Bad Axe, page 21
“I don’t know,” Thorn said. “Sounds like a family business disagreement. When it comes to blowing up people with landmines, I don’t see a lot of difference between one cause and another.”
She looked at him sharply and shook her head.
“You don’t understand. You weren’t there. You don’t know how it was.”
“No, I don’t.”
“It’s all changed,” she said. “It’s gone rotten. A virus eating away at decency and human dignity.”
Thorn glanced at Sugar and he shook her head, let it go. And yeah, as usual, Sugar was right. Arguing with Savannah was pointless. Like Bobby Tennyson, she had never truly left behind Johnston Atoll, that poisoned island, and that raging war.
Thorn said, “We’re going to do what we can to stop these people. How many are there besides Marco and Ingrid?”
“Don’t know. Could be dozens, or it could be just the two. I’m not sure.”
Savannah turned away from them and reached both arms as high as she could stretch and pressed her palms against the hull of the Flying Dragon as if she meant to claw her way up the side and climb aboard and sail back half a century when revolutionaries had flowers in their hair and the best of intentions
“Go on, get out of here. Go, I’m done with you. I’m done with all of it.”
Sugar gripped Thorn’s shoulder and steered him back to the truck.
When they caught sight of the last house on the road off in the distance, Thorn pulled to the shoulder and cut the engine.
“What’s up?”
Thorn sighed.
“Maybe you should get out here, work your way to the house through those trees. Take the Smith. Get the drop on them.”
“That wasn’t the plan. We‘re going in together. I got this damn tat for the occasion.” Sugar patted his forearm.
Thorn tried to find the words, but nothing came for a few awkward seconds.
“I don’t know, Sugar. Given who these assholes are, you might set them off.”
Sugarman looked away at the bare trees, nodding, absorbing the remark.
“Hadn’t thought of that.”
“Just occurred to me. Mexicans, Hondurans, African Americans, to these assholes what’s the difference?”
“Yeah, yeah, good catch, Thorn.” But there was nothing upbeat in his tone. “Sometimes I forget.”
“I forget all the time.”
“Except just now,” Sugar said. “Just now you remembered.”
Thorn stared out the windshield. In the stretch of silence, he felt a gulf widen between them, one that never existed before or else until now had gone unspoken.
“Look, I’m sorry.”
Sugar waved him off.
“Not your fault. Like I said, it’s good you caught it. We could have walked in there together, the blond WASP dude and the darkie, they wouldn’t think twice before mowing us down.”
Thorn lay a hand on Sugarman’s shoulder, trying to find something to say to bridge the divide, bring them back. Sugar reached up and patted his hand.
“It’s okay, man,” Sugar said. “Really, don’t sweat it. You go through the front door, hit ‘em in the face and I’ll sneak in the back and shoot ‘em in the ass, between the two of us we’ll take down these jamokes. Make the world a safer place. That’s what we do, right?”
“That’s what we do,” Thorn said.
Sugar got out of the truck, closed the door quietly and without a backward glance wandered away into the woods.
“Okay, what the fuck is going on? This asshole is way too early.”
Marco stood at the front window fingering open a slit in the curtains.
“And he’s driving a pickup not a van,” Ingrid said.
“I don’t like the looks of this. Not even a little bit.”
When Thorn stepped out of the pickup truck and strolled into the center of the big yard, Dulce wanted to scream with joy and relief. He glanced over at the pen, stopped, met her eyes and though his face remained empty, she believed he was telling her to stay quiet and still, to let him do whatever it was he’d come to do.
Thorn dallied in the yard for several minutes, not moving, not looking her way again, just staring off at the forest where the giant flock of crows had landed.
It seemed like a long time before the muscular man threw open the front door of the house and came down the steps in jeans and a tight black T-shirt. The pistol was in his hand again. He walked slower than last time, something different about him, tensed and cautious like a street dog approaching a menacing trespasser.
Dulce’s fellow prisoners were also watching intently. Now that they’d seen what was in store for them, they were alert to every unfolding event. If their captor repeated the process he’d used before, it would only be a minute or two before he brought Thorn over to the pen and directed him to select the next victim.
With a quiver of suspicion rising inside her, Dulce found herself considering the thought that Thorn had not come to rescue her at all. Was it possible he was an accomplice of her captor? No, no. Everything Thorn had done on behalf of Dulce seemed evidence of his goodness. Every single thing.
But as the tremors in her chest grew with the growing doubt, she began to imagine each step Thorn had taken on her behalf was actually a deception. What if it was all done to move Dulce closer to being taken hostage and brought to this remote place? A scheme to betray her. It seemed incredible, but as she went over each step, recalled how he coaxed her from her hiding place, won her trust, tempted her with food and lavished her with new clothes, then left her with Sister Kathleen, so exposed and defenseless, she was no longer certain if she could trust this man.
Why would anyone, especially a stranger, be so kind? When she asked him that, why he was helping her, his answer was torpe. Clumsy, awkward. He said he cared about her, and when she challenged him that he had only known her for a few days, Thorn replied that was enough time. But was it? Was it really?
