Devils and Dust Read online

  “I’m going to step outside and get some air,” Keller said. “Come get me.” She nodded.

  Keller passed the kitchen and went out on the porch. He took a seat on the top step. The men had moved over to the picnic table and were wolfing down the food. The basketball game was still going on.

  He agreed with Angela. Putting those people, including children, in danger was unconscionable. But they needed the information only Miron could give them. Without it, they were at a dead end.

  “Hey,” he heard someone said. He turned to see the teenager, Magdalena, taking a seat on the step next to him. She was smiling broadly.

  “Hey,” Keller said, as noncommittally as he could. This I absolutely do not need.

  If the girl noticed his chilly tone, she gave no sign of it. “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Jack,” he said.

  “Nice to meet you, Jack. I’m Maggie.” She stuck out a hand.

  Keller took it. “Short for Magdalena, right?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I hate that name. It’s so…old sounding.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Keller said. She was still holding on to his hand. He pulled away.

  “So that lady you’re with,” she said, “is she your wife?”

  “No,” Keller said. “Just a friend.”

  “Maggie,” a male voice said. Keller looked up. The tall young man from the basketball game was standing at the foot of the steps. He didn’t look happy.

  Maggie sighed theatrically. “What is it, Cesar?”

  He said something to her in Spanish, low and fast. Keller didn’t catch all of it, but he thought he heard the word puta, and that gave him the gist. He saw her jaw clench. She replied to him, also in Spanish, practically spitting the words back at him. The other young men had begun to gather, and Keller heard one of them snicker. Goddamn it.

  Cesar bent over and tried to grab the girl’s wrist. She yanked it away. “You keep your hands off me!” she said. Cesar reached again.

  “Hey,” Keller said quietly, “knock it off.”

  Cesar straightened up, eyes narrowed in rage. “Stand up, asshole.”

  Keller stayed put, looking up at him. “Really?” he said. “You’re really going to do this?”

  “I said get up,” the young man yelled. “You fucking pussy!”

  Keller sighed and stood up. “I’m not going to fight you, kid.” He noticed that the group of older men had left the picnic table and were hurrying toward them. He hoped they would get there in time to short-circuit the confrontation the kid seemed determined to have.

  Cesar nodded. “Yeah,” he sneered. “That’s what I figured.” He started to turn, as if to walk away, then came back, fast, throwing a hard right at Keller’s jaw. He was quick, and fired up, but the feint was so obvious, the kid might as well have sent Keller a postcard. Keller threw a cross block that directed the punch past him, the kid’s momentum spinning him around and leaving him off-balance and sideways to Keller, his ribs exposed. Keller fought down the reflex to step forward and break those ribs with a short jab to the torso. Instead, he grabbed the young man by the shoulders from behind, turned him the rest of the way around, and shoved him hard. As Cesar stumbled, trying to get his footing back, Keller raised his leg and gave him a shove in the ass with his boot. Cesar went sprawling on his face in the dirt. The girl screamed. Cesar rolled to a sitting position, glaring at Keller with hate in his eyes. He started to get up.

  “Kid,” Keller said, “if you stand up, it better be to shake hands. Because if I have to put you on the ground again, you’re not getting up. At least not on your own.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the young man said. He struggled to his feet and crouched as if ready to charge.

  “CESAR!” a voice barked from behind him. Keller didn’t take his eyes off the kid. He sidled to his right to put the speaker in his field of vision. It was Rosita Miron. She spoke to the kid rapidly in Spanish, her voice a scourge of anger and outrage. He tried to answer her, but she overrode him, the words and the tone lacerating the young man until he stood, head down and sullen. One of the older men, the one who’d spoken to him earlier, came up and put a hand on his shoulder. Cesar shrugged off the hand and stalked away.

  Keller looked around. The group of men, young and old, stood in a rough semicircle, staring at Keller, their faces hard and unfriendly.

  “Sorry,” Keller said. “A little misunderstanding.” He turned to Miron. He didn’t see any friendliness there, either.

  “I think you should leave,” she said.

  “I agree,” Keller said. “But what about the information we need?” He saw Angela come out on the porch behind Miron. “The information she needs,” he pointed at Angela “to help find her husband?”

  Miron shook her head. “I can’t help you,” she said. “My contacts don’t want to talk to you.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” Keller said.

  “Not…” Miron’s dark face grew even darker with anger. “How dare you come to my house, and tell me what’s acceptable? You people…you think you own everything.” She pointed at the cars in the lot. “Get out,” she said in a hard, angry voice. “Now.”

  “Jack,” Angela said, “let’s just go.”

  He turned to her. “We can’t…”

  “Jack,” she said quietly. “Please.” She came down off the porch. “Come on.” She led the way, moving with slow dignity behind her cane. The circle of men parted to let her through.

  He could feel the blood pounding in his temples, feel the rush of adrenaline ramping up, but he followed her to the parking lot. “Look,” he said, “stay here. I’ll go back and try to talk to her again.”

  “No,” Angela said. “We need to go. Now.”

