Everything slowed down. Stopped.
The pistol was a chunky black thing, a Glock. Mel vanished into the grass. The man smiled and it sounded like he said something to himself about el gato negro. The pistol dropped a few degrees, shoulders relaxing, but the grin froze and his eyes changed and Rice knew what was happening: caution exploding in his mind—if a housecat is here, maybe he shouldn’t be so sure Rice has left—the feelers switching back on, the sicario Spidey-sense tingling, some ancient reptilian subconscious proto-mind detecting danger in the innocuous disheveled chaos of the meadow. The almost imperceptibly too-dark shapeless bunching foliage that was Rice must be visible now, surely manifest at the periphery if not in his conscious mind, the part of his mind still busy with the implications of the black cat. Rice’s perception of time picked up again, from stopped time to slow time. His eyes stung but he didn’t blink. He watched the man’s expression as he let go of the cat and answered the screaming Paleozoic core of his brain telling him something was in the meadow, something was wrong there, his gaze pulled Rice-ward as Rice himself tried to shrink, to evanesce, but his own unwilling gravity was palpable, tugging the man’s eyes toward the lumpy nonshape of the ghillie there among the late-season grass, Rice-gravity hauling his attention on a rope now, hand-over-hand, pulling his head, shoulders, the triangle of his arms with the pistol at its apex, his hips pivoting, obeying the attraction, turning toward Rice in a slow arc, accelerating.
Forty-Nine
The Glock went off in a burst like a submachine gun, two of the bullets slapping into the wet ground close enough to spray Rice with mud, but the man was falling as he pulled the trigger, unconscious before he hit the ground, everything limp, a small splash before settling into the saturated ground.
Rice dropped the rifle and picked up the .45, swept it slowly left and right. He was sure the guy had come alone but he waited anyway. Thirty seconds. A minute.
His mind fizzed like he’d been bombing speed. Those shots going off all at once, Rice’s rifle and the burst from the guy’s pistol, what the hell was that? Bullets in the ground right there. He almost got me.
Don’t think about that yet.
Be patient, he thought, don’t fuck this up.
Three minutes. He shucked off the rain-soaked ghillie poncho and walked into the yard and stood with his pistol pointed at the man lying facedown in the grass. Bloody exit wound near the hairline, below the hem of the knit cap. No pulse. He’d been standing slightly downhill from Rice, leaning forward in his gunman’s crouch, and Rice’s bullet had entered his skull via his left eye and passed through the lower part of his cranial cavity, disrupting the brain stem and shutting off consciousness almost instantly.
The sun was on the mountain. The day had begun: wet green grass bent low with the weight of water; bright turning leaves of yellow, red, orange; the storm’s last southwesterly breezes shaking loud cascades of rainwater in the forest. Birdsong sounding far off. A quiet cool morning, the air washed clean. Rice thought he understood what had just happened, but it kept slipping.
He rolled the man over with his foot.
He didn’t recognize him. He’d thought he might, that there might be some family resemblance, but he didn’t see it. His lips were parted and his teeth shone bone white but his left eye was a bloody hole. The other eye, lovely dark brown, stared up at the stark blue sky, where compact cumulus clouds scudded fast in a high wind, passing over the sun the way they had over the moon, dark then light, a shutter closing and opening.
Information about the universe leaked from the open eye like poison gas. Stuff you knew but had to pretend you didn’t, just so you could make it through the day.
He reached down and closed the eye with his thumb. It slowly opened halfway. He pushed it closed and it opened again.
Hysteria fluttered like a moth in the back of his throat.
Fifty
His forefinger in the cutout over the three, pulling the rotary dial down and around to the curved metal stop, releasing, the dial returning to where it started. His finger over the eight, a longer pull, the long return. Then the rest of the sheriff’s number, slowly, one by one. Ringing. Sheriff Walker himself answers, and Rice explains. The sheriff pauses. Hell, he says, I don’t need the paperwork. Why don’t you just take that body and bury it up on the mountain.
He stared down at the body, morning sunlight slanting in over the mountain now and warming the cool wet grass.
Another fugue, maybe a couple of minutes’ worth.
