The highway is little traveled at this hour, in this weather, but there has been no Armageddon that made the world a graveyard. Someone is likely to come along at any moment.
Michael gets to his feet and tosses the gun into the drainage channel, where it vanishes under the rush of muddy water. He grips the dead man by the ankles and drags him off the blacktop, onto the shoulder of the highway, and rolls him into the same ditch. Although the current is swift and the runoff is deep enough to cover Masud, the corpse is not borne away. Animated by trapped air, a portion of the black raincoat swells above the turbulent surface of the runoff, shuddering and strange, as though a vengeful spirit strains to free itself from the body in which it can no longer enjoy life.
Badly shaken by what he’s done, Michael looks at the tortured shapes of the apple trees, which stand in cryptic testament to the history of humanity. He remembers Nina telling him this valley is as near to Eden as anywhere she’s ever seen; that was when the orchard was productive. Knowledge is transformative and elevating, but it isn’t a reliably sweet fruit. They say that, from the first Eden, innocents came naked into the outer dark with the bitter knowledge of lost immortality and a grim recognition of a new life measured in meager years that quicken to the grave; worse, they soon learned that although they must submit to death, they could also subject others to it on as little as a whim, and for some that became a pleasure. Michael takes no pleasure in it, and he hopes that he won’t have to kill anyone else. His duty to Nina and John, however, will require him to do what must be done. Killing and murder are different things, and killing evil men to prevent them from murdering others is not wicked work. Just the same, he’d rather not be burdened by such memories as the sound of flesh splitting and facial bones shattering under the hammering butt of a pistol.
He returns to the Bentley and retrieves the AR-15 and closes the driver’s door. He hurries south, looking for an entrance to the orchard that bridges the flooded drainage ditch.
UNNERVED BY MEMORIES
One end of the sodden hundred-dollar bill floats in the rippled surface of the packing-house flood, and the other end is pasted to the concrete threshold over which the murky water laps and recedes. The wise, sad eyes of Benjamin Franklin gaze up into the light with which Jason reveals this evidence, which is more than a clue but less than proof that Nina and the boy might be sheltering in this place. The bill is neither filthy nor half rotted away, but clean and whole, as though it must have been dropped here minutes earlier.
Soaked and chilled and muddied, denied the comfort of the SUV and the convenience of a phone, mocked with “Macarena,” foiled and humiliated by a woman who seems to have the power of a true witch, Aleem is in a homicidal mood. His fury is so great that he dares not show it. A man of his position can’t afford for his crew to see him ruled by emotion. At all times, he must be perceived as in iron control of himself, dispassionate and obdurate in his pursuit of his goals. An excessively emotional man—even if the emotion is furious anger expressed with vicious cruelty—is thought to be a weak man, one who will be relentlessly plotted against by his underlings. When he finds Nina, he’ll kill her quickly, lest the delight of seeing her torn by pain becomes too much to contain. To compensate for abstaining from the pleasure of torturing her, he’ll destroy her spirit. He’ll cast her into despair by shooting John twice in the face, in front of her, before blowing her brains out, thus killing her twice, and he will do so with apparent indifference.
Puzzled by Aleem’s silence and his continued focus on the hundred-dollar bill, Jason says, “You with me here?”
“Speedo,” Aleem says. “Go back and find your phone, see does it work now. It don’t, then hike into town, call Modeen and Lincoln.”
Speedo is a tough little bastard, but he’s the smallest among the crew, the least useful in this action. Besides, of them all, he’s the one who can most easily pass for a church boy whose only gang is God and all His angels. Girls think he’s sweet and funny. Old ladies look at him and figure he spends his time delivering meals to shut-ins. Most men seem to view him as an earnest young hustler who probably delivers newspapers before school, mows lawns in the late afternoon, and works at the car wash on Saturdays.
“Remember,” Aleem says, “they bring plastic drop cloths and strappin’ tape, so we can wrap two burritos for Hector Salazar.”
Speedo is amused. “Give Hector some takeout for his afternoon at sea. I’m on my way, bro.”
Through all of that, the wet currency at their feet has held Aleem rapt, so that Jason says, “We goin’ in?”
“Gimme a minute,” Aleem says. “I’m thinkin’ out a strategy.”
That’s a lie. The events in the orchard have left the first-ever hairline crack in Aleem’s self-confidence. The hundred-dollar bill seems to be an omen, like the painting of the wolf in The Portent, which should have been a movie with sequels, except they killed off the entire cast and left nowhere to go with the story. After he saw that flick, he wondered if there might be truth in the concept of karma, if maybe the shit you did to others would sooner or later be done to you. The thought had bothered him for a day, maybe two, before he got over it. But now the hundred-dollar bill has brought back memories and spooked him.
When Aleem was seventeen, eighteen, the gang was led by Tatum Krait, whom nobody ever called Tatum, whom everyone called Mamba or sometimes Doctor Mamba, everyone but his father, Walter Krait, who despised him and called him Tumtum. Then a real mamba bit Walter, who died. After the results of the autopsy were revealed, the medical examiner declared the cause of death a rattlesnake bite because, for one thing, mambas weren’t native to Southern California and, for another thing, he understood that was what he needed to declare to ensure that nothing terrible would happen to his eleven-year-old daughter. Mamba saw Aleem as a young man of promise and groomed him for a leadership position, first by secretly assigning him the job as the axe in the human resources department. Sometimes a swing man gets greedy and too often steps on a shipment, cutting it too hard with baby laxative, until it’s bunk. Or an authorized dealer finds his own source and underreports sales. Or a mule is seen on a pier, pretending to fish side by side with a known DEA agent. Termination must ensue. So young Aleem cultivates an image as a party animal and get-along guy. No one he asks to a one-on-one meeting suspects where it will lead. When they are alone, he opens a bottle of whatever he knows his target prefers and pours and says he is speaking for Mamba, who wants to express his gratitude for work well done. With a second round, sometimes a third, Aleem is laying on the praise, swapping stories, sharing some laughs. When the mood is high, he produces three plastic-wrapped bricks of Benjamins, the thank-you from Mamba, thirty thousand. The doomed know full well what they’ve done, but they believe they’ve gotten away with it, always bask in the praise, and take the bonus with delight, Ben Franklin regarding them with his wise and sad eyes from every bundle of cash. On the way out of the room, Aleem puts his arm around his guest, telling him how valued he is, which is when he slams the stiletto between two ribs and into the heart. It’s part of his job, by himself, to get the body into a van, which he can do because he’s strong and has the right equipment, including a hydraulic hand truck. He drives the van to the funeral home with which Mamba maintains an arrangement. A cremation occurs. In the three years he’s the axe, he resolves seven such problems and begins his ascendancy.