Black Rust (24 page)

Why did I take Sienna into the woods with me?  I couldn’t answer that.  I’d killed the brute who’d tried to have his way with her and the choice to save her seemed to carry an irrevocability that didn’t make sense to me, especially given that she refused to accept my bribe. 

Was I buying time to convince her, or delaying a decision to solve the problem?  I wasn’t sure.

I’d never hesitated in pulling the trigger before, though something about the whole situation had me feeling like a marionette.  It occurred to me then, I needed to take a closer look around for puppet strings.

Listening to the modulated buzz of cicadas that seemed to get louder as the day wore on, I retrieved my clothes and weapons from where I’d hidden them in the forest and got myself dressed. 

Sienna was wearing a d-gen shirt she’d had a supply of in the building.  With the button popped off her jeans, she had them belted up with a piece of rope she’d found lying on the floor of the occupational therapy room outside her office.  Now she stood on the bank watching the reddish-brown water flow. “The river cuts through the southern soybean fields south of here.”

I nodded.

“Those fields are part of the farm.”  She pointed downstream.  “We’ll run out of forest before we get off the property.”

“If we can’t find a shallow place to wade across, we may have to swim it.”  The forest across the river ran twenty miles east.  Blue Bean property ended in five or six.  “Can you swim?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“This is more dangerous than it looks,” I told her.  “The water runs swiftly in places.” 

“Why didn’t we take my car?” she asked.

I looked up, listening for the sound that had been chasing me for a good part of the day.  “Buzz bikes were all over me—cop bikes before I got onto the property, Blue Bean-owned bikes later.  I’m not sure we can lose them in a car.”

“Maybe we can wait until dark.”  Sienna looked up to get an idea of the time.  “It’ll be easier than running through the forest at night.”

She was right about that.             

“Christian,” a voice sounded out of the trees.

I raised a weapon.

Sienna crouched into some bushes.

I stepped behind a tree, peeking around the trunk to see what I could see.

“Christian,” the voice repeated.  “I know you’re close.”

Sienna looked over at me with a silent question on her face.  “Who’s that?”

“Talk to me, Christian.”  The voice belonged to Lutz.  He wasn’t making any effort to be quiet.

I took a quick glance up the trail we’d followed along the river.  It looked clear.  I stepped over and squatted near Sienna and pointed back upriver.  “That big cypress tree back there, the one growing right on the bank.  You commented on it when we passed.”  It was maybe forty or fifty yards up the trail.

“What about it?”

“Go back there,” I told her.  “Hide nearby.  I’ll come get you in a little bit.”

“And if you don’t come?”

“I’ll be there.”  I had the strong suspicion bullets were soon going to be in the air.  Lutz was in the woods, miles from where he should have been, inexplicably aware of my location.  He was either bait in a trap, or he was a duplicitous backstabber in need of retribution.

Other possibilities?

I’d know soon enough.

Sienna ran up the trail.

I silently worked my way into the thickest undergrowth.

“Don’t run away,” Lutz hollered.  “Talk to me.”

He was drawing closer.

I waited, ready to ambush.

“Christian?” Lutz called, louder this time.

He was on the trail, just downriver, following it up.

Moments ticked slowly by.

Leaves crackled as he brushed past bushes.  Twigs snapped under his heels.  It was the noisy way he always moved through the woods.  The noise never bothered him because he was stupid enough to believe he was always the deadliest predator in the forest.  He’d only hunted d-gens, prey too stupid to associate Lutz’s racket with danger.

“Christian, you’ve stopped.  Good.  I’ll be right there.”

Odd thing to say.

A moment later, Lutz came into view.  Behind him nothing moved that wasn’t a natural part of the forest.  To my flanks, nothing made a sound.  He may not have been alone, but if so, he wasn’t with the dullards who’d hunted me earlier.

I stayed out of view as he closed in. 

“Christian,” he called.  “Come meet me halfway.”

He was on the trail just a few feet from me, and then he passed by.

I gave the trail behind him one more quick glance.  If a man was back that way, he was better at this game than me.

I silently stepped up behind Lutz, put the cold metal of a pistol barrel at the back of his neck, and grabbed his shirt collar to bring him to a stop and hold him in place.  I hissed, “Not a word.”

Lutz froze.  He knew my voice, and he believed every bit of the threat.

I tugged on the collar and steered him off the trail until we were twenty feet into the trees.  With an additional threat to keep him silent, I laid him down on his belly and took his belt to bind his feet.  Over his mumbled protests, I used his shoestrings to tie his hands.  I removed his boots, slipped off his socks, and knotted them into a gag.

When I was done, I leaned in close and whispered in his ear, “You be here when I get back.  If I hear any noise from you—a grunt, a shuffle, even a fart—I’ll kill you.”

