“No. I’m not.” I stepped back, putting a little distance between us. It wasn’t enough.
“You’re hard cast in an old mold, you from me and me from my daddy and he from his. On and on, probably back to Cain.”
“You think that’s true—make your offer. Try to buy me for La Familia, and see how that works out.”
“I didn’t come for that. I came to ask you to let all this play without you. Walk away. Have a chance at a life.”
“Why?”
Buick deflated, and it was his turn to step back. “Because I’ve already lost one son to this, and I don’t want to lose you both.”
“It was your life that led up to this. Every part of it—every thought and action—brought Paris’s murder a step closer.”
“You think I don’t know it? You think I don’t live it in my heart and my bones? But what about the lives after his?” The old man backed away until he pressed against the truck fender for support. He fiddled at his pockets looking for a new smoke and then gave up and looked squarely at me again. “All your life you blamed me. I guess rightly so. I was responsible for the boy. But for the man, you have no one to blame but yourself.”
I suppose it was a weakness, the kind of character flaw that Buick had talked about, but right then I needed to strike back at him. I asked, “Did you know that Paris was gay?”
“Of course I did.”
I felt nothing but shame for asking and for having not known. “Get off the truck.” I reached out and jerked the door open. The dome light created a cone of illumination that seeped through the windows. Buick looked old in the faint light. “I have things to do.”
“You’re not going to run, are you?”
“What do you think?”
He slapped his hand on the hood. “Listen to me.”
I came back around the open door and faced him. “I’m listening.”
“You’re in it now, boy. These people—La Familia—they ain’t the forgivin’ kind.”
“Neither am I.”
“It’s not about you. Don’t you get it yet?”
“Talking to you is like chewing glass, Buick. Spit it out, or step aside.”
“That little lady. The pretty girl with the tattoos.” He said it like a confession. “They don’t take things out on you. They take it out on everyone around you. Then you.”
“Lenore.”
“That’s what they do. They suck all the life out of everything you touch.”
“Like a vampire.” I recalled Lenore’s description.
“Call it what you want. They burn the fields, leaving you in the middle of the char to think about it. Then they come for you. Maybe you can save her if you disappear. Maybe it’s too late.”
“I’ll kill Simon Machado.”
“He’s not the one to worry about. He works for his brother. Simon is a rabid dog on a leash. Eladio is the one who plans and orders.”
“He looks like a skeleton.”
“Cancer’s eating him up, slow.”
“I can speed things along.”
Buick shook his head slowly. “It wouldn’t be the punishment you think. His mind is sharp and cruel, but the man is resigned to death. He welcomes it.”
“Fine by me,” I said, imagining things worse than death.
“She was his, you know.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“The pretty girl.”
“Lenore.” I said her name like a warning.
“Whatever you call her, she was his. Eladio bought her for a few pesos at gunpoint when she was a little girl. He raised her to be his. When the cancer took his hard-on, he shared her out to his brother.”
“To you.”
“To me. And to you too. To anyone he wanted to compromise or control.”
“That’s where they’ll start? With Lenore?”
“That’s where they started.”
TWENTY-THREE
I whipped the red truck through streets and onto the highway, flying on asphalt. I called Hector.
In the black distance, the motel sign blazed in Easter egg colors. The pastel neon hit me like party balloons tied to a gravestone. Pushing the truck harder, I recognized something hopeless in the speed. There was not a chance in the world that Lenore was safe. This brutal life simply did not work that way.
Still…
Hope. It’s a bitch.
Vacancy—the fluid pink word shone in front of the two-deck Desert Drop Inn. It was an innocent announcement that I read as a cruel joke. I slowed down. When I hit the parking lot, I was going something over seventy and slammed down on the brakes. My headlights projected my spin on walls and railings and closed doors.
One door was open and flickering with soft internal light. Mine.
The truck tires stopped screaming, and I ran. At the end of the motel building, approaching the stairs and dark concessions corner, I pulled my weapon. To make the turn and clear the machine cove, I slowed. Then I was running up the stairs again.
I stood in my room with my arms hanging loose. They were useless. My hands were lead shapes with no life in them. The gun I had gripped so tightly fell to the floor. Everything. Every feeling, thought, memory, and wasted desire of my life was coming back through my eyes.
The light in the small room was from forty or fifty candles flickering at their own rhythms. Illumination was a burden the scene bore sadly. I tried to see—and not see—the walls and blood that marked them. In my bed, Lenore was facedown. Her blood, still wet and vibrantly dark, soaked the sheets and spilled out onto the carpet. The blood was nothing. Lenore’s hair, matted and wet to the point of being glossy, was bundled and set aside over her shoulder. Someone had been careful to keep it away from the work the blade had done.
A fly buzzed, and suddenly my ears worked again. An instant later my lungs gulped air, and I could smell dirty, wet copper. I retched at the scent. My gut kicked my spine again, and I doubled over. The smell was a thick miasma as physical as a knife in the belly.