Wouldn’t be calling the sheriff. Yeah, it was self-defense, barely. But he wouldn’t be calling the sheriff.
He flicked the safety on and pushed the .45 into its holster. Light nausea. Shallow, fast breathing. Hands trembling.
He’d just killed somebody. To make sure he wasn’t missing the point, he said the words, not aloud, but he said them in his mind. This wasn’t even the first somebody he’d killed. How many people in the world had killed other people? On purpose? Had killed more than one? Couldn’t be all that many. Especially if you didn’t count military and police. It was pretty fucked up that he was one of them. How did he turn into this person who killed other people? He needed to sit down.
Stop it. Focus. There would be time for the other thing later.
He needed a plan, something simple, a short-term plan, some way to organize the present chaos that kept pushing him into his fugues. He checked his watch, not even seven thirty, but Sara must have heard the shots, she might be scared, thinking about calling the sheriff. He had to run up there, stop her from worrying, from making any unfortunate calls. But she shouldn’t see the body.
So, first: body in SUV, SUV in tractor shed.
He jogged to the Tahoe, thinking don’t touch anything, no prints—he used his bandana to open the door. Keys were in the ignition, smelled like cigarettes inside. The night-vision goggles lay on the passenger seat. Using the bandana to turn the key, shift the transmission, and hold the wheel, he pulled forward between the lodge and the shed and backed up to the body.
The guy’s boots were dull-black, crepe-soled, quiet. His jeans were black, loose-fitting, wet from the rain, and he wore a tight black T-shirt under a black stretchy jacket that was the kind of fabric that wouldn’t make noise when you moved. Tattoos on his neck: skulls, roses, stylized Spanish script that Rice didn’t have the wherewithal to decipher just now. The tight black watch cap. Time to make sure: he pulled off the cap and turned the head to the side, with his fingers pushed the short dark hair on the back of the man’s head into a part, exposing brightly colored tats. He checked to the left, the right, yeah it was there: the crazy eyes, the open mouth.
He’d come to take Rice out himself. And he’d come alone. Rice had knowingly signed up to run from this hellhound the rest of his life, and now he was dead.
This might be over.
It was good news, better than Rice deserved. If he didn’t do anything stupid in the next few hours, he might be able to stay at the preserve after all.
He patted the ankles, pulled up the right cuff—a little SIG .380 in an ankle holster—and ripped open the Velcro straps to detach the holster. He picked up the Glock where it had fallen in the grass. It had a hole in the top of the slide revealing compensator cuts in the barrel, and a lever that looked like a safety on the left face of the slide, nothing Rice had seen before. He would look it over later. He laid the pistols on the front seat next to the goggles, went back and found four spent 9mm casings in the grass, put these in his pocket.
A Spyderco folding knife in the man’s left pants pocket; in the right, the cigarette butt he’d stashed earlier. The flesh of his thighs felt cold, felt like meat.
It hadn’t been five minutes.
Rice stood, shut his eyes. Should he apologize, the way he had to the animals he’d killed in the forest? He took a few deep breaths, fought back the nausea.
Keep moving.
A Kydex holster on the man’s belt, a phone in the vest pocket of his jacket. In one
side pocket was a small flashlight similar to Rice’s, a loaded extra magazine for the Glock, a half-empty soft pack of Camels, and a disposable lighter. In the other, a small black stun gun, smaller than Sara’s, and ten heavy plastic zip ties.
He held the ties in his hand.
“What the fuck are these for?” The man lay there, his face slack. Not answering.
He tossed the stuff from the man’s pockets on the front seat and, using his bandana, unlatched the big rear door to the cargo area. It rose up on pressurized cylinders, a great maw opening in no particular hurry.
Inside were the bolt cutters he’d expected, along with a new green plastic tarp, a big one, still folded and in its clear wrapping, and two Wal-Mart shopping bags. He stared at the bags for a moment before rifling them. In the first he found a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, a box of blue latex gloves, a package of disposable hairnets, a pair of plastic booties with elastic cuffs, three rolls of duct tape, and the open package of zip ties. In the other bag, a cheap ice pick and garden shears, both still in their clear blister packs.
