On a distant, scratchy station, Los Lobos were singing 'The Road to Gila Bend.'
Payne checked the rearview mirror. Shit. A police car, maybe half a mile back. Was it Dixon? He eased his foot off the gas.
Los Lobos turned to full-bore static, and Payne hit the dial. In a second, he heard a familiar baritone voice.
'Every wetback holds a dagger pointed at the heart of America. I no longer live in California. I live in Mexifornia.'
'That's the guy who lent you his iPod,' Payne told Tino.
'What a cabron, ' the boy said.
'This isn't a melting pot,' Cullen Quinn bellowed. 'It's a cracked pot overflowing with illegals.'
'That idiota talking about me?'
'If the federal government can't stop the illegals, what about us?' Quinn ranted. 'The citizenry. What about the good folks who've formed well-armed militias under the Second Amendment? If a burglar breaks into your home, you can shoot him. How about aliens sneaking into our country? Should we start selling hunting licenses?'
'I don't think he got enough sleep last night,' Payne said.
'And you know who's to blame?' Quinn said, picking up steam. 'Everyone who hires these lowlifes and freeloaders. Right here in California, we have the biggest employer of illegals in the country. I've called him out before, and I'll do it again.'
Simeon Rutledge, Payne knew. Quinn's favorite target.
'It's fat cat Simeon Rutledge in the San Joaquin Valley. Rutledge Ranch and Farms, a quarter million acres of prime valley land. He hires thousands of illegals every year. What terrorists lurk among them? What diseases do they bring with them? Rutledge doesn't care, living in his mansion, thumbing his nose at the law.'
'Quinn needs new material. He's been beating this drum forever.'
Payne glanced again at his rearview mirror. The cop was still there, keeping the same distance.
'Rutledge lures the wetbacks with promises of greenbacks. But you folks are the ones who pay when the illegals land in our hospitals and jails. And you foot the bill for their hordes of children in our public schools.'
'What an asshole,' Tino said. 'A real asqueroso.'
'We need to crack down on the employers as well as the illegals,' Quinn continued. 'Are you listening, Simeon Rutledge? I've challenged you to debate a dozen times, but all I hear from your lawyers is that you're too busy. 'Mr. Rutledge is a working man.' Yeah? Well, I've got another term for it. 'Racketeer.' Why don't the feds bust you? Because you've bought off every politician from Sacramento to Washington. If I'm lying, sue me, Mr. Rutledge. Go on. Get your high-priced lawyers to sue me, you greedy S.O.B.'
Jimmy turned off the radio, looked back. The police car had picked up speed. It closed the distance, its blue bubble light flashing.
THIRTY-ONE
'I won't sue you, Quinn. But I sure as hell might kill you,' Simeon Rutledge said.
One hundred seventy-five miles north of the Burbank studio where Cullen Quinn was shouting into a microphone and three hundred miles from where Payne was driving, Rutledge straddled a sawhorse, sharpening the blade of a ranch implement called an 'emasculator.' As he listened to an old portable radio perched on the railing of a horse stall, his lips stretched into a slash as angry as a knife wound. 'I'll strangle you with my bare hands.'
'Did I just hear you threaten Cullen Quinn's life?' Charles Whitehurst asked.
'You gonna testify against me, White bread?' Rutledge laughed, hawked up some phlegm, and spit into a pile of straw.
'As you well know, Simeon, the attorney-client privilege precludes me from ever testifying-'
'Screw the privilege. If you ever turned on me, Charlie, you'd be singing soprano the rest of your life.' Rutledge gestured with the two-bladed emasculator, ordinarily used to de-nut stallions, not shysters. 'If a man called my granddad the names Quinn calls me, Granddad would have killed him without a second thought.'
'Ezekiel Rutledge's ways don't work anymore, Simeon.'
'Don't be too sure.'
'Jesus, Simeon. When are you going to stop trying to prove you're as tough as your grandfather?'
Rutledge flashed his lawyer a look that stung like a bullwhip. 'Ain't too many men I let talk to me like that.'
'I thought that's what you paid me for.'
Rutledge laughed, the sound of a boar crashing through a tangle of brush. 'My granddaddy never would have hired you, Whitehurst. Wouldn't have understood your ways.'
A proud and defiant man, Ezekiel Rutledge had lost his Mississippi cotton plantation to the banks and the boll weevils before heading west to make his fortune in the 1930s. He had the foresight to hire Mexicans for his farmwork. Field hands who complained about working conditions were likely to be flogged or sent back home, sometimes sprawled over the back of a horse. Simeon Rutledge could still remember his grandfather explaining the economics of cotton farming.
'We used to own our slaves. Now we just rent them.'
No, you didn't amass a quarter million acres of prime farmland by being a gentleman or a limousine liberal. You blew up dams, poisoned neighbors' wells, horsewhipped union organizers, and occasionally shot government agents as trespassers.
Then came Jeremiah Rutledge, Simeon's father, who nearly lost the farm. Jeremiah spent money on whores and booze and dice, and drove a sapphire blue Caddy convertible as if the devil were riding shotgun. Marriage and middle age slowed him from a gallop to a canter, and he eventually cleaned up. Remembering his own father's lessons, Jeremiah pushed competing farmers into foreclosure, paid off politicians, and diverted rivers without regard for the law, his neighbors, or the Ten Commandments.
'I'm not trying to turn back the clock.' Rutledge doused the blades of the emasculator with disinfectant. 'I'd just like to find a way to shut Quinn up.'
'You've got bigger problems, Simeon.'
'If it's the migrants, we've dealt with that for years.'
'Not like this,' Whitehurst insisted. 'This time it's different.'
The two men were just outside the gelding stall in the main barn of Rutledge Ranch and Farms. Whitehurst had been Simeon Rutledge's lawyer for three decades and had gotten him out of numerous scrapes, from breaches of contract to paternity raps. But in recent years, as Whitehurst moved up in society circles, Rutledge felt his legal advice had gotten prettified and sissified. As if he no longer wanted mud on the Persian carpets of his fancy law office. Lately, Rutledge had been wishing his lawyer had the cojones of his stallion.
Whitehurst had the trim physique of an aging squash player. Back in the Transamerica Building in San Francisco, his office walls proudly displayed parchment from Stanford and Harvard. When Whitehurst had walked into the barn today, he shot discreet glances downward. Checking his English brogues. You never knew when a wad of horseshit might get stuck in the threading of the hand-cut calfskin.
In his dusty cowboy boots, Rutledge harbored no such fears. His appearance was far less refined. Rutledge thought he could pass for a longshoreman. Or a guy who slopped boiling tar on roofs. Or, with his short, bristly gray hair, a retired Marine Corps drill instructor. Wide shoulders, a thick chest that strained against the buttons of a dirty denim work shirt. His skin was the texture of tree bark and sun-baked the color of tea. Hands thickened with calluses. Knuckles like walnut shells from wrestling steers and shoveling shit and punching out big-mouthed bastards in bars from Fresno to the Mexican border.
Whitehurst had dropped in by helicopter, and Rutledge would end up paying for the charter service as well as $800 per hour for his lawyer's gloomy tidings. The call setting up the meeting had been cryptic. They couldn't speak on the phone. One way to jack up the bill, Rutledge knew, was to predict an apocalyptic event of biblical proportions, which could be avoided only by the skills of your London-tailored savior.
Rutledge was barely curious about what ill winds brought Whitehurst to the ranch. He was too old and too
