“Find out a way to get you into a clinical study. I think you’ll be invaluable to researchers everywhere. We’ve always wondered where the gene pool got screwed up. Some think it’s because the Neanderthal gene got mixed in with the Homo sapiens’s, but no one is sure. Your DNA may contain the answer.”
Collins’s eyes were lifted to Hackberry’s as Hackberry spoke. “Once inside, you’ll see what the wrath of God is all about. Don’t stand in its way or you’ll feel it, too,” he said. “You listening to me, boy?”
“Count your blessings, you piece of shit,” Hackberry said.
Krill’s plan to get one of his warders into the cell had not worked, and now he was being forced to witness the acts they were perpetrating upon the body of the Asian woman called La Magdalena. He had not been able to pick the lock with the shaft of the spoon, so he had deliberately scratched the metal around the keyhole, hoping the scratches would be detected and a man would enter the cell in order to search for the spoon. But none of them, particularly Frank, had so far been willing to admit to Josef Sholokoff the nature of their blunder, so Krill stood at the bars, staring impotently at the silhouette of La Magdalena, who had been strung from a rafter by her wrists, the soles of her feet barely touching the floor.
“I was mistaken about you, Senor Sholokoff,” Krill said. “I thought I had been captured by the kind of mercenaries I knew in my homeland. But this is not so. As Negrito said, you are all cobardes. A nest of cowards. You smoke your purple cigarette with the gold tip and blow smoke through your nostrils like a dragon would, but you are a small, wasted goat of a man, I suspect one that has a very small penis and cojones the size of smoked oysters. Do you torture the woman because she rejected you? I have a feeling that may well be the case. A man like you was never intended to touch a woman of quality. Look at her, then look at yourself. She is beautiful and pure, but the people who smuggle your dope and know you say your whores call you a human tampon. These are not my words but Negrito’s. He has a terrible fate designed for the comunista with the perfumed cigarette. That is what Negrito calls you, Senor Goat Man.”
Five men stood in a circle around the woman. Two of them had taken off their shirts; they both had hair on their backs and large hands and jugheads and ears, the light from the bare bulb over the stairs yellow on their shoulders. Sholokoff stood directly in front of the woman, seemingly oblivious to Krill’s taunting, sucking on his cigarette, blowing the smoke on the ash so the tip glowed a bright orange in the gloom.
“Noie Barnum made sketches of the drone,” Krill said. “I have them hidden in Durango. I can take you to them.”
“You missed the bus, greaseball,” Frank said.
“Don’t abuse the woman further, Senor Sholokoff,” Krill said. “I am the one you want. I am the one who can increase your riches.”
“How’d you like a can of Drano poured down your throat?” Frank said.
Through the ground-level window on the far side of the cellar, Krill could see a dirt road winding through the fields and rain starting to fall on a line of white hills and a flatbed truck and another vehicle coming down the road toward the compound, a rooster tail of dust rising behind each, the electricity in the clouds flicking like snakes’ tongues, forked and sharp, without sound.
“Senor Sholokoff, your employees have been screwing you behind your back, conspiring against you in order to hide their incompetence,” Krill said.
“What’s he saying?” Sholokoff said to Frank.
“Mike let the half-breed have a spoon to eat with and didn’t get it back,” Frank said. “The guy was probably working on the lock with it.”
“Where is the spoon now?” Sholokoff said, lowering his cigarette from his mouth.
“I don’t know, sir. He isn’t going anywhere,” Frank said.
“You’ve decided that, have you?”
“It’s not a big deal, sir. I’m taking care of it.”
“Not only do you make decisions for me, you also decide whether or not I should know about them?”
Krill could see the rain sweeping across the fields in a gray line, dimming the hills in the background, the flatbed and an SUV behind it turning off the road into an unfenced pasture, the drivers circling behind a pecan orchard.
“You hear something?” Mike said.
“No,” Frank said.
“I thought I heard a car,” Mike said.
“It’s thundering in the hills,” Frank said.
“Senor Sholokoff, listen to me when I tell you I have the plans for the drone,” Krill said. “I can be a very valuable employee to you. Your men are worthless. Look at them. They cannot think. They hide like children from their responsibilities. I retract my insults, senor . They were said in hot blood. We are both businessmen and need to behave as such, without rancor, without pissants like these to obstruct us.”
“You shut the fuck up,” Frank said.
“No, it’s you who needs to be silent, Frank,” Sholokoff said, glancing over his shoulder at the ground-level window. “I heard a car or truck. Look out the window, Craig.”
One of the men standing closest to the far wall rose on his tiptoes to see outside. “There’s a flatbed truck out by the pecan trees,” he said. “It’s probably some of your field hands.”
“They’re not supposed to be there,” Sholokoff said.
“It’s some peons, sir. I can see one of them,” Craig said.
“Mike, you get the spoon back from the man in the cell,” Sholokoff said. “The rest of you come upstairs with me.”
“Sir, the woman is about to break,” Frank said. “I got everything under control. I’ll check around outside if you want, but don’t ease up now.”
“You received a phone call earlier. Who was that from?”
“A gal I met in the cantina,” Frank replied. “I told her not to call while I was working.”
“A girl from the cantina? You are always thinking about your appetites, Frank. Do you never think about the man who took you off a porn set and made a soldier out of you? Do you have no gratitude for the life I’ve given you-the women, the power, the money?”
“Sir, I got on the cantina gal’s case. I want to prove myself to you. Leave me with the Chinese broad. Trust me, you’ll have everything you need when you come back downstairs.”
“You have a great problem, Frank. You have never been able to hide your lean and hungry look,” Sholokoff said. “That’s because a black heart has no loyalty. You can only think in terms of your own needs. I do not believe your story about the girl in the cantina. Have you done something you shouldn’t? Do you want to confess to La Magdalena?”
“Why do you mock me, sir? I’ve done everything you wanted, including hanging up that cowboy preacher on a cross.” Frank’s features sharpened with resentment, his cheeks sinking and pooling with shadow. “I’m surprised you didn’t have us throw dice for his clothes.”
One of the men on the first floor opened the door that gave onto the stairwell. “Mr. Sholokoff, there’s a truck and an SUV out by them trees,” he called down the stairs. “The maid hauled freight like somebody stuck a cattle prod up her ass. I sent Toy Boy out.”
Hackberry and Pam Tibbs and Jack Collins and Eladio and Jaime fanned out in the pecan trees as soon as they had exited their vehicles. The rain was blowing in a fine mist against a barn that stood between them, dimming out Sholokoff’s compound. Hackberry held the cut-down twelve-gauge with one hand, the barrel resting against his shoulder, and studied the main house through his binoculars. Pam was to his right, carrying the AR15 with her left forearm partially wrapped in the sling, a thirty-round magazine inserted in the frame. She had strung two pairs of handcuffs through the back of her cartridge belt and had stuffed a twenty-round magazine in the back pocket of her jeans.
The house was massive, the walls two feet thick, built of stucco that had been painted a mauve color, the flower beds bordered with bricks and packed with soil that was as dark as wet coffee grounds, the yellow and red hibiscus and climbing roses and Hong Kong orchids trembling with rain that dripped off the roof.
The position was bad; the angle of approach was bad; and there was too much light in the sky.
The back door opened, and an overweight Mexican woman came into the yard and walked toward a hogpen with a heavy bucket in her hand. Then she looked once over her shoulder and dropped the bucket, full of slops, onto the grass and ran past the barn into a cornfield.
