me. The Mexican pilots looked out their side windows at me. The old man patted the machine.
“President Bush!” he said. “DEA!”
I looked at Arnie. He smiled, nodded at me. “Fight the drogas,” he said.
The engines whined and chuffed and the rotor started to turn.
“Is very secret what we do,” said the old man. “But you take a ride and see. Is my special treat. You go with Arnulfo.”
“Come with me,” Arnie said.
“You go up and see, then we talk about love.”
The old man hurried away, and it was just me and Arnie and the soldiers with their black M16s.
“After you,” Arnie said.
He pulled on a helmet. Then we took off. It was rough as hell. I felt like I was being pummeled in the ass and lower back when the engines really kicked in. And when we rose, my guts dropped out through my feet. I closed my eyes and gripped the webbing Arnie had fastened around my waist. “Holy God!” I shouted. It was worse when we banked—the side doors were wide open, and I screamed like a girl, sure I was falling out. The Mexicans laughed and shook their heads, but I didn’t care.
Arnie was standing in the door. He unhooked a big gun from the stanchion where it had been strapped with its barrel pointed up. He dangled it in the door on cords. He leaned toward me and shouted, “Sixty caliber! Hung on double bun-gees!” He slammed a magazine into the thing and pulled levers and snapped snappers. He leaned down to me again and shouted, “Feel the vibration? You lay on the floor, it makes you come!”
I thought I heard him wrong.
We were beating out of the desert and into low hills. I could see our shadow below us, fluttering like a giant bug on the ground and over the bushes. The seat kicked up and we were rising.
Arnulfo took a pistol from his belt and showed me.
“Amapola,” he said.
I looked around for her, stupidly. But then I saw what was below us, in a watered valley. Orange flowers. Amapola. Poppies.
“This is what we do,” Arnulfo said.
He raised his pistol and shot three rounds out the door and laughed. I put my hands over my ears.
“You’re DEA?” I cried.
He popped off another round.
“Is competition,” he said. “We do business.”
Oh my God.
He fell against me and was shouting in my ear and there was nowhere I could go. “You want Amapola? You want to marry my sobrina? Just like that? Really? Pendejo.” He grabbed my shirt. “Can you fly, gringo? Can you fly?” I was shaking. I was trying to shrink away from him, but I could not. I was trapped in my seat. His breath stank, and his lips were at my ear like hers might have been, and he was screaming, “Can you fly, chingado? Because you got a choice! You fly, or you do what we do.”
I kept shouting, “What? What?” It was like one of those dreams where nothing makes sense. “What?”
“You do what we do, I let you live, cabron.”
“What?”
“I let you live. Or you fly. Decide.”
“I don’t want to die!” I yelled. I was close to wetting my pants. The Huey was nose-down and sweeping in a circle. I could see people below us, running. A few small huts. Horses or mules. A pickup started to speed out of the big poppy field. Arnulfo talked into his mike and the helicopter heaved after it. Oh no, oh no. He took up the .60 caliber and braced himself. I put my fingers in my ears. And he ripped a long stream of bullets out the door. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. Louder than the loudest thing you can imagine. So loud your insides jump, but it all becomes an endless rip of noise, like thunder cracking inside your bladder and your teeth hurt from gritting against it.
The truck just tattered, if metal can tatter. The roof of the cab blew apart and the smoking ruin of the vehicle spun away below us and vanished in dust and smoke and steam.
I was crying.
“Be a man!” Arnulfo yelled.
We were hovering. The crew members were all turned toward me, staring.
Arnie unsnapped my seat webbing.
“Choose,” he said.
“I want to live.”
“Choose.”
You know how it goes in
PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION
BY LEE CHILD
He said he wouldn’t talk to me. I asked him why. He said because he was a cop and I was a journalist. I said he sounded like a guy with something to hide. He said no, he had nothing to hide.
“So talk to me,” I said, and I knew he would.
He scuffed around for a minute more, hands on the top of the bar, drumming his fingers, moving a little on his stool. I knew him fairly well. He was edging out of the summer of his career and entering the autumn. His best years were behind him. He was in the valley, facing a long ten years before his pension. He liked winning, but losing didn’t worry him too much. He was a realistic man. But he liked to be sure. What he hated was not really knowing whether he had won or lost.
“From the top,” I said.
He shrugged and took a sip of his beer and sighed and blew fumes toward the mirror facing us. Then he started with the 911 call. The house, out beyond Chandler, south and east of the city. A long low ranch, prosperous, walled in, the unlit pool, the darkness. The parents, arriving home from a party. The silence. The busted window, the empty bed. The trail of blood through the hallway. The daughter’s body, all ripped up. Fourteen years old, damaged in a way he still wasn’t prepared to discuss.
I said, “There were details that you withheld.”
He asked, “How do you know?”
“You guys always do that. To evaluate the confessions.”
He nodded.
I asked, “How many confessions did you get?”
“A hundred and eight.”
“All phony?”
“Of course.”
“What information did you withhold?”
