“That was your doing, sir,” Frank said. He was standing behind Sholokoff, wearing tight leather gloves like a race-car driver might wear, his flat stomach exposed by his scissored-off T-shirt.
Sholokoff turned in his chair. “You need to explain yourself, Frank.”
“We shouldn’t have been wasting our time on the minister. It wasn’t me that had the hard-on about him. That’s all I was saying.”
Sholokoff puffed on his cigarette, his eyes warm and shiny, exhaling the smoke from his nostrils. He put out the cigarette under his foot, then picked up the butt and handed it to one of his men to dispose of. “Frank, tell me this. Why is it that Sheriff Holland is not responding to our calls? Even after we sent part of Temple Dowling to his office. Why is a man like Holland, a personal friend of Ms. Ling, seemingly detached from her fate?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Frank said.
“Could it be that he no longer has Noie Barnum in his possession? Or that he’s closer to us now than he was this morning?”
“You mean he’s coming here?” Frank said.
“Put Antonio back in his cell. I have to use the bathroom,” Sholokoff said. “While I’m gone, I want you to devise something special for Ms. Ling. I also don’t want to have to correct you again. Do you understand me, Frank?”
“Loud and clear, Mr. S.,” Frank said.
“Señor, you got a minute for me?” Krill said from the floor, staring through the legs of the men who surrounded him.
“You want me to be your friend now, Antonio? To take you out of all this unhappiness?” Sholokoff said.
“Yes, sir. I am very tired of it.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
“I don’t want to be here when the next bad thing happens.”
“With Ms. Ling?”
“No, with you and your friends, señor.”
“I think you have become delusional, my Hispanic friend.”
“You didn’t see what Negrito just did. Negrito was living inside my skin, but he just left my body and went up on the ceiling. Now he’s standing right behind you. You are in deep shit, señor.”
“Who’s Negrito?” Sholokoff asked Frank.
“The guy who’s gonna fuck you with a garden rake,” Krill said. Then he began laughing on the floor, his long hair hanging in a sweaty web over his face.
Sholokoff seemed more bemused than offended and went upstairs to use the bathroom. Two men picked Krill up by his arms and carried him to his cell and threw him inside. “Hey, Frank,” one of them said. “There’re scratches around the keyhole.”
“What?” Frank said.
“His food bowl is here, but there’s no utensil. The guy must have been using a fork on the lock.”
“Somebody gave the greaser a fork?”
“Frank, I gave him a spoon,” said the man who had brought Krill his food.
“Then where is it?”
“I don’t know, man.”
“We should tell Mr. Sholokoff,” said the man who had discovered the scratches.
“Shut up. Both you guys shut up,” Frank said. He stepped inside the cell and kicked Krill in the base of the spine. “Where’s the spoon, greaseball?”
“That hurts, boss. It makes my mind go blank,” Krill said. “Somebody gave me a spoon? I must have lost it. I am very sorry.”
“Frank,” one of the other men whispered.
“What?”
“Mr. Sholokoff just flushed the toilet.”
JACK COLLINS HAD led the way in a Ford Explorer through a winding series of low-topped white hills on which no grass or trees or even scrub brush grew. The road through the hills was narrow and rock-strewn and dusty, the wind as hot as a blowtorch, smelling of creosote and alkali and dry stone under the layer of blue-black clouds that gave no rain.
He had seen white hills like these only one other time in his life, when he was marching with a column of marines in the same kind of dust and heat through terrain that was more like Central Africa than the Korean peninsula. The marines wore utilities that were stiff with salt, the armpits dark with sweat, the backs of their necks tanned and oily and glistening under the rims of their steel pots, their boots gray with dust. In the midst of it all, the ambulances and six-bys and tanks and towed field pieces kept grinding endlessly up the road, the dust from their wheels blowing back into the faces of the men. Ahead, Hackberry could see the white hills that made him think of giant wind-scrubbed, calcified slugs on which no vegetation grew and whose sides were sometimes pocked with caves in which the Japanese prior to World War II had installed railroad tracks and mobile howitzers.
