by Chuck Dixon
He keyed the press button on his headset and spoke low.
“Deputy Small. Anyone there?” A crackle in his ear.
“What’s up, Jimbo?” The drawl of Lester Horse.
“Got traffic down here heading my way.”
“You have a visual, Jimbo?”
“I can hear ’em makin’ for the fence line. You close, Lester?”
“Depends on where you are, Jimbo.”
“I’m above that draw where the deer trail crosses near that spot where Dan Squires found the dirt bike last winter.”
“Damn, Jimbo.” Crackle and crosstalk. Jimbo could hear Lester talking to someone off mike. Probably his partner John Haytown.
“Lester?”
“We’re all the way the hell up on the east fire road near the highway fork. “
Jimbo took another turkey-peek. He could see them now. They were scrambling down the wall of the gully on the other side of the fence.
“They’ll be over by the time you get here, Les.”
“How many?”
“I count eight.”
“Loaded down?”
Through the scope, they were closer now. Six were carrying bundles on their backs. Backpack suitcases packed with brown, flake, or most likely grass. Two, maybe three million dollars walking right toward him. The two who weren’t humping rucks wore brand new cowboy hats and had rifles or shotguns shoulder-slung.
“Carryin’ weight, Les. Six mules humpin’ and two coyotes walkin’ heavy.”
More crackle and crosstalk. Busy night on the border.
Les came back on. “Let ’em go, Jimbo.”
“They’ll be up in the reservations. You’ll never find ’em.”
“Let ’em pass, Jimbo. No John Wayne shit, okay?”
“Yeah. Small out.”
Jimbo’d have to lay here quiet and allow them to pass below him. If he moved now, he’d be inviting fire. They could all be armed as far as he knew. Might as well lay still and watch the late show. He pressed his eye to the scope. They were fifty yards south of the fence. Two of the mules were smaller than the others. From their gait, he knew they were women. They struggled with their burdens more than the others. The end of a long day. Twelve or more miles walking with maybe ten more ahead of them before the night was through.
One of the coyotes stopped and held up a hand. They were close enough that Jimbo could hear the sound of his voice if not the words. What was this dude up to? Why the sudden caution?
The coyotes stopped the procession. They made a pantomime of looking about them in the dark. What could they see? There’s no way in hell they knew Jimbo was watching them. They turned now, rifles unlimbered, and motioned to the mules to sit on the floor of the gully. One of the mules hesitated and was dropped to the dust with the butt of a rifle.
Jimbo knew what was next. He’d found the evidence of it enough times. These poor bastards paid all they had to get over the border to a job with decent wages. They even agreed to carry shit as part of the fare. Now some of them were going to pay with their dignity. The coyotes had the power now, so close to the prize, to make these peons endure further hardship.
A coyote pulled one of the girls to her feet and yelled orders at her. He wanted that pack off her. When she struggled to shrug out of the straps, he pulled at her and, freeing her from the ruck, threw her to the ground. The other coyote held his rifle on the others and they sat, shifting in the sand until he shouted at them to be still.
The girl was young. Jimbo could tell that much. She tried to crawl up the lip of the shallow draw. The laughter rose up and echoed off the rocks, and Jimbo felt the flesh on his forearms go cold. The coyote was on top of the girl now, and they both slid down the wall of the draw and out of his sight. But he could hear the sounds. The pleading and the answering shouts. The other one stood with rifle trained on the mules and turned now and then to watch his amigo’s progress with an eagerness that was plainly visible in his body language. He was doing the horny dance in his shiny rodeo boots while waiting for his shot at sloppy seconds.
Jimbo could easily move now; slide from his position while they were occupied. Take his gear and move up to where his ATV was hidden under a desert camo tarp. No one would blame him. No one had to know. They were on their side of the line, for Christ’s sake.
Fuck it. Just fuck it.
He leaned into the scope again. He willed his shoulders to unbunch, his hands to unclench. He spat out the smooth round pebble he’d been sucking on and breathed in a clean lungful of cold air. Blew it out slow enough it wouldn’t ruffle a butterfly’s wings. When his lungs were empty, he settled the triple hairs on the head of the sucker standing and waiting his turn.
