“You have any idea where Collins might be?”
“Are you serious?” she replied.
In the silence, she could hear the tall man breathing and see the camouflaged fabric ruffling around his mouth. Why was he breathing through his mouth? In anticipation of what he was about to do? Was he about to make a decision that would take him and her across a personal Rubicon she did not want to think about?
“Collins is a religious head case. He seems to have obsessions with women in the Bible,” the tall man said. “You might fit the bill. What’s your opinion on that?”
Don’t let him know you’re afraid, a voice inside her said. “I think you’re an idiot.”
The short man standing behind the others peered through the corner of the window shade into the yard. He wore heavy boots that looked like they had elevated soles and heels. She saw his head tilt upward and guessed that he was checking for the first glow of dawn beyond the ridgeline. Then she realized that the tall man was watching the man at the window shade. The tall man was not in charge. He was waiting on the man at the window to tell him what to do.
The man at the window did not speak but made a rotating motion with his index finger, as though saying either “continue” or “wrap it up.”
But which?
The tall man went to the closet and threw a robe on Anton Ling’s bed. “Put it on,” he said.
“What for?” she asked.
“Certain things have to be done. Don’t make them harder than they already are.”
“Who do you work for?”
“The country. The people who want it to remain free. You think protecting a traitor like Noie Barnum is a noble act?”
“I won’t put a robe on. I won’t move. I have no control over what you’re about to do. But I won’t cooperate with it.”
The tall man leaned down and took her wrist in his hand. His fingers went easily all the way around it, as though he were compressing a stick in his palm. “Get up.”
“No.”
“You’re making this personal, Ms. Ling. It’s unwise.”
“Don’t use my name. I don’t know you and have no intention of knowing you. Don’t you dare address me as though you know me.”
“I heard you were arrogant, a Mandarin princess or something.” He jerked her up from the bed and knotted her hair in his fist, twisting it hard, pulling her head back until her mouth fell open. “We used to call this cooling out a gook. Is that what you want? Tell me. Tell me now.” He twisted her hair tighter. “I don’t like to do this. This is all on you. I can make it worse and worse and worse, to the point I start to enjoy it. Don’t make me do that.”
When he released her hair so she could speak, she gathered all the saliva in her mouth and spat it full in his face. Then he hit her so hard with his fist that two picture frames fell to the floor when she crashed against the wall. Two of the other men picked her up and shoved her toward the doorway. She thought she heard the sound of water running in the kitchen sink.
CODY DANIELS KEPT his truck pointed south, slamming over the ruts, water splashing up on the hood and across the windshield. He had his radio tuned full-blast to an English-language station that broadcast from across the border to avoid FCC regulations, its signal reaching all the way to Canada. Twenty-four hours a day, it provided a steady stream of country music, evangelical harangues that left the preacher gasping into the microphone, and promotions for baby chicks, tulip bulbs, bat guano, aphrodisiacs, glow-in-the-dark tablecloths painted with the Last Supper, and miracle photographs of Jesus. Late at night it was the refuge for the insomniac and the ufologist and the sexually driven and those who loved the prospect of the Rapture. But right now, for Cody Daniels, it was a source of maximum electronic noise that he hoped would pound the name of Anton Ling out of his head.
He was pastor of the Cowboy Chapel, not the overseer for Asian females in Southwest Texas. Why didn’t she go back where she came from? She had told him to get lost. All right, that’s what he was doing. Live and let live. Besides, maybe the truck with the extended cab wasn’t going to Anton Ling’s. Maybe it was the Border Patrol rounding up stray wets. The wets traveled by night. Wasn’t it reasonable for Cody to at least conclude the oversize pickup was on a government mission?
Except the Border Patrol usually operated by the numbers and didn’t use pickup trucks to round up wets or drive down hillsides through private property in the dark.
Why did his mind always set traps for him? His own thoughts were more intelligent and wily than he was. Again and again, his thoughts knew how to corner and bait him, as though a separate personality were constantly probing at him with a sharp stick.
Without thinking, without planning, as though his motor control had disconnected itself from his instincts, he removed his foot from the accelerator and depressed the brake pedal. He felt the truck slowing, the vibration in the frame diminishing as though of its own accord. Then the truck stopped as rigidly as a stone in the road. He switched off the radio and listened to the windshield wipers beating in the silence. He opened his cell phone, praying that this time the screen would show at least one bar.
No service.
Where was the sheriff? Where was the female deputy who had thrown him in the can? This was their job, not his. Who had dumped all this responsibility on Cody Daniels? He looked through the windshield at a long white streak of lightning that leaped from the hills into the clouds.
You? he asked.
No, God had more to do than concern Himself with the likes of Cody Daniels.
How do you know? a voice said, either inside or outside his head.
Cody put his truck into reverse and turned around in the middle of the road, wondering if the tattoo BORN TO LOSE that he had removed from his skin should have read BORN TO BE STUPID.
