This Wicked World (26 page)

Virgil scrambles to his feet and examines his hand, ignoring Miguel’s laughter. A single puncture wound, where the dog nipped the tip of his middle finger, oozes blood. Virgil pops the finger into his mouth and sucks on it.

“You see that shit?” he asks Miguel. “Motherfucker charged me.”

“He’s fighting tonight,” Miguel says. “He’s nervous.”

The kid’s nutty, thinks dogs are almost human. He told Virgil the other day that they talk to each other like people do.

Virgil returns to the tub to replace the beer he dropped when he fell.

“They ever bite you?” he asks Miguel.

“I don’t make them mad,” Miguel replies. He picks up the beer can Virgil left in front of the cage and, after turning it over to make sure it’s empty, drops it into the trash bag he’s carrying.

“One bited the boss once though,” he says.

“Who, Bill?” Virgil says. “That must have been great.”

Miguel glances at the open door of the barn to make sure nobody is in earshot, then leans in close to Virgil and says, “No, man, no. It was very bad.”

He motions Virgil to the workbench. “I was only helping then,” he continues. “This other guy, Oscar, was taking care of the animals. The dog, Henry, he bited the boss’s hand. The boss says it was because he came from a black man.

“He make me and Oscar and Spiller hold the dog, then” — he picks up a pair of pliers off the bench and waves them around — “he pull all that dog’s teeth.”

“That’s fucking sick,” Virgil says.

“It was, man. So bloody, and the dog escreaming so loud.”

“My sister didn’t see it, did she?” Virgil asks. He can’t imagine Olivia standing by and letting that happen.

“No, she was in the house,” Miguel says. “Then the boss, he give Oscar a gun and tol him to take Henry away and kill him. But Oscar can’t do it because he love that dog, you know?”

“Miguel!” Taggert calls from outside. Miguel freezes like he’s been caught stealing, then rushes to the door. Virgil follows.

T.K. and Spiller have arrived in T.K.’s Explorer. Taggert and his guy, Benjy, are standing with them next to the truck.

“Yes, boss?” Miguel says.

“Unload this before it melts, throw it on those beers.”

T.K. opens the rear door of the Explorer. The cargo area is filled with bags of ice. Miguel trots down the road to the truck without another word, his feet kicking up little dust blooms.

Virgil ducks inside the barn before Taggert calls on him to help. He feels like hiding somewhere until tomorrow morning, when he plans to be out by the Explorer as soon as the sun rises, all packed up and ready to go.

O
LIVIA LEANS BACK
in the car seat on the patio of the house, exhales loudly, and tries again to thread her needle. She snagged the sleeve of her favorite blouse on a barbed-wire fence the other day and has decided to mend it so she can wear it tonight.

The problem is, she can’t sew. Mama Juju tried to teach her, but Olivia didn’t want to learn anything from that bitch. She knows how you start though — slide the thread through the tiny hole at the top of the needle — and the rest of it can’t be that difficult if every old lady in the world can do it.

Slowly, slowly. She doesn’t understand why her hands are shaking so much. It’s been hours since her morning coffee. Maybe she should smoke another joint. A drop of sweat rolls down her nose and hangs off the tip. The thread approaches the hole, bumps the edge once, twice, then slips through. She ties the ends of the length of thread together — she remembers that much — and picks up the blouse to examine the tear more closely.

The screen door opens, and Taggert steps out onto the patio. Ever since Benjy left a few hours ago, he’s been busy getting ready for tonight’s dogfight, ordering Virgil and Miguel around, sprinkling the parking area with water to keep the dust down, and changing the propane tank on the grill. He pops open a Dr Pepper and sits down beside Olivia on the car seat.

“I’m thinking I ought to yank another case of burgers out of the freezer,” he says. “Don’t want to run out like last time.”

Olivia shrugs, not looking up from her sewing. She can tell he’s excited about having his friends come to the ranch, and he loves fighting those dogs, but she’ll be damned if she’s going to buy into it. Not when he hasn’t said word one about the counterfeit bills since that night in the bedroom, even though he promised to fill her in on what happened at the meeting with the Mexicans. And what were he and Benjy talking about earlier, in the kitchen? The fucker probably thinks that if he puts her off long enough, she’ll say, “Oh, well,” and give up her demand for a cut, but he’s dead wrong.

