Chapter 39

Table of Contents

The assemblage gathered in the clearing of the Tamarisk grove gave the impression of a hastily convened wedding party, the mixing of two feuding families, with no dearly beloved we are gathered together, but more like a gunpoint roundup of two members caught in an unauthorized tryst.  Mike was the reluctant groom, being pulled at gunpoint from a cookie cutter gangster SUV to make an honest woman of a parturient bride waiting at the altar, this being Marisol. Little F filled the role of Love Child, and the funereal dressed Danny Valero seemed poised to perform the nuptial rites. But contrary to the dignity of his vocation, he delivered a swift kick to groom-Mike’s rear that sent him toppling face first into the sand.

If Mike Gasden had known anything about football in his androgynous, appeltini world, he might have thought that Danny's rather effective right foot could have filled a place kicker vacancy for many an NFL roster.  But because he had grown up a chronically sports challenged computer nerd, he was left without an analogy to describe what had just happened to him.

"So you thought you could steal my niece and kill my people!" Danny roared, then he kicked Mike again with the toe of a highly polished dress shoe, hard enough to cause intense pain but not hard enough to break anything.  How does he keep his shoes so clean in all this dirt, Mike wondered as he lunched on dust.

"He didn't steal or kill anybody!" Marisol shrieked, motioning with a clinched fist, her hands having been left unrestrained. "I went with him on my own.  I killed Sal.  You're a beast.  Leave him alone!"

Danny shuffled toward her with his own fists clinched at his sides.  "How much did he pay you, you little whore?"  He was clearly going to strike his niece.  Mike took advantage of the distraction to roll toward Danny in the dirt and intertwine his legs with his, making Danny stumble and fall to his knees.  Marisol then took advantage of Danny's compromised position to kick her Uncle Dear sharply in the chin, demonstrating that the skill set ran in the family.  Danny fell back stunned before his goons could respond but got up quickly, dusted himself off and waved away the goons.

"I'm going to kill these two myself," he proclaimed.

"Don't do anything impulsive, Danny!"  A loud voice declared from across the clearing.  It was the narco by name of Vasquez. He and his men had moved in quietly while the riverside wedding was taking place.  Danny's two watchdog goons,now laying garroted in their final resting places beneath wispy Tamarisk branches, had been rendered unable to sound the alarm. Danny Valero was an efficient killer, but he couldn't do everything himself and the cartel could afford to buy slightly smarter, slightly more stealthy goons.

Vasquez himself didn’t look the role of hardened, cold-blooded, cartel chieftain. He gave off the smooth, well-groomed vibe of an educated, urbane, civil servant Latino, a throwback from the days when affirmative-action was still strictly enforced and the sky was the limit as far as promotions for his type were concerned. "Is this your computer whiz kid?  It's pretty clear you can't handle him,” Vasquez said.  “Hand him over to us, Danny.  We know what to do with him."

"He's mine," Danny growled.

"You were just about to kill him," Vasquez remarked.  "Why waste all that talent, especially if he's loaded.  You don't know how to treat your assets, which is why he should be taken away from you.  Let us have him and maybe the boss will call it square."

"Per the franchise agreement my people are at my disposal," said Danny.  "This kids skills are mine alone to decide what to do with."

"Yeah, but you're messing him all up, Danny, kicking him around like that.  You really think he's going to want to work for you now?  I know these kinds of nerds.  They run from violence of any kind.  You have to stroke them, tell them they're great.  You keep them under the illusion they're living in a perfect world full of video games and comic books. All you got to do is pump them up with donuts and energy drinks and they’ll work all night.  Hell, they get such a hard on when they successfully hack someone you barely gotta pay them.  They're real pendejos when it comes to business, but who cares?  By the way Danny, did I mention that the franchise agreement has changed?"

A voice from a wireless device buzzed in Vasquez's ear.  If the big boss found out he was wired to a Fed he may as well bury his own dead ass beneath one of these Tamarisk tombstones.  "Where is our item?" Agent Smith's voice said to Vasquez through the static.  "Does he have it or is he just playing games?  If he doesn't produce dispose of them as you see fit."

"I'm afraid we're taking your hacker before you beat all the good hacks out of him," said Vasquez, trying to keep his face blank.  "Now where is that other... thing.  Hand it over."

Danny gestured toward the Little Fucker.  The boy was standing in his overalls, leaning against Marisol's leg, looking over at Mike in the dirt with more weariness than fear.  He was thinking that for a while the world had been fun, life had approached the happiness he heard about in the songs his mother sung, songs rendered with a touch of sadness in her voice. Knock Knock, Who's there? I am the wind, open. I miss you my loved ones.  Who could know that his mother would go away on the wind, with the dust, back to the place where the wind began.