TWO MEN HELD Anton Ling’s arms while a third plunged her head into the water brimming over the sides of the sink. She clenched her mouth and held her breath and tried to twist away from the hand that pushed her head deeper into the water. She kicked sideways with her feet and pushed against the cabinets with her knees. All she accomplished was to drain herself of the energy and oxygen she needed to survive. After what was surely a minute, her lungs were bursting and air was bubbling out of her mouth and she knew she was only seconds away from both swallowing water and breathing it through her nostrils. Then the hand went away from the back of her neck and she reared her head above the level of the sink, gasping for air.
“Noie Barnum must know other people around here besides you. Who would he contact?” the tall man said. His gloved right hand and sleeve were dark with water. She realized it was he who had held her head down in the sink.
“He’s a Quaker. Other Quakers.”
“Where do they live?”
“There’re none around here.”
“Wrong answer.”
“He’s with Collins.”
“Where’s Collins?”
“I don’t know anything about Collins.”
“Hold her arms tighter,” the tall man said.
“No, wait,” she said.
“Your time is running out, Ms. Ling.”
“Noie has no ties here. He is wherever Collins is. How could I know where Collins is when the FBI doesn’t? You’re making me do the impossible. I can’t prove to you what I don’t know.”
“I got to admit I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. But you created this situation, not us. This is the way it stands: You went down the first time for exactly one minute and ten seconds. The second time you’re going down for two minutes and twenty seconds. Think you can hold your breath for two minutes and twenty seconds?”
“I can’t.”
“Then you’re going to die. Maybe you’ll have a heart attack before you drown, so it won’t be that bad. I’ll let you fill up with air first. Nod when you’re ready.”
“My father flew with the original Flying Tigers. He was a friend of Claire Chennault.”
“Who cares?”
> “If he were here, you’d have to hide.”
He plunged her face into the water and leaned his weight heavily on his hand, driving her forehead to the bottom of the sink, his gloved fingers spreading like banana peels on the back of her head. Her skin broke against the porcelain, and blood curled around her face and rose in a smoky string to the surface. The more she struggled, the weaker she became. Her lungs burned as though someone had poured acid in them. She dug her knees into the cabinets and pushed herself backward with all her remaining strength. Then she realized that the incendiary raids she had lived through as a child, the pancake air crash she had survived on a Laotian airstrip, the ordeal she had endured at the hands of Chinese Communists, had been illusions, flirtations with a chimera who was a poseur. Death did not appear with a broad flapping of leathery wings; death came in the form of a stoppered silvery-green drain hole at the bottom of a flooded sink, while three men snapped her sinew and bones with their hands.
But something had just happened that neither she nor her adversaries could have anticipated. Her upper body was soaking wet, and the man on her left let his grip slip for just a second. When he tried to reposition his hands, she jerked free of him and fell backward to the floor, sucking air as raggedly into her windpipe as she would a razor blade.
The tall man reached down and grabbed the front of her shirt and pulled her to her feet. She could feel the sourness of his breath on her face. “Now, you listen,” he said. “You’re making us waste time that we don’t have. You’re vain from your hairline to the bottoms of your feet, and you know it. You’ve turned your pride into a religion and convinced a bunch of ignorant peons you’re a Catholic saint. Be assured, if you want to be a martyr, we’ll arrange that. But in the meantime, you’re going to tell us where Barnum is or prove to us you’re as unknowledgeable as you claim. If you don’t know where he is, give us the name of somebody who does. That will get you off the hook, that and nothing else.
“If you doubt me, tell me how you feel one hour from now, after I let my associates take you back in the hills. Maybe you saw ugly things in the Orient, the kinds of things my associates are capable of doing, but you saw them, they didn’t happen to you. If they had happened to you, you wouldn’t be here today. You would be either dead or in an asylum, unable to deal with your own memories of what was done to you. My associates have insatiable appetites. When they start in on you, you will renounce everything you ever believed in just to make them stop what they’re doing for only one minute. You’ll give up your lover, your family, your religion. I’ve seen them at work. I don’t judge them for what they do. They are only satisfying the desires that to them are natural. But I never want to witness human behavior like that again. You don’t know how kind I have been to you, Ms. Ling.
“There’s another notion I want to dispel here. People in your situation convince themselves that a miracle is going to happen, that their pain will be taken away, that angels will protect them in their last agonizing moments. But it doesn’t work that way. No God will help you, no plastic Madonna, no hallelujah choir will arrive singing the praises of Anton Ling. You’ll die a miserable death, and no one will ever know where you’re buried. Tell me what you want to do.”
Her hair formed a tangled skein in front of her eyes and dripped water and blood on her face and shirtfront. Her eyes were crossed from shock and trauma, her bare feet slippery on the wet floor, her pajamas sticking like wet Kleenex to her skin. Her chest was still laboring with shortage of breath, her heart swollen as big and hard as a cantaloupe. “I know nothing,” she said.
“Then enjoy your time in hell, bitch.”
His hand reached out and settled almost lovingly on the nape of her neck. Then she twisted her body and back-kicked him with more strength and force than she thought she had.