Center shot. It was a heavy round Jimbo custom loaded himself in his garage shop. It threw the guy from his field of vision. He moved the scope to the lip of the draw where he last saw Coyote One drop out of sight.
Like a prairie dog, the fucker popped up his head to look around in animal panic. The soft lead took him square in the neck. Cut short in mid-shout. A sweep of the scope found the coyote who’d been waiting for sloppy seconds face down and still in the dust with a dark shadow spreading under him.
The mules were running wild away into the dark, their bundles forgotten. They’d be back to cross the fence some other night. But not tonight. He brought the scope back to the lip of the draw in time to see the girl rise into his field of vision. She was pulling her clothes tight around her and looked about her with wide eyes that flashed white in the scope’s harsh contrast. She bent to pick up one of the rifles and held it in her hands uncertainly.
Jimbo was unable to turn away as she brought the butt of the rifle down again and again on the skull of her attacker. Big overhead swings until she could no longer lift her arms. She stood exhausted and heaving and dropped the rifle to the ground.
“Come on, bonita,” Jimbo said under his breath.
The girl looked toward Mexico lindo and home and turned back to gaze straight into Jimbo’s eyes. Then she crawled on her belly under the fence and ran down the draw, heading north toward the golden lights of America.
“Good girl,” he said to himself and stayed put for an hour before snaking out of his hide.
HE SAT IN JOSIE’S FUEL and Food on the highway, lingering over a second coffee and a third Marlboro. It was noon, and he wasn’t on shift for a few more hours. Jimbo reviewed the night before. Dropping those Mexes. Watching the girl crawl under the fence. Hell, she probably already had a job in Tucson. Making beds at a Best Western or cleaning stalls at a horse barn.
He thought about how he belly crawled under that fence with his entrenching tool and buried those two hombres in a single grave away from the draw. Took near to dawn. He left the bundles of dope where the mules left them. Somebody’d come pick them up. Waste not, want not.
In a couple of hours, he’d be asked to fill out a report. He’d make up some politely-worded lies about the night before. An incident report with no incidents. He’d wallpaper over two murders like they never happened. It was bullshit piled on more bullshit. He’d be lying if he said he felt sorry for those cabrones. He’d be lying if he said he wouldn’t do it all over again. Two assholes the world would never miss but they were dead and buried, and he killed them and dug their graves. And that was in his rearview no matter what and it would prey on him.
That’s what his life was now. Pretending to enforce laws that his betters didn’t have the cajones to stand by. Those fuckers could rape young girls and murder their mules and bring that shit across the border every night and make the tribe’s land their goddamn golden highway, and Jimbo wasn’t even allowed to ask them their business or even their names without getting himself in a world of shit. He smeared out the Marlboro and scooted the coffee mug across the Formica.
“Well, what put you on the warpath, chief?” said someone standing over the booth.
Jimbo half-rose, a fist white-knuckled and drawing back.
Dwayne Roenbach stood gri
nning at him.
Jimbo’s face creased in a smile that almost hurt. The two men embraced. Regulars at Josie’s looked up to see the unusual sight of Deputy James Small hugging another man, and the even more unusual spectacle of the dour Pima lawman looking happy.
Dwayne shoved Jimbo away.
“You got anything tying you down, Small?” Dwayne said. “A woman? Family?”
“Nothin’ I can’t walk out on,” Jimbo said. “That badge?”
“Don’t mean shit,” Jimbo said. “Not to me.
Not to nobody else neither.”
4
Rick Renzi
The house was probably nice once. Three bedrooms, two baths, two car garage. Little split level on a decent lot in a nice enough subdivision outside Cincinnati. But the lawn had gone to hell, the siding was grungy, and the paint around the windows was peeling away.
Dwayne and Chaz climbed out of the rental car and made their way up the cracked walk.
“I’m already sorry I came along for the ride,” Chaz said.