I didn’t wait for an acknowledgment.  If he screwed up that simple set of rules, then he’d have to deal with the consequences.

I crept into the trees to search for his new friends I was sure had to be out there. 

Maybe I was too jaded by the lies of men like Lutz to accept that I was wrong in my assumptions, but after running through a fast search of the forest nearby I was frustrated—I’d found no ambush forming up to capture me.  Blue Bean’s security forces were off doing whatever they normally did to fill their days.

I jogged up the trail to make sure Sienna was okay and told her to stay put.  She had questions—a lot of them—but I had too few answers.  I needed to get some information out of Lutz and I wasn’t sure how hard I was going to have to push. I didn’t want a witness infatuated with her integrity there watching me if I did go too far.

I returned to the spot where I’d left Lutz.  I untied his hands and slipped the sock gag off his head.  I asked, “What’s going on?”

Lutz sat up, shaking his hands while opening and closing his fingers.  “You asshole.  I can’t feel my hands.”

“You probably can’t feel your feet either.”

He spit on the ground.  “My mouth tastes like ass.”

“They’re your socks,” I told him.  “Now you know the importance of good hygiene.”

“You’ve had your boots on since yesterday, just like me,” said Lutz.  “You wanna tell me what
your
socks taste like?”

“Like your mother’s kisses.” 

Lutz ignored me and looked around.  “Where’s Sienna?”

“Close by,” I told him.  “How did you find us out here?”

“They triangulated on her phone.  She’s on the company network.”

Dammit!

I’d not thought once about her phone.  I apparently had a blind spot there.  When I’d left Mexico, I’d been a finely honed weapon that didn’t blunder the details.  Too many months going soft while hunting d-gens in Texas was starting to look like a burdensome mistake that grew heavier at every turn. 

I wasn’t going to let the next screw-up slip by.  Triangulation on Sienna’s phone location was being done by a Blue Bean employee.  That meant Lutz was working with Blue Bean.

“You need to tell me a story,” I told him.  “And I’m going to run out of patience quickly, so you better make it captivating.”

Lutz ran through a quick version of how he’d been picked up by Blue Bean’s trustees and taken to meet with Keith Workman, the CEO of Blue Bean Farms.  “What you won’t believe,” said Lutz, to put an interesting climax on his little yarn, “is they want her dead, too.”

Trying to discern the lies, I stared at Lutz.  But it all sounded like lies to me.  Maybe I’d been in Lutz’s company too long.  Maybe my preconceptions were tainting my judgment.

“It’s true,” he affirmed.  “She’s causing Blue Bean all kinds of regulatory problems with the state.”  Lutz looked around.  “Is she close enough to hear us talk?”

I shook my head.

“Workman wants to do away with her.  That’s how all this shit started.”

“Are you telling me it wasn’t some random employee who called in the tip last night, it was this Workman asshole, the guy who runs Blue Bean?” It sounded like a stretch.  It sounded like lies.  “They wanted us to kill her accidentally.  Was that the setup?  They were going to sacrifice us to make their problem go away.”

“No, no,” said Lutz.  “We’ve got it all worked out.  You see, you just kill her and burn the body over there in the clearing.  When it cools, we haul it to the kill site, and we say she was already dead when we got there.  That’s the evidence we need.  That justifies the kill.”

“And what, we make another version of the video that shows her carcass on the fire?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Lutz agreed enthusiastically.

“And what about the police at the scene?” I asked.  “Won’t they wonder how a body magically appeared after they already checked out the site?”

“Details.”  Lutz threw his hands up as if all those little bits of fact could disappear in the breeze.  “We’ll figure something out.  We’ll have Ricardo make a video to match.  Easy.”

“And how do we pay Ricardo for whatever scenario you’re dreaming up?”

“We don’t,” said Lutz.  “Workman pays him.  And Workman puts his lawyers on our defense, makes sure we walk away free and clear.”

“Not believable, Lutz.”  The story was getting too farfetched.  “Why go to all that trouble?  Makes no sense.”

“That’s because I haven’t told you everything.”

“I’m out of patience, and I’m out of sarcasm.”  I drew an exasperated breath and scanned the bits of blue sky still visible through the trees looking for buzz bikes and drones.  I looked at the forest around me, looking for assholes with guns.  “Make it quick.”

“Workman knows about
Oscuridad
.  He knows about
Oxido
Negro
.”

I said nothing for a moment and then told him, “Get off that shit, Lutz.”

“He needs somebody from time to time to do things for him,” said Lutz.  “Off-the-farm kinds of things.  Down-in-Mexico kinds of things.  Blue Bean is going to expand.”

