by Bobby Adair
“And what, we make another version of the video that shows her carcass on the fire?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Lutz agreed enthusiastically.
“And what about the police at the scene?” I asked. “Won’t they wonder how a body magically appeared after they already checked out the site?”
“Details.” Lutz threw his hands up as if all those little bits of fact could disappear in the breeze. “We’ll figure something out. We’ll have Ricardo make a video to match. Easy.”
“And how do we pay Ricardo for whatever scenario you’re dreaming up?”
“We don’t,” said Lutz. “Workman pays him. And Workman puts his lawyers on our defense, makes sure we walk away free and clear.”
“Not believable, Lutz.” The story was getting too farfetched. “Why go to all that trouble? Makes no sense.”
“That’s because I haven’t told you everything.”
“I’m out of patience, and I’m out of sarcasm.” I drew an exasperated breath and scanned the bits of blue sky still visible through the trees looking for buzz bikes and drones. I looked at the forest around me, looking for assholes with guns. “Make it quick.”
“Workman knows about Oscuridad. He knows about Oxido Negro.”
I said nothing for a moment and then told him, “Get off that shit, Lutz.”
“He needs somebody from time to time to do things for him,” said Lutz. “Off-the-farm kinds of things. Down-in-Mexico kinds of things. Blue Bean is going to expand.”
“Expand into a failed state?” I asked. “That’s insane.”
“You’re The Darkness,” he told me. “You can make it happen. There’s nothing you won’t do. I’ve told you, I researched you before I took you on as a partner. He wants to hire us. You get rid of the girl. He pays to clean the mess up. Then we work for him.”
I wasn’t biting.
“We’ll make a lot more money than we do now,” Lutz told me. “But that’s not the best part.”
“What’s the best part?” Apparently I hadn’t run out of sarcasm.
“He’s going to pay your debt to the Camachos.”
How the hell did that story spread all the way up here? “Nobody’s going to pay that much money.” I snorted. “It’s not like you can just send them a check. Workman’s an idiot.”
“He’ll give you the cash. You just take it to them.”
“Drive through lawless Mexico with a couple big bags of money?” I laughed. “You’re an idiot. And what happens when I get there? I just knock on the door? Drop it off? Eat some menudo and talk about old times? You think they’re just going to forgive and forget?”
“Wasn’t that your plan all along?” Lutz asked.
It was. It’s just that its lunacy was much more obvious when spoken aloud than when swirling vaguely in my imagination. “How the hell would you know what my plans are?”
“Things you said.”
“I never said those things to you.”
“Yes, you did.”
I glared at Lutz. Did I forget that?
“Pay them extra,” said Lutz. “Pay them double. It’s Workman’s money. What the hell do you care? The Camachos are businessmen. They’ll take the profit and tell you to piss off back to Texas. Let’s go get the Mercedes. We can have the cash by morning. We can head out tomorrow. By this time next week, we’ll have it made.”
“The money isn’t the solution to my problem with the Camachos,” I told him. “The money is the prerequisite.”
“What does that mean?” asked Lutz.
“My relationship with them is complicated.” It was more complicated than my patience with Lutz allowed for discussion.
And why the hell am I even admitting to Lutz I know the goddamned Camachos?
“Doesn’t matter,” said Lutz. “Not one bit. We get the money from Workman. I’ll go down with you. We do it together. This is a great deal for us. All you need to do is put a bullet in Sienna Galloway’s head, and we’re good as gold.”
“A bullet in her head?” I asked. “Workman said that? He wants me to do it that way?” I was laying traps for lies I could pin to somebody in particular, Lutz or Workman.
Lutz was thrown off by the question. “Yeah, sure. I mean, who cares, you know? Like I said, you kill her. Ricardo fixes the video however you like. Workman pays the bills and his lawyers clean up the mess.”
I was thinking it was probably time to put a bullet in Lutz’s head. Either he was a liar or Workman was. I couldn’t figure which.
