by Chuck Dixon
Lou Bragg rested his head against the high back of his chair and closed his eyes. Merle could be right. This Mexican business could get ugly. Could get costly. He might just have sent his cousin into an unholy clusterfuck.
Well, he had plenty more cousins.
He sat up and touched the intercom button.
“Carlotta, changed my mind. Bring me a bourbon on ice.”
38
They rode with the windows down despite the heat. Brand new windows to replace the ones blown out when the Toyota rolled in the ditch. A brand new door on the driver’s side. Cranberry red.
Merry made an airplane of her hand, holding it against the wind rushing by. The clean smell of the woods filled the cab of the Toyota. It had rained that morning. A haze was still rising off the asphalt where the sun reached through the arch of leaves to touch the road surface.
“You’re going to finished fixing your old car soon, right?” Merry said.
It came out of the clear blue. Levon knew that she’d spent the start of the drive playing this conversation out in her mind.
“There’s a few things left to do before I get it painted,” he said.
“So the barn will be empty,” she said.
“Sure. Though Uncle Fern might have plans for his barn seeing as it’s his barn.”
She went silent a moment. The exchange was not playing as she hoped. A new approach was called for. Something direct to the topic.
“There’s room for a horse in there,” she said.
He nodded. “Room for three or four.”
“Jessie said Bravo’s owners are looking to sell. I could pay for him myself. Work it off at the stable.”
“A horse is a lot of work.”
“Maybe you could get a horse so Bravo’s not alone. You like to ride, right?”
“I can ride. I don’t really like to ride. It was part of my job.”
“I’ll do the work. It’s not like it’s even work to me. It’s fun,” she said.
“I know that, honey. But you’ll be starting school soon.”
“Maybe I could home school.”
He turned to see her smiling, eyes dancing.
“Yeah,” he said. “My uncle could teach you the proper amount of yeast to put in the mash and I could teach you to field strip a rifle.”
“I could do it. I could take care of Bravo all on my own.”
“Tell you what. We’ll talk to Jessie and see what’s what.”
“Great.” Merry beamed.
He pulled the Toyota to a patch of gravel by the barn and brought it to stop. She jumped from the car. He killed the engine and stepped out, too.
“Are you going to watch me ride?” she said.
“And I’m going to help you get Bravo cross-tied. And I’ll be here to help you brush him down,” he said.
“You sure you want to?”
“There’s no place in the whole world I’d rather be.”
They walked to the barn together in a halting gait. She pressed to his side, arms about his waist. He with a hand gripping her shoulder to hold her tight against him.
Gunny Leffertz said:
“You can’t see evil by looking for it. Comes in all shapes and sizes. Same as you can’t tell how much fight a man has him in just by looking. You’re just as likely to have your ass kicked or your throat cut by a little man with a baby face and a child’s smile.”
39
The man who got off the eight-seater prop was not listed on the passenger manifest.
He was aching from the eight-hour journey up from Old Monterrey in a Piper to a field outside McAllen, Texas and then to a battered Cirrus with sprung seats that landed him rough on an empty highway north of Baton Rouge. A midnight drive to where a Gulfstream waited on a private field. The final leg brought him here to Makepeace Commercial Airfield where he stepped out into the wet air of an Alabama summer.
Two cousins, Carlos and Lupo, met him with the best car they could steal, a two-year-old Audi that now sported Arizona plates. Doctor’s plates. They stood in a mix of awe and fear at the cyclone fence waiting for the man.
El Chistoso.
The Stoneface.
The man approached the gate. He was stooped with broad shoulders and the start of a belly over his tooled leather belt. He carried a silk jacket over one arm. No luggage. There was a hitch in his walk. It was the result of a wire bomb from back in the day when the Columbians still thought they could scare the Mexicans back into their place. The same explosion that shattered the man's knee made a landscape of crossed scars over his face and neck. The tiny bits of white-hot wire, hurled his way at ballistic speed, slashed through flesh and nerves leaving him with a face as immobile as a granite carving. It left him with a visage that expressed his true nature. Heartless. Soulless. A man who brought pain to others without a trace of either joy or sympathy.
