Light Before Day

by Christopher Rice

  The guy cackled. "I pop wood for a nice set of tits, kid, and from the look of things, you ain't got any. Whaddya say? I betcha your mom don't pay shit for all the work you do trying to cover her ass in there."

  The guy's face was almost as long as his mane of wiry silver hair, and his eyes were sunken below the bridge of a nose that resembled an upturned shark's fin. His lips were so cracked it seemed he'd been sucking the exhaust from a tail pipe. The truth was, Eddie bussed a few tables and took the trash out without his mother asking him to, and each time he did it, he hoped she would give him something more than a strained smile.

  "Good money, kid," the guy said. "All you gotta do is clean up after a few friends of mine.

  All cash. None of that IRS bullshit." Eddie heard a tinge of desperation in the guy's voice, knew something wasn't quite right with his manic movements and darting eyes. "Come on, kid. This is a sweet deal I'm offering. Get in and let's discuss the particulars."

  Eddie envisioned how the rest of his night would play out if he didn't go with the man. He'd kill time faking his way through his homework in the diner's kitchen. Every now and then his mother would come in, lay her hands on his shoulders, let out a long, pained sigh, and depart, as if her son could offer nothing more than a split-second reprieve from the world outside, including a sister who was always either newly pregnant, recovering from an abortion, or screwing up someone's order. Close to closing time, the pharmacist from down the block would stumble in, a few drinks on his breath, and Eddie would be forced to listen as the guy flirted with his mother, his comments becoming more lewd as the others diners departed. Then on the ride home, his mother and his sister would find something to fight about, something that would leave his sister in hysterical tears and his mother cursing a father Eddie had never met.

  "I've got a switchblade in my pocket," Eddie told the wasting rancher. "Try anything fruit and I'll get serious with it."

  As Eddie climbed into the truck, the man cackled and clapped his hands together as if he were keeping time to machine gun fire. "That's the spirit, kid. That mouth we'll have to put a muzzle on, but your spirit's A-okay!"

  They were speeding west on Highway 198, into the hills on a route that Eddie's mother had forbidden him to take on his bike. The guy's words came out at the same speed his fingers drummed the steering wheel. He'd had a cattle ranch once but lost it, along with his wife, and he'd killed time drinking whiskey and watching his cows die where they stood. Then the rancher had made some new friends. Important friends. Guys who were very good at what they did and needed a nice secluded spot to let off steam.

  Eddie knew without asking that the rancher was afraid of these new friends, afraid in the same quiet and supposedly respectful way that his mother was afraid of a God who answered her prayers with a headache or a car accident.

  Just as night fell over the inner Coast Ranges, the rancher turned onto a road lined with a rotted cattle fence. Eddie saw a single trailer uphill a little ways from a large barn with a cathedral window over the front door. They jerked to a stop right next to a battered trailer surrounded by the stalks of dead trees. Several yards away lay the burned-out crater where a small house had once stood. Just then the guy's hand brushed Eddies shoulder, and he jumped a foot off his seat. The guy cackled and reached past Eddie for the glove compartment.

  Eddie watched as the guy removed a small glass pipe and a plastic bag full of white rocks stained slightly yellow. Loading the pipe gave the man a sudden focus, and when he spoke, it was with the patient and even voice of a schoolteacher: "You come up here on the weekends and you stay here. Tell your mom you're at a friend's house or something. Come Sunday you get a hundred bucks cash."

  "What do I have to do for it?" Eddie asked, his voice shaky and his heart turbocharged.

  "The minute you see an empty beer bottle hit a table, you pick it up. One of these guys spits in your direction, you get a rag and start wiping." The guy pressed several white rocks into the glass pipe with one thumb; then he shook it with one wrist. "Every now and then they'll bring in some bitch and get rough with her. If it gets bloody, make sure she's cleaned up after they're done with her. Maybe talk sweet to her or something."

  His pipe loaded, the rancher met Eddie's eyes, and Eddie saw there was a strange fire in them fueled by anticipation and fear. "Call 'em all sir. They're all fucking wetbacks, so they'll love that shit. Especially coming from a little gringo like you. Not senor, 'cause then they'll think you're fucking with 'em."

