Fielding waved his hand, as he would wave away a mosquito. ‘Please don’t underestimate my ability to influence media coverage, or to influence the US government response. Let’s just say that members of Congress are among the least powerful of my friends. Anyway, this is a tiny island, barely worth mentioning. I’m sure you read the newspapers – people are dying everywhere. If a few thousand people here suddenly succumb to an infectious disease…’
He shrugged and paused for several seconds. Then he nodded. ‘And what am I going to do in this land of the dead, as you describe it? For one thing, I’m going to stay and see my enemies defeated. Then, after an appropriate length of time has passed, I’ll repopulate the island with immigrant workers who can better appreciate the blessings available here. To put it another way, I am completely prepared for the consequences of the operation.’
When he finished, a silence drew out between them.
‘Have I answered your concerns, Mr Gant?’
‘I guess you have. And I assume that means your operatives are ready?’
‘They’ve practiced nighttime attacks on the water towers half a dozen times now, without being detected.’
‘And you’ve taken the precautions I suggested? You have bottled water and food stockpiled? Your people are ready to defend this perimeter?’
‘I do, and they are.’
‘I want to tell you something. It’s a hell of a thing, what’s going to happen. I hope you’ll feel as gung ho about it afterward as you do now. Personally, I think you probably won’t.’
‘I’m surprised to hear you say that, Mr Gant. You sound like a man suffering from regrets. Will you lose sleep over this project? Have you lost sleep over similar projects in the past? If so, then I’m afraid I have the wrong intelligence sheet here.’
Gant stared into Fielding’s deep black eyes. ‘I’ve been around death a long time, Mr Fielding. It doesn’t bother me. In fact, it’s been my constant companion. If I’m away from it for any length of time, I start to feel lonely.’
Fielding smiled. ‘That’s good. That’s very, very good to hear.’
Gordo hummed a happy tune.
An hour had passed since they missed Foerster, and he and Jonah were in Kelly’s Bar, a dark and moody watering hole with two shamrocks in bright green neon adorning the front windows. The place sat along a grim and desolate strip of road, across from a cemetery. The nearest open shop was halfway up the street, a place that installed alarm systems. Also, there was a scrap metal dealer next door, a sign announcing ‘We Buy and Sell’ hovering above a barbed wire fence, but Gordo had never seen anybody go in or out of there. Kelly’s itself was long and narrow inside, like a tunnel, and always smelled of beer and piss. On the plus side, they had their own diesel-powered generator under an awning behind the building, and they weren’t reluctant to use it. As a result, the jukebox in the far corner and the color TV bolted to the wall over the bar always worked.
Gordo had the beers in hand, pints in frosted glasses. Despite the day’s fiasco, he felt pretty good. It was a temporary setback. Before leaving the scene today, Gordo had gone upstairs and snatched some unopened mail he found laying around the apartment. There was good stuff in that pile of envelopes, he knew there was.
When Gordo arrived at the table, Jonah was slouched on his stool, ignoring Foerster’s mail. Instead, he held a wet cloth napkin packed with ice against his forehead. He said he had gotten hit with a bottle, and he had an evil lump to prove it. The lump had cracked open and was oozing a sort of liquidy pus. Maybe there was some glass in there, Gordo didn’t know and didn’t care. He had bigger things to think about. For one, Jonah had shown him something today. That leap across the fire escapes, that took the door prize for guts. That was probably why Gordo felt so good, just knowing he had a partner with the stones to do that.
For a moment he saw the Jonah others saw. Light-skinned black man, son of a black mother and a white father. He had softer features than a lot of black guys – a leaner nose, thinner lips. Jonah was a solid, handsome dude, like an actor or maybe a pro baseball player out and about in street clothes.
It was rare for Gordo to look at him this way. Most of the time, Gordo still thought of his partner as he was when they first met and became friends in junior high school – a skinny kid with a crazy head of curly hair and basketball shorts hanging down past his knees. They had known each other a long time now – just about twenty years.
Gordo placed the beers on the table and slid onto his stool.
‘You want some acetaminophen?’ he said. ‘I got some out in the car. Generic store brand, but it works real good.’
Jonah shook his head. ‘The stuff is poison, man. It kills the liver.’
Gordo saw right away that Jonah was in a mood. Well, then it was up to Gordo to lighten the place up a little. ‘Listen, it was poor planning,’ he told Jonah. ‘The fucking guy out-thunk me, that’s all.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Jonah said.
‘We learned something today, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Planning is the key, all right? We just gotta look at all the angles. Cover all possible exits, no matter how crazy they seem.’
Jonah grimaced in response and stared down at the table. ‘That’s a long way to go to learn something.’
Gordo sipped his beer.
He was thirty-two years old, stood a shade under six feet tall, and weighed almost two hundred and fifty pounds. He thought he carried it pretty well, more like a strong, heavy thickness than fat. His massive belly was as hard as an iron skillet. His legs were like the trunks of California redwoods. His arms were like the big bass pipes on a giant church organ. And the nickname? He loved it. El Gordo. It reminded him of a superhero, or maybe a monster from the old Jap Godzilla movies. He had loved the girl down in Santo Domingo who thought it up, too. She was dark black with dyed-blonde hair and a killer body. Chocolata, she called herself, though God knew her real name was probably something a little more conventional like Rosa, or Maria. In any case, Gordo did her good, in ten different ways and in the morning he gave her an extra tip for the nickname idea.
He had been around.
He sold cocaine for a while when he was coming up. He had a little route that took him all over the metro area three days a week. It turned him off pretty quick. He grew tired of listening to screaming babies in the back bedrooms of tiny houses while Mom and Dad had a taste in the kitchen before buying. How often had he seen that? Once or twice, but it seemed like every week. He also didn’t like that paranoid, up-all-night feeling after too many lines, hours of time to think about the cops knocking down the door and coming through the walls one day soon. He got out before that could happen.
Later, he spent some time repossessing cars. It was back when the collapse started happening, the first phase. People had bought all kinds of junk on credit, and now they were out of money. Gas prices going through the roof, house values tanking, people losing jobs left and right – suddenly, paying the note on that Hummer or that Land Rover didn’t seem so smart anymore. Those were good times and Gordo made good money. It seemed like he could always make money, up or down, it didn’t matter.
But the banks themselves started going belly up. There was a glut of consumer shit out there – cars, boats, jet skis – and nobody was paying on any of it, but the companies didn’t want it back anymore, either. It cost more to collect the stuff than the money they could get reselling it or unloading it at auction. Then the gasoline dried up, and no middle-class worker bee would take a powerboat or a jet ski if you tried to give them one. You might as well try to give them bubonic plague. It was a good lesson to learn – toys that had once cost ten thousand, twenty thousand, even thirty thousand dollars or more could become worth zero, or less than zero, practically overnight.