How could a happy song be sad? Little F asked himself. To Little F this was proof that at the end of the day, sadness always won. Why should he stay in a place where sadness always won?

"What are you talking about?" Vasquez spewed angrily, breaking his cultivated character as he looked at the child. "Who is this fucking kid?  What the hell is going on here?"

On the other side of the river, Tony Vargas was thinking that from the railroad bridge he would have a good shot down into Danny’s conference clearing.  Maybe he could get a good vantage there without technically crossing the river.  Would the inner demons that controlled his unnatural phobia be appeased by this compromise?  How did he know?  How many times had he put it to the test?  The one time he tried he had to be resuscitated in a hospital.  He was young then.  He wasn't young now.

The mere sight of water seriously freaked Tony out.  When he did laundry he dropped the clothes in backwards.  He ate off disposable plates to avoid doing the dishes.  The little it rained around here was enough to make him hide in the closet with his headphones on, surrounded by his critters for emotional support.  Taking a bath was a grim ordeal that he endured only because he was a lady's man, and a lady's man can't stink.  When he had to bathe he filled the tub about two inches, then used a cup to rinse himself.  He always came out shaking and dizzy, so if he didn’t have a date he preferred not to risk it. The good thing was he didn’t sweat much, only in the butt crack region.  Eventually his fear of water got so bad he tried bathing in beer, the only liquid his body could tolerate. This worked okay but got pricey, and he hated to see good beer go down the drain.

Only an aquaphobe like Tony Vargas could truly love the desert.  People always asked him how he got this condition.  Did you drown in a swimming pool, some moron inquired.  “No you fucking idiot, would you be talking to me now if I drowned in a swimming pool?”  Did your momma drop you on your head in the bathtub when you were a baby, a drunken imbecile said before Tony broke five of his teeth out.  This was the kind of idiotic interrogation Tony had to endure his entire life.  The truth, according to his mother, was that the first time she tried to bathe him Tony kicked and wailed like he was dying.  After that she had to give him sponge baths.  Tony had been born with an aversion to water programmed into his genes.  So every day he thanked sweet Jesus, the blessed Mother, and the three or four saints he thought could kick his ass that he had been dropped into a place as God-awful dry as the Gadsden Purchase.

Tony tried to remove all aqueous thoughts from his head as he climbed the gravelly, rock strewn embankment that rose to the rickety bridge.  His arthritic ankles and knees cringed and groaned as he strained his way on the poor, slippery footing.  He had seen some movie where a bunch of kids had almost been run over trying to cross a railroad bridge.  If a train came while Tony was up here there was no way he could get his fat ass out of the way in time, like a kid could.  But what a bitchin way for a railroad guy like him to go, huh?  Too bad no trains had used this line since 1996.  He would rather die epic, getting run over by a locomotive, than dying of fright from water like some little pussy.

The bridge was a big metal cage atop concrete pilings.  It had been built to withstand a deluge, but the flow beneath it was fickle.  There were some cloudless July days when a gushing muddy torrent would come raging down here, fed by monsoon rains so far away you couldn't even see the thunderheads that produced it.  Then there were days it was such a feeble trickle you could cross in flip flops and not wet your toes.  Slimy, muddy rivulet or biblical inundation, either way Tony was terrified by the prospect of crossing the stream.

Somehow he kept his head as he set foot on the rusty trestle, which was scorching to the touch in the July heat.  As he navigated the bridge, Tony tried to suppress his damp thoughts and focus on the semblance of the Little Fucker, but it didn’t work.  The river was at low ebb, barely a drip, what Wikipedia would refer to as a "dry rut," well below its "historic flow."  With a twinkle in his eye, Josef had often related to him the story of the German prisoners of war who tried to escape confinement in the desert by running down the Gila in a homemade Kayak.  They had been rounded up and caught after finding out they couldn't paddle through sand.  In other words, the Gila wasn't really a river anymore.  There were suburban gutters that had a higher flow on lawn watering day. But no matter how many times Tony repeated this to himself, and thought about Herr Mueller's great escape, his legs turned rubbery as he staggered and stumbled across the ties.

Tony shuffled breathlessly to a place where he thought he would have a commanding view of the meeting.  He propped Dustin's rifle up on one of the steal beams and swept the Tamarisk on the opposite bank through its sight, but from here he only caught the top of one of the SUVs.  He clambered onward, wondering why they built so much bridge if all it bridged was sand.  Maybe they should just build a bridge across the whole fucking desert, he thought, so no one would have to look at it.  Why had nobody ever thought of that?

