by Layla Wolfe
I ruled out a Presención, coming to get me for picking off their men last night. A sicario for the Presencións would be following me, not Pippa Lofting, as Flavia Brooks was calling herself. He could be with the Ochoas, who owned a pot farm that rivaled The Bare Bones’. Or, worst of all, a Jones operative who figured out where Flavia Brooks was on his own, and was getting there before me. He’d just tooled on by when he’d seen the cop stop her.
Since my Panhead could carve these hills better than any lumbering Impala, I soon came upon the guy. I backed off a bit, not wanting to be seen. Around a few more corners, a puff of dirt told me which unpaved road he’d taken. I tailed him another five miles in this manner. Now I ruled out the Jones sicario possibility. He would’ve gone back to find Pippa. That left one of the pothead Ochoas.
Something about Pippa had set off long-buried triggers in me. She was tough, all right, so it was no flowery bullshit about wanting to protect her vulnerability. Her syrupy Texas drawl, the way she hooked her fingers in her back jeans pockets, her little cowboy boots, it all prodded at the back of my brain. Her full lips, how mischievously she smiled. The way she tossed her highlighted brunette hair to get the bangs from her eyes.
And then it struck me.
Lola.
Lola McShane.
I almost laid down my scoot when this reality hit me. I recovered in time to sedately pull up behind a boulder. The metallic green Impala was parked about sixty yards up the dirt road. In case of any altercation, I could get out before him.
I had to put Lola aside for a few minutes. This time, I would not be caught off guard. I strapped my assault rifle to my back and for the hundredth time made sure the magazine in my Springfield semiauto was full. I had to make a snap decision not to wear my leather jacket over the rifle. The chances of someone in this remote burg seeing a guy wandering around armed to the teeth paled compared to the odds of me fumbling with the assault rifle when I needed it most.
I’d seen where the lowrider had disappeared through the trees on foot, so I took the same path. Only then did I allow myself to think a little bit about my ex-wife. Pippa did remind me of Lola, but only superficially. They were both from Texas. They were both sassy and brash, full of piss and vinegar. I didn’t like that Pippa reminded me of Lola, though. I would not have my buttons pushed the way Lola had. Pippa was nothing like her.
Then I started wondering why it mattered so much to me. If I equated Pippa with Lola, it’d be so much easier just to pop her off, wouldn’t it? But I’d decided not to, and let the chips fall where they may. I’d worm my way out of it with Jones. Pretend I couldn’t find her, something along those lines. Not that I’d ever lost a mark I was tracking before. I’d dye my hair black if he made me go into New Mexico.
There. The hair-netted Ochoa pendejo had approached a tall, electrified, barbed wire fence. Floodlights and security cameras topped some of the poles. This place was secure like Fort Knox, so what was he hoping to gain? I held back behind a pine tree and watched while he cased the joint, as if he was about to make a prison break.
The cholo hadn’t been following Pippa at all. She was right—he’d been following June Driving Hawk, and she had led him right to her pot plantation.
On the one hand, it might be considered overkill if I buried a guy who was just scoping out whose indicas were choicest. He was probably just checking out who had headier, more cerebral selections. Or he could be eyeing the security system, figuring a way to breach it. I was a sicario, a paid hitman. Not someone who got a thrill out of offing random guys who were trying to figure out if someone’s sativas had been pinched or topped.
Like me, he had a piece in the waistband of his chinos, but no rifle. A South Korean fragmentation grenade was clipped to his belt. I could get the drop on him, put my barrel to his head, and demand to know his fucking business. Lytton would probably appreciate me finding out why the guy was here. I was just starting toward him to do that when my dilemma was answered for me.
A large caliber round went zinging past both our heads, nicking the pine I’d been hiding behind. Was the Leaves of Grass guard shooting at me? What the fuck? In the one point five seconds it took me to sling my rifle from my back to my side, the cholo turned and regarded me with wide eyes. It was hard to detect whether he was full of terror or rage, but one thing was for certain, he whipped that Glock from his waistband and leveled it at me, gangsta tilt style.
