can do is figure out how to cook it.'
'You can do it, Dad,' Sarah said.
'You bet he can,' Cynthia said.
Actually, Leo was a pretty fair shot, having practiced with the girls on tin cans in the backyard. Still, that was different than a moving target, and a living one to boot.
Cynthia was discussing ways to prepare rabbit when Leo thought he heard something rustle ahead.
'Hear that?' he asked.
'Hear what?' Cheryl said.
'Nope,' Sarah said.
Cynthia was excited. 'A rabbit?'
'I don't know.' Leo frowned, bit his lower lip. 'You guys wait here. I'm gonna check it out.'
No one argued.
Leo squeezed the slingshot handle and rode forward. Alone.
Dirk Fallows snapped his fingers twice.
A young man in blood-splattered fatigues ran over, slapped a pair of binoculars in Fallows' open hand, and retreated back to the fire pit to finish skinning the damn dog. He was the only one besides Colonel Fallows who wasn't down the hill hidden in the woods, though he'd have given anything to be crouching behind a tree with the others where all the action was about to take place. Anything other than doing this crummy job which they gave him because he was the youngest one there. Personally, eating dog made him nauseous, and once or twice he'd even sneaked off to the woods after they'd feasted on one to throw up. But Colonel Fallows had gotten a taste for them while in Nam and would as soon eat a German Shepherd as a rabbit or deer. And it wouldn't do to argue with the colonel. Not unless you wanted to end up worse off than the dog.
'Very nice,' Fallows grinned, as he peered through the binoculars at the scene below. The man was riding ahead, his head cautiously panning the woods. Searching. The three women sat on their horses and waited. Excellent. It had been close, they'd almost lost them. Someone had fucked up and made a noise that spooked them. They'd hesitated. If they'd turned back then, well, that would have been that. They'd have gotten away. But they didn't. And soon his men would do what they were trained to do. Simple as a stone sinks in water. And as inevitable.
Fallows swept the woods with his binoculars, but saw none of his men. No rustle of leaves, no twitching branches. His thick lips stretched into a huge grin and square white teeth bloomed into view. Well done, Cruz, he nodded. Cruz was turning out to be a better leader than Fallows had anticipated. The men were deathly afraid of Cruz, sometimes even more than they were of Fallows. Certainly he'd given them occasion to be once or twice. Even Fallows was respectful of Cruz to some extent, but then only he knew about Cruz's past.
They'd met in an Army stockade two months after Fallows was sentenced. Cruz worked in the library, filing books that he never read because he couldn't read. He got the job because he was the tallest man in prison, maybe the tallest man in the Army and could reach the high shelves without a ladder. He had to be almost seven feet, even in that hunched bearlike walk of his. Fallows had asked him once how he got past the Army's 6'8' height restriction and Cruz had answered coldly, 'I lied about my size.' Fallows had let it drop.
Because Fallows was using the library's law books to mount his own legal appeals, he had a lot of contact with Cruz, who never offered a single word unless he had to, as if every word he spoke cost him money. A grunt or a shrug was the most you could expect from the man. And nobody pushed it because Cruz was not only tall, he was the most powerful man in the stockade. He lifted weights with awesome regularity, his muscles swelling and bulging under his clothes like hidden animals. Once Fallows had seen him working out in the yard doing arm curls with a 250-pound barbell. Cruz had been naked to his waist, his dark skin slicked with sweat like rain-soaked macadam. His chest was gigantic, quilted with solid muscles like layers of rock on a mountainside, all funneling down to a trim waist of maybe twenty-nine inches of corrugated steel. With each curl of the arm, muscles popped or stretched, thick drops of sweat plopped into the dirt. But the face remained serene, distant, the eyes thin slits covering shiny black marbles. It was as if Cruz had slipped out of his body, was wandering about somewhere else while his muscles worked on themselves. It was unnerving to everyone else, especially the guards, who did their best not to offend or annoy Cruz. The rest of the inmates just avoided him as much as possible. Only Fallows found him intriguing.