That was the day Hackberry had an epiphany about death that had always remained with him and that he called upon whenever he was afraid. He had reached a point of exhaustion and dehydration that had taken him past the edges of endurance into personal surrender, a calm letting go of his fatigue and the blisters inside his boots and the sweat crawling down his sides and the fear that at any moment he would hear the popping of small-arms fire in the hills. When the column fell out, he looked at the red haze of dust floating across the sun and on the hills and on a long flat plateau dotted with freshly turned earth that resembled anthills, and he wondered why any of it should be of any concern to him or his comrades or even to the nations that warred over it. In a short span of time, nothing that happened here would be of any significance to anyone. Ultimately, every cloak rolled in blood would be used as fuel for flames, and the sun would continue to shine and the rain to fall upon both the just and the unjust, and this piece of worthless land would remain exactly what it was, a worthless piece of land of no importance to anyone except those who lost their lives because of it.
Just as he had experienced these thoughts, someone had shouted, “Incoming!” and Hackberry had heard first one, then two, then three artillery rounds arching out of the sky, like a train engine screeching down a track and then exploding, striking the earth in such rapid succession that he’d had no time to react. From where he was sitting on top of a ditch, he saw the barrage intensify and march across the plateau, blowing geysers of dirt and buried pots of kimchi into the air.
The North Koreans were laying waste to a field filled with buried earthen jars of pickled cabbage. Hackberry continued to stare at the rain of destruction on the most ignoble of targets, bemused as much by the madness of his fellow man’s obsession as by the bizarre nature of the event. When clouds of pulverized dirt blew into his face, he never blinked. Nor did he blink when a piece of artillery shell spun toward him like a heliograph, its twisted steel surfaces flashing with light, whipping past his ear with a whirring sound like that of a tiny propeller. He felt neither fear nor self-recrimination at his recklessness, and he did not know why, since he did not consider himself either brave or exceptional.
His lack of fear and his whimsical attitude toward his own death stayed with him all the way to the Chosin Reservoir and his imprisonment in No Name Valley, and up until the present, he was not sure why his fear had temporarily disappeared or why it had returned. With time and age, he had come to think of mortality as the price of admission to the ballpark; but why had this road in Mexico taken him back to Korea? Was he finally about to step through the door into the place we all fear? Would his legs and his mettle be up to that dry-throated, heart-pounding, blood-draining moment that no words can adequately describe? Or would his courage fail him, as it had when he dropped a litter with a wounded marine on it and ran from a Chinese enlisted man who stood on a pile of frozen sandbags and sprayed Hackberry’s ditch with a burp gun and shot him three times through the calves and left him with years of guilt and self-abasement that he came to accept as a natural way of life?
The flatbed truck followed the Explorer between the hills, then emerged into a green valley where a paved road lined with eucalyptus trees led due south through meadowland and cornfields and farmhouses that were built of stone or stucco or both. Finally, the Explorer turned off the road and crossed a cattle guard and passed a burne
d-out house and pulled into a two-story barn that was filled with wind and the sounds of rattling tin in the roof.
Jack Collins cut his engine and got out of the Explorer and pulled his guitar case after him, then shut the driver’s door. “The sun will dip behind that mountain yonder in about four hours. If you want, you can rest up,” he said.
“What is this place?” Hackberry asked.
“It used to belong to a friend of mine. At least it did until the army burned him out.”
“You’ve spent time around here before?”
“Now and then.”
“Working for Sholokoff?”
“I did some contract stuff for him. I work for myself. I never ‘worked’ for Josef Sholokoff.”
“Why the wait?” Hackberry asked. Through a side window, he could see Eladio urinating inside a grove of citrus trees.
“You want to attack a houseful of armed men in daylight?”
“I don’t know if Ms. Ling can afford to write off the next four hours.”
