by Layla Wolfe
“Come on,” said Brick. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. Can you walk?”
“Can you? Help me up. Maybe I can use that two by four as a crutch. Our bikes are parked right down this hill. Course, I only have the key to mine.”
Brick helped Ormond up. “They were holding me prisoner, man. After they shot Lester through the fucking head, I tried to run, and Iceman threatened to shoot me, too. That’s when they put these shackles on me, like some kind of slave in the Deep South. Man! That fucking shrine they had with the dead snakes? Snakes know holy mysteries. I knew this was no good from the start—I just wanted the money. Iceman had me doing the work of five people, can you fucking imagine? Come on. How far is your bike?”
“Can you handle a bike?”
“I rode one…once. Do you think you can sit behind me while I drive it?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. Ow! Look, I had a piece in my hand when the shack exploded. Can you hobble around looking for it?”
“I can try, but don’t you want to get out of here? I think that’s what we should do first, man, maybe call for help for your friend. He seems like a nice guy…”
“Too nice. Look, it was in my hand, then suddenly I’ve got Iceman’s hair in my hand, so it can’t have gone far.”
“Look, I think our top priority should be to get the fuck out of—”
A gunshot out of the RV’s window aimed at a spot between the two men told them all they needed to know.
“See?” cried Brick in a high voice. “He doesn’t want us around either! Let’s get the fuck…out of here…”
Ormond had never been more depressed as he limped downhill, leaning against a teenager in shackles.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ANSON
“You are an interesting man, Anson Dineyazzie.”
We sat at the fold-out kitchen table like two old timers at a state park. Only, the Sinaloan in the fedora had an odor that could knock over a skunk at twenty yards. And he had my piece stuck in the waistband of his rayon pants.
I couldn’t stuff my cynicism inside. “You gonna take me back to your leader?”
“I haven’t figured out yet how you are more valuable.” I was surprised the sicario would admit that. People like that didn’t usually tip their hands. “I get tired sometimes of putting people in my trunk to bring them across the border. Last time, the esé woke up at the border crossing and started kicking and yelling. Luckily, he wasn’t discovered.”
I snorted with false humor. “I really hate it when that happens. Listen, we’d be willing to work with you. But we don’t want anything being manufactured up here on the Rez. Too much exposure.”
“You trippin’. The kids love working for us. Otherwise their lives are pathetic jokes. Hijo de puta, do you know how much they make per month in subsistence checks? Nada, mierda! Working for us, they can be kings.”
“Yeah. And clank around in shackles and live in fear for their relatives’ safety? You’ve got Brick working twenty-four seven in fucking ankle chains, El Viceroy. That’s no life for a kid. No. We don’t want any activity on the Rez. And no one comes north of the border to check on us. We’re not little fucking kids. We don’t need to be followed around like truant kids.”
“Oh yeah?” As though he’d regressed to grade school, El Viceroy shot to his feet, rage blazing in his eyes. Under the shadow made by the hat brim, he was an even meaner, scarier customer. But I had met face-to-face dozens of times with famous executioners such as him. It didn’t faze me. If anything, it slowed down my heart, lowered my blood pressure. I became calmer in life-threatening situations. “Well I’ll show you who’s boss, come mierda!” Shit-eater!
El Viceroy whipped an enormous knife from his boot. It was like a king-sized Bowie, and I imagined I could even see bloodstains on the blade. My instinct was to feint to the side and hit El Viceroy low. Once I lunged out into the center aisle of the motor home, El Viceroy followed suit, and I tackled him at the hips.
My shoulders hit the axe man squarely, scissoring the guy in half. Air was bashed from Viceroy’s lungs with a giant ooph, and it struck me that I could yank my piece from the guy’s pants.
I ran the sicario into the feeble aluminum wall. But the guy was a professional just like me, and he didn’t lose his grip on the knife or his own automatic weapon. He seemed to be ambidextrous, the way he simultaneously pressed the gun barrel to my temple while slashing the side of my jugular.
