Chapter 37

Table of Contents

In the hothouse storeroom of the Double V service station, twin letters that summarized the two Valeros who once ran the place, Mike Gadsden and the Little Fucker broiled like a pair of potatoes.  At first glance, it appeared that leaving the two alone here was an error of judgement on the part of their captors, but on closer inspection Mike observed there was no way to escape.  No vents or ducts led out of this suffocating vault.  There was nothing on any of the shelves that could be used for a weapon, because there were no shelves.  It was a storeroom in name only, because anything stored here in the boiler room of hell would eventually explode through spontaneous combustion, as Mike felt like he was about to do.  Surprisingly, Little Fucker appeared to be unfazed by the heat.  As Mike dripped with greasy sweat, F's brow remained cool and colorful.

"You're used to this shit, aren't you?" Mike said.  "Back in Aleppo I'll bet you grew up roasting in some bunker where they deep fried rats on the tin roof.  To you, this hell hole is like the fucking Hilton."

Little F nodded.  "Fucking Hilton," he agreed.

"I knew it.  That's very nice for you and everything, but I wish they would just shoot me already.  We have to get out of here.  Grab onto my neck and climb out of that stupid playpen.  Like a silly playpen could hold you.  That offends me worse than anything else they have done, to think you're just some mindless brat who is going to sit on his diaper covered ass and suck his thumb in a playpen.  Pull yourself out of there."

Little F shinnied himself up on to Mike's shoulders and scooted out.  "I want you to untie these knots," Mike said, turning 90 degrees so that Little F could have access to the bonds.  "Once you do that we're going to tear that playpen apart.  We're going to trash that playpen, and not just because it is a symbol of the subjugation and exploitation of Middle Eastern youth, but because it has metal parts we can use to fight our way out of here.  We're going to go intifada on that playpen.  You get it?"

"Intifada," said Little F.

"Good.  I know you can do it.  You got it in your blood."

Mike was full of bravado, not because he was not frustrated, angry, and terrified, but he had to keep himself from sinking into despair, a pit he was teetering on the brink of.  Furthermore, if he bantered in this fashion with Little F, maybe the boy would think that things weren't so bad.  Then again, the kid wasn't stupid.  But he was already working his tiny fingers into the knots around Mike's wrists.

"Hey, let's scoot over to the door," Mike said softly. "I think I can hear them talking.  Maybe we can find out something useful."

Since both his wrists and ankles were tied, Mike had to squirm on his buttocks over to the door.  Interestingly, but not surprisingly, there was no knob on their side of the door.  This room was obviously designed as a one-way trip.  If you locked yourself in, it was because you were supposed to.  Even so, the door was not particularly thick, and the murmur of human voices could be heard through it. One of them belonged to Marisol - may her contaminated cunt be infested by a verminous plague, and the other to the gun-toting brute named Sal, who Mike felt considerable less animosity toward than for that Delilah strumpet he had once loved. But still, the goon would still have to be reckoned with.

Mike put his ear up to the door, and could hear Marisol giggling in a flirtatious way.  That brainless gash, he thought.  He really didn't want to hear her playful chatter.  Twice he had been made the fool by perfidious trollops, and being reminded that he had fallen in love with the debauched skank on the other side of the door threatened to send him into a depressed funk he might not recover from.  Mike forced himself to concentrate on the words, not the source of the words.  His hacker's mind facilitated the creation of self-contained black boxes that did not intrude upon one another.  This was what he had to do now, put his feelings about Marisol in a mental box and seal it shut.

"Why'd you run out of the room?" Sal was asking her.  "You liked him, didn't you?"

"No, knucklehead," she said, "I left something on the stove.  You want me to burn my Uncle's house down?  Of course I don't like him.  He's a pathetic wuss-bag. I just played him."

Mike had to press down hard on the box lid to keep the Pandora's stockpile of emotions, stirred by the words pathetic wussbag, from bursting out.  Yeah, and you're a fucking whore, he whispered defiantly.

"What kind of guys do you like?" Sal asked.

There was a sultry pause in which Marisol drew a deep breath, like she wasn't going to come up for air for a while.  The 80s porn groove soundtrack cranked up in Mike's head.  "I like tough guys, with a big weapon."

Mike supposed Marisol had gotten a lot of practice reciting cheesy lines of dialogue like this. She was very good at it, very convincing.  He imagined her fingers running lightly across that fucking gorilla Sal's chest.

"You mean like me?"  Sal asked.

"Shut up, stupid, and let's see what you got down there.  No, don't take your gun off.  It turns me on. I wanna grab it."

"I got an even bigger gun down here, honey."

"You better."

This banter was so bad that, in spite of the seething fury rising up inside him, Mike had to roll his eyes.  Little Fucker is lucky he doesn't understand this shit, or does he?he wondered.  You could never tell with that one.  Yet the F demonstrated no outward signs of indignation over this exceptionally bad porn scripting, as his little fingers continued to wriggle into the ropes on Mike's wrists.

There were exaggerated moans coming from beyond the door. Mike realized with irony that it was painted green.  "Do you like it like that?" Marisol murmured.

"Oh yeah, baby," answered Sal.

"You'll really like this," she said, and then there was a gunshot.

In the cramped, confined, claustrophobic space of the Double V garage, the bullet blast echoed like an artillery round.  Mike sprung back so hard he almost crushed Little Fucker, who had barely flinched. What the hell just happened out there? he wondered from the flat of his back, where he lay painfully atop his bound hands. Meanwhile, Little F looked down at him with a curious, Whatsa matter you never heard a gunshot before expression.

As the blast subsided, Mike wondered if Marisol was dead.  Even after everything she had done to him, he couldn't help feel a certain twinge of sadness.  Being murdered helped to wash away some of the Judas stain that besotted his memory of her.  But right now there were more urgent matters than holding a mental wake for his slutty ex-girlfriend.

“Hurry up with those knots,” he said to Little F as he sat up painfully.  Then a key turned and the door opened anew.

