by Blake Banner
She shook her head. “It’s a kind of unspoken understanding, we stay away from the depot, and we don’t talk about it.”
Sean had sat up straight and was grinning. “I know!”
Abi snapped at him, “Sean! I hope you haven’t been near that place!”
“No, Mom! I’ve been watching it from my room, with my binoculars. I know what goes on there!”
“What did you find?” It was Abi, looking like she really didn’t want to know.
I sucked my teeth. “I found big, reinforced rubber drums of dirt. Hundreds of them.”
She frowned like I was talking a language she didn’t understand. But Sean interrupted. “I bet you found people too, didn’t you? He has people living there!”
I nodded. “One hundred Mexicans, fifty women and fifty men. And hundreds of drums of dirt. Tell me what you’ve seen.”
“Every day, early in the morning, a truck arrives, one of those ten-wheeler jobs, and all these people climb in the back. Then the truck takes off and goes south. And every evening two trucks come back. One of them unloads the people and the other unloads something else, I can never see what it is because it goes inside the fence. But I guess it must be those drums of dirt.”
Abi was shaking her head. “Why dirt?”
Sean put his hand on her arm. “Wait, Mom, there’s something else. Once a week or every ten days, a truck comes from the north. It’s bigger, it loads up and then heads back north again.”
I studied Abi’s face. I was pretty sure I knew the answer, but I asked her anyway. “Have you any idea what it means?”
She shook her head. “Why would anyone ship dirt? It doesn’t make any sense.” She frowned at me. “Have you any idea?”
“I’m not sure. What or where is Rochdale?”
“I don’t know of any Rochdales around here.” She hesitated a moment. “It sounds more like a name from the east…”
I smiled. “I know two, New York and Massachusetts, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t taking us east tomorrow. There has to be a Rochdale around here, close enough to drive a snow plow to, and two gets you twenty it’s south on Route 400.”
Sean was nodding vigorously. “Six or seven miles south of the crossroads where you found Peggy, the road turns west and crosses through the mountains. It comes out on the I-80, just north of Lovelock. I bet you anything you like, Rochdale is somewhere along that pass through the mountains.”
I nodded back at him, a little more slowly. He had echoed my thoughts. There was, as my British comrades in the Regiment would have put it, sweet fuck all south of Independence until you got to the Mexican border, more than five hundred miles away; just desert, and then more desert. And the only road around here, Route 400, took you straight to the I-80, as Sean had said. But the quickest way to I-80 was north, back up toward Mill City. The only reason you’d go south on Route 400 would be if you had some reason to go through that pass. So the question was no longer ‘where is Rochdale?’ but, ‘what is Rochdale?’. And I had a nasty feeling that I knew the answer.
I stood. “Let’s try and get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a tough day. You guys get those chairs out of the way and I’ll pull the mattress over.”
I dragged the heavy mattress and the bedding in front of the fire. We took off our shoes but left the rest of our clothing on, and climbed under the covers. Sean was dispatched to turn off the light, and by the flickering glow of the flames Abi put her arms around me and her head on my shoulder, and Sean curled up next to her. Outside, the wind howled and wailed, and the snow fell thick and freezing, and I lay staring at the wavering orange light on the ceiling, wondering what the hell I was going to do in the morning, how the hell I was going to keep the promises I’d made.
* * *
I slept eight hours and was awake before six. I spent an hour training and then had a shower. When I came out of the bathroom, Abi and Sean were awake and looking depressed and frightened. I wondered absently when they had last eaten. If they were planning to kill us later that morning, they would not waste food on us.
The door opened and Vasco was there with his four goons behind him. They were all holding guns. I suppressed the impulse to kill him where he stood. It would not have been difficult. But the risk of getting Abi and Sean hurt was too great. Instead I watched, and enjoyed the expression on his face as he stared at the broken bed. He narrowed his eyes, like he was trying to squeeze understanding out of his brain. “What is wrong with you?” He gestured at the broken mess with his hand. “That bed is two hundred years old! It’s worth a fortune…!”