Carlos held a rear door for him while Lupo raced around to get behind the wheel of the Audi. El Chistoso waved Carlos aside with a grunt and pulled open the front passenger door to take a seat beside Lupo.
The air within the car was chilled. The sweat of Chistoso’s Ban-Lon polo shirt turned to ice water. A thrill of cold as he pressed his back to the seat. He let out a long, slow breath while the cousins stared at him as though he were an animal recently escaped from a cage.
“Do you have a phone for me?” Chistoso said. His voice was a grating rumble. More evidence of the damage from the Medellin bomb.
From the back seat, Carlos fumbled in a pocket. He thrust a cell phone forward.
“It is clean, señor. We bought it on the way here today.”
Chistoso took the phone and thumbed it to life.
“Merle Hogue. He is the one I must speak to. Put in his number.” He held the phone back to Carlos who tabbed keys with sweating hands.
“Drive,” Chistoso said.
“Where?” Lupo said.
“How am I to know? I have never been to this shithole in my life,” Chistoso said. He eyed Lupo from deep within recesses of scar tissue.
The Audi left behind a gush of gravel that tinkled against the chain fence.
40
“You know not to drink when you take those, right?” the girl at the prescription counter said.
“Yeah. I know,” Dale said. He was already a six-pack of Miller up on the day and it was only a little past noon.
“Just so you know,” she said.
Dale leaned on his aluminum cane and sniffed at her as she finished ringing up his oxy scrip along with a Red Bull and a bag of salt and vinegar chips. Stupid little bitch barely out of high school. Thinks a blue smock turned her into a doctor or something. If she’s so damn smart why doesn’t she take care of that bumper crop of zits sprouting on her forehead? He snorted but said nothing.
“Be healthy,” she said. A professional smile and a hand held out to offer him his plastic sack.
“Yeah. You too,” he said. But in a cutting tone. She ignored him to greet the next person in line, a mom with a sniffling kid in her arms.
Out in the Walgreen’s parking lot, Dale sat in the cab of his truck and washed down a pair of oxys with a mouthful of warm Miller. The pain in his leg was a constant but the itching from the skin grafts was worse. A torment. They told him the pain would calm down to a simmer once enough scorched nerve endings gave up the ghost. And the itching would subside as the new flesh knitted together. They told him going to physical therapy would help some. Fuck that, he said.
Some guy, a Jew probably, was on the radio talking about how you could make yourself happy just by deciding to be happy. Dale flipped over to the country station. Some warbling bitch was singing about how she didn't need a man. He snapped the radio to silence. They never played good stuff like George Strait or Patty Loveless any more.
A tap on the glass shook him. He snapped out of a deep nod, mildly surprised to find himself still parked outside the drug store.
A face leered at him through the smeared passenger window.
“That you, Roy?” Dale said.
“Roll down the window, you dumb son-bitch,” Roy Mathers said. The leer was frozen on his face. His peculiar pearl gray eyes fixed on Dale from a sunburnt face. A raised star of white scar tissue creased his cheek. It was a remnant of a .38 slug that passed through his mouth a few years back taking most of his teeth with it.
Dale fumbled for the button on his door panel. The window rolled down and Roy leaned in to help himself to a Miller out of the sack by Dale’s hip.
“What can I do you for, Roy?” Dale said.
“Whyn’t you stop by the Legion hall? There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Roy said. He popped the top off the Miller. He flicked his fingers to spray foam off his fingertips.
“I might just do that sometime.”
“You should do it right now. Follow me back. Goddamn! It’s warm!” Roy flung the beer back into the cab where it gurgled empty on the floor mat.
“Sure. Sure. Okay.”
“Follow me back.” The leer that passed for Roy’s smile turned to a feral snarl revealing his too-bright new teeth. They shone even whiter with his face burnt red.
“Sure. Sure.” Dale ground the key to bring the truck to life. Roy headed for his restored ’76 Charger. He waved a lazy hand, beckoning Dale to follow.