I had underestimated the professionalism of the hit man. More in surprise than anything else, I staggered back holding my hand to my throat. I looked at his hand. Not too much blood. The guy was such an expert he could gauge how deep he was cutting, and cut only to frighten. This would have emboldened me to attack again, had the guy not also been pointing the enormous forty-four at my head.
My life had flashed before my mind’s eye many a time before. I’d been kidnapped, held captive, even assaulted sexually at gunpoint. There had been nothing I could have done about any of that. Up until now, I’d thought I had control over this Viceroy situation. I had guessed wrong. The guy wouldn’t be a cartel hit man if he allowed the other man to get the jump on him.
“All right.” I held his hands up in surrender. “All right. I cave. You win, fucker. You’ve just got all the hardware. I’ve got none. That’s all it ever boils down to, doesn’t it?”
“Puta madre! It’s hardware and skill. I am greatly skilled and valuable to my organization!”
“Strictly hardware, hate to tell you. There’s no skill behind a bullet.”
“Skill!” shrieked the sicario. I had hit his Achilles’ tendon. He loathed being informed he wasn’t talented.
I had pushed the wrong buttons. Jabbing my arm with the barrel, El Viceroy forced me to sit at the table again. “Spread your left hand on the table.”
Oh, fuck me dry. Elif air ab dinikh. Viceroy was about to cut at least one of my fingers off, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do if I wanted to stay alive.
“I said put your hand—there. Good.”
In one powerful thrust, the razor-sharp blade sliced off my index finger clean at the first knuckle. The joint separated like a slice of cheese, that’s how sharp the blade was. I didn’t even flinch. A doctor had told me once I was one of those people who couldn’t feel pain nearly as acutely as everyone else. It was a handy talent, but could also be hazardous. I might be in fatal pain, like with appendicitis, and not even know it.
To rile the sicario even more, I calmly lifted my hand to hold it above my heart. I purposefully didn’t even glance at the detached joint on the table. Just kept my narrowed eyes level on the hit man’s as blood trickled down my forearm. The impudent, self-righteous, victorious look on the asshole’s face filled me with livid rage. I thought back on shooting Iceman in the throat. That satisfying feeling of burying someone you loathed with a deadly passion. Someone who had wronged you or people close to you. It was like that overseas. I reserved a particularly lethal rage for the asshats who had wronged a co-worker or fellow military man.
“I’d like to wrap it in a bandage,” I said evenly.
El Viceroy shrugged. He had stuck the knife back in his boot, but still held the pistol. “Go ahead, if you can find one.”
I, too, had a knife in my boot. Always kept one there. But again, I didn’t want to tip my hand by showing the knife to cut off a strip of my shirt or whatever. So I rose slowly, carefully, not taking my eyes off El Viceroy. Without looking at my good hand, I rummaged around in what seemed to be Brick’s supply of heavy metal T-shirts tossed on top of some shelving. I felt the most threadbare one, and was able to tear a strip off that using my teeth.
Sitting again at the table, I slowly, methodically wrapped my injured finger. “Now that’s over with. I heard Iceman was making shatter in the cook house.”
El Viceroy frowned. “Shatter? What is that?”
I suppressed a smile. “It’s a much better way of processing marijuana. I see you’ve got some marijuana in this
trailer.”
“Yes? And what’s so much better about it?”
“It’s light as hell, highly portable. Dispensaries pay a high premium for it. It’s a clear, golden-brown product, butane hash oil. Much stronger than regular old weed, too.”
“And you know how to make it?”
“Yeah. Looks like Iceman was attempting it, but I can give you the recipe. Or demonstrate. All I need to do is go outside and get that double boiler that’s rolling around in the sand. You’ve got a stovetop right in here. It’s easy to transport. The trick is to use cellophane and axel grease to trick the canines. You know about that?”
El Viceroy made a lip fart. “We know all kinds of ways of fooling the dogs.”
“Oh yeah? You know about coffee grounds, garlic, and mustard?”
“I’ve used them all many times before! Well, maybe not the…you say mustard? Like the stuff you put on hot dogs?”
