“I’m going to have a talk with those guys,” he said.
“Who, the Stillers?”
He looked at her. Shrugged.
“They’re not going to talk to you,” she said.
Nineteen
Just south of the Camino del Diablo and the southern edge of the Cabeza Prieta Wilderness, a few hundred yards into Sonora, Mexico, sometime after 4 A.M.
Rice held his flashlight in his teeth and pulled on a pair of leather gloves. Watching for scorpions, he pulled flood-packed trash, brush, and cholla pieces away from the northern end of a culvert under Federal Highway 2, eventually uncovering a lattice of welded rebar. It looked solid, but he tugged on it once, then rared back and kicked it with his boot, setting off a rattlesnake some ways into the dark culvert. He kicked again, but the grate didn’t budge. He cut his light and stepped away from the concrete abutment, into the light of a waning gibbous moon.
“Fuck,” Apryl whispered behind him.
A tractor-trailer roared past overhead. When the sound of the truck had receded, the rattlesnake was still buzzing. Must be a western diamondback, Rice thought. He’d brought a snake stick, but they had no time or tools for the rebar, and they were going to have to cross the highway. He preferred the rattlesnake. Behind them, past the bollards lined up along the border, was one of the most remote and forbidding areas of the continental United States. But here in Mexico, well before first light, the machinery of commerce was surprisingly busy.
Apryl was peeking up above the abutments, watching for the next traffic. He decided to try her one last time.
“It’s a sign,” he said. “We have to back off.”
She didn’t even look at him. “Mia said it might be blocked. It’s not a big deal, the surveillance here is broken half the time. Let’s go.”
Bent at the waist, she ran up to the tarmac and sprinted across. Feeling like an armadillo, Rice followed, noting headlights a quarter mile off, coming from the east. Truckers probably saw lots of people scurrying across this highway. Mostly going the other direction.
Mia Cortez, their cartel contact on the U.S. side for the past few months, had set up this meeting, supposedly with people who were important in the narco-government of Sonora and who had need of Apryl and Rice’s unique services. Mia had risen to some sort of management position in the cartel’s Chicago operation, and she was smart, and she knew a lot of people on the Mexican side. She even helped launder Rice and Apryl’s money to fund the border wall study. But Rice had always had a bad feeling about her, and he and Apryl had nearly broken up over Mia Cortez. The only part of the argument about this meeting that he’d won was his insistence that they leave their firearms in the United States, buried up in the Chiricahuas. You seriously did not want to be arrested with a gun in Mexico.
They’d camped last night near Quitobaquito Springs so they could arrive at the meeting place early enough to have a look around. Mia had planned to drive down from Phoenix. Rice’s certainty that today’s plan would be disastrous had bordered on premonition even before Mia had texted Apryl after midnight, saying she was held up in the city and wouldn’t make it in time. They couldn’t miss the meeting, she texted, couldn’t be late, so Apryl and Rice had to go without her. Rice had said absolutely not, this is fucked, we abort, but Apryl asked him to trust her judgment the way she had trusted his for the past year, and he’d decided that if he couldn’t talk her out of this debacle, he would walk right into it with her.
South of the highway, they had to cross a half mile of mostly flat ground to the tamarisk thicket along the nearly dry Rio Sonoyta. They walked fast through nothing but knee-high saltbush for cover, due south by Rice’s compass, hunched over and finding what shadows the land gave them. In the tamarisk, they searched by moonlight for twenty minutes before they found the big stone cairn, river stones piled in a neat pyramid up out of the riverbed. It had been there for a while; Rice imagined some kid with stonemason skills marking the place he first got laid. Or maybe it was someone’s point of departure from old Mexico, headed for the promise of el Norte.
The clients would be watching for them at the cairn. They might or might not be asked to carry one or more dry bags back across the border. Mia would know what to do with the bags.
Apryl watched the cairn while Rice headed out to scout a perimeter. It didn’t take him long to find what he’d expected: two rattletrap topless Broncos with big tires, four federales lounging in each, whispering and smoking. He could have found them with his eyes closed.
At the cairn, he took Apryl by the hand and led her deeper into the cover of the thicket.