Marisol stood there, an icon of the Madonna of Manslaughter, the revered image of Our Lady of Assassination. She held a gun in her hand and a fine mist of blood upon her mantle.  The halo of homicide glowed about her head.  She was a beautiful, beatific vision.

For a moment Mike thought she would kill them too, and found he didn't care.  It would be a lovely way to die.

"What are you staring at boys?" she scolded them.  "Get off your asses.  Let's go before my uncle gets back."

"I'm kind of tied up right now," Mike said, all hog tied and tongue tied.

Marisol had come prepared.  She pulled a pocket knife from the seat of her cutoffs and sliced Mike's cords, which Little F had managed to loosen considerably.  "Those things you said, did you..." Mike started.

"Don't be a goddam idiot.  I just blew a guy's brains out for you, and you still got the nerve to ask that stupid question.  What do you want?  I would tongue kiss you but I still have the taste of that animal's underwear in my mouth.  I need to gargle first."

Mike kept his mouth shut after that, contenting himself with wiggling his toes giddily as Marisol cut the bonds around his ankles.  "Let me change, and we'll get out of here."

Mike and Little F followed her out of the storeroom.  The lifeless lump of Sal was sprawled out in a bloody mess on a chair. What little brains he had were splattered everywhere.

Mike had never seen a dead body before, but found it didn't bother him as much as it should.  The scene had a rather distant, wax museum quality to it.  "What are we going to do with this guy?" he asked Marisol.  She seemed to be the authority on such matters.

"That?  Nothing.  Nobody will miss him.  Let my uncle clean up the mess."

Marisol took a backpack off a work bench. Mike thought it was the same one she had used to lug marijuana from Mexico.  She seemed to have anticipated what was going to happen here today, and prepared for it.  She went about cleaning herself up like she had done it before. From the pack she took some baby wipes, which she used on her skin after stripping to nothing.  Mike turned away prudently.  "What?  You've seen everything."  When her skin was bloodless, she redressed in fresh cutoffs and wife beater. Calling this dressed was a stretch, but the uniform seemed to be the extent of her wardrobe.  Finally she put the bloody wipes and clothes in a plastic bag and tied it shut.

On the wall was a rack with several sets of keys.  "We better not take your truck," Marisol said.  "They'll be looking for it.  We'll take one of these clunkers instead."

"Who will be looking for it?"

"Just about everybody in the Gadsden Purchase.  You're a marked man for the cops and criminals.  Once we get out of town we'll have to ditch this hulk and get another one."

Marisol retrieved Mike's duffel bag from a desk drawer.  To Mike it looked like all the money was still inside there.

"My asshole Uncle left your money just sitting around.  That arrogant prick never dreamed anybody would cross him."  She spit on his desk, symbolically. 

There was a Dodge Charger and a beige Crown Victoria to choose from.  Marisol picked the Crown Vic.  "The Charger is a ticket magnet," she said.  "The Crown Vic is a car for either snowbirds or Feds.  It won't attract attention."

Mike took his bag.  Marisol scooped up Little F.  He put his finger on her nose like he was pressing a love button.  "You never doubted me, did you?" she gurgled to the boy.

The three piled into the Crown Vic.  "Wait, we need a car seat for Little F," Mike said paternally. 

"Are you fucking kidding me?  I just killed someone, and you're worried about a car seat?"

"Just joking," Mike said.

In spite of being pursued from all directions from the good, the bad, and possibly the ugly, their precipitous escape from Cornudo had the air of a festive family road trip.  Mike joked, and Marisol kicked off her sandals and stretched her beautiful naked feet up on the dash.  Little F played with his Osama doll in the back seat.  "Drive fast," Marisol told him.

Mike didn't drive fast enough.  As it turned out, their flight into Egypt was quickly interrupted, their liberty short lived.  They started well enough, speeding south down Main, angling toward Yuma via the dusty desert roads that drew geometric lines across the vacant plain.  The meager civilization represented by Cornudo vanished quickly.  Soon they were alone in the stark, scorching nothingness.  Then, at the base of the lifeless moonscape mountains, through which the road crossed via a gap, they could see a little knot of gangster SUVs gathered.  In the rearview mirror, two other speeding SUVs were moving in, one per lane, to block their escape.  They were effectively cut off at the pass, like in the old westerns.

"My uncle must have put a GPS on this car," noted Marisol.  "I guess I'm not as much of a trusted, darling niece after all."  She put her sandals back on.  "We're screwed," she added, but she sounded more angry than scared.

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Image of The Flight Into Egypt, by Rembrandt, public domain via Wikipedia, altered by author

Chapter 36

Table of Contents

As Dustin and Tony clunked along to their precarious destination, in another part of the Gadsden Purchase, secluded by the thick curtain of a Tamarisk grove, Danny Valero prepared to bargain his way out of the threat to his desert fiefdom.

The locale for Danny´s last stand, a stand of salt cedars, was appropriate for practical, spiritual, and poetic reasons. In a land that was both a corridor and a refuge for the illegal alien, it was only fitting that it had also become a refuge and corridor for the ultimate illegal alien, the Tamarisk.  Like the Bedouin woman who had recently lost her life trying to drink from this barren soil, the Tamarisk tree is indigenous to Saudi Arabia and the Sinai peninsula.  Unlike her, it had not only survived in this foreign desert, but had thrived.

Just as the seeds of humanity blowing in from Mexico were blamed for social and economic displacement, the Tamarisk was vilified for driving out the locals.  That these so-called old locals had only recently replaced really old locals, in geographic terms, was rarely mentioned.  There were too many uncomfortable analogies to draw between the Tamarisk and the ¨new¨ human demographic, also settling along riparian corridors in the Gadsden Purchase, to make it a subject of polite conversation. One of these forgotten awkward comparisons was the fact that the tree, one that struggled to rise above the lowly status of bush, was the only thing that could survive on the saline-saturated banks of denuded steams.