“The hell you are,” Dwayne said. “You’d push your own sister down a well to get on that corporate jet.”
“You figure out who’s payin’ the bills yet?”
“Jimbo’s working on that. He’s been running it down on his laptop. So far he’s just finding a bunch of shell corporations.”
“At least it ain’t government,” Chaz said. Dwayne pressed the doorbell and heard a pleasant three-chord chime echoed within the house. He rang again and heard a thump and a crash of glass. The door opened a crack, and a wiry-looking man in a stained t-shirt and wrinkled running pants glared at them from painfully red eyes.
“You didn’t answer your phone, Renzi,” Dwayne said.
“Thought you were the pizza guy,” Rick said. His voice was a croak. His breath was foul with tobacco and whatever he’d been drinking. His body gave off the rich stink of weeks of neglect. An ashtray smell with an aftertaste of rotting food was seeping out of the house.
“You gonna let us in?” Chaz said.
In answer to that the door slammed.
“We came all the way here, right?” Dwayne said. Chaz nodded.
A double shoulder hit took the door off its hinges and carried the two big men into the middle of the living room.
Renzi didn’t even get up from the sofa.
“I’m not sharing the pizza when it gets here,” he said. He popped the top on a fresh beer and took a long pull.
The sofa was the only piece of furniture in the room. There was an open trash bag in a corner spilling empties of Yuengling quarts and cans to the carpet. Empty pizza boxes were in an untidy pile along one wall, forming a cardboard condo development for a swarm of roaches. An open pizza box on the coffee table was an impromptu ashtray piled with butts. There were chips in the plaster where pictures once hung. Pictures of Rick’s family. Wife and three kids.
“Nothing nastier than a beer drunk,” Chaz said. He sniffed the air.
“When did she leave?” Dwayne said.
“A month,” Renzi said and slouched back, resting the can on his knee.
“You got this fucked up in a month?” Chaz said.
“We have a job,” Dwayne said. “Short-term, with a big payday. You could get them back.”
“Had a job,” Renzi said with a snort. “Had a lot of jobs. Got pissed on or pissed off. Whatever you got goin’, I’d just shit all over it.”
“I need you for the one thing you do right,” Dwayne said. “Blowing shit up.”
“Forget it,” Renzi said. “Nothing you say is gonna get me off this couch. Nothing you do is gonna get me out of this house. I’m past whatever it is you want me for. I’m used up. I’m tired. Find someone else.”
The fight was a short one. Renzi was too long drunk and too long tired. They tossed him into the back of the rental and drove away from the sad little split-level.
“Wish we threw him in the shower first,” Chaz said and rolled down the windows.
RENZI’S HEAD HURT IN A new way. A couple of new ways. The old hangover pain behind his eyes and on top of his head was there. But his right cheek was sore, too. The inside of his mouth was cut. And his left ear hurt.
“Drink this, Ricky.” Dwayne was offering a glass tinkling with ice.
Renzi sat up. He was in a broad swivel chair covered in plush leather. He accepted the tumbler and looked around. He was in a long narrow room with upholstered walls, a paneled bar and a big screen TV with a golf game on it. He took a sip. It was ice water.
“Drink it,” Dwayne said. “It’ll clear your ears.”
“Ears?”
“You’re on a plane, dumbass,” Chaz said and switched the TV to a poker show.
“We’re going to Nevada,” Dwayne said. “That’s where the job is.”
“You guys steal this jet?” Renzi said. “Belongs to our client,” Dwayne said. “We still don’t know who that is. But they’ve paid all our expenses and a solid advance against a ten million dollar payout. Tax-free cash. The job is a week, maybe. Most of that is prep time. The actual mission is one or two days tops, and it’s domestic.”
“Something legal?” Renzi said. “You guys don’t expect me to blow a safe or like that?”
“Nothing illegal,” Dwayne said. “But it’s a corporate secret. No talking about it after.”
“Like Tikrit,” Renzi said. “Just like that,” Chaz said.
“Is Hammond in on it?” Renzi said.