  Before he could stop himself, Eddie said, "These guys aren't really your friends, are they?"

  The rancher pressed his feet against the floor and straightened himself, holding his pipe up in one hand as he dug in his pants pocket with the other. He pulled out a lighter and smiled at it.

  Suddenly the rancher seemed to remember Eddie was sitting next to him.

  "And you don't sleep," the rancher said. He lit the pipe and gave it a long deep kiss.

  When he extended the pipe toward Eddie, Eddie frowned at it. He had some vague notion of what was inside of it, but some cruel instinct in him, as natural as his thirst for water, told him that he couldn't possibly know or judge what was inside the pipe until it was inside his lungs.

  During the long nights that would follow, when his fingernails bled because he spent hours on end cleaning the windows, or with his bones trembling as he cowered on the floor of a drunk tank, Eddie Cairns would come up with lots of different reasons for why he took the pipe without asking what was inside it.

  He took it because he had buckteeth and chicken legs. Because when his sister came home pregnant by another man, he felt what could only be described as jealousy. Because no matter how tough he tried to be, the sound of a backfiring car made him clutch his heart looking for a bullet hole. Because when his mother moved a piece of furniture several inches to the left, he was overcome by a paralyzing sense of dread and a desperate urge to tell his mother how he felt without having her laugh at him.

  Eddie Cairns took the pipe because no matter how hard he tried not to, he still saw things other people did not: fissures, phantoms, and blood. Lately he had started to suspect that all the people around him had trained themselves not to see these things, but for some reason, they had deemed Eddie unworthy of learning their tricks.

  When Eddie brought the pipe to his mouth, the rancher took his lighter and applied its guttering flame to the bowl. Eddie saw the white rocks light up around the edges. He inhaled. He watched the orange glow fringe the red rocks inside the glass pipe and then spread to the fields outside and the ridges of the mountains. The strands of low clouds passing high above the truck revealed the strange energy inside themselves by dragging some of it across Eddie's skin.

  Then the rancher said, "Suck it in, son. The spiders will be here soon."

  At least ten men came to the barn that night: the ringleader, a bald and portly man with cue ball eyes named Eduardo Velasquez, a man who controlled a large chunk of the Central Valley meth trade, and his small posse of meth cooks, runners, and street dealers, the starry-eyed young boys who had come up from Mexico to brew a drug that reduced houses to craters, men to jackals, and mothers to murderers.

  The rancher had provided them with enough Corona to keep them singing badly for days on end, and a stereo system with surround speakers mounted on the ceiling. The barn still had some of its cattle stalls, and the men were using one to take turns with an emaciated, groaning prostitute.

  Eddie had spent most of the evening doing exactly what the rancher had told him to, but now his teeth felt like they were crumbling in his mouth, and his skin was lacquered with a noxious sweat. He needed a three-hour shower and another hit from the rancher's pipe.

  He was about to find the rancher and ask for both when the double doors to the barn rolled open. Right away, Eddie knew the two guys at the entrance didn't belong there. Worse, they had made no attempt to blend in. Both men wore black jeans, black T-shirts, and leather jackets that looked oddly lumpy in the che
st and shoulders. Each one had a black motorcycle helmet clipped to the side of his belt.

  The first one to step inside the barn had a husky frame, a square head with black steel-wool hair, and a flattened nose. He breathed hard at the scene in front of him like an angry bull. His partner was taller and slender, one of the prettiest guys Eddie had ever seen. His dark hair fell to his shoulders from a part down the middle. He had a dimple in his chin, and his slanted green eyes betrayed no emotion. Neither of them looked old enough to be out of high school.

  Right away, Eddie knew there was going to be trouble, so he backed into one of the empty cattle stalls, just several doors down from where the men were going to town on their whore. His first thought was that the strangers had come to use or rescue the prostitute, but Eddie watched in astonishment as the two men moved to the center of the barn, met chest to chest, and started a slow, out-of-synch waltz to the piercing cries of Celia Cruz.

  Eduardo Velasquez stepped forward first. Eddie watched him approach the swaying couple like a restaurant manager summoned to a rowdy table. When Eduardo called out to the men over the music, Eddie heard the steady confidence of a man who was sure his violence could fix any situation in due time. But the two men didn't react to him.