“Federales,” he whispered in her ear. “Quarter mile downstream.”
“That’s who we’re meeting, Rice.”
He stared at her.
“It’s the feds, on both sides. Off the books. I can’t tell you more than that, not now. The police are probably here for security.”
“Wait, what?” He was apoplectic. Mia Cortez had stolen Apryl’s brain. “She told you that? I knew she was a fucking cop. Come with me.”
At the riverbank downstream, they crawled to the edge of the thicket, and he handed her his binoculars.
“These guys are not our clients. They’re here to arrest us.”
She watched them for a while. She handed the binoculars back to Rice without speaking.
“We have to go back,” he said. “Now. It’s going to get light soon.”
They backtracked to the edge of the tamarisk. The highway looked clear in both directions, and they were jogging across the bare flats, halfway to the culvert, when four police cars approached in the eastbound lane, lights flashing.
“Might not be for us,” he said, knowing they were. He and Apryl flattened themselves on the sandy ground behind a small rise.
The police cars slowed and pulled off the side of the highway, two on each side of the culvert. A big black SUV pulled around in front of the lead police car. Back in the river bottom, a poorly muffled engine cranked, then another. They wound up, whining and protesting, as the Broncos climbed the riverbank in low gear.
The takedown was perfectly civilized, probably in part because two DEA agents had come along to assist. Rice was glad he and Apryl hadn’t brought their guns, as there was really no reason to arrest them, but then the DEA guys turned to face the United States of America and the Mexican captain produced two condoms filled with something, presumably cocaine, and dropped them into Rice’s backpack. The captain ushered Rice into one of the Mexican vehicles while the two agents put Apryl in the Suburban and sped off toward the border crossing at Lukeville.
Twenty
Bilton Stiller ran his general store in a hundred-year-old painted clapboard building crouched on a low bank above the Dutch River. Inside, a single wide room tilted slightly from the front door to the back, where a small porch cantilevered out over the riverbank. Too-bright fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling, humming and flickering. In that light the deer and bear heads watching from the walls looked shocked, interrogated. A walk-in refrigerator filled with Stiller’s impressive stock of beer was in a more recent addition to the old building—in the summer it felt like a little cube of Antarctica magically transported to the mountains of Virginia. On the doorjamb at the store’s entrance, dates were stenciled beside faint watermarks from past floods. The highest was level with Rice’s chest: November 5, 1985. The oldest was waist high, from October 17, 1927.
The girl working the register looked high school age to Rice, but really he couldn’t tell anymore. She was talking to a tall, languid fellow leaning over the counter, their heads close together. Blurry blue prison tats on his arms, though he seemed young for that. They both smiled at Rice when he came in, plenty friendly, must not recognize him. He asked if they knew where he could find DeWayne or his brother.
“Which one?” the kid asked, grinning.
Rice grinned back. “The one that’s not in prison.”
“Nardo,” he said, and looked at the girl.
<
br /> “I ain’t seen ’em all week. They party over at Ape Hanger if you want to check later.”
“Didn’t know they had bikes.”
She laughed. “They don’t, yet. They hangaround with a guy in—” Her boyfriend said “Hup” without looking at her and she stopped with her mouth open. Then she shut it.
The boyfriend spoke to Rice. “Mister, if you’re lookin’ to score I can help you with that.”
Rice shook his head, said he had to talk to DeWayne and them about something in particular. He left, and drove the forty minutes to Clifton, and found the bar on a side street not far from the interstate. Parked outside were two Harleys and a dualie Chevy pickup with those exaggerated woman-silhouette mudflaps—secondary sex characteristics of the female human as imagined by juvenile males. Neon signs in the bar’s blacked-out windows advertised cheap beer. The girl at the store had said “hangaround” as one word, the stress on hang, which meant the Stillers were hoping to join a club. If they were looking to expand their drug business, which he assumed they were, the club would be one of the so-called outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Again he left his pistol in the truck. There wouldn’t be any trouble in here. Rice had never had a problem with bikers, and whenever he’d ventured into their world they had always treated him reasonably well. He disliked the decibel level of their bikes and he found the complicated high-school-for-grown-ups social structure of the clubs a little ridiculous, but even the outlaw gangs were less psychotically violent than the cartels, and the fight-the-mainstream ethos of their subculture suited him just fine.