Thorn and her captor were talking in the yard, the muscular one had his back to the pen where Dulce and the others were trapped. A cloth bag was in Thorn’s hand, much like the briefcase the red-headed man held. Thorn glanced over at her again and his face was empty. Nothing to reassure her.
All she’d believed was a lie. Dulce had been tricked. She saw that now. She was certain of it. She was on her own. Any hope of survival was in her hands alone.
She turned to the fence at the rear of the pen, hesitated a moment, gathering herself, picturing her run toward the chain-link fence, leaping as high as she could, grabbing hold and climbing.
TWENTY-SEVEN
T horn had no idea what Marco’s protocol was, his specific arrangements with the buyers. There had to be numerous tripwires with a transaction as lethal as this. He and Sugar had discussed it on the flight and they’d run a few possible scenarios. Though there was simply no way to predict how the deal was supposed to unfold, the one common element in all their versions was weapons. Marco and Ingrid would be heavily armed. These two wouldn’t dare peddle nerve agents otherwise.
There was also a possibility Marco would have a crew to back him up. It seemed unlikely that he and Ingrid would risk trying to pull this off alone. The Whitman brothers had been killed in the assault on their ranch, but surely Marco had other allies in Abyss.
“On the other hand,” Sugar had said, “far as we can tell, they’ve done everything on their own, just the two of them, Bonnie and Clyde.”
“We have to assume there’ll be more than just those two.”
“To be on the safe side, yeah.”
“As if there’s a safe side to this,” Thorn said.
They also suspected there’d be some other requirements. No way to predict that either. The only one they were sure of was the Abyss tattoo. They had that covered, otherwise, Thorn’s best chance of grabbing Dulce and making it out of this alive was to stay flexible, improvise, adapt to whatever wild cards were played.
But as soon as he’d climbed out of the pickup truck, he was already tensed and off balance. Seeing Dulce caged nearby had spiked his anger.
Maintaining a poker face wasn’t in Thorn’s skill set, neither was throttling back his fury, but for Dulce’s sake, he tried to keep his expression neutral, trying to let her know as best he could that she shouldn’t expose any hint of their connection.
Thorn scanned the surroundings, an eye out for Sugar or any of Marco’s crew but saw no sign of either. He surveyed the layout, the barn, a sagging two story house, the pen, an abandoned tractor and two cars on blocks, a field where crops had once grown and a distant forest. Ragged rows of evergreens rimmed the property and more firs and pines were sprinkled randomly around the edges as though this place had briefly been a Christmas tree farm before it went to seed.
The nearest neighbor was Savannah Snyder, two or three miles back on Taggart Road. Like the Whitman’s ranch in Arizona, this place was so isolated, any gunfire or explosions or screams would go undetected. Perfect spot for whatever butchery these monsters had in mind.
There was no obvious sign of the landmines, but storing them inside the house was unlikely. If leakage or any mishap occurred it would pose a high risk to anyone lodged there. If they were stashed on-site, they had to be in the dilapidated barn adjacent to the pen where the migrants were caged.
Assuming he was being watched, Thorn stayed stock-still in the open yard, staring off at the distant forest where batches of crows left their perches, fluttered into the air then resettled back into the limbs in an edgy dance whose music only they could hear.
He didn’t fidget, did nothing that might give away the thump of anger in his chest, and as much as he wanted to, he didn’t take another sideways glance at Dulce.
An agonizing five minutes passed before he heard the screech of rusty hinges and turned to see the front door of the house open and a big man come warily down the steps.
Thorn had only a single glimpse of Marco during the shootout when he’d been grazed and Castillo hit twice, a blurred image of a bulky man clambering into the front seat of a van while gunfire sprayed. But from all Thorn had learned about Marco and his hateful creed and ruthless acts, Thorn formed an image of the man, a picture that took such vivid root that he’d begun to believe he might be able to spot Marco in a crowd. He’d be the man with the warped smile, the ugly laugh and the acid twist of flame in his eyes.
But as Marco crossed the yard, Thorn saw he’d got it very wrong. This was a melancholy specimen, a guy who Thorn would wager was adrift in an ocean of pain and humiliation.
His face was so malformed that he’d probably attracted waves of bullies and drawn taunts and cheap shots since he was a kid, which had no doubt pushed Marco past the usual adolescent insecurity into full blown self-loathing. If a person’s face alone could set the moral trajectory of one’s life, this was one that could do it.
It was a face at war with itself, composed of hard cheekbones, chilly blue eyes frilled by lashes so long they might have been a movie starlet’s, and a nose that had been broken and reset inexpertly more than once, features that together might have given him a certain masculine authority were it not for a tiny, puckered mouth that belonged on a five year old girl or a Barbie doll, and below those pink lips was a chin that was hardly there at all.
What his face lacked in menace, his body made up for. He was a few inches taller than Thorn, twenty pounds meatier with upper arms that strained the short sleeves of his black T-shirt. He had the rubbery hardness a man can’t build with gym equipment. This was work-muscle, the sort earned by decades of digging post holes or slinging hay bales into the beds of pick-ups. Wrists so thick there was no ordinary cuff that would button around them.