He went forward a few dozen more feet, until he reached the point where the sand ended and the thick brown oozing muck that was the mighty Gila began.  He stopped again to survey the opposite bank.  He could see a semicircle of parked cars there, and the occasional hairless head of a gangster thug moving among them, but it wasn't enough for a single good shot, and he knew he would have to make several good shots.

Tony stopped for a moment and leaned heavily against the rifle.  There was not going to be any way to do this except bust into the clearing with guns a blazing.  Meanwhile, the murky seep of the Gila taunted him below.  He could hear it.  Yeah, I may not be much of a river anymore, asshole, but I'm enough to stop your fat ass, because you're not much of a man anymore.

Ouch. Tony's expansive panza heaved with worried breaths.  He felt lightheaded and weak.  He was going to have to get over this shit.  Nobody ever died just crossing a fucking river.  Well, a lot of people had drowned that way, true, but there wasn't enough water in that stream to drown an ant.  Then, with a wide grin, an idea came to him that turned his ugly mug handsome.  I'll pretend it's beer down there, I'll pretend the Gila is a river full of beer!  Tony loved beer.  For all of his unnatural aversion to water in its unaltered state, he was fine with beer, he was down with beer!  He looked at the Gila and replaced the mud with a foamy hoppy head.  He visualized a clean amber pouring along that sandy spigot.  It worked!  The Gila was now a river of beer, just like the one in heaven awaiting good Christians when they died, like Father Luke had promised if he would go to mass once in a while.

With the delicious pale ale of the Gila bubbling beneath him, Tony crossed what was left of the bridge and emerged on the other side.  He had done it!  There was nothing to it!  He had crossed the river, just like he had said he was going to do when he was ready to move on.  Well, he was moving on, one way or another.  But instead of going into epileptic convulsions or foaming at the mouth with seizures he felt renewed, invigorated!  He was ready to kick some ass!

On the far shore, Tony worked his way carefully through the tamarisk.  Down here in the thick grove he could see nothing yet, but he could hear angry, urgent voices.  One of them sounded like his brother.  He guided himself closer by the sound, which gradually became more heated and intense.  He didn't care, he felt invincible.  The oxygen on this side of the river must be better, purer.  How was it he had chickened out of coming over here all his life?  In High School his drunk friends had crossed the Roll Bridge in the middle of the night, back when trains still ran on it.  Tony had declined, and they taunted him mercilessly, calling him a pussy.  He sat calmly waiting in the moonlight, listening to the haunting cry of the coursing poorwills, then kicked all three of their asses one by one when they got back.  Moral of the story? - Nobody got away with calling him a pussy.

Tony found a downed willow that had been uprooted by flood and clambered up its denuded trunk, which rose at about a 30 degree angle.  From there he could see the clearing perfectly.  He saw Mike, Marisol and Little F, side by side like one of those cute sticker families you see on the back window of people's cars, except on those decorations one of them is usually not face down in the dirt, with a sticker gun pointing at his sticker head, like here. "Danny what you gone and done?" Tony said, then propped the sniper rifle on a branch. Steadying his aim, he put his brother's head directly in the cross hairs.

"Shit!" Tony growled.  Danny had that crazy thyroid eye look he got when he was really angry.  Tony knew Danny was dangerously impulsive when he got like this.  But although his finger hugged the trigger tight, he couldn't shoot him.  Maybe he was cycling through typical big brother memories about Danny - Danny holding his hand, Danny taking him for ice cream, Danny telling him stories, every word of which he believed because Danny was his big brother, and he lived in awe of him. Maybe he was thinking of the kind, gentle Danny taking meals to shut-ins with him, then sitting around with the old folks, talking and holding their hands. But no, he wasn’t thinking any of that, because there were no such big brother memories on some mythical lovely, shady, flower-lined la la land lane of recollection. Danny had always been an asshole to him. Always had been, always would be.

What Tony was really thinking about was the year of the flood. The year when an irrigation damn overflowed, and an irresistible surge of muddy red water ran unchecked through Cornudo, turning streets into gullies. How old had he been then – three or four, he couldn’t remember, but he definitely remembered finding himself in waist-high water that hit him from nowhere while crossing the road, and he remembered feeling his legs coming out from under him from the force of the torrent, and he remembered thinking This is it, se acabó, when Danny rushed into the stream and pulled him to safety. After that Danny had beat his ass good but had not killed him, like the flood was planning to do.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill his own brother. His finger eased off the trigger.

