During college, Cole saw Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman played a mild-mannered math professor driven to extreme violence when circumstances around him spiraled out of control. At the time, Cole was struck by the underlying question the film presented: Just how far would a person go to protect his home? Over the years, the idea became one of his favorite after-dinner conversation starters. He realized that many years ago, it was easy to say “whatever it takes”—and most men did. In reality, Cole was unsettled in his own mind just how far he could actually go.
Cole realized that it was dusk, and he saw the fog begin to roll up from the bay. Soon the bridge and the entire marina would disappear into a grey blanket. As night fell, the grey would turn to a white veil that swirled around street lamps. The fog would turn headlights of cars into solid conical tubes projecting from the vehicles. All the hookers, muggers, dopers, and street people in the city would appear and disappear within a few steps. It was time to go inside.
CHAPTER 2
He sat popping the blisters on his sunburned shoulders with a curved stick. The sweat beaded and dripped from the split ends of his dusty brown hair. The salt burned his raw shoulders, but blister after blister, he used the stick to puncture the pockets of clear liquid.
The winds of the foothills were a source of annoyance to Curtis Winger. His allergies were driven crazy by the dust and pollen that rode heavy on the winds. If he’d stayed in Minneapolis, he’d probably been rich by now, but the glamour of Las Vegas landed him in the dusty windblown piece of ground where he now sat bewildered.
The small canvas canopy provided little shade, and the shining aluminum of his Airstream trailer radiated with the afternoon sun. The plastic stereo speaker covers on the deck behind the back seat of his car drooped in molten black ruin. Three cans of ravioli hissed from swollen, near bursting seams as they gently rocked on the back seat.
Curtis’s pet rabbit, Harvey, lay dead on the front seat, a small trickle of blood still dripping from the corner of his small pink nose. He always wanted a rabbit like Jimmy Stewart had in the movie but settled for a small New Zealand instead.
Curtis’s clients went up with the first blast. Lucky for him, he decided to take a drive in the desert. Why he decided to take a drive was still a considerable mystery. His usual habit was to spend Sunday morning in bed. Getting up at six o’clock was as out of character for him as winning at the crap tables.
The revolution seemed such a good idea at the start. Mel Lyman tried to show the way, but Curtis knew the CIA or FBI, somebody poisoned him and he was gone. “Freedom from the repressive politics of the power elite,” and “share the wealth,” all seemed like the type of things that would surely propel the masses onto the “winning” side. They used to believe in the Doors’ lyrics—“They got the guns, But we got the numbers, Gonna win, yeah, We’re takin’ over”—but in the end, the guns proved to be the great leveler of philosophies. “This time there won’t be any changing water to wine,” that’s what Mel said, and look where it got him, dead. Lillie said Mel wasn’t dead, that if we believed, he would come back. That’s what they say about Elvis and Jim Morrison. Curtis even heard some kids say that about the black dude Tupac. He knew they were all dead, just like his friends, just like the revolution.
In the distance, the smoke and flames still rose above Las Vegas. They went ahead without him and taken out three casinos on the strip. He told them not to mess with his stuff. They didn’t know what they were doing, and Curtis knew it. He planned every step of the hit. He left the bombs in the backpacks on the table. He saved the materials for a year. All the preparation, all the work. It was gone, and for what?
The blockade of the city stopped any chance of taking a look at his boys’ handiwork. He knew they weren’t the real thing. All that talk of “filthy lucre” and “God’s pure light of judgment.” What was all that about? Curtis thought. With the evacuation came the cutoff of the water supply. The water Curtis brought from Vegas was almost gone. When it goes, that’s it, he thought. He drank up all the beer and soda in the trailer when he first got there. Now he was down to the water from the hotel that he’d filled jugs with for the radiator.