  Eddie expected someone to kill the music. No one did. As they stepped forward from the stall, a few of the men started to laugh as if they had figured out the whole thing was a prank and were just waiting for their boss to get the joke.

  "El Maricon!" Eduardo shouted.

  Suddenly the shorter man spun his dancing partner out, long enough for the pretty boy's slanted green eyes to meet Eduardo's. He gave a sudden smile. That's when Eduardo reached for the pistol on his belt. No one else saw what was coming—no one besides Eddie Cairns. If they had, the two men would have been shot dead on the spot and hell would have stayed where it belonged for at least another night.

  Again the shorter man spun his dancing partner out toward Eduardo. Eduardo pulled his gun from its holster just as the pretty boy reached up to the top of his back with his free hand and found a grip on something buried under his leather jacket.

  The next thing Eddie knew, Eduardo Velasquez had fired his gun into the air and was stumbling backward, his knees buckling. The pretty boy returned a bloody machete to its hidden holster. Then he and his partner ripped their motorcycle helmets from their belts, put them on, and sank to their knees. Eduardo hit the floor on his back, a gushing red line down the center of his face, between eyes as big as eggs.

  Eddie heard the commotion several stalls down as the other men leapt to their feet and crawled over one another. The two strangers stayed right where they were, on their knees, their gloved hands clasped in front of their chests.

  Just as the men started to rush them, there was a sound like a giant whip cracking across the roof of the barn. Pieces of glass from the giant cathedral window tore through the air like a swarm of locusts, driving the other men to their stomachs, to their knees, their faces laced with blood and stripped flesh. His ears ringing, Eddie saw shards of glass impaled on the walls of the stall just above his feet. He expected a fire but none came. The explosion had been all sound and force. His back pressed to the rear of the stall, Eddie watched as the two strangers got to their feet and surveyed the bodies all around them. The duo was unscathed, thanks to the helmets and whatever body armor had given their clothes a bad fit.

  The strangers went to work. They moved from man to man, lifting each by the back of the head or rolling them over onto their stomachs if they needed to, then swinging their machetes high and leaving long lateral slashes down each man's back. By the time they were finished, the ten men were rag dolls, their limbs twitching, eyes bulging, and jaws quivering. Incapacitated but alive.

  Eddie realized that if the strangers weren't killing the men outright, their work was not over.

  Without a word to his partner, the shorter, thicker man walked out of the barn, ripping his motorcycle helmet off as he went. The pretty boy stayed behind, surveying from behind the visor of his black helmet the writhing limbs all around him.

  As soon as the man outside turned his back to Eddie, the boy took off. He could feel the stranger's eyes fall on his back, but he kept running, past the parked cars and past the spot where the old rancher lay, his throat a red grin. Expecting the husky guy to jump out at any minute from behind a fence or truck, Eddie fled up the rutted road in the direction of the highway.

  When he was almost to the highway turnoff, Eddie looked back. In the distance, a flickering white glow lit up the interior of the shattered cathedral window. The tall stranger stood in the doorway to the barn, his helmet raised above his head in a gesture of farewell to him. That's when Eddie Cairns realized that they had known he was there all along and had allowed him to run because he had borne witness.

  Caroline pressed Stop on the tape recorder and got to her knees. She took one of Eddie's trembling hands in hers and leaned in toward his sobbing face. It sounded like she was saying soothing things to the man.

  I stumbled into the clearing, focusing on the leaves that scattered at my feet in the weak wind and the gray-blue luminescence the slanting sunlight gave to the valley oaks all around me.

  Eddie Cairns had described a slaughter that bled revenge. A young man who answered the description of Reynaldo Reyez had slaughtered the drug lord who had torn apart Reynaldo Reyez's family.

  I heard a snap of twigs behind me. Caroline's face was flushed, her freckles almost crimson.

  "Eduardo Velasquez was found beheaded in an irrigation ditch when Eddie Cairns was sixteen years old," she said.

  "Burned?" I asked.