When he sat at the bar he got a few slow glances but he was more comfortable here than he’d been at the Beer & Eat, certainly more at home than he was at the coffee shop in Blakely. Sometimes the students in the Bean looked up glassy-eyed from their phones and stared as if a grizzly bear had come through the door.
The pudgy bartender had an open, guileless face, young, not the biker-bar stereotype. He greeted Rice like a regular and Rice ordered Bud in a bottle and a shot of Wild Turkey and turned on his stool to check out the other patrons. A slow afternoon: a couple of two-tops and three guys and a young girl together at the bar. The music was headbanger metal but not too loud, not yet.
He’d had no reason to care about the motorcycle clubs in the area, but now he was curious. The bartender hadn’t tried to make conversation, maybe he’d learned not to, and Rice had to wave him over.
“So what are the colors around here?”
“You out of state?”
Rice nodded. “I wrecked my bike couple years back and ain’t been riding in a while. Finally found my next ride, sent the deposit today. I’ll be out there on my own and I want to know what’s up.”
“It’s bones and pistons but you don’t see ’em much. More guys are in the support clubs. You’ll be okay.”
Rice knew the club; he’d dealt with them a few times in Arizona. Definitely an outlaw gang, one of the bigger ones, generally well organized and deep into the usual criminal shit.
“I’m not worried,” he said. “It’s a matter of respect.”
“Hear that.”
The bartender set up another beer and shot without Rice asking. This would be the most whiskey he’d had in a long time.
“What’s the ride?”
“What?”
“The bike you’re gettin.” He was watching Rice sidelong. The little shit is testing me, Rice thought. He almost laughed.
“’81 Shovelhead. Needs some work.” This was the exact bike Apryl had bought and promptly wrecked soon after Rice started working with her. Her one indiscretion.
The bartender brightened at this. “’81 Shovelhead,” he repeated. “That sounds all right to me.”
“I’ll be glad to get back out there,” Rice said.
“Just watch out for the tourists.”
Rice shook his head, not understanding.
“You know, the SOA fanboys. They roll up in here weekends, act like they’re into bikes and shit, they’re scouting for ‘one percenters.’” He made air quotes and shook his head, the world-weary insider with a baby face. “They see some dude with a beard and cuts and they’re trying to sneak pictures with their phones. I got to throw them out so they don’t get the shit beat out of them.”
“Fuck is SOA?”
“It’s on TV. It’s about a club, you ain’t seen it?”
“No, I don’t get to watch much television.”
“Hollywood bullshit.” He shook his head, but then he paused and glanced over Rice’s shoulder at the tables, lowered his voice. “Sometimes it’s okay.” He pulled out his phone and pressed and swiped at the screen with his thumbs, handed it across the bar. A promo shot of a strong-looking brunette in sunglasses: streaked hair, middle-aged, sexy. A little trashy, enough to prompt the imagination.
“That’s the club president’s old lady. On the show. She’s like sixty but tell me you wouldn’t hit that.”
Rice looked again, feeling out of touch, and handed the phone back. “Shit, son, that woman would fuck you to death.”
“Ho!” the bartender said. “Yes, she would.”
He said it again as he left to take care of the increasingly rowdy kids at the other end of the bar. They were drinking draft beer, pitchers, getting after it at three in the afternoon. Then again, so was Rice. His head was expanding like a balloon, what liquor did to him. Should’ve had something to eat before he left the preserve. They didn’t seem to serve food here. When he’d finished with the others, the bartender drifted back to Rice, rolling his eyes. He seemed to think Rice was the real deal.
Rice looked at his watch. “I was supposed to meet someone but I guess I’m too early. You know the Stillers? DeWayne, Nardo?”
“I know of ’em. They come in here. Them and their buddy.”
“Skinny fucker?”
The bartender laughed. “Yeah that’s him. Jesse. I wouldn’t mess with him though.”
“They said they were joining a club.”
