The Librarian Her Daughter and the Man Who Lost His Head
Page 25
She didn’t move. She was embarrassed.
I looked at her. “What’s the matter?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
I smiled. I waved a hand, “Go. Find a bush.”
She hesitated.
“What?”
“I don’t have any toilet paper,” she said.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I took the knife and cut off a piece of my shirt. I handed it to her.
“Here.”
She took it, but wouldn’t look at me. I turned my back and went into the palo verde. I sat, my back to her. I heard her moving away. A few minutes later she was back. She came and sat next to me. We sat silently for a long time.
The day moved slowly. I calculated how long it would take Blackhawk to get from the El Patron to us. A half hour to prep. At least two hours to drive to Cottonwood. Another hour to our area. Call it four hours. I pushed a stick into the earth and we watched the shadow creep around it.
After a while, Megan leaned against me and went to sleep. When I calculated enough time had passed, I roused her.
“I’m going to look around,” I said. She mumbled something, stretched out on the ground and lay her head on her arm. I moved silently out of the cover. I worked my way up the knoll.
Again, I crawled to the top. The red truck was gone. The air had warmed and was clear. I could see a long way. Suddenly, there was crashing movement in the brush by the big wash. A huge bull came hustling out of the brambles and scrambled down into the wash, then across toward me. Behind him came five cows and two calves, the calves skittish and spooked. They crashed through the brush without thought of staying in the cattle track. I watched. A minute later six men came out of the brush and stood on the bank of the wash. They wore black niqabs. They carried automatic rifles. They stood for a long time, then they started across. They disappeared in the brush on this side. I watched for a long moment, then turned and looked all around. The desert stretched out toward the distant mountains. There was a hawk gliding in circles, so far off he was but a dot.
In the far distance behind me, I saw dust. Could be a vehicle. Could be a dust devil. I watched that area for a long moment. If it wasn’t Blackhawk, I hoped it was a dust devil.
I went back down. Megan was sitting up.
“We have to move,” I said.
“Why?”
“We are going to have company.” I took her hand and pulled her up.
Her face was pale and pinched with fear. Her hair was matted and her face was smudged. Her hands were filthy.
“Is it those guys?”
I put an arm around her. “Yes, it is.” I wasn’t going to lie to her. “We have to move. I have to find you a safe place to hide.”
“What are you going to do?”
“The best I can. Let’s get you safe.”
Pulling her along, I moved us quickly across the desert floor. At the bottom of the slope the brush and the cactus were thicker. Fed by runoff. We had gone about two hundred yards when we came upon a very small wash. More of a depression than a wash. Caused by the occasional heavy rains running downhill. It was shallow and had brush on its sides. I had her lie down in it. From ten yards away she couldn’t be seen. She didn’t like it. She sat up.
“I want to stay with you.”
“It will be more dangerous if you do. I’ll be back soon.”
“What if you’re not?”
“If I’m not here in two hours, start walking east.” I pointed. “That way. You will eventually hit a road. But I’ll be back.”
She looked like she would cry. “How will I know when two hours is up?”
“You’ll know.” I squatted down and looked at her. “You are doing fine. You’ve been great. You’ve been tough. Just hang tough and I’ll be back.”
“I’m scared,” she said.
“I know, honey. Lie down. I’ll be back.”
She reluctantly lay down and I moved away quickly before anything changed.
I angled back to the crazy cactus. If Eddie and Blackhawk got the message, this is where they would come.
I got back to the palo verdes, and worked my way behind a thicket of creosote. I squatted low and tried to blend in. I was like that a long time. My mouth and jaw were throbbing. My thigh had stiffened and I could feel the hurt with every beat of my pulse. I was a little dizzy.
I tried the meditation techniques I had been taught. I thought of my capture instructions, how to keep the mind on the right things. After a while, I decided I was losing the mental exercise when I heard a man pushing through a thicket of thorns and brush. He was thirty yards off, and to my left. He was cursing under his breath. I pulled the K-Bar out of my belt. I didn’t move. I wanted him close enough I could take him out quickly. He pushed through the brambles a few feet away, and stepped into the open.
It was Eddie. He was carrying a backpack and a rifle. I stepped out. He started, bringing the rifle up. He broke into a big wide grin. Mine matched his. I sensed movement behind me and I whirled, and Blackhawk stepped out of the brush a few feet away.
“What the hell took you?” I said.
“We stopped for a couple of beers. I figured you had this under control.” He stepped to me and wrapped his arms around me and gave me a bear hug. He looked into my face.
“Jesus, you look like hell.”
“I’ve told you not to call me Jesus.”
67
I led them to the girl. When I called her name, she came up out of the brush with a squeal and ran to Eddie. She threw her arms around him. We didn’t have time for celebration. We hurried her back to the vehicles. A truck and Nacho’s Jeep. The truck was Billy’s. I figured we had less than a half hour before the men I had seen came over the knoll. Nacho stood beside his Jeep with a sawed- off shotgun. He was trying to rub the Arizona pinstriping off the Jeep. That’s what happens when you run a vehicle through the desert with the creosote and desert thorn digging at its sides.