An even stronger argument could have been made against the Tamarisk: that it sheltered illegal activity with its dense, tangled, low lying branches.  The soaring umbrella of its predecessor, the Cottonwood, left a clean understory that obscured nothing.  Even though we are told there is nothing hidden which shall not be revealed, nothing spoken in the dark that will not be shouted from the rooftops, this didn't stop people from trying. In other words, the thick Tamarisk groves were a lot better for murmured conspiracies than the tattle-tale Cottonwood had been.  The branches of the Cottonwood were not low lying, they were no lying.  Untruths and injustices could not be conducted beneath their cathedral canopy without being exposed.  But now the Tamarisk had moved in and corrupted the incorruptible altar. The individual Tamarisks were wispy puffs of green smoke that together, in their giant conglomerations, created a smokescreen on a massive scale.  As such, not only had this newcomer sown salt into the soil, like the invasive Romans after the sack of Carthage, but had helped plow iniquity and falsehood into once pristine ground.

Danny Valero and his criminal colleagues were gathered in that screened off confessional of salt cedars, dressed as if for Sunday worship, to decide the fate of Mike Gasden, plus the toddler known only as Little Fucker.  Danny arrived early, accompanied by two of his armed henchmen, so non-descript in their thuggery that they could have swapped birth certificates and each one gone home to the other one's mother, without causing anxiety or confusion.  Danny was impatient with their similitude.  He wanted to yell at somebody, but you couldn't yell at someone whose name you can't remember.  So instead he paced and fumed and glowered at both in an indirect way.

On the other side of the negotiating table, the representative of the nebulously nameless entity known only as the cartel - that being the only title it needed to cause fear and trepidation among those not sympathetic with its mission, was fashionably late.  The cartel foot soldier was fashionably late because he could be, due to the fact he held all the cards and most of the guns.  To him, Danny Valero was but a small time provincial hood with delusions of grandeur.  Furthermore, Danny´s hubris had caused him to fuck up bad, to lose an investment that was near and dear to those calling the shots in Nio, Sinaloa.  It wasn't just about the lost up front money, it was about lost future returns.  A tunnel paid for by American taxpayer dollars would have been a lucrative, unquenchable revenue stream, and now the hole had been plugged.

The Sinaloa soldier named Vasquez showed up 15 minutes late, not long enough to get Danny to flee in fear that the meeting was compromised, but long enough to make him squirm in consternation, believing that the cartel's soldiers were surrounding him in the thick Tamarisk.  Danny had wanted to hire more thugs to screen him from such an eventuality, but he was short on funds.  He would have to make do with the two non-descript, low budget hoods flanking him now.

Vasquez materialized through the Tamarisk with a quite visibly more numerous entourage of thugs. One could see by the look on his face that he was not happy about having to be here, but it was also impossible to detect through his angry scowl that he had ever been happy about anything.  His thuggish aspect was interchangeable with Danny's thugs across the way, except that his attitude was more smug for being higher on the food chain.  Altogether, his expression denoted cruel, criminal indifference.

"You're going a little overboard with the secrecy, aren't you Danny?" Vazquez said with a sneer as he walked into the clearing.  "Why couldn't we just meet at your place?  It's hotter than fuck out here."

"The heat will help you get used to the place you're going with a mouth like that," Danny said.  "To keep it on a level our sainted mothers would approve of, I don't like to defecar where I comer."

Vazquez's only two emotions were mean and meaner, and he now switched to the second.  "You might get to that place before me," Vazquez said.  "My boss is not too happy with the way things are going here.  He wants an explanation for how his big plan went bad, and how you're going to fix it."

"Tell the boss that in spite of my reputation, I can't control the weather, and I can't control the stupidity of every flag-waving idiot carrying a rifle."

"I was told he was one of your guys.  You can't control your own people?"

"He wasn't one of my guys.  We had defined spheres of influence.  He broke the boundaries.  He's dead now."

Vazquez furrowed his brow in surprise, the only evidence so far that there might be an organ beneath his square skull capable of something higher than the control of breathing, digestion, and bowel movements.  "Dead?"

"He had a heart attack.  Just today, as a matter of fact.  How convenient."

Vazquez looked slightly unnerved by this news, which is exactly what Danny intended.  He wasn't sure it was all true, but the heart attack part was.  If the cartel thought Danny could smite his enemies with cardiac arrest, that could only be good for him. 

Vazquez reigned in his nerves, then quickly put his thug face back on.  "None of that matters.  The fact is, this is your territory, and it happened right under your nose.  It shows a lack of control.  The boss not only wants tunnels under the wall, he wants wall workers on our payroll.  He hears they are going to put fiber optic cables in the ground, so they can hear anyone digging, pinches topos.  Your guy on the inside was perfectly placed to sabotage all that, and you fucked it up."

Nothing rankled Danny more than an F-bomb dropped on his home turf.  In spite of the difference in years, he was sure he could easily wring this profane punk's neck, but even if he won that one battle he could not win the war.  Now that Chapo was out of the picture, such punks as these were getting greedy and sloppy.  They would kill you without considering the consequences.  He would just have to hold his tongue and take it out on his punching bag back home.  Toughen the girl up a bit.  She seemed to enjoy it, she purred like a kitten afterward.

"Like you said, he was my guy," Danny answered.  "I'll get another guy."

"You make it sound easy.  The money is spent now.  The money is gone, and you won't be getting any more.  Let's face facts, Danny.  You move pot, and the marijuana market doesn't pay anymore.  It's legal in California, and they have medical weed in Arizona.  You're selling to a handful of hopeless sketchies so low on cash they can't even pay a doctor to give them a card."

"We're open to expanding our operations.  I've told you that.  I can move the harder stuff just like I moved la mota."

"Come on Danny, get real.  Se acabó.  It's over.  With the wall, we won´t be able to move shit through the desert anymore.  You'll be allowed to continue doing whatever petty crimes you're doing now, but the big stuff will come in in by air or by sea.  Let me rephrase that.  You'll be allowed, as long as the boss gets his money back.  He's not greedy, he's not going to squeeze you for interest.  He just wants his original investment back.  Where is it?"

Danny clinched his fists at his sides.  He looked at his two non-descript thugs one by one, as a way of signaling them to get ready, that he wasn´t sure if they would have to shoot their way out of here or not.

