by Logan Miller
He stayed in the dirt for a short time longer and caught his breath while his captors’ laughs trailed off into the vacant prairieland.
And as they laughed he said to himself, Keep it up, you’re about to die.
He pushed himself back onto his left leg and hopped into the woodshed and toward the red Craftsman tool chest that stood nicked and dented against the far wall. He could see his brother’s mutilated body in the corner of his eye, but he would not look over at him. The sight could only distract him now, cloud his thinking, disrupt his composure. He needed to be as levelheaded as he could.
He made the tool chest and rested against it and caught his breath. When he reached to open the top drawer a loud bash startled him as the man with the shotgun hammered the metal tool chest with the butt of his weapon.
“Hold on,” he said. “Slow the fuck down.”
The man opened the top drawer, which was still rattling, and looked inside. He pushed tools out of the way, metal scraping against grit and metal, checking for a weapon of some sort. He opened the second drawer and the third and the fourth, more metal scraping against grit and metal. Nothing but scattered tools smudged with grease.
Satisfied, he stepped back. He didn’t bother checking all nine drawers.
Caleb removed an Allen wrench from the second drawer.
“Can I have my leg back now?” he asked.
It clanged against the tool chest and thumped beside him.
“Can I grab that stool right there?” Caleb asked.
One of them nodded.
Caleb pulled the stool over and sat down and started wrenching on the ankle joint. The two men were standing near the door and from that distance it must have looked like he was really trying to fix things. He sure was selling it well.
But there was nothing wrong with his prosthetic.
“Can I get a screwdriver?” he asked.
The man with the shotgun nodded.
Caleb opened a lower drawer, testing the boundaries, the vigilance of his captors. But they had already dropped their guards and reassumed their funnyman roles.
The man with the machine pistol nudged his buddy and pointed with amusement at Jake’s corpse.
“Why is your brother covering his ears?” he asked. “He can’t hear shit.”
“That’s cold.”
“No. He’s cold.”
The men howled at the gruesome barb.
Keep it up, Caleb said to himself. Keep it up.
Caleb set the screwdriver atop the tool chest and reached down for the bottom drawer, betting it all, betting his life that the .40 cal Beretta was still there, that his brother had stayed true to form and once again been neglectful of his duties. He slid open the drawer and reached inside. He felt the grease rag and he could feel the gun wrapped within. He turned his back slowly to the men. They were still laughing and pointing and mocking his brother.
They did not notice that he had opened the bottom drawer but it probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Caleb unfolded the rag, took the gun by the handle and slid back the action halfway. A brass shell winked at him. One in the chamber.
He swiveled in the stool and killed the men in mid-laughter with four rapid gunshots to the face and chest before they could even raise their weapons or register that they had been fooled.
38.
The teeth of the backhoe carved into the earth on the mesa near the edge of their property line. The eastern sky was growing pale and the far western horizon was a thin sheet of the deepest night.
Lelah and his brother were in the shovelhead and he was nearly finished with the second grave. He had pulled out the nails fastening his brother’s severed hands to the side of his head. He wouldn’t bury him in that mocking pose.
The teeth plunged into the grave and he raised the bucket and emptied the load into the pyramid of soil to the left of the machine. He turned off the diesel and stepped down from the cab and the chill wind from the north ruffled his pant legs and nipped at his bare chest. In all this he hadn’t even thought about putting on a shirt. He didn’t even know he was shirtless and he did not feel the cold of the wind.
He walked over to the shovelhead and rolled his brother into his arms and carried him down the earthen ramp into the grave. He laid his brother down and climbed back up the earthen ramp and retrieved his brother’s severed hands from the shovelhead. He placed his brother’s hands where they belonged as best he could. He climbed back up and took a bucket of water and a rag from inside the cab and went back into the grave and washed his brother’s face. He kissed him and laid his head on his chest. The wind blew and he stayed there beside him until he had strength enough to move on. He kissed his brother on the forehead one last time and walked back up the earthen ramp with the bucket of water and the wet rag.
He stared at Lelah reposed in the shovelhead, pale blue and beautiful, his gorgeous angel, their unborn child now sleeping inside her forever. She looked so young in death. He only needed to nudge her awake.
Death did not look real.
Where was her lovely voice now?
He took her into his arms and noticed how heavy she felt. She had never felt heavy in his arms. He carried her over to her grave and walked down the earthen ramp and laid her inside. He walked back up the earthen ramp and retrieved the wet rag and bucket.
He wiped the dried blood from her face and the blood that had washed down her neck, dipping the rag and wringing it out until the water in the bucket had taken her color. There was so much blood that it smeared her skin and left a pinkish veneer as though it were bringing life back to her. He continued dipping and wringing the rag and washing her skin until the veneer was gone.
When her lips were clean they held the chill of the winter sky. He kissed them and rode out into memories of the future that were supposed to happen but would never arrive. He thought he could still make out traces of blood on her skin in the early light and so he wiped her cheeks and lips again.
