by Nick Petrie
They passed a big church standing in the center of an empty cracked asphalt parking lot, long narrow driveways that disappeared into the trees, and cultivated fields growing low green crops Peter couldn’t name.
After a mile, the asphalt stopped with a bump and the road turned to gravel. Lewis checked his mirror and pulled over. “Time to suit up.” He popped the rear hatch.
From one of his leather duffels, he removed a pair of thick tactical vests and tossed one to Peter.
It was a desert-camo plate carrier, just like he’d worn in Iraq. The weight of it was comforting.
“You couldn’t have given me this when I went to talk to Mrs. Carruthers?”
“I didn’t think she’d have Dirty Harry’s Magnum in her apron,” Lewis said. “Anyway, wearing that vest, she wouldn’t have said a thing to you. What we’re up against now, this is different.”
“Plus June will beat your ass if I get shot.”
“Like a redheaded stepchild. I do not want that woman mad at me.”
They put sidearm holsters on their belts, then pulled the vests over their T-shirts and checked each other. Peter snapped mag pouches in the same old places and loaded two extras for both the Beretta and the HK. He adjusted the sling on the assault rifle. His T-shirt was already soaked through in the dense afternoon sun.
It was all so fucking familiar. He found himself smiling.
“You think a hundred thirty-five rounds is enough?”
“If it ain’t, we’re screwed, blued, and tattooed. Although I admit I wouldn’t mind a grenade launcher.”
“You know this is a bad idea, right? Just the two of us?”
“Yep,” Lewis said. “You want to wait for the county mounties?”
“Hell, no. I want to get this done.”
Lewis closed the hatch and they took their places in the Yukon.
* * *
• • •
Slower now, they looked at the addresses on the mailboxes posted like sentries at the ends of weedy dirt driveways. Windows down, the heat so thick it was almost liquid. The fields were calm and utterly still, the only wind that of their passing. A dust plume followed behind and settled slowly like a fungus on the green growing leaves.
They found the address on a dented red mailbox beside a modest new building on the road. Metal roof and siding, a small loading dock, a massive air conditioner, and a small sign, red letters on a white background. FERAL HOG ERADICATION AND MEAT PROCESSING.
There were no cars in the gravel lot. Lewis looked at Peter, who shook his head. Lewis turned up the driveway that threaded past the building. They drove up a low hill and into the trees.
Lewis stopped at the crest in the deep lingering shadow of towering oaks and elms and walnuts. Fifty meters on, a clapboard farmhouse stood tall and narrow across a broad weed-and-gravel patch from a fieldstone barn with its big door partway open. Past the farmyard the trees opened up, showing small, neatly tended fields just beyond.
Lewis turned off the Yukon. The sound of the natural world returned. Insects, bird calls.
They heard no radio, or engine, or machine noise of any kind.
Peter looked through binoculars he’d taken from the glove compartment. The house windows were open, but there was no visible movement. Beside the house was a red Ford Fiesta with rusted-out door panels. An old round-fendered stake-side flatbed truck sat parked by the barn, probably the Mack that Gantry had mentioned. A steel hand-crank crane was bolted to the back bumper, and the rear planks were dark and layered with the unmistakable stains of old blood.
“Both the vehicles we know about are here,” Peter said.
Lewis held out his hand for the binoculars. “We should have gotten out at the road.”
“If we had a platoon,” said Peter. “Or even a squad.” He looked at his friend. “Last chance before we do something stupid.”
Lewis put the binoculars on the dash and opened his door. “You want to start with the house or the barn?”
Peter walked down the drive and into the open, rifle at low ready, head on a swivel, the taste of copper in his mouth. Sweat trickled through his hair, but he wouldn’t have minded a helmet. This was no way to die. Any asshole with a decent .22 varmint gun could put a round through his head from thirty meters. Now twenty. Ten.
He could feel Lewis to his right, just outside his peripheral vision. Both moving steadily forward.
They went up the outer edges of the porch steps to minimize the creaks. The front door stood wide open. The static climbed up his brainstem like a friendly parasite.
Inside, the heat was like a sauna.
Three rooms on the main floor, three bedrooms upstairs.
A few clean dishes stacked on the kitchen counter. Furniture with flowered cushions from a bygone era. Narrow beds with wrinkled sheets, clothes folded neatly on a dresser. Flies circled frantically in the golden rays of sun through the windows.
Nobody home.
They sprinted across the yard to the barn.
A vintage tractor stood in the main bay, with an antique plow rig and hay baler lined up behind it. Not painted up for show, but good old working machinery. To the side was a workroom with tools left out on a bench and a welder standing by a half-open man door, power cord still plugged in to the wall. Tire ruts deep in the mud outside. Baled hay stacked in the loft. Otherwise empty.
Peter looked out the open loft door toward the fields. A faint track ran down the far side of the hill, past an odd round wire fence enclosure to a modest stand of enormous trees. Through their leaves he could see the angled line of a roof gable.
He climbed down, caught Lewis’s eye, and ran down the track, his boots soft in the weeds, his gear creaking with every step. Lewis circled behind.
