This Wicked World

by RICHARD LANGE

  “Okay, amigos,” he calls to the Mexicans, who are standing with their shoulders hunched, their backs to the wind and rain. “Adios.”

  He trots to the pickup and scrambles inside, uses his sleeve to dry his face. Scooping up his phone from the dash, he calls Taggert.

  They’ve worked out a code: “Everything’s fine” means “The motherfuckers are holding a gun to my head and making me say this.” “All clear,” on the other hand, means “Proceed as planned.”

  “All clear,” he says when Taggert answers. The Silverado’s taillights come on, and it pulls back onto the pavement. “They’re on their way to you now.”

  “Okay, bro. See you at the ranch,” Taggert replies — “at the ranch” signifying that everything is okay on his end.

  Spiller pats his pockets for his cigarettes and lighter. He notices that the Silverado has stopped and is now backing down the road toward him. Fucking morons probably need directions.

  The Silverado stops alongside the pickup, and the cowboy motions for Spiller to roll down his window.

  “Hola, amigo,” the cowboy says.

  “Yeah?” Spiller replies.

  The cowboy reaches up into a hidden stash box that’s been added to the headliner of the cab and whips out a pistol. He thrusts it out the window until it’s about a foot from Spiller’s face and pulls the trigger.

  You gotta be kidding me, Spiller thinks in the instant before a bullet destroys his left eye and slams into his brain. You gotta be fuck —

  26

  TAGGERT HANDS HIS PHONE TO OLIVIA, TELLS HER TO PUT it in the glove box. They passed through their checkpoint ten minutes ago, stood around in the rain while one of the bodybuilders from the Indian casino searched the truck for weapons, and, finding none, waved them on.

  The wipers of T.K.’s Explorer are going full speed, and Taggert can still barely see through the windshield. There’d been talk of a summer storm, but it wasn’t supposed to hit until Wednesday at the earliest. It’s hot and muggy to boot, almost tropical. Taggert switches on the air conditioner and cracks his window.

  “Slow down,” Olivia says.

  She’s been quiet since they left the ranch, kind of pale and spooky. Maybe she’s finally realizing what he’s been trying to tell her all along, that she’s not cut out for this life. Shooting T.K. was a good lesson for her. Some people can handle a thing like that; most can’t.

  He tries to remember how he felt the first time he killed a man. Well, not the first time, because that was in Nam, where greasing gooks got to be like shooting gophers for a bounty. No, no, his first civilian kill was in Louisville, some pimp who ended up on Big Donnie’s bad side. Taggert walked up to him on his corner one night, put two in his dome, and went to a movie afterward, Papillon, with Steve McQueen. So he must not have been too busted up about it. Relieved the thing was over, probably. A little scared of getting caught. Hard to say. It was a long time ago.

  He reaches out and squeezes Olivia’s thigh, and she flinches like he burned her.

  “Hey,” he says. “Everything’s cool.”

  She nods and gives him a sickly smile. He’d laugh if he wasn’t certain it would set her off. She looks like she’s going to puke. After hounding him for how long to let her come on a job? Good thing all she is is a warm body on this one. Imagine if he actually needed her for something.

  He glances over his shoulder at all the money he has in the world, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag on the backseat, and smiles. He’s almost giddy now that everything is in motion. This is when he feels most like the man he wants to be, the man he is. Tomorrow it’ll be back to worrying about this and that, back to contemplating and deliberating and driving himself crazy with all the choices it takes to make it through a single goddamn day, but right now, what’s going to happen is going to happen, and there’s not a thing he or anybody else can do about it.

  They come to the hamlet of Goffs, a windburned scatter of rickety wooden structures and mobile homes cowering miserable in the storm. The paved road makes a sharp right turn here, but Taggert keeps going straight, heading down a rutted asphalt track that soon peters out into graded dirt. He’s forced to reduce his speed because of the many potholes that have already become muddy puddles.

  At one point, a ten-foot-wide stream rushing across the road stops him completely. Not willing to risk a blind crossing, he gets out of the truck and walks to the edge of the flow to check its depth with a stick he picks up off the ground. Five inches, six. No problem.