  "Eddie didn't say they burned Velasquez's body," she responded. "Eddie said they set fire to the barn after the kid ran for it. Eddie's story has been floating around for years. He just gave us the definitive version."

  "Definitive?" I asked. "Directional explosives that don't combust? Body armor under black leather suits? That's not definitive, Caroline. That's illustrative."

  "Eddie Cairns just told us that he saw a man who looks just like Reynaldo Reyez murder Eduardo Velasquez. Do you believe him or not?"

  "Yes," I answered. "Rut I think he got the rest of it out of a comic book." Amid all the gory, impossible details, the part of Eddie's story that had affected me the most was his description of his own addictions and the insanity they had visited upon him at such a young age. This, above all else, convinced me that there had been truth in his nightmare.

  "Eduardo Velasquez," I said. "How big a story was his murder?"

  "I remember it made the nightly news up in San Francisco," she said. "I think there was an article in the Chronicle, too."

  Joseph Spinotta had lived and worked in California for most of his life. According to the file Jimmy had assembled on the man, Spinotta had been working for tech firms in Silicon Valley six years earlier. It was possible that he had heard the story of Velasquez's murder, maybe even some mention of the killer they called El Maricon. A gay assassin surely would have caught the interest of a man like Joseph Spinotta.

  Later, when Martin Cale told Spinotta the tragic tale of his nephew's romance with a young man named Reynaldo Reyez, whose family had been destroyed by the brutally murdered drug lord Eduardo Velasquez, Spinotta had asked to meet with Corey. Had Spinotta made the connection I just had? Had he figured out that Corey's boyhood lover had turned into an assassin visiting a bloody revenge against the drug network that had destroyed his family?

  Somehow Reynaldo Reyez had ended up working for Joseph Spinotta, and it was Corey who got him the job. Reynaldo Reyez, also known as El Maricon, had become Joseph's supplier. That might explain why the meeting between Spinotta and Corey had been such a secret. Spinotta would not even give his kept boy the location of their hideout. It made sense that he wouldn't tell Billy about the dangerous assassin he had employed.

  "Your boy's been hired out," I finally said. "By a guy named Joseph Spinotta."

  She wasn't impressed.
It was still my turn. "Let him go and I'll tell you the rest."

  "Who?" she asked.

  "Eddie!"

  She recoiled, then put her hands on her hips. "What did you think I was going to do with him?"

  "I didn't ask that question for a reason, Caroline." She rolled her eyes and walked back inside the barn. I felt foolish for having judged her. I was now in pursuit of a man whose operation was larger and bloodier than I had imagined. If Reynaldo Reyez was actually involved in this operation, then someone—either Corey or Spinotta—had lied to him. But if I was going to find him, I needed Caroline Hughes and all her rage.

  Chapter 18

  We left the Coast Ranges behind without saying a word to each other. Caroline turned left on Highway 33 and headed toward Avenal, the reverse of the route I had followed her on. Eddie Cairns lay under a tarp in the cargo bay. He was not a free man yet, which meant I didn't have to tell Caroline squat.

  I tried to imagine the lunch between Spinotta and Corey. I tried to write the scene the way James Wilton would.

  Corey is still shattered from Melissa Brady's betrayal and his exile from the Marine Corps.

  Barely out of his twenties, he has returned to Los Angeles a broken man. Suddenly a wealthy and charismatic businessman like Spinotta wants to meet with him in private for no apparent reason.

  Spinotta starts in gradually on the topic of Reynaldo Reyez, luring the story out of Corey piece by piece. Then Spinotta starts his pitch. He dreams of lifting young children out of the kind of squalor and abuse that Corey was raised in. Does Corey know anyone who can help him make this dream a reality? Corey buys into this lie and agrees to put Spinotta in touch with Reynaldo Reyez.

  Reynaldo the assassin and Joseph the pedophile probably communicate entirely by phone, each one unwilling to reveal his identity to the other. Joseph repeats the same lie he gave to Corey: He wants to give kids who are being denied every chance a new shot at life. A new identity.

  Reynaldo Reyez believed he was delivering the abused children of meth addicts into a new and better life. But the truth was far different. Joseph Spinotta was taking possession of these young boys and profiting from their sexual violation.