"I have the hacker kid I was telling you about," Danny said.  "He's got millions, and he'll give them to me, because I have something he wants."

There seemed to be an invisible line in the salty flat of the Tamarisk grove.  Until now, neither faction of thugs was willing to cross it.  Now Vazquez took a cautious half step over, possibly to hear better, possibly to shoot better.

"What is this something?"

Danny smiled.  "Something the big boss in la casa blanca is looking for. Don´t ask me why, but he wants it bad.  I'll throw it in as a bonus, and you can do what you want with it."

Vazquez's impatience betrayed him.  That last tidbit had definitely hit him in a soft spot.  Damn, I should have held out for more, thought Danny.

"Well, let's have it," said Vazquez.

"Calm down, my friend.  We're not used to doing much business here in the heat of the day.  We prefer the cool of the evening.  We'll both have cooler heads then."

"I want a down payment, a big down payment, and the other thing here by sundown."

"Not a problem," said Danny.  "But let's not attract attention by meeting in the same spot twice.  There's a dirt track on the other side of the railroad bridge in Roll.  I'll have someone meet you there to guide you in."

"Okay, but I'm bringing an army.  Don't try to lead me into a trap, and don't think you can get away."

"Wouldn't think of it," said Danny.  "This is my home.  I love the climate.  I would freeze anywhere else."

The meeting broke up with both sides backing out of the clearing carefully, like two rutting elk that have fought to a draw and make a gentleman´s agreement, but still don't trust each other.  Vasquez felt a measure of uneasy relief.  Chapo had been extradited, but the DEA was busy trying to round up the remnants of his old gang.  Vazquez was a marked man, but had cut a secret deal with the Fed in Trump's inner circle, the one who called himself Smith and wore dark glasses, day and night.  If he could deliver what Smith wanted, he got boy scout time in minimum security.  Since he would be delivering what the cartel wanted too, he wouldn't attract attention to his back room dealings.

When they were in reach of the cell phone tower, in sight of the Interstate, Vasquez pulled his SUV off the road.  "Wait here," he told his driver, then walked out into the brush, where he took a disposable flip phone from his pocket and dialed Smith's number.  "I found it," he said, "I'll have it for you tonight."

"Good," said Smith. His tongue-licking trademark reptilian grin could be heard through the phone, along with the Corey Hart beat on his stereo he had cranked up, to provide the appropriate sound track. "So the kid had it after all. The boss will be happy.  Text me a picture immediately when it is in your possession.  I'm tired of chasing false leads. No goods, no deal."

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Photo from US Department of Agriculture, altered by author

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?"

NEXT >>

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."

NEXT>>

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

Chapter 32

Table of Contents

Cut und run.  The time had come.

The desert had grown deadly.  The heat had boiled the Gadsden Purchase to the point of spontaneous combustion.  From its lonely outpost between the Perseus and Orion belts of the Milky Way, the sun had looked down upon Michael Gasden scornfully, and meted out punishment, castigating him for his hubris in believing he could tame a place that had never been tamed. 

In the course of its untamable history, the raiding and marauding Indian bands here had been supplanted by outlaws. One form of lawlessness had only been replaced by another form of lawlessness, and this would go on as long as there was a stain on the map called the Gadsden Purchase.  Cut und run. Sure Mike could try, but he could only slice, he could never sever the umbilical that connected him to this steaming cesspool of brigands and outcasts.  You could run, but you could not cut.

Mike had upset the precarious balance of power that the place perched precariously upon, and it was clear that his defiance of the hierarchy would also be precarious, and have dire consequences.  He could see now that the Gadsden Purchase was divided up into fiefdoms, parceled out among different Lords.  You paid one or you paid another for protection, but you always paid somebody.  Mike had refused to hand over his tribute, and the penalty was either death or exile.  He had to pursue the latter before the former got him.

The final impetus for his decision of hasty, headlong flight was a phone call he had received from the Earl, just minutes earlier.  In his typical stiff upper lip, cheerio there's a good fellow style, the Earl had informed him of the roadblock outside Tombstone. He told Mike about those dangerous looking desperados, one wearing an enormous hat of John Wayne proportions who bore have you seen me leaflets with the likeness of the Little Fucker.  The Earl had inadvertently let it slip to the man in the hat that he had seen the boy, and told him where. So now Mike was sandwiched between the wrath of the Freedom Frontiersmen on one side, and the thuggery of Danny Valero on the other.  All of this spelled cut und run, in any language, or combinations thereof.

Mike's first reaction to the Earl's news was to ask himself why the FF would be looking for Little F.  Then it at last occurred to him, that aggravating buzzing fly of a thought he had not been able to snatch from the air. He knew what that human sized rolled taco he had seen in the back of one of the FF trucks was, the tarp that clearly belonged to Tony because of the shape and nature of its peculiar stains, wrapped around some heavy, bulky filler.  Holy crap it made sense!  Tony's fingerprints, as well as his unique genetic signature imprinted by certain bodily fluids, were all over that tarp.  That was why the police had tagged him as the killer of Little F's Mom.  They couldn't know that Eric and the FF had stolen the tarp out of the back of Mike's truck and used it to wrap up the victim, probably with the express idea of framing Tony for the crime.  Now the FF was looking for Little F because they feared the boy might be able to tag them as the killers.

This realization clinched Mike's decision.  If he didn't give a shit about his own safety, if he was willing to stay put and hold back Danny Valero, armed only with his extended middle finger, he couldn't exercise such folly where the safety of the boy was concerned.  The only remedy was the Herr's prescription to cut und run.   But therein lay the rub of where to cut und run to.

Going home was out of the question.  If Danny Valero was to be believed, Agent Smith and his sunglassed cronies were on his ass.  As such, home offered no sanctuary, and he didn't want to get his Dad involved in this shit anyway, more than he already was.

Flight to anywhere in the continental United States was probably also unadvisable.  Mike had the feeling that Agent Smith could see a long way through those shades.  Furthermore, Mike had pissed off the President.  However wrong the accusation may be, assaulting the Chief Executive was not something you could just hide from in Podunk, Iowa. Isolated as it was, most of the children of the corn there were probably Trumpsters who would not hide him.

