Bucking horses in west Texas in the fresh snow, it didn’t hurt quite so goddamn bad when you went off, even though underneath the clean white blanket, the ground was like a brick. The soft fresh powder, early in the mornings when the horse’s breath was a thick wide cloud mixed with his own, cushioned the fall, so he wasn’t afraid of the crazy ponies with their long winter hair and wild eyes because it didn’t hurt like it hurt in the summer, when the drought had baked the earth in the corral until it cracked and the dust made the horses sneeze and they were mad with the heat anyway and they started fighting the minute they heard the saddle leather creaking, oh, God, he hated the summers.
‘Show some guts, boy, I’ll take th’ fuckin strap t’ yuh.’
‘Yes, Pap.’
‘Git back on that goddamn rogue pony and straighten his ass out or I’ll take an inch a hide off’n yer butt.’
‘Yes, Pap.’
‘Mount up, goddammit, don’t be hangin’ around that fuckin’ water bucket.’
‘Yes, Pap.’
‘Dontcha call me Pap, goddamniit ya bust that fuckin’ pony’s balls, git him on his knees, then I’m your goddamn Pap. We ain’t havin’ no fuckin’ fairies in this family.’
Tall, raw-boned, Texas kid, drawl-voiced and leather- handed, his old man’s venal temper and a two-inch fuse, on the rodeo circuit while he was still in high school, and by the time he was twenty-one and old enough to order his own beer in the endless saloons from Wichita to Cheyenne to Phoenix to El Paso, he had big, swollen knuckles from dusting off all the smart-ass bastards that made fun of his name (‘Hinkie Hinkle’), and he bad the trophies and the belt buckles, and he had hunted with the best of them, brown bear and eight-point buck and jaguar, and he also had more than a dozen broken bones and the miseries and it hurt to get up in the morning and he was living on eggs and bacon and uppers and downers and painkillers and washing it all down with Coors beer.
Twenty-two years old and peaking out.
At the Armed Forces rodeo he got drunk and missed his ride and a honey-voiced lady sergeant from recruiting fucked his brains out all night and all morning and had him signed and on his way to boot camp before his hangover was gone.
Nam,
seven months later,
human game,
fuck breaking horses and shooting longhorn buck.
In eight weeks in 1967 he kills twenty-seven Buddhaheads. Mot Sog, the Army’s special assassination squad, for which all records will be destroyed after the war, taps him. One night near the DMZ, using an infrared scope mounted on a Mannlicher single-action CD 13, from more than a quarter mile away, he picks off a Cong agent, sneaking across the lines, so unbelievable a shot that a couple of guys from the Corps of Engineers measure the distance with a transit, just for the record. Nineteen hundred and twenty-seven feet, the longest kill shot in Army history.
After that, it was a honky tonk shooting gallery, like knocking over ducks, barn, barn, barn.
Back in Texas, he went up for hire. In Rhodesia, where he earned three hundred dollars a day plus per diem, he took a postgraduate course in interrogation, and became an expert in the deadly art of persuasion, hanging captured blacks out of a helicopter at five hundred feet by the ankles until they talked, and letting them go if they didn’t. When he came home after two years, Pap never cussed at him again, even when he changed his name to Hinge. Pap was afraid to.
He decided the belt buckle was too ostentatious. By now, Spettro probably knew everything there was to know about Ray Hinge. He put on a more conservative belt, checked himself out in the mirror, and walking as straight as a sergeant in the Queen’s Guard, he opened his side of the door to the adjoining room and knocked. A moment later Falmouth opened the door from his side.
Hinge was surprised at how tall Spettro was. He was almost dapper in appearance, deeply tanned, with snow-white hair at his temples, and dressed in a three-piece raw-silk navy-blue suit with a tie striped with wine and gray.
Hinge was exactly as Falmouth had expected, raw-boned and hard-looking, with small, agate eyes and leathery hands, and coarse, dishwater-blond hair.
You better be good, Tony thought. For this deal, I need the best there is.
Hinge knew the scenario by heart and recited it with ease. A good actor, that was a help. ‘Excuse me,’ he said in a lazy Texas drawl, ‘I thought this was some kind of closet.’
‘No problem.’
‘Say, yuh wouldn’t have a spare cigarette, would yuh? I just ran out.’
‘Sure.’
Falmouth handed him the Camel and lit it. Hinge took a deep puff and as heat from the glowing tip was drawn up through the tobacco, the word ‘Spettro’ appeared on the side of the cigarette. Hinge smiled and held out his hand.
‘Hinge,’ he said. ‘And it’s a goddamn pleasure, man.’
‘Thank you, Mr. Hinge. Call me Spettro.’
‘Yes, suh.’
Falmouth held the door open and Hinge entered his room. There was a briefcase on the bed.
‘I just left the lads from the plant,’ Falmouth said. ‘We’ve got one big break. This Rafsaludi bunch has agreed to a meeting this afternoon to discuss payment of the ransom. They think a company man is coming in. There were four of them in the group that pinched Lavander, according to Gomez, the chauffeur who was driving Lavander when he was grabbed.’
