This Wicked World (14 page)

But it’s true. He’s working on a retirement plan for himself. If this thing that Benjy is setting up comes through, he’ll have enough cash to last him for as long as he keeps ticking. He’ll finish the house, pay off his debts, and then he and Olivia will sit back and watch sunsets and drink margaritas until they’re bored to death with each other.

A buzzard circles in the distance, its ragged black wings outstretched, its shadow sliding over the rocks below. Spiller takes a deep drag of his cigarette, tilts his head back, and fires off a few smoke rings.

“Boss,” he says, “I want to come right out with you about something.”

“No, you can’t suck my cock,” Taggert says.

“Seriously, bro,” Spiller says. “You know I’ve been in a custody fight with that whore I was married to for half a second and that part of the deal is I got to have some of my ink removed.”

Taggert looks down at his own forearms, which are covered with ancient tattoos that have faded into mush.

“Well, that shit’s expensive, the treatments,” Spiller continues. “And what I was wondering is, I think I’ve been doing good work for you these past few years, and it seems to me that it’s time I get a bigger cut, if you see what I’m saying.”

Taggert puts his palms behind him on the slab and leans back. The concrete is already warming up. He wouldn’t trust Spiller in a dark room with a sharp knife, but the weasel does what he’s told and isn’t afraid to mix it up if it comes to that. Has it really been three years he’s been part of the crew? Must be. He was around for the Russian thing and the AK-47s.

“I’ll never hold it against you, you asking for what you want,” Taggert says. “I mean, how else are you gonna get it, right?”

“So I’m gonna get it?” Spiller says.

“What if you don’t?”

Spiller frowns. Taggert can tell that he feels like he’s being fucked with and that he doesn’t like it.

“I might have to take on some side work,” Spiller says. “Stony’s been after me to ride with him on some shit.”

“Petrovich? Good luck. Word is ATF is all the way up his ass, and he’s going down any day now.”

“I’m just saying. That’s one thing.”

Taggert cups his hands over his eyes to cut the glare and squints down the hill toward where he thinks he saw a flash a moment ago — the sun on an old beer can maybe — but it’s gone now. He turns to face Spiller.

“You’re a good soldier,” he says. “I won’t play about that. Hold off on freelancing for a while, because between you and me — and I said between you and me — there’s something in the wind that could put us all in the black for a long time.”

“For real, man?”

“On my skin. Give me like a week.”

“That’s good to hear,” Spiller says. “ ’Cause I really don’t want to work for anybody but you.”

Taggert doesn’t tell Spiller that there’s no way he’d have let him work for anybody else, least of all Stony Petrovich, and that, in fact, he’s a little pissed that he’s even been talking to the guy. He swallows the bubble of anger in his throat and returns to thinking about tile, what color he’s going to use in the master bath, while Spiller removes one of his sneakers and shakes out a pebble that’s been bothering him.

A few minutes more, and they head back to the truck. They’re almost there when a rattle sounds, stopping them in their tracks. Taggert spots a huge Mojave green coiled in the sand a couple yards from where Spiller is standing. A real monster. Five feet long and as big around as an ax handle.

Spiller sees the snake, too, and all the color drains out of his face. “Hey,” he whines. “Help me, boss.”

“Keep still,” Taggert says.

As far as he’s concerned, rattlers have more right to be out here than he does, but if they make the mistake of challenging him, they’re going to get the short end of the stick. He walks over to the truck and leans in the open window to retrieve his vintage Colt, a big old cowboy-movie six-shooter that he carries in the glove box.

“Hurry,” Spiller says. “I think I’m gonna puke.”

Taggert finds a good spot, raises the revolver, and blows the snake’s head off, the shot echoing from rocky hill to rocky hill. Spiller’s legs give way, and he sits hard on the ground.

Taggert shoves the Colt into his waistband and takes out his lockblade. He walks over to the snake and cuts off its rattle, then whips what’s left of the beast into the scrub. When he goes to put the knife back into his pocket, it slips out of his hand and falls to the ground. Panic constricts him for an instant, a cold finger pinging his spine. It’s nothing, he thinks. Clumsiness. Still, he flexes the hand, opens and closes it, testing the muscles for weakness.