The first couple of days after the blasts, several cars passed, but none passed lately. The roads in and out of Vegas were crawling with National Guard troops, FBI, state and local police and sheriff’s units. Curtis spotted the old trailer on his drive. All the backtracking and circling around trying to avoid the roadblocks caused him to run out of gas. He had just enough inertia to coast down the drive and into the yard in front of the trailer. The old man said he didn’t have any gas and that his car wouldn’t start. It all was true, but Curtis didn’t believed him. Curtis killed him. He killed the old lady, too. He found a length of hose connected to the trailer used to drain water from the sink, but there wasn’t enough gas in the old man’s car to be able to siphon it out. That was the problem with cars; they have to have gas. Thus Curtis’s current predicament.
So, there he sat, out of gas, almost out of water, a dead pet, and three cans of Franco American Ravioli in Meat Sauce. The sunburn, he could let slide. That was his own fault, but why this other stuff? What had he done? Maybe he could still shoot somebody, if they would just come by, but he hadn’t seen a car in nearly two days. He really needed to leave.
The thing that particularly bugged him was that they chose the desert in the first place. They should have gone to Reno or Lake Tahoe. Their money was just as dirty, God’s pure whatever would still work, right? It was cooler there; there was water, trees, and beautiful lakes. The statement would have been just as meaningful. All that money, all those fat-assed rich people, not one cared that their SUVs and RVs were killing the planet. The irony was that he was sitting there paralyzed. He laughed to himself.
In Minneapolis, the Muslims were going to give him almost a million to teach them about explosives. Curtis didn’t like their religion. Mel Lyman was the only god he ever believed in, and look where that got him. So, now his money from The Cleansing Army of Christ went up with the casino hotel. Curtis had been broke before. The old man kept $50 in his wallet, so technically he wasn’t broke. Things would turn around.
Curtis would never strike someone as a revolutionary, an outlaw on the run for more than 30 years. At five-foot-five and 115 pounds, he was not a real physical threat. He could no longer remember, but he was pretty sure he would be 65 years old on his birthday. Trouble was, he had so many sets of fake IDs, he wasn’t absolutely sure which one was right anymore. He cut his hair short before he made the trip to Las Vegas. He no longer got “you look like Willie Nelson” comments. His red hair streaked with grey, his freckles and wrinkles, and his casual way of dressing made him look like a regular guy, a neighbor, the guy down the street. The thing that set him apart from all the “regular guys” was his total lack of regard for human life. This made him a grave threat.
In the beginning, the Peoples Deliverance Committee found ways around the gun control laws and brought weapons in from Mexico. As their revolution wore on, however, ammunition became a problem. Now with the government constantly looking for drug dealers, it made shipping difficult. After September 11, tighter and tighter restrictions were put into place on large caliber ammunition and the amount a person could buy. That’s where Curtis came in. Without a moment’s thought, he would plan and execute the indiscriminate killing of dozens of people through the use of chemicals, drugs, and poisons. The police and even the military always labeled the deaths as accidental. Curtis’s work was clean, well planned, and lethal. If they needed ammunition, Curtis would create another “accident” and liberate whatever was needed. National Guard armories were his specialty.
In the last days before the capture of Friend-Leader Adam A, Curtis eliminated an entire unit of the Kansas National Guard out on maneuvers by placing Trimetholene-Sentox into their water supply. The anti-electrical qualities of the compound “short circuited” the central nervous systems of all who dran
k the contaminated water. Curtis acted at night, and the chemical found its way into the system of everyone who brushed their teeth, drank coffee or tea, or ate anything prepared in the commissary the next morning. That got just about everyone on the field. The attack yielded more guns and ammunition than Curtis and his people could haul away.
The deaths were blamed on Legionnaires ’ disease. Adam A sent a letter to the New York Times claiming responsibility and warning of future attacks. With it he sent a list of demands, one of which was that the Peoples Deliverance Committee’s Manifesto be published in the Times. One week later, the FBI surrounded the house where Friend-Leader Adam A was staying with five members of the Committee. Adam A shot himself. The rest gave up without a struggle. It was then that Curtis determined he would go on alone. Mel Lyman taught him when he was chosen for the Karma Squad that “the embodiment of the Truth can withstand a loss of numbers, but the vision of one can carry the reality of the Truth on forever.” Curtis claimed that truth as his own and never looked back.