Candles flickered and smoked. The smell got worse.
Steeling my heart and my timid guts against the odor of death, I looked into the nearest glass-jar candles. It was like peeking behind the robes of a dozen saints who were not who they claimed. Each candle was wet on the inside with melted wax and trickles of Lenore’s blood.
I backed away, stopping at her naked feet. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to take her up and hold her. Even in death, though, I had the feeling an embrace would cause her to suffer more.
There was a spot behind the knee of her right leg that was clean. Her skin was still warm looking there and unstained by blood. That was where I concentrated looking.
Concentration was wasted effort. I stared at that spot but saw only the vicious outline of her flaying. The line ran from her neck down her ribs and waist until it curled around the soft shape of her hips and returned. All that skin was gone. All the beautiful art and words of her body had been stripped away and taken.
When Hector arrived, I was outside the room, bent over the railing. I was shaking with a rage that roiled in my gut. My mouth was open, waiting for the heaving spew that never came. Sunny Johnson showed up and put a blanket over my shoulders. It was a nice thought—that I could be soothed or comforted. That I could have the normal reactions.
I left the blanket hanging off the railing.
* * * *
That second drive was slower. My eyes were glazed with revenge. More than once I caught myself in the wrong lane. One time I realized I was staring at the speedometer. It read zero. I was stopped sideways in the highway with no idea how I had gotten there.
Eventually, though, I made it to Tubby’s.
The big man was still cleaning up after a busy night and already tending the meats for the next day.
“Chief?” I could tell by the look on his face that it wasn’t the first time Tubby had tried to focus my attention. He was holding out a beer. When I took it, he asked, “What can I do for you?”
I held the bottl
e up and savored the feeling of cold wetness in my hand. I pressed it to my face, soaking in the chill. It seemed for a moment I could get drunk by osmosis, but that was wishful thinking. I turned the beer up to my lips and swallowed it all. As the last suds spilled over my chin, I gasped to catch my breath.
“How much for that?” I pointed at a spread hog sitting on the grate.
“You want another hog?”
“One that you haven’t put on the smoker yet.”
“You want a whole hog? Raw? Whatcha got goin’ on?”
“I can’t tell you,” I said, trying hard to look sincere and noncrazy.
“Oh,” Tubby nodded sagely. “You want some of them can’t-tell-you hogs.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded again and then said, “Hunnert bucks a carcass. Wholesale price.”
“You got it.” I offered my hand. Tubby pushed another beer into it.
* * * *
I took a six-pack and the hog with me when I left Tubby’s. My head was a little clearer since I was traveling with the windows open to the night air. I went west out of town, past the bank building and the Border Crossing. When I sailed by the gates of the gun club, I hit the horn, blaring my presence even though no one could tell who was at the wheel.
Beyond that, the road degenerated, and I left it behind in favor of the dirt. I was on the same path I had taken that day after I’d made such a scene in the Border Crossing with Gutiérrez. That day I had been tired and angry, and I had ended up in Big Bend National Park to sleep in my truck. Sleep was the last thing on my mind now.
Hitting the high beams, I caught the green flash of ground-level comets. Coyotes scattered, tracking me with the reflective lasers of their eyes. I was glad for their company.
Spinning the wheel, I turned the truck, backing it up onto the flat plateau that overlooked the small valley. In the starlight, clumps of mesquite, juniper, and pecan trees were motionless demons. They witnessed, without commenting upon, my rite. Under them, the tiny stream had only enough water to make holes of reflected stars in the ground. The little valley was a place of power at night. I was there to harness it and sacrifice to it.
Dropping the tailgate, I reached in and grabbed the hog by one of his trotters and pulled. I couldn’t see it, but I knew his skin was tracked with flakes of Joaquin’s blood from the truck bed. The thought pleased me. His blood added depth to the offering.
I didn’t stay to watch. I knew what would happen. I didn’t drive back to the motel either. I went instead to the police station. There were still quite a few off-duty officers milling around. They looked at me like I was a ghost visiting their home. Maybe I was. I was a tired ghost, though, and avoided questions. I locked myself in my office and put my head down on the desk.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sleep would have kept me bound in its embrace much longer but for the demanding beat of knuckles on the door. It was Hector.
“Here,” he said, shoving my own phone at me. “You dropped this…on the floor.” He didn’t need to say what floor. As soon as it touched my hands, it rang again.
“Thanks.” I dropped it in my pocket.
“You’re not going to answer it?”
“In a minute.” I wiped at my face with my palm and then tried flicking crusts of sleep from the corners of my eyes. “How are you doing?”
“How am I doing?”
“Yeah. You. Everyone. Things.”
“Where did you go last night?”
“Away,” I lied. I think he knew it was a lie, but Hector held his tongue. “I needed—separation.”
“Okay. I can understand that. Sunny’s worried about you. Hell, we all are.”