“P
HOENIX EYE
,” T.K. says, forming a fist from which the second knuckle of his index finger protrudes. “Very nasty if you catch someone in the throat with it, or the eye, or —” Before Virgil can react, T.K punches him in the hand, finger bone striking wrist bone. Virgil yelps and recoils as pain like an electric shock shoots up his arm.

“Yo, man, that ain’t cool,” Virgil says.

“You asked me to show you some stuff,” T.K. replies.

“That don’t mean you can whale on me though.”

Virgil walked out of the mobile home earlier to find T.K. practicing kung fu, kicking and punching imaginary opponents in what looked like some kind of lethal dance, his massive chest and arms gleaming with sweat. The big man said he’d teach him how to put the hurt on someone, but all he’s done for the past ten minutes is use him for target practice.

Virgil was tripped out to wake up here in the middle of nowhere this morning. It was so dark on the way in last night, there was no way to tell just how much nothing there was around. It’s freaky, all this dirt, all this sky, the sun sitting right on top of you, no place to hide. It makes him dizzy.

He’s pretty sure he’s not going to end up like Eton — at least it doesn’t feel like they’re about to shoot him every other second anymore — but when Taggert banged on the door this morning, man, Virgil almost swallowed his tongue. The guy is all the way o.g.: silver hair slicked straight back, thick goatee, prison muscles straining the sleeves of his T-shirt, a gnarly scar on his throat. An older dude, sure, but one who could break you in half if you crossed him. And that voice of his, a rusty whisper that you’re forced to listen closely to because you don’t dare ask the man to repeat himself.

“Okay, throw a couple jabs at me, then a right,” T.K. says.

Virgil’s ready to go back inside and see what channels the mobile home’s TV pulls in, but he puts up his dukes and tosses a few halfhearted punches.

“Stick some dick into it, boy,” T.K. says. “Let’s see some of that white power you woods are always going on about.”

Jab, jab, stopping inches from T.K.’s jaw, then a hard right.

“Better,” T.K. says. “Again.”

Jab, jab, right, and all of a sudden Virgil is bent backward over T.K.’s thigh, a sweaty forearm pressed to his throat. If T.K. hadn’t stopped him midfall, he’d have ended up in the dirt.

“That was a sweeper kick, a great way to take someone to the mat,” T.K. says. He returns Virgil to his feet and releases him, and Virgil moves away, rubbing a twinge in his lower back.

“Forget this shit,” he says. “I ain’t nobody’s punching bag.”

T.K. wipes the sweat off his forehead with his palm and says, “You got to have patience. Guys come in and want to be Jet Li right off the bat, but it doesn’t work like that.”

“How long till Taggert and Spiller get back?” Virgil asks. “I’m fucking starving.”

“Couldn’t say, man,” T.K. replies. “Nobody tells me nothing.”

Virgil walks over and sits on the steps of the mobile home. A couple of dogs are barking somewhere nearby. They’ve been at it all morning. Virgil picks up a stick and drags it through the sand, drawing naked women, while T.K. goes back to practicing punches and kicks.

“So what are you, man? Chinese, black, what?” Virgil asks.

“When they ask, I check ‘other,’ ” T.K. replies.

“You been with Taggert long?”

“Couple three years or so. Me and Spiller joined up about the same time, after his old crew fell apart.”

“What happened?”

“Ah, you know, something about somebody fucking somebody else’s. Taggert’s a legend, so I jumped at the chance to get in with him. He stood up to the Mexicans, the Colombians, the Angels. He’s a fearless motherfucker.”

T.K. keeps going. He tells Virgil how Taggert was born in Kentucky into a family of coal miners and moonshiners, how he was drafted right out of high school and did a tour in Nam but was finally booted out of the service for being part of a ring that was hawking weapons stolen from the base armory.

He tried mining after that, concluded that it was a job for men who sold themselves cheap, and eventually ended up in Louisville, where he fell in with a local mover who taught him to run whores, put money on the street, and set odds. The mover disappeared a few years later, and Taggert took over his operation, adding dope dealing to the menu. This didn’t sit well with certain old-timers. A shooting war broke out, and lots of people from both sides fell into shallow graves. Taggert came out on top but a year later went down for a truck hijacking and did a bit in the Kentucky state pen.