  “But if we do that,” Keller said, “we’re stuck. We’re at a dead end.”

  “Not exactly,” Angela said.

  “What does that mean, ‘not exactly’?”

  “It means that while she was running outside to see about the commotion, I stole her cell phone,” Angela said. “We can look at the last number called. And it may have the numbers and the addresses of the people she does business with.”

  “Okay,” said Keller. “I see your point. Let’s go.” They got in the car. When they were almost at the end of the driveway, Keller said, “She’s really not going to be happy when she finds out you’ve got her phone.”

  Angela looked back. “I think she just did.”

  Keller looked in the rearview mirror. The big Ford truck was barreling down the driveway after them.

  “SHIT,” KELLER said. He punched the gas and the tires on the rental squealed as they hit pavement. The car fishtailed for a few heart-stopping seconds before Keller got it back under control. He headed down the two-lane road that cut through the rolling countryside.

  “He’s gaining,” Angela said. The rental was comfortable, but underpowered. Keller saw the big truck growing larger in the rearview mirror. He gritted his teeth and pressed the gas pedal down all the way. They only pulled ahead a little before the truck accelerated and began gaining again. Keller looked down at the speedometer—85…90…95. The rental’s engine was beginning to strain.

  “What do they think they’re doing?” Angela said as the truck drew within inches of their back bumper. Then she yelped as the truck sped up and rammed them. The car shuddered from the impact, but Keller held it under control.

  “Guess they really want that phone back,” he said.

  “What are you going to…” the truck hit them again, causing them to swerve slightly.

  “Guess we’re going to have to give it to them,” he said. He saw a sign up ahead and put on his signal.

  “Jack,” Angela said.

  “Listen,” he said. “We don’t have much time.” As he began slowing, he told her what to do. They reached a wide spot in the road where an abandoned gas station stood. The front plate glass windows were long gone and boarded up and rusted stumps of piping stuck up through a crumbling c
oncrete island where the pumps used to be. Keller pulled to a stop on the time-shattered concrete slab of the parking area. Weeds grew up between the cracks, brushing against the bottom of the car as they stopped. The truck pulled in right on their tail. Keller took the phone from Angela and got out. Three men got out of the truck. One was Frank, the older man who’d greeted Keller when they’d first arrived. The other was a squat ugly man with acne scars on his face and muscles bulging against his tight T-shirt. The third one was Cesar. He was grinning and holding an L-shaped tire iron.

  “Howdy,” Keller said. “How can I help you fellows?”

  “Your friend took something that didn’t belong to her,” Frank said. “And we need it back.”

  Keller held up the phone. “You mean this?”

  The man nodded. “Yes. That.”

  “And if I give it back,” Keller said, “We can go on our way?”

  Frank shook his head in apparently sincere sorrow. “I’m afraid not,” he said.

  Cesar broke in. “We’re going to fuck you up, bitch.” He slapped the tire iron into his palm for emphasis. Acne Scars had come up to stand on the other side of him.

  “Cesar,” Frank said impatiently. He turned back to Keller. “Tia Rosita says you need to be taught a lesson. And warned to stay away.” He nodded at the car. “Your lady friend will not be harmed.”

  “She’s too messed up to fuck, anyway,” Cesar said nastily.

  “Oh,” Keller said. “Well, that’s a relief. I guess. Still, I’m not sure I can give you what you want.”

  “Then,” Frank said, “we’ll have to take it. Cesar. Mateo.” The two men advanced on Keller, grinning.

  “Oh, all right,” Keller said when they were a couple of feet away. “Here.” He tossed the phone underhanded at Cesar’s face. Startled, the young man stepped back and instinctively swung the tire iron as if he was trying to bat the phone away. He missed, the wild swing almost catching Mateo in the chest. Keller stepped forward, seized the iron with his left hand, and punched Mateo in the face with his right. Mateo’s head snapped back, but he recovered from the blow quickly. He swung at Keller, who was twisting to his right, grabbing the iron with both hands now and using Cesar’s grip to pull him sideways into Mateo and throw off the aim of the punch. In the tangle that followed, Cesar loosened his grip on the tire iron and Keller ripped it out of his hands. He used the momentum to spin around, drop to one knee in front of Cesar, and smash the iron into the younger man’s knee as the counterpunch went over his head. Cesar screamed and fell to the ground, clutching the shattered knee in both hands. Keller stood up, reversing his grip on the iron, and jammed it into the gut of Mateo, who was charging forward, arms outstretched to wrap Keller up and bear him to the ground. Mateo grunted in pain and doubled over. Keller raised the iron above his head, ready to bring it down in a blow that would have crushed Mateo’s skull. He checked himself at the last second, tossed the iron aside, and waited for Mateo to try to straighten up. When he did, slowly, Keller finished him with a short, chopping right to the jaw that dropped him next to Cesar, who was still writhing on the ground, holding his knee and keening in a high, thin voice.

  “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.

  “WELL,” ANGELA 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 w
ith 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.

  BENDER 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.