It seemed odd, though, for such a hero of the revolution to be sitting alone on the porch of an aluminum trailer sneezing and wiping his watering eyes with the tail of his shirt. Across the valley, waves of heat rose from fields of golden dead grass. In the foreground, the rusting cadavers of three bullet-ridden delivery vans blocked the gate hanging at half-mast at the edge of the road.
It rained, they say, about six months before Curtis arrived at the Baby Oxen Ranch. You couldn’t prove it by him, though. In 18 months, not one drop. That’s what the old man said. Even the gnarly live oaks that dotted the countryside were bare of leaves, so it was for sure the water table all but dried up.
As the hot wind tossed yellowed newspapers around the snaggled picket fence marking the boundaries of the yard, Curtis’s eyes fell on a piece of ground that broke the smooth golden pattern of the surrounding earth.
Powdery brown soil, with only pieces of straw here and there, held his unblinking gaze. The wind rocked the shovel next to the plot ever so gently, but enough to send a piercing needle of the hot summer sun into Curtis’s eye.
“Guess I should have buried them farther from the house,” he said aloud, looking at the graves.
A thin wisp of sticky saliva spanned the open chasm of Curtis’s parched lips. His dry tongue moved across his lips like the dry butt of a carpenter’s hand across a rough-cut timber. He unscrewed the cap from the white plastic gallon jug that sat between his feet. He brought the jug up to his eye. No more than three inches left, he thought. He took a short pull on the hot water from the jug. It tasted like chlorine. Clorox jugs were tough, that’s why he used them. They were treated with special stuff, too. Curtis used them a lot to store and transport various chemicals. He wondered if he cleaned this one well enough. Oh well, he thought, the water hasn’t gone bad. Must be the Clorox.
Curtis held the water in his mouth a long time. He pretended he was soaking his tongue in it. He licked his lips with great care, trying not to spill even a drop of the precious water. There was something different, like how sound changes when you go underwater. The sound was different. He strained but couldn’t tell. Were his ears ringing again? He did so much damage to them. Between explosions and rock bands, he lost most of his high frequency hearing years ago. He scanned the horizon. Far in the distance, Curtis could see two thin wisps of smoke. As he stared out across the rocks, the smoke seemed to change directions.
Curtis’s eyes were itching and watery, and his vision constantly shifted between crisp and blurred. He wiped his eyes with the arm of the stained T-shirt that lay across his lap. When he looked again, the smoke was gone. Curtis frowned and rubbed his eyes. He thought he saw something out there. There it was again, this time closer. It wasn’t smoke. It was dust. At what Curtis judged to be about a half mile away was a trail of dust behind some kind of vehicles. Couldn’t be cars, he thought, too far apart. He blinked and tried to refocus. It was a pair of four-wheel all-terrain vehicles.
Curtis closed his eyes and felt the watery tears roll from their corners. The sensation was short lived as the tears dried quickly on his dry windblown cheek. ATVs meant a way out. Shortly, the itching in his eyes subsided. Curtis blinked twice and smiled as he opened them to see the riders coming in his direction. Now less than a quarter mile away, he could see two men in long-sleeved white T-shirts and jeans. The rider on the right was wearing a full-faced red-flamed helmet. The other rider wore a three-quarter helmet with goggles.
Curtis sat up straight in the lawn chair. He reached down to the pile of magazines and newspapers on the ground on his right. He flipped past the magazines and pulled out the green sporting section of an old newspaper. The other sections turned yellow with age and exposure. Curtis looked down at the green canvas bag on his left. Should he wait? Better to be prepared, he thought. He unzipped the bag and reached in, feeling the cool steel barrel of his FN Herstal Five-seveN. Curtis took it off a policeman in Belgium two years ago. He wasn’t a gun nut. He used many weapons over the years. He was a good, but not great, shot. Several times he almost was killed when he forgot to put a round in the chamber of an automatic weapon. He was always afraid of running out of ammunition, so he never carried a revolver. He fell in love with the Five-seveN. It was always ready. No hammer to cock. Safe to carry with a round in the chamber, it was ready to fire. It held 20 rounds in the magazine. Those 20 rounds were bullets that could pierce a bulletproof vest like a knife through a watermelon. The gun was perfect for what Curtis needed, up close and personal. He laid the gun in his lap and held the paper as if he were reading.