  He’s soaked by the time he returns to the Explorer. Olivia leans back in her seat and braces herself as he releases the parking brake and creeps forward.

  “Are we gonna make it?” she asks.

  Taggert blinks the rain out of his eyes and says, “We better.”

  The truck easily fords the stream, and they continue on their way.

  “This is crazy,” Olivia says, the shadows of the drops on the windshield like tears on her face.

  “Crazy’s good,” Taggert says. “Crazy means there’s nobody out here but us lunatics.”

  Just then a crooked spear of lightning arcs out of a black cloud shot through with gray veins and slams into the ground somewhere beyond the horizon. Taggert feels the thunderclap deep in his chest and shouts, “Fuck yeah!”

  BOONE SQUATS NEXT to the rusty water tank on the main street of Lanfair. Carl has taken up a position at the depot, and Robo is hidden in the remains of a cabin at the edge of town.

  Rain is still falling, but Boone is relatively dry under the narrow wooden awning attached to the tank. He can see most of the town from here and has a clear view of the road. Wherever Taggert and the Mexicans decide to get down to business, he’ll be able to keep an eye on them until he reveals himself.

  He checks his watch — 11:52 — before turning around to make sure the Xterra, parked in the warehouse on the bluff behind him, won’t be visible to anybody approaching the town from either direction.

  The walkie-talkie in his pocket beeps, and Robo’s voice crackles out of it, singing, “Raindrops keep falling on my head…”

  “Let’s keep the chatter to a minimum,” Carl barks.

  “Roger,” Robo says. “ Ten-four.” Then, after a pause, “Kiss my ass.”

  Boone chuckles to himself. His glands are shooting all kinds of buzzy stuff into his system that makes him feel like a superhero. “I pity the fool,” he chants quietly to himself. “I pity the fool. I pity the fool.”

  A flash to the north gets his attention. There’s been some lightning this morning, but this is something else, lower to the ground. He peers through the binoculars Carl lent him, sees a truck splashing down the road toward town, headlights on.

  “Vehicle approaching,” he announces into the walkie-talkie. “A mile or so out.”

  The truck, a Silverado, slows to a crawl when it reaches Lanfair, rolling past the depot, the general store, and finally stopping in the middle of the road about twenty yards from the water tower. Its wheel wells are caked with mud. Boone can’t see who’s inside, but whoever it is doesn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to stand in the rain.

  Another vehicle appears, this one coming from the south. An Explorer. Boone doesn’t risk using the walkie-talkie this time because Robo and Carl would have to be blind not to see the truck as it drives into town.

  The Explorer brakes, its taillights turning the rain to blood, and comes to a stop facing the Silverado. There the two vehicles sit, thirty feet apart, until Taggert finally steps out of the Explorer and raises his hand in greeting.

  Then Boone sees something he can’t be seeing. He presses the binoculars to his eyes in the hope that a closer look will prove him wrong. Nope: that’s Olivia in the passenger seat of the Explorer. Boone isn’t sure what this means. If the plan has changed somehow, she would have called, wouldn’t she? Best to stick to the program for now. He pulls the ski mask over his face and swings the M-16 into firing position.

  RAINDROPS SLITHER DOWN inside Taggert’s co
llar and make him squirm. He stands in the no-man’s-land between the Explorer and the Silverado while Mando and his boy sit with mean grins on their faces, high and dry in their truck, and watch him take a soaking from the storm. Taggert clenches his fists and squishes one boot in the mud, then the other. Right now he could do both of those bastards with his bare hands.

  The two men slide out of the Silverado, Mando in a white straw cowboy hat that shines like it’s lit from within. They approach Taggert, carefully placing each step to avoid puddles. When they get close, Mando smiles at Taggert from under the dripping brim of his hat.

  “Good afternoon,” he says. He has to raise his voice to be heard above the rain.

  “You piss somebody off?” Taggert asks with a nod at the seething sky.

  “Not me, amigo,” Mando replies. He squints at the Explorer. “Who you got in there, your sister?”