“Hey, man. Sorry to hear ’bout your daddy,” Dale called after him.
Roy turned back as he pulled the Charger’s door open. Eyes dead as slate. Dropped his chin one time, slid behind the wheel and peeled away.
Palms damp on the steering wheel, Dale sat a moment watching Roy wedge the big muscle car into traffic on the county road. A honk, a chirp of tires, a squeal of brakes as he cut off a UPS truck. Roy was gone south and out of sight behind the signage in front of a strip mall.
Dale pulled to the exit and considered, for one giddy second, turning left instead of right and driving like hell for the interstate and from there to Chicago or even Quebec. Instead, he made the right to follow Roy Mathers back toward Colby.
No idea who it was that Roy wanted him to meet. But Dale decided already that he wouldn’t like the son-bitch.
The interior of the Legion hall was hushed. Cool, dry air stirred from a pair of wall units humming above the Stars and Stripes and Stars and Bars hanging side by side from the long wall opposite the bar. Except for the tang of beer skunk the place could have been a church.
Two old guys sat in mumbled conversation at a table. An even older guy sat humped on a stool playing the poker machine at the end of the bar. A black guy known to everybody only as Simms leaned back behind the bar watching a sports channel on the screen above the shelves of bottles; three black guys and a white girl talking and laughing on a set that looked like the bridge of a space ship. Simms was resting his good leg on a stool. His other leg, the steel and wire contraption Uncle Sam had given him, was braced against the duck boards.
Simms wished he could turn the volume up on the TV—he was reading the closed captioning and it wasn't the same. But the old cracker playing poker would start bitching for him to turn it down. And that old cracker marched up the boot of Italy in '44, fighting Nazis every step of the way. Simms figured the old boy earned his silence while he nursed his Bud and poured his monthly check into the flashing machine.
The door out to the parking lot swung open letting in a burst of sunlight like from the heart of a furnace. Two men stepped in, the door closing behind them to restore the gloom. One of them was a guy Simms knew as Dale. Came in with the help of a cane. Couldn’t recall his last name. Remembered that he was in Iraq, too.
The guy following was Roy Mathers. Simms knew him all right. Knew that the only uniform Mathers ever wore was one-piece and orange.
“We’re heading on back,” Mathers said. His hand jinked up, finger pointing to the rear of the long room.
“They’re waiting on you,” Simms said. He nodded to Dale who nodded back before cutting his eyes away. Sad eyes.
Roy led the way through an arch with Dale behind. To one side was a pair of restrooms. To the other a hallway that ended in a sliding accordion door. Roy shoved it open and held it for Dale to enter.
A couple of tables were set up in the windowless room. The walls were lined with cases of empties. Bud. Miller. Coors. The open space in the middle of the room was lit by hanging lamps drawn low over the table tops. Thursday through Saturday this was a poker room for members only. A stubby little man in a cheap gabardine suit sat smoking at one of the tables. Dale didn’t know him but thought he might know who he was.
He damn sure knew the man leaning back, arms crossed, against the wall of empties. He knew he didn’t like a thing about the guy. Gary Bush was well over six feet with prison muscle straining the chest and sleeves of a Jack Daniels t-shirt. His arms were covered to the wrists with tats. Most prominent on his ham-sized biceps were a noose on one arm with a Maltese cross in the center of the loop and a screaming skull sporting a Confederate kepi on the other. Gary wore a disapproving sneer as he met Dale’s eyes. He glanced down at Dale’s cane and made a woofing sound between his lips.
“We have a situation here,” Merle Hogue said. The stubby little man glanced up at him from under shadowed brows.
“Uh huh.” Dale’s mouth was dry as dust.
“I represent people who have an interest down here. You know who I might be talking about?” Merle said.
St. Louis, Dale thought but said nothing.
"Roy tells me you been working for his family a couple of years now. Tells me you keep an eye out for him and his. You keep him in the picture concerning his family's competition. Like these Mexicans." Merle smeared out what was left of his Chesterfield and lit another from the pack by his hand.
