Judas Horse ag-3

by April Smith

  “Does he always go by the front door?”

  When I first came to the lost farm, the agent in the cherry picker who was dressed like a repairman, aside from wiretap devices, installed cameras on the telephone poles. Command center in Portland can see everything that comes and goes.

  “Because we don’t always get a visual until he’s a quarter mile away from the house,” Donnato says. “How does he get out? Suddenly he pops on-screen, heading north. We don’t know how he gets there or where he’s going. Find out.”

  At 7:45 a.m. the next day, Stone, wearing a fluorescent yellow Grateful Dead T-shirt, running trunks, and a belt holding a water bottle, heads out through the kitchen door. No big mystery about that. I watch from the second-floor window — careful to stay beyond the range of the camera installed in the German clock — as he jogs twice around the soft track of the orchard, then veers into the wooded parcel behind the house.

  I’m out the kitchen door, across the overgrown garden, and on the trail, keeping a hundred yards between us. As we move through the woods, I can see his shirt flashing up ahead. Then I lose him, but he has to stay on the trail or run through scrub. When we come out at the cottonwood trees, I duck below the wash. Now he’s in open territory, looking like any other fitness runner, tuned in to his iPod, dark stains on the T-shirt, churning muscular calves. The music keeps him focused — eyes ahead, not even thinking of watching the rear — so I stretch out and match his pace as we come up to the muddy tracks of the wildlife sanctuary.

  Against the sky, the matrix of power wires becomes more defined as we draw close. To my right is the plain where the blind foal was found. As Stone keeps on moving through the maze of manzanita, an epiphany of logic breaks over me like a cold shower: He’s heading for the shooting range where I found the.50-caliber shell.

  This is where he practices shooting his weapons. Including the sniper rifle that killed Sergeant Mackee.

  I am getting excited now. I wish to call Donnato, but I know there is no cell phone service here. The hard-furrowed roads are hazardous for turned ankles, and Stone is slowing down. No shots echo — it’s too early for your ordinary amateur shooter. I take a spur trail and circle around to where I suspect he’s going, accelerating to beat him and duck into a concealed position behind the Dumpsters overflowing with trash and flies.

  He stops in the center of the firing range, heaving and throwing drops of sweat. He swigs water and spits it out while turning around in a 360, checking the perimeter.

  Where does he hide the guns? A chest buried somewhere? A cave in the wash?

  Now he slides a black-and-silver phone from the belt holding the water bottle and glances up at the sky, moving until there are no power lines above him. The phone is way too big to be a cell. I can make out the profile of an antenna, like a little finger pointing up. He is using a satellite phone to get past our wiretaps.

  You can only use a satellite phone outside, with a clear view to the sky. That is why he comes to the shooting range.

  “Gemini? It’s Taurus. What have you got? You’re the expert. You’re the one with access to intel, the off-site, the whole deal. Don’t leave me hanging out here with my pants down, buddy.”

  He waits. I wait. My breath comes fast.

  “You said you could get past the SAC. I’m counting on it.”

  The cold shower of logic becomes a deluge of ice. It is unmistakable. Dick Stone is talking to someone inside the Bureau.

  On an untraceable satellite phone.

  Twenty-five

  Once again, I am a passenger in the dark, being driven along unknown roads to an uncertain destination — just like in undercover school. As in undercover school, I have made the strategic decision to imbibe an illegal substance, meaning I am as stoned as the rest of them on some awesome weed.

  That night, before I could alert Donnato to the discovery of the satellite phone, we learned through a posting on the FAN Web site that Lillian, the sweet old bird-watcher rescued from the mustang corral, was dead.

  Dinner was quesadillas, and Megan was quiet.

  “What happened?” Sara said. “I thought she was okay.” “She’d just had a heart-valve replacement and it got infected.” “Too bad,” said Stone with a mouth full of cheese.

  “It was a direct result of the action,” Megan snapped. Her face looked slack, darkness beneath the eyes. “She was traumatized, and then she’s taken to a bad hospital in a piss-poor excuse for a town.” Slammer was jamming green apple halves and carrots into an industrial juicer.

  “Do you have to do that?” Sara asked.