Lutz caught me looking at the river. “Take the deal, Christian. There are more than a hundred guys at the edge of the forest on this side of the river. They’ll come in and get you if you don’t agree.”
That sounded like bullshit, too.
“They’re over there, across the river,” said Lutz. “Maybe another hundred. I don’t know for sure. That’s just what Goose told me.”
More lies?
Hooking up with Lutz had been a mistake, one of those mistakes that takes a long time to bear its fruit. The question in my mind was whether the fruit was poison or just thorny.
And now, standing here, listening to all his bullshit had my head spinning with trying to figure out which parts were true and which lies came from him and which came from Workman.
And a couple hundred halfwits with hunting rifles and shotguns were in the woods.
The count didn’t worry me because I knew I’d not be facing them all, I’d only have to deal with a handful, the ones in my way as I made my escape. But if I killed them, my life in the States would end. No, it was already over.
That was the aching point of clarity trying to find its way to the surface of my messy thoughts.
My life in the States ended the moment this Keith Workman asshole and his Goose Eckenhausen dipshit decided they were going to set up a couple of gullible Regulators to do their dirty work.
I was the dumbass because I didn’t see the truth of it until now.
There’s got to be a way out!
Unfortunately, as I sat there looking at stupid, lie-spinning Lutz, trying to find my way out of the trap I’d stepped in, I couldn’t come up with an escape that didn’t involve me putting bullets in somebody’s head.
Maybe a much older choice—one I’d made down in Mexico nearly two years ago—was the mistake I was still paying for.
And there I was thinking I’d already paid for that mistake with blood that was too precious to spend.
I felt cold metal press against the back of my skull.
So caught up had I gotten in Lutz’s stupid yammering and my rotten thoughts, I’d let myself slip into another mistake, maybe my last.
I’d stopped paying attention.
The barrel of the gun pressed harder against my head and a nervous man’s voice trying to feign bravery bellowed, “Don’t move, asshole.”
Chapter 66
When a man says, ‘Don’t move, asshole,’ it sounds like he’s giving orders, but what he’s mostly doing is trying to convince his buddies and the guy he’s talking to that he’s a harder man than he is. He’s silently praying the situation doesn’t escalate. He’s on ground he hasn’t tread before. He doesn’t know what to do next, doesn’t know if he can pull that trigger, doesn’t know if he can kill, doesn’t know if his friends will support him or rat him out, doesn’t know if he can do hard time, doesn’t know if he’ll muck it up somehow and get killed.
When the reaper stalks, amateurs quake. Their fear fills the air around them.
That was the nervous guy’s problem.
Not mine. I wasn’t afraid.
I never am when these things go down.
Death doesn’t rattle me—not the possibility of my own, not the act of gifting it to someone too afraid of life to ask for it.
“You got me, asshole?” Mr. Nervous with the gun asked, because I didn’t react to his previous imperative.
If he’d been a logical man, he wouldn’t have asked that second question, because he’d have known I w
as following his previous instruction already.
If he’d been a smart man, he’d have taken three or four steps back, or never put the gun against my skull in the first place.
If he’d been a hard man, he’d have killed me already.
For my part, I’d already counted his buddies. They were trading irrelevant macho boasts and congratulations. They’d nabbed the cartel hitman. They were proud.
Too soon for hugs and hand jobs, boys.
The sounds of their voices told me which of them was cool, and which was nervous, which needed to die first, which could wait at the end of the queue. They were all too noisy, footsteps crunching leaves, denim on pants legs rasping with each step, breathing loud or slow. They freely gave me all I needed to know.
There were four of them—a pitiful number.
Mr. Nervous, the one behind me with a gun didn’t have a reserved spot on my kill list. His spot wasn’t for my choosing, though if I did everything right, he’d be last.
The guy off my right shoulder, eight paces back, would die first. He wasn’t nervous. If anything, he was impatient. I’d heard him huff softly just after his amateur buddy, Mr. Nervous, made the mistake of talking instead of pulling the trigger. He was the most lethal of the bunch.