“Right. The stuff on hot dogs.”
“Does it not get messy?”
“Who cares if you’ve sealed it? I see you’ve got one of those sealing machines. Listen, our dispensary sells shatter. It’s a perfectly legitimate product.” If you can safely manufacture it. Morons were constantly blowing themselves up. A little butane would puddle up, and one tiny spark from a cigarette or bong, and hello, Pearl Harbor. That had probably been the lonsituation today when I’d shot Iceman. “A pound of marijuana makes about one-tenth, one-fifth a pound of shatter. Much smoother, stronger high, so they say.” My idea was that I could blow up the evil sicario just as he’d blown Iceman to kingdom come.
“You don’t need to show me how to make it. Show the kids.”
That was actually a fucking idea that I could entertain. I didn’t know how well it’d fly with Rez elders, but there weren’t many other options for teens out there. They could work in the casinos, go to a local community college, and wind up working in a gas station anyway. That’s why I’d joined the army. It was one of the only options available to poor Rez kids without the most stellar of grades. They could just stick the shatter on the Herbal Legends truck and be done with it. It’d all be perfectly legitimate.
But then how was I going to blow up El Viceroy if he wouldn’t let me assemble all the components I needed?
“All right. I can see doing that. But listen, El Viceroy. You’ve got to let me show you, so you can take it back to your boss in Sinaloa and see if he approves our proposal.”
El Viceroy seemed to like the idea that his okay was needed on the project. He probably didn’t usually get much say in anything. Drive out, shoot guy, come back. Or knock guy out, put in trunk, come back. That was his daily grind. He nodded thoughtfully. “Si, esé. I’ll let you go out and get that double boiler, but that’s it, comprende? Don’t try any funny stuff.”
That was classic—“funny stuff.” As though he’d been watching too many Humphrey Bogart gangster movies. “Listen here, you dirty rat.”
I held out both hands. Blood had already saturated the T-shirt bandage on my finger and was starting a slow percolating drip out the stump, but that was the least of my concerns. No one made it out of the Rez without a host of scars. A white gash through my eyebrow told where a sheep had dragged me through a dry gulley. I only saw my scalp scars the time I had to shave my head for lice after being held hostage in Mosul. And, of course, the latticework of whip lashes across my back where I’d been beaten to extract information while overseas. One knee would never be the same after being crushed jumping off a third story rooftop to escape some other insurgents. It was the name of the game. The Rez had prepared me for life as a professional soldier.
I said, “All right. I’m going to go outside real slow. You follow me. I’ll need to get some butane and that boiler. You’ve already got coffee filters and a turkey baster on that counter.”
“Si,” said the sicario, cautious as ever. He half-rose in a crouching position, waving his piece to indicate I could rise, too.
But how the fuck could I blow up the vicious hit man without sending myself spiraling to the heavens, too? I went down the three outer steps, my eyes scanning the debris scattered around the butte for the cooker. “El Viceroy! This pot is heavy. I could really use help lifting the lid, seeing as how you took away one of my fingers.”
El Viceroy, standing at the top of the stairs, made a sound of disgust. “Okay. But this better not take long, esé. If I’m not taking you for a ride in my trunk, I want to make it back to Yuma before sunset. They’ve got a nice Homewood Suites there with a fresh salad bar. I’ve got an app to choose my room right here on my phone.”
“I’m so glad for you,” I muttered under my breath, lifting my chin in the direction of the double boiler.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ORMOND
Ormond had never felt lower in his life, hobbling down the hill, leaning on a crippled teenager.
Anson had been making huge strides in his personality lately. A thirty-seven-year-old mercenary was probably the most set in his ways of all men. They lived by codes of various sorts—enduring, stable codes that dictated every facet of their lives. How else would they function? How else would they know what to expect around the next corner in a place where the tiniest motion meant kill or be killed?
Ormond knew Anson had rarely, if ever, jacked another man. He did that for him, in Stumpy Meadows’ grimy, dusty kitchen. Heaven had flooded Ormond’s pelvis, warmed his innards straight to his heart, to have the tough, macho merc’s fist pumping his dick. He had come way too soon just from the sheer novelty of being touched. And then.