It was an ancient barn, mossy roof sunken in, the structure leaning like a drunken uncle. The big door was rolled aside revealing the canary-yellow Country Squire parked in the main bay. It reeked of burnt plastic and cheap beer.
Eyes scanning, Peter side-stepped around the car, but nothing was moving. He glanced down into the car, looking for the steel-plate firing box built into the back seat to protect the gunner, but it was gone. He saw only shattered glass and melted vinyl seats and the holes punched into the side panels by the pistol he’d taken from Charlene.
Where was the steel plate?
He stopped thinking about it when he looked past the car and saw a makeshift table cluttered with tools, metal plumbing parts, snips of thin blue rope, a plastic funnel. A scattering of dark granules. Not what he wanted to see.
Even worse, past the table stood a pair of scraped-up rectangular composite cases. Peter had seen Hardigg cases just like them many times before, in loading bays and armorer’s shops at Marine Corps bases across the world. Cases the military used to ship and store automatic weapons.
They were unlocked but heavy. He flipped the latches and lifted the lid.
M16 carbines, dusty and old, probably slated for disposal like Gantry had said. With the plastic insert, the crate capacity was twelve to a box, but he saw only ten weapons. He tipped back another lid. Beat-up M4s. Again, only ten in a crate meant for twelve.
Thankfully, he didn’t see another big machine gun like the 240, nor did he see any ammo boxes. But you could buy rounds and magazines to fit those carbines at any gun store across the country.
He was searching through the rusty old junk accumulated in the rest of the barn, finding nothing worth worrying about, when Lewis stuck his head through the doorway.
“You better come see this.”
* * *
• • •
Peter smelled it before he saw it. The acrid spent-powder smell of an afternoon at the gun range, but different. With the lack of wind and rain, the odor lingered in the dust and unmown grass.
He passed a heavy homemade picnic table turned on its side like
a barricade. The top was scarred and chipped, with black metal shards stuck deep into the thick wood.
“Over here.” Beyond the table, at the edge of the clump of enormous trees, Lewis stood beside a giant tree stump. It was four feet across, or it had been once. Now it had overlapping circular chunks taken out of it, like giant bites from an angry rodent, and it was scorched dark along with the ground around it. More black metal shards were embedded in the remains.
“Shit,” said Peter. Now he knew the smell. Modern smokeless powder had a cleaner tang than the old black powder used by antique firearm enthusiasts and reenactors. Black powder smelled more sulfury, like brimstone.
With its faster combustion rate, black powder had other uses, too.
Lewis saw the look on his face. “What’d you find inside?”
“The makings for pipe bombs.”
“Remote detonation?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t see any wiring or anything electronic, just cut-off bits of fuse. I think what we see here was a kind of rehearsal. This guy likes to get close.”
Lewis let out a long slow breath. “Then you know where we’ll find them.”
“Yes.” As they ran back to the Yukon, Peter told Lewis about the automatic weapons, the missing steel plate, the welder, and the deep tire tracks. “I don’t know what they’re driving, but we’ll know it when we see it.”
“Jesus.” Lewis reversed at high speed down the long driveway. “What we need is a fucking tank.”
Peter scratched his stubble. “Funny you should bring that up.”
PART 5
47
Skin still sweat-slick from dodging that saltine whose old green truck he’d taken, Eli had slipped through the midnight woods and crossed the river into Frayser on the old railroad bridge.
There were only so many ways across. When you were a skinny black boy without a crew, the tracks could be a good way to travel without people taking notice. He’d gone back and forth to the Lucky Lounge on that rusty bridge many times.
After a long afternoon and night playing for tips on the street, heading back to the empty with a pocketful of singles and his guitar slung over his shoulder, or wrapped in a big plastic garbage bag as protection from the rain, he liked to imagine that he was walking the path of Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, or one of those other great old bluesmen, taking the train to seek their fortune in Chicago or Detroit.
Sometimes, after a night with Dupree and Romeo at the Lucky, with the music they’d made still resounding inside him, he felt like he was one of those bluesmen himself, walking his own path. Wherever it might lead. Maybe even with Nadine at his side.
Not anymore. Now, with his boys dead and gone, and King Robbie and this saltine after him, and his guitar smashed to splinters, walking the tracks felt like the end of everything good and the start of something bad.
He couldn’t stop thinking about what Miss Wanda had said, something that had flipped a switch for Eli. Who benefits?
Now he knew.
King Robbie had somehow got Eli’s daddy put in prison so King could take over.
King had killed Eli’s big brother Baldwin to get him out of the way.
And Baldwin’s dying pushed Eli’s mother into overdose.
Which had killed her.
* * *
• • •
Now, despite what he’d told that saltine about not wanting any part of that other life, Eli felt the anger rise up in him. He wanted to hurt somebody the way they’d hurt him.
He’d thought wrecking that guitar had mattered, but it didn’t. Not anymore. The guitar was the only thing Eli had left in the world because King had already taken away his family. Taken away everything that had really mattered. Turned it all to hell and ruination.
Looked like Eli was going to have to step into his brother Baldwin’s shoes for real.
Do a man’s job. Settle the score.
The only question was how to go about it.
