Devils and Dust (9 page)

“I tried to tell you, kid,” Keller said to Cesar. He looked over at Frank. “He’s going to need to go to the hospital for that knee.”

“You don’t know what kind of trouble you’ve brought down on yourself,” Frank said.

“I think I do.” Keller looked at the pieces of the cell phone scattered on the concrete. “Tell Mrs. Miron I’m sorry about the phone. But tell her, and whoever she works with that I have the SIM card.”

Frank looked confused. “The what?”

Angela was out of the car, standing beside it. “It’s the little computer card that has the phone’s information on it,” she said, “including the contacts.”

“Tell her for me, I meant it when I said I don’t care about how she makes her money,” Keller said. “I don’t care about getting any of her friends in trouble. All I care about is finding my friend. That’s it. And to do that, I need to talk to the people he talked to. That’s all I want. If I don’t get it, though, I know some people who’d probably like to have the information I have. About Delgado, and Miron, and what’s on that SIM card. Think about it.” He turned and walked back to the car.

“I’ll tell her,” Frank called. “But these people you want to talk to…they do more than just move immigrants. You’ve made some very bad enemies.”

Keller turned as he opened the car door. “Well,” he said, “it won’t be the first time.” He and Angela climbed in and drove off.

“W
ELL,”
A
NGELA
said, “that was…interesting.”

“That’s one word for it,” Keller said. “You do have the card, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We get another phone that uses the same kind of card. See what we can pull off the contact list.”

“You think that’ll give us anything?”

Keller glanced in the rearview mirror to confirm they weren’t being followed. “Probably not.”

“They’re most likely using burners,” Angela said, referring to the prepaid cell phones meant to be used a few times, then discarded so they couldn’t be traced.

“Most likely,” Keller said.

“Which is why you were provoking them. You want them to come after you.”

Keller just nodded. “Yeah.”

She shook her head. “You’re enjoying this.”

They were entering a small town. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.” He took a right at the town’s lone stoplight. “You got a problem with that?”

“Actually, no. You want to know why?”

“Sure,” he said. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us. We might as well make conversation.”

She sighed, “Okay. I know I’ve been fretting over you like a mother hen. But I care about you, Jack. And I know how close to the edge you walk sometimes. It scares me.”

Keller didn’t answer. He took another left, out of town, headed for the highway that would take them back to Angela’s home in Wilmington. The place where Keller had once lived. The place where he’d found a way out of the desert in his head, before he’d had to do things that sent him right back there.

“It scares me sometimes, too,” he said quietly.

She nodded. “But back there, at that fight…you had the chance to kill someone. I could see it. You had that tire iron raised, ready to smash that guy’s skull…and you didn’t do it.”

He replayed the incident in his mind. Certainly there’d been a savage and primal part of him, in the back of his mind, screaming for him to bring the iron down, to feel the shiver run upon his arm and into that bloodthirsty place in his head, to hear the crunch of metal crushing flesh and bone. But he’d pulled back. “I didn’t need to,” he said.

She smiled. “Exactly.” She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me when you want to change drivers.”

He drove on in silence, through small towns, then bigger ones, then back out into the country again before reaching the main east-west highway that led to the coast.

He looked over at Angela. Time and care had etched a couple more lines on her face than he remembered, but there was still the same strength in her face that had brought him out of the numbness he’d been living in since the war, the same beauty that had made him think that living again might be something he’d be interested in doing. She’d given him a job chasing bail skips that gave him the jolt of adrenaline he needed to shock him awake again. That had taken him into even darker places, but he’d felt alive for the first time since that night in the Kuwaiti desert when a stray American missile had killed his entire squad, sparing him only by chance.

He’d loved her then. She’d turned him down, still suffering the physical and emotional effects of her own near-death at the hands of her abusive husband who’d left her scarred and damaged, but not broken.

Then had come Marie. He’d fallen in love with her, and that had helped him get past how he felt about Angela. But then, the things he’d done to protect her and her son had exposed his own dark side and the brutality and violence he was capable of. He’d recoiled from that, just as Marie had. He’d retreated again, back into a different desert. Back to the devils and the dust.

And now, Angela had brought him back again. He wondered what he’d have to do this time. He wondered what it might do to him.
You’re a warrior, not a killer,
Lucas had said.
Embrace it. It doesn’t make you the monster you think you are.
He hoped that was true.

Keller shook his head as if to clear out the cobwebs.
Enough of this
.
I’ve got a job to do. Someone to find. And a friend who needs help.
As he rolled through the flat fertile lands of the coastal plain, he began to smile.
By the time he crossed the Cape Fear River Bridge into Wilmington, he was whistling.

B
ENDER AND
the other guard, a skinny, cadaverous-looking man who never spoke around the toothpick in his mouth, had marched them back to the camp as the sun had started to sink behind the trees. They didn’t go back to the barracks, however. They were lined up outside Building Three, between the end of the building and the lone tree that stood nearby. They stood there, slumped with exhaustion and trembling with fear, until the door opened. Kinney walked out, one end of a thick rope hanging in coils on one shoulder. Diego was on the other end of it, hands still cuffed behind him, the rope knotted into a noose around his neck. His face showed the unmistakable signs of a beating. One eye was completely swollen shut, the other looked straight ahead with the glassy stare of one already dead. His shirt was gone, his body crisscrossed with raised welts and lacerations. There were patches of dried blood caked on his chest and back.