The utterly lovely, unexpected, surprise blowjob just now, a few feet from where Ormond was about to stagger down the hill.
What the fuck had that cost Anson? How many blowjobs had he given in his life? Ormond ventured to guess the tough hired gun had probably performed zero, maybe one. Two, tops. Son of a biscuit. When Anson had dropped to his knees and licked Ormond’s dick, his legs had turned to water. Just the fucking idea of those brusque lips anywhere near his cock was unthinkable. Suddenly Anson was hoovering away for dear life, proving a point, obviously.
What fucking point could that have been? Did he have a presentiment that one of them would die on this mission? Did he want to make someone blissfully happy before expiring? Flooding Anson’s delicious mouth with his load of hot jizz was the apex of Ormond’s frivolous life, so far. And the funny thing was, the more subservient Anson’s position, the more he retained his control over Ormond. Ormond was at his mercy. Every flick of the tongue, every moan that vibrated deep into his testicles—Ormond was his slave. Now and forever. Technically, there had been a power exchange. In reality, Anson reigned supreme.
Ormond practically sobbed, gimping down that fucking hill. “There must be something we can do, Brick! Anson saved our asses—traded his life for ours! We can’t just leave him there dangling in the wind. Who knows what that sicario is going to do to him?”
“Yeah,” said Brick, “that’s the guy who came and coldly shot Lester through the head, then threw him in his trunk. I presume he’s the guy who hung him from the bridge. Believe you me, I’m not overly fond of that fucker either. I’m a tough noodle, but that guy’s got me shaking in my boots. Or I should say, he took my fucking boots away. I’ve seen too much, man. They’ve already threatened my mom and dad and brother if I take one step out of the norm, which I’m already doing by walking away. What the fuck are we supposed to do, dude? My best friend and partner just got murdered. Then my boss, who I hated like dirt anyway, just blew up in front of my fuckin’ eyes.”
“Exactly!” Ormond tried to sound chipper and enthusiastic, but it was difficult. “You had no choice! I will back you up on that. You had no other choice other than to walk away. Anson will take care of it. He will make sure your parents aren’t harmed. He made a trade—him for us.”
“Yeah,” Brick said sullenly. “Why’d he do that, anyway? Why does he care about me? I stole his fucking weed in the first place.”
�
��He thinks you’re from the same clan or something. You’re both Diné, no?”
“We are,” Brick allowed. “Lester told me Anson comes from Fort Defiance. I’ve got some clan members, some cousins there. We could be related. He could be a member of the Towering House clan. Then I owe him hospitality and loyalty. I know. You’re right, dude. But what’re we supposed to do? We can both barely walk, and we have no weapon.”
Ormond stopped hobbling. “My gun is up there somewhere. I was holding it when the roof blew off that cook house and landed on me.”
Brick stopped cripping along, too. “Seriously?”
The idea that he might find the gun and use it filled Ormond with both dread and excitement. “Seriously. If we can somehow lure that sicario out of the trailer, we can plug him. My arm is still good.” Ormond suddenly had absolutely zero reservations about plugging another human being. He’d practiced a lot at the indoor range, but he’d obviously never been called upon before to practice against a live target. Suddenly, he knew he could bury the sicario with no regrets.
Without further discussion, both men turned and staggered back uphill. They hadn’t gotten very far downhill anyway. Brick was doing a good job with one of Ormond’s arms draped across his shoulders, keeping the weight off Ormond’s injured leg, but he could only do so much when he could only walk five inches at a time.
“You’re in that gay motorcycle club?”
“Si.”
“Dineyazzie’s gay? He sure doesn’t seem gay.”
Ormond didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t his place to come out for Anson. “He’s not a member. He’s just a contractor, doing a favor for the president. Hey, wait. You hear that?”
Brick stood upright, his ears pricked, listening. “Yeah. Another bike.”
Again, they pivoted to face the lower road that led to the geoglyph parking lot.