“Expand into a failed state?” I asked.  “That’s insane.”

“You’re
The Darkness
,” he told me.  “You can make it happen.  There’s nothing you won’t do.  I’ve told you, I researched you before I took you on as a partner.  He wants to hire us.  You get rid of the girl.  He pays to clean the mess up.  Then we work for him.”

I wasn’t biting.

“We’ll make a lot more money than we do now,” Lutz told me.  “But that’s not the best part.”

“What’s the best part?” Apparently I hadn’t run out of sarcasm.

“He’s going to pay your debt to the Camachos.”

How the hell did that story spread all the way up here?  “Nobody’s going to pay that much money.”  I snorted.  “It’s not like you can just send them a check.  Workman’s an idiot.”

“He’ll give you the cash.  You just take it to them.”

“Drive through lawless Mexico with a couple big bags of money?” I laughed.  “You’re an idiot.  And what happens when I get there?  I just knock on the door?  Drop it off?  Eat some menudo and talk about old times?  You think they’re just going to forgive and forget?”

“Wasn’t that your plan all along?” Lutz asked.

It was.  It’s just that its lunacy was much more obvious when spoken aloud than when swirling vaguely in my imagination.  “How the hell would you know what my plans are?”

“Things you said.” 

“I never said those things to you.”

“Yes, you did.”

I glared at Lutz.  Did I forget that?

“Pay them extra,” said Lutz.  “Pay them double.  It’s Workman’s money.  What the hell do you care?  The Camachos are businessmen.  They’ll take the profit and tell you to piss off back to Texas.  Let’s go get the Mercedes.  We can have the cash by morning.  We can head out tomorrow.  By this time next week, we’ll have it made.”

“The money isn’t the solution to my problem with the Camachos,” I told him.  “The money is the prerequisite.”

“What does that mean?” asked Lutz.

“My relationship with them is complicated.”  It was more complicated than my patience with Lutz allowed for discussion. 

And why the hell am I even admitting to Lutz I know the goddamned Camachos?

“Doesn’t matter,” said Lutz.  “Not one bit.  We get the money from Workman.  I’ll go down with you.  We do it together.  This is a great deal for us.  All you need to do is put a bullet in Sienna Galloway’s head, and we’re good as gold.”

“A bullet in her head?” I asked.  “Workman said that?  He wants me to do it that way?” I was laying traps for lies I could pin to somebody in particular, Lutz or Workman.

Lutz was thrown off by the question.  “Yeah, sure.  I mean, who cares, you know?  Like I said, you kill her.  Ricardo fixes the video however you like.  Workman pays the bills and his lawyers clean up the mess.”

I was thinking it was probably time to put a bullet in
Lutz’s
head.  Either he was a liar or Workman was.  I couldn’t figure which.

Lutz caught me looking at the river.  “Take the deal, Christian.  There are more than a hundred guys at the edge of the forest on this side of the river.  They’ll come in and get you if you don’t agree.”

That sounded like bullshit, too.

“They’re over there, across the river,” said Lutz.  “Maybe another hundred.  I don’t know for sure.  That’s just what Goose told me.”

More lies?

Hooking up with Lutz had been a mistake, one of those mistakes that takes a long time to bear its fruit.  The question in my mind was whether the fruit was poison or just thorny.

And now, standing here, listening to all his bullshit had my head spinning with trying to figure out which parts were true and which lies came from him and which came from Workman.

And a couple hundred halfwits with hunting rifles and shotguns were in the woods.

The count didn’t worry me because I knew I’d not be facing them all, I’d only have to deal with a handful, the ones in my way as I made my escape.  But if I killed them, my life in the States would end.  No, it was already over.

That was the aching point of clarity trying to find its way to the surface of my messy thoughts.

My life in the States ended the moment this Keith Workman asshole and his Goose Eckenhausen dipshit decided they were going to set up a couple of gullible Regulators to do their dirty work. 

I was the dumbass because I didn’t see the truth of it until now.

There’s got to be a way out!

Unfortunately, as I sat there looking at stupid, lie-spinning Lutz, trying to find my way out of the trap I’d stepped in, I couldn’t come up with an escape that didn’t involve me putting bullets in somebody’s head.

Maybe a much older choice—one I’d made down in Mexico nearly two years ago—was the mistake I was still paying for. 

And there I was thinking I’d already paid for that mistake with blood that was too precious to spend. 

I felt cold metal press against the back of my skull.

So caught up had I gotten in Lutz’s stupid yammering and my rotten thoughts, I’d let myself slip into another mistake, maybe my last.

I’d stopped paying attention. 

The barrel of the gun pressed harder against my head and a nervous man’s voice trying to feign bravery bellowed, “Don’t move, asshole.”