  “Fiber, man.”

  The juicer must have been outfitted with a jet engine.

  Megan told Stone she was leaving for two days.

  “Why?”

  “Lillian’s memorial service.”

  The juicer howled.

  “Where?”

  “San Jose.”

  “Turn that thing off,” Stone shouted. “Fuck your fucking fiber.” The motor ticked to a stop. Slammer had extracted a quarter cup of amber-colored juice.

  Megan put her head in her hand. I laid my arm around her shoulders.

  “Megan’s upset. She saw the whole thing at the corral.” “Never should have happened,” declared Stone.

  “The lady was too old to go on something like that,” Sara added.

  “It wasn’t her being old.” Megan raised her burning eyes. “It’s us who were arrogant. We were breaking the law when—” “What’s the law anyway?” asked Stone. “Whatever the government decides. Arbitrary bullshit.” “I’ll be back late Sunday,” Megan said tiredly.

  “You’re not going. It’s a trap. The feds will be there.” Megan stood. “That’s crazy!” She had gone shrill. “I am so sick of your paranoid fantasies. The world is fucked and we can’t save it. We’ve been living in fantasyland all these years, without one normal day. Without peace of any kind. Without family.” “We could have had a family.”

  “All I ever wanted was a baby.”

  “You could have had a baby.”

  “No! I couldn’t! We were always on the run.”

  “Hush up now!” Stone said menacingly.

  “I won’t! This is my house.”

  “You want me to leave? Because I’ll leave,” said Stone.

  “Thank you,” Megan said. “After you have ruined my life.” And she walked out of the room.

  We waited in silence until Sara and I got up to collect the dishes.

  Stone told us to sit down.

  We sank back into our seats.

  “This is a tragic situation that did not have to happen,” Stone repeated in a hurt voice. “Nobody would have had to get messed up with wild horses if it hadn’t been for Herbert Laumann. He is the oppressor. He is the United States government. Megan has a right to be angry. A lady is dead who didn’t have to be.” He was good. Low-key and light on the rhetoric. You could feel him gathering up the fractured energy left in the room, wrapping it ever so piteously around himself.

  Hours later, Megan was gone and Stone roused the household — Sara, Slammer, and me.

  “We’re gonna have some fun,” he promised. “Gonzo political action.” Now, miles away from the lost farm, we are squeezed into the white truck, and Dick Stone is singing Otis Redding: “They call me Mr. Pitiful. That’s how I got my fame—” He keeps switching songs, genres, decades. Inside his head must be some crazy mix of rhythm and blues and screaming black-leather motorcycle metal. In a fraction of a second that goes on for eternity, he can hear Blue Oyster Cult expanding like the day of reckoning since 1975.

  “Music is consciousness; it never dies,” Stone proclaims. “Music exists forever, somewhere in the universe.” “If it never dies,” Slammer apes, “where was it born?” “In a thirty-twoer laced with windowpane.” Dick Stone grins.

  Rewind.

  We are forty minutes outside Portland. Real time. It is way past the midnight hour, and this, in the grand saga of injustice and revenge, is what Dick
Stone has been given: two kids passing a joint as if they are on a lark, the boy running his mouth about his wicked life, the poor little rich girl without a clue; and the pretender, the eager stranger with wild dark hair and shifty eyes, slouching in the seat beside him.

  But he is pleased with the discipline of his rock ’n’ roll commando unit. Under his leadership, they have put together a goody bag of plastic squeeze bottles you would use for catsup, now filled with hydrofluoric acid; cans of red, white, and blue spray paint; a video camera; and Molotov cocktails made with the bandit’s signature Corona beer bottles.

  Still the original, still the best.

  For no discernible reason, he jerks the joint from Slammer’s mouth and flicks it out the window.

  “What the fuck?” The boy laughs uneasily.

  The bandit punishes him with silence.

  Sara is all of a sudden in a fit of giggles, rolling on her back in the rear seat, long, thin arms and legs kicking out at funny angles.

