Suckerpunch: (2011) (19 page)

The gate shuddered and started to slide open.

The compound looked about the same as I remembered. There were a few more abandoned vehicles spread out across the rocky area leading to the house, but I couldn’t tell which ones were new. The first time I’d seen them there was something odd I couldn’t place until I realized there was no daylight underneath the frames. The cars were all hollowed out and sat on concrete foundations, filled with dirt up to the windowsills and angled toward the gate in perfect firing positions. I counted ten vehicles, staggered away from the house so a man could work his way from the front door to the gate with minimal exposure.

It was a lot of work, especially since the tunnels probably made the whole configuration moot.

The track led us between the vehicles to the right side of the house and stopped—no fence or barrier, just stopped—at the edge of a gulley that dropped a hundred feet and ended in a washout filled with dry silt and more scrub brush. The ridge on the other side of the gulley was a bit higher and gave a good vantage point over the house, which was why Chops put land mines up there.

The house was a one-story Frank Lloyd Wright built into the ridge. It looked like it had grown out of the rocks after some tectonic shifts. The huge windows that made up most of the structure’s exterior had all been replaced with one-way glass, and I watched the truck T-bone its reflection as we drove past the corner and stopped at the edge of the ridge.

Jairo straightened in his seat and tried to peer over the hood to see how much road was left. He eased back down so as not to shift us over the edge.

On our left was the garage door, wooden and a shade darker than the stacked stone pillars that bracketed it. The wood looked a little warped and cracked from the Nevada sun. It was veneer, meant to look like a weak point when behind the thin varnished skin was a steel core that could only be raised with hydraulic pistons sunk into the bedrock.

I shut the truck off and checked the rearview mirror to make sure nothing was rolling toward us to push us into the gulley. Clear so far. Jairo opened his door and I said, “Wait.” He cursed and pulled it shut. We sat there for a minute, and I wondered if I should reset my five-minute deadline or continue it from the gate. If the latter, time was up.

I reached for the door handle and had it at the release point when the ground started to hum and the garage door lifted. There were two work boots inside the door, then jeans above them. The boots shifted, and one knee dropped to the cement floor, and I saw the barrel of an AR-15 slide under the door and point at my face.

The door finished its ascent, and everything got quiet. Chops knelt in the middle of the opening and held the gun steady in a compact posture, his elbows tucked in with his fake left hand just in front of the clip. He still had the blond high and tight and thick wire-framed glasses. He was ten years older than me, but his face was smooth and young—paranoia must be good for the skin. I could only see his left eye; the right was dipped down so he could line me up through the optical sight mounted on the rail of the gun. His left eye was open. If it closed I would really start to worry.

Jairo said, “Um.”

I put a hand out to soothe him. It probably worked as well as a Band-Aid on a decapitation.

“Show me,” Chops said.

I held my hands up where he could see them. Jairo did the same. We waited.

About a decade later, Chops said, “Hey, Aaron.”

“Chops.”

“What’s happening?”

I said, “Oh . . . you know.”

“Yeah. You remember the last thing I said to you?”

I put my thinking face on. “I believe you said if you ever saw me again, you’d kill me.”

“And here you are.” His left eye closed.

I fought the urge to duck under the dashboard until he opened it again, just blinking out some sweat. “I’m here to make it right,” I said. Then, quieter, “And to ask a favor.”

“Who’s that with you?”

I leaned back so Chops could get a better look. “This is Jairo. He’s from Brazil.”

Chops said, “I don’t move people anymore.”

“It’s not that.”

“What then? Wait, no. First I wanna see if you can make it right. This should be good.”

“Can you lower the gun?”

He smiled behind the optical sight. “Can. Won’t.”

Dickhead. “I never told those guys you weren’t in the military. They caught me off guard, asking me about your medals, and I didn’t know what they were talking about. I guess they figured it out themselves.”

“That was my cover with them,” Chops said.

“Yes. I realize that now.”

“See, I needed them to trust me. They were veterans, and they would respect a fellow veteran.”

“Sure.”

“So when they came to me after they talked to you and said they wouldn’t do business with a dishonorable piece of shit, you can see why I would be upset. I mean, come on.”

“I understand.”

Chops shifted his stance and reacquired me through the sight. “I had to kill all three of them, man. Three brothers in arms and bury them out in the desert instead of in Arlington with a flag over their coffins like they deserved.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“But you know what?”

The punch line was going to be loud. I swallowed. “What?”

“I found out three weeks later one of them was working with the Feds.” He lowered the rifle and swung it to port arms. He sniffed. “I would have found out anyway but maybe too late. They did a sweep of the city looking for the guy. Asked me about him, but I didn’t even leave a speck of his dust for them to find. But I’ll tell you, I wanted so bad to ask the one who’d turned, ‘Hey, who’s dishonorable now?’ You know?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t really know, but I try not to pick fights with people who recently stopped pointing a gun at me.

Chops spit a white bullet out into the dirt and stood up. He put the rifle on safe, but that didn’t mean a whole lot as long as he still held it. “Does your friend there speak English?”

