'I can't see,' I said.
'Shut up,' he answered. 'Ya sound like a feckin' pussy.'
A match was struck and a Coleman lantern hissed, throwing a dim light into the area. I looked around. We were in some kind of old water-control building or pumping station. There were rusted pipes and valves everywhere. Off in the distance I could still hear bombs exploding.
'This here's a no-impact area, inside the gunnery range,' he said. 'I found it three years ago. I wait here durin' fire missions.'
Then the man came over and looked at Sonny's stump. 'This here boy's gonna have to be tough as stewed skunk ta get through what we gotta do. But we cain't wait, gotta fix this mess now.' He reached down and pulled a piece of Sonny's pant leg away, exposing the bloody stump.
'Don't touch him,' I said. 'He needs a doctor.'
'We don't get this fixed up now, this Mexican won't need no doc. He'll be upstairs with Jesus. I was a medic. Vietnam. Seventy-fifth Army Rangers,' he said. 'I seen a lot worse than this. But we gotta triage the fecker now.'
He had a deep cracker accent-Virginia, or South Carolina. He took off his hat, revealing a snow white forehead above a tan line on his weathered face. Gray hair, growing long, covered his ears. His teeth were a mess and he hadn't shaved in at least a week.
'Gimme yer shirt,' he said.
I took off the SWAT vest, then removed my shirt, leaving me in a T-shirt. My forearm didn't look so bad, now that I saw it in the light. It had more or less stopped bleeding.
The man started ripping my shirt into strips. Then he took off the tourniquet belt I'd put on Sonny's thigh.
'Gonna let this bleed out a little, clean her out some,' he said, and Sonny looked at his newly shot-off right leg in horror. Blood started spouting out onto the floor around us. Then the man cinched up the belt again, stemmed the flow, pulled a pint of scotch out of a backpack, and handed it to Sonny.
'Get this down,' he ordered.
Sonny took a sip.
'Not like that. Give yerself a party, boy.'
So Sonny started swallowing the scotch until the bottle was empty. The man crossed to one of the valves and turned it. When the water started to flow, he washed his hands, then brought the lantern closer. He knelt down, and picked up Sonny's stump in both hands.
'Whatta you gonna do?' I asked, feeling a little sick as I looked at what was left of the leg.
'Cain't git no lard without boilin' the hog,' he said softly.
'Ain't gonna be much fun, but I gotta tie off them bleeders, or this boy's gonna be tradin' his guitar for a harp.'
He crossed to his backpack, pulled out a small nylon combat medic's bag, and returned to Sonny. 'Keep this handy and gimme what I ask for.'
For the next ten minutes, while Sonny screamed in pain, this man, whoever he was, searched Sonny's bloody stump for the main arteries, then one by one, pulled them out, then clamped and sutured them.
Somewhere in the middle of this Sonny stopped screaming. He had fainted.
The FA-18s had completed their run and were gone. It was strangely quiet in the little concrete room. Finally, the man completed this field surgery and bound up the stump with strips of my shirt. He did it all in thirty minutes.
'Help me move him over there to the bed,' he said.
We carried Sonny to a futon by the far wall, laid him down and elevated his leg. I sat on the floor next to him while the man went back and washed Sonny's blood off his hands. Then he returned and slumped down next to us.
'Who the hell are you?' I asked.
'I'm the guy you stole that feckin' sand buggy from,' he said, flat southern vowels ringing on poured concrete.
'I'm a police officer,' I said.
'Then ya oughta know better,' he replied.
He had iridescent blue eyes-the kind of eyes I'd sometimes seen on the criminally insane. Madness glinted there. Everything else screamed hillbilly. The bony hips and the lean frame with the bulging beer belly, an Adam's apple that looked like somebody had shoved a tennis ball down his throat.
'I'm Shane Scully,' I said. 'This is Sonny Lopez.'
'Royal Mortenson,' he answered, but made no move to shake hands.
'I've gotta get him to the hospital,' I persisted.
'You go back out there before the twenty-three-fifty strafing run and Blackie will drop you with that big Browning. He's pretty damn good with that thing. Knows the terrain. He'll set up over at the wall, or north a' Cactus West where he can see us coming. Before we get to any of my through-holes, mother-fecker will rip us all new assholes.'
'What the hell do you do out here?' I asked, wondering why he and Smiley were wandering around at night on an active gunnery range.
'I'm a scrapper,' he said. 'All this shit lyin' around out here-the fins on the inerts and stuff-is worth money.'
He wiped his hand across his mouth, then pulled out a can of Skoal, took a pinch, and put it behind his lower lip.
'Aluminum on them fins of the two-thousand pounders is worth plenty.' He pronounced it al-ow-min- eum.
'Depending on the market, I kin git ninety bucks a fin on them thousand-pound inerts. Sometimes I'll disarm some of the smaller unexploded stuff. A seventy-pound fin is worth thirty-five bucks a blade. Then, twice a week them Cobra assault choppers with twenty-millimeter cannons, swoop in here, blow up some dump truck. Brass cartridges coming down all over the place. Fifty cents a round, like it's raining money.' He smiled at me, his brown, uneven teeth looking like a busted-down fence.
'And Smiley? Does he scrap too?'
'Who's that?'
'The guy in the black Dodge Ram.'
'Ya mean Blackie? Blackie is a big feckin' problem. I'm out here pickin' up scrap, tryin' to make me a livin'. He's bringin' the EOD down on us.'
'Don't you need a permit for this?'
'I got me a permit.' He held up the.45. 'The EOD don't got no problem with me, on account they know I'm an ex-Ranger and I'll do the right thing, by God. Yessir!'
'I was a Marine,' I said, looking for some connection.
He seemed to think about that. Then he went on.
'Blackie's a problem cause he don't give a shit. I only take fins off the inerts and the low-yield ordnance. Them's the blue bombs and the yellow stripers. But we got a lotta UHE shit out here-that's undetonated high explosives, and it's stuff EOD doesn't want messed with.'
'What's EOD?' I asked him.
'Explosive Ordnance Disposal. They shut this place down once a month and go searching for unexploded JADAM two-thousand pounders and up. Hot ordnance that didn't detonate. Them's the bombs got C-four packages in 'em. Gotta disarm the warhead to get a one-pound package out, but it's worth fifteen grand or more on the black market, especially now, with terrorists tryin' to buy it. I could mine C-four easy, but I never do it. I'm an American. Ain't gonna help no sand nigger terrorist assholes get shit to blow us up. That's why EOD kinda leaves me alone. Fifteen years out here and they coulda busted me easy, but they let me be. Blackie, he's a whole 'nother story, 'cause he's in the C-four business. He's out here three times a week pullin' warheads off the reds, takin' out C-four packs. I been tryin' to catch the fecker myself, but he's tricky, and smart as a windmill fixer.'
That explained where Smiley got the C-4.
The strange man spit a stream of tobacco juice across the room into a Folgers coffee can. He hit it pretty