The only solution was Mexico.  The Mexican government might be sympathetic to someone suspected of running afoul of a person, one Donald J. Trump, who was generally hated by the population.  Maybe they wouldn't officially give him asylum, but maybe they wouldn't go out of their way to track him down, either.  Furthermore, the inept, disorganized bureaucracy of a third world country would probably not be too efficient about investigating his custody of Little F.  If necessary, he could probably bribe a few officials.  Then, when he ran out of cash, his Dad could bring him more. 

The real problem with this plan was evading any cartel connections Danny might have in Mexico. But if that danger emerged, he could skip to another Latin American country, buying false passports for he and Little F if need be.  The part of this plan that made him happy was that he and Little F would be together.  There was no longer the specter of a New Jersey aunt to threaten their bond.

He loved the Little Fucker now.  He didn't have a problem admitting that to himself anymore.  It had been a long road from hating children and never wanting any in his life, to not wanting to live his life without this little waif who had crawled in from the desert.  The kid was family.  Biology had not forged their ties, but the desert heat had seared the weld that held them together. Such a connection could not be ripped asunder without an irresistible force acting upon it.

So the plan now was to flee that irresistible force.  With Little F holding Mike's hand, and lovingly clutching his Osama action figure to his chest with the other, the unlikely pair went into the office of the soon to be abandoned Gasden Motel.  What would become of the place? - Mike considered sadly.  He had spent a lot of time, energy and money fixing it up, turning a shithole into a beacon of comfort in the dreary desert.  Now he was abandoning the property to the forces of erosion.  Wind, sun, and human malice would soon wipe it from the face of the planet.  He looked up apologetically at his cherub-faced forebear, the haughty James Gadsden, hanging on the lobby wall.   "I tried," Mike told him.  It was not to be.

Black duffel bag in hand, Mike opened the safe and began emptying his squirreled-away cash from it.  When he was finished, all that remained there was the sealed envelope from the Herr to Tony.

Shit.  How important could that be, Mike wondered.

Mike didn't know if he would ever see Tony Vargas, or anybody else in Cornudo ever again.  If he left this letter here and it turned out to be a matter of life and death, he would be the one responsible.  A dark cloud of that good old Gasden guilt came over him.  The Gasden guilt could be deadly, he knew, but he couldn't help it.

After a spell of figurative hand wringing, Mike figured out how to appease his nagging conscience.  He would leave the letter with Linda at the cafe, with instructions to give it to Tony when he came back, which he was bound to do sooner or later.  As such, Mike would wash his hands of it.  Then he could wash the Cornudo dust off his body just as soon as he and Little F got to a safe spot. 

He had been played for a fool by everyone in this town.  First Tony had duped him into free rent by claiming he was the caretaker.  Then the Freedom Frontiersmen had duped him into free lodging by playing on the heartstrings of his patriotism.  Then Danny Valero had played him into hacking creeps on the dark web by playing on his sense of righteous indignation.  Finally, and most painfully, he had been tricked into falling in love with a tainted but beautiful women who played on his sense of loneliness and abandonment.  He didn't trust anybody here, anymore.  He couldn't wait to get out, now that he thought about it.  But first, he had this one last quick job to do.  Who would play him in the meantime, he wondered with a laugh.

Mike threw the duffel bag back into the safe, and shut the door.  "Fucker, hide!" he ordered.

"Fucker, hide!" the tyke responded with a crisp salute. Mike then smuggled him in the cleaning cart to the shelter of the critter room. Then he took the Herr's letter and crossed the asphalt to the Cornudo Café for the last time.

The Cornudo Café was in its usual state of post lunch torpor.  Like everything else in the desert, it estivated after gorging, conserving energy for prolonged periods of unfavorable environmental conditions.  Linda was literally snoozing, flat on her back on the front counter, but when she heard Mike she flopped to life, wriggling upward like a lungfish after years immersed in sand.

"I'm glad to see you, my little Zagnut" she said.  "And it has nothing to do with my cougar fantasies this time."

Zagnut? What the hell was Zagnut? Mike tried to crack a courtesy smile.  He couldn't help but feel sad that he may never see Linda again.  Most of the time she had been really sweet to him, but like with everyone else in the Gadsden Purchase, Mike just assumed she was playing him too.  Mike intended to keep this short, so as not to be hypnotized.  "I came to ask you a favor," he said.

"Good, because I need a favor too.  Since you don't want to swap bodily fluids, we can swap favors."

They stood there staring at each other for a moment, Mike hypnotized despite himself by her lovely, ageless eyes.  "You go first," Linda said.

It look Mike a minute to remember why he was here.  Linda had that effect on people, without trying.  Her magnetism was much stronger when she was 30, at the height of her powers, but even at 50 she could still snare men with her spell.  Mike had to command himself to focus.

"I'm going out of town for a few days," he said, handing her the letter.  "Tony might drop by and this is an important letter for him, from Herr Müeller."

Linda raised her lovely eyebrows.  "Josef?  What a sweetheart.  I miss him.  How is he?"

"He's doing good," Mike said.  "He's writing a book."

"He's finally writing that old book of his?  Good for him.  I sure will give this to Tony, butter cookie, but why didn't you just leave it in the critter room?"

"It's kind of cluttered," said Mike.  "He might not see it.  The kid has his little papers all over the place and he is very protective of them."

"I hear that.  Is it my turn for a favor?"

A bittersweet part of Mike's life was ending.  He would never again be called a Zagnut, a butter cookie, or any kind of empty calorie, sugary confection. Normally Mike was not a nostalgic guy.  He had done many a complete cut und run before and never looked back.  But butter cookie?  That was painful.  "Yeah, go ahead."

"Max's computer is busted again.  I know that doesn't sound like an emergency, but it's an emergency.  I wouldn't ask you to help if it wasn't an emergency.  If he can't take the edge off with his porn he gets really cranky.  When he gets cranky he can't concentrate on his work.  When he can't concentrate on his work customers get burned bacon and lumpy grits.  His bad attitude is going to put us out of business if somebody don't do something quick."

