding the stalled car like the grand marshal in a grisly parade of death, greed, and utter evil. He also was committing vintage car abuse.

I’d never forget his face as I first saw it in Wichita. At this safe distance I could study it longer. The brim of his flat-crowned black leather hat cut across the satanically arched eyebrows overhanging his hooded gaze. Thin high-flared nostrils made his nose as flat as a snake’s, his lipless mouth a raw slash like deli-sliced rare beef.

Why hadn’t I recognized who Torbellino looked like before? He was the spitting image of the sinister corporate muscleman in Metropolis who was only known as The Thin Man. That reminded me of the film title that had introduced my CinSim friends, Nick and Nora Charles, to an adoring public. Weird that something so innocent and light echoed something so evil.

Two chupacabras flanked the car, their eyes gleaming red with smoke steaming from their scaly hides like a visible stink. This multibreed creature resembled a small dinosaur with leathery gray-green skin and sharp quills down its spine and tail.

Despite the lizardlike quality, its fanged face, smoldering red eyes, and black forked tongue gave it demonic cast. To underline that, I can speak from experience that a chupacabra’s every exhalation broadcast the hellish and overcoming reek of sulfur.

I had reason to know chupacabras weren’t the biggest and brightest monster at the matinee, but they sure were among the ugliest.

Tallgrass was shaking his head at the opposition. “I didn’t believe in chupacabras until I saw that one in Wichita. Just how dangerous are those mythical beasts? It’s not a native Midwest monster.”

“A monster it is,” I agreed, “and mythical for too long. The real ones had a great cover all these years. Cheesy tabloids kept producing what people found and called chupacabras, dead coyotes ravaged by mange. You’d think they’d realize that creatures reputed to suck the blood out of goats and other stock had to weigh more than thirty pathetic pounds.”

“People want to believe folktales that look safe and are in somebody else’s backyard,” Tallgrass said. “The more lethal and unkillable the monster, the less we want to believe it’s really out there.”

“Some of the worst monsters aren’t supernatural.”

“That’s for sure. Look at these cartel mobsters.”

“And we call unhumans inhuman.” I surveyed our immortal enemy on his throne.

El Demonio’s thick bull whip draped the car’s front seat, windshield, and long, shiny hood before it coiled down to the desert floor. The last three feet of thirty—which Ric had often felt the slash of—swayed upright, an animated leather cobra ready to strike. Torbellino was a demon with an exterior tail.

And with every sway of the hypnotically moving whip end, lightning sizzled and danced in the sky, obscuring the stars and stabbing at the moon.

Ric marched closer to the drug lord’s battle line, Quicksilver nipping at the sides of the silver wave to shape it into an advancing U-shape.

“Great strategy,” Tallgrass observed. “We need to move to the ridge Ric left, pronto.”

He slung his bulky new rifle over one shoulder and sent sand chunks tumbling as he hurtled down with a sideways gait.

I followed his example, stumbling and having to abrade my fingertips on the sand a time or two. Getting up the last ridge was easier, and we lay just under the crest, breathing hard.

Apparently it was going to be a battle of words before action.

“How do you like my wheels?” El Demonio’s basso voice jibed across the barrier of stalled silver desert life.

I followed Tallgrass in sticking my head above the ridge to hear the cartel boss’s rant.

“JFK bought it in this car. Jackie crawled where I’m sitting. The conspiracy nuts thought it was the mob, but they had the wrong mob in mind.”

“Wrong,” Ric shouted back. “That car’s a museum piece far away and you soon will be too.”

“Hola, mi niño pequeño,” he taunted in tones of false fondness. “How you have grown. Every inch of height you gained must have stretched the welts from my whip on your back.”

The crude Kennedy car reference had made my blood boil and now it boiled over. I scrambled to my feet and used my strongest voice from when I was at the back of a noisy press conference.