“She hit me with a piñata stick, but I’m risking my life to save hers,” Collins said. “I don’t think she’s got any kick coming. Maybe Sholokoff will take some of the starch out of her.”
Hackberry kept his face turned away so Collins would not see the emotion he was trying to suppress. Through the window, Hackberry saw Eladio turn his back to the barn and zip his fly, then remove a cell phone from his pants pocket. “What’s your plan?” Hackberry said.
“I’ve arranged to have the cellar door and the French doors left unlocked on the patio. Three of us go through the French doors, and two go straight down the steps into the cellar. In the confusion, we’ll pop two or three of them before they’ll know what’s happening. The others will cut bait.”
“How do you know that?”
“They’re for hire. They go whichever way the wind vane turns. How do you think revolutions get won? You get the religious fanatics and idealists on your side, people with no monetary interest. What kind of weapons did you bring?”
“An AR15, a cut-down twelve, a Beretta nine-millimeter, and our revolvers.”
“Y’all didn’t end up with any of that Homeland Security money?”
“Worry about your own ordnance, Mr. Collins. How far is Sholokoff’s place?” Hackberry said, his gaze wandering out the window, where Eladio was walking back toward the front of the barn.
“Three miles, more or less,” Collins said.
“We go in now.”
“Impetuosity might be your undoing, Mr. Holland.”
“It’s Sheriff Holland to you.”
“Not here it isn’t. The only title that counts down here is the one you pay for.”
“Is there any reason one of your men would be using his cell phone while he’s hosing down a lime tree?”
Collins’s eyes sharpened, but they did not leave Hackberry’s face nor glance in the direction of Eladio, who had just walked through the barn’s entrance.
“You saw that?” Collins said.
“Ms. Ling’s life is hanging in the balance. Why would I try to throw you a slider?”
Collins’s mouth flexed, exposing his teeth, his eyes staring at the straw scattered on the dirt floor of the barn. “You’re sure about what you saw?” he said.
Hackberry didn’t reply.
“All right,” Collins said, his eyelids fluttering. “We go in now. Later, I’ll clean up the problem you just mentioned. How about the woman?”
“You mean my chief deputy?”
“Yeah, that’s what I just said. Can she take the heat in the kitchen?”
“You’re really a test of Christian charity, Jack.”
“Don’t patronize me. I won’t abide it.”
“When this is over—” Hackberry began.
“You’ll what?”
“Find out a way to get you into a clinical study. I think you’ll be invaluable to researchers everywhere. We’ve always wondered where the gene pool got screwed up. Some think it’s because the Neanderthal gene got mixed in with the Homo sapiens’s, but no one is sure. Your DNA may contain the answer.”
Collins’s eyes were lifted to Hackberry’s as Hackberry spoke. “Once inside, you’ll see what the wrath of God is all about. Don’t stand in its way or you’ll feel it, too,” he said. “You listening to me, boy?”
“Count your blessings, you piece of shit,” Hackberry said.
KRILL’S PLAN to get one of his warders into the cell had not worked, and now he was being forced to witness the acts they were perpetrating upon the body of the Asian woman called La Magdalena. He had not been able to pick the lock with the shaft of the spoon, so he had deliberately scratched the metal around the keyhole, hoping the scratches would be detected and a man would enter the cell in order to search for the spoon. But none of them, particularly Frank, had so far been willing to admit to Josef Sholokoff the nature of their blunder, so Krill stood at the bars, staring impotently at the silhouette of La Magdalena, who had been strung from a rafter by her wrists, the soles of her feet barely touching the floor.
“I was mistaken about you, Señor Sholokoff,” Krill said. “I thought I had been captured by the kind of mercenaries I knew in my homeland. But this is not so. As Negrito said, you are all cobardes. A nest of cowards. You smoke your purple cigarette with the gold tip and blow smoke through your nostrils like a dragon would, but you are a small, wasted goat of a man, I suspect one that has a very small penis and cojones the size of smoked oysters. Do you torture the woman because she rejected you? I have a feeling that may well be the case. A man like you was never intended to touch a woman of quality. Look at her, then look at yourself. She is beautiful and pure, but the people who smuggle your dope and know you say your whores call you a human tampon. These are not my words but Negrito’s. He has a terrible fate designed for the comunista with the perfumed cigarette. That is what Negrito calls you, Señor Goat Man.”
