Roach turned to them, tears streaming down his face. ‘Hey, if you’re going to do this, just do it, OK?’
‘Why shouldn’t we torture you a little bit first, like your friends did with Aaron?’ Ty said. ‘Eyes front, cockroach.’
Roach complied.
Lock raised the SIG again. ‘Now, you have one chance and one chance only to tell us who you ratted Aaron out to.’
Roach sucked some snot back up his nose. He shuddered a sob. ‘He never told us his real name.’
‘He must have called himself something.’
‘Cowboy.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Like six two. Bigger than average. Real fit. He was in the military.’
Another look between Lock and Ty.
‘Ex-military?’
‘No, still serving. He was trying to get us to sign up too. He said that was the best shot the movement had. For as many of us as possible to join up, get the training and then use it when the time came.’
‘What unit was he in?’
‘He never said.’
‘Infantry? Air Force? Navy? What?’ Lock pressed the SIG into Roach’s back.
‘He just said something about Special Forces.’
Lock noticed Ty’s wry grin. Every wannabe Walter Mitty character — and the white supremacists had plenty of those — claimed some kind of connection to Special Forces.
‘Did he say where he was based?’
‘He said they came from all over, but he was down in Coronado.’
‘You got the Seals down there, far as I remember anyway,’ said Ty.
Lock jabbed the gun into Roach’s flesh. ‘That ring a bell?’
‘No. I swear.’
‘So this Cowboy guy came down and hung out round here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘After you told him about Aaron and who his father was?’
‘No, I met him before that.’
So much for Aaron dicking about on the wrong internet forums. The Feds had called that one wrong. Lock could see Ty thinking the same thing.
‘He come on his own?’
‘Apart from one time. There was a woman with him.’
‘Catch her name?’ Lock asked, his attention sharpening.
‘Chance,’ said Roach.
Lock sighed. Another street name.
‘What was she like?’
‘Like maybe twenty-five, twenty-six. Blonde. Super-hot. Nice rack.’
‘She military as well?’
‘No, but her father had been. She talked about him some. He was a martyr to the cause. You know, like David Lane and those guys in the Order.’
‘He was in the Order?’
‘No, he came after those guys. She said he was up in Pelican Bay.’
Lock breathed in sharply. ‘She have a name for him?’
‘No.’
‘Think hard, Roach,’ Lock said, pushing so hard into Roach’s neck with his gun that he could see a welt starting to form.
‘Cowboy called him something. It was kinda cool.’
‘Reaper?’
‘Yeah,’ said Roach. ‘That was it.’
52
Cowboy woke with a start. The engine was idling, and he was in the passenger seat. He started to sit up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
Before he could get an answer, Trooper floored it and Cowboy was flung backwards.
‘He’s up ahead.’
‘Jogging?’
‘Taking a walk. You know that little rise we came over when we got here?’
‘Yeah,’ said Cowboy, hauling himself up so he could see through the front of the windshield.
‘Well, right now, he should be just about over that.’
The speedometer of their SUV crept past fifty, then sixty. Either side of the road was grass and trees. They had to make sure they stayed on the road. And so did the man up ahead of them.
‘Keep the speed up but the revs down,’ Cowboy said. ‘He hears the engine, he’ll jump out of the way.’
‘OK, but he’s probably going to think it’s kids, not someone who’s aiming for him.’
Junius Holmes heard the car behind him as he crested the hill. There was the road and then three feet of asphalt beyond the white line where it was safe to walk. Anyone passing him, and recognizing him, might have guessed he was thinking about weighty matters. A case the Supreme Court had before it, or what he was going to say at a seminar he was to give shortly at Harvard about law and philosophy. In fact, he was thinking about what he was going to have for dinner. Even a justice of the highest court in the land had to eat, he told himself. He was thinking chicken, with mashed potato and broccoli.
Ahead of him there was a low roar — a big rig struggling to get up the sharp gradient. It wasn’t a road ideally suited to such a wide vehicle, but there was rarely much traffic here and it would be on the opposite side to where he was walking, so he didn’t deviate from his path.
The SUV was up to seventy now. They couldn’t see Holmes, so unless he had ducked into the woods to take a leak, he was just ahead of them over the hill.
‘OK,’ Cowboy said to Trooper, ‘keep that speed.’
‘Dude, you’re worse than my ex-wife. Shut the hell up and let me do this.’
Junius glanced round and saw an SUV behind him. Life didn’t go into slow motion. Instead, he froze like a rabbit for a second as the big rig which had climbed the hill shifted up a gear.
Cowboy could see Junius Holmes, but he could also see the driver of the big rig, who was shifting the path of his vehicle to avoid the pedestrian.
‘Do it then, man!’ he shouted at Trooper. ‘Do it now!’
53
They left Roach in the desert, naked and bleeding. A less than fitting punishment for him, thought Lock, but it would have to suffice. Ty had argued the merits of throwing him into a cactus bush, but Lock had countered by pointing out that most of the cacti out here were endangered species which didn’t deserve having a low-life such as Roach thrown at them.
They had thought about taking Roach up to San Francisco themselves (where Lock wanted to talk to Coburn) and handing him over to the Feds there, but they wanted away from this part of the state as fast as they could. No, Lock decided, once they had some distance they would put a call in to the authorities. If they got lucky with the timing, by the time Roach found his way back home he would have someone from federal law enforcement there to
