Chapter 35

Table of Contents

Tony Vargas stood outside the adobe jailhouse of the ranger station with his hands cuffed behind his back, watching Dustin Diesel stare at his squad car and stroke his Odobenian mustache.

"Let's get going already," Tony said as he squirmed in his manacles.  "What are you thinking about?"

"I'm thinking I'm going to commandeer Lindell's truck," he said.  "Mine is about to come up with a flat tire, I am thinking."  Dustin walked into the jailhouse and found the keys to Lindell's Ranger pickup hanging on the rack. Since Lindell was the local ranger, it was appropriate he drove a Ranger.  Dustin made sure the truck started, then pulled out his pocket knife and put the blade through one of his squad car tire´s sidewalls.  Then he got on the radio.  "This is Santa Cruz Sheriff Dustin Diesel.  I have suffered a vehicle breakdown and I am heading back to Nogales in the automobile of a private citizen, escorting a prisoner.  No need for assistance at this time."

Dustin dropped the mike after hearing a rather disinterested 10-4 on the other end.  "These squad cars got a black box in them.  All of our conversations will be recorded.  They also have dash cams.  We don't need any eyes or ears on this.  Besides, I get the feeling it's better to travel incognito."

"Yeah, but Lindell is going to be pissed.  He loves his truck."

"Lindell is so drunk he won’t know what hit him. Sometimes he wakes up from a bender and forgets where he parked his truck. One time he reported it stolen, then found it a week later, parked under a pinyon half a mile away. We will either be back or be dead before he sleeps it off.  When he sees my squad car with a flat he'll probably figure it out anyway.  He's a drunk but he ain't stupid."

Dustin transferred his weapons from the squad car to the pickup.  In addition to his sidearm he was packing a 12 gauge and a Savage 308 Winchester that had a scope for long-range work.

"You still carrying that old piece of shit?" Tony said with mock disparagement, knowing the Sheriff was deadly with it.  "They got better sniper guns than that now."

Dustin caressed the rifle stock lovingly.  "I'll either go to heaven or hell with this weapon, depending on where the good Lord sees fit to send me.  The shot is about the man, not the machine.”

“I just hope you shoot better than you golf. Save that noise for your rifle range flunkies, and get me out of these handcuffs.  It might get complicated, so you better deputize me on the spot.  I can't raise my right hand with my hands cuffed."

The Sheriff could see the merit of this argument, but he was nervous.  If any man was his match, it was Tony Vargas. He looked and acted like a buffoon, but he was still quick, tough and smart. "You're not going to try anything funny, are you?"

"Hell yeah.  You know me, I’m the class clown.  Come on man.  I'm at the end of my rope.  I've got nowhere to run to.  I've spent the last few weeks trying to force myself with every ex-girlfriend from the past 50 years of my life, but none of them will have me.  It's like I grew a harelip all of a sudden.  I'm done.  Game over."

Dustin read helplessness and despair in Tony's eyes.  His old buddy was a philandering jerk, that was for sure, but he didn't like to see him with the fight all gone, with his swagger surgically removed. He took off the cuffs, and Tony sat down passively in the passenger's seat of the Ranger.

"Let's roll," Tony said.  "On second thought maybe I'm better off in jail.  They got porn there, right? Didn’t some judge say that’s a constitutional right?”

Dustin glowered at him. ¨Yeah, I think so, but around here you of all people should know we wipe our backside with the constitution.¨

The Ranger rolled down the mountain.  The pair moved quietly at first, without Tony's usual banter,  but then Dustin started thinking out loud about things.  "Your brother Danny has got to be mixed up in all this.  Danny has Eddy Drucker on a short leash, from what I understand.  Whatever happened to your brother, anyway?  I remember he used to be such a well-behaved fella, taking your mother to church on Sunday, tipping his hat to the ladies, making the rounds of the old folks to make sure they were okay.  It seems to me he went bad in a hurry."

Tony sank a little bit in his seat.  He never liked to talk about his brother, but people were always trying to coax it out of him.  "Me and Danny are only half brothers, you know."

"I know that.  Everybody knows that.  It's kind of obvious, you got two different last names."

Tony winced.  "Well that's only because my mother, for all her saintly glory, had really bad taste in men.  Her first husband Abel Valero got too drunk one day, then fell down and drowned in a ditch.  To drown in a ditch in this waterless shithole you really got to be fucking trying.  I call it suicide.  My mother could be kind of tough to live with.  Those dudes deserved the treatment anyway, they were assholes.  Her second husband, Hector Vargas, just ran off, or maybe wound up in jail."

Dustin looked over at Tony carefully. This question was a land mine. "Hector was your Father, right?"

"What are you, Dr. Phil? Why you gotta go there?  I've spent my whole life trying to convince people that bueno para nada was not my Dad.  Unfortunately, I got cursed with his name, but he ain't got nothing to do with me.  Look at my skin.  Didn't they always used to call me huero in school?  Hector Vargas was dark as a fucking cigar store Indian.  Short little fucker too.  I'm six feet.  There's no way."