He wasn’t ready for it, and his upper body jacked forward with the blow, both of his hands grabbing his genitalia, a cry rising involuntarily from his throat. The man to her right tried to grab her, but she ripped her elbow into his rib cage, then kicked the tall man again, this time in the face. The third man grabbed her pajama top, tearing it down the back, but she pulled loose from him and got past the tall man and the man who had been holding her left arm. The inside of her head was roaring with noise, her hair matted with blood, her feet slipping on the floor. She felt a hand grab her neck, then fingers trying to find purchase inside the religious chain she wore.
The drawer holding the collection of tools and wire and duct tape was half open. She got her hand inside the drawer and picked up a screwdriver, a short one with a thick stub of a handle and a wide blade and perhaps a two-inch shank. She whirled and plunged it into the face of the man whose hand was tangled in her chain. The blade pierced the fabric of his mask right below his left eye, the shank sinking all the way to the handle, the wood and fabric pressing into the wound. The man screamed once, then touched the screwdriver’s handle, his hand trembling, and began screaming again, this time without stop.
“You shut up! You eat your pain and shut your mouth!” the tall man said.
“I’m blind!”
“No, you’re not. You’re in shock. Shut your fucking mouth,” the tall man said. Then he whirled around. “Get her!”
Anton Ling ran through the enclosed back porch and crashed through the screen into the yard, falling once, getting up, then plunging across the yard toward the barn, where her pickup was parked with the keys in the ashtray.
That was when another hooded man, even bigger than the others, a man whose breath smelled like snuff and spearmint, picked her up in the air, crushing her against his chest with his huge arms. “What do we got here?” he said, his lips brushing against her cheek through his mask. “A flopping goldfish, I’d say. We better slow you down a little bit. How about some hair of the dog that bit you?”
He carried her kicking to the horse tank by the windmill, his big hands and wrists notched into her rib cage.
CODY DANIELS HAD turned the truck around in the middle of the road, his stomach churning with fear, his sweat as cold as ice water. He slowly depressed the accelerator, his right hand trembling on the gearshift, each jolt in a chuckhole like a piece of glass in his entrails. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his sleeve and swerved wildly around the pools of water in the road, wishing he would break an axle or tip off the shoulder’s edge into a gulley. He prayed for the dawn to come, for lightning to strike Anton Ling’s house and set it ablaze, for the FBI to descend from the sky in a helicopter. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. But why? Just because an oversize diesel-powered truck had come grinding down a hill? It was irrational.
No, it was not. Cody knew he had a talent, and it was not one to be proud of. He was con-wise. He knew how to read iniquity in others because it resided in him. He also had a tuning fork that vibrated when he was around dangerous people. And he understood that cruelty was not an occasional vice. If it existed in an individual, it was systemic and pervasive and always looking for a new prospect. Cody knew the oversize truck was coming for Anton Ling, and inside it were men in the employ of Temple Dowling, or maybe even Dowling himself.
The lessons he had learned in prison were simple. There were two kinds of people in the slams: screwups like himself and those who had not only gone over to the dark side but enjoyed being there and had no plans to return. The joke was the latter category was not confined to convicts. The worst people he had ever known had worn uniforms or used ballpoint pens to do damage that no burglar could ever equal. How did you recognize the Temple Dowlings of the world? That one was easy. They always mocked. It was in their voice, their use of difficult words, the way they twisted whatever came out of your mouth. They stole other people’s dignity and made them resent themselves. He and his men had invaded Cody’s home and treated him as though he were sewage, then had driven away as indifferently as if they had run over a bug.
Where did that leave him in the mix, a man who had helped blind and disfigure a nurse in an abort
ion clinic? He didn’t like to think about that. His one serious fall was on a forgery charge. He had never deliberately hurt anyone. Why had he gotten mixed up with the people who had set off the bomb at the clinic? That one, too, was easy. They knew a useful loser when they saw one.
Maybe what was waiting for him under the thunderclouds up ahead wasn’t a totally undesirable fate. Maybe this was as good a place as any to cash in. He had spent most of his life waking up with a headful of spiders, then spending the rest of the day pretending they weren’t there. He had shot over the heads of Mexicans coming out of the desert, scaring the hell out of women with infants hanging in slings from their chests and backs. He had painted the American flag on the cliff above his house but had never been in the service. He was a religious hypocrite and a peckerwood bully. His mother took off with a trucker when he was three, and his father, whom he had loved, had placed him in an orphanage when he was nine, promising to return after working a pipeline job in Alaska. But he never saw his father again or heard what happened to him, if anything. Was everything a conspiracy against Cody Daniels? Or wasn’t it more probable that he was simply unwanted and, worse, unwanted for a legitimate reason? Gravity sucked, and shit always slid down the pipe, not up.
He felt his foot pressing on the accelerator. He had never thought so clearly about his life. The thunder rolling through the hills, the smell of the ozone, the cold tannic odor of the rain and dust, the branches of the mesquite and scrub oak bending almost to the ground all seemed like the pages of a book flipping before his eyes, defining the world and his role in it in a way he had never thought possible. Let Temple Dowling and his men do their worst. What was so bad about ending here, inside an electric storm, inside a clap of thunder that was as loud as God slapping His palms together?
Cody had all of these thoughts and was almost free of his fear when he drove into Anton Ling’s yard and his headlights lit up the scene taking place by the windmill. Then he remembered why he had been so afraid.