Like a prairie dog, the fucker popped up his head to look around in animal panic. The soft lead took him square in the neck. Cut short in mid-shout. A sweep of the scope found the coyote who’d been waiting for sloppy seconds face down and still in the dust with a dark shadow spreading under him.
The mules were running wild away into the dark, their bundles forgotten. They’d be back to cross the fence some other night. But not tonight. He brought the scope back to the lip of the draw in time to see the girl rise into his field of vision. She was pulling her clothes tight around her and looked about her with wide eyes that flashed white in the scope’s harsh contrast. She bent to pick up one of the rifles and held it in her hands uncertainly.
Jimbo was unable to turn away as she brought the butt of the rifle down again and again on the skull of her attacker. Big overhead swings until she could no longer lift her arms. She stood exhausted and heaving and dropped the rifle to the ground.
“Come on, bonita,” Jimbo said under his breath.
The girl looked toward Mexico lindo and home and turned back to gaze straight into Jimbo’s eyes. Then she crawled on her belly under the fence and ran down the draw, heading north toward the golden lights of America.
“Good girl,” he said to himself and stayed put for an hour before snaking out of his hide.
He sat in Josie’s Fuel-and-Food on the highway, lingering over a second coffee and a third Marlboro. It was noon, and he wasn’t on shift for a few more hours. Jimbo reviewed the night before. Dropping those Mexes. Watching the girl crawl under the fence. Hell, she probably already had a job in Tucson. Making beds at a Best Western or cleaning stalls at a horse barn.
He thought about how he belly crawled under that fence with his entrenching tool and buried those two hombres in a single grave away from the draw. Took near to dawn. He left the bundles of dope where the mules left them. Somebody’d come pick them up. Waste not, want not.
In a couple of hours, he’d be asked to fill out a report. He’d make up some politely-worded lies about the night before. An incident report with no incidents. He’d wallpaper over two murders like they never happened. It was bullshit piled on more bullshit. He’d be lying if he said he felt sorry for those cabrones. He’d be lying if he said he wouldn’t do it all over again. Two assholes the world would never miss but they were dead and buried, and he killed them and dug their graves. And that was in his rearview no matter what and it would prey on him.
That’s what his life was now. Pretending to enforce laws that his betters didn’t have the cojones to stand by. Those fuckers could rape young girls and murder their mules and bring that shit across the border every night and make the tribe’s land their goddamn golden highway, and Jimbo wasn’t even allowed to ask them their business or even their names without getting himself in a world of shit. He smeared out the Marlboro and scooted the coffee mug across the Formica.
“Well, what put you on the warpath, chief?” said someone standing over the booth.
Jimbo half-rose, a fist white-knuckled and drawing back.
Dwayne Roenbach stood grinning at him.
Jimbo’s face creased in a smile that almost hurt. The two men embraced. Regulars at Josie’s looked up to see the unusual sight of Deputy James Small hugging another man, and the even more unusual spectacle of the dour Pima lawman looking happy.
Dwayne shoved Jimbo away.
“You got anything tying you down, Small?” Dwayne said. “A woman? Family?”
“Nothin’ I can’t walk out on,” Jimbo said.
“That badge?”
“Don’t mean shit,” Jimbo said. “Not to me. Not to nobody else neither.”
4
Rick Renzi
The house was probably nice once. Three bedrooms, two baths, two-car garage, a little split level on a decent lot in a nice enough subdivision outside Cincinnati. But the lawn had gone to hell, the siding was grungy, and the paint around the windows was peeling away.
Dwayne and Chaz climbed out of the rental car and made their way up the cracked walk.
“I’m already sorry I came along for the ride,” Chaz said.
“The hell you are,” Dwayne said. “You’d push your own sister down a well to get on that corporate jet.”
“You figure out who’s payin’ the bills yet?”
“Jimbo’s working on that. He’s been running it down on his laptop. So far he’s just finding a bunch of shell corporations.”
“At least it ain’t government,” Chaz said. Dwayne pressed the doorbell and heard a pleasant three-chord chime echoed within the house. He rang again and heard a thump and a crash of glass. The door opened a crack, and a wiry-looking man in a stained t-shirt and wrinkled running pants glared at them from painfully red eyes.
“You didn’t answer your phone, Renzi,” Dwayne said.
“Thought you were the pizza guy,” Rick said. His voice was a croak. His breath was foul with tobacco and whatever he’d been drinking. His body gave off the rich stink of weeks of neglect. An ashtray smell with an aftertaste of rotting food was seeping out of the house.
“You gonna let us in?” Chaz said.
In answer to that the door slammed.
“We came all the way here, right?” Dwayne said. Chaz nodded.
A double shoulder hit took the door off its hinges and carried the two big men into the middle of the living room.
Renzi didn’t even get up from the sofa.
“I’m not sharing the pizza when it gets here,” he said. He popped the top on a fresh beer and took a long pull.
The sofa was the only piece of furniture in the room. There was an open trash bag in a corner spilling empties of Yuengling quarts and cans to the