As he navigated the featureless highways, Dustin nodded thoughtfully.  "Folks always did say that.  I guess that's why they always said you crawled in off of the desert, and that's why you got this tendency to take care of homeless critters."

"Well that theory actually makes more sense than Hector Vargas being my Dad.  I wish I could just erase that asshole's name from my birth certificate, but it's ain’t that easy."

It got awkwardly quiet for a moment but then Dustin resumed the discussion.  "So what happened? In spite of not having a Pop around, you seemed like a good little family.  Your Momma was a strong lady.  She kept you three boys in check.  I don't know where Danny went south."

"Believe me, Danny was always an asshole,” Tony said,”but we kept it in the family, under wraps. Then one day he bought that filling station. You know every business around here pays protection money to someone, but Danny didn't want to pay. When he came back from Vietnam he was a bad-ass vato. He was a tunnel rat over there, you know. They always sent Mexicans to do those jobs because they're expendable.  One beaner goes down you just throw in another, like tossing in a grenade.  But Danny was a tough, ornery son of a bitch.  He used to drag those little rice eating gooks out from their holes by the skin of their balls.  He seen a lot of bad shit over there and it made him mean, after that he wouldn't let anybody fuck with him.  When the local thugs tried to shake him down he said fuck you I ain't paying.  Except he didn't say fuck you because he don't curse. Never did.”

There was a pause between quotation marks as Tony gathered his words.  He still didn't know on which side of the fence Danny sat on this current issue. They had argued about Mike before they left, Danny trying to call in a favor involving the kid.  What fucking favor? Tony asked him. I got you out of jail, Danny answered.  Yeah, but first you got me into jail with your bullshit.  Leave the kid alone. The conversation had almost ended in fisticuffs.  Then that same night, that squinty little whore had gotten in between he and the kid right when things were going good, and now he found himself here, homeless and under arrest, while Danny muscled in on Mike and the motel.  Danny was his brother, but was only really his brother when it was convenient for Danny.  The rest of the time you were just a tool for him, something to be used and thrown away when service had been rendered. Fuck Danny.

"You already know that Danny killed Bobby Cortes and his whole gang, one by one,” Tony continued. “I can't say I did not participate logistically, but I never pulled no trigger. The whole town was behind him anyway, Danny became a hero, because Cortes was a thug.  But you know as well as me that no one operates  independently down here.  Cortes was part of a bigger racket, and that racket wanted revenge.  Fighting them took soldiers and money.  So now, instead of paying Bobby Cortes, the local merchants paid Danny.  Some of them dragged their feet, naturally, and although Danny tried to reason with them, sometimes he had to use heavy hints.  The shit got deeper and deeper.   Instead of being some kind of Robin Hood freedom fighter, Danny became Bobby Cortes, reincarnated.  He had to make deals, he had to make alliances.  To get the money he needed, he had to take over the operations that Cortes was running before, and bring in new people to supply him."

"At that point," Tony went on, "I think Danny was still trying to do the right thing.  I think his heart, if he ever had one, was in the right place.  Could be he still thinks he's doing the right thing.  But things changed when Saul died.  Saul is Marisol's Pop, you know."  Dustin nodded.  "Saul was always a sweet kid, and he idolized Danny.  That was his undoing.  Danny was always sending Saul out to do his dirty work, and one night he got gunned down, right there on Main Street Yuma.  He died with a smile on his face, like he got the joke, but the joke was on him."

"Danny really changed after that.  He got even meaner, and he got violent.  He didn't try to persuade people nicely anymore, you were just supposed to do things because he said so.  I was already working for the Southern Pacific at that time, you know.   I was kind of a tunnel rat myself, crawling into boxcars sometimes, that were like holes in the ground with wheels.  I sparred with some bad mother fuckers riding the rails for free.  A lot of times they were some real swine carrying guns or blades, and they deserved to be knocked on their ass.  Other times they were just broke kids trying to catch a free ride home.  I still had to rough them up a little, to send a message, but I never left a mark, and I never enjoyed that part.  That was just my job and I did it good.  I was a soldier for the Southern Pacific, with my whole heart and soul thrown into it.  I got the job done and they loved me for it."

"But like I said, after Saul died Danny started treating us like we were his bitches.  He expected me to use my job to move his merchandise but I told him to get fucked, in so many words.  Like I said, I was a soldier for the Southern Pacific, and that's where I drew the line.  After Saul died, not too many people got away with saying No to Danny.  The only reason I did was because he is my brother, and he swore to my Mother on her death bed that he would take care of me.  He takes that shit seriously, otherwise I would be dead, like everybody else who crossed him.¨

Dustin had pulled the bumpy little Ranger onto the freeway now.  Cornudo loomed ahead. It was a town that existed in defiance of its exclusion from every map, based on strict guidelines that prohibit roadkill, bug splats, potholes and other road hazards from being annotated on cartographic instruments.