“Nothing to worry about.” I wondered how much of a lie that one was. “Not anymore.”
“Right.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost eleven.”
I patted the phone in my pocket. “Let me handle this, and then I’ll get cleaned up.”
“You should switch that around. You smell like you got drunk with a roadkill dog.”
“Hog.”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ll be out in a minute.” I shut the door.
The phone rang again.
If I needed another indication of how screwed my life was, it came when Milo asked, “You doing okay?” instead of cursing at me.
“I’m fine,” I answered.
The silence on the line judged me harshly.
“What do you want?” I said.
“Just an update and a warning.”
“You’ve been calling all night. I don’t imagine it was about the update.”
“You knew I was calling all night?”
I took a long breath that cleared nothing and then filled Milo in on everything that had happened since we had last talked.
“It’s time to get you out of there.” Milo didn’t curse or push. He didn’t spin anything, and he didn’t sound like I had fucked up. The statement worried me.
“Why?”
“It’s time.”
“Now? All of a sudden—now it’s time?”
More silence from his end.
“You mentioned a warning,” I reminded him.
“We’ve been thinking…”
I’d never seen or met Milo face to face; still, I was imagining him looking at the ceiling and gathering thoughts that didn’t come easy.
He tried again. “We’ve been working this as a rogue thing. We—I thought it was all about the SOT getting off leash and working on their own.”
“They’re not.”
“There’s pushback.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means there are questions—pressures—coming through official channels, from Homeland and from unofficial—official channels.”
“You’re saying what’s happening here is legal?”
“No. I’m not saying that.”
“Then what are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s time to get you out of there.”
We talked for a few more minutes, circling the same black hole. I began to think that maybe Milo’s phone was being monitored. If someone was listening to his conversations, how hard would it be for them to spy on mine? I disassembled the smartphone again and dropped it into the drawer with Stackhouse’s badge.
I opened my door. Before Hector could say anything, I asked him, “Do you have a rope?”
“What kind and how much?”
“I don’t care what kind, but fifteen or twenty feet ought to do it.”
“There’s a twenty-five-foot length of nylon tow rope in my trunk.”
“Would you put it in the bed of that red truck outside?”
“I will if you change.”
Hector was right; my clothes smelled vaguely of dead animal. I should have cleaned up or at least washed my face. Instead I went down the hall to our holding area.
Joaquin was holding his wounded hand against his chest. He looked as terrible as I smelled. His hand was bloody and black. Some of the darkness came from stippling, burning powder that had been injected into his skin from my gunshot. Some looked like creeping infection. The finger had not been attended to. That didn’t bother me a bit.
The jailer cuffed him behind the back and chuckled when Joaquin winced. I checked him out and took him to his own truck.
“Are you going to throw me in the back again?” His question was pissy but without a lot of power. I doubted he’d slept at all.
“Nope. You get to ride up front with me. We can talk.”
“I don’t have anything to say to you.” He clumsily climbed into the cab, and I closed the door behind him.
“I figured you would say that,” I said, once I was seated and the truck was in gear. “It’s why we’re going someplace before the big meet-up with your people.”
“Where?”
“I noticed you didn’t ask which people.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re goi
ng to have a choice.”
He looked at me, mistrustful and angry, but he didn’t ask.
“Your cover is intact. You can go back to La Familia. Or if you think you’ve had enough, you can go back to Stackhouse.”
“You’re cutting me loose?”
“Such as it is.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I don’t think much of either choice you have. But they’re your choices. You deal with them.”
“Why? And where are we going?”
“Now, that’s the big question, isn’t it? Why?”
“You want information.”
My answer was to give him my biggest grin. Then I turned off the highway and headed up to the bluff with the trailer park development.
“Why are we going up here?”
“Room.”
“What room?”
“Room to talk. And room to move around.”
“Open the window,” he said. “It stinks in here.”
“I don’t notice it anymore.”
“Are you taking me someplace to work me over?”
“You’ve seen too many movies.”
“Bullshit.”
“Are you a runner? How’s your cardio?” I pulled the truck off the road and onto the graded plain that waited for more trailers. Dust swirled around when we stopped. “Come on,” I said as I jumped out, even though I knew he couldn’t open the door.
“What do you want to know?” Joaquin asked desperately as I pulled him out. As soon as his feet hit the dirt, I dragged him to the back of the truck.
“What have you got?”
“Just tell me what you want.”
“Nope.” I dropped the tailgate. The rope was neatly coiled behind the fender well. “You see, I don’t think you’re properly incentivized yet. Know what I mean?”
“What’s that for?”
“It means I don’t trust you to tell me anything straight without you knowing how much it is in your interest to do so.”
When I secured one end of the rope around the trailer hitch, Joaquin got an idea of why. “No.”
“Yep.”
“Ask what you need to know.”
“Run first; then talk.” I pointed at his boots. “Those are going to be tough going. You should have worn some running shoes.”
“What the fuck?”
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