Melinda’s shaking now. I retrieve the pipe from the floor; it’s broken and useless. I hold it up to show her and she nods toward the table. I open the drawer—it’s deep and compartmentalized—and find another pipe. I hand it to Melinda, along with the torch and the already opened brick.
¤ ¤ ¤
I go outside again. The gate is closed and the dirt road extends downhill through about a mile of brush. I can see the juncture to the main road that leads to the highway. The truck is parked right next to the house; the trailer is about fifty feet away. Behind it, the hills rise steeply, sparse and rocky.
Back in the house, Melinda’s lying on one side, propped on her elbow so she can use her cuffed hand to hold the pipe while she aims the torch with her right. Blood is drying, dark brown and stiff, on her jeans. She lets out a cloud of smoke.
“So what are you gonna do when Herbie gets back?”
“Guess I’m going to have to shoot him. Got any better ideas?”
“You could make a deal with him. You can take the car and leave. No problem. Just don’t shoot him.”
I think about the photo of them in the other room. Somewhere in their feeble minds they still think of themselves as the couple in the picture.
“He’s planning on killing me after I finish my delivery.”
Melinda goes wide-eyed on me. “No, man, that’s not true, he wouldn’t do that.”
“Two birds with one stone. Mario. Ka-Boom. I heard the whole plan.”
“He was just high. He talks out of his ass when he’s like that, for real.”
I go back to the drawer and rummage through it. There’s a plastic shopping bag in one of the compartments. It’s got an extra pack of C-4 and a remote. There’s a high-intensity flashlight and a pair of binoculars. I’m thinking if I get out of here and actually make it up the hill to the mine, this stuff could be useful. I wrap the pack of C-4 in a rag and put everything in the backpack.
I crack the door and see the Saturn stop at the gate. Herbie gets out and swings it open. I back into the house and crouch in the hallway to the bedroom, aiming the Ruger at the door. Melinda sits up and stares at the door, the torch in her free hand spitting its flame into the air.
The door starts to open and I’m ready to fire. Melinda yells, “Herbie, run!” and throws the torch at me. My shot goes wild as the torch bounces off my shoulder.
I sprint for the door and catch Herbie running toward the trailer. I fire at him from behind the truck, but miss as he goes up the steps into the trailer. He turns and fires twice with Mo’s gun; the rounds slam into the side of the truck as he opens the door and disappears inside.
I wait and watch. The Saturn is parked down the driveway, washed-out blue as the bright and cloudless sky; crows circle overhead, flapping and cawing in the morning sun. The trailer’s door starts to open. I put two bullets in it and it closes again.
Melinda’s voice screams, “You’re gonna die, motherfucker,” and a barrel pokes through the louvered windows on the side of the trailer. More bullets slam into the truck and fly past me in a swarm. I guess he got the Tec-9 converted to full auto. I fire at the windows and duck back into the house.
Melinda’s staring at me triumphantly. “You’re so fucked!”
I go straight to the table, pick up the transmitter and push the “Arm” switch. I tell Melinda, “Say goodbye to the Big Island.” A clatter from the Tec-9 sends bullets through the thin wood wall of the house and out the other side. I push the red button.
¤ ¤ ¤
Melinda screams an endless “Noooo . . .” that is drowned out by the explosion. Debris clatters against the wall of the shack; seconds later, more lands on the roof. After a few minutes the crows return and Melinda’s scream subsides to a convulsive sobbing.
The trailer’s not looking too good. I hope the keys are in the Saturn, or I’m in for Freddy Krueger’s Easter egg hunt. I duck back into the shack for the backpack. I sweep up the three cell phones and put them into the pack. For some reason I feel thirsty, so I grab a Coke out of the cooler. Melinda looks up at me and says, “What about me?”
“What about you, Melinda? Just a minute ago you were all excited about me getting killed, and now you want my sympathy?”
“You can’t just leave me here like this.”
“Well, yes I can. There’s a cloud of black smoke a quarter mile high coming off the trailer. I’m sure somebody’s going to be dropping by soon.” I retrieve the torch and toss it to her. “Here, this’ll keep you entertained.” The flame is out.