"But now I think Danny is desperate," Tony went on as he took a wistful glance in the direction of his hometown.  "You can say what you want about him, but up until this point he's been kind of a benevolent dictator, as long as you don't fuck with him.  Now he´s different, I think he's in some kind of big trouble.  Do you remember that construction site that got shot up on the border, where they were waiting for funds to go ahead with the wall building?  That sub-contractor was one of the cartel´s guys.  The buzz I've heard in the bars the last few days is that the cartel set that company up so they can get a jump on digging a drug tunnel right under the wall.¨

  ¨Well, now the operation is exposed, the feds found plans for a tunnel there, and Danny is in deep with the cartel because the dudes who raided the site, namely Eddy and the FF, work for him.  He needs quick cash to get out of this problem.  Mike has a lot of cash, and Danny knows that.  Can't this clunker go any faster?"

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Image by US Customs and Border Protection - public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 34

Table of Contents

In the kitchen of the Cornudo Café, Mike Gasden heard the shot, but thought nothing of it.  He assumed trigger-happy yokels were just shooting bottles in the desert, a common pastime around here. In a place where nothing useful could live or grow, it was assumed that God had created the desert for human despoliation.  Nobody really knows what God was thinking when he made the wretched place - was he punishing mankind, was he exercising his divine sense of humor? The theory that he had created the desert so people could destroy shit and not feel guilty about it seemed as good as any.

Mike wrapped up his purging of Max's computer and stood to stretch his legs.  His sense of urgency to be away from Cornudo had been smoothed over by the soul-purging catharsis that exorcising cyber-demons out of another human's cyber-soul always gave him.  By restoring order to a disorderly morass of binary anarchism, Mike always walked away happy that he had re-imposed his own sense of purpose, his place in the cosmos.  Justice is its own reward, ma'am, the hat-tipping gunslinger says as he rides into the sunset, after refusing payment for his services.  To Mike the feeling was the same.  He rarely charged for such favors, believing that he had selfishly benefited by rectifying the great evil of mutinous electrons.

"I'm finished," he announced to Linda, who was standing a few feet away at the cash register.  "You can tell Max to come out of the bathroom now."

Linda shuffled over and planted a very stimulating kiss on Mike's lips - not quite a lover's kiss, not quite a dry spinster aunt's kiss either, but something in between that was imminently satisfying, something he would remember her by, very fondly, for the rest of his days.  "Thank you gingerbread.  You saved our asses again.  You better run along now.  I saw a customer pull up a couple minutes ago."

"Probably somebody who got turned around," said Mike.  "If they had stopped at the office Little F would have called me."

"How do you get lost around here?  Hell is east, heaven is west.  It's easy to find your way."

Mike shrugged and tapped on the bathroom door.  "Bye Max." You sick bastard

"Thanks Mike," the subdued, shamed voice of Max the cook said through the wood. He didn´t say See you later, because he was not sure he could face Mike, after this.

Mike walked across the scalding tarmac back to the Motel, his steps less urgent than on the outbound trip.  The rumored sighting of a motorist in his lot did not begin to concern him until he emerged from his virus-smiting Zen and chanced a look up, which threw the Toyota parked in front of the critter room into his vision.  Immediately he was cast from the cyber heavens, hurled back by his hubris onto the scorched earth-reality of the Gadsden Purchase, and broke into a run.

The door to the critter room was wide open, and a large motionless man lay outside who appeared to be dead, straddling the walkway and parking lot.  Mike´s first concern was for the occupants of the critter room, not for the beached cetacean, but there was no evidence of Little F except his abandoned postcards, writing paper, and Mike's cell phone.  If the boy had left all this behind, it meant he had departed in a hurry.  Mike sprang now toward the office, but as he did so the carcass in the doorway lifted a feeble hand to stop him.  He saw that it was Catalina Eddy down there, out of uniform and out of character.

"Some famous Chinese guy said there is poison in the fang of the serpent and the sting of the scorpion, but the wicked man is saturated with it," Eddy said in trembling voice.

Mike didn't bother to correct him that the quote was of a famous Indian guy, because unlike Eddy's auto-correct sidekick Costello, he didn't know.  "I suppose this is an appropriate way for me to go out.  The scene reminds me of Kim Basinger in Kill Bill, laying on the floor, blind in both eyes after the deadly viper strikes."

"Wasn't that Darryl Hannah?" Mike said impatiently.  He was looking at the fang marks on the tip of Eddy's finger.

"You sure?  You're probably right. I suck at that."

"Pretty sure. Red on yellow?"

Eddy nodded.

"The venom is potent, but the delivery system is inefficient.  You'll probably live if you get antivenin in time.  Where is he?"

Eddy pulled himself up a little by Mike's pant leg.  "Don't call for help.  I've done enough damage for one life."

Mike yanked himself away.  "Where is he?"

"The kid escaped, but I think he's with Danny now.  I heard him walking off with Danny´s pretty little niece a little while ago."

This news eased Mike's anxiety, but only by a tad.  She may be a faithless, fickle slut, but he couldn't imagine Marisol hurting Little F.

"Don't leave him with Danny," Eddy cautioned.  "I used to be in a sort of unholy alliance with him, but now that I'm on my way out there's no need to maintain that axis of evil anymore."