Mike looked back longingly toward his motel.  He tried to mentally calculate the driving time between here and Tombstone, but for a computer science guy who had been forced to take calculus and beyond, he sucked at math.  He really should beg out of this.  Little F was in danger and shouldn't be left alone.  But Linda looked so desperate, and Mike was thinking about the time she had hooked them up with a doctor in Yuma.  Did Max's inability to satisfy his porn addiction constitute a similar medical emergency?  Mike supposed this was a matter of perspective, and he was no doctor to be judging the medical merits of people's warped fetishes.  Besides, how hard could it be?  There was probably just a tiny corrupted file that had to be flushed out.  He could fix it in 15 minutes and be on his way.

Max's computer turned out to be a veritable cesspool of buffer overflow, registry errors, and deleted processes.  Mike immediately ascertained that the source of Max's woes were the hundreds, possibly thousands of files that progressively got worse in degree of sleaziness.  There were videos of women doing things with eels and other aquatic animals.  There were odd acts with livestock and family pets.  There were bodily fluids being used in ways that Mike had not thought possible.  Mike was no Puritan by any stretch, but there were things here that no human eyeball, or even the eyeballs of the goldfish swimming in the bowl next to the computer, should be subjected to.

A tormented Max had known that Mike was going to find weird stuff, and in shame he had locked himself in the bathroom, from where Linda was trying to coax him out.  "It's okay honey," she said softly through the door.  "He's a computer guy.  He's seen everything."

Mike nodded in solidarity from behind the corrupted computer - no, defiled would be a better word,  but in truth there were abominations here he had never seen, or even thought possible.

"Can you fix it?" Linda asked with the gravity of someone asking the odds of her 90 year old mother surviving heart surgery.

"Oh yeah," Mike said confidently, "it's just a little more complicated than I thought."

Meanwhile, as Mike Gasden furrowed his brow, then dug and uprooted and sterilized, falling into that zone from which the only return is a hard drive made spotless by a hacker's sweat, the shadows lengthened over the forgotten Gasden Motel.

NEXT >>

Photo by Vegas Scorpion via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 31

Table of Contents

The dusty, rag tag, but steely eyed patriots of the Freedom Frontiersmen had set up an unofficial roadblock just outside Tombstone. It was in a place where the 80 and 82 merged to bring people together from one obscenely hot remote corner of the state into another obscenely hot remote corner of the state, but Catalina Eddy didn't seem to mind the heat at all.  While his sun-sensitive associates of the Freedom Frontiersmen hunkered in whatever miserable shade they could get in the lee of their dust caked transports, Eddy smiled and waved at the passing motorists he flagged down, to whom he distributed flyers.  The flyer featured a surprisingly accurate composite drawing of Little Fucker, who was of course not identified there as such, alongside a caption that read Help me to get home.  Beneath this was the logo of the Freedom Frontiersmen (A community service organization), and Eddy's personal cell phone number.

"I don't know what good this is going to do, boss," Costello grumbled from the side of his jeep. 

"Just keep quiet and lay low.  I don't want your ugly mugs out here scaring people away.  Keep your repugnant pusses where nobody can see them.  I'm the photogenic face of this shabby band of mongrels.  But write down their license plates, just in case."

"Honestly, boss, what do you think the odds are someone has seen that kid?  Most of these people are from out of town.  A lot of them are from some freezing arctic circle country where 50 above is a heat wave.  They think frying in the upper hundreds is some kind of eco-adventure.  Being in the capital of Arizona gunslingers here just increases the thrill.  If they have seen this kid, he looks like just one more non-descript blonde Swede that blends into thousands more they have seen in their sub-zero lives."

"I don't approve of your cynicism," said Eddy.  "I would appreciate it if you would let me make the speeches.  Now here comes a car.  Lower your ballcap.  Jeez that thing is filthy.  Don't you ever wash it?"

As predicted, a minivan full of Scandinavian eco-tourists pulled up, full of pink sunburned faces that had previously never known color.  Back in Stockholm, happy sunburned selfies from this group were going viral. 

"Howdy Folks!" Eddy said with a cheery smile.  "Welcome to Arizona, the land of eternal sunshine.  Carolina might claim to be the sunshine state, but their sun is swallowed by thunderclouds 90 percent of the time.  Our sun, however, is shamelessly, magnificently naked most of the time."

"Florida is the sunshine state, boss," Costello mumbled from behind the jeep.  ¨Carolina is two or three states North of it, just so you'll know."

"These people don't know that," Eddy whispered through his teeth.

"Chances are they do.  The geography literacy level in Northern European countries is extraordinarily high. Much higher than here.¨

"Don't embarrass me.¨

"You are real American Cowboy, Ja?" the driver said.  Everyone in the van lifted their cell phones to take pictures of this curiosity.

"Well, sir, the days of real cowboys and gunslingers are long gone, but I've lassoed a few doggies in my day."  He basked in the attention.  "Now folks, I hate to put a bummer on your happy sojourn, but we're looking for a lost little kid."  He handed them a flyer.  The five or six occupants of the van scrutinized it, chattered with incomprehension in their strange Nordic tongue, then took photos of the flyer too. They did this mechanically and without enthusiasm, as if compelled by some unwritten tourist code.

"Looks like my little cousin Günter," said the driver, handing the flyer back.

"Please keep that with our compliments," Eddy said.  "And call us at this number here if you happen to see anything."

"Told you," Costello said as the van drove away.

Eddy could not be dissuaded.  He remained standing at the junction, a curiosity in his tall cowboy hat and khaki shorts.  Dozens drove by, but nobody could recall having seen the little boy.  Eddy was about to admit defeat and go elsewhere, when a small rental car drove up. The back seat of the compact contraption was stuffed to the breaking point with books, telescopes, and a set of golf clubs.

"Good morning," said Eddy, leaning down to the car window to make one more try.  A tall, angular, thin man with a pronounced lack of chin sat there. Alongside him was a prim, taciturn, rather doughy looking lady in a big floral hat.  "Where you folks coming from?"

