through the mass of material she had accumulated on the Village and the Villagers. No inspiration leaped out at her. If only she had some way to get to those damned llamas! She needed an agent.
Lunchtime came. Bertha knocked on Vanna’s closed door, and then poked her head in. Her bouffant blue hair looked like a cloud rising over the mountain of her face. Vanna growled “Yes?” at her.
“It’s lunch time, Ms. Dee,” Bertha said. “Do you want me to order in for you, or will you be going out?” Vanna glared at the clock on her wall. She put a post-it note on the page she had been reading to hold her place.
“I’ll be going out,” she said. “I need a change of scene and some fresh air. Are you eating in?”
“No, I have a lunchtime appointment with my doctor,” Bertha said. She didn’t mention that it was only to eat lunch. The less Vanna knew about Bertha’s private affairs the safer Bertha felt.
“Very well, then,” Vanna said. She picked up her purse and stood. “Lock the office; I have my key in case I get back before you do.”
“All right then. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Please do,” Vanna said, and stalked out. She wore a thundercloud on her brow. Behind her, Bertha shrugged, as if to throw off the weight of Vanna’s presence, got her own purse, and locked the office as she left.
Vanna had already caught an elevator and was gone. Bertha smiled. Working with the woman was bad enough. Having to make small talk riding down in an elevator with her was above and beyond.
On the street Vanna marched to the local delicatessen and got a salad and a bowl of watery soup. The meal was as unsatisfactory as her plotting. Vanna had contacts in many places, but the kind of man she needed now must have special abilities in slinking, skullduggery, and nefarious behavior. In short, she needed an ex-con, most probably a convicted drug user or dealer. Deceit, she believed, was essential to the drug culture. Her contacts with the underbelly of Las Tumbas were limited.
Noah Count approached her again, displaying another of his pastel drawings. This was an abstract presentation of an earth-mother goddess. It didn’t look like a llama. Vanna was about to send him packing with a scathing rebuke when she remembered Bertha’s chatter about Noah’s past.
She pretended to study the picture. “Are you Noah Count?” she asked.
“Who’s asking?” he said, warily.
“I’m looking for someone who can do a bit of work for me,” Vanna said, “work that would be ‘off the record’ so to speak.”
“Something the sheriff shouldn’t know about?” Noah put his earth-mother goddess drawing on top of the stack of drawings he had leaning against the storefront where he stood. He thumbed through the stack, as though looking for a specific drawing.
“You might put it that way.” Vanna watched him sift through his drawings.
“Does this work pay well?” He paused in his search through his drawings and looked up at Vanna.
“Yes. Five thousand.”
Noah pulled the drawing that had so irritated Vanna that morning from the pile as if to show it to her. “I know somebody who can be bought,” he said. He pointed to his chest. “Me.”
“Do you mind killing animals?”
“No. Don’t have a gun, though.”
“Couldn’t use a gun in this place,” she said. “Too much noise. You’d have to use a knife.”
“How about a bow and arrows?”
“Those would work. Can you use a bow and arrows?”
“Like a master,” Noah said. “Learned on the range at La Lechuga. It was part of my rehabilitation, don’t you know.”
“I need some llamas killed,” Vanna said. “Out on the coast.”
“Oh yeah, in San Danson, I presume. I read about the hearing.” Noah grinned at her. Vanna observed several of Noah’s teeth were missing, or represented only by stumps. She glanced away from Noah’s face. Her eyes landed on the infuriating drawing. She grimaced. Noah noted the twist of her face. He nodded very slightly.
“I’ll need the five thousand dollars up front,” Noah said. For that I’ll throw in a drawing.” Noah grinned at her again. “That way you’re paying me for a picture, not for killing anything.”
“Clever,” Vanna said. “I’ll get half the money and meet you here in an hour. I’ll get the rest when you’ve completed the job.”
“Only half?” Noah read implacable decision in Vanna’s face. “Done,” Noah said. “I’ll wrap the drawing for you and be here. In one hour, then.”
“In one hour,” Vanna said. When she returned with the cash, she exchanged the roll of bills for a wrapped drawing. It wasn’t until she got home that night that she unwrapped the drawing. It was the llama picture. She put it in a corner, turned to the wall.