Then a bullet rang out from somewhere else and Danny Valero's head exploded, right there in the crosshairs.

Just a minute or two before Tony took aim from a treetop, Danny Valero's eyes had been bouncing and spinning in their sockets as he ranted and flailed about with his handgun.  Marisol hid Little F as best as she could behind her body but as for Mike, there was no cover whatsoever.  Much as he wriggled into the dirt like an earthworm, there was no amount of burrowing that could get him away from Danny's craziness.

"Who's this kid, you mean who is this kid, with no F word!" Danny raged.  "Don't come into my house and profane it with your filthy mouth.  I warned you about that.  WHO is this kid?  You know who. This kid is the one you're looking for, the one that everyone is looking for!  Don't play stupid with me. Acting like you don't know who the boy is doesn't mean you'll get him for free!"

Trying to crane his neck up out of the dirt so he could breathe something besides sand, Mike found himself rooting for Vasquez across the way.  Something had snapped inside of Danny.  That calm, emotionless, harmless looking old timer he had first seen sweeping the gas station parking lot had turned into a dangerously unhinged fiend, pointing his loaded gun at everyone in turn.

"You're the one playing stupid, Danny," said Vasquez.  "This little boy is not what we want.  Looks like you don’t really have it, which also means you are blowing smoke out your ass about this computer whiz and his mega millions.  You've lost it Danny.  You can't be trusted.  Your franchise is terminated."

Danny turned toward Vasquez with a John Brown Tragic Prelude, wide-eyed scowl of wrath.  "Don't say ASS! How many times do I have to warn you not to use profanity in my presence!  Franchise, you say!  I'm not the one taking franchises around here!  I'm the one giving them!  No one gives me permission to do business in my territory.  I give the permission!  I am the Gadsden Purchase!  You say this little boy is worthless to you.  Well then he's worthless to me too.  I got no use for him, so I'll just bury him. I’ll bury them all!  Let's see what you can do about that!"

Danny stormed toward Marisol, who was desperately squeezing the Little Fucker behind her.  Even now Little F refused to cry.  He knew this moment had to come sooner or later.  Now was as good a time as any to go back with his mother.

"Step aside, you whore!" Danny shouted.

"Don't do this Uncle, I mean Uncle dear," Marisol pleaded.  "He's just a little boy.  He can't hurt you.  You always said the life of innocents should be protected.  Let him live."

"I decide who is innocent.  No one here is innocent!  You have all betrayed me!  You have no right to call me uncle anymore.  Now get out of the way before I kill you first."

"Good.  Kill me first.  I'll fall on him and you'll never get him.  Kill me.  I'm the one who betrayed you."

"Don't do it Danny," Vasquez warned across the way.  He didn't care so much about this lady or this kid as much as he did about keeping this situation from getting out of control and attracting the attention of law enforcement.

"You stay out of it.  Don't tell me how to discipline my family."  Danny raised the gun on a level with Marisol's head, and that was when his own head exploded.  It exploded not so much as a soda can explodes through the lid straight up, but as a watermelon does in scattered chunks, when smashed with a mallet by Gallagher or one of his bad drunken imitators.  The effect was too sudden to inspire any emotions - neither outrage, sadness, or even relief.

Danny's outgunned goons were already running for their cars as Vasquez lowered his weapon.  "Round them up!" he shouted, and it was the last thing he said, a curious epitaph for his unvisited tomb, as his own head exploded like a mushroom puffball.

Laying face down in the dirt, Mike did not have the best vantage to observe the proceedings, but he knew human beings were dropping around him from gunshots. From this view it was hard to keep score, to know if the bad guys or the good guys were winning, or even who the good guys and the bad guys were.  He had already escaped once today, and the odds were a little unrealistic to think he and Little F might escape twice.

As Mike flopped helplessly like a beached fish on the sand, Marisol took a moment to ponder her uncle's lifeless body and wonder if she was supposed to feel sad, because she didn't feel anything.  Then, during this briefest of moments when she thought she should recognize her Uncle's passing, she only thought about his gun.  She lunged for the discarded pistol and prayed that it was really loaded.

"Get down behind the bad man, Little Fucker!" she yelled, and lowered the boy behind the unmourned meat pile that was Danny Valero.