Of course. Plain assassination wouldn’t feel like sufficient revenge to a guy like this. Too merciful. He wouldn’t have even considered it. No, he would surprise Rice in bed, disable him with the stun gun, zip-tie him to the bedpost, and go fetch the Tahoe with the rest of the tools. In a remote location like this, there would have been no hurry. He would’ve had all the time in the world.
Rice knew what these items in the Wal-Mart bags were for, and how to use them. He knew what had been planned for him. He’d been well schooled. It had started as idle entertainment first for Fernandez, then several other bored sicarios, all of whom must have recognized something in Rice: a powerful will to survive, a latent capacity for violence, a willingness to kill. Some athletic aptitude. Certainly a good memory, though most of it he’d prefer to forget. His hold on what he’d always believed was right and what was wrong had grown fatigued, eventually warping to fit the contours of the world he inhabited. He’d also developed an appreciation for the depressing banality of professional violence. The sicarios were just guys—highly skilled, and unusually willing to visit violence on other human beings, but ordinary in so many ways. Not alien, not other. He’d decided he couldn’t judge them. After Apryl’s murder, the training gave Rice not just a survival strategy but a story to cling to, a vengeance narrative that animated him, that bound together the atoms of his body.
He’d learned, for example, that a sharp point could be used to inflict intolerable pain in the auditory canal without making a mess of blood, tissue, DNA evidence that would require cleanup afterward. The ice pick there in the blister pack in the back of the Tahoe also was ideal for bone-tickling: stabbing through the flesh to any large bone—femur, pelvis—and then dragging the point along the periosteum, scraping across all those nerve endings, which made it feel like the bones were being broken, over and over. Again: lots of pain, not much bleeding. If he’d had an ice pick in his truck, he wondered, would he have tried that on DeWayne?
And the garden shears, doubtless made in China, cost less than ten bucks. Why spend more? These were plenty sharp. If nothing else worked—or if you were in a hurry—what got to interrogation subjects most reliably was lopping off parts of the body. Here his instructor had shaken his head in mock wonder at the quirks of the human psyche. There was something about losing pieces of yourself. People couldn’t tolerate it.
No, he wouldn’t have done that. Of course he wouldn’t have. No way.
Exhausted and worn raw by what he had done in the past twelve hours, Rice felt horror and relief, anger and shame all scrabbling for purchase in his mind. It occurred to him that but for DeWayne’s warning about the Mexican, right now Rice would likely be missing various pieces of himself. And Sara, what would have happened to her? He made a mental note to be nicer to DeWayne in the future.
Okay, enough.
Body in SUV.
He shuffled his feet up close and sat into a squat, keeping his back straight, worked his right hand under the man’s stiff black leather belt at the buckle, gathered the front of his jacket with his left, and lifted.
A giant rag doll filled with water.
All of the parts lifelessly slumping: head lolling back, arms and heavy legs hanging. He stood as tall as he could, raised up on his toes, shrugged his shoulders high, shoved the body forward with his hips. The head thunked against the chrome bumper. Boots dragged in the grass. His grip on the jacket started to slip, and for a desperate moment he watched what was about to happen, saw it from a point in the air above and behind his right shoulder, a grotesque, panicked wrestling match with the uncooperative body, grabbing an ankle, an elbow, tumbling into the back of the Tahoe, flopping limbs, bloody head twisting around on the limp tattooed neck, the man’s face contorted against the rubberized floor, an outraged, one-eyed stare.
Wait. Wait wait wait. Think.
He set the body back down in the grass. A fecal stench, and a darker stain in the crotch of the black pants. A smear of blood on the bumper. He was going to have to wipe that off. Another wet dark spot of blood the size of a fist on Rice’s pants leg. Did he want to get blood all over the cargo area? All that stuff in there. The Wal-Mart bags, the duct tape.
The tarp. The tarp that Rice’s body was supposed to be wrapped in.
He laughed out loud. Couldn’t help it. Irony, he knew, was a fundamental force at work in the universe, like gravity and electromagnetism.
“Rice?”