"You tried to shoot the boy, didn't you? That was the shot I heard."

A shroud spread over Eddy's face.  His complexion blanched from a wave of self-realization.  "Yeah," he admitted with a cold shudder.  "I don't know why I do the things I do anymore.  I wasn't always bad.  Up until a minute ago, I still didn't think of myself as bad.  This place does it to you.  This gall-dang Gadsden Purchase is a refuge for people who are hiding from their true natures.  The first lie we tell ourselves when we seek asylum here is that we love the desert.  Nobody loves the desert, it is a self-inflicted penance, self-flagellation, a banishment for imagined sins.  This first lie then becomes a slippery slope.  The lies come quick and easy after that, starting an avalanche of untruth.  After you build a house on a foundation of self-deception, it ain't easy to remodel the interior.  The lies become part of your being, and you get to the point where you can say anything or do anything without feeling anything.  Get out of the Gadsden Purchase son, while there is still good left in you."

Cut und run? Too late."Yeah thanks for the advice but I gotta go.  Wait.  How did you get the key to this room?"

"We took it from Tony," Eddy wheezed, breathing with difficulty.

Mike's hopes sunk.  He had been hoping Tony might ride into the rescue.  "Is he dead?"

Eddy made a painful effort to shake his head sideways.  "I don't think so.  He got away."

There were a lot of unanswered questions spinning through Mike's skull.  He could stay here and interrogate Eddy more, but he had to make sure Little F was safe, first.

Mike started for the office but Eddy latched on to his pant leg again, weaker this time.  "Let me die.  Don't send help."

"You should pay for the things you've done.  Dying is too easy.  You killed his mother, didn't you?"

Eddy nodded. "If you let me live, I won´t repent, I'll just go back to being evil again.  I'll do more bad things.  I'll hurt more people.  Maybe by dying I'll finally do some good.  Believe me, I'm paying.  That snake juice in your veins is painful.  Go get the boy.  Danny is a no good son of a motherless goat.  He'll use him for leverage then kill him."

Mike looked down at Eddy the stranded whale and didn't know what to say, so he said nothing.  He left him there and ran to check the panic room.  Mike felt really stupid for letting Marisol learn of its existence, and showing her how to get in.  When women hand over the keys to the sweet spot between their legs, a dude will hand over the keys to the city.  Men could resist extortion, bribery, even torture, but they couldn't resist a beautiful woman´s smile.  Mike was not a student of history, but he thought it a pretty safe bet that behind the lowered curtain of every great civilization lurked a woman.

As predicted by the fallen chieftain of the Freedom Frontiersmen, Little Fucker was no longer in the panic room.  Little F's manifesto was scattered there on the floor, as was the devil-horn Stuka pilot, whose image lay upside down, a desecrated icon amidst the rubble.  Mike thought about picking up the papers, but realized these desperate scrawlings were an attempt at communication.  He didn't understand any of the strange, looping letters, so they weren't for him.  Better to leave them for someone who got the message.

Mike was certain that Little F was no longer on the property.   Both the motel and his soul both echoed with emptiness.  He shut the door and started for the gas station, hoping maybe Marisol had only decided to take care of Little F while Mike was away. But if that was true, why had she taken the kid out of the air-conditioned sanctuary of the motel into that hell-hole gas station?  Had she just been a tool all the while, an instrument used by Danny to get his hooks into him?  Since Mike was no longer earning income for Danny, was he going to use Little F for ransom money?

Danny was obviously not in his usual place, as the gas station office door was locked.  A black Silverado pickup was parked around the side that Mike had never seen before - it had a Mexican flag license plate holder and a Mal Verde decal in the back window, a slick haloed gangster with crossed machine guns beneath him.  The presence of this unknown truck should have set off alarm bells, but at this point Mike was still laboring beneath the naive assumption that he would just walk up to the door, ask nice, then take Little F home.

Mike rapped his knuckles on the rusty metal of the roll up.  He had not once seen this door open, as one would expect in a functioning service station.  It was possible the door did not work, maybe a deliberate effort on the part of Danny to reinforce the ghost town vibe of Cornudo.  The corrugated metal´s paint was a greasy, faded, rain-streaked aquamarine that had been tacky and third-worldish when freshly applied several decades ago, and now was just tired and dreary.  The desolate, deserted feel was amplified when Mike's knocking did not result in any audible stirring within the dilapidated structure.

Mike knocked again, and this time perceived the shuffling of feet, after which came the squeak of rusty hinges around the side.  Mike walked around there and saw Marisol. 

For a microsecond it was as if nothing had changed between them.  Marisol´s protective barrier dropped and she gave Mike a beaming smile, followed by what could have been a Judas kiss on the cheek, except that Gethsemane never felt so good.

"Where's Little F?" Mike asked.

"He's right here," Marisol answered in an overly sweet tone he had never heard from her before.  "Come in."