  “You’re a little butterfly.” Dick Stone looks in the rearview mirror. “Just like Megan, back in the day.” It was Megan, he tells us, who shared that thirty-twoer of psychedelic malt liquor in the Civic Auditorium down in San Jose, when BOC was at the height of their satanic debauchery; the concert from which he never came back. Like the apparition of young, idealistic Megan (aka Laurel Williams, the environmental scientist at Berkeley), Sara, he intones, is a butterfly who alights on your hand, revealing magic yellow granules of powder on its wings. Why would such a vision be given to you?

  Meanwhile, the new one, Darcy, keeps to herself, staring at the suburban night. Dick Stone smiles at some reverie and rolls his window down, dropping an arm out of the truck, letting the cigarillo hang, wasting good Dominican smoke as a rush of air tears hot embers off the tip, leaving a trail of extinguishing sparks. It satisfies him, like pages burning in time.

  “Hey now,” says the boy, “what’s that asshole doing?” Slammer jumps up and hits the horn and a van in front of us swerves to a stop. The driver of the van throws the door open, shouting in Farsi.

  Stone turns his head very slowly toward the boy. His graying stubble looks Halloween raspberry in the cold red intersection light.

  “Don’t…do…that.” He accelerates, but not too fast.

  “I really feel like slapping someone right now.” Slammer pounds a fist hungrily. “I really feel like getting into a fight.” Dick Stone ignores him.

  “That’s what I mean!” Slammer agrees, as if the old dude had said anything. “There’s two chicks in the car, know what I’m saying?” “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “We should hit ’em.” The boy is pointing and alert. “McDonald’s, man.” The drive-thru is bright as an alien spaceship. There is a line of cars.

  The bandit asks, “Why?”

  “Babylon profits by killing animals,” Slammer chirps. “Why not?” The bandit sighs. “It’s a cliché.”

  I guffaw. He cocks an appreciative eye. He loves Darcy for being a little rebel, and right now, stoned as the rest of them, Darcy loves him.

  Sara sits upright in the backseat. “McDonald’s is too corporate. Too big.” Slammer scowls. “You’re a freak.”

  Kindergarten.

  The bandit makes a U-turn and heads out of town.

  “Sara has a point,” he instructs, and pulls out a well-worn piece of rhetoric: “Evil needs a face.” The road becomes a country lane, no lights. The houses are spread farther apart. Only by slowing down and scanning the fences caught in the hard white headlights do we notice a small metal sign that says THE WILKINS. Stone turns down a road that bisects a pasture and leads to a newly constructed four-bedroom home with a spindle-post porch — just the kind of hypocritical western touch that ticks the bandit off.

  He pulls off the road, beneath a stand of juniper trees, and cuts the lights.

  “That’s the target.”

  “Who are the Wilkins?”

  “Our friend BLM Deputy State Director Herbert Laumann’s in-laws. The government whore is mooching off the grandparents now.” Because someone destroyed his house and his kid is still in the hospital.

  My stomach tilts with the sickening recognition that old obsessions die hard.

  Slammer whispers, like he’s seen a prophetic city: “Babylon.” Beneath the dashboard the prudent bandit has mounted a sophisticated scanner that picks up encrypted radio signals used by law-enforcement agencies. He fiddles, listens to the static. Nothing threatening on the airwaves.

  The bandit holds up the bag of tricks. “Who wants it?” Slammer: “Me!”

  Perversely, Stone hands the bag to Sara instead, watching the disappointment grow once again in Slammer’s face. But then, another whiplash turn of mood, and he offers the boy a Colt.45 pistol.

  Like the scenario in undercover school, reality shifts to a perilous key. A screaming siren wakes me from this loopy daze. The kid is armed.

  Slammer handles the gun. “What am I supposed to do?” “Figure it out, genius.” Stone gives me the video camera and unlocks the doors. “You have three minutes. Go.” We scamper down the driveway, past a couple of bicycles and a redwood tree house with swings, along a path to the backyard. A raccoon darts from the shadows. The yard is open, no cover. We hunker against the garage wall.

  Sara, indignant: “Why’d he give you the gun?” “Because you’re a pussy.”

  You can see the weed shining through Sara’s huge eyes. “He wants you to shoot Laumann?” “Let’s do it.” Slammer pushes unsteadily off the wall.