The one off my left shoulder, a little farther away—Mr. Anxious—would die second. He was eager to do something. He had something to prove to somebody. He’d act too hastily to fire an accurate shot.
The guy on the trail, a little behind and off to my left side, maybe twenty paces out, would go third, though that depended on how much of himself he had hidden behind Sienna. That was the part that bothered me the most—I’d been so distracted by Lutz’s bullshit I hadn’t heard him bringing her up the trail. I’d have to beat myself up about that later, though. By the sound of it, he maybe had an arm around her throat and was shuffling her forward, ahead of him. Holding her, he’d not be able to get an accurate shot off.
In the span of a few seconds, I had my plan. All I needed to do was wait for the prompt.
Human reaction time is about a quarter-second, depending.
People tend to have one-track minds. If you catch someone while their brain is busy doing something, then reaction time is a little slower because they have to get off the track they’re on before they switch to reacting to the new stimulus.
I wasn’t going to need the extra time, but I do like my insurance when I can get it.
“Hey, asshole,” Mr. Nervous started on his new track, “you hear—”
I snapped my head in a turn to the right to move it quickly from in front of the gun barrel—safe.
I spun to my right as I moved my head, swinging up my right arm to get control of Mr. Nervous’s gun hand.
I drew one of my pistols with my left hand, and as I came around, Mr. Lethal was in the first syllable of his “Oh, shit” thought, which came right before he would have decided to target me and pull his trigger. He never got past the word, “shit.” My first bullet punched a hole through his face.
Still spinning with my momentum, keeping Mr. Nervous off balance and between me and Mr. Anxious, I fired my second shot through Mr. Anxious’s throat.
Hostage Boy came into my pistol sight next, and I saw him standing mostly behind Sienna—left arm around her throat, old-timey long-barrel revolver in his right hand, not pointing at Sienna, not pointing at me. His aim was way off because he was pressed against someone who was just starting to duck, and it threw him off balance.
The bullet I fired tore through his forearm, shattered his elbow, and blew a red haze out the back of his tricep.
Off balance from the spin I put him into by torquing his outstretched arm, facing away from me with feet twisted, Mr. Nervous fell, and my pistol followed him down, sending a round through the back of his head before he hit the ground.
I planted my feet, put both hands on my pistol and scanned in an arc across the trees and the targets I’d just downed.
No movement.
“Holy shit!” It was Lutz. His reaction time was slow.
Sienna finished dropping to the ground.
The big cowboy pistol dropped from Hostage Boy’s hand at the end of the destroyed arm and hit the dirt. Hostage Boy was still spinning from the momentum of the bullet that had hit his arm and the last instruction his brain had sent to his body—get behind the girl.
He finally fell.
I rushed over to him, careful to step around Sienna.
The guy was on his back, his crumbled straw cowboy hat on the trail a few feet past his head. He was looking up at me.
I dropped down and put a knee in the center of his chest. “You must be Goose.”
He spat something unintelligible.
“It’s him,” Sienna said. “That’s Goose.”
“Where’s your boss?” I asked.
“Where do ya think?” Goose snarled, through what had to be a flaming shitload of pain.
Wasted bravado.
I smashed the barrel of my gun through Goose’s teeth and jammed it into his mouth.
Goose howled. Blood, spit, and bits of teeth spewed out.
I pulled the barrel back out of his mouth. “Where’s Workman, your boss?”
Goose put a hand over his mouth as he coughed and spit. He said something I didn’t understand.
“Try again, Goose.” I pressed the barrel of my gun against his cheek, just below his eye.
“Admin,” Goose managed. “Office.”
“He’s in his upstairs office,” Sienna interpreted.
Good enough. I stood up, pointed my pistol at Goose’s head and pulled the trigger.
