Money to Burn Read Online Free Page B

siesta hour, on Town Hall Square, in San Fernando.
    The Kid touched the medallion of the Virgin to bring himself luck and got out of the car. He was so thin and fragile and was so drugged that he looked diseased, as if he were a victim of tuberculosis, as they'd told the gunmen beforehand ('sick as a consumptive'), but he earnestly clasped the Beretta .45 in his two hands and when one of the guards moved, he discharged his weapon into his face. The bullet sounded dry, unreal, like a snapped branch.
    Dorda had the nylon of the woman's stocking stuck to his face and breathed heavily through the fabric stuck inside his mouth. Off to one side he could see a guy getting down from the truck, and started to fire.
    Two old fellows sunbathing on the plaza benches, along with a regular customer, busily perusing his newspaper seated at a table by the bar window opposite, saw how two or three men inside the Chevrolet 400, its plates registered in Buenos Aires province, leapt from the car, weapons in hand.
    They seemed enraged, aiming at everyone in sight, sweeping the air in semi-circles as they approached, in slow motion, towards the pick-up. The tallest (according to the witnesses) wore a woman's stocking over his face, but the other one had his features exposed. It was the skinny one with the face of an angel, the one all the witnesses began to call 'the Lad'. He got out of the car, smiled, took aim at the rear end of the pick-up with his machine-gun, then fired off a round.
    From the square, one of the retired chaps caught sunbathing saw how the bodies bounced off the seats and the blood splashed off the car windows.
    'The fat one was alive when the round was over,' declared one of the old men, 'he tried to open the door and escape and at the same moment saw the guy with a woman's stocking pulled over his head walking along the middle of the road towards the pick-up, and threw himself down on to the pavement.'
    He looked like a gigantic bundle, Fatso Spector, thrown against the car and all that in broad sunlight.
    Over and again he was convinced they were going to kill him. He remembered the face of the skinny guy who'd regarded him with a glint of irony. Spector closed his eyes and prepared to die, but felt something like a kick in his chest and was saved by the metal watch his father had left to him.
    The assailants he managed to catch sight of were two young men dressed in blue suits. Their hair was cropped short, very short, military style. When the firing was over, it was all he could do to run as far as the Bank and ask for help.
    Now he was getting nervous, afraid that the police would accuse him of complicity in the handover.
    'So you got to see the assailants at close range ... '
    It wasn't a question, but Spector answered it anyway.
    'One was dark and the other blond, both were really young and with razored haircuts like soldiers.'
    'Describe what you saw.'
    He described one. It was Twisty Bazán.
    'He was in the bar and then he crossed the square with a pistol in his hand.'
    'You mean he was the driver, the one with a stocking over his face, the blond one, and then there was another.'
    Spector nodded his head obediently. Had they told him there were four, he would have sworn that indeed, four there were.
    The fellow with his face covered by a stocking moved quietly down the middle of the street, and seemed to be smiling, though perhaps this was a grimace induced by the silken mask he had put over his face and tied up on top like a bun. Martinez Tobar was wounded, lying on the floor, doubled over, leaning on his left side, with his briefcase tied to his wrist, and he wasn't able to see when the Kid pulled out the wire-cutters, sliced through the chain and picked up the briefcase with the loot in it, then, as he was moving backwards after all this, fired a shot at his chest. He was equally unable to see when the Gaucho with his stocking-covered face killed the policeman with a shot to the back of the neck.
    He'd killed him,