Will Chaser would have been in the back of a truck, or a car trunk, or beneath a blanket in the backseat. It would have been dark. The car stopped for a reason, then hurried off for a reason: tire tracks and duct tape had been left on the road. A bloodied wrench nearby. The Cuban Program produced three bona fide monsters, Malvados, but they were also pros. They wouldn’t have made stupid mistakes.
I interrupted myself. Realized my brain was plodding along, projecting a scaffolding of probabilities instead of perceiving-typical.
Screw it.
Tomlinson was Tomlinson. I was me, a cognitive plodder like most people.
I angled down the hill just to see what there was to see, testing bits of scaffolding as I went, discarding most pieces, accepting a few.
A bloodstained wrench. Left by the Cubans, it meant Will Chaser was dead. If the kid had escaped, he wouldn’t have stuck around to do battle using a tire iron. Anyone in their right mind would have run and kept running.
Dead, yes. Logical.
What wasn’t logical was the Cubans leaving behind the murder weapon. I had witnessed their articulate abduction. More likely, some local guy had knocked part of a knuckle off while changing a tire and thrown the damn wrench in a rage.
I was near the fence. I knelt and picked up a baseball-sized rock, intending to see if I could lob it to the road. For some reason, I stopped. Stood there feeling the weight of the rock, its mineral density. Smooth, river-sculpted.
I studied the rock for no particular reason. Brown rock, a glacial oval. One point was stained black: earth tannin, I guessed. Or…
I was cleaning my glasses when Sudderram called, “Have you gentlemen seen enough? They spent three hours here.”
The search team, he meant.
I looked from the rock to the road as a bit of scaffolding returned to my mind for review. If left by the kidnappers, did a bloody wrench guarantee the Indian kid was dead? Will Chaser was different, I had been told. Handled anger differently: He’s so silent!
Maybe the teen had attacked one of the Cubans. The interrogator nicknamed Farfel had to be in his late fifties. Hump looked a lot younger, Harrington had said, a giant. Even so… The kid had a temper. Maybe he’d gotten so mad that he couldn’t stop himself. Possibly got some solid licks in before he ran.
I bounced the rock in my hand, thinking about it. Imagined the kid with the wrench in his hand, hammering at some hulking guy POWs had called Hump; the guy spinning, trying to get away, before the kid lunged toward the fence, possibly injured-the size difference made it likely-then ran for the barn because horses were familiar. The only home a kid like Will Chaser had ever known…
Wasting time, Ford. It’s a Tomlinson fantasy.
I realized I was playing a game. I was seeing what I wanted to believe. Astrologers and Tarot-card frauds made their living playing the same game.
I dropped the rock in the weeds. I returned to the car.
15
Will Chaser was reviewing, punishing himself with what he could’ve done and what he should’ve done, a key moment being when he’d bounced the rock off the Cuban’s head and ran.
Instead of throwing the damn thing, he should’ve pulled the rock from his pocket when he was on Buffalo-head’s back and beat him unconscious. A lug wrench is unwieldy, badly balanced. But a smooth chunk of granite had heft to it. It was as dependable as a hammer and wasn’t as easily deflected as a light piece of steel manufactured by Chrysler.
A tomahawk. Same concept.
The boy winced when he made the association.
A tomahawk. I had a damn tomahawk! But I threw it instead of using it the way it was meant to be used.
Some warrior. A dope, that’s what he was.
Will replayed the encounter but changed his selection of weaponry. He pictured himself swinging the rock, like a hatchet, dispatching Buffalo-head, before turning his attention to Metal-eyes, who he would charge and… do what?
Metal-eyes had a pistol with laser sights. A tomahawk didn’t stand much chance against a gun, unless…
That’s when I should have thrown the rock! Drill the old bastard right between the eyes. Grab his gun and kick him a few times for luck, see how he likes having his ribs busted.
Metal-eyes, that’s who the boy wanted to beat into unconsciousness. After what he’d done to Cazzio?
That sonuvabitch!
It was painful even thinking about it, so Will allowed the fantasy to drift, then vanish. He was making excuses for what had happened to the horse and he knew it.
Hindsight isn’t twenty-twenty, it’s an excuse for following some asshole know-it-all instead of your own instincts.
Otto Guttersen-a man who didn’t feel kindly toward assholes or excuses. It was true. What had happened happened.
Will was on his back, hands, legs and mouth taped once again, in the darkness of what his nose told him was a horse trailer or possibly a stall, although a trailer created a distinctive echoing effect when there was a noise outside.
Yeah, a horse trailer most likely. A big one, fairly new.
Fresh paint, a recent grease job. He could smell that, too.
Over the last few hours, there had been some noise. Sound of vehicles coming and going, the mumble of distant conversations. But nothing close, until Will heard what might have been the panting of a dog as it sniffed around, taking his time, acting important, the way dogs do before choosing a tire to piss on. The boy had tried to make some noise of his own, inchworming over the floor, until a distant whistle called the dog away.
The only other noise he heard was every hour or so when Buffalo-head returned to make sure Will wasn’t chewing himself free again. The man walked like Frankenstein in the movies, his feet slow and heavy. He would crack the door, shine a flashlight, then hurry away. The Cuban was afraid of him, that was obvious, never spoke a word.
Will liked that. But during the hours of darkness, even the satisfaction of scaring the hell out of Buffalo-head grew boring, so he spent most of his time replaying his escape attempt.
It came back so clearly, it was like there was a movie screen behind Will’s eyes, but the movie didn’t play beyond that instant when he heard the whap of the first gunshot and then later felt Cazzio’s muscles spasm rock-hard as the horse struggled to run, shuddering as if jolted by electricity.
Up to that frame of the movie, though, Will’s memory could review it all scene by scene, seeing himself, seeing the horse, and the Cubans, too, as if a camera was mounted above them on tracks. Will knew how TV westerns were filmed-he and Old Man Guttersen had watched a documentary on the great director John Ford-so he could imagine the camera placement if he wanted to.
He wanted to. What had happened happened, but that didn’t mean Will couldn’t change a few scenes here and there. It made events more tolerable because if they had been filmed for a movie, it was all pretend. Something he could do over until he got it right, replaying scenes, editing, cutting, muting sounds he didn’t want to hear. A horse’s scream, a whinny that bubbled from Cazzio’s chest-just one of the sounds he never wanted to hear again.
Pretending there was a camera made it bearable, so that’s what he did.
Will’s favorite scene: He was back in Cazzio’s stall, mounted on the horse, holding the syringe-tipped spear. He could watch his own silhouette, as he cut a handful of hair, tied some to the spear and knotted the rest into the horse’s mane.
It brought the feeling back: a warrior sensation. Powerful… real, not like the drunks playing Indian back on the Rez. Will clung to that feeling. Wanted to hold on to it.
Why not? Gives me something good to think about until they bury me
… or I get another chance to escape.
Maybe he would. Will had been chewing at the tape and now almost had his hands free. Buffalo-head didn’t have the nerve to take a close look.