Across the clearing, Vasquez's goons were proving to be more resilient than the flighty ones of Danny Valero. Perhaps the consequences of failure scared them more than bodily harm.  So instead of hastily retreating, about a half dozen or more were moving toward Marisol, charging with their fallen leader Vasquez's injunction to round them up.  They came buzzing out of the brush one by one, like some sort of swarming vermin unique to the Tamarisk, moving in on Marisol.  The fiery-eyed lady, however, was not much in the mood to be rounded up. She stood like a textbook photo of proper handgun shooting stance, from which pose she aimed and hit the first goon square in his center of gravity. But more were coming, and even Annie Oakley couldn't have brought down so many goons in so little time.

Marisol was thinking she would go down in a blaze of glory when an unexpected thing happened, which was that instead of an irresistible quantity of goons rushing in to overwhelm her, they were dropping in place, seemingly of their own accord.  One goon fell with half his head dissected, another flopped limply to the sand with an ugly exit wound in the side facing Marisol.  Somebody was shooting, and shooting skillfully.  The only explanation was that the cops had somehow gotten wind of this rendezvous.  While this was not the most ideal source of assistance, she thought what the fuck any port in a storm, which was, ironically, the title of one of her most popular porno flicks. Then she turned her attention back to the goons.

The goons had been thrown into considerable disarray and confusion by the unexpected assault from behind.  Smelling betrayal, one uncharacteristically bright goon knelt down over Vasquez's inert carcass and began probing his clothing, all the while using the fallen leader's body for a barrier as bullets continued to whiz by.  "He's fucking wired!" the perceptive goon shouted.  "Mother Fucker sold us out! Get out of here!"

Unfortunately for this goon, being uncharacteristically bright was not enough to save his life.  As he rose to take flight, a bullet from the mysterious sniper in the Tamarisk took him back down.  Now all the goons were abandoning the battlefield in scattered, disorganized retreat, but both Marisol and the secret sniper in the trees kept shooting because, to quote the military maxim of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, you have to “keep the skeer on ‘em!" Marisol had never read any military manual, she had never been drilled in assault tactics, she had embraced this truth instinctively, and very quickly.

Although the goons were on the losing end of this skirmish, and over half a dozen of their soon to be rotting cadavers lay scattered about, the ultimate outcome of this encounter in the tamarisk remained uncertain.  With the clearing now de-gooned, Marisol swiped a knife from a body, knowing that these gangster types always carried a long blade to compensate for their penis anxiety.  Surrogate phallus in hand, Marisol now sliced through Mike's bonds and helped him to his feet, though he hesitated for a moment. With all the bullets buzzing about he seemed to have taken a liking to being low on the ground.

"You were fucking bad ass," Mike congratulated Marisol as he turned his face upward and remembered with nostalgia that there was a blue sky.  "Where did you..."

"Shut up," she said.  "I never want to do anything like that again.  I just want to forget about it."

Marisol carried Little Fucker into their circle and the three locked tight in a blood-splattered embrace, because who could tell if after today they would see each other again.  They had survived, but the feds were after Mike, Little F was an illegal alien, and Marisol had just murdered several men. Even though the men were only useless, soulless, unloved goons, this still counted as murder in the eyes of the law.

Then, as the three were entwined in this inseparable starfish death grip, the secret sniper came into the clearing, brandishing his rifle at the hip, the business end now lowered safely toward the ground.

"Hey guys," Tony said.  "Can I get a hug too?"

Chapter 38

Chapter 38

Table of Contents

A swirling dust devil swept the fringes of the parking lot of the Gadsden Motel, making slow and methodical circles, as if it too could not find the energy to work in the heat.  It switched directions several times from clockwise to counter clockwise, unable to make up its mind if it was a good spirit or bad spirit.  Finally it sandblasted the abandoned motel before moving on without any apparent sense of urgency, having carried out its intention - which was to get first licks in on the erosion process of the vacated structure.

On its way out it splattered a capricious shower of uplifted gravel against the pickup occupied by Dustin Diesel and Tony Vargas, but they didn't really care because it was Lindell's truck, not theirs.  Dustin stopped the truck in front of the office, where Mike's truck was parked, but they found nobody there.  Then they went to the critter room, where Tony discovered he did not have his key, so Dustin kicked the door in.  The effort was considerable.  Dustin changed colors for a moment then bent over and breathed deeply, his right hand clutching his stomach.

"You all right, homey?" Tony said with concern untainted with the usual sarcasm he colored everything with.

Dustin nodded.  "I'm getting it together.  I felt a little twinge there.  It'll pass.  I got my pills, just in case."

The critter room was empty of all, save critters.  Hundreds of legs skittered over to deliver salutations to Tony.  He stroked the back of the 99 leg centipede lovingly and let the amputee tarantula crawl up his arm.  Rusty the rattleless rattlesnake shook his tail in joy, but nobody heard it.