“It needs butane.” She’s pathetic now, eyes pleading. She looks to the drawer.
I pull out a new can of butane and hand it to her.
“Bye, Melinda. It’s been swell.”
23
Good news. The keys are in the Saturn and the tank is full. I am now Paul Cleary; my driver’s license says so. And my passport. I’ve got a gun with a few bullets, a mini-bomb with a remote detonator, a flashlight, cell phones with no signal, and clear directions to the mine.
I feel strangely invigorated, and the cold coke tastes good going down my throat. The dirt is brown and the shrubs a dull green; I can see color, though it’s washed out and dim, like at dusk. I wonder if my condition is improving. Maybe I was just badly wounded.
Yeah, right. And whoever delivered me to the morgue was an idiot. And besides, badly wounded wouldn’t explain my ability to leave the body. Roaming seems to be a special privilege of some kind of extraordinary state.
Or I’m badly wounded and delusional. Now there’s a possibility.
There’s a film I saw in college: During the Civil War, a man is about to be hanged from a bridge. Union soldiers are standing guard. The rope breaks and the man swims down the river toward safety. Pursued by rifle shots and baying hounds, he finds a road and runs toward his plantation home. A beautiful woman seems to float down the steps from the veranda, her hand stretched out to greet him. When their fingers touch, the rope snaps taut and the man is hanging from the bridge. There’s a book about Jesus on the cross that’s basically the same story. I wonder if that’s my story too: to wake up and die.
I’m down Herbie’s hill at the juncture of his private driveway and the road back to the highway. Left on that road takes me into the hills, to the mine.
To Ratboy.
To Mindy.
There’s nobody in the world that I’m closer to than Mindy. She understands me with a wisdom that I can’t begin to explain. She knows my problems and forgives me unconditionally. Her mother says it’s because I let Mindy do whatever she wants, that Allison’s been forced to play bad cop to my good cop for so long that in Mindy’s eyes I can do no wrong, but I think there’s more to it than that.
Well, I would, wouldn’t I?
I make the left turn and head up into the hills. The road crosses a dry creek bed and gets steeper. I put the Saturn into second gear. I can see the plume of black smoke from the trailer over my left shoulder.
I’m high enough in the hills that I can see the ocean in the rearview mirror. The sun catches just right through the windshield and I’m blinded for a second. I hear another echo of the roaring in my head, the bullet invading my skull; I’m flying off the bike and there’s a face behind the gun. Is it Ratboy’s? Or his partner’s? I can’t capture it. What doesn’t make sense is Ratboy showing up at the restaurant for the reports. Did Jason send him? Then who was Tanya talking to at the coffee shop when she said that I didn’t show up with the briefcase? Her husband? Where does he fit in the picture? And why are there two conflicting reports?
The road crosses over the creek bed again and then goes parallel to it into a sort of dip between two hills. The brush is scraping the car on both sides, and the Saturn’s shocks weren’t built for this terrain. The road gets bumpier as it gets steeper. I wonder if the C-4 in the backpack is sensitive to jostling; I have no experience with it. Nor do I have experience with gun fights, gold mines, or the Mexican desert, but there’s only one way to go and that
’s forward. Unless the C-4 turns me and the Saturn into a second pillar of black smoke in the Mexican sky.
I hit the top of a rise and the view changes entirely. The road leads down into a flat valley nestled between the hills, with higher terrain about a half mile on the other side. About twenty yards down from the top of the rise there’s a partially open gate with barbed wire and a sign that says “Private Property.” There’s a stand of trees on either side of it. The barbed wire extends north and south from the gate. I decide to park in the shelter of the trees.
I grab the backpack and walk to the tree nearest the gate. The valley sits in a depression in the hills, about two hundred feet below me. To my left, the hill I’m on steepens and becomes an almost vertical wall forming the north side of the valley. Set against it is a long, rectangular concrete building, its single door open. Two small shacks sit next to it. Beyond them is a water tank and then a series of pyramid-shaped mounds, some taller than the building. A bulldozer sits idly in the dirt. Cactus and mesquite trees grow randomly, some right up to the side of the structure. The road from the gate leads down to the building and then veers south and recedes into the distant hills. Down that road, about halfway to the building, is the Chevy van I saw in the picture in Ratboy’s room.
It’s a weird place to have stopped and parked. Herbie’s binoculars bring the van up close, and I don’t like what I see. First of all, the van seems to have veered partly off the road and is turned sideways to me. I sharpen the focus and see that the windshield is missing. I swap the binoculars for DeShaun’s gun and sling the backpack over my shoulder. I head down the road, keeping the van between me and the concrete building.
The driver’s side door is open. There’s shattered glass all over the seats and floor, but no one inside, and no blood. I step in and crawl between the seats; the rear of the van is carpeted with thick plush. Aside from fast-food wrappers and some empty beer bottles, the only thing I see is a pair of Mindy’s sunglasses, the same pair she was wearing when I picked her up forever ago at her mother’s.
I run my hands through the plush, combing it with my fingers. Up against the bench that runs lengthwise behind the driver’s seat, right at the juncture with the floor, I feel a hard, metallic nugget. It’s a bullet, flattened from impact. A bit more scrabbling around yields two more. I study the passenger-side panel and see the light streaming in from three holes.
I could play it safe and roam, but last time the re-entry knocked me out for a while and left me disoriented, which wouldn’t be good if anyone decided to check out the van. Instead, I slip back between the seats and crouch in front of the passenger seat and peer out the window. There’s a body about thirty feet away, sprawled in the middle of the dirt road.
The van’s door opens with a loud squeal. I drop to the ground and move, crab-like, toward the body. Something crunches under my hand; a tarantula’s body fluids seep between my fingers and remind me of the blood flowing from Jason Hamel’s wound.
A heavily tattooed Mexican wearing a wife-beater tucked neatly into baggie shorts lies on his back in the dirt. His head is shaved and has a red devil’s face tattooed on it with Roman numerals on his forehead. He looks like he spent most of his life pumping iron. There’s a pool of blood in the middle of his chest, and flies are buzzing over it. I get closer and see maggots squirming blindly on his neck and shoulders. There’s a gun in his right hand, a big military issue S&W .45.
I kneel to remove the gun, as the Ruger is down to two bullets. A hand snaps out and grips my wrist. I see the gun swing around to point in my direction as the man’s eyes pop open and glare at me. Our eyes meet and his expression turns from a triumphant leer to one of panic. He screams, “No, no, Madre de Dios, no,” and coughs up blood. His body quivers, the gun fires over my shoulder, and his eyes lock in a stare to nowhere. The quick and the dead, two qualities that should never combine, and he saw them both in me. So, I am vindicated. At least the dying know what I am.
I take the gun, which has fallen out of the man’s hand. A shot rings out and the dirt flies up three feet to my left. Another shot, this time slamming into the van’s front hubcap and sending it spinning off into a cactus thicket. A third one hits me just under the right clavicle. I feel the impact, but no pain. I let it take me to the ground and lie spread-eagled and motionless. Leaving the body, I watch an older man walk up the road from the building, a rifle in his hand. He’s dark and lean and has a face like a crumpled grocery bag. His denim shirt has mother-of-pearl snap buttons that match the huge buckle on his belt. His teeth are the color of the plug of tobacco he spits out as he raises the rifle.
I re-enter the body and fire into the man’s heart. The rifle sounds like a cannon as it discharges five feet from my face, but the bullet hits the dirt beside me.
I will the body to move. I will the heart to pump the blood to feed the cells to imitate life. I’m getting better at this. My shoulder wound bleeds, but I go on.
¤ ¤ ¤
The gunshots don’t seem to have attracted any more attention. I approach the building holding the dead man’s rifle in one hand, the .45 in the other. The windows are small and square and about head high, but if I’m going to offer a target to anyone inside, my face isn’t my first choice, so I duck through the door, ready to fire. There’s no one inside. It’s all one room, about forty feet long and twenty wide. Four bunk beds are in the far end, two against each of the longer walls, with a couple of ramshackle chests of drawers between them. I approach the beds; they have uncovered mats on them and resemble the ones at the county jail. Each has a sleeping bag rolled up at its end. There’s no sign that Mindy has been here.
The other end of the building has a huge table propped up on two-by-fours. Workbenches line the walls, covered with buckets of rock and dirt. There’s a kitchen corner with a steel sink and a hose for a faucet. A wooden chair faces a mirror that is stuck to the wall. A four-burner electric hotplate and a small refrigerator, along with a few hanging light bulbs, indicate that there must be a generator somewhere outside.
The big table is strewn with junk: buckets of dirt and rock; magnifiers and an old microscope; various tongs and long, needle-nosed tweezers; a hatchet and a fire extinguisher; a boom box and a stack of CDs—Marvin Gaye, Quincy Jones, Aretha Franklin; a terrain map, presumably of the mine and the surrounding mountains; and the odd pen, flashlight, sunglass case, and pocketknife, all covered with a layer of dust. It looks like someone left years ago, planning on coming back the next day.
I go back outside. There’s a broad expanse of nothing but the occasional cactus or bush ahead of me. The dirt road comes down from my right and then bears south—the way I’m facing—to some hills miles away. To my left are the two shacks and the mounds of dirt, and, far beyond that, an incongruously wooded hill.
The shacks are empty. Bunks with mats. Rat shit on the window sills. They look like they were built by the same guy that made Herbie and Melinda’s palace, but this time he was in more of a hurry. There’s an outhouse past the second shack that I couldn’t see before. Still no sign of Mindy or Ratboy and his giant friend.
I walk past the water tank, which has a Rube Goldberg set of PVC pipes leading back to the main building. Behind it, to my left, is the steep hill, almost a cliff, that backs the main building and the shacks. Ahead of me is the first of the dirt and rock mounds I viewed from the gate at the entrance. It’s about twelve feet high, and I have to walk around it to the right or climb over the lower part that butts up against the cliff. I keep the rifle pointed ahead of me as I climb.
There’s a hole in the cliff, just past the mound of dirt, about five feet high, with a scaffolding of two-by-fours propping it up at the opening. A wheelbarrow sits on its side in the shadows about five feet in. I sit with my back to the wheelbarrow, scan the valley for any sign of life, and leave the body. About ten feet into the tunnel I realize it’s useless; I can’t see in the dark any better than when I am in the body. I re-enter the body and put the rifle down and the ba
ckpack next to it. Herbie’s flashlight and the dead Mexican’s .45 point my way into the dark.
24
I’ve always hated the dark, but enclosed spaces make my head want to explode. For our honeymoon, Allison and I went to Italy. It had always been a dream of hers to see the Vatican, the ruins of Pompeii, the Amalfi coastline, the tower in Pisa; we did it all, holding hands and exploring like high-school kids in love. One day we were having lunch in Siena when a middle-aged British couple sitting at the table next to ours started telling us about the bell tower of the church across the piazza from us. “Fabulous,” the woman said. “You can see for miles in every direction.”
After lunch, Allison and I walked to the church. A buck apiece bought us entrance to a narrow, winding stairway, just wide enough to let one person climb at a time. I went first. A tiny, dim bulb shaped like a candle and strung on a wire once at every full turn of the stairway provided just enough light to see the steps. The amber-colored walls were cool and smooth. About six turns up, the person ahead of me stopped; someone was descending and neither could pass. Allison was right behind me, with the British couple—on board for their second time—at her back. The lights flickered, became suddenly very bright, and then died with a faint clicking sound.
If I had been in a sarcophagus under a pyramid I would have been more comfortable. I wanted to go berserk, to push Allison and start a domino effect of fallen tourists I could trample on my way to open space. I got short of breath, dizzy and desperate, and prayed the prayer of the momentary believer: Help me, I’ll do anything.
¤ ¤ ¤
And now, here I am, stooped over and shuffling into the narrow blackness, the beam from the light illuminating nothing but a small circle on the ground. I will the body to move. I trudge on, full of dread, ready to put a hole in the next tweaker, gangbanger, or Mexican thug that gets in the way of me finding my daughter. I aim the light ahead; it gets lost in the gloom. I walk face first into a spider web and want to scream and tear my skin off. I wipe my face in the crook of my arm and keep moving.
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