"Good day, my good fellow," replied the Earl of Easely.  "Between you and the Border Patrol a chap has to endure a lot of roadblocks around here.  We've been exploring the Dragoons and the St. David monastery today.  Lovely place, with all the peafowl running about.  Am I required to show some form of identification?"

"No sir," said Eddy.  "We're helping to search for a missing child.  Maybe you and your lovely missus have seen the little fellow."

The Earl took the flyer and immediately spoke up.  People are suckers for an official looking flyer.  A stalking serial killer who posts a slick looking Have You Seen Me flyer will get hundreds of tips within minutes to help him track down his victims.  "Egad!" exclaimed the Earl.  "This looks exactly like the little chap we saw back at the motel."

Eddy was jolted by this revelation, and had to struggle to suppress the excitement. "I beg your pardon, Sir?"

"Yes, I believe I have seen him."

"Just where, exactly?"  Eddy couldn't believe it.

"Back in Cornudo, at the motel."

Eddy threw his head back so hard he could have filed a whiplash claim.  "Cornudo, Arizona?"

"My dear fellow," said the Earl a bit testily, anxious to move on.  He had a report of a Black Rail near Yuma and was desperate to investigate.  "Just how many Cornudos are there, exactly, on this planet?  Driving across this fair land, one comes across a Madison or a Jackson at every turn of the highway.  On the other side of the Mississippi the name of that bloody anti-royalist Bolivar is splattered everywhere.  But I assure you, there is no other Cornudo but here."

"Wh...who did you see this child with, in Cornudo?"

"He was with the lady friend of the motel owner.  Mike, I believe his name is.  They were in a room on the southwest side.  But that was a while ago now."

That would be the critter room, Eddy realized.  They were hiding the kid in the critter room.  That made perfect sense, because no one sane wanted to go in there.

"This boy is missing you say? He looked pretty happy and at home to me. Shouldn't we contact the appropriate authorities?" He had his bony nose raised in Earlish displeasure at Eddy´s distasteful wardrobe.

"We certainly should sir," agreed Eddy.  "And that is exactly what I intend to do, right now.  I have the sheriff on speed dial.  He has sort of, you know, deputized us to help out."

The Earl had been surreptitiously watching shadows slinking around the parked jeeps, where from time to time the wretched, ruddy face of an unsavory, unwashed human specimen would peek out from amongst them.  Not from among, but amongst, as the British say and think, which is totally ridiculous and basically why we had to fight for independence.  Anyhow, the Earl was beginning to question the legitimacy of these concerned citizens, who looked more like brigands and cutthroats.

"I do say my good man," he said to Eddy.  "I must protest any sort of vigilantism that might be going on here.  I find that sort of thing reprehensible in a country that prides itself on law and order."

"No vigilantism, I assure you sir.  The sheriff will be notified to investigate your report.  Where are you folks headed next?"

The Earl was normally a pillar of truth, prevarication having been purged from his genes by several generations of careful inbreeding, but something about these ruffians didn't sit right.  "We're going to catch a plane in Phoenix," he said.  "We've had a jolly good time out here in the colonies, but duty calls, you know."

"Oh, don't I know," Eddy said with a broad grin that reached to the underside of his cowboy hat.  "You folks have a safe trip, and come back and see us sometime.  Thanks for the tip."

The Earl turned onto the highway 80 in a northwest direction.  "Oh dear I fear I put my foot in it," he addressed the Lady Easely.  "I don't like the smell of those chaps at all.  Perhaps I have gotten our friend Mike into some sort of trouble...Yes I know he's been such a good sport, he handled that embarrassing situation with the rejected credit card with such aplomb.  Fancy that - an Easely a pauper!  How was I to know that nose picking brute of a cashier in the petrol station in Safford, that, that cock eyed, six-toed mutant named Earl Easely, would hijack my identify?  How did that larcenous wretch ever chance upon such an honorable name? Nasty piece of business!  But Mike was a true gentleman about it.  I am of a mind to see he gets knighted, when we get home...What?  Can I do that?  Of course I can do that.  I'm an Easely!  But first things first.  We've got to call the young fellow and give him a warning.  Drive faster dear, there's no reception here."

Back at the junction, Eddy was busy rubbing their noses in it, pointing out to everyone this was why he was the boss, because he was the only one who could think up great ideas that seemed stupid to everyone else.  Once he had finished high-fiving himself, however, it was time for the FF to plot its next move.

"Danny said the motel was off limits," one of the non-descript goons reminded Eric.  "How are we going to grab the kid without him seeing us across the parking lot?"

"Easy," said Eddy.  "Roy at the filling station in Tacna has his wife's Camry parked in the back. It ain´t Sunday, so that woman ain´t driving. You couldn't ask for something more non-descript touristy than a silver Camry, and Roy owes me a lot of favors.  I'll take that car and go in pretending to be a tourist.  I'll put on some big sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt and an under armor ballcap.  Nothing looks more California than that.  Then I´ll grab the kid and come right out. Nobody will recognize me without this big, stupid hat.  Only problem is, how do we get into that room once we are there?  I'm betting that Gasden boy changed the locks on us."

"He might not have changed this one," said Costello, holding up a single brass key that gleamed like the Holy Grail in the southern Arizona sunlight.

"What is that and where did you get it?"

Costello let out an exasperated sigh.  "While you boys were getting amorous with Tony up against the side of his car, I had the foresight to remove it from his keychain."

"You Sir, just got a promotion," said Eddy as he swiped the key from Costello´s unwashed hand.

"Promotion to what?" asked Costello, unimpressed.

"Chief knucklehead."

"Uh huh.  Seems like I've already been filling that job slot for years.  Tell me something.  Once we get this boy, what are we planning on doing with him?"

Eddy´s brow furrowed momentarily beneath his big cowboy hat.  Which begs the question, if your brow furrows and nobody sees it, did it really furrow?  And because the furrow was burrowed beneath the big hat, nobody could tell if it was a thinking furrow, or a crisis of conscience furrow, contemplating momentous moral or ethical issues.

"Well, as said Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, Fiddle-dee-dee I'll think about that tomorrow."