“You gonna chop the onions and lettuce and stuff?” he asks.

“Soon as I finish this,” she snaps, letting him know she’s irritated with him. She jabs the needle through the blouse, draws her first stitch tight. It looks like crap, the fabric all puckered, and the second is even worse. She has to stop herself from ripping the blouse to pieces.

The sun drops below the patio’s awning, and a wave of warm red light washes over her and Taggert. Pretty soon the surrounding hills will take on that color as the day slowly dies. Taggert leans back in his chair and fiddles with his glasses, which are hanging around his neck.

The goats are crying down at the barn. T.K. and Spiller toss a football in front of the bunkhouse, and their occasional exclamations drift lazily up the hill a second or so after they leave their mouths, a disconcerting trick of distance.

“Okay, so listen,” Taggert finally says. “Tell me what you think of this.” He leans forward and motions for her to do the same, then uses his index finger to draw two parallel lines about a foot apart, one above the other, in the dust that covers the patio. “That’s Interstate 15,” he says, pointing at the top line, “and that’s the 40.”

He scratches another line, this one joining the midpoint of the top line to the midpoint of the bottom line. “This here’s a little dirt road that runs between the two freeways through a patch of desert called the Mojave Preserve,” he says. “Nothing on it but an old ghost town.” He makes a dot on the new line, right in the middle. “Ghost town. Got it?”

Olivia nods.

“Now, come Tuesday, there’s two cars, ours and theirs,” Taggert continues. “Two cars, two people in each, no guns. That’s the setup. They’ve got one million in funny money, we’ve got $150,000 of the real stuff. They come down from the 15 on the dirt road, we come up from the 40, and we meet in the town.” He taps the dot. “An old post office, a couple of abandoned houses. No people, not for years. Just snakes and shit. So we meet there, make the exchange, then they drive out the way we came in, and we go out the way they came in. Done deal.”

Olivia examines the map. She can’t believe that Taggert is giving her so many details and wants to come up with something that’ll show him she’s on the ball. “What’s to stop them from coming in with twenty guys and a whole bunch of guns?” she says.

Taggert smiles. “Aha!” he says, then leans over and makes two new dots at both ends of the dirt road, where it intersects the freeways. “We’ll have a guy here, where the road meets the 15, to check their car, and they’ll have someone down at the 40 to inspect ours. If everything’s cool, our guy calls to let us know. Same with their guy and them.”

He sits up and rubs the dirt off his finger with his thumb, then sips his Dr Pepper.

Olivia continues to stare down at the map. The plan seems awfully complicated. “What’s wrong with meeting in a parking lot somewhere?” she says.

Taggert shrugs. “Benjy said they’re paranoid as shit about surveillance cameras and that this is the way they do things in Mexico. He said if I want in, it’s how it’s got to be.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Olivia says.

“The way I look at it, they’re taking as big a chance as I am,” Taggert says. “They don’t know me from Adam either. We’re all going into this with our dicks hanging out.”

“Is it worth the risk?” Olivia asks.

Taggert nods. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. I’ve tucked my tail too many times, missed out on big scores because I was too goddamn cautious. This one’s mine. I want it, and I’m going to get it. Now that doesn’t mean I’ve got my eyes closed. At the first sign of anything fishy, I’m out. These guys seem like the real deal, though, and you know what, fuck it, I’m the real deal too.”

Olivia picks up the blouse from her lap and begins sewing again. Her mind’s not on the task though; it’s just something to get her hands moving. Her heart is pounding as she says, “So what’s my part in it?”

“Not this one,” Taggert says.

“But you promised.”

“I did not.”

“You said —”

“I said I’d see if there was somewhere we could use you, and I’m sorry, but there isn’t.” He reaches over and squeezes her knee. “Something’ll come along soon, though, I promise.”

Olivia’s disappointment instantly, uncontrollably swells into rage. She digs her nails into her palms and swallows hard.

Taggert sits there drinking his soda and staring out at a dust devil whipping across the yard. All kinds of junk is caught up in it — a Doritos bag, newspaper, part of a
NO TRESPASSING
sign. Olivia watches him watch the swirling column.

When the dust devil passes, Taggert turns to her and says, “What’s that you’re doing there?”

“Fixing a rip,” she replies.

Holding out his hand, he says, “Let me see.”

She passes him the blouse. He squints at her handiwork, then remembers his glasses on the chain around his neck and puts them on.