As another bullet from the plantation guard went winging past my ear—they were more like warning bullets, I gathered—I squeezed the trigger of my rifle and nailed the pendejo right in the chest with about four, five rounds. He jiggled around a bit like a marionette, now definitely looking surprised he’d been shot. But a strange thing happened.
Another few rounds, coming from somewhere behind me, hit the Ochoa man in the head. Bone and brain matter splashed the electrical wire of the fence. Before I could get a grip on what had just occurred, some moron came leaping out of the underbrush behind me. I mean he seriously jumped like a springbok with unnecessarily high steps, gripping his rifle as though he were in an ROTC training film.
Of course, I leveled my piece on him now. I didn’t need any fucking competition for making the hit, and this newcomer was really confusing the issue.
“I got him!” the guy yelled jubilantly. “Bam! Pow! I sure gave him the business!”
The interloper—I now realized it was that annoying Wolf Glaser who, according to Santiago Slayer, was “a good man to have in a hard place”—went right up to the sprawled body, put his boot on the cholo’s chest, and took a selfie, smiling the whole while. His belt fairly dragged down his pants with all the implements hooked there. Bowie knife, taser, two grenades, a radio, brass knuckles, nunchaku—I mean the only thing missing was a Walkman.
I was just open-mouthed with disbelief. Still wearing that wide grin, Wolf Glaser kicked the Ochoa for good measure and bounded over to me. “I’m just here to meet my girlfriend. Well, she doesn’t know it yet. But she lives in the ranch house, the office for Leaves of Grass. Tracy’s a smoke show.”
“Is that so?” was all I could think to say.
“Well, right now she sort of lives with this nerd Tobias. He’s not a cool outlaw like we are. He’s just some bowl-headed, Game of Thrones-watching, Bloodborne-playing byte-boy, if you ask me.”
I said, “So she lives with another guy, and doesn’t know you’re coming?” Wait a minute. Why am I talking to this cockhead like this? “How the fuck did you come to take a detour up this road? You know, I didn’t need your fucking help to ace that Ochoa pendejo.”
“Oh, it that who it is? All I saw was this beaner about to shoot you, so I got him first.”
“No, I got him first. So why don’t you just continue down the road to the chick who doesn’t know you’re coming and doesn’t want you?”
That seemed to get to Wolf Glaser. The smile turned into a frown. He looked like a bowl-headed nerd whose joystick had broken. “It’s been so dull since I patched into the Bones. We haven’t had a good shoot-out in a long time. I just saw that guy about to shoot you, and did what comes naturally.”
I wasn’t falling for it. I waved my rifle in his general direction. “Just trundle down the road now, Poindexter. The Leaves of Grass guard knows where I am, so I can take it from here.”
In fact, I could hear a four-wheel-drive quad heading our way already. While I was looking over his shoulder in the direction of the sound, Wolf started waving his rifle madly. “Hey! We’re over here!” he yelled to the unknown driver.
I put a hand on his arm and applied gentle pressure to lower his weapon. Wouldn’t want him blasting a barrage of rounds into the sky. Those bullets had to come down somewhere. “Wolf. Wait ’til we see who it is. We don’t need this reported to the cops.”
He looked at me with an idealistic, cheerful expression. I was starting to suspect he looked like that all the time. “Oh, no one who works here will report anything. Especially if it’s an Ochoa. They use so
me of Ochoa’s shittier weed in A Joint System, charging less of course than Leaves of Grass’ primo bud, but we’re hardly friends with them. Let me look at his wallet.”
As Wolf booted the body onto what was left of its face, I kicked myself for not having thought of that. “Lots of illegals have their I-862 form on them.”
Wolf unclipped the wallet from the guy’s chinos and opened it gingerly. It was funny how he was so careful with a clean wallet, but had cheerfully taken a selfie with a faceless guy. “Yeah, if he works for Ochoa. They’ve got to be as legit as possible to be bought out by Gunhammer. Yup, here it is. I-862, Notice to Appear in immigration court. Jorge Sanchez. He’s even stupid enough to have a pot farm business card with Ruben Ochoa’s name on it.”
Even I had heard of Ruben Ochoa, though northern Arizona wasn’t my usual neck of the woods. “I wonder why Ruben would risk sending this laborer over here,” I mused.