"Looks like the kid took pretty good care of the critters," Tony said with appreciation.

Then they found Little F's writings on the bed.  Dustin looked closely at the indecipherable scrawling.  "If you ask me, that's writing.  What age do you think they start them in school over there?"

"The boy couldn't even walk yet when he got here.  I doubt he was ever in school.  He's just smart. Smart attracts smart."

Dustin’s mustache curled doubtfully. "I think he was trying to say something."

The Santa Cruz sheriff looked around the room with a detective's eye.  In the bathroom he found the door beneath the sink open and got down on his painful, arthritic knees to investigate. "Hey, check this out," he called to Tony.  "There's a little door under here that leads to a empty place behind the mirror.  Did you do this? Maybe to hide your girlfriends under here, or something equally perverse?"

Tony stuck his head beneath the sink.  He could barely get his bulky torso inside, but managed to wriggle his balding skull through the little door.  "Hell no I didn't do this.  A lot of renovations have been going on at the Motel since I left.  Hand me your flashlight."

Tony shined the light upward, and found a ladder rising to the attic. It led to a narrow opening that was only large enough for a child.  "The kid built an escape route for the Little Fucker," Tony concluded.  "The Little Fucker must have grown on him, because at first all he could think about was giving the boy away."

"I think the kid used this escape hatch," said Dustin, "because the door under the sink was open.  But Mike's truck is still here, with no Mike.  What does it mean?"

"I don't know.  You're the cop.  I think it means they're in deep shit."

The pair checked the rest of the Motel, but found it empty.  Only one room looked recently lived in, with the beds unmade, towels on the floor, and a note to Mike from some guy named Earl saying that they had to check out "precipitously," and had left the key in the door slot.  Thanks for the hospitality, cheerio and all that, the message added.

"Mike wasn't here when these folks split, because if he had been he would have cleaned the room already.  He was anal about that," said Tony.

"Why do people say anal?" Dustin wondered.

"I don't fucking know.  I think it's short for anal retentive."

"Well if you don't know, why do you say it?  What does anal retentive even mean?  It sounds disgusting. It sounds like something only constipated people should say, people whose turds are so backed up that when they finally come out the fumes are worse than the Bhopal disaster.”

"I don’t know nothing about China,” said Tony. “It's just something people say in a particular situation.  Like, if someone's a neat freak, you say he's anal."

"It doesn't sound neat to me at all.  An anus is a nasty thing.  Please don't say it."

"What the fuck am I supposed to say instead?  The word fits."

"Well, how about neat freak, or tidy person?  Even better, how about fastidious?  Fastidious is a real nice word."

Tony shook his head in frustration.  "Okay.  Fat-tit-ious, whatever.  Now just focus on your job."

"Okay, I'm focusing.  Look over here.  There's a bullet hole in the ceiling."

They decided to head over to the Cafe to see what Linda knew.  Through the big diner windows Linda could see practically everything that went on in town and on sleepy, stifling summer days like this, when she wasn’t napping on the counter pretty much all she did was spy on people.

Linda squealed when she saw Tony, then wrapped him up in a semi-erotic embrace.  "Have you seen Mike?" Tony asked as he tried to peel her off like the Nautilus breaking free of the giant squid.

"He was here earlier fixing Max's computer.  How have you been, honey?  I haven't seen you in forever."

"Yeah, yeah, forever whatever," Tony growled poetically.  "I never change, I’m the same asshole as always.  We need to find Mike.  He might be in trouble."

Linda gasped, her marvelous Milf breasts perking up, then deflating to their normal state of inertia.  "Truth is, I was starting to get worried.  When Mike left I heard a gunshot over there toward the motel.  I assumed it was just kids target practicing in the desert, but it was only one shot.  After that the Earl arrived at their room and it looks like he and Lady Easely cleared out in a hurry.  I thought that odd, because they have been stopping in for tea pretty regularly, and never said anything about leaving.  I love how the Earl refers to me as the 'tavern wench.'  I think that's the cutest thing.  Anyway, a while later an ambulance showed up over there, but I couldn't see what was happening because it parked in a way that blocked the view of the room.  Ambulances in the summer time aren't too strange anyway, people can't deal with the heat anymore and decide to check out.  What better place to check out, then from a motel?  I didn't think much of it but then, to tell you the truth my thinking cap is overheated. But you got me worried now."

Tony looked at Dustin.  "You said the bullet missed.  Why would there be an ambulance?"

Dustin shrugged.  "This is getting weirder and weirder.  There was no blood anywhere."