“This is all fucked up,” he says. “Didn’t your mom teach you anything?”

Olivia doesn’t reply. She’s got to hold back, not come at him with her claws out. Taggert reaches into his pocket for his knife and uses it to tear away her awkward stitches.

“Gimme the thread,” he says. She hands it to him, and he unspools a length, runs the end of it through his lips and rethreads the needle in nothing flat. “Amazing, the shit you pick up in the joint,” he says as he sets to work on the blouse.

When she can’t control herself any longer, Olivia says, “I could go with you to the ghost town. All that’s gonna happen is a few bags changing hands.”

Taggert looks at her over the top of his glasses and says, “It’s not gonna happen, babe. These Mexicans are macho motherfuckers, and they don’t let their women get involved in their business. They’re just waiting for me to fuck up, and I can’t be throwing curveballs our first time out. Maybe later, when they trust me more, you can ride along, but not this time. No way. Put it out of your head.”

He resumes sewing.

Olivia is so angry, she has to work hard to draw a breath.

The man’s such a fucking liar. Tears sting her eyes, and she barely manages to get out, “It’s always going to be something, isn’t it?” without sobbing.

“Look, if this is about you having your own money, I’ll start paying you for all the stuff you do around here,” Taggert says. “Cooking and cleaning and everything.”

Olivia springs to her feet and says, “I don’t cook, Bill. I don’t clean. All I do is fuck you. Is that what you’re going to pay me for?”

Taggert looks up at her pleadingly. “Please, babe, not tonight,” he says. “I got all these people coming and everything.”

Olivia can’t stand looking at his ugly face any longer, can’t talk to him. She runs into the house, slamming the door so hard, the window in it cracks. Across the kitchen she goes, down the hall and into the bathroom, where she presses a towel to her mouth to muffle her screams of frustration.

B
OONE WORKS THE DAY SHIFT AT THE BAR, THEN GETS
on the road about six, headed east on the 10, after throwing an extra shirt and a toothbrush into a backpack and leaving the key to his bungalow with Amy so she can feed Joto. Off to visit an old Marine buddy, he tells her. The real deal is, he’s going to find Taggert’s place this evening, sleep somewhere in the Olds, then approach the guy tomorrow morning, have a little chat about dogs and such, see if he can shake anything out of him.

Traffic is heavy all the way to Pomona. Boone watches the sun sink lower and lower in the rearview mirror and listens to what passes for country music these days on the radio. He’s nervous about what lies ahead, can’t stop tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.

L.A.’s sprawl dries up somewhere past Banning, giving way to ugly scrubland and wind-scoured hardpan. Boone pushes the Olds to eighty-five as he zips past the outlet malls, the Indian casino, then drops into the Gorgonio Pass. The two tallest mountains in Southern California rise straight up from the desert to scrape the purpling sky on either side of the freeway, San Gorgonio to the north, San Jacinto to the south.

The hundreds of towering high-tech windmills arrayed in martial ranks on the surrounding hillsides and plains whirl silently, transforming the energy of the ceaseless wind into electricity. They’re ominous in the half-light of dusk, a new species freshly risen from the sand pausing to gather strength before marching to the sea.

A mile or so past the turnoff for Palm Springs, Boone leaves the 10 and drives north on the 62, which passes through Yucca Valley and Joshua Tree before becoming the main street of Twentynine Palms. The little town is sandwiched between Joshua Tree National Park and the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, the largest Marine base in the world, home to ten thousand jarheads and their families. It doesn’t look to Boone that it’s changed much since he and his unit came out here for war games when he was a grunt: the same barbershops offering cheap high and tights, the same tattoo parlors, the same fast-food restaurants, the same joyless cinderblock bars.

He pulls into a gas station to buy provisions for his car camp-out. A chime ding-dongs when he walks through the door, and the clerk, a ravaged old speed freak with a homeless tan and no front teeth, waves and calls out, “Hi, howdy, how you doing?”

The only other customer is a heavyset Indian woman pushing an empty baby stroller and wearing a T-shirt with the American flag and an eagle on it. She and the clerk talk about someone named Dodo, who just went to jail, while Boone picks up a bottle of water, two cans of Red Bull, a couple of Snickers bars, and two tuna sandwiches sealed in triangular plastic containers. That should get him through the night.