After the Rain

“I don’t feel so hot,” Gordy said. For the first time his voice caught in his throat. He had a sensation that something very big now loomed over him, and he could almost hear the crack of fear start to break his night apart. His arms weighed a ton each. Couldn’t lift them.

“Woulda killed me, too, if I hadn’t pointed out a few things.” Dale drew himself up and tucked in his shirt, which had been hanging out since they unloaded the whiskey at Lute’s garage. He smoothed his hand down his sloping chest and stomach. “They say killing the first one is the hardest. The second one is easier, they say. You think that’s true?”

“Please,” Gordy mouthed weakly as his eyes rolled up, showing a lot of white.

“Man, you’re sad. Ginny, at least she put up a fight,” Dale said. And then he kicked one of the boxes and sent it flying into Gordy’s face. It bounced away in the dark. “They been using us. You, Ace, me. Before us my dad. To study the border.” Dale slipped the board under his arm and smiled. “George has been doing a huge business in meth precursor. Joe handles the Canadian side…and the people they’re in with are way heavier than the biker clubs up north. Shit, man, they’re running dope to finance those suicide bombers over there.”

Gordy pitched forward and dropped to his knees and Dale saw he was losing his audience. He talked faster to get it all in.

“But then they met me and now they’re onto something a lot bigger than boxes full of cold pills. Oh, yeah, and zarba-that means shit. Just thought you should know.”

Dale could see the wheels turning slower and slower in Gordy’s mind. See him struggling to connect the dots.

“He’s an…Arab?” Gordy was drooling all over his chest as the ketamine really hit him. He fell forward on all fours. Blinking and shivering like a dog, he watched Dale lean over and pick up the yellow thing…

Dale weighed the Epipen in his palm. “I stuck you with ketamine. It’s slowly paralyzing you. Some people say it feels like dying. Any comments?”

Dale yanked the board up off the wall, wrapped his big hands around it, planted his stance, and drew it back.

“Shit,” Dale said, “you’d think I’d be good at baseball, since Ace had such a good swing. But I always struck out.”

Putting all his bulk into the move, he swung the heavy board like a Louisville Slugger. Gordy, bent over on his hands and knees, stared straight ahead through dull, uncomprehending, heavy-lidded eyes. Didn’t even see the pole-barn spike before it hit him in the center of his forehead.

The spasm erupted out of Gordy’s head, an electric jolt that Dale felt momentarily in his own hands. Dale expected more blood than just the red masklike pool around the one eye that was filming over. The breath a deep rattle. The ketamine probably eased the pain a bit. Merciful almost.

Dale squatted and held the light bar close to Gordy’s trembling face and studied the life growing dimmer in his eyes. “Told you. Shouldn’t call me Needle-Dick. But you wouldn’t listen.” He took a handful of Gordy’s hair and tipped his head back and up. With his other hand, he scooped up a fistful of the loamy sediment from the floor of the root cellar. Slowly he released his fingers so a stream of the sandy soil filled both of Gordy’s nostrils. Some involuntary reflex forced a deep cough, his tongue protruded as he struggled for breath.

Handful after handful, Dale slowly poured sand down Gordy’s gagging throat until his entire mouth was full and his chest eventually became massively still.

Dale took off the rubber gloves, reached down, peeled up one of Gordy’s eyelids, exposing the opaque iris. Touched it. Made a face. It felt like a grape. “In case you haven’t noticed, asshole, I’ve changed.”

Dale stood up, dusted off his jeans, marched up the stairs, and closed the door to the cellar. He stood, taking deep breaths of the thick night air. Damn. I’m getting good at this. This was the first one he’d done all by himself.

He went to Gordy’s truck, took out his bike, and then drove the truck into the empty barn behind the house. He closed that door, too. Then he got on his bike and pedaled slowly down the empty road, the long fields ticking with cicadas on either side. The orange dome of light glowing against the horizon guided him.

And lots and lots of stars above. That meant the clouds were finally clearing out.

Half an hour later he pumped up the driveway to his folks’ house, and there was Joe’s brown van. Joe was sitting on the front porch steps, smoking one of those French cigarettes.

“Where you been? George is out there risking his neck for you, to throw them off,” Joe said, getting to his feet. Dale could see he was pissed, but holding it in.

“I been looking for that woman,” Dale said. No need to tell Joe about Gordy.

“She ain’t at the bar, I just came from there. Look, we got to get on the road. And you have to call Irv Fuller. Remember? He has to arrange for a security clearance and a time. It’s not like you can just walk in unannounced.”

“Too late to call Irv, I’ll call him in the morning. And I ain’t going without her.”

“Listen, there’s other…women,” Joe said.

Dale pointed his finger. “No, you listen. It’s this woman. I gave you this idea. I showed you how to do it. Without me you’d still be wandering around on the fucking prairie with a ton of explosives. I’m making this happen.”

Joseph Khari studied Dale Shuster in the dark. Many things passed through his mind; mainly the irony of how a great event could emerge from such a disgusting piece of shit.

“Nothing goes boom without me,” Dale reminded him.

If it was up to him, Joe would shoot him and leave him in the driveway. But, in the end, practicality won out. The fat fool was right.

Chapter Twenty-eight

George Khari, driving north from Grand Forks, was thinking numbers. When he looked up, the night sky sparkled with numbers instead of stars. Endless random numbers. It was like a big lottery, see, because, George was thinking, out there in the darkness, millions of people were touching numbers at this very moment. Pressing buttons on wireless telephones, sending signals to towers. Connecting.

Why had he listened to Joe and wired the blasting caps to telephone pagers? Didn’t he have enough problems?

The American agents were virtually on top of Dale and Joe. So close yet so blind, because they’d focused on Ace as a target. So George had told Joe to make a point of mentioning his meet with Ace in front of the female agent. He would draw the agents toward himself. He doubted they’d be interested in tonight’s petty contraband. If his plan worked, he’d be off the hook. It might even collapse their operation.

George smiled. It was like the weapon itself; sometimes it was best to hide in plain sight.

He’d know pretty soon. The van he’d spotted in his neighborhood and around his store was following him right now, at a discreet distance.

George grinned and shook his head. As a youth he had commanded respect in the Bekaa Valley. Now he was down to running two killers, both difficult to control. He hunched forward and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

I can do this thing.

The lights, traffic, and general clutter of Grand Forks had faded behind him, and now he was alone with the huge sky and the empty ribbon of road. For more than two decades he had dwelled among these spoiled children; envying and despising them as they ignored the suffering of Arab peoples. Watching them as they busied themselves watching O.J. and Monica, eating bigger portions, driving bigger cars with bigger gas tanks.

But 9/11 got their attention. Though they still didn’t really understand. That now it was their turn. For decades they had channel-surfed over mass graves filled with Rwandans, Bosnians, Chechens. A million Afghans. Now viewers in the Middle East would get to recline in their living rooms and watch Americans fester and die slowly on satellite TV for a change. Just like the children in the camps. Or burn fast, like his parents, like his own baby and his wife, who met their end in the Israeli napalm…manufactured in Midland,