He ducked behind the Tahoe, his hand reaching back for the .45, but of course it was only Sara, she must have heard him laugh. She stood up from where she’d been hiding in the meadow. Carrying something, probably that can of bear spray. She wore one of his dark plaid shirts over her blue rain shell for camouflage. Her blond hair shone in the sun and he realized he should’ve thought of that, should’ve told her to cover her head.
“Sara, you need to stay back.” He rounded the Tahoe and walked toward her, glad the body was hidden from her view.
“What happened? Are you okay? I heard shots.” Her voice trembled but she ignored his instruction to stay where she was and came forward, pushing through the heavy wet grass to the edge of the yard, where she stopped. “Whose truck is that?”
“Did you call Walker?” he asked.
She shook her head. Good. He relaxed just a touch.
“Were you laughing?”
He wasn’t sure he could explain, so he let her questions hang.
“I didn’t really believe you.”
“I know.”
“It sounded like a machine gun. I knew you didn’t have a machine gun.”
“Nope.”
She asked again what happened, and what he’d been laughing at, then she asked if whoever it was was dead, but he didn’t respond. His shirt was too big for her and she’d buttoned it wrong and it hung lopsided off one shoulder. Her pants were soaked to the thighs from the tall grass. He thought about Sara hearing gunshots and deciding the best course of action was to leave the safety of the forest and sneak down here with her bear spray to see if he needed help.
“I’ll call Sheriff Walker.” She pulled out her phone. “Do we need an ambulance?”
“Hang on,” he said.
Her eyes got a little bigger. Rice knew how this looked: he’d almost certainly just shot someone, in self-defense or otherwise, and he’d been laughing, and now he didn’t want to call the sheriff?
He tried to soften his voice. “If we tell the sheriff about this, if we set the wheels of justice a-turning, I’ll have the entire Sinaloa organization after me within forty-eight hours. I won’t live long. It was bad enough when it was just one guy.”
“That makes no sense to me.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” He was afraid the next bit wasn’t going to go over well either. “I have to ask a big favor. I want you to walk back up to your car, drive straight out of here, go home. You could end up in jail if you stay any longer. As far as you know I sca
red off a bad guy and he hightailed it into the forest, left his vehicle here. I sent you home. You haven’t seen anything to the contrary. I’ll call you—”
“I’m not leaving.”
He stopped talking. He realized he didn’t have a plan for this.
“Are you going to shoot me too?”
He stared, his mouth open. “What? No. Sara, were you listening?”
“I’m really sorry, Rice, but you have to tell me what happened. Otherwise I’ll call the sheriff and you can tell him what happened.” She paused, sighed. They both knew she wasn’t going to do that. When she spoke again the note of hysteria was gone. “You can’t keep doing everything by yourself. If you’re as smart as you seem to think you are, you’re going to let me help you.”
Fifty-One
Sara walked back up the fire road while Rice tucked his hair into a hairnet and struggled to fit his still shaky hands into a pair of latex gloves. His knowledge of criminal law was rusty and superficial, but if Sara was going to be an accessory to the various crimes he was committing, he guessed it would be better if she never saw the body. It was irresponsible to let her stay, but she was a stubborn person and he told himself there was no way to make her leave against her will.
Under Sara’s interrogation, he’d admitted to wanting to shoot the man at the first opportunity. He’d emphasized his crisis of conscience. He didn’t admit that he probably would have killed the man in cold blood if Mel the cat hadn’t interfered, converting a murder into a near-death experience of self-defense. When he’d pointed out, with studied casualness, the divots in the grass where the man’s bullets had nearly hit him in the face, she’d asked where the other bullets had gone.
“He didn’t shoot at Mel, did he?”
“No, Sara, he only shot at me.”
“Good.”
When he’d asked why she wasn’t more horrified at what he’d done, why she wasn’t running down the driveway and calling Sheriff Walker on her cell, she’d deflected with an offhand “I probably should be,” but her look was hard to read. After thinking about it, he’d decided some of what he’d seen in her face was trepidation over her hard-to-fathom decision to trust Rice in an extremely sketchy situation, but the rest was a sheepish awareness that she was admitting to a hardness of heart that polite company might find abhorrent.
Bearskin Page 26