“Shit. They’re too good for the support clubs, got hooked up as prospects with this one local full patch, probably the only one in the county.”
“Who is that?”
But the bartender just shook his head and smiled, and Rice smiled back. No hard feelings.
“I figured they were just hangarounds.”
“They say they’re prospects. They’re pretty tight with this guy.” He shrugged. “Might be bullshit.”
As Rice understood it, if you wanted to be in one of the clubs you had to start by hanging around in places where the members and their entourage went to party. You did what you could to ingratiate yourself, and if they liked you they’d take you on as a “prospect,” a probationary status involving slave labor and a rougher version of fraternity hazing. It could go on for years, but if you were fit to join, eventually they let you into the brotherhood. It was all deadly serious, life-and-death for some folks.
He was still feeling the whiskey and figured he’d better get out of there before he wanted a third. He paid, left a good tip, and as he was walking away his new buddy called out that he had to bring that Shovelhead by when he got it. Rice nodded and pushed the door, squinting at the bright afternoon. Maybe he should buy a bike. The caretaker of the Turk Mountain Preserve ripping up Turpin County on a Harley, frightening the wildlife. STP would love it.
When he got to his truck, the driver’s-side window had been smashed, glass shards on the seat and in the gravel, glinting in the sun. He tried the door but it was still locked, so he used his key. Nothing inside was disturbed. His pistol was still in its hiding place. Wasn’t really anything else to steal.
He walked all around the truck but found no other damage. The hot parking lot was empty, the same bikes parked in the shade, the big pickup. Quiet except for traffic noise from the interstate. He found a hammer in the junk behind his seat and knocked out the rest of the window, brushed the glass from the upholstery. Sat and shut the door and waited a moment before turning th
e key, beer and whiskey coloring this new development. He felt giddy, thinking it didn’t take much to get people’s attention around here.
Twenty-One
The skeleton had been disarticulated by coyotes and stripped clean by smaller scavengers. With no skin in the way, it hadn’t taken long. Dark red bones lay scattered among the pine needles; the spine had been dragged away from the tree but was still partly intact, still connected to the ribs arcing up from a drift of fallen oak leaves. The remnant of some viscera even the vultures wouldn’t eat hung desiccated from the rack of the rib cage like foul jerky.
Rice squatted on his heels beside the big pine tree, remembering the day the mushroom picker had shown him the bear. It seemed a long time ago, but could only have been a couple of weeks. He was sleeping less and less and the passage of time had become dreamlike, hard to track. He had come here partly to make sure his afternoon with the mushroom picker hadn’t been a hallucination.
The sun felt warm on his neck but the light was watery and autumnal, the dusty carpet of pine needles glowing in sunlit patches. Today was Saturday, so he and Sara had walked down the canyon just a few days ago. He reached his hand down and dug through the duff to the soil. It was cool, not quite moist. All that rain had dried up fast, still droughty in this part of the state. A high-pressure system had settled in and the sky in the north held a deep, impenetrable blue. Cottony balls of cumulus decorated the western horizon. Last night had threatened frost, and with no moon the Milky Way had swarmed bright and animate across the sky.
Yesterday he’d found a junkyard north of Clifton with a window that would fit his truck, and they only charged him fifty bucks plus another fifty to install it. Usually he would put off fixing something like that but he couldn’t afford to be pulled over. The junkyard guy said that kind of daylight vandalism would be quick, in and out: probably they pulled up alongside and the passenger reached out the window with a hammer, didn’t even get out of the vehicle. He asked Rice if he had enemies and Rice had said not that he knew of, but he was sure those kids at the store had called the Stillers the minute Rice walked out the door. On the way back from the junkyard he’d stopped off at the store looking for the young couple, but old Bilton Stiller was ensconced in his usual spot at the register and refused to give Rice their names or tell him where his boys lived or much of anything else. After that, an uneventful hamburger dinner at the Beer & Eat, which was packed again on Friday evening. He’d sat at a table by a window so he could keep an eye on his truck. His several attempts at conversation had gone nowhere. He’d waited until near closing, nursing a third beer, but the place had remained bereft of Stillers.
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