“That’s ’cause you the best. Why do we need the best? ’Cause this fucking guy, he’s the best.”
He handed a photo around: it passed from shooter to shooter. It showed a thin man who might have been handsome if he hadn’t been so grim, leathery-faced, with thin eyes, squirrel shooter’s eyes.
“This guy was a big fucking hero in that little war they had over in fucking gook country.”
“Hey, Hor-hey, you not be talking about my country that way, man,” said the ponytailed Asian, as he popped the bolt on a 16 and it slammed shut.
“Hey, we can be friends, no? No bullshit. I’m telling you good, you listen. Nigger, spic, cowboy, motorcycle fuck, wops, slope, fucking southern-white-boy asskickers, we got to work together on this. We’re a fucking World War II movie. We’re America, the melting pot. Nobody got no problem with nobody else, right, am I right? I know you guys have worked alone mainly or in small teams. If you want to go home in one piece, take it from Jorge, you do this my way.”
“I don’t like the gook shit.”
“Then take it out on this boy. He killed eighty-seven of you guys. That was back in ’72. They even got a nickname for him; they call him Bob the Nailer, ’cause he nails you but good. You think he forget how? In 1992, bunch of fucking Salvadorean commandos, trained by Green Berets even, think they got his ass fried on the top of a little hill? He kills forty-four of ’em. He shoots down a fucking chopper. He sends them crying home to mamasita. This guy is good. They say he’s the best shot this great country ever produced. And when it gets all shitty brown in your underpants ’cause the lead is flying, they say this guy just gets cooler and cooler until he’s ice. Ain’t no brown in his pants. His heart don’t even beat fast. Part fucking Indian, maybe, only Indians are like that.”
“He’s a old man,” said the lanky cowboy. “His time has passed. He ain’t as fast or as smart as he once was. I heard about him in the Corps, where they thought he was a god. He wasn’t no god. He was a man.”
“Were you in Nam?” asked Jorge.
“Desert Storm, man. Same fucking thing.”
“Yeah, well,” said Jorge, “whatever. Anyhow, we tie the whole thing together on secure cellulars. We move south this afternoon, as I say, three cars, three men in a car, and me, I’ll be in a pickup, I’ll hold the goddamned thing together while I’m talking to the boss. We know where he lives, but I don’t want to do it there. We hunt him on the roads. We move in hunter-killer teams. You get a sighting, we work the maps, we plot his course, we pick him up. Very professional. Like we are the fucking FBI. We get him and his pal on a goddamned country road, and then it’s World War III. We’ll show this cabrón something about shooting.”
21
ow it was his turn to dig. He looked around, making certain. Yes, yes, this was it. The fallen loblolly, over there, snarled in moss, that was the first marker. The gray chunk of rock ten feet away was the second; he remembered it well, though it seemed to have worn over the years. Standing where he could see a notch in the high ridgeline of Black Fork Mountain through a gap in the pines was the third. Triangulating between the three, he knew: this was the spot.
Bob set himself, and with the same sure spade strokes that he had seen liberate the coffin that was not his father but some poor young man he attacked the earth. It fought him, but he was in a mood for a fight. The spade sliced and cut into the earth and lifted it; he began to sweat as he found a rhythm, and beside him a pile of dirt grew.
It was still early. He’d arisen before dawn, while the boy slept, and headed up this trail, a mile from his trailer. He used to walk it all the time with the dog Mike, but Mike was gone now. So Bob was alone, with the spade and the earth. As the sun rose it sent slats of light through the shortleaf pines and they caught the dust that his efforts raised, enough to make a man cough. He worked on, taking pleasure in the power of his movements.
It wasn’t a coffin he uncovered. It was a plastic tube, nearly a foot in diameter, nearly four in length. Pulling it from the ground at last, he felt its considerable weight, even as its contents shifted a bit, but that was fine. He got it out on the ground and stood for a moment, breathing heavily. All around him it was quiet. His actions had scared the birds. No animals came around, and it was too cool yet for bugs.
He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. Then he put his boot on the cylinder to hold it steady and thrust the sharp blade of the spade against the cap of the cylinder, punching at the Loc-Tite bonds that sealed the capsule, until at last they gave. With his hands, he pulled the cap entirely off, then reoriented the cylinder so that he could get at its contents easier and began to empty it.
First came a Doskosil gun case. He opened it, flipped away the envelope of desiccant and took out a Colt Commander .45, dead black, with Novak sights and a beavertail-grip safety. He pinched back the slide to reveal the brass of a Federal Hydrashock; eight more rested in the magazine. It settled into his hand, almost nesting; he hadn’t touched a gun in years. Thought he was done with guns. But in his hand the gun felt smooth and familiar, knowing almost. It fit so well; that was the goddamned thing about them: they fit so well. He cocked the hammer and locked the safety up; cocked and locked was the only way to go. Somewhere in here there was a holster too, and a couple of more magazines, but for now he only wedged the pistol, Mexican style, into the belt above his right kidney.
What came out next was a longer gun case, and when he got it out and opened, he saw a Ruger Mini-14, a kind of shrunken version of the old M-14, almost delicate-looking, light and handy. He seized the weapon, threw the bolt and clicked the trigger against an empty chamber. It was a carbine-style semiauto, capable of firing a 5.56mm cartridge that could chew through metal or men, depending. It looked fine too, though oily after three years underground. The film of oil and the packs of desiccant strewn about the tube had done their job.
He pulled out a last trophy, a canvas sack, and looked inside: four Mini-14 magazines, one of them an oversize forty-rounder, the Galco holster for the Commander, six boxes of .45 Federal Hydrashocks, five boxes of hardball 5.56mm and five boxes of M-196 tracer.
He sat back, then turned.
“Whyn’t you come on down and fill in this hole for me?” he called.
Silence.
“Russ, you don’t know enough how to move through the woods quietly. Come on out.”
The boy came out sheepishly.
“I saw you go. I followed you. I heard the sounds of your digging.”
“You shouldn’t sneak around on an armed man.”
“You weren’t armed when you left.”
“Well, I am now.”
“What the hell is going on? You have to tell me. You owe me.”
“What is going on is I want you to go home. This thing may get hairy. I was meaning to speak to you on it. Yesterday, I realized. I should have realized earlier.”
“Bob, I’m not going. This was my idea from the beginning. I have to stay.”
“I don’t want to have to call your father and say, ‘I got your boy killed for nothing.’”
“It doesn’t matter about my father.”
“Your mother, then. It would kill her.”
“She’s been killed before.”
Bob said nothing.
Russ came over and started shoveling the dirt into the hole.
“I’m not giving you a gun,” Bob said. “I don’t have time to train you and I won’t be around an untrained man. If there’s shooting, boy, you just hit the deck and pray for the best.”
“I will.”
“Well, we’ll see how it goes. I’m sending you home at the first sign of heavy weather. This ain’t a picnic. Ask your father. He’ll tell you. It’s about as goddamned scary as it gets. Now let’s move out. You carry the ammo. It’s the heaviest.”