man, you can buy your mother a condo on the fucking beach. Do another government man and buy yourself a car like mine and all the clothes you want. Only you know what you got down there besides the druggies and the
Louis would glance over his shoulder at the jack-boys, three big kids, their heads and shoulders moving with the motion of the van. Quiet, serious in the gloom back there. Like migrants being taken to work, except for the Chinese machine guns they held.
Ordell didn’t say a word about their business this morning until, a few miles past the Loxahatchee Road Prison, he turned off Southern to head through open scrub and they were by themselves out here. A dark line way off marked the beginning of the cane fields, a half million acres from here down into the Everglades. Ordell looked at his rearview mirror.
“We getting close now. Turn on this dirt road. . . . The man don’t make it easy to get to his place.”
A road lined with shaggy Australian pines on the other side of a worn-out canal. A few miles of dust and stones hitting the underside of the van and Louis could see a farm layout through the trees: neat-looking red-brick ranch, barn with pens and a tractor shed to one side, a Quonset hut off on the other side of the house. Louis hung on tight as Ordell cranked the wheel hard and the van bounced in and out of the ruts.
“You see that turtle? Shit, I missed him,” Ordell said and glanced at his mirror. “You all take a look right now quick, see what we coming to. We cross the bridge we on the man’s property.”
The van rumbled over loose planks spanning the canal and Ordell looked at the mirror again.
“See that big tin building? That’s call a Quonset, where the man keeps all his guns and military shit. Has a M-60 machine gun in there mounted on a jeep we gonna tear off. Has hand grenades. Has what they call a L-AW rocket launcher, has a bunch of them. It stands for Light Antitank Weapon. Has the rocket already inside and the instructions printed on how to shoot it and then throw it away, it’s a disposable weapon. Government man comes driving along in his car down in Medellin—
Ordell said, “I expect we gonna find the man by hisself. His wife, I heard she got tired standing inspection, dusting all his guns and shit, and left him.” Turning into a gravel drive then, Ordell said, “No, it looks like the man’s got company this morning. Couple of bikes . . .”
Parked behind a pickup truck in the drive, the bikes becoming Harleys as the van crept up behind them.
“They over at the gun range,” Ordell said. “See? Up back of the tin building?”
A long counter with a flat roof over it, about fifty yards from the house. Two men stood there. Off beyond them were targets on posts and a high ridge of earth, like a levee.
“Couple of Bikers for Racism,” Ordell said, “practicing up to shoot us African-Americans when we go to move in their neighborhood and take our pleasure with their women. You all get down now. Me and Louis, once we get out you gonna be quiet as mice, you dig? No looking out the window. You hear us in the house commence to shoot, that’s your signal. You go take out the bikers straightaway. That’s your assignment on this operation, the Turkey Shoot, huh? Listen.”
They could hear gunfire now coming from the range, thin popping sounds in the open, shots spaced apart.
“Firing pistols,” Ordell said. “They have these targets with ugly-looking Neegroes painted on them they shoot at. Nigger coming at them with a machete—you
Louis looked over his shoulder again. The jackboys were doing coke now, digging it from a baggie with teaspoons, each one with his own, sniffing and wiping their noses on their sleeves.
“Got our own
Louis got out with the Mossberg in the fold of newspaper. He adjusted the Beretta, digging into his groin, then pulled it out of his waist—the hell with it—laid it on the seat, and closed the door. Louis walked around the front of the van to join Ordell. He glanced back to see Melanie getting out of the Toyota parked behind them, hanging the knit bag from her shoulder. Melanie coming up to them now, not looking too happy.
“There he is,” Ordell said.
He raised his hand to wave and Louis looked toward the house.
“How you doing, Big Guy?”
Still grinning, Ordell lowered his voice to say, “Look at the motherfucker. Thinks he’s Adolf Hitler.”
The man stood on his stoop across half the front yard from them, dressed in tan Desert Storm camouflage pants and a GI khaki T-shirt, paratrooper boots planted two feet apart, hands on his hips.
Melanie said, “If you think I’m gonna fuck that bozo, you’re out of your mind.”
Ordell turned his head. “Be cool. Just bring the man on’s all you have to do.”
Then turned his head back saying, “Look who I brought to see you, Gerald. ‘Member I told you about Melanie? Here she is, man.”
Gerald had animal heads with horns and antlers mounted on his knotty pine walls. He had framed color prints of different fish. He had brown leather furniture, a wagon-wheel chandelier, crossed muskets over his fireplace, trophies sitting on glass-front gun cabinets, a rack of shotguns . . . Nothing in the room with a woman’s touch.
Ordell was telling Gerald how anxious his friends were to see his place, hoping he didn’t mind their dropping in like this, while Melanie poked around looking at things, bending over, sticking her butt out, and Gerald’s eyes would follow her cutoffs.
Louis stood holding the Mossberg in the fold of newspaper, looking around, then moved to a window to check on the two bikers. Still out there making popping sounds.
Gerald got rid of the cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, dropping it in an ashtray made from a shell casing, sucked in his gut, and strolled over to tell Melanie about the fish prints. All the different kinds you could take out of Lake Okeechobee. Bullhead, bluegill, channel cat . . . Gerald taking peeks at Melanie’s bare shoulder and down the front of her halter, his hands shoved into his back pockets, as if to keep them from touching her. Timid, Louis thought, for a man his size. Gerald turned to Ordell saying they were going out to the kitchen. “You and him make yourselves at home.”
Ordell picked up a hand grenade that was now a cigarette lighter and came over to Louis flicking it at him.
“Big Guy’s something, huh?”
Louis turned from the window. “What’d you tell him about Melanie?”
“I said she gets off looking at guns. It’s the truth.”
“So he’ll try and nail her.”
“I ‘magine. You want to protect her, go in there and shoot him.”
They were eye to eye.
Louis said, “You know you’re gonna have to.”
Ordell said, “Somebody is.”
They came back in the room, Melanie holding a mug of coffee, the knit bag still hanging from her shoulder. Gerald said, “Why don’t you boys go out to the range? I’ll loan you a couple pistols.”
Ordell said to Louis, “Show Big Guy your piece.” Louis took the Mossberg from the fold of newspaper and held it out. He watched Gerald looking at it, not too impressed.
“It’s got a laser scope on it,” Ordell said. Gerald came over to take the gun from Louis and walked back with it to where Melanie stood with her coffee. He said to her, “Can I be frank? I wouldn’t hang this in my toilet,” checking it out now, racking the pump. He aimed, squeezed the grip, and put the red laser dot between the eyes of a white-tailed buck on his wall. “You still have to hold your weapon against recoil. That red dot don’t mean shit, if you’ll pardon my French,” he said to Melanie. “I’ll go against him with an old single-shot Remington I got as a kid and outscore him any time he wants. Put some cash on the line, make it interesting.” He tossed the Mossberg back to Louis saying, “Careful now, you got a load in the chamber.” Shaking his head then to say, “What’s a weapon like