The interior of the garage is exactly what one would expect the interior of a garage to be like when it is 115 degrees outside and there is no air conditioning.  The word sweltering would be a gross under-representation of the facts.  If there was an English word to combine sweltering and suffocating, like sweltercating, for instance, that would be more accurate.  The oil and grease stains splattering the walls and concrete floor seemed to be melting in the heat and releasing noxious fossil fuel vapors into the air, if such an unbreathable combination of boiling chemicals and human emissions could still be called air.  The metal roll-up door radiated heat from outside like, well, a radiator.  The interior of this stifling hot box would have never passed Geneva convention muster, even as a facility for storing genocidal war criminals.  Bacteria that thrived atop scalding geothermal vents would rebel at the thought of being sequestered in these confines.

"Why did you bring Little F inside?" Mike complained.  "It's horrible."

The unmistakable click of a gun hammer being pulled back sounded in Mike's ear.  "You fucking cunt," Mike said.

Marisol spun and ran out of the room. Mike was left with a rather large, blockheaded Hispanic male wearing a large diamond earring in the straight ear. The brute forced Mike up against a greasy wall and pointed a large caliber pistol in his face. Am I really dying? thought Mike. Then Danny came out from somewhere. He was dressed formally for a change, though his black tie and white shirt made him look like he was going to a funeral, or maybe on his way to distribute Watchtowers.

"Ease off of him Sal," said Danny. Sal took his heavy elbow off of Mike's throat. "Now I told you to watch your mouth around me. If we're going to do business you have to observe the ground rules. I especially don't appreciate your foul mouth around my niece."

Danny didn't appear to rear back very far, but the shot he delivered to Mike just beneath the rib cage almost caused him to pass out from pain. Mike´s eyes retreated momentarily into the back of his skull, and he teetered for a moment between mere blindness and the totality of unconsciousness. Almost was what Danny intended. Unconsciousness didn't serve his purpose. He needed Mike to remember the pain.

As for Mike, he was surprised that intense pain was not as bad as he imagined. Rather than subdue him, he rose from his doubled-up state with a lot worse words than cunt on the tip of his tongue. Then he remembered Little F was around here somewhere.

"Tie him up," said Danny. "We have things to negotiate, and it's better you keep me in a pleasant frame of mind.

This time Danny pinned Mike to the wall while Sal bound his hands with a cord. Sal must have had onions for lunch, thought Mike, because his breath really stank. Simmering in the sweltercating heat, the stench was worse than the pain.

"Where's the boy?" Mike demanded, as if having his hands tied was a manageable tangle, on the order of Max's virus infested computer. "I'm not negotiating anything until I see he's okay."

Mike looked at Danny defiantly. Danny wanted to knock the sass right out of him but he thought he better get the money first. When he had it he would make sure Mike paid dearly for his lack of respect.

"You'll see him soon enough," Danny said. "Take him into the storeroom with the kid. I'll get Marisol out here to help. Solita!"

Marisol walked in much more composed than before. In fact, she looked angry. Danny put his hands on her cheeks. "Que tienes mija?"

"Didn´t you hear what he called me? You told me no one would get away with saying things like that to me again. You should kill him now."

Danny smiled, looking pleased by this outburst. "Oh, he'll pay one way or another, I promise. Now keep it together. I've got a little meeting but I'll be right back. Throw him in with the kid. That little bug who crawled in from the desert means a lot to him. That's good for business.

Danny walked away whistling the hook from Lowrider. Mike thought maybe that was his idea of a good Mexican folk song. Meanwhile, the one called Sal led him away at gunpoint, taking him into what was called the storeroom, an inappropriate name because there was nothing stored in it. Its prominent features were blank cinder block walls and a cement floor with a drain. Instead of batteries, hoses, belts and other things that would be useful in a garage, the storeroom was obviously used for temporary storage of people about to die.

The only other item in the storeroom was an old, non-descript playpen containing the Little Fucker. If they think that will hold him they're in for a surprise, Mike laughed inwardly, trying to make sure Sal could not read the amusement in his eyes.

Sal slammed Mike down beside the playpen, using more force than necessary. When Sal had shut the door behind them, Little F stood up and shuffled over to Mike with worried happiness on his face. "Mike," he said, then repeated it like a prayer. "Mike."

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Image is of an engraving by Jacob Matham, in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 33

Table of Contents

As Mike puzzled away at the Gordian knot, that tangled, fetid mess of ones and zeroes, jammed together like some rancid mixture of short hairs and rotten soap scum, a putrid fatberg blocking the bowels of Max's computer, here is what was happening across the parking lot at the Gasden Motel.

It turns out that the driving time between Tombstone and Cornudo was not as long as Mike's faulty math had calculated, especially if the driver in question can commandeer an escort of law enforcement officials.

With a few phone calls, Catalina Eddy was able to pull a small cordon of sympathetic deputies away from their sworn duties.  Lights flashing fore and aft of the FF flotilla, the armada of grimy minutemen then crossed the dreary sea of sand separating them from Cornudo, moving much more quickly than the legal speed limit would allow.  Years of siphoning off ill-gotten gain into sheriff funeral funds, police athletic leagues, and massive peace-officer kegger-stripper parties, had paid dividends.  Of course, the gaudy escort was dismissed where the 85 met Gila Bend, lest the public servants bear witness to a spectacle that would forever sully the public service image of the Freedom Frontiersmen.