“No,” Dwayne said. “This is my deal. I don’t even know where in the world Hammond is.”
“I hear he’s back in the States,” Renzi said. “I heard that, too,” Chaz said.
“Hammond’s not part of this,” Dwayne cut in. “It’s not his kind of play.”
“Okay, I’ll come along and look it over.” Renzi sat back.
“Like you have a choice,” Chaz said.
“Hey.” Renzi gestured toward the bar with his glass. “Any chance I can get a little . . .”
“No way,” Dwayne said. “You have forty-eight hours to straighten your ass up before I let you anywhere near det cord and Semtex.”
5
The Rundown
The following morning, the four men gathered in the largest Q-hut, which would serve as an operations center for the mission. The biggest room within was soundproofed and windowless and held computer workstations with big flat-screen monitors. These monitors swam with a screensaver image of rolling surf.
“Everything must be done to reduce your impact on the environment,” Dr. Tauber said. “Your clothing, body armor, and footwear are made from chemical-free paper and vegetable-based materials so they decompose rapidly.”
“This some Al Gore bullshit?” Renzi said. “That means no smokes either, Ricky,” Chaz said.
Dwayne stepped in. “Think of it more like a covert necessity. We have to get in and get out, and no one can ever know we were there. Ever. If something goes wrong and we don’t get back, there can’t be any evidence we were there. Imagine someone digging around in the desert, and they find a hundred-thousand-year-old Swiss Army knife where it has no business being. It may seem like a long time ago, but the doc tells me that you’d be surprised at the stuff that survives to be found.”
“So we pick up our brass,” Jimbo said.
“No brass,” Dwayne said. He reached into one of the large steel equipment crates that were stacked along one wall. “We’ll be armed with these.”
Dwayne held up an ugly black rifle about two feet in length, a bullpup design with a heavy box magazine mounted near the rear of the weapon. The three ex-Rangers studied it with something like hunger. Whatever this new piece was, it was this ordnance that would help them stand up to any threat they met. It would be the difference between dying and getting back alive. He tossed the rifle to Jimbo.
“We have ten of these. They fire a .30 caliber rocket round propelled by a mix of two chemicals ignited electrically from a battery worn on our belts. Twenty-round magazines. The roun
ds are frangible and made of compressed organic matter. Hard enough to penetrate any living target but composed of materials that will degrade—break down—over time. The frame is steel and ceramic and will biodegrade within a thousand years.”
“Who built these?” Jimbo said. “I used Vinnie Barnes in Tulsa,” Dwayne said. “He’s expensive, but he’s good. They’re based off a design of his he’s been working on for a while. And he doesn’t ask questions or kiss and tell.”
“You tried one of these on a range, Dwayne?” Jimbo inspected the rifle.
“It’s accurate enough within fifty yards, and jamming is minimal,” Dwayne said. “It’s lots quieter than any piece we’re used to. But the punch it offers is considerable. There’s two charges in each projectile. The first forces the projectile from the barrel at less than ballistic speed. A second charge goes off once it’s in free air and traveling downrange. That brings the speed to three-K FPS. That means the muzzle energy increases exponentially as it nears the target. We won’t be up against a military, or even a human, opponent so we don’t need much range. But we do need punch. The missiles are a mix of explosives and slugs. Chances are we won’t need these at all. And if we do it’ll be against wildlife that will most likely run the first time we fire at them. But you’re our gunhound, Jimbo. I want your opinion on this pig.”
“Will do,” Jimbo said. He was already stripping down the one in his hands.
“How about explosives?” Renzi said.
“Doc thinks Semtex won’t be a problem,” Dwayne said. “If we have to use it, it means it’s been detonated. Any chemical traces that survive are likely to be negligible. Think you could work up some quick and dirty grenades for us?”
“Satchel charges do?” Renzi said. “They’re easy to make and use.”
“As long as it goes boom, bro,” Dwayne said. Make up a dozen.
“You have pictures of who we’ll be looking for?” Chaz said to Dr. Tauber.