Nacho grinned at me. He studied my face, cocking his head one way then the other.
“At least it wasn’t your foot, this time,” he said.
“Just good luck,” I said. I looked at Eddie. “Get the girl back to her mama.” I turned to Nacho. “You have a phone, let the girl call her mama. You go with them, in case there’s trouble.”
Megan came to me and wrapped her arms around me. She buried her face into my chest and hugged me tight. It didn’t affect me at all. Tough guy.
She looked up at me. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure, honey. Blackhawk and I are going to talk that over.”
“Let’s get going, honey,” Eddie said. He opened the Jeep door.
Megan moved her arms to around my neck and squeezed her face against mine. I winced.
She pulled back. “Does that hurt?” she said, concerned.
“Naw,” I lied.
She climbed in the back and ran the window down. “What are you really going to do?”
I smiled. “We thought maybe we’d go talk with those guys. Get ’em to surrender.”
Nacho and Eddie climbed into the front. Nacho started the engine.
Megan was still looking at me. As they started moving, she had Nacho’s phone and was staring at it. She held it out the window at me. “Signal,” she shouted.
Blackhawk and I watched the Jeep move out of sight.
Blackhawk said, “So much for stealth.”
“Tough girl,” I said.
He was looking at my face.
“That hurt?”
“Like a son-of-a-bitch.”
I looked into the back of the pickup. There was a large, army-issued duffle bag. It appeared to be full. “Whatcha got?”
He opened the tailgate, and pulled the bag onto it. He unzipped it. He handed me some camo clothes. I stripped down and put them on while he pulled more out of the bag. In the daylight, my thigh was a mixture of saffron, yellow and purple. I pulled the trousers up and resolved not to think about it anymore.
“How’s my Mustang?” I said.
He didn’t look at me. “You don’t have a Mustang.”
He had filled canteens. I strapped the ammo belt around me, and hooked on the canteen.
He looked down. “Your feet okay? I didn’t take time to stop at the boat for the hiking foot.”
I shrugged. “Been okay so far.”
He pulled a first aid kit out of the bag. He opened a pack of ibuprofen and I swallowed all of them.
“You going to make it?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Sure you just don’t want to wait for the cavalry?”
“I’m sure,” I said. “They’ll be gone.” I thumbed shells into the shotgun. It was a pump with a seven-shell extension tube on it.
He snapped a clip into the Spikes, and slung on a small backpack.
“You know where they are?”
With a nod, I indicated the knoll I had spotted them from. “On the other side of that hill.”
“How much time do we have?”
“If they are coming straight over, not much.”
“What’s the plan?”
I looked around. “I figure they’re following the same cattle track I was. The ground was soft so they’ll see our tracks. Let’s move the truck into some brush, then double time up the hill. Get the high ground.
68
He backed the truck into a thicket of eight-foot high brush. You’d have to be right in front of it to see it. I turned for the hill, and he followed. It was possible that they could beat us to the top, and if they did we would be in for it.
We hustled up, thinking more about speed than quiet. We reached the crest without incident, and I dropped to the ground with Blackhawk beside me. We crawled until we could see the wash below. There was no one in sight. No one. I was so sure I would see them, I shut my eyes, then opened them, expecting a change. No one.
Blackhawk slid back so he couldn’t be seen, then went up on his knees. He dropped the backpack strap off one shoulder and slung it around. He opened the flap and pulled out a pair of ten power Nikon binoculars. He crawled back up beside me. He methodically scanned the area.
He was looking to our left when he said, “There.”
I looked to where he was looking. I didn’t see anything. He handed me the binoculars.
“Along the wash where it begins to split out.”
Then I saw them. Or at least, two of them. They were moving away from us and they were moving quickly. I handed him the binoculars and he slid them into the backpack.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We slid back out of sight, then began moving quickly to the south. I had no idea where they were going, but I knew we had to catch them. If they disappeared into this desert, and had transportation, they could quickly disappear into the world. Once in the world, they could raise all kinds of hell.
We skittered along the side of the rise for several hundred yards, then the ground began to dip and rise into a series of rocky hills. These were the foothills that would eventually lead up into the mountains. The ground was littered with basalt volcanic rock. A million years ago, volcanoes had ripped and formed this land. It made the footing treacherous. We kept pushing. Every few minutes Blackhawk would slow down to let me catch up.
Since I wasn’t sure where they were headed, I wanted to get our eyes on them again. When we came to a steep rise I moved us straight up till we reached a very steep outcropping. We kept very low, and edged up to the top. We peered around a very large basalt boulder. You could see a long way. Down below us, a hundred yards away, there were buildings. And corrals. The corral gates were open. In one of the corrals was a large stilted water tank. On the ground below it was a four-feet high, oval metal cattle tank. It had water in it. The ground in the corrals was covered with cattle dung. There were no cows in sight. The buildings were old and rickety and looked more like ruined barns than houses. Boards were busted out and you could see the light from the other side. On the back side of the buildings the land was steep and covered with brush and cactus. This place wasn’t for living. It was what the rancher used at round up.