  I grab his arm. “No! They have an alarm system,” I say, pointing to random telephone wires.

  But Slammer is hyped. “Two more minutes! All we’ve got!” Absurdly, he gets on his belly and combat-crawls across the lawn. Seems like a plan, so I follow. Sara’s behind us, dragging the bag of tricks. This is good. We’re leaving loads of evidence — footprints, fibers off our clothes. Then the lights go on and figures appear in the downstairs windows.

  “Freeze!” Slammer hisses.

  We are too far away to make the people out.

  “Get the video!”

  Lying down in the sharp, wet Bermuda grass, zooming in on Herbert Laumann’s family through the camera lens, we discover a mother, father, and baby girl. The baby is sleeping on the mother’s shoulder. She walks up and down as the father yawns, rubbing his temples with two flat palms. They are all wearing nightclothes. The mother has a towel over her shoulder, on which the infant’s cheek is resting, blue-eyed slits staring into babyland.

  Slammer says, “Babylon nation, prepare to die.”

  The mother sits slowly at a table, balancing carefully to keep the baby still, as the father talks. His ordinary white bureaucratic all-American face — the face of evil — looks collapsed with exhaustion. He reaches out to touch the baby’s head — a cupped hand, a blessing.

  “Are you really going to do it?” Sara whispers, mesmerized by the family on the tiny video screen, like a snow globe showing a scene of mystery and magic. In its light, a tiny floating square of light in acres of pitch-black farmland, the youngsters without a home and the spy with a soul of ash are watching transfixed, through a secret window, the simple arithmetic of two loving parents and a child. You would think they had never seen such a thing.

  Prone, Slammer tries to sight the gun on wobbling elbows. He should take a lesson from Sterling McCord. The gun quivers.

  “Wait!” I say, allegedly watching through the camera. “You don’t have a shot.” “I have it,” he grunts, but he lays the gun down to wipe his sweating palms on the wet grass.

  I am a millisecond from disarming him.

  He picks up the weapon but doesn’t shoot. The gun is shaking wildly. Comically. This is not surprising. In real wars, there are troops on the battlefield who refuse to fire, because they can’t. Unlike the movies, it doesn’t come naturally, killing another human being.

  “Three minutes are way up,” I say gently. “We’re out of here.” Slammer slumps d
own to the grass and sobs. Helpless, deep, undifferentiated sobs. I lift the gun away.

  Sara strokes his bristly head, then kneels and awkwardly puts her arms around his shoulders, laying her cheek on his back.

  “Allfather will be mad,” she whispers.

  “He can fuck himself,” Slammer replies.

  I erase the videotape.

  Twenty-six

  The following day, Slammer walks into the kitchen, to find Dick Stone sitting at the sloping counter with the broken tiles, reading the daily fish report — how many chinook salmon and steelhead have passed through the bypass systems of the lower Columbia River dams — and holding the Colt.45.

  The gun is aimed at the doorway. At the next person to walk through the doorway, who would be Slammer, back from the grocery store.

  The devil boy stops in his tracks.

  “What up?”

  “You tell me.”

  The gun is pointed at Slammer’s belly.

  “What?” Slammer shrugs and grins foolishly, as if missing the joke. “Can I at least put the groceries down?”

  Slammer notices his voice has grown small. Besides the black hole of the barrel, Dick Stone is showing him the Look. Slammer, Sara, and I have talked about the Look. You can’t see his eyes when he does it: narrows them to a pair of emotionless chinks that the angry part of him seems to be just gazing through, like the faceless column of light that pulses behind the crack in the TV cabinet where the doors don’t shut. You have no idea what’s on. When Stone hunkers in like that, the worst part is the excruciating silent anticipation, because you know he’s slowly taking in your worthless mistakes and calculating the punishment. “The tax,” he likes to say.

  Slammer lowers the grocery bags, shoulders aching, as if he’d been holding sacks of rocks.

  “What’d I do?”

  Slammer is drowning in panic. He is seventeen years old, a long way from last night’s tears, but the memory of terror is right there.

  “Just tell me what I did wrong, okay? So we can talk about it maybe.”