Lytton drove to his side of the fence and got off the quad. He killed the motor so we could talk in reasonable tones as we explained what had happened. I figured, be honest. I thought the guy was tailing June and I wanted to know why.
Lytton said, “Probably sussing us up, since we’re Ruben Ochoa’s biggest competitor in the whole state. I wouldn’t give him a tour of the place when he asked a few months ago. He probably wants to know what I’ve got that he doesn’t. I told him I was considering Gunhammer’s proposal, which is true. Any proposal should be considered. I could change my mind and go for it. My weed is far superior to Ruben’s. They’ve got those super mega steroid plants that get as big as Christmas trees and suck all the water from his creek. I’m sure Gunhammer would prefer taking over Leaves of Grass.”
Wolf pointed at Sanchez. “I nailed him in the face. Sorry about the mess on your fence.”
I didn’t usually stoop to petty competition like this. But I needed Lytton’s approval in order to stick around Pure and Easy, decide what to do about Pippa. “Yeah, well I got him in the chest. Why not go for the biggest target, right?”
Lytton nodded, but Wolf declared, “You want to be sure he’s dead, don’t you?”
I kicked the body so it lay on its back again. “Uh, I’d say he was dead when the first round went right through his heart.”
“Listen,” said Lytton, as though he hadn’t even been listening to us fussing and fighting. “I want to give you guys a task. You’re a professional, right, Fox?”
I nodded uncertainly. A task would be good, would give me a reason to stick around, to draw out making a decision about Pippa that I couldn’t undo. “A task…doing what I do?”
“Not unless you have to. Wolf’s good about that.”
I snorted at the ridiculous buffoon. “His timing isn’t the best. He seems capable of overkill.”
Lytton ignored that part. “I want you guys to find out why the Ochoas are suddenly spying on me. Find out what this stiff wanted. Ruben’s gonna know something’s up when his guy doesn’t come back, so do it without anyone seeing you, if possible.”
Wolf sneered. “That sounds like a job for Tobias, to hack into Ochoa’s computer. I’m going up to the house anyway to see Tracy. I can tell Tobias.”
Lytton laughed. “Still pining away for Tracy?”
Wolf made a lip fart. “Who said I’m pining? I just wanted to get some Eminence Front at cost.”
Lytton said, “Well good, because I’m gonna need you guys to bury this pinche guey. Let me deal with Tobias. I’ll have my guard bring you a couple of shovels. Do a super good job. Last guy we buried out here, the coyotes dug up.”
CHAPTER SIX
PIPPA
“Use your core muscles. Tighten them up and don’t stop even when you’ve released the arrow. Don’t lower your bow until you hear the arrow hit the target.”
There seemed to be so many things to remember all at once. Breathe in, exhale. Keep your bow fingers loose. Don’t look at the level. Feet wide apart, but not too wide. Elbow up. The mysterious Fox was a hitman, so he should know about shooting things. But having the heat of his body slam up against me while I was drawing back a thirty-pound compound bow, well, that was distracting.
No doubt he was a “known felon,” the sort I wasn’t supposed to fraternize with. How did a white guy get to become a sicario, anyway? When he took off his black leather jacket, I could see around the tissue-thin white tank top that hung from his sinewy frame that he did indeed have some tattoos. Looked like a Bible verse covering his back, in a very artistic way, of course. Other tribal artwork twined around his biceps, and a big cursive statement disappeared tantalizingly over a pectoral. I found I enjoyed watching him shoot, watching the images come to life on his body. A mermaid on his right bicep undulated when he drew the bow.
“I get so nervous with you watching me,” I giggled, struggling to pull the bowstring past the let-off point. Once there, it was easy to draw the rest, and not look like a hundred-pound weakling shaking while holding the bow. I was more agitated by his body heat as he stood close behind me.
“Don’t be afraid of blowing it,” Fox said. “Just aim and release.”
Aim and release. That’s easy for him to say. I let it fly. Predictably, it landed in one of the outer rings twenty yards away. “Oh, brother.”
“At least you hit the target. Do another.”
“At least I hit the target! Look, I know you’re trying to be supportive of a lame-ass beginner, but shouldn’t I at least be in some of those inner rings? Yours are all in the inner ring.”