And whether Eli had it in him to do what had to be done.
* * *
• • •
It was hard to walk on the railroad timbers. The spacing was off, he couldn’t take a decent stride. The rounded stones were soft between them, and gave way with dull notes under his sneakers. So he put both feet onto a single steel rail as he sometimes did late at night when nobody was near.
While his conscious mind was focused on managing his balance on that narrow rail, shifting his weight to keep him moving forward, the mathematical part made its deeper calculations. What to do, how to do it.
That little gun Coyo had given him was gone.
First thing, he needed a new one.
The tracks were down low, under bridges, running through a gap in the trees. He ghosted under the busy four-lane, under Whitney Avenue and Frayser Boulevard and behind the houses along Madewell Street. Once he slipped by the Corning Village Apartments and made it past the Steele Street crossing and the Pershing Park Apartments, he was almost back at the empty.
He hoped he’d be safe there. Could still spend the night. Make his plans.
While he walked, the mathematical part kept getting stuck on Miss Wanda, the picture taker. All the gangsters knew Miss Wanda. Her rep was major. She was fearless. Nobody messed with her. With that camera, anywhere Wanda stood was safe ground. What’s more, the gangsters all bragged that you weren’t nobody in the hood until she’d tagged you on her feed.
Even the dead. Wanda didn’t care how they got killed, or what they’d done to end up that way. Wanda knew that the worst bangers still had brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. And most of them hadn’t done nothing near wrong enough to deserve that cold, dark, lonely grave.
She used her feed to keep those dead alive.
So what was Wanda Wyatt doing with that saltine, Peter?
The only answer the mathematical part could find was, maybe that Peter wasn’t such a damn saltine after all.
Eli walked silent up the familiar street and slipped around back of the empty. No sign of King Robbie’s big Mercedes. No sign of Charlene in her low, dark ride. No light peeping through the boarded-up windows. The chairs still stood in a circle in the high grass, where he and Skinny B and Anthony and Coyo had started this damn stupid thing.
They’d ambushed him, sure, and threatened to break his guitar. Not that it mattered now. He should have let them break it, because it was gone anyway, like everything else. At least those boys would still be alive and walking, talking shit like always. Except for Coyo, who never said a thing unless he meant it.
Had it all happened just in the last few days? His shitty idea for a robbery, then taking the man’s truck because Coyo’s crappy car gave out? There it sat, the old green pickup, half-hidden in the overgrown tangle, reminding him of his failure.
The death of his friends.
He knew Skinny B and Anthony were dead. The news had told him as much at the Wet Spot earlier. With all the gunshots and all the cops, he was sure Coyo had to be dead, too. It was the only thing that could have happened.
Now the house would be truly empty.
He wondered if Wanda had ever taken their pictures.
He’d see them in his sleep, he knew. Like he saw his brother, his mother, his father, everyone else who’d been taken away. Damn nightmares, sure, but somehow welcome for all that.
Just to see their faces.
He had a foot on the back stoop when he heard the sound coming through the partly open door. A slow rasp, back and forth, like Dupree with his sandpaper, making rough things smooth. But Eli knew there wasn’t nobody looking to smooth out this rough old house. It was just waiting for the wrecking claw.
Back and forth. Slow and low and unsteady.
Eli put his fingertip on the door and pushed it open.
The rasp came from the living room, darker inside than out. Eli turn
ed on his run-down phone to get some light from the screen.
It was Coyo, laid out flat on the three-legged couch. The slow rasp was his shallow breathing.
In the faint light of the screen, Eli saw the old, plaid couch fabric stained dark.
Coyo was alive. Maybe just barely. But alive.
Eli wanted to cry, but the mathematical part shut it down and shifted gears.
“Coyo.”
There was a hitch in the breathing, then it went back to how it was before. Maybe the breaths took a little longer. That rasp a little deeper.
“It’s Eli. Don’t pretend.”
Coyo didn’t sit up, but his eyes opened, lit like lamps. His whisper was just another rasp. “I’m sorry, Eli. Didn’t have no place else to go.”
Like it was a damn inconvenience. Eli stood over him. Raised the phone so he could see better. Coyo wore the same old cut-off jeans and a white T-shirt turned red and black with blood, wet and dry. His pistol was tucked by his leg where he could reach it.
“You dying?”
“Prob’ly. Shot me three times.”
Maybe a little proud of it, too. As if getting cop-shot was some kind of accomplishment. Damn this neighborhood.
Coyo’s eyes blinked slow. “Anthony make it?”
“Just you and me. We all that’s left.”
His mouth tightened. “You still got the bag?”
“Yeah.”
“Good, good.”
“How’d you get here? I didn’t see a car.”
A faint smile. “I walked. Slid out through that Macy store. Hid in some bushes. Walked some. Hid some, rested. Drank some Cokes. Walked some more.”
“All that way? It’s got to be fifteen or twenty miles.”
Coyo just shrugged with his tired eyes.
It came as no surprise to Eli that a young black man could walk across Memphis, clothes red with blood, and nobody stopped to help or called the police. They probably didn’t even look up from their phones. People like Eli and Coyo were invisible, disposable. Except to each other.
