by Peter Craig
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, exasperated. “Here comes the pitch.”
“I’m going to make you a trade. You come back and get me, and you let her go. Just listen, don’t hang up. I’m going to tell you why this is the right thing to do—from your standpoint.”
“Enlighten me.”
“I know twice as much as Lydia does. I know all about your business—and I know exactly who to talk to over your head. I know the houses from Culver City to Valencia, man, and I figure you skimmed—what?—about a hundred or two off every load. I won’t go to the cops, buddy; I’ll go to the shot callers. I’ll get in touch with the cell heads, L.A. and Orange County; and if I have to, I can talk to the AFO directly. I’m not a big man here, but I did a lot of time and made some friends over the years, and I got people who can get me through the door. They’ll be real interested in solving this problem.”
There was a windy pause on the line, until finally he said, “Don’t threaten me with something like that, old man. I know my situation better than you do. Besides, we just killed your daughter about fifteen minutes ago. She’s already dead.”
“No, you didn’t,” said Link. “If you did, then it’s easy: We’re both dead men. I got no fear of dying, kid, and I hope you’re the same. You better hope you can trust those idiots around you, because they’re going to have to stay loyal for years. And while you run out of money, there’ll be a good bounty on your head. And let me tell you something: You might stay alive for a month or so, but wherever you go on earth, these people are going to find you. I’ll find you. I’ll offer my services for free. You can do it like that, or you come back and get me. Clean up the mess now, while you still can.”
“You know what? I’m amazed. After everything your daughter hoped about you, you really are just another stupid biker. Do you honestly think I’d fall for this shit?”
“It’s a simple trade. You tell me where you want me to be. I’ll meet you anyplace out there in the desert—so long as we can make a deal. Then you take me and you let her go. You set up the meeting place, you control the situation. How could I do anything but follow my word?”
“And why would you trust me? I could just kill both of you.”
“I don’t trust you, but I’ll tell you why you’re not going to do that. Because this is personal with Lydia. You don’t want to kill her; you want to hurt her. You want her to suffer for what she did. I know you, man. I know all about you. You want her to see what you see. You want that kid to get it—and it sounds like that’s all you ever wanted from the beginning. And you know what? Killing her won’t do a damn thing. You’ll be angrier afterward; you’ll feel worse than before. No, you make her watch me go down. Whatever you meant for her, you go ahead and do it to me. Mark my words—she walks away and she’s no danger to you. She’ll remember, and that’s how the professionals do it. They let one person get away, so they can build the legend. You make her carry this for the rest of her life. Watching her father die. You know what that’s like, kid. Right?”
“What the fuck are you talking about now?”
“Like I said, I know who to talk to.”
Through the crackling reception, Link could hear Jonah talking to someone else in the car, then he said into the receiver, “If I gave you a meeting place—it would be just you. If you tried to bring anybody, or do anything unexpected . . .”
“Of course.”
The manager was approaching Link across the store, trying to get him off the phone. The salesgirl interrupted, and Link could hear her excitement as she retold the story about his wife in delivery. Link glimpsed the manager’s face, however, and saw that he was far more skeptical. He stopped beside a table of military fatigues and said, “Sir, we don’t allow this phone to be used by customers under any circumstances. . . .”
Jonah said, “Give me a number where I can call you back. We’re going to find a place to meet.”
Link looked down at the phone, then at the manager, and asked, “What’s the number here? It’s an emergency.”
“Sir, this is not a public phone. There’s a pay phone by the restrooms.”
“Is it a boy or a girl?” asked the salesgirl, drifting away down an aisle.
“A girl,” said Link. He pulled out a wad of cash from his pocket, a few hundreds along with a mess of tens and twenties, and he stuffed them into the shirt pocket of the manager, who looked down, flabbergasted. “I don’t have any cigars,” said Link. “So buy yourself a pack of Cubans. Now what’s the fucking number?”