“Yes.”

Chops leaned to his left and looked at Jairo. Loudly, he said, “Sorry about that. Just working out an old misunderstanding.”

“Okay,” Jairo said. “No problem.”

“Roger that. So what’s this favor? Funny, huh, about that Fed. I go from having to kill you over something to wanting to plant a big wet one on you.”

“That is funny.” I tried to smile, but it felt more like stemming a gag reflex. “It’s about Lance.”

Chops frowned. “Lance? What’d he do now? You know I kept asking him about you so I could get in touch and let you know I didn’t have to shoot you anymore, but he was never with it enough. He’d fuck up the message.”

I said, “Lance is in a bit of trouble, and I’m trying to help him out.”

“Money?”

“That’s what started the problem, but it’s gained momentum since then. He got snatched. He’s being held somewhere in the city, and I need to find him in the next few hours.” I didn’t want to mention Marcela. Chops would understand not leaving a man behind. A woman, he’d try to find a way to exploit the situation because he thought women caused weakness in men.

“Who took him?”

“A guy named Kendall Percy.”

Chops took his rifle off safe.

I stopped breathing and sat very still. Jairo followed my lead, but I heard him blink once.

“You know Kendall?” I asked.

“You say my name to him?”

“No.”

“Did Lance?”

“Not that I know of.”

He looked at me sideways. “Think hard.”

I hate dealing with crazy people. They bounce around too much; what’s nice one second is blasphemy the next, and if it comes to smacking them around they might like it. “No one said anything.”

A breeze came over the edge of the gulley, and Chops turned his face into it and opened his mouth as far as it would go.

I glanced at Jairo. He was watching Chops like he was an ass-shaped bomb—fascinating, but he still wanted to get the hell away.

The breeze died, and Chops stood there with his eyes closed for a few seconds, then said, “I don’t know Kendall. I know
of
him and some big hoss he swings around town with when things go bad.”

“That would be Jake,” I said.

“Maybe. I only heard about them through a guy I work with. From what he’s told me, this Kendall is a bit of a cowboy. Likes to make things . . . interesting. When they don’t have to be.”

“That’s my guy.”

Chops wiggled his eyebrows. “You going to kill him?”

“Nah. It’s not like that.” Not yet, anyway.

“Yeah,” Chops said. “Why do it for free, right?”

“Who’s this guy you work with?”

I thought he was going to pass on that one, but after a few seconds, he said, “He’s a shot caller for one of the gangs. Name’s Tezo.”

“Never heard of him. Is that his first or last name?”

Chops squinted at me. “You tell me.”

I frowned. “How would I know?”

“He didn’t send you?” The AR was creeping back my way.

“What the fuck? Send me for what? No, I just told you. Kendall? Lance?”

Chops took a deep breath. His cheeks puffed out and turned bright red. He kept his eyes on me, and they started to take on a wet gleam that made me want to blink and rub my own.

“Woody,” Jairo said.

I didn’t tell him everything was cool, because it wasn’t. Backing toward the gate would be a very good way to get shot. Driving over the cliff would be the quickest way out of the line of fire, but if the drop didn’t kill us, whatever Chops had wired up probably would.

We both jumped when Chops exhaled and blinked a few times. “Come on inside, and we’ll get this op figured out.” He turned and walked into the garage.

Jairo grabbed my arm. “This guy . . .”

“I know.”

“If he points that gun at me again, I’m not going to like it. I might tell him so.”

“I think he’s calm now,” I said. Jairo kept his grip on my arm until I figured out what he was saying. “Oh. Yeah, I’m with you. If you have to move on him, I got you.”

He let go and looked into the garage with a crease between his eyebrows.

I said, “You can wait in the truck if you want.”

He scowled at me, said “Psh,” and got out. Chops stood with his back to us, hunkered over a large folding table pushed against the far wall. The sides of the garage were stacked a few columns deep with cardboard boxes that could have held DVD players or frozen organs. Or nothing.

The door into the house was on the back wall to the right of the table. I knew four people who’d been to this place, and none of them had ever been through that door. One of them said if you stood close enough, you could smell something musty and sweet poking around the edges. I kept my distance from the door and breathed through my mouth.

Chops tossed the AR onto some papers on the table like it was a clipboard and shuffled through a stack of manila folders until he found the one he wanted, then turned around. “All right, boys, here’s the plan. I’m 99.999 percent sure Tezo can help you out. From what I gather he and Kendall have significant, uh, financial connections, so I imagine Tezo likes to be able to get in touch with him whenever he needs to. But there’s no way Tezo will trust you unless you’re with me, and I can’t leave.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Chops pointed the folder at me. “Save all questions until the end. Now, as I see it, the next best thing is for you to take Tezo something from me to prove I vouch for you.” He looked at both of us to make sure we were keeping up. I was concerned he might give us his fake hand as the proof, and I would have to ask for door number two, but he held out the folder. “You take him this, and you’re golden.”