“When I started, when I moved to Pure and Easy,” Wolf Glaser yelled, unnecessarily loudly, for he was only four lanes away, “I couldn’t even hit a gym. I only got better when I started doing it every day without fail.” He was using a stick bow without a sight. When he let loose his string, his arrow landed in the target of the lane next to his. “Well,” he said, unshaken by the fail, “these stick bows are notoriously hard to use. I think I’ll go get a smoothie down the block. You guys want any?”
We gave our orders—Fox’s being concocted for a guy about to row to Hawaii, with soy and whey boosts added. My order seemed to give energy for waddling to the kitchen to get more. I cursed myself for ordering first.
“You want extra drizzles of fudge sauce on that?”
I wasn’t sure if Wolf was joking or not, so I said haughtily, “Of course not.”
“Just checking,” said Wolf with a straight face. “Seems like it’d go with the triple chunk chocolate and ultra bananarama ice creams.”
I said nothing, just harrumphed and angrily shot a few more arrows. Hey, I was getting better. Maybe my anger was propelling me, but all three went into one of the inner rings. Not the inner yellow or red scoring rings, of course, but the sky blue and black.
“Hey, look at you!” said Fox in one of those high, singsong voices one uses to encourage a kid to use the pot. “Scored on all three! It’s finally sinking in, then. You’re getting into the swing of it.”
I actually was quite proud. “Yours are all so perfect. How’d you learn archery?”
He shrugged. With one arm resting on the bow rack and his booted feet crossed, he looked sunny and happy. For a guy who murdered strangers for a living, he seemed unconcerned, ironed-out. I felt no fear in his presence, either. He’d saved me from a potentially fatal blunder with the cop. I was never sure how well WITSEC had cleaned my old Flavia Brooks records in their clearinghouse, or whether my Pippa Lofting driver’s license would fly, or if some random childhood prank from my past would come back to haunt me, force me to leave town once again and start all over from scratch. It was a hell of a way to live. So yes, I existed on pins and needles. I was very grateful that he’d come to my rescue.
“I don’t know. Typical boy scout shit.”
I gaped, then closed my mouth as I wandered closer to him. No one else was in the Hip Quiver indoor range at one in the afternoon other than that clown Kneecap, fixing something to do with bows in the repair shop, but I still felt discretion was necessary. “Bei
ng a boy scout doesn’t mesh with your hitman career.”
Again he shrugged. “Why not? Hitmen had childhoods, too. I wasn’t always on the path to becoming a hitman.”
“What were you? Were you really a lawyer?”
“I was really a lawyer.”
“But why would someone want to quit a lucrative job—I presume it was lucrative—to pursue such a dirty, dangerous job?”
“Hey. This dirty, dangerous job pays more than lawyering. Especially being a public defense attorney. What made you drop everything and come to P and E?”
That threw me for a loop. I generally tried not to ask people probing questions. In my experience, this just made them poke me back even harder. “So you do it for the money.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t buy that. Someone as clever as you has to have a higher reason for doing something.”
He didn’t answer me right away. It was ballsy of me to poke the brawny hitman. I didn’t even know why I was doing it. Well, it was hard not to see the similarities in our situations, although of course I couldn’t tell him that. For whatever reason, he was running from his former life. And I was running for my life.
He finally said thinly, “Sometimes money does cure all evils. Listen, let’s go get our arrows from the targets. Clear!”
He yelled clear even though we were the only two people in there. Such a thorough man would not have left his former life for trivial, or even strictly monetary, reasons. He couldn’t be in WITSEC, though, I thought with a chuckle. His agent would hardly allow him to work for a cartel. Then I started wondering which cartel he worked for. I was familiar with some of them, though of course not all. But that would be the last question you’d ask a sicario.
“Oh, look,” I said weakly. How embarrassing! “I got the arrow way up there.”
“No big deal. You threw that one away.”
“I’ll say. Can you reach it? No? I’ll go find a stepstool.”
“No sweat.” Bending at the knees, Fox wrapped his big hands around my waist and lifted me. It was fun, being so light, up that high. I admit I made it seem like it was harder than it really was, getting the arrow out of the wall. There were lots of holes in the wall where idiots had done the same thing.