Five men stood in a circle around the woman. Two of them had taken off their shirts; they both had hair on their backs and large hands and jugheads and ears, the light from the bare bulb over the stairs yellow on their shoulders. Sholokoff stood directly in front of the woman, seemingly oblivious to Krill’s taunting, sucking on his cigarette, blowing the smoke on the ash so the tip glowed a bright orange in the gloom.
“Noie Barnum made sketches of the drone,” Krill said. “I have them hidden in Durango. I can take you to them.”
“You missed the bus, greaseball,” Frank said.
“Don’t abuse the woman further, Señor Sholokoff,” Krill said. “I am the one you want. I am the one who can increase your riches.”
“How’d you like a can of Drano poured down your throat?” Frank said.
Through the ground-level window on the far side of the cellar, Krill could see a dirt road winding through the fields and rain starting to fall on a line of white hills and a flatbed truck and another vehicle coming down the road toward the compound, a rooster tail of dust rising behind each, the electricity in the clouds flicking like snakes’ tongues, forked and sharp, without sound.
“Señor Sholokoff, your employees have been screwing you behind your back, conspiring against you in order to hide their incompetence,” Krill said.
“What’s he saying?” Sholokoff said to Frank.
“Mike let the half-breed have a spoon to eat with and didn’t get it back,” Frank said. “The guy was probably working on the lock with it.”
“Where is the spoon now?” Sholokoff said, lowering his cigarette from his mouth.
“I don’t know, sir. He isn’t going anywhere,” Frank said.
“You’ve decided that, have you?”
“It’s not a big deal, sir. I’m taking care of it.”
“Not only do you make decisions for me, you also decide whether or not I should know about them?”
Krill could see the rain sweeping across the fields in a gray line, dimming the hills in the background, the flatbed and an SUV behind it turning off the road into an
unfenced pasture, the drivers circling behind a pecan orchard.
“You hear something?” Mike said.
“No,” Frank said.
“I thought I heard a car,” Mike said.
“It’s thundering in the hills,” Frank said.
“Señor Sholokoff, listen to me when I tell you I have the plans for the drone,” Krill said. “I can be a very valuable employee to you. Your men are worthless. Look at them. They cannot think. They hide like children from their responsibilities. I retract my insults, señor. They were said in hot blood. We are both businessmen and need to behave as such, without rancor, without pissants like these to obstruct us.”
“You shut the fuck up,” Frank said.
“No, it’s you who needs to be silent, Frank,” Sholokoff said, glancing over his shoulder at the ground-level window. “I heard a car or truck. Look out the window, Craig.”
One of the men standing closest to the far wall rose on his tiptoes to see outside. “There’s a flatbed truck out by the pecan trees,” he said. “It’s probably some of your field hands.”
“They’re not supposed to be there,” Sholokoff said.
“It’s some peons, sir. I can see one of them,” Craig said.
“Mike, you get the spoon back from the man in the cell,” Sholokoff said. “The rest of you come upstairs with me.”
“Sir, the woman is about to break,” Frank said. “I got everything under control. I’ll check around outside if you want, but don’t ease up now.”
“You received a phone call earlier. Who was that from?”
“A gal I met in the cantina,” Frank replied. “I told her not to call while I was working.”
“A girl from the cantina? You are always thinking about your appetites, Frank. Do you never think about the man who took you off a porn set and made a soldier out of you? Do you have no gratitude for the life I’ve given you—the women, the power, the money?”
“Sir, I got on the cantina gal’s case. I want to prove myself to you. Leave me with the Chinese broad. Trust me, you’ll have everything you need when you come back downstairs.”