“Then enjoy your time in hell, bitch.”
His hand reached out and settled almost lovingly on the nape of her neck. Then she twisted her body and back-kicked him with more strength and force than she thought she had.
He wasn’t ready for it, and his upper body jacked forward with the blow, both of his hands grabbing his genitalia, a cry rising involuntarily from his throat. The man to her right tried to grab her, but she ripped her elbow into his rib cage, then kicked the tall man again, this time in the face. The third man grabbed her pajama top, tearing it down the back, but she pulled loose from him and got past the tall man and the man who had been holding her left arm. The inside of her head was roaring with noise, her hair matted with blood, her feet slipping on the floor. She felt a hand grab her neck, then fingers trying to find purchase inside the religious chain she wore.
The drawer holding the collection of tools and wire and duct tape was half open. She got her hand inside the drawer and picked up a screwdriver, a short one with a thick stub of a handle and a wide blade and perhaps a two- inch shank. She whirled and plunged it into the face of the man whose hand was tangled in her chain. The blade pierced the fabric of his mask right below his left eye, the shank sinking all the way to the handle, the wood and fabric pressing into the wound. The man screamed once, then touched the screwdriver’s handle, his hand trembling, and began screaming again, this time without stop.
“You shut up! You eat your pain and shut your mouth!” the tall man said.
“I’m blind!”
“No, you’re not. You’re in shock. Shut your fucking mouth,” the tall man said. Then he whirled around. “Get her!”
Anton Ling ran through the enclosed back porch and crashed through the screen into the yard, falling once, getting up, then plunging across the yard toward the barn, where her pickup was parked with the keys in the ashtray.
That was when another hooded man, even bigger than the others, a man whose breath smelled like snuff and spearmint, picked her up in the air, crushing her against his chest with his huge arms. “What do we got here?” he said, his lips brushing against her cheek through his mask. “A flopping goldfish, I’d say. We better slow you down a little bit. How about some hair of the dog that bit you?”
He carried her kicking to the horse tank by the windmill, his big hands and wrists notched into her rib cage.
Cody Daniels had turned the truck around in the middle of the road, his stomach churning with fear, his sweat as cold as ice water. He slowly depressed the accelerator, his right hand trembling on the gearshift, each jolt in a chuckhole like a piece of glass in his entrails. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his sleeve and swerved wildly around the pools of water in the road, wishing he would break an axle or tip off the shoulder’s edge into a gulley. He prayed for the dawn to come, for lightning to strike Anton Ling’s house and set it ablaze, for the FBI to descend from the sky in a helicopter. He had never been this afraid in his entire life. But why? Just because an oversize diesel-powered truck had come grinding down a hill? It was irrational.
No, it was not. Cody knew he had a talent, and it was not one to be proud of. He was con-wise. He knew how to read iniquity in others because it resided in him. He also had a tuning fork that vibrated when he was around dangerous people. And he understood that cruelty was not an occasional vice. If it existed in an individual, it was systemic and pervasive and always looking for a new prospect. Cody knew the oversize truck was coming for Anton Ling, and inside it were men in the employ of Temple Dowling, or maybe even Dowling himself.
The lessons he had learned in prison were simple. There were two kinds of people in the slams: screwups like himself and those who had not only gone over to the dark side but enjoyed being there and had no plans to return. The joke was the latter category was not confined to convicts. The worst people he had ever known had worn uniforms or used ballpoint pens to do damage that no burglar could ever equal. How did you recognize the Temple Dowlings of the world? That one was easy. They always mocked. It was in their voice, their use of difficult words, the way they twisted whatever came out of your mouth. They stole other people’s dignity and made them resent themselves. He and his men had invaded Cody’s home and treated him as though he were sewage, then had driven away as indifferently as if they had run over a bug.
Where did that leave him in the mix, a man who had helped blind and disfigure a nurse in an abortion clinic? He didn’t like to think about that. His one serious fall was on a forgery charge. He had never deliberately hurt anyone. Why had he gotten mixed up with the people who had set off the bomb at the clinic? That one, too, was easy. They knew a useful loser when they saw one.
Maybe what was waiting for him under the thunderclouds up ahead wasn’t a totally undesirable fate. Maybe this was as good a place as any to cash in. He had spent most of his life waking up with a headful of spiders, then spending the rest of the day pretending they weren’t there. He had shot over the heads of Mexicans coming out of the desert, scaring the hell out of women with infants hanging in slings from their chests and backs. He had painted the American flag on the cliff above his house but had never been in the service. He was a religious hypocrite and a peckerwood bully. His mother took off with a trucker when he was three, and his father, whom he had loved, had placed him in an orphanage when he was nine, promising to return after working a pipeline job in Alaska. But he never saw his father again or heard what happened to him, if anything. Was everything a conspiracy against Cody Daniels? Or wasn’t it more probable that he was simply unwanted and, worse, unwanted for a legitimate reason? Gravity sucked, and shit always slid down the pipe, not up.
He felt his foot pressing on the accelerator. He had never thought so clearly about his life. The thunder rolling through the hills, the smell of the ozone, the cold tannic odor of the rain and dust, the branches of the mesquite and scrub oak bending almost to the ground all seemed like the pages of a book flipping before his eyes, defining the world and his role in it in a way he had never thought possible. Let Temple Dowling and his men do their worst. What was so bad about ending here, inside an electric storm, inside a clap of thunder that was as loud as God slapping His palms together?
Cody had all of these thoughts and was almost free of his fear when he drove into Anton Ling’s yard and his headlights lit up the scene taking place by the windmill. Then he remembered why he had been so afraid.
CHAPTER TEN
Two men were holding Anton Ling by her arms. Her bare feet were bloody, her wrists duct-taped behind her. They had just lifted her out of the tank. Four other men stood close by, watching. All of the men were masked and had shifted their attention from Anton Ling to Cody. The only person not staring at him was Anton Ling, whose head hung on her chest, her wet hair wrapped around her cheeks. Cody Daniels braked and stared back at the men staring at him. He felt he had walked into someone else’s nightmare and would not be leaving it any time soon.
He opened the door and stepped out of his vehicle, the engine still running. The ground seemed to shake with thunder, pools of quicksilver rippling through the clouds. “Howdy, fellows,” he said.
No one answered him. Why did they look so surprised? Hadn’t they heard or seen his truck coming? Maybe the sound of the engine had gotten lost in the thunder. Or maybe Temple Dowling’s people had recognized his truck and had already dismissed his presence as insignificant. “It’s me. Cody Daniels. What’s going on?” he said.
“Turn off your engine and lights and get over here,” a tall man said.
“I was just doing like y’all told me. Keeping an eye on the place and all. I don’t think y’all should be doing this to Miss Anton.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then cut your engine and your lights.”
“Yes, sir, I’m on it,” Cody said. He reached back in the cab and turned off the ignition and headlights. He looked at the sky in the east and the wind flattening the trees on the hillcrests and the darkness that seemed to extend to the edges of the earth. “Boy, this has been a frog-stringer, hasn’t it? Where’s Mr. Dowling at?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Motoring around and such.”
“Motoring around?”