El Coronel Pasa
Beauregard LeSieupe went forth upon a blustery November afternoon. Gray rain clouds clustered over the western sea. The few gulls wheeling over the crashing surf cried mournfully into the moisture-burdened air. The killdeer danced frantically with the foamy edge of the waves on the shrinking beach. Again and again the waters wiped away the cuneiform their feet left in the packed wet sand. Into this turmoil of nature Beauregard went, his white coat tails flapping, his hat and wig jammed tightly on his head lest he lose both to the thieving fingers of the wind.
For reasons he never knew, and none other ever guessed, Beauregard, who commonly walked the beaches, elected this afternoon to climb the hill behind the Village. Despite the increasing turbulence of the pre-storm winds, he climbed up the slopes, using the twisting trail behind the chapel to make his progress. Perhaps he had some vague intent to scout the manor house’s gardens for spies. Perhaps he intuited a Yankee spy lurked among the llamas. Poor Beauregard was not a part of the balance of things, and so his thoughts are not collected.
Nonetheless, slowly and steadily up the mountain he went. Occasional raindrops spattered him, but not enough to deter him with their wetness. At whiles the wind wailed with the death cries of dolphins caught in tuna nets. Beau was oblivious to the melancholy music the wind moaned. Whatever his purpose, he trudged toward it without faltering or stopping.
Within the same body, Juan slept. He had been up much of the night soothing Luis, the terrified boy who shared the body with him and Beau. Luis slept, too, an uneasy turbulence of dreams chasing their tails through his mind.
Near the top of the mountain, where the trail to the manor house went up a knoll, a less traveled track went north, toward the Coastal Commission lands. Beau took this road less traveled by. This high above the sea the crash of the surf was more a sigh than a roar. Beau walked the narrow trail near the crumbling cliff edge. Now and again a small stone his foot dislodged tumbled down the cliff face toward the sighing sea. Bits of shattered path followed the tumbling stones. Beauregard pressed on as though he carried the message General Lee needed most to take back Petersburg.
The path turned at its northern end to wind along near the fence that marked the Coastal Commission area apart from La Señora’s San Danson Mountain. Beauregard followed it up the still rising slope, winding among the drizzle shrouded sage bushes. Far enough inland from the sea that he could no longer hear the surf he encountered a ghost from his past.
Noah Count stood, leaning against a wooden fence post, carefully avoiding the barbed wire that stretched in both directions from it along the steel posts of the fence line. Beau’s sense of time was fragile; though he had not encountered Noah for more than twenty years, it seemed to him but yesterday they had talked and shared a smoke.
“Hello, Colonel,” Noah said, saluting Beau in a mocking way. A cigarette dangled from a corner of Noah’s mouth. His eyes were red-rimmed. Deeper marks than Beau remembered lined his face. Beau presumed war did that to a man, wore him old in a short time. He returned Noah’s salute.
“Where is your uniform, sir?” Beau asked.
“I’m working undercover, don’t you kno
w,” Noah said. “Can’t let the Yankees guess me out.”
“Yankees active in this area?” Beau asked, looking around him in startlement.
“Yankees all around us, Colonel,” Noah said. He leaned further toward Beau. “Can’t be too careful, don’t you know.”
“Yes sir,” Beau said.
“Come up hill a few feet, Colonel,” Noah said. “We can sit and talk. Share a smoke like we used to do.”
Juan stirred in his sleep, but weariness was too heavy upon him to wake him. Beau said, “Sounds good. You can tell me about the Yankee positions.”
“Sure,” Noah said. He walked with Beau on the other side of the fence to a log that had fallen before the fence’s construction. The fence builders, on government contract, had built the fence over the middle of the log rather than move it.
“Sit here, Colonel,” Noah said, and took out a homemade cigarette. Not tobacco, this cigarette, but marijuana heavily laced with angel dust. To Noah a mild buzz-maker. To Beau, it would be rather more. Noah lit the white torpedo and took a deep inhalation. Then he passed it to Beau, who, remembering the old wild days, took the smoke deep into his lungs. From this first hit, Beau was lost in a world of wandering mists and fluttering dreams.
Beau did not notice when Noah got up and left him with the tag end of the cigarette. Neither did he notice the burn on his finger and thumb when the fire came to the end he was holding. He did not know he dropped