At the ice cream parlor beside the grove of fruit-bearing palms at Dateland, Eddy left his co-militiamen behind.  "Go in and shake 'em down for a shake," he told his band of merry buccaneers, privateers on the sea of sun-baked earth that was the Gadsden Purchase.  "I'll be along presently.  I have to go in alone.  If Danny spots us muscling in on his territory we will have a shooting war on our hands.  We're not ready to take on that ilk just yet."

Carrying the key to the critter room in his pocket, Eddy obtained the Toyota sedan, then drove the last stretch alone.  He felt naked without his celebrated sombrero, but in a pleasant skinny-dipping way, feeling unencumbered by the image it represented.  Dressed in Hawaiian shirt and beach shades, he wondered what life would have been like without the charade, pursuing his true predilections and passions, hanging out with shaven beefcakes on South Beach, instead of with hairy, unwashed barbarians in dirty, scorpion-infested pits on some thorn-choked stretch of borderland.

Maybe after this last little loose end was tied up, he could finally retire from this rotten business and do the things he really wanted.  He had started off years ago defending militia thugs in court, and had wound up becoming one, his ambition for adulation always taking him one step further then he intended to go.  Revival preaching had been a lucrative side gig, but even his aptitude for slick talking couldn't always shield him from outrage and its consequences. His gospel career was sidetracked when he was caught in the sack with the son of the youth pastor at a megachurch where he had been doing quite well, selling fire insurance at lucrative commissions.  Hell, if he could walk away gracefully from this militia gig, maybe he could take his traveling salvation show to South Beach, peddling a more hedonistic version of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.  The Gratification Gospel, or some such.  He could buy big dinner plate teeth like Joel Osteen, sell millions of books, then fly around in leer jets with plenty of male tail packed in the luggage compartment.  The prospect was pleasant, if he could just complete this one last mission.

The Gasden Motel came into view.  Looking to his left, Eddy did a quick inspection of the inn´s parking lot.  There were no cars there, not an unusual situation for the summertime, when most business consisted of weary, head-bobbing travelers rolling in after dark.  From this vantage he could not see Mike's truck parked around the front, but that was not necessarily an empediment, because if he rolled in from the café side he could grab the kid and be out of there before Mike had time to run down from the office and interfere with the abduction.  Of course, all of these plans assumed the kid was in the critter room.  Common sense asked why anyone would keep a child in a chamber of horrors like that, packed with fanged beasts that were sometimes venomous?  Precisely because of its bad reputation, which was enough to stop most people from going in there, making it the perfect hiding place.  Of course, Eddy wasn't most people.  He shared his sleeping bag with scorpions and centipedes on a regular basis.  Once a rattlesnake had crawled in beside him.  The horrors of the critter room did not daunt him.

Eddy paused at the far edge of the lot and checked the loaded pistol in his pocket.  He still had not decided whether to kidnap the boy or just make sure he stayed quiet, forever.  The latter was certainly easier, perhaps even more humane.  But a murder investigation would be much more intense than a missing person case for a person that nobody even knew was missing.  Either way, If Danny found out that he, Catalina Eddy had been here, no police department would track him down before Danny did.

Still undecided, Eddy rolled into the parking lot of the Gasden Motel and pulled up parallel to the door of the critter room, positioning the vehicle in such a way that he could make a quick getaway.  Then he walked the few necessary steps as casually as possible, playing the role of naïve, desert-deluded traveler to the tee in his beach comber costume. He tried the key, and when it fit perfectly he jolted back shocked a little, as if the door handle carried an electric current. 

The door swung open and there was the boy, sitting on the bed as if gift wrapped for him.  "Aren't you a cute little devil," Eddy said to the tender young face, who looked up from his doodlings with his mouth drawing a perfect O of surprise.  What the heck, Eddy thought.  This kid was too pretty to drag out into the nasty, cruel desert.  He raised the pistol.

The storyteller now digresses a moment to the subject of Chekhov's gun, first brought to his attention through the works of Japanese author Haruki Murakami.  One might think our author is stealing a literary device from Murakami – no, literary is a reach, let's call it a storytelling device.  Perhaps he is, but if it makes the offended reader feel any better, the axiom will be modified a little.

The doctrine of Chekhov's gun is interpreted such that 'if in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.'  Haruki Murakami, who is a very experimental writer, deliberately defied Anton Chekhov's gun laws, using what seemed like three or four hundred pages to do so, instead of jumping as required from one act to the next.  Here, however, we shall adhere strictly to the strictures of Anton Chekhov. Even though we have never read him, Chekhov is a literary giant. Murakami is another giant, true, translated into 50 languages, so he can get away with disobeying Chekhov. But who are we?