It took some digging and paying some bribes, but finally Fallows managed to get a photocopy of Cruz's case history. It was worth every cent.
His full name was Indigo Cruz, though no one called him anything but Cruz. His mother was a Yucatan Indian come to the United States after a flood had destroyed her village and killed her parents. She had managed to bargain her way across the border by dropping to her knees among the Rio Grande brush and allowing two border guards to relieve themselves in her mouth. Her knees had scraped on rough pebbles and rocks as they'd taken turns pumping their hips against her face, jerking in spasms as each clutched her long, black hair in clenched fists, finally shooting their semen into her mouth, across her tongue, down her throat. Not allowing her to rise until she swallowed and licked each clean like a pet cat. Laughing, they left her kneeling there, good for their promise at least, her knees imbedded with sharp gravel, skin shredded and bleeding. She kept the scars on her knees for the rest of her life.
She was thirteen.
Within two weeks, she became a maid in a San Antonio motel that catered to afternoon traffic from nearby office buildings. Mostly husbands and wives, though not each other's. One Wednesday she was changing the soiled sheets in Room 216 when the man in 217 came over. His jacket was off and his tie loosened. He had a huge, jowly face with a splotchy red nose blistered with fiery capillaries. Even Maria Cruz recognized the signs of an alcoholic, having seen many such men in her own village. Her own father had begun to show similar signs.
'Yes, sir?' she'd asked, trying hard to pronounce each word properly. It was important to her to learn perfect English as soon as possible. Become a U.S. citizen. Its best citizen, she hoped.
'What time is it?' the man barked, his words slightly slurred. 'The fucking clock in my room is broke.'
Maria Cruz glanced over at the cheap radio/alarm built into the bedside stand. The laminated wood around the edges was chipped and scratched where someone had tried to pry it out of the table. 'Eet sayas 1:20,' she said, inwardly delighted at how much like an American she was already sounding.
The man laughed, a thick, cruel laugh. 'It don't say shit, gal. Ya gotta read it.' And he laughed again, holding himself up against her laundry cart.
Maria didn't understand the joke, but smiled anyway.
The man stopped laughing abruptly. 'Fucking twenty goddamn minutes after fucking one.' He looked out over the ledge of the balcony, peering left and right. The railing sagged under his weight. 'My lunch hour's almost over and that cunt still ain't showed up yet. My boss'll chew my ass like a dog with a rag if I'm not back in the fucking office on time again. Fucking cunt and her fucking excuses.'
Maria didn't understand everything the big man was saying so she just smiled and continued changing the bed. The couple who'd rented the room had only checked out fifteen minutes ago and the sheets were still wet. Maria stripped the bed with a couple of practiced motions, then checked the pillowcases. If they had lipstick or anything that could be seen on them, she changed them. But if not, her orders were to leave them. One pillowcase had a smudge of black eyeliner so she changed it. The other was clean.
'You women are all alike,' he drawled, scowling at Maria. 'Nothing but slimy holes on two legs. You know why women have cunts? Huh, do ya?'
Maria bustled the sheets into a ball in her arms. 'Excuse, please,' she smiled, heading toward the door and her laundry cart.
'I'll tell ya why. 'Cuz if they didn't, there'd be a bounty on 'em.' He guffawed, slapped the laundry cart with a huge, meaty hand, jarring a couple rolls of toilet paper loose. One tumbled off the edge of the balcony.
'Ex-cuse, please,' Marie said again, squeezing by him through the door. She flopped the dirty sheets into the bottom of the cart, then started off after the toilet paper. But a hand grabbed at her, snagged the back of her bra through her uniform, tugged her backwards.
She spun away from him, her face red with anger, but her voice quiet and measured. 'Must work, sir. Many rooms to finish.'
'Hell, girl, I'll pay ya for your trouble.' He reached into his pants, fumbled drunkenly for his wallet. 'Shit, I come here to fuck and I intend to do just that. Here's five bucks. Buys a shitload of refried beans.' He held out a