“Was,” I said. “It was two hundred years old, and it was worth a fortune. And we were cold. And it was my idea. I did it. You want to punish somebody, punish me.”
He was nodding. “You’ll get your damn punishment, Walker.” He jerked his head at Abi and Sean. “They get breakfast. You get to come for a ride.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “They get breakfast why?”
“Mind your own damn business!” Over his shoulder he said, “Take ’em down to the kitchen. If they try to run, shoot them.”
I put my hand on Sean’s shoulder. “Remember what I told you. Stay cool. OK?”
He nodded and one of the goons led them away and down the stairs. I smiled at Vasco. “So you didn’t find Primrose, huh?”
He frowned.
I shrugged. “Why else would you keep them here? Last night he wanted to bury them in Rochdale. This morning you’re giving them breakfast. So what happened? You took the plow over, found Pete and Davie dead in the Toyota and no sign of Prim. So you put the word around the neighbors: you have Abi and Sean and if she wants to see them alive, go to the farmhouse, Al and Karen just want to make things right, no harm will come to anybody.”
He studied my face a moment. He wanted to hit me but he dared not get that close. He stepped back and gestured at the door. “Downstairs, genius. We’re going for a ride.”
I stepped out and made my way down the stairs with the four gorillas behind me. Over my shoulder I said, “Where are we going, to Rochdale?”
They all laughed, but that was the only answer I got. Vasco went ahead and opened the door. “There ain’t one of us couldn’t shoot a fly off a hog’s back, Walker. Don’t try and run.”
I stopped dead and stared at him. I made no expression, but my eyes told him everything he needed to know. “I won’t run, Vasco. Before the day is out, I’m going to kill you. But before I do that, I want to see what you have going down at Rochdale.”
He curled his lip. “Put him in the back of the truck. If he moves, blow his kneecaps off.”
They shoved me outside. The sky was still heavy. The snow drifts were five and six feet deep, but the snow had eased and there was a path cleared to the road. They tied my wrists and shoved me in the back of a Dodge RAM. Then we moved down the drive. At the intersection we turned south, and headed down, under heavy, leaden skies, toward Rochdale.
eighteen
The sky looked like Odin just told Thor he punched like a girl. It was an angry sky, with low-bellying clouds heavy with menace and frozen water, though only the odd, desultory flake drifted down, hinting at the Norse fury which was to come. The road, straight for almost seven miles, plunged away from us through a white wasteland, looking exposed and vulnerable under the awful sky.
Eventually the road turned right and became a broad, dirt track, and we followed that for about two miles west, moving toward the Humboldt Mountains. Then the road began to climb, and the brush and gnarled bushes that poked up through the mantle of snow became trees, naked and skeletal, half-buried in frozen white. We climbed for another two miles, then slowed and eased off the road onto a wide, pitted, rutted track.
Now we ground slowly, winding and bumping up ever steeper hills until eventually we came to a broad esplanade and I saw that Rochdale was exactly what I had thought it was: the only thing it could be in Nevada.
There was very little snow here. Most of it had been removed. It was
dirt, like a big scar on the face of the Earth, where the mountain had been flattened with dynamite. On the right, as we drove in, I saw two trucks. Beyond them there were two ten-wheelers, which told me that the Mexican couples were here already.
Beyond the trucks, there were three buildings set in a horseshoe around a kind of courtyard, with the open end toward us as we approached from the south. The two buildings to right and left were long, maybe thirty or forty feet, and comparatively low—not more than ten or eleven feet high. They were made of wood and had no windows. The building at the end was different. It was made of concrete, two stories high, and had two SUVs parked out front. I figured that was where the offices were.
But the two things that struck me as most interesting about the place were, first, the vast stretches of cleared earth, excavations and huge terraces that stretched for nearly a mile to the west and to the north, with groups of people working among trucks that were being steadily loaded with dirt; and second, the armed men who stood guard everywhere. In the courtyard I counted three, plus two outside the office building. And in the quarry I spotted at least seven. Rochdale was, as I had suspected, a mine, and the Mexicans were slaves used to work it.