For you the literary literalist out there, unable to get past the concrete image of a gun hanging on a wall, the storyteller must interrupt the narrative flow one more time to explain that Chekhov's gun is just a concept, an abstraction that can be expanded to other objects besides firearms.  Chekhov's gun can be a knife, a box of rat poison, a box of kitchen matches, a Masai spear brought back from a photo safari, a poisonous jungle frog in a glass bowl, anything that can be used by the protagonist or his/her antagonist to retard the progress of his/her literary foe.

In this case, in act one we identified a couple of items in the critter room as our surrogate Chekhov's gun(s).  We were very careful to point them out, doing so repeatedly, I would say even with a bit of overkill, just in case you were snoozing the first couple times around.  Now, in act two, our Chekhov's gun(s) will be fired, because the accepted standards of storytelling must be satisfied.  Back to the narrative.

When Eddy pointed the gun at Little Fucker, a firearm which, ironically, was not really a Chekhov´s gun at all in the strict definition, the boy let out a shriek. Having survived a civil war he knew what a gun was and what it could do.  When he yelped, something stirred beneath the bed and then whipped around with its scaly tail, if a being´s entire body can be referred to as a tail, an act that set the lost half-empty mayonnaise jar in motion, from where it had rolled into a recess in the wall.  Next, the first of our surrogate Chekhov's guns slithered its way out of the dark den to follow the other, in order to investigate this unwelcome invasion of privacy.

Eddy took a couple of steps forward to get a better shot.  As he did so he stepped on one of Chekhov's guns, the mayonnaise jar, of which the other Chekhov's gun, the deadly serpent, was very fond.  Eddy then lost his footing on the half-eaten jar of condiments and fell backwards.  His shot went wild into the roof, and Little F took this as his cue to spring for the hidden door between two critter covered dressers. Behind this door lay a Fucker-sized ladder leading to the attic, where there was a Fucker-sized passageway leading to the Herr's refurbished panic room, concealed beside the safe in Mike's office.  The boy had been drilled on this eventuality numerous times and, because he was a good soldier, he carried out the plan with tactical precision.

Laying flat on his back in the doorway of the critter room, Eddy pondered this unexpected eventuality.  The tanned beefcakes of South Beach looked farther away than ever before.  On the descent off the mayonnaise booby trap, he had hit the back of his noggin hard on the cement walkway just outside the door, making him dizzy and delirious, unable to move.  He could only lay there helplessly as the other Chekhov's gun came slithering into view, specifically that missing snake of uncertain toxicity, hissing its angry way along to avenge it's friend, whose plastic sides had been flattened by Eddy's weight.

"Red on yellow will kill a fellow," Eddy noted clinically, but not without some humor.  Then the serpent struck.

Across the street, shielded from view of the critter room by the intervening building, Danny Valero was reading the Arizona Republic inside the greenhouse sauna of the gas station office, a place at least as hot as the surface of Venus, when the gunshot went off.

Danny had just seen a tourist pull in, probably some anachronistic dude from the midwest on his way to San Diego, a cloistered slicker who still thought floral shirts were in vogue, thirty years after Miami vice.  Danny had not given him a second thought, dismissing him as a yokel in a rented silver sedan.  Then the gun went off, something not expected from a yokel in a rented silver sedan.

"Solita!" he called out, and Marisol emerged from where she had been stretched out on a lawn chair in the garage, where it was only the temperature of the shade on Venus.  She walked in languidly like the sultry catwoman she portrayed in Gotham Go-Down II, her bare shoulders and upper bosom beaded with sweat.  Softly she wrapped her arm around Danny's shoulder, then leaned down to give him a kiss on the cheek.

"Yes, Uncle dear," she said.

These putillas are such helpless pendejas, Danny thought. Putty in my hands.  All they need is a good wake-up call sometimes, to remind them who their Rey is.

"Something is going on over there at the motel.  You better go grab that kid now.  I'm going to call Sal.  Hurry up while Mike is still over at the café." If Danny was worried about exposing his dear, loving niece to the shooter, he did not show it. Either he thought these pirujas were expendable, or he knew she was smart and could take care of herself.

His plan had been to have Marisol grab the boy after a little kiss-and-make-up session with Mike.  When Mike rolled over in contented post-coitus sleep after a couple rounds, she would simply walk out with the kid.  But the process had accelerated.  Danny was not sure what this gunshot signified, but maybe others were after the orphan too.  Danny would find out soon enough who they were, and why they were there.  Right now he had to get the child in his possession.  What better opportunity, with Mike absent over at the café. 

When the kid was his, Danny would then squeeze Mike for three million dollars, the two million he owed the cartel plus one million of lagniappe on top of that.  Maybe as a reward he would set Marisol up in her own place in town, one with an air conditioner, where she could slowly take over the business as his heir apparent.  The girl was absolutely merciless, something he had not expected out of her.  She kept suggesting that they should kill both Mike and the little one, after the money was paid.  On the other hand, Danny thought why kill them if they could be scared into a lifetime of dedicated service?  Mike had a lot of talents to profit from, it would be a shame to waste them.  But he still had to think it through.  Right now Danny had leverage over Mike, but as soon as he got outside Danny's sphere of influence he might go straight to the cops.  Maybe Marisol was right.  He had been a little rough on her, but no doubt the girl had potential.