I holstered the pistol and raised my rifle, scanning again. I stopped on Lutz, who was wearing a perverse smile and eyeing Mr. Nervous’s pistol, still gripped in the dead man’s hand.
“Every time I see you shoot,” said Lutz, “damn!”
“Sienna,” I asked, “are you okay?”
“Yes,” she told me in a distant voice.
“Go over there,” I told her, “Frisk Lutz.”
“Not necessary,” said Lutz.
Probably true. I’d already frisked him. He’d had little time to pick up a gun. But I was tired of paying for mistakes. I told him, “Necessary.”
Sienna hurried past me.
“Hands in the air, Lutz,” I ordered. “All the way up.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Lutz.
Sienna quickly ran her hands over Lutz’s clothes. She gave me a nod. “Nothing.”
“Lutz, how’d you get here?” I asked.
He vaguely pointed at the corpses. “They drove.”
“How many guys are in the woods?” I asked. “Let’s be honest now. You’ve already passed your bullshit limit with me.”
“You’ll get no more lies from me,” said Lutz, smiling as though seeing Goose and his buddies dead was the best thing that had happened to him all day. Hell, maybe it was. “There aren’t any trustees in the woods. I lied about that. It’s just us. Goose said something about them having a farm to run and needing to get back to work.”
“Okay, Lutz, let’s go see this Workman prick.” I glanced at Sienna. “We can drop you at your car. You might want to get off the farm. Illegal things are going to happen.”
Sienna looked pointedly at the bodies on the ground.
I shrugged. “Premeditated, illegal things.”
“You should go,” Lutz told her.
“What?” I looked at Lutz, surprised. All day long, he’d been doing nothing but encouraging me to kill her and now he wanted her to go. Fucking Lutz.
Sienna ignored him. “Let’s go see Workman.”
My kind of girl.
Chapter 67
The Mercedes was closer to us than the truck Goose and his knuckleheads had driven to find Sienna and me. Once we found it, still parked between a couple of tall pines, I realized it had been ransacked. Everything it held could be replaced, but the one thing I hoped to get—now the killing had started—was a goo
d load of magazines. I always like to have more than I think I’ll need. Unfortunately, the prison’s trustees had taken my spare ammunition as well.
I instructed Sienna to get in the back seat and buckle up. Over Lutz’s protests, I told him to get in the passenger seat in front where I could keep an eye on him.
“If you think I’m going to pull something,” said Lutz, “do you think you can stop me if you’re driving?”
“Roll the dice, buddy.” I patted the butt of one of my pistols. I wasn’t sure what to do with Lutz. Idiot or liar, I just didn’t know, but I was going to get to the bottom of it when I finally got him and Workman together in the same room. Then I’d kill one or both of them. “Now get in the fuckin’ passenger seat.”
Lutz did. Sienna seated herself in the back.
I took the driver’s seat, buckled my belt, started up the Mercedes, and gunned the engine before tearing backward out of the trees, skidding across red dirt and pine needles. I glanced back toward Sienna. “Buckle up back there.
Lutz decided that was good advice, too.
Moments later, I was speeding up the dirt road toward the admin complex. “We’ve only got a few minutes.” I glanced at Sienna in the rearview mirror. “You said Workman will be in that two-story admin building, right?”
“Yes.” She wrapped her fingers tightly around a handgrip over her passenger side window and stretched the other hand out to hold onto the seat in front. She didn’t complain about the speed.
I gave Lutz a hard look. “You’re quiet. Shouldn’t you be bitching about your precious Mercedes?”
“Just don’t kill us.” Lutz slouched down in his seat, and he stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“What do you got in there?” I asked him.
“My dick,” he spat.
“Sienna, are you sure he wasn’t armed?”
“Sure,” she told me.
I drew a pistol with my left hand and laid it in my lap, gripped it, and pointed the barrel at Lutz. I drove with the right hand only. “Tell me more about this place.” I glanced at Sienna in the rearview mirror. “Where will I find Workman in there? What does he look like?”