“Who the fuck is this asshole standing in my yard?”
The Glock in his right hand was pointing down, finger touching the trigger.
Thorn allowed himself a faint, reassuring smile, then drew back the sleeve of his black sweatshirt, presented his right forearm. With a dubious frown, Marco came close, examined the symbol, then he wet a finger and scrubbed it across the Mehndi image.
Thorn’s gut clenched and he sketched out an escape route, figuring a sprint toward the far corner of the barn was his best chance. But bless Aarushi’s skill, the drawing of the interlocking pyramids didn’t smear.
Marco wiped his finger dry on the front of his shirt.
“I said three o’clock. It’s not even noon.”
“I was eager,” Thorn said. “I couldn’t wait. I’m ready to do this.”
“It’s a breach,” said Marco. “Means you can’t follow instructions. I made it clear. Any fuck-ups, the deal is off.”
Marco stepped back a half-step as if to bring Thorn into better pistol range.
Thorn shrugged a half-hearted apology.
“Okay, so I fucked up. Not the first time. Probably won’t be the last.”
“What’s your race?”
“What?”
“You heard me. What’s your genetic stock?”
Thorn was baffled.
“You can’t tell just looking at me?”
“You’re too dark for Caucasian. Looks like there’s jigaboo blood pumping around in there.”
“Fuck you, Jack.”
“Pakistan, India, one of the third worlds. Where you from, your parents?”
“I believe my great grandfather was a drunk in County Cork. That’s Ireland.”
“I’m not joking around, smart guy. You want some of my inventory, answer the question. You don’t look like any white man I’ve seen.”
“I spend a lot of time in the sun, maybe that’s what you’re seeing, it’s called a tan.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’s that place, all this sun you been lying around in?”
“Florida,” Thorn said.
Innocent enough answer, and true, but it triggered something in his face. A twitch around the eyes, a hardening in the jowls as if Marco felt a wasp tickling across his cheek and wanted to send it off with the least chance of being stung.
“Is that a problem, being from Florida?”
“It fucking well could be,” Marco said.
“Why?”
“Where in Florida?”
It was clear to Thorn the time for truth-telling was past.
“Ft. Lauderdale, ever hear of it? Big with spring breakers.”
“How close is that to Key Largo?”
A swallow of air clogged in Thorn’s throat like a chunk of raw meat.
“What’s wrong, I say something you didn’t see coming?”
“I’m not following you.”
“See, here’s how it is. Out in Arizona last week, I hear the name of a guy, some kind of secret agent or some bullshit. He was sticking his nose way up my ass, looking to fuck with me. I was informed he was from Key Largo, Florida.”
“Florida’s a big place. Lots of people. The Keys are hours from where I live in Lauderdale. I don’t know anybody down there, and I’m not here to fuck with you. I’m here to make a deal, hand over a shit ton of money in exchange for items to use for our shared goals. Yours and mine, and the goals of Abyss. Bringing fire and fury down on our mutual foes. You’ve been an inspiration to me and my people. We’re going to show our appreciation by using these babies for our common interests.”
“Your name wouldn’t be Thorn, would it?”
By slow degrees the pistol was rising, aiming now at Thorn’s knees, inching upward to his crotch.
“Man, I don’t know where you’re getting this shit. But my name is Lucas. Never heard of anybody named Thorn. What kind of dumbass name is that?”
Marco’s eyes worked over Thorn’s face as if trying to pry beneath his neutral mask. It took him half a minute before he made his judgment, then he backhanded the moisture off his tiny mouth. The deadly gleam in his eye waned and the pistol sagged.
Thorn allowed himself a sigh that he tried to conceal, though he wondered if Marco might notice the veins bulging in his temple from the throb of his pulse.
Marco knew his name, knew Thorn had been tracking him in Arizona. The only person with that information was Castillo who as far as he knew had never had face to face contact with Marco. So it had to be Tensia, his secretary, who Marco and Ingrid tortured to learn Dulce’s whereabouts.
“Give me the cash,” Marco said.
Thorn handed him the bag, making another quick scan of the surroundings for signs of a sniper. He was beginning to worry about Sugar, if he’d gotten lost or fallen into the hands of one of Marco’s goons or maybe worse.
Romy in the crop-duster was another problem. Dropping hundreds of leaflets was meant to create a distraction, give Thorn a chance to do whatever was necessary at that moment. Instead, now that Key Largo was on the five-alarm watch list, if Marco spotted those words on a random page, things could move fast and fatal.
Marco lifted the cloth bag and said, “Feels light.”
“It’s what you asked for.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“I need to have a look at what I’m buying.”
“In the barn. Lead the way.”
And yes, the landmines from Bobby Tennyson’s long ago story were inside the shadowy building stacked three high and arranged in orderly rows. Marco stood close behind him, a tempting target.
But Thorn stifled the impulse to take him on, unsure who might be hiding in the gloomy corners of the barn or worse, sighting their weapons on Dulce and the others in the pen. He was willing to risk his own skin but not the innocents outside.
“Impressive,” Thorn said. “We’ll put these to good use.”
“I give a shit. Take them home, blow them up in your backyard for all I care.”