The Impala and the white rental car drove past the sand dunes and headed northeast along a dimming horizon, following a highway so desolate that there were soon no longer any ranch fences to block the migrating tumbleweed. Lydia sat upright now, her wrists duct-taped together and her hands in a praying formation, staring out the window with a detached, exhausted feeling, as if she were watching television without sound. She had been crying for close to an hour, intermittently pleading or cursing, until she had overheard the conversation between Jonah and her father and fortified herself with the idea of an extra hour or two of waiting. That time seemed to stretch out for miles, and she found herself fixated almost hypnotically on shadows and formations of clouds.
On the alkali flats, the two cars turned off the highway and drove over the crusty desert toward dark mountains in the distance. For what must have been twenty minutes, the rental car bounced and rocked over the rough ground, faintly uphill across the badlands, over cracked and sloping earth that looked like a hatching eggshell. Twice the car’s wheels got stuck in trenches, but each time Choop was able to free them by reversing and pulling forward again.
They slowed on a stretch of flat ground, the wheels grinding like pestles and stopping. A few hundred yards farther the ascent became steeper, into hills of flaking shale and carved sandstone. The wind was picking up, blowing dust across the windshield and obscuring the horizon with an auburn haze. The Impala idled just a few feet away, with its front fender mangled and its headlight smashed. Jonah tried to call Tito on his cell phone, but there was no longer any reception. He gestured for Tito to roll down his window while he did the same. Leaning out, his sculpted hair swarming out of place, Jonah hollered, “We’re not going to be able to call out here—so let’s figure this out.”
The six men gathered between the cars for a conference, each squinting and grimacing into the stinging wind. Jonah’s white shirt had come untucked, inflating like a sail off his thin shoulders. He had a gun nestled in his belt. The others gathered into a circle around him, close enough to hear his voice over the bigger gusts, but Iván soon wandered away toward the drainage gullies beside the car, watching his feet like a dejected child. Choop stared away at the mountains; Tito stopped listening to sit on the hood of the Impala and pout. Lydia had not seen this sullen behavior before. Rather than confront his brother or Iván, Jonah spoke with still more force to Chase and Cully, who nodded along. They were worn out and frayed and short with each other. It looked as if they had been on a long expedition together, filled with mishaps, and Jonah had the shrill, exasperated quality of an overwhelmed guide.
As they hollered over the wind, Lydia could hear some of the plan. Jonah wanted to draw her father to this spot in the desert, elevated enough that they could watch his approach off the highway. Then they would escort Link and Lydia to another isolated place to assure that he hadn’t planned an ambush. Someone would have to drive a few miles south to where there was still cell phone reception, and relay the directions to him: “Give him the mile marker.”
Next, Jonah wanted someone to wait in the Impala at the highway’s edge in order to make sure that no one came along behind Link.
Lounging on the hood with his eyes closed, Tito yelled that this part of the plan was pure bullshit. Jonah grew so angry that he needed to walk a circle around the cars to calm himself.
Rolling up his sleeves, Jonah paced back to Tito. His voice was buried in the wind, but Tito was speaking loudly enough for Lydia to hear him.
“Because we’re going to take him to another spot, right? So if one person is waiting out there, then what are you going to do—tie him to the fucking roof, dude? There’s not going to be enough room in that shit car.”
“I know that, Tito! Jesus. So three of you—you, Iván, and Cully—you ride down to the highway, wait for us—”
“I’m not going with fucking Cully, dude. I’ll shoot his fat fucking head off, I swear to God.”
Cully said, “Fuck you, you whiny little bitch.”
Jonah was so livid that he pulled out his gun, walked a few steps away, and fired twice out into the empty desert.
After pacing listlessly around the desert, kicking rocks, Iván returned to the outskirts of the discussion with Tito. He sighed and rolled his head around as Jonah stomped back, waving the gun at him.
Lydia yelled through her closed window that she had to pee, and Cully made an exaggerated crying face to her.
Iván stood directly beside Lydia’s window now, motionless except for his flapping V-necked shirt. “What are we doing?” he asked, not seeming so much mutinous but defiant in the way of a student who refuses to pay attention. Jonah was now gesturing with the gun, reiterating his plan, emphasizing her father might have bikers waiting to surround them. “So wait down there. Then you follow us back down to the dunes, and we take care of them there.”