Linda shook her index finger in the air, tuning her unresponsive thinking cap.  "Some time after that I heard another gunshot, coming from Danny's garage.  Then somebody left in the Crown Victoria Danny has been working on the past few days.  I couldn't see who, the glass was dark.  Since there are always strange doings over there, people coming in one car and leaving in another, I wasn't paying close attention.  You know I can't watch everything.  I do get a few sunburned customers in here on days like this, tired of being hypnotized by the mirages on the highway, and I have to serve them like it or not.”

"We better go check out the garage," said Tony.

"One more thing before you go," said Linda.  She opened the till of the cash register and produced an envelope, which she handed to Tony.  "Mike gave me this to give to you.  I guess he went and visited the Herr in the rest home.  Don't ask me why.  The Herr gave him this, to give to you."

Tony snatched the envelope and gave it a cursory inspection.  "What does that old fucker want now?  He's always asking me to do this and that, like he was my Daddy or something."  Irritated, Tony stuffed the envelope in his back pocket.  "I ain't got time for that crap. Old fucking Nazi."

Linda insisted on a kiss and a hug from each before they left.  Tony had a look on his face like he was kissing his matronly old halitosis aunt instead of a voluptuous babe, but he still copped a little feel, for old time's sake.  Then they motored over to the garage.

"We're going to have to break in and it's not going to be easy because Danny keeps things locked tight," said Tony when they reached the Double V.  Danny's Toyota 4 runner was not there, indicating Danny's absence, but there was an unknown black SUV parked outside with a Malverde sticker on the back window.  "One of Danny's goons is inside.  We better be careful.  Give me that shotgun."

Surprisingly, the side door to the garage was open.  The two stormed in and fanned out SWAT style, but the only one of Danny's goons present no longer presented a threat.  The Malverde devotee was slumped in a chair with half his head missing.

"There's your second gunshot," said Dustin.  "Who was he?"  The Sheriff had his hand on his chest again, and looked pale.

Tony shrugged.  He wondered if his friend was going to hold up.  "You got me.  All of his recognizable features are splattered on the wall.  Does it matter?  These goons look the same, talk the same, and think the same, what little they think.  Danny stamps them out of the same goon mold.  He gets them dumb and ugly on purpose, so they don't get no ideas in their empty heads."

Dustin and Tony started searching the rest of the building, and soon worked out what happened.  They found the storeroom with the playpen and the sliced ropes.  Inside the playpen they discovered a little scrap of paper with two of the strange curlicue words written on it.  "You're right, said Dustin.  "That baby is smart.  He leaves breadcrumbs. But these knots are too big for a baby's hands."

"Mike was here, Mike came to get him.  I'm sure of it," said Tony.  "Here's how it went down.  It makes sense now.  Eric grabbed my key to the critter room off the ring when he tried to do a Deliverance on me at the campground.  After Hal rescued me he went to the Motel and tried to kidnap or kill Little F.  Mike was away fixing Max's computer.  Eric failed, Little F got away, and something happened to Eric in the process.  That part I don't know.  I don't think Danny found him, because Danny would never call an ambulance.  Then the Earl rolled in, whoever he is, saw Eric sprawled out, and called an ambulance, because that's what proper Earls do.  But I guess the Earl and his Lady decided that this town was a little too exciting for them after all, and decided to leave precipitously.  Somewhere along this timeline, who knows when, Danny got here and kidnapped Little F from his hiding place.  I don't think the boy would go with him willingly.  I heard Marisol was working here a while, maybe she went over.  That sounds like Danny, using his niece to get an edge on someone.  Pussy works better than threats most of the time.  I'm thinking Little F knew Marisol, trusted her, and came out of his hiding place.  What else?  Then Mike came back from the diner, couldn't find the boy, and went straight to Danny's.  Danny kidnapped him because he's in trouble and knows Mike has money.  But Danny's not here, and he's always here except when he is off at a secret meeting with some cartel thug.  Until Danny gets money out of Mike he will let him live, but we better hurry.  You see, you're supposed to be the cop, and I just figured all that out for you."

Dustin shrugged.  "I'm just some yokel Sheriff from Bumfuck Arizona.  Where we going next, Sherlock?"

"To the river," said Tony.  "That's where Danny has his meetings.  I know the exact place, but I've never been there because it is on the opposite side."  He paused a moment, then looked at Dustin seriously.  "So what I mean is you are going to the river.  I can't go because I can't... you know."

"Lucky me," said Dustin. "Your scenario makes sense, except for one thing.  Who cut Mike's bonds? Who let him out?  And why do we have to go to the river, if he escaped?"