The General came next, dressed in his black judge’s robe. As Kinney, still smiling, led Diego past the line, he stopped in front of the queue of men and crossed his arms. “A trial has been held,” he intoned, “and verdict announced. This man has been found guilty of assault on a lawful authority and attempting to escape lawful punishment. As an example to you all, the sentence is death.” Ruben heard a sob from down the line. He prayed it wasn’t Edgar, but kept his own face stony. The last thing he wanted to do was attract the attention of any of these madmen, this so-called General especially.

“Turn and face the tree,” the General said, “and do not close your eyes if you want to keep them in your heads.” Some of the men seemed confused. The General turned to Ruben. “Tell them.”

“He says we have to watch,” Ruben told them in Spanish, “or we’ll be punished.”

Slowly, they turned. More than one man was crying now.
Shut up, you idiots,
Ruben raged inside, but the General took no notice. Or maybe tears were what he wanted.

Kinney stood beneath the tree and unspooled the rope. It took him a couple of tries to toss the free end over a high branch. When it finally went over and dangled down within reach, Kinney grabbed it and pulled it tight, causing Diego to rise up on his tiptoes. Kinney gestured with one hand to Bender, who slung his gun and joined him on the end of the rope. The thin man kept his gun trained on them.

“Does the condemned man have any last words?” the General asked.

Diego’s one open eye showed a last glimmer of defiance. “Yeah,” he croaked in a dry, ruined voice. “
Cuando llegue al infierno, voy a coger a tu puta madre por el culo
.”

The General looked puzzled. He turned to Ruben. “What did he say?”

Ruben hesitated.

“Well?” the General asked.

Ruben cleared his throat. “He said, ‘When I get to hell, I’m going to fuck your whore mother in the ass.’”

The General’s face darkened with rage. He motioned to Kinney and Bender. They began to step backward, pulling on the rope. Diego was hauled into the air. His face turned red, then purple. He began to kick. His struggles grew wilder, more desperate, as they hauled him higher. His eyes bulged and horrible strangled sounds came from this throat as his lungs tried desperately to draw air through a windpipe shut by the pressure of the rope. The crotch of his pants darkened and liquid dribbled from the one leg of his pants. Kinney was laughing in a high, hysterical giggle. Bender just looked determined. The General stood expressionless, his hands behind his back. All of the other men were sobbing, but Ruben kept his face like stone. Like the General’s. “They want to see us suffer,” he thought. “I won’t let them
.
”

It took Diego almost five minutes to die. When he finally hung limp, tongue bulging, eyes seeming to start out of his head, the General turned to them. “Back to your barracks,” he said. “And back to work tomorrow.”

T
HE
G
ENERAL
sat in the dark, behind his empty desk, and sent up a prayer. Not a petition for the soul of the man he’d just sent to hell, but a prayer of thanksgiving to his God for being allowed to do His holy work. “Thank you, Lord,” he breathed, “thanks be to You, O Elohim, You for making me your General. Your Sword Arm.”

In his former life, Martin Walker, the man who now called himself General, had only risen to the rank of Staff Sergeant in the American Army. Twice. After the second time he’d been found drunk on duty, he’d been given a bad-conduct discharge, booted out of the Army with loss of all pay and allowances.

He’d been a different man then. He’d even had a different name. When he’d found Jesus, or more accurately, when Jesus had found him, he’d left all that behind—the drink, the fornication, the gluttony, and weakness of the flesh. He’d held onto one thing: his hatred of the lower races, the ones whom God had marked as inferior but that Satan had been raising to power, diluting and poisoning the greatness of America, God’s true Promised Land. He still remembered the smirk on the dark black face of the JAG Captain who’d thrown him into exile. Satan had won that day, and Satan had continued to hold sway over him until the Church of Elohim had found him and taught him the nature of his true tormentors. They had put him back together, given him new purpose, and a new name.

Satan had had his victories since: that nigger-loving prosecutor in Ohio, for example, made a martyr of Father Elihu, the man who’d founded the Church of Elohim. Even now, the man who’d given Walker his life back was rotting in a cold prison cell in the Midwest, in the belly of the beast, surrounded by the devil’s dark servants and protected by only a very few sworn disciples. It had been Father Elihu who’d given Martin this task: take the money they’d made from selling the black devils the powders and pills that were their own destruction, come to this place, and make a new Israel, where the faithful would make a place for themselves and live according to God’s natural order. “You aren’t a foot soldier any longer,” Father Elihu had said to him on the last day they’d met. He’d been thinner, almost gaunt, and his beard had been shot through with gray, but the fire of God’s truth still burned in those brilliant blue eyes. “You are the General. The Sword Arm of the Lord. Lead the people of God.” He’d placed his hand against the glass of the visitation room, his eyes locked on Walker’s. “Like Moses, I won’t see the Promised Land. But you will be my Joshua.” Walker had placed his own hand on the opposite side of the glass, unable to speak, so great was the upwelling of pure love he’d felt for Father Elihu.