  “I’ve got your money,” Taggert says. “What do you have for me?”

  “Everything you asked for.”

  “So then what?”

  Mando motions to his partner, and the two of them start back to the Silverado. Taggert walks to the Explorer, goes to the passenger side and opens the rear door.

  “What’s happening?” Olivia asks. The glare of the dome light bleaches all the life out of her face.

  “A few more minutes,” Taggert says as he reaches for the grocery bag and opens it to look at his money one last time. He glances out the windshield and sees that Mando and his man are already returning, each carrying a bulging duffel bag. Everything is going like it’s supposed to, except for the rain, and who could have foreseen that?

  Taggert slams the door of the truck and walks out to meet Mando, the grocery bag clutched to his chest. There’s an instant of hesitation when they come together again. Neither wants to make the first move. Taggert finally steps forward, holding out the bag of money to Mando with one hand and extending the other to take his duffel bag. The exchange completed, he reaches out with his free hand and accepts the other duffel from Mando’s partner.

  He hefts the bags a bit and says, “I’m gonna trust you on the count.”

  Mando opens the grocery bag just enough to confirm there’s money inside, then wraps it up tight. He grins at Taggert and says, “Maybe I fuck your girl now, like you fucked mine.”

  Something almost like fear jolts Taggert. “I don’t think so,” he says.

  “No?” Mando replies and whips out a pistol from under his coat.

  Taggert lifts one of the duffel bags to protect himself. The first round passes through the bag and bores into his shoulder like a railroad spike. The second grazes the side of his head, zipping off a strip of scalp.

  “You motherfucker,” Taggert roars.

  The duffel he was holding with his injured arm drops to the ground. He swings the other up and flings it into Mando’s face before running for the Explorer.

  Mando jumps back, startled, and loses his grip on the grocery bag. It falls open, and stacks of rubber-banded bills plop into the mud at his feet. Regaining his composure, Mando fires again, and the bullet hits Taggert in the thigh as he reaches the truck.

  Taggert yanks open the driver’s-side door but slips climbing in and falls to his knees. Another round smacks into the door, which is now between him and Mando, protecting him from the waist up. If he can get inside before the pain registers, he’ll be able to start the truck and run them down, or at least distract them enough that he and Olivia can escape.

  “Oh my God,” Olivia screeches. “Oh my God,” and he wishes she’d shut the fuck up. What happened to me? he wonders. When did I forget everything I know?

  THE MEXICANS ADVANCE on the Explorer, the one with the cowboy hat firing a pistol, the big one what looks like a MAC-10. Taggert is struggling to pull himself into the driver’s seat, and Olivia leans over to grab his arm as the big guy sprays the Explorer, spiderwebbing the windshield.

  Boone steps out into the street. He was about to order everyone to hit the dirt when the shooting started, but now his only thought is to keep Olivia alive long enough to find out where Amy is being held. He squeezes off two bursts into the mud in front of the Mexicans and shouts, “Drop your weapons.”

  The big guy whips the MAC around and sends a string of bullets his way. Boone drops to the ground and rolls behind an old concrete foundation. The sodden ski mask has twisted around to cover his eyes, so he tears it off.

  The Mexicans run to the Silverado and scramble inside. The engine starts, but before they can get moving, there’s more gunfire, and half a dozen rounds chew up the grille of the truck. The engine emits a shrill scream, then grinds to a stop.

  Wind-driven rain is pounding down harder than ever, and Boone can barely make out Robo, who is advancing cautiously toward the two vehicles, covering both with his M-16.

  “Jimmy, where are you?” Robo shouts.

  Boone rises to his knees and waves. “Over here. What are you doing?”

  “Coming to help. I thought they got you.”

  “Go back to cover. And no more shooting.”

  The Spider-Man walkie-talkie beeps incessantly. Boone takes it from his pocket, keys it, and says, “Yeah?”

  “We got to go,” Carl says.

  Boone watches Robo waddle toward a cabin on the side of the road. Before he gets there, shots come from the Silverado, and he falls to the ground.

  “Bring the truck,” Boone yells into the walkie-talkie. “Wait for us by the depot.”