Tony stroked his whiskers.  "Good questions.  The only answer to question number one is that Marisol cut him loose.  She probably had a change of heart, because Danny can be a real mean son of a bitch.  She's a smart girl too.  I think she seduced that dog who is dead in the chair over there. He thought he was getting a blow job and he did, she blew his fucking brains out.  As for question two, Danny ain't stupid.  Do you think he was just going to let his gold mine drive away in a Crown Vic?  I'm pretty sure he was tracking Mike with some kind of GPS he put on that car, and those kids didn't get far.  I'm betting Danny has them down at the river right now, deciding their fate.  We better go.  If it's up to Danny to decide they might have a chance, but there could be other deciders involved."

They jumped back into Wendell's gravel splattered Ranger.  "Drive for the Roll railroad bridge," Tony told him.

Dustin did as Tony directed him, but it was clear he was uncomfortable.  As they sped along I-8 to the Roll exit he kept rubbing his chest.

"What's the matter?" Tony asked him.

"I don't know," Dustin moaned.  "It must be something I had for breakfast this morning."

Tony tried levity to distract Dustin and get him on track.  "Why does Doris keep making you all those big ass breakfasts?  You should be eating cottage cheese and tofu at your age.  No wonder you can't get any serious police work done.  You eat one of her breakfasts and you're taking a dump the rest of the day."

Dustin did not smile.  "Look in the glove compartment and get my pills out, just in case."

Dustin turned off the freeway and they rolled along the road that angled northeast, following the railroad along the base of the Antelope Hills. 

"There's nothing in here except a very old copy of Penthouse Letters with some nasty looking stains on it," Tony said. "I ain't touching that shit.  Wait a minute vato, this ain't your cruiser, remember? Did you leave your pills in your own car?"

"Shit," said Dustin.  He felt terrible.  He had indeed eaten another artery clogging breakfast this morning, and Doris had packed him a pretty good lunch too.  His doctor had told him he could either give up all the stress, or give up the good chow, but Dustin couldn't bring himself to give up either one of them. He was addicted to both.

"Come on pard, snap out of it.  We're almost there.  Let's bust these bozos and go home."  Tony remembered that he had no home, he didn't even know where the Love Machine was anymore, but it sounded like an inspirational thing to say to people who actually had a home.

"Okay," Dustin said weakly.  He didn't look like the badass sheriff who was the terror of all outlaws, bandits and general miscreants in Santa Cruz County.

They got to the point at the tip of the Antelope Hills where Roll Road crossed the Gila River.  The Railroad bridge loomed to their left.  The pickup rolled bumpily off the gravel and jerked to a halt at a clump of creosote.

"Wait, not yet," said Tony.  "What the f-?"

Dustin's large head was slumped over into his chest.  Part of his tongue was hanging askew from the corner of his mouth, and a thin trickle of drool was already coalescing into a thick drop on the long, drooping bristles of his mustache.

There was no point asking Dustin if he was all right because it was obvious he wasn't.  Tony began reaching for Dustin's cell phone.  "I'll get help," he said.

Dustin jerked his head negatively.  The effort caused him a spasm of pain, and he clutched his chest.

"Dammit I'll save the kids," said Tony.  "You wait for help.  I'll get you help."

Tony knew Hal was usually bouncing around this sector.  If there was someone who wouldn't ask uncomfortable questions about what they were doing out here, it was Hal.  Tony grabbed Dustin's phone and scrolled through the contacts until he found Hal’s number, then dialed it.

As the phone rang Dustin weakly took it back from Tony, his hand over his heart as if trying to keep it from bouncing out of his chest.  "I'll take it from here.  Take my guns and go," he wheezed.

Tony looked at his friend and was torn in different directions.  Although he would never admit it, he realized he was fond of this old fat fool.  On the other hand, he still had a sweet spot in his gruff exterior for Mike, even though he still wasn't sure if he was a fucking faggit or not.  So what if he was screwing his niece, that was no proof - a lot of your homos had girlfriends for appearances sake.  But was he really ready to cross the river just to save some limp-wrist who drank appletinis and might pass that infection on to the world?  He tried to talk himself out of it, but then a picture of the Little Fucker formed in his head.

"Holy shit," said Tony.  He grabbed Dustin's sniper rifle and started walking down the dusty road toward the railroad bridge.

NEXT >>

Altered image courtesy of Ben Churchill, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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.

NEXT >>

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?"

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

Chapter 34

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Pretty sure. Red on yellow?"

Eddy nodded.

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

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

Mike yanked himself away.  "Where is he?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where's Little F?" Mike asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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