The ATVs coasted to a stop 10 feet from where Curtis sat, and the riders killed the engines. Before him were two young men in their mid-20s. The rider on the right was tall and thin. He wore heavy engineer boots and jeans. The other man was smaller and wore tennis shoes. The taller of the two flipped up the face shield on his helmet.
“How’s it goin’?”
“Fine. What do you call those things, anyway?” Curtis smiled, indicating their vehicles.
“Mines a KFX700, his is a 400.” The taller man boasted.
“Okay, now in English.”
The shorter man laughed and looked at his companion. “He means to say they’re Kawasaki All Terrain Vehicles. His is bigger, so he always rubs it in.”
The taller man began once more. “Hey, we got kind of turned around. The National Guard guys blocked the canyon we were going to take, and when we took the trail they pointed us to, we got lost, I guess.”
“Where you guys from?” Curtis asked.
“Bakersfield,” the shorter guy offered.
“You camp out here?” Curtis continued.
“Yeah, we’re here for a couple weeks. We do it every year.”
“Been here long? Did you see the bombs go off downtown?” Curtis continued questioning the shorter man.
“No, we just got here last night. That’s somethin’, isn’t it? We figured things would have lightened up by now. It’s been a couple weeks, right?”
“Yeah, two weeks Sunday. The rocks around here must play hell with your tires,” Curtis said, looking the vehicles over.
“We bought those new Fukuoka Steel Knobbers. Seem to be working good. So, how do we get back to Mac Johnson Park, anyway?” The taller man seemed impatient with the conversation and his friend’s chatter.
“Which one?”
“Mac Johnson, it’s new, just west of Red Rock Canyon. Opened last May. We really like it. Nobody knows about it yet, so it’s really empty.”
“You got to be a good 20 miles north of Red Rock. This is Old Murphy Road. Red Rock is hell and gone from here,” Curtis said, pointing to the end of the dirt driveway.
“Daniel, you idiot,” the short guy laughed, “I told you we were going south.”
“How far’s a thing like that get on a tank of gas?” Curtis said to the man named Daniel.
“No problem us running out. We’ve only gone about 25 or 30 miles. We can get almost 200 miles to
a tank.” Daniel rocked the vehicle side to side. “We just topped up before we left.”
“You guys are lucky your women let you go on vacation alone. My old lady would never have stood for that.”
“We’re not married,” Daniel said. “No one to answer to but ourselves.”
“Fine-looking guys like you not married?”
“Sometimes I feel like we’re married, the way Kyle is always bitchin’ at me to clean up the house.”
“You live together?”
“Yeah, but we’re not gay or nothin’. We have been friends since junior high, and we work together at Kurland’s Kawasaki. That’s how we got these. Employee discount.”
“Yeah, if we were married I’d divorce him,” laughed Kyle.
“So, nobody will know you’re missing for two weeks,” Curtis said as he stood up. The newspaper hid the pistol.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Daniel snapped.
“Take off your helmet, Kyle,” Curtis said in a flat, firm tone.
“Why?” Kyle said, a frown starting at the corners of his mouth.
“I don’t want to get blood on it,” Curtis said as a smile went across his face.
“What the hell are you talking—” Before Daniel could finish his sentence, Curtis raised the gun and shot him through the right eye. With the force of the bullet exiting his helmet, Daniel flew off the bike like he was yanked by an invisible rope. Daniel fell against Kyle and crushed Kyle’s leg against his own ATV.
Helix of Cole Page 3