We pulled up in front the office building and I was dragged out the back of the truck. The air was freezing here and our breath billowed in thick clouds from our mouths. Vasco turned to the two armed guards and shouted, “Ern! Jerry! Come here!”
As Ern and Jerry approached, I took a better look around me. The two long, low buildings intrigued me. One might be for storage and equipment, but what was the other for? It wasn’t a big, mechanized operation, and by the looks of it, they were shipping the raw product out for refining every day and storing it at the depot. So what was in the second building?
The realization dawned suddenly. It was like the icy air had got inside me and clutched my heart with frozen fingers. Everything I’d seen and everything I’d heard fell into place, and I knew what it was for. I knew what they kept in there. But I had no time to process the realization, because Vasco was saying to Ern and Jerry, “Take him away. Bury him in the north quarry. I never want to see this son of a bitch again. Comprende?”
I took a moment to calibrate the two guys. Jerry was six two, powerfully built and had a crew cut and pale blue eyes. His face looked like his wife had been doing frying pan practice on it, and his expression had all the bright intelligence of a bad hangover. Ern was much like a Latino version of his pal. He was shorter and broader in the shoulders, and had a neck like a redwood tree. His eyes expressed the Zen ideal of a total absence of thought, but for all the wrong reasons. He jerked his head toward the side of the building and said, “Walk.”
I walked. They shoved with their rifle butts. I walked faster.
We rounded the building and I saw a track climbing up toward a steep, open cast quarry where the snow had been allowed to gather in drifts, presumably because the vein had been exhausted. I figured what they were going to do was to take me to the top, shoot me, throw me into the pit, and then bury me using one of the excavators. It made sense.
It was a ten-minute walk to the top of the quarry. The snow up there was not so deep, because it was exposed and the wind had carried most of it away. By the time we got there, Jerry and Ern both looked bored. Maybe they’d done this so often it wasn’t fun anymore. Ern pointed over at the edge of the mine and said, “Go and stand over there.” He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice.
I smiled at him but didn’t move. I asked, “Have you got a knife, Ern?”
He frowned and glanced at Jerry, then looked impatient. “Just go stand over by the edge. Dumb-ass question…”
I shrugged. “Just grant a dying man a wish! I’m not asking you to explain the golden mean. I’m just asking you if you have a knife!”
“No! I ain’t got a knife! OK? Now go stand over by the goddamn ledge!”
I smiled at Jerry and spoke in an exaggeratedly elaborate voice. “How about you, Jerry? You look like a guy who likes hunting and all sort of outdoor recreational activities. Have you got a knife?”
He stared at me a moment. “I don’t know what in the hell you are talking about, mister. You playing for time or what?”
I sighed and smiled sadly. “So what if I am, Jerry? Is that such a bad thing? Ask yourself, if you were going to be shot and thrown over a cliff into an open cast mine, would you play for time? Is it too much to ask that you answer a simple question? Have you got a knife on your person?”
He had that look people get when accountants try to explain to them exactly what they do. He creased his eyes and started to shake his head. He pointed at the ledge.
“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I have a knife. Now go! Stand over there.”
I sighed noisily and made a face of huge relief. “That is great news!”
“What are you talking about? Just go over…”
I interrupted him, but stopped smiling and spoke in a dead voice. “I don’t want to have to go searching in this cold. I’ll need a knife to cut the ropes on my wrist after I kill you.”
And there it was. The two seconds of surprise that I needed.
You either hate tae kwon do or you love it. Personally, I love it. It has definite weaknesses, like the lack of hand techniques, but if your hands are tied behind your back, who cares? It’s exactly the fighting style you need. I turned the toe of my left foot in, and spun. Suddenly his rifle was aiming at empty air and the heel of my boot was smashing into his sternum, shattering the cartilage and fracturing his ribs. The pain of that kind of blow is paralyzing. It can cause cardiac arrest. Every breath is like having a thousand shards of glass dragged into your lungs.