Dale waited.
"Heard you had your own trouble with these Mexicans. They killed your ma. Nearly killed you. Do you care to share with us why that might be? Why a bunch of greasers have such a hard-on for a small town hillbilly ex-deputy?"
Gary Bush snuffled.
“Guess they thought I was getting too close,” Dale said. He lowered his eyes to the floor.
“Too close? Too fucking close? Try point blank, boy. Try so close you have their cousins’ and their nephews’ and their bastard bambinos’ blood all over your hands.”
Dale said nothing.
“Now tell me that’s not true. Now just try, try and convince me that those wetback motherfuckers weren’t after your ass because you killed a bunch of their crew and stole their money and their product.” Merle’s voice was mocking, playing for Gary Bush who was eating it up.
Dale’s fingers danced on the curved handle of his cane.
“Now we have dead Mexes and dead white folks and nobody’s happy. And when it’s all said and done, business is affected. The money flow has fallen to a piddly little dribble outta this county and the people I represent are displeased. And the amigos are a damn sight displeased. And how do we make this right?”
Dale clutched the cane handle, knuckles white.
"We need your help, son. You tell us what happened — every scrap. And you tell us who helped you. And we'll go easy on you. Otherwise, we have to give you up to the Mexicans. You understand that there's no other way. You understand that your only choice is between the wholly unthinkable and the slightly preferable."
Dale nodded. He could feel his pulse behind his eyes. His throat was in the grip of a fiery fist.
“Tell us, then. Who’d you rob the Mexes with?”
Dale turned to pivot, drawing the barrel of the cane up into his fist as he moved.
He swung the handle of the cane in a wide arc that took Roy Mathers square in the temple. He’d taken the cane apart after the hospital gave it to him and poured eight ounces of molten lead into the hollow of the handle. It was a half-pound hammer that dropped Roy to the floor with a shout.
Gary Bush had pushed himself off the beer cases to launch at Dale. The cane handle came up as Dale shortened his grip. He stabbed out, spearing Gary in the throat with t
he heavy handle. The big man stumbled. Eyes goggling. Mouth working like a fish caught up on a bank. He hurled himself back to crash into the cases, toppling a tower of them. The bottles spilled out to turn into a shower of glass on the tiles.
Dale moved for Merle who had shoved himself from the table in a crouch. His teeth had bitten the end from his cigarette. His chubby hands clawed for a revolver in his waistband. Dale raised the cane over his head for a downward blow aimed at the smaller man’s skull.
Before he could drop the hammer his elbow was hooked by an arm from behind him. Dale half-turned his head to look into Roy Mather's face. Twisted in a blind rage and painted crimson with blood where the cane handle opened his brow.
Roy raised an automatic in his hand. A big nickel-plated job. It came down on the back of Dale’s neck. Once. Twice. Then Dale felt nothing. Knew nothing.
41
The day was dying but the heat remained. The air grew thicker as the sky darkened; a cloying stickiness unrelieved in the still air that lay between the hills.
Clouds of moths gathered under the pole lamp on the gravel lot along the farm road. Just as the insects were drawn to the light, dozens of farm workers walked from the rows of cinderblock huts to line up at the food truck parked in the pool of light. They lined up, paid, and retreated either to their temporary homes or to the picnic tables set in the shadows of the pines that loomed around the lot. Children chased each other in and out of the light. The blue glow of tiny screens was visible in the gloom.
El Chistoso watched from the air-conditioned interior of the Audi. This could be his family, his mother and father and brothers many years ago. But for the firefly glow of the smartphones, this could have been an evening in the camps after a long day of picking tomatoes, string beans or melons. Even the food offered by the truck was the same. Pork. Pulled beef. Chicken. Barbecued corn. Beans and tortillas. Peasant food. All washed down with an orange soda and, if there was enough money, an ice cream. Often he had to share a cone with a brother. Each taking turns to lick the scoop of vanilla or chocolate, fighting over the last bite of the sweet cake cone.