It was 1979 when he got clear of that, and he decided to kiss the Bluegrass State good-bye and try his luck in California. Washing up flat busted in San Diego, he quickly found work smuggling Mexicans and marijuana across the border and in time put together his own crew and started pulling off jobs — bank robberies, credit card scams, shakedowns — all over the Southwest. He took another fall in the early nineties — assault — and did a couple years behind that, which is when he got his throat cut and fucked up his voice. It’s been up, up, and away since then though. People want a car, they come to Taggert. Dope, guns, explosives, chemicals — the man has connections.

And he’s still as tough as he ever was. There’s the story about him walking into a bar in Tijuana, blowing away three crooked
federales
who fucked him over on a coke deal, then spending the afternoon drinking mescal with his boots propped up on the corpses. Or how about when he drove five miles north on the southbound side of the freeway to shake the CHP?

“See, what it is, he doesn’t give a shit about dying because he should be dead already,” T.K. says. Having finished his workout, he crouches in the shade next to the mobile home. “His granddad, his dad, his brother, they all died from strokes before they hit forty. His uncle lived through his but wound up paralyzed, being fed through a tube. The poor bastard couldn’t see, couldn’t swallow. Taggert finally snuck in one night and pulled the plug on him.

“All them dying like that? From the same thing? Taggert is cursed, and he knows it. Any minute now some fucked-up little vein in his head will pop, and he’ll either be dead or drooling all over himself and shitting in a diaper. He stares at death in the mirror every morning and carries it around inside him every day, and that gives him all the power in the world. Look into his eyes next time you get close. The end of everything is in there. You can’t reason with a man like that. You can only kill him or follow him.”

Virgil shivers, a little spooked. “Damn, man,” he says. “You ain’t hungry yet?” He should have brought some weed, that’s for sure. Definitely should have raided Eton’s stash before leaving the house. He stands and stretches, and a cloud of dust catches his eye, a truck speeding up the dirt road toward the ranch. Taggert and Spiller. Virgil’s legs shake and his heart races. Goddamn T.K., talking all that shit.

B
OONE WAKES BEFORE DAWN AND CAN’T GET BACK TO SLEEP
. He tosses and turns for an hour or so, his mind swirling with thoughts of Oscar Rosales. The kid was no saint, but by all accounts he was trying to do the right thing by Maribel and the baby, trying to get his life on track. So how, then, did he wind up being mauled, and who frightened him so badly that he refused to seek treatment for the wounds? Exactly what kind of craziness did he run into out there in the desert?

Boone’s brain feels like it’s going to explode, so he gets up and takes a cold shower, trying and failing to wash Oscar out of his thoughts. He walks into the living room afterward and notices a puddle of vomit on the floor.

“Did you do that?” he says to Joto.

The dog, curled up on the ragged comforter Boone laid out for him to sleep on, opens his eyes briefly, then closes them again. Boone kneels beside him and puts his fingers to the animal’s nose. It’s warm to the touch. Not a good thing, Boone remembers hearing somewhere.

He and Amy are supposed to go to breakfast at nine. At eight thirty he walks across the courtyard to her bungalow.

“You’re a little early,” Amy says when she opens her door. She’s wearing jeans and a red tank top, and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail.

“There’s kind of a problem,” Boone says. “The dog’s sick. He’s been throwing up and seems really lethargic. I hate to flake on you, but I should probably get him to a vet.”

“The poor thing,” Amy says. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Please,” Boone says. “I know squat about animals, so maybe I’m freaking out over nothing.”

Joto barely reacts when they walk into Boone’s place. Amy sits on the floor beside the dog and lifts his head to peer into his eyes.

“I’m not an expert or anything, but I think you’re right to be worried,” she says. “Do you have a vet?”

“I didn’t even have a dog until last night,” Boone replies.

“My friend is a total animal nut. If you want, I can check with her and see if she has any recommendations.”

“That’d be awesome.”

While Amy is at her place, making the call, Boone lifts the bowl of water sitting next to the comforter to Joto’s mouth to encourage him to drink. His tongue flaps once or twice, but then he turns away and drops his head onto the blanket. Boone fingers a scar on the dog’s flank, traces its path down his leg. “Don’t worry, buddy,” he says. “You’ll be all right.”

“Everything’s cool,” Amy says when she returns. “My friend told me about a vet in West Hollywood who specializes in pit bulls. I called, and she’s in the office this morning and can see you.”