Marisol nodded assent, then walked across the parking lot to the motel office, working her flip flops sensually, like stilettos. She knew the fire drill over there, had helped Mike work it out.  By now, after responding to the gunshot, the Little Fucker should be hidden away in the hiding place Mike had built for him.  Mike was smart and clever in some ways like this, but really stupid in others.  His Achilles heel was trusting skanks like her who it was obvious to everyone else should never be trusted.  Exhibit A of this suicidal tendency to revere women of questionable moral character was the key she had with her, bulging like a phallus in the pocket of her skimpy cutoffs.  It was, of course, the motel master key that stretched the denim on her sculpted ass to the breaking point. 

Marisol wondered if that pathetically trusting chump had changed the locks since she left, but suspected that eight months in the Gadsden Purchase had not shaken his faith in the goodness of human nature.  Mike was cute and sweet for sure, but fatally deficient when it came to common sense.  The problem was that there was no real malice in him, so he could not see malice in others.  Snooping around on google, Marisol found out that the corporation that bought Mike's software had done it for a song, practically stealing it. They had raked in hundreds of millions off of it since, but Miked payout had barely ventured into eight figures.  He was a dupe, a patsy, a loser.  He couldn't swim with the sharks, and when you had several million in your bank account there would always be sharks in the water, no matter where you tried to hide.  Sometimes the sharks accumulated thickest in the least likely of places, and now they were circling that floundering suckerfish Mike Gasden in a feeding frenzy, right here in the bone-dry Gadsden Purchase.

Marisol pried the master key from her tight butt pocket, and as expected it still worked in the office door.  She went inside, savoring the air conditioning, then walked across to the painting of the cherub faced, rosy cheeked aristocrat.  His scarlet lips seemed to be slightly creased in disapproval of her.  "I never liked you," he seemed to be saying.  Marisol gave James Gadsden the bird, which made his delicate cheeks redden further.  Marisol had never liked him either.  She pulled the painting down, put it on the floor and turned it to face the wall.

The nail on which the portrait hung was actually a lever. Marisol pulled it downward.

In the semi-darkness of the panic room the Little Fucker was scribbling away madly on the motel stationery.  The bleak walls of the secret chamber were adorned only by a portrait of a smiling man in a uniform, standing before an old style airplane.  The caption scrawled drunkenly beneath the photo read Hans Ulrich Rudel - Der Teufel! Someone had drawn devil horns on him.  Little F didn't like the picture.  He took it off the wall and turned it upside down, so that thinking about it wouldn't interfere with his work.

He was hiding in the panic room because the man in the hat had come back for him. Even in his tender two-year old mind he understood that this was bad, and someone should know about it, though his still maturing neurons could still not quite formulate the concept of justice.  As a matter of fact, until very recently basic right and wrong had been indistinguishable to him.

In Aleppo, he had watched from his window as people without guns were gunned down by people with guns.  In the blank slate that was his brain, how could he formulate any moral judgement against that?  His conclusion was that if you didn't like somebody because they were different than you, and you had a gun and they didn't, it was okay to kill them.  That was what the man in the hat had done to his mother.  The man in the hat had guns.  His mother did not have one.  The man in the hat did not like his mother, for reasons he could not understand, so the man in the hat had killed his mother.  No need to wring his little hands in grief and anger, no need to swear vengeance, that was just the way things were done. 

Then Little Fucker had met Tony and Mike, who had forced him to rethink his philosophy.  Tony and Mike were very different from him, even he could see that. When he spoke they didn´t understand him, they thought it was baby gibberish, when he wrote they assumed his letters were the meaningless doodlings of an infantile mind.  Their way of talking was different, and they also didn't kneel down five times a day to Allah as the people in Aleppo did, good and bad alike. As far as he could tell Tony and Mike did not pray at all, but loved him and took care of him anyway. They were both bigger and stronger than he was, and in Fucker's former world that meant they had the right to kill him.  Still they had not killed him, which made F question for the first time if his world view was wrong.  Was it possible that the correct and proper order of things was for the strong to protect the weak, instead of killing them or making them do things they did not like?  Maybe his formerly cruel and heartless world was the one that was not normal.  Maybe the gentle, loving hand of Mike was the right way to be.  His mother had prayed to Allah the compassionate and merciful. He thought he knew what that meant now, and that it was the right way to be.

The seeds of wisdom were planted in these thoughts.  There was a thing called justice, and no matter what happened to him, the world needed to know about what the man in the hat had done, so they could stop him before he hurt someone else.  That was why Little F was scribbling away so eagerly in the semi-darkness, with only a little flashlight to illuminate his hand.

Then the entrance to the panic room swung open, and there in the doorway stood the angel of Fucker's salvation.  "Come on, Little F," she called to him, and the teary-faced boy threw his arms around her.

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Image of Anton Checkhov by Unknown, in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons