So he was ready and eager to get going. But T.R. seemed to enjoy taking his time. Rufus sensed that this was, for T.R., a welcome break from whatever activities normally filled the schedule of such a man. For a minute he stood beside the chopper conversing with someone in the back seat, and Rufus’s ears picked up the solid mechanical chunking and snicking of well-oiled firearms being checked out. T.R. said something indistinct to indicate how fired up he was, then turned his back on the chopper and came crunching over the hard land toward where Rufus had set up his camp last night. It was at the end of one of T.R.’s ranch roads, where it fizzled out in a dry wash. The coordinates had been sent to Rufus yesterday over the encrypted messaging application that T.R.’s staff insisted be used for everything.
Rufus had offered to provide breakfast and meant to make good on it, so he’d deployed the awning on the side of the trailer
and set up a pop-up canopy as well. He had a camp stove going and was working on some huevos rancheros with red chile sauce. Coffee was ready and waiting. “Whoo! That smells good!” T.R. remarked from a distance. “We landed downwind of you.”
“Noticed. Appreciate the courtesy.”
“Did you find the accommodations to your liking?” T.R. asked wryly, holding up his hands and looking around. Though the creek bed was dry, there was apparently enough seasonal water to keep a sparse belt of trees going. Birds were singing in those. Life was good.
“I took the liberty of harvesting some mesquite,” Rufus said, nodding at a small but aromatic campfire, which he’d surrounded with some folding chairs.
“Be my guest. Plenty more where that came from,” T.R. said. “Nature’s bounty.” He threw Rufus a socially distant salute, which Rufus returned, and settled into one of the chairs. “Coffee’s right there, help yourself but don’t burn your hand,” Rufus said.
“Don’t mind if I do. Much obliged,” T.R. said and poured himself a mug of java from a fire-blackened pot. “So we gonna kill some pigs?”
“As many as you got time for, sir. I know where they live,” Rufus said. He was assembling the huevos rancheros from ingredients scattered around the burners of his stove.
“How’d you find ’em? What’s your process?”
“Satellite imagery tells me about where to look. I drive around in the truck to get the feel of the place. The sight lines. I look for signs. After that it’s all drones. Cameras on those nowadays is better than the naked eye. The pigs, you know, rub against trees to scrape the parasites off their bodies and that leaves damage on the bark that you can see.” Rufus looked up from his work. “Now, if I were here on a solo job, I’d have gone out and done the work on foot, in the dark. But since you was coming with the chopper I got caught up on my sleep instead.” He carried a tin plate over to T.R. and set it on the camp table next to him.
“Oh, mercy, that looks as good as it smells,” T.R. said, tucking a napkin into the neckline of a UV-blocking khaki shirt. “I thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Rufus returned to the stove, shut off the burners, and collected his own plate. “Think of it as me paying rent on this here campsite.”
“Say more about the drones, Red.”
Rufus pondered it as he chewed his first bite of food. “They’re like guns.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You go buy yourself a gun, say. It shoots bullets. Fine. Maybe you decide you want a custom grip. You buy that on the Internet. Turns out you need a special screwdriver to install the damn thing.”
T.R. chuckled.
Rufus continued, “So you buy the screwdriver. Maybe you buy a whole set of them. You throw those in a drawer. Time goes by. You end up replacing every single part of the original gun with something different. Maybe you got other guns too. Drawer gets full of old parts and special tools. It’s the same with drones, except worse.” He nodded at his trailer. “That’s my drawer.”
“Mm, if these eggs wasn’t so delicious I would request permission to come aboard and have a little old look round!”
“Plenty of time to finish the eggs and do that too,” Rufus said, though he already felt that they were running a bit late. He settled himself down by reflecting that he had killed a lot of pigs in his time, it was nothing new to him, and so what he really ought to be concerning himself with wasn’t killing even more of them, but rather satisfying whatever mysterious agenda T.R. McHooligan was pursuing. And this was a topic on which he could only speculate; but he had the sense that he was being recruited. Also, he had made love to a queen.