"I hate to break the news, but that was Scarlet O'hara in Gone With The Wind, boss," Costello noted.

Westward, beyond the Huachuca Mountains, Sheriff Dustin Diesel was rolling along a winding highway with his prisoner, Tony Vargas, handcuffed in the back.

"Where the hell are you taking me?" complained Tony, looking out the window to avoid the sight of Sheriff Diesel's fat head, which were basically his only two choices for scenery.  "Is this going to be one of those police brutality things, because you're taking a roundabout ass way to Nogales.  Is this the part where you bury a beaner in the woods after beating him to death?  I want a lawyer."

"The Sheriff respectfully requests that the prisoner keep his mouth shut," Dustin said from up front.

"You're not supposed to say that," Tony answered.  "You're supposed to read me my Miranda rights, named after another beaner you guys tried to railroad.  After you read my rights, then you get me to jabber so I incriminate myself.  See, you don't know shit about the law."

Despite Tony's best efforts, Dustin remained quiet as they turned off the highway and onto a reasonably well-maintained dirt road.  "Here we go," said Tony as they bumped along through oaken scrubland, mixed with pinyon trees.  "Don't I at least get a priest to give me the last rites?"

A sign by the road said Canelo Ranger Station.  They passed by a corral and a few irregularly placed buildings. A jaded horse munching a mouthful of hay peered at them indifferently.  Then Dustin moved down a small lane to a creek, where he parked by a squat adobe structure with a pitched roof.

"Hey, this is the ranger station," said Tony.  "Where the hell is Lindell?  I want to lodge a complaint that my civil rights have been violated."

"Just keep your mouth shut and I'll explain everything once we're inside."

"You gonna waterboard me in there?"

"Don't be stupid.  You know I don't waterboard people.  Just shut your yap for one minute, if you can manage."

Dustin led Tony by the cuffs into the building.  The cramped structure contained a small holding cell infrequently used by the rangers, more often by Dustin when he was going to hand over a prisoner across jurisdictions.  Dustin put Tony in the cell and removed his bindings.

"I'm putting you in this cell for your own protection, Tony," he said.  "I didn't call this in because I know you didn't kill that lady.  You're not guilty of any crimes other than first degree pain in the ass."

"Better your ass than mine," said Tony, stretching out on the small bunk.  "I almost had my booty popped today.  How about you, Sheriff?  Is your starfish still clinging to the reef or have they pried it loose already?"

"Let me finish, because this is serious business.  AZ DPS is turning over every rock between here and the New Mexico border looking for you.  You know the Colonel hates you since you were screwed his wife a few years ago."

"Hey, she threw herself at me.  I couldn't help it.  I was a victim of sexual assault. Just like I almost was today, except the Colonel´s wife was a lot more tolerable."

"Yeah right.  Anyhow, if Public Safety gets its hands on you they're going to arrange for you to resist arrest or assault an officer, and then your wise cracking days are over.  So we got to keep you here off the radar until we find some evidence to counteract the evidence they have on you."

"Evidence?  What evidence?" said Tony, putting his hands under his head for a pillow.  "They got nothing on me."

"They have your fingerprints and DNA on a tarp that was used to cover her body.  That's pretty damning evidence."

Tony sat straight up.  "Holy shit.  Wait a minute."  He squeezed his forehead as if that could concentrate his thoughts.  "The tarp was stolen out of the kid's truck. The kid told me later he saw it rolled up in the back of one of those Frontiersman's trucks.  Holy shit the body must have been in it!  They stopped for breakfast at the cafe carrying a corpse."

"Okay, that explains the fingerprints.  What about the DNA?"

"Well, that's a little complicated," Tony laughed, slightly embarrassed.  "The kid and I took the tarp to cover the groceries when we went to Costco in Tucson.  Afterwards, we went to Striggys.  Remember that cute little half-Asian, half-Mexican, half God knows what else waitress there?  Monica, Veronica, I forget.  I invited her out to the truck on her lunch break, we used the tarp to cover ourselves and..."

"I think I get it," said Dustin.  "Thanks for the clarification.  What I have to do then, is to get the investigators to check for prints for any of the Frontiersmen.  In the meantime I'll unload some food and water, and you stay here and reflect on your sins a while."

"I did that already.  There are way to many to reflect upon, so I gave up in like five seconds." 

As Dustin stood over him like father-confessor, Tony's mustache twisted in deep thought.  "Hey, what about that kid they were looking for?  The one that Hal was all obsessed about?  The one the Feds were pulling out all the stops to find?"

Dustin tensed up, because this subject was definitely a sore spot. "The Feds weren't involved in finding that boy.  That search had nothing to do with the kid.  Hal is wrong about that, he´s just chasing shadows, hoping for a promotion. Hey, what's with that cat swallowed the canary look?  What do you know?"

Tony smiled.  "I think I know what the search is for."

Dustin faced Tony dead on. "How the hell could you know? Me and my men have been combing the desert for months and they won't even tell us what we're looking for. You expect me to believe you have access to information so secret that the people assigned to protect it don't know what it is?"

Tony was sitting up on the bunk again. "Yes, I have special insights. That's the difference between me and you. You're so used to taking orders from some asswipe you don't know how to think for yourself anymore."

Dustin chewed on his own walrus-like mustache for a minute and decided Tony might have a point. "Let's hear it. What's this great revelation of yours?"

"Not so fast. We need to make a deal. As a matter of fact, since I'm a sweet, generous guy and you're an old friend, I'll trade you two secrets, and all you have to do is let me go."

"Let you go? You're crazy. That's not good for either one of us."

"Not exactly let me go, just let me out of here. I'll still be in your protective custody and I'll be a model prisoner, I promise. I won't even think about escaping. You just need to go where I tell you to."

Dustin stroked the bristly hair beneath his lip suspiciously. "Clue me in. Deliver the goods first."

"I'll clue you in on the way," said Tony. "We gotta get moving. Things are heating up now, I can sense it.¨ He got the feeling the kid is in some deep shit.

NEXT >>

Canelo ranger station image by Alison T. Otis, USDA Forest Service, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.