  WHEN OLIVIA MANAGES to haul Taggert into the Explorer, he slumps in the driver’s seat, his breath coming in stuttering gasps. There’s blood all over his face, and bright red gouts of it spurt from a hole in his thigh. He clamps a hand over the wound to stanch the flow.

  “What do we do?” Olivia asks, shaken by his suffering.

  Taggert looks past her out the passenger-side window. She follows his gaze and sees the fat man in the ski mask who just went down. His body lies in the road, ten feet from the Explorer.

  “Get that guy’s gun,” Taggert hisses.

  “I can’t,” Olivia wails.

  He shoves her hard. “Do you wanna fucking die out here?”

  Frightened into action, Olivia shoulders her door open and leaps out into the storm. Three long strides bring her to the body. The man is on his back in the mud. Olivia snatches up his rifle, then spots a pistol in the pocket of his fleece vest and takes that too.

  A flash from the Silverado pulses in the corner of her eye, and bullets crack and whistle all around her. She half crawls, half runs back to the Explorer. More rounds ding into the truck, metal hitting metal. She and Taggert cower beneath the dash until the shooting stops.

  “The M-16,” Taggert says, reaching out the hand that isn’t applying pressure to his leg.

  “What?” Olivia says, confused.

  “The fucking rifle.”

  She passes it to him, and he uses the stock to punch a hole in the shattered safety glass of the windshield, then releases his hold on his thigh long enough to draw back the bolt and fire at the Silverado.

  “Take the keys out of my pocket,” he says. “Put them into the ignition.”

  His voice is slurred, his tongue uncooperative. They killed him, Olivia marvels. She fishes in his pants with tears in her eyes. Her hand comes away coated in blood.

  TAGGERT LETS LOOSE with another burst. Got to keep their heads down until he can start the truck. He’s getting weaker, though, feels the juice draining out of him. The round in his thigh must have hit an artery. As soon as he and Olivia break out of here, he’ll have her apply a tourniquet.

  The girl fumbles with the keys. As she’s pushing them into the slot, her door pops open. It’s the fat man who, just a second ago, appeared to be KIA. She screams and slides over the center console in an attempt to get away from him.

  “Let me in,” the fat man says. He’s bleeding from a wound in his side, looks half crazy.

  “Shoot him,” Taggert snaps at Olivia.

  She kic
ks the guy, catches him in the chest. He falls back into the mud.

  “Shoot him,” Taggert yells again.

  She bobbles the Glock, gets it straight, and leans out the door to point it down at the motherfucker.

  “Stop!” someone new shouts and knocks her arm sideways before she can pull the trigger. “He’s with me.”

  Boone. The son of a bitch who came asking about Oscar crouches behind the door and fires at the Silverado with another M-16, like he’s on their side.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks Olivia.

  “I… I don’t know, I…” she stammers. “What do we do now?”

  “Hey, it’s your fucking plan,” Boone says.

  Everything becomes clear to Taggert then. Not the dirty details, but the gist of Olivia’s betrayal is right there in front of him. She was fucking him over too, had something cooked up with this Boone, some sort of double cross that fell apart when the Mexicans started shooting. The little bitch has been playing him all along. He must have Alzheimer’s or something, not to have seen this coming. He must have stroked out and not even realized it.

  His vision is fading, and there’s a chill in his guts. He’s done for, no getting around that, but he’ll be damned if these snakes will watch him die.

  “Get out,” he says to Olivia.

  “Wait, Bill,” she says.

  He lifts his right hand from the hole in his leg, balls it into a bloody fist, and punches her repeatedly in the face and body.

  “Get. The. Fuck. Out.”

  Olivia retreats under the hail of blows, backs awkwardly out of the truck. Taggert starts the Explorer and pops it into drive. He can’t feel his right foot anymore, so he uses his left to jam the gas pedal to the floor.

  The tires spin in the mud, then catch, and suddenly he’s moving toward the Silverado, picking up speed. Mando and his partner fire wildly through their broken windshield — at him, at Olivia and the others, who are now pinned down with no cover.