Darl swerved around the barrier his father had moved, opened up the Harley, the back wheel ripping a trench through the earth, and plowed into the steel cable that was stretched neck-high between two pine trunks.
His bike spun away into the trees, the engine roaring impotently against the ground.
The cable was thinner in diameter than a pencil, and Darl had tightened each end until the steel loops had bitten so deeply into the pine bark that the cable looked like it grew horizontally out of the trunks.
He died on his back, the headlight of his Harley shining across his face. His mouth was open, as though he wanted to speak, but the cable's incision had cut his windpipe as well as his jugular. When his father found him, three misshapen, emaciated dogs with spots like hyenas were licking Darl's chest, and Jack had to drive them from his son's body with a stick. The medical examiner later said the dogs were rabid. He refused to answer when a reporter asked if the dogs had found Darl before the time of death.
chapter thirty-six
But when I drove down the rutted road to the Hart Ranch that same night I knew of none of the events I just described.
The gate that gave onto the ranch was open, the padlocked chain snapped by bolt cutters. I turned off my headlights and drove the Avalon across the cattle guard, parked in a grove of mesquite, and slipped L.Q.' s revolver from its holster. Then I pulled six extra rounds from the leather cartridge loops on the belt and dropped them in my pocket and stepped out into the darkness. The revolver felt heavy and cold and strange in my hand.
The moon was above the hills, and I could see deer grazing in the glade between the woods and the river, and in the distance the roofless Victorian home that had been gutted by fire and the log and slat outbuildings and rusted windmill in back, wrapped with tumbleweed.
The edges of the house were silhouetted by a white light that glowed in the backyard. I moved along the perimeter of the woods, spooking coveys of quail into the darkness. The grass was almost waist high from the rain, and a set of car tracks stretched through the glade and ended where a 1970s gas-guzzler was parked in the shadows. A second set of car tracks, fresher ones, the grass pressed flat and pale-sided into the wet sod, led past the parked car to the back of the house.
I walked between the woods and parked car and looked through the car window. In the moonlight I could see the ignition wires hanging below the dashboard. From behind the house I heard a metallic, screeching sound like a board with rusted nails in it being pried loose from a joist.
I walked to the right of the house, through a side yard that was strewn with plaster and broken laths that looked like they had been ripped from the interior walls and thrown outside. A Coleman lantern as bright as a phosphorous flare hissed on the ground in the center of the backyard. Farther on, a blue van was parked by a barn with a tractor shed built onto one side, and through a dirty window in the shed a second lantern burned inside and the shadows of at least two men moved back and forth across it.
I crossed the yard, outside the perimeter of light. My foot went out into a pool of shadow, where there should have been level ground, but instead I stepped into a hole at least a foot deep, my ankle twisting sideways inside my boot, a pain as bright as the sting of a jellyfish wrapping around the tendons in my lower back.
The shadows beyond the window froze against the light.
Then I thought I heard L.Q. Navarro's voice say, 'The dice are out of the cup. Make 'em religious, bud.'
I limped forward and flung the door back on its hinges and pointed L.Q.'s revolver into the room.
Felix Ringo and a second man stood just beyond a worktable where Garland T. Moon was wrapped fast against the wood planks with chains that were clamped and boomed down on his chest and thighs. Moon's face was turned away from me, as though he were napping. The clothes of Ringo and the second man were streaked with soot and bits of hay and dried horse manure. Behind them, the flooring in the barn had been ripped up, the plaster board gouged out of a bunk area, a rusty hot water tank split open with an ax.
The room was hotter than it should have been, filled with a hot smell that at first I thought came from the lantern.
'You don't look too good, man,' Ringo said.
I could feel the muscles constrict across my back, just like someone had taken pliers to my spine. I propped one arm against the doorjamb and held the pistol level with the other.
The second man clutched a plastic bag full of credit cards in his hand. He had the scarred eyebrows of a prizefighter and small ears and hair so blond it was almost white.
'Both you boys put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees,' I said.
The second man studied my face, his tongue moving across his bottom lip. 'Fuck you, buddy,' he said, and bolted into the barn, crashing out the door into the yard.
But I didn't fire. Instead, I kept the.45 pointed at Ringo's face, my other hand holding on to the doorjamb for balance. When I took a step forward, the pain caused my jaw to drop open. I heard the van start up outside and drive out of the yard.
'You want to go to a hospital? I can do that for you, man,' Ringo said.
I eased my hand onto the worktable, inches from the JOX running shoe on Moon's foot, stiffening my arm for support. An odor like the smell of burned scrapings from a butchered hog rose into my face.
'Last chance, Ringo. Get on the floor,' I said.
'You're all mixed up. This is DEA. You don't got no business here.'
I pulled back the hammer on the revolver.
'Okay, man. My friend gonna come back with some local law. They gonna jam you up, man,' Ringo said, and knelt on the floor and laced his fingers behind his neck. He crinkled his nose, his mustache wiggling on his lip, as though he were about to sneeze.
I worked my way around the other side of the table. Moon's eyes were staring at nothing. The skin of his face looked shrunken on the bone, puckered and red like a rubber Halloween mask. The cloth of his flowered shirt was crisscrossed with scorch marks, and inside the scorch marks were lesions that looked like they had been cut into the skin with a laser.
The blowtorch was turned on its side by the far wall.
'I'll take a guess. Crystal coming in, counterfeit credit cards going out,' I said.
'Hey, the guapa you was in the sack with? Ask her. This is a federal operation, man. She gonna fuck you again, except this time you ain't gonna enjoy it.'
'If y'all were looking for some of your stash, you tortured the wrong guy. It was probably Darl Vanzandt and his friends who ripped you off.'
'You want to take me in? That's good, man. 'Cause I'm gonna be on a plane back to Mexico City tomorrow morning. So let's go do that, man.'
'I don't think so.'
His eyes studied my shirt front.
'What's that you got in your pocket?' he asked.
'This? It's funny you ask. A friend of mine dropped it down in Coahuila.'
A dark and fearful recognition grew in his face, like smoke rising in a glass jar.
I moved toward him, my hand sliding along the table for support. Inches away from my forearm, a viscous tear was glued in the corner of Moon's receded blue eye.
'I bet ole Moon spit in your face,' I said.
Felix Ringo rose to his feet and began running toward the back of the barn, his head twisted back toward me. He grabbed onto a stall door and pulled an automatic from an ankle holster and fired three times, the rounds slapping into the front wall, then he began running again. He passed a tack room and flung the plywood door open in his wake, his arms waving almost simultaneously, as though hornets were about to torment his flesh.