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