He said goodbye to the unborn child inside her. He said goodbye to the tiny life that would forever swim in the darkness. He said goodbye to the spirit that had only just been chosen and that would never have the earth to walk upon.
He placed a blanket over Lelah so that she and the baby wouldn’t get any colder.
After laying with her for minutes that had no hour and smoothing over her hair and kissing her one last time on the winter of her lips he climbed back up the earthen ramp and into the loader and began filling the graves.
ᴥ
He dragged the dead men from the woodshed across the yard and stacked them inside the living room with the death-twisted corpses of Sheriff Darius Gates and Deputy Sparks. He took the lawmen’s key rings and clipped them to his belt loop.
Then he moved through the trailer with a jerrican of gasoline and doused the interior with the combustible liquid, the ratty carpet and the warped linoleum, the stained mattresses and blankets, the cheap couch, the faux wood paneling, the objects that would flame high and crackle loud with their own blackened destruction.
He drenched the heap of corpses and trailed the gasoline across the carpet and down the front porch and onto the ground outside. He struck a wooden match and the fire danced and jumped along the gasoline path into the living room and ran through the trailer.
He watched the fire burn and rage and devour what used to be his home.
When the first rays of dawn touched his eyes he turned away and drove the patriotic cruiser down the dirt driveway and onto the paved road.
39.
He never thought he would have to go to war again. He never thought he would have to kill again either, especially not in his own country. He figured that was thousands of miles behind him in a land and memory that he had hoped he would lose one day but knew that he never would. There were things that he had never told anybody. Things that he’d done that he never even told Lelah or his brother. They were secrets that he kept inside and now he felt guilty for never telling them. He had
always figured he would tell them one day.
He wasn’t proud of the things he’d done. But he’d had a job to do and he’d done it well. He’d done it better than he thought he ever could have. And he surprised and horrified himself only afterward when he thought about the doing. He’d killed twenty-seven men in Fallujah. Six in one building. They were holed up in the third floor of a bombed-out apartment. The first two never woke up. The last one had time to reach for his weapon but his hand never made it that far.
He had no regrets about killing the men while they slept.
ᴥ
Twenty minutes after he drove away from the wood yard Caleb steered the patriotic cruiser into the parking lot and pulled in front of the squat building that stood on a stamp of concrete in the unincorporated prairie. A lone outpost for lawmen.
He swung out of the cruiser. A large brass key ring clattered in his hands as he approached the front door. The sun had barely crested and its slanting rays held little heat. There were no birds in the sky. He heard the faint tire thrum of a big rig on the interstate miles away. He looked over the scrubland and could see for a great distance the emptiness and stillness only.
He slid the key into the lock and pushed open the door.
He limped into the sparse office. Two desks a few feet across from each other. A bathroom in the back corner. No detention facility. When they had prisoners they drove them seventy miles south to Española.
He moved over to a storage closet and tried a few keys until one worked. He opened the double-doors and found several uniforms pressed and hanged. He lifted one off the rack and read the size. It would be a little baggie up top and he figured the pants would be a tad short. But they would do. So far as he could tell there were only two different size uniforms in the closet, which would make sense because Gates and Sparks were the only lawmen that worked out of this place.
He limped over to another storage closet. This one had a padlock for extra security. He found the right key and opened it. He took stock of the arsenal. Two AR-15 automatic rifles. One with a silencer attached. Three Remington tactical shotguns. Several spare clips already loaded and two boxes of 12-gauge shells.
A Smith & Wesson .44 magnum revolver caught his eye, an old-school handheld cannon. Dirty Harry. Plenty of shells for this one too.
A few minutes later he stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. His beard and long hair were matted with blood that was nearly black and clotted in tangled clumps. He had swollen bruises under his eyes and his left temple had a lump the size of a quail egg under the skin. He touched the lump and felt the sensation of physical pain, but mostly he was numb to it right now. The purple was starting to darken his bruises and would deepen in color over the coming hours and days.
He lost himself in the mirror. He was the image of what he had been through. No less.
Hair clippers buzzed in his hand. He raised them to his scalp and cut a swath down the middle of his crown and thick tufts of hair tumbled onto the tiled floor.
The clippers cut swath upon swath and the hair piled around his bare feet until there was only white scalp. Then he took the clippers and removed his beard down to the stubble. Then he ran the hot water and lathered his face with soap and ran the razor down his skin until his lean jawline was shaved clean and fierce with clarity.
He washed his face and then showered.
He dried off and sat on the bench and slid his prosthetic into its sleeve and made his leg whole again. He stepped into the pressed pants and strapped on a bulletproof Kevlar vest. He buttoned the black shirt over the vest and pinned a gold star to his chest.
He limped into the other room and loaded the shotguns with 12-gauge slug loads. He ran the action and chambered rounds in each. He took the AR-15 clips and slammed one into each weapon and pulled back the slides and they were ready to roll. He pressed six hollow points into the .44 magnum and then spun the stainless steel cylinder and it hummed with a smooth-ticking rattle. He thrust the revolver into the holster on his right hip. A fully arrayed gunbelt: handcuffs, pepper spray, nightstick.
A few minutes later he exited the building and stocked the cruiser with two AR-15s, three combat shotguns, and a black sea bag with boxes of shells and loaded clips and a back up Kevlar vest. There was no coming back and so he was taking all of it with him. All of it.
He sat in the driver’s seat and paused.
One last touch.
He set gold-rimmed aviator shades onto his bruised face and looked at himself in the rearview mirror. Big metallic fly-eyes and remorseless as a biblical locust.
Yeah. That’ll do. If you ain’t a cop then there never was one.
He backed up the cruiser and turned onto the empty blacktop, the road open to the horizon. It was just past 7:30 in the morning.
40.
Sheriff Caleb huddled over his coffee and pancakes in a booth near the back of the truck stop diner. A big cop breakfast for a big cop day—his first one on the job. His current persona was unrecognizable from the longhaired and bearded woodsman of yesterday.
He figured he had about eight hours before the heat came down on him. And by that time, he would either be dead or wounded and dying in some gully out in the badlands or his mission would be complete.
There were no local police in the conventional sense. There was the sheriff and the state. He reckoned if there was an emergency that demanded local law enforcement this day, well, the sheriff would never respond and eventually the state police would be called to resolve the matter. Once resolved, the state cops would start investigating where the hell the sheriff was—hours would have passed by then. And where would the state police begin their investigation? First, they’d go to the station and find it empty. Then they’d ride out to Gates’s house and find it empty as well. Then Sparks. Same thing. Cell phone calls unanswered. He’d torched their phones along with their corpses. There would be nothing but utter bewilderment. When would they wander down the back road to the wood yard and find the burned ruins of his place? And why would they? Then they would need to identify the bodies that were incinerated to charcoal and ash. Moreover, he had removed the transponder from the cruiser. It could not be tracked. He had a small window of time unless he was very unlucky or did something really stupid. And if he survived, well, he’d worry about the consequences and what to do next with his life, if he even chose to go on living. For now, it was all about the mission. It was about not running. The mission was omnipotent.
Brooding behind his aviator sunglasses, the metallic surface reflected the world around him. His pancakes were buttermilk and the syrup had soaked the bacon. He took a strip into his mouth and chewed the salty sweet pork without taking his eyes off the four men on the other side of the diner, the true nature of his presence. They had been remarkably easy to find and when he walked past them into the diner they had barely noticed him, only that a lawman had entered. But what did they have to worry? As far as they knew, their boss owned the law in this desolate backwater, operated with impunity.
They might have noticed his limp but they never made the connection, if they had noticed it at all.
The waitress approached with a pot of coffee and refilled his mug.
“Can I please have another stack of pancakes ma’am?” Caleb asked.
“Long day ahead?”
“Real long.”
“You new?”
“You could say that.”
“Where are Gates and Sparks?”
“Retired.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes.”
“How do you like that?” she said. “They been coming here for twenty years, well, Sheriff Gates has, and don’t even have the courtesy to let me know.”
“I guess it’s a sign of the times.”
“I guess it is.”
He ate the second stack of pancakes and drank his coffee and when the four men exited he exited right behind them.
ᴥ
They piled into a mudcaked Chevy Tahoe and pulled o
nto the interstate. He let a car pass in front of him and followed about a half mile behind. The blacktop was wide open and he could see across the basin of the broad valley for thirty or forty miles in every direction.
They traveled north for fifteen minutes, passing beneath the high bluffs of Ghost Ranch and the ancient road to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, and then turned onto a rutted strip that cut across barren mesa land with columns of melting clay hoodoos.
He pulled onto the shoulder and watched the Tahoe until it disappeared over a rise. Then he turned onto the rutted strip and rolled through scrubland and scattered stands of pinyon and bur oak until he was looking at a doublewide trailer below an escarpment with an apron of cedar trees.
The Tahoe was parked out front next to a Ford Taurus and a Honda Pilot. He watched the trailer for twenty minutes from the front seat of the cruiser. The curtains were drawn shut on every window and nothing moved outside.
He watched the dashboard clock and listened to the police radio. The land was quiet and so was the radio.
And as he sat there listening to the soft morning wind through the dry grass outside his mind wandered into strange and commonplace things. He thought about how long he’d been alive and that his heart had beaten every second since then, and before then, in the womb when it had miraculously formed and pulsed for the first time, whole, the rhythm and sound of his genesis, and how this had continued and never ceased throughout his life, and how all of his organs had never failed him, not for a moment, ever, not even when he was unconscious after the blast and in a coma, unaware whether he was alive or dead, pure sleepless oblivion, but his body knew that he was still alive and never failed him. His heart had never failed him, not even for a beat.
He unbuttoned his shirt and slid his right hand underneath the bulletproof vest and tried to feel the life inside his breastplate. He sat there and listened, straining his ears. He readjusted his hand and thought that perhaps his heart had stopped, this one time when he had actually tried to feel it working without instruction. He listened a while longer for the elusive beat and then brought two fingers up to his neck and felt his pulse in his carotid artery. His heart hadn’t failed him. It was still there.