The kick took less than a second. Ern was gaping and, all credit to him, he reacted and brought the barrel of his rifle around, but it was too late. As my right foot came down I stepped toward him and kicked savagely up into his elbow with my left foot, deflecting his weapon and badly damaging his joint. He staggered back and I smashed my right instep into his testicles. His eyes bulged and his face turned purple as he went down.
I kicked his rifle out of reach, just in case, and went back to Jerry. He was making a bad noise in his chest as he tried to breathe, and by the look of him, he was suffocating. I used my foot to move the hem of his jacket back, and saw his knife in a sheath hanging from his belt. I knelt down, leaned back against him and, with difficulty, managed to ease out the blade with my fingertips. Then I maneuvered it around so I could cut my bonds. The knife was sharp and within thirty seconds my hands were free.
I am not big on philosophical beliefs, but one thing I am clear about is that suffering is worse than dying. So as soon as I had my bonds cut, I turned his head to expose the left side of his neck and sliced deep through his jugular and his carotid. Death came quickly in a couple of heartbeats. I did the same for Ern, collected their rifles, and went to lie on my belly at the edge of the cliff to look down at the mine.
In the distance, I could see the small groups of people digging at the quarry face, loading the rubble into the trucks. It was hard to make out any details, or how many there were, but all in all I figured there must be two or three hundred people there. I remembered the Mexican guy at the depot: “Cien, cincuenta hombres, cincuenta mujeres. Somos familias. El lo quiso así.”
One hundred, fifty men, fifty women. They were families. Vasco wanted it that way. But there were more than a hundred people working out there. There was more than double that number. And that confirmed for me what I had realized earlier: that the long building I had been wondering about was a dormitory, a dormitory for the rest of the family: for the kids.
I didn’t try to repress the rage I felt. I encouraged it. I fed and fuelled it. But I set it on one side for later. For now I had to remain as cold as the snow I was lying on. My mind had to be clinical and clear.
I had at least answered one of my questions: how Al and Vasco seemed to be able to replenish their men so easily. Now I saw how. They kept a handful at the farm and more at t
he mine. This, what I could see now, I figured was the full compliment of what was left. Three in the courtyard, plus seven more dotted around the mine. That was ten, plus Vasco—and a couple he had kept back at the farm. I’d deal with them later.
I lay and watched for half an hour, trying to ignore the cold and formulate some kind of plan in my mind. After about twenty or twenty-five minutes, a dark blue SUV pulled into the courtyard. It looked like an Audi Q7. It stopped outside the office building and I saw Al climb out. He stood looking around for a second or two, like he was thinking you just couldn’t get decent service anymore. Then Vasco came out and they talked for a moment. I guessed Al was asking him where the two guards were, and Vasco was telling him they’d taken me up to the quarry, to get rid of me. They called over one of the armed men who was standing by the building I’d pegged as the dormitory, and he approached them at a run. They talked and then he and Vasco went around to the passenger side of the SUV and opened the door.
I watched as they helped Arnold down. He could barely stand, but between them they walked him across the yard to the dormitory and went inside. I lay chewing my lip for ten minutes, then crawled backward out of sight, stood, took Jerry’s jacket and his baseball cap and started a slow, careful descent back toward the mine.
nineteen
I kept my head down and my collar up, and walked around the corner and over to the main door of the office building. If anybody saw me, they assumed I was Jerry. I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. I didn’t know how many people I was going to find, or who they might be. I was kind of hoping Vasco would be there, but he wasn’t. Nobody was. There was an empty front office with a tin desk, a filing cabinet, and a telephone. There was a staircase leading upstairs and to the right there was a door that led to a back office that was just as empty. It didn’t surprise me much. It was pretty clear this was an illegal operation and any bookkeeping and admin paperwork was going to be kept to a minimum. What there was would be done by Al and Vasco at the end of the day.