Iván shook his head at the ground. His stubbornness had an odd, introverted quality, as if he were too ashamed to face anyone. Something had sickened him deeply over the past few days and he was a different person, all of the swagger gone. “Nah, man,” he said. “I don’t want to be like that.”
It was the most unthreatening Lydia had ever seen Iván. All of the posturing was gone, and he seemed to hang in the air, draped with loose laundry, flapping in a stiff wind. This made it even more astonishing when Jonah lifted his pistol and shot him through the leg. Iván fell down and writhed in the dirt. As if firing were not an act of violence but dismissal, Jonah immediately turned away and began clarifying the instructions to the others. Choop lunged down and began dragging Iván to the Impala, while Chase and Cully quickly backed up Jonah by drawing their guns. Tito was shouting furiously, but he quieted down when Jonah put his gun on him. “Anybody think they’re going to get out of this shit without me, they’re dead fucking wrong. Now do your job, and do as you’re told. Now.”
Choop lifted Iván into the backseat of the Impala with tenderness, then returned to his job, undaunted, nodding at Jonah’s order to drive the rental car. Cully took Iván’s gun, duct-taped his hands and ankles, then joined the rest in the idling white car, while Chase hollered from outside that he would make sure Tito didn’t try anything stupid. Somehow, after this series of tantrums, they seemed to regain their focus. All of the bitterness between them terrified Lydia, as if even in the worst situations a person still longed for someone clearly in charge.
Tito gunned the engine of the Impala and fishtailed downhill with spinning tires, an automotive display of anger. The car shrank against the murky horizon until it was no more than a moving cloud of dust.
The remaining three waited with Lydia in the rental car to stay out of the gritty wind. Under the visor mirror, Jonah tried to fish out a piece of sand in his eye. The car was silent except for the whistling of air through the unsealed windows. Lydia rested her head against the glass and gave a slight humming sound.
“Don’t you start in on me now,” said Jonah. “I got even less patience for you.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
There was a long silence. Beside her, Cully had taken off his shoes to pour out a few small rocks, and the car filled up with the rank smell of his feet. Lydia asked, “Does the radio work?”
“No, the radio doesn’t work.”
“Maybe AM radio works.”
“We’re not listening to the radio.”
After another long silence, Lydia asked, “What are you going to do to my dad?”
Jonah twisted around to look at her, and she saw that some of the discolored gauze and bandages on his neck had accumulated more grit and dust from outside, like air filters. As if he had been rehearsing the line in his head, he told her, “You did this to yourself, Lydia. I didn’t make this happen to you. You need to understand that.”
Cully had been going through Lydia’s purse to occupy himself, and he began unwrapping pieces of gum. She asked if she could have a piece, and he said, “Open your mouth.”
“Jonah—tell him to give me a piece. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”
“I’m going to give it to you, bitch—just open your mouth.”
She opened her lips and Cully tried to pitch the square of bubble gum into her mouth, laughing as it bounced off her chin and onto the floor. “Wait, wait—let me go again.”
“Not now. It’s got shit all over it.”
Cully brushed off the fuzz from the floor mat, then began taking aim again. “Come on. Open.”
“No.”
“Then you don’t get any.”
“Just fucking give it to her, Cully! Jesus Christ.”
She opened her mouth faintly, and Cully slapped the gum between her teeth, palming her face for a moment. His hand smelled like wet cardboard. She called him an asshole and he made a fake whimpering sound.
For ten minutes on the dashboard clock, the car was silent except for Lydia’s chewing; but soon Cully began whispering to her, trying to slide the barrel of the gun between her crossed legs. Jonah watched in his mirror and didn’t seem to care, and this made Lydia’s eyes well up with frustration. Jonah grew angry at the sight of more tears, and he said, “Why don’t you accept some fucking responsibility for once in your life. You want to see this?” He peeled back the bandages on his neck to reveal a messy patchwork of sutures and grafted skin, a seam as deep as Frankenstein’s. “You did that. As far as I’m concerned, whatever happens now is fair game.”