Inside one of the buildings there was shadowy movement. Then one of them showed us why they were there. He pushed an ATV out into the sunshine.
“They take off on those and they are gone,” I said.
“Then we have to hit them now. Let’s go at them from the back side,” Blackhawk said softly.
He pushed himself up and began to move quickly down and around. I followed. We kept higher ground between us and them, and began to move as fast as we could. When we calculated we were behind the buildings, we began scrambling up the basalt hill. We were in the right place. The buildings were just below us. We went over the top and came down the other side. We were shielded by mesquite and heavy brush. The corrals were strung with barbed wire. Keeping the buildings between us and where the men would be, Blackhawk held the wire as I slipped through. Then his turn. We carefully slid up to the side of the building and listened. There were cracks between some of the wall boards and I peered in. It was empty, but I could see the men, now out into the corral. We could hear one of the ATVs start.
I looked at Blackhawk and he shrugged. He jacked the first round into the Spikes. I pumped a shell in. He winked at me, then went around his corner. I went around mine. Two angles of fire, and surprise evened the odds.
All six men were gathered by the metal tank next to three ATVs. I didn’t look to my left at Blackhawk. I knew he was there. Two of the men were on ATVs. One was Atef. The man standing to the left was tall with a scraggly beard that barely covered a prominent Adam’s apple. To his left stood a short stocky man. His beard was as scraggly as the first guy. The other two were rinsing their faces in the water tank. At least they had decent beards.
Adam’s apple caught sight of Blackhawk from the corner of his eye, and began to turn.
“Which one of you guys is Ike Clanton?” I said.
Adam’s apple raised his weapon, and Blackhawk shot him. He crumpled. Just melted to the ground. I was at a park once watching nine, ten-year old boys playing army with toy guns. They had divided into two groups and were waging war. It wasn’t about winning the shoot-out, it was about who could get shot the most dramatically. Flopping and tumbling, like the movies. Real life wasn’t like that.
The guy just crumpled, and then Blackhawk shot the stocky guy. Down he went.
Atef was quick. He took off so fast the ATV did a wheelie. I fired from the hip and the right rear tire blew. The machine dumped on its side. He hit the ground rolling and rolled behind the water tank. I pumped another shell in and shot one of the bathers. This was like the movies. The buckshot hit him hard and he went into the tank with a big splash. I pumped another round in.
The last one standing charged me. He was digging his pistol out of the holster, and screaming at the top of his lungs. I shot him in the chest and the force of his momentum spun him and he crumpled at my feet. I pumped a round in. Now there was just Atef.
His hands were in the air as he climbed to his feet.
“I surrender,” he shouted. “Don’t shoot, I surrender.”
Blackhawk and I walked forward. We stopped with the cattle tank, with the body in it, between us and him.
“How about that U.S. military training?” I said.
Atef was silent, but he didn’t look scared.
Blackhawk said to me, “What now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it.” I moved farther to my right. “We take him in and then there’s a big trial and he gets to run his mouth all over the media, and the whole world sees it. They’ll drag Megan through their media shit.”
“He’ll be a big time hero. A big time martyr,” Blackhawk said. “He’ll be the ISIS poster boy.”
>
“Yeah, their A number-one recruiter. Incite hundreds more just like him.”
“I have surrendered,” Atef said. “You have to take me in.”
I looked at him. His eyes were black, expressionless like a snake. I didn’t see one glint of humanity.
“Why did you cut Dick Mooney’s head off?”
He was silent, then he shrugged, “He had a loud mouth. He was a cretin. He was worthless to me. He made good practice.”
Blackhawk made a noise, deep in his throat.
“How about the other guy? You took his hand off.”
“He was a thief. It is the law.”
“What did you do to the girl?”
“I did nothing to her,” he said.
I shook my head, “I don’t know. It looked like you were going to cut her head off. You remember that? I remember that. What were you going to do? Have a little fun with her before you killed her?”
Atef frowned. “You Americans are soft. Allah gave us women to use. They cook our food. They have our babies. They wash our clothes. They are inferior to men. That is all. She is cattle. We didn’t expect her to be with you. But she was. Then the girl belonged to me. She was mine, to do with as I wish.”
“You speak of Allah, but you are a Godless fuck.”
He put his hands down and looked at me with scorn. “What do you know of God?” He shook his head. “You know nothing. You are infidels, born of whores, and raised like rats.”
I looked at Blackhawk. He stood, in his quiet way, looking at Atef.
“I was taught that God made all of us,” I said. “Including rats and whores. And, unfortunately, men like you.”
He spit on the ground.
“But, my Dad taught me that even though God loved all his creatures it was our moral duty to fight and stop evil when we can. I asked how he knew this and he said God talks to all good men. All you have to do is listen hard enough. Maybe you should have a few more discussions with God.”
“I’ll arrange the meeting,” Blackhawk said, and shot him.
The bullet sliced through him and Atef looked completely shocked. His hand went to the entry wound. He looked at Blackhawk, his eyes wide with surprise. Then he collapsed. He was dead before he hit the ground.