Choop pointed to something in the distance, and each of them stared ahead at a moving smudge of sand and dust, looking like a wind devil traversing the scrub.
“Fuck, he’s early,” said Jonah.
They each stepped out of the car and Lydia was ordered down onto her knees. Cully held his gun against the back of her head, hitting her with the barrel.
The wind had grown so strong that portions of the earth seemed to be shedding into the air. The last thin topsoil formed a spindrift along the ground. Already the light was obscure, the sun falling and turning red in the mineral haze.
When her father was visible as a speck in the distance, casting a wake of sand and debris, she could already hear the engine, sounding like an angrier and deeper wind approaching. Then the bike slowly became visible, a dim shape in the murky air, and her father was soon distinct, with a tie waving like a streamer behind him.
He stopped the bike about two hundred yards downhill, idling.
“What is this motherfucker doing?” asked Cully.
Her father stepped off the bike with his hands in the air, his clothes gusting.
“Let’s go!” shouted Cully.
“Hold on,” said Jonah. “He’s just showing us he’s not carrying.”
Her father took off his jacket and waved it beneath him like a matador, then he draped it over the handlebars.
“Okay, keep going!” shouted Jonah, gesturing at his own clothes.
The jacket nearly blew away, so Link wadded it up and secured it under the kickstand. Then he loosened his tie and carefully unbuttoned his white shirt, knotting the sleeves around the handhold. He took off his tie and threaded it through the spokes. He stood up again and turned around, stripped to his undershirt, pulling out the pockets of his suit pants to show that they were empty.
“The shoes!” shouted Jonah, lifting his own and slapping them.
Link waved that he understood. He stooped down beside the bike, taking a long time to untie one of the laces, then he placed his shoes and socks against the back tire.
He walked gingerly ahead now
on bare feet, hands in the air, until he was close enough that Lydia could see his heavy breathing. Jonah said, “Keep the gun on Lydia—he might still have something.”
Lydia could see her father’s eyes now. He was just a few feet down the road when Choop met him and frisked his pants. Lydia could read nothing on his face—no fear or plans or anger. He seemed to be in a trance.
Choop nodded that he was okay, and Jonah called down, “Let’s hurry up and get them both in the car. We’re going someplace else, old man. Bet you didn’t think of that.”
They cramped together into the backseat with Lydia flattened against the window. Cully managed to squeeze into the back alongside them, keeping his gun tight on Link. Jonah sat in the front seat, guarding Lydia; Choop drove slowly ahead down the dirt path, his gun resting on the dashboard.
As Choop steered along the drainage route between rocks and brush, Jonah began to fiddle with his cell phone. Cully peeled a strip of duct tape with his teeth while he still held the gun in one hand. Lydia had expected her father to put up a fight before getting into this cramped car, but he offered his wrists for Cully to bind, as stoic as a prisoner after last rites. As the car stopped, he put his lips against the crown of Lydia’s head and whispered, “Hey, kid.”
Strung with his remaining clothes, the chopper stood in the middle of the only clean pathway onto the smooth expanse of desert. Choop stepped out of the car to move it. Jonah’s gun was in his lap, his head down beside the dashboard as he fussed with the antenna of his phone, all the while mumbling, “Whatever shit you try, old man—I figured it out already.”
The seat belt reminder rang steadily.
Lydia saw what she thought was a gesture to her, a flicker of his index finger, pointing to the ground. He nudged his elbow into her side.
Lydia’s mind was working as quickly as it would in an accident. She understood. In the corner of her eye she saw Choop grab the handlebars and lift the kickstand off the bundled jacket. She threw herself down against the passenger seat. Choop’s motion pulled a trip wire, which detonated one of Preacher’s claymores into a sudden splash of dirt and blood against the windshield, hurtling debris from the motorcycle like shrapnel around the car. The blast was so sudden that Cully and Jonah were thrown into a moment of confusion. The windows shattered; the air bags deployed with a gunshot sound, and the engine shut down. The burning remnants of the bike’s fuel tank caught fire and cast tumbling sparks across the desert.