“Speak,” Larry said.
Cantu lifted his head. It took some effort. “You actually think your sister matters, Larry?” he said. “You really think her tired old cooze means a damn thing?”
When Mark hit him, he did it so fast and so hard that even Larry said, “Shit!” Mark backhanded Cantu across the face with his.38, driving his head sideways, and then caught him again for a forehand, using the pistol like a tennis racket, two fluid swings that left Sal Cantu howling into his hands, curled up and bleeding on the porch. Mark saw Larry shift from side to side, but his uncle didn’t say anything, just watched. Mark didn’t look him in the eye.
“You’ve got a dangerous impression of things,” Mark told Cantu, who was writhing in pain, blood running between his fingers. “You think you know why we came here, and what we want, and what we left behind. You don’t know any of those things.”
Cantu still had his hands up to his face, his fingertips looking as if they’d been dipped in red ink, but over them, his dark eyes were focused. He was listening.
“Allow me to introduce myself,” Mark said, kneeling down, “so you don’t have to suffer the pain of your misconceptions any longer. I’m Markus Novak, and I’m not here because of anything that happened with my uncle or my mother or any of the people you consider relevant in this situation. That’s important for you to understand. I’m here for something very different, all right? And I don’t have time to waste.”
Cantu breathed through his mouth and stared at Mark and didn’t speak. Mark looked at him for a moment and said, “You’re going to test my seriousness here, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “That’s a poor play.”
Mark stood up and holstered the gun and extended his hand to his uncle without looking at him. He kept his eyes on Sal Cantu.
“Let me borrow that slapjack.”
Larry didn’t hesitate. The weighted leather socked into Mark’s palm. He grasped it, stepped back, and took a couple of short practice swings, testing the feel. It was perfect; heavy enough but balanced and flexible. A craftsman’s answer to brass knuckles. Mark ran his thumb along the worn leather and advanced toward the bleeding man on the porch floor.
Sal Cantu watched him come and said, “I’ll tell you where to go, but you’ll get more than what you’re ready for. With Pate, you’d better believe that.”
“Sure. Where is he?”
“There’s a warehouse in Byron, maybe a mile out of town north on Route 5, toward the oil field. A big prefab deal with an eight-foot fence around it. Looks empty.” He was speaking to Larry now.
“But it’s not empty,” Larry said. “He’s there? Pate himself?”
“He’s there.”
“It’s a long drive if he isn’t.”
“Guess you’ll have to trust me.”
“Guess so,” Larry said, and then he reached behind him and withdrew the length of paracord he’d stuck in his pocket. He tossed it to Mark. “Hands and feet.”
Mark caught the cord, tossed the slapjack back to his uncle, and knelt to tie Cantu’s hands.
“Hey,” Sal said. “The fuck you think you’re going to do? I just told you-”
“When we find Pate, someone will find you,” Larry said. “Until we do, you’ll join the missing. Consider that, and consider if you want to give different directions.”
“Nobody’s tying me. I gave you what you needed, damn it.” Cantu struggled upright.
“Glad to hear it,” Larry said, and then he stepped forward and swung the slapjack again, and this time he had more than his wrist behind it. The lead-laced leather cracked off the back of Sal Cantu’s skull, and the big man dropped to the porch floor. Mark stared as blood dripped down the unconscious man’s face. Larry put the slapjack back in his pocket and looked at Mark with challenging eyes.
“You forget how to work a knot?”
Mark bound Sal’s hands and feet while Larry opened the cabin door. Then they hauled him inside. Larry found a dishrag, shoved it into Cantu’s mouth, and said, “Tie that in there good too. If he wants to breathe, he’s got a nose.”
“You believe those directions he gave are worth a damn?” Mark asked.
“Oh, I’m sure they’re worth something,” Larry said. “That boy isn’t the sort to send you on a wild-goose chase. He’s the sort to send you into a hornet’s nest.”
47
The recruitment of Doug Oriel had been Janell’s primary assignment in Florida. His combination of military-grade demolition skills and full-blown conspiracy-theorist paranoia was enticing to Eli, but his network of like-minded souls was even more intriguing. The problem with Doug was that he had a deep-seated distrust of the Internet, which meant Eli’s standard recruiting tactics were ineffective. Thus the decision to approach him in person.
For nine months, Janell had devoted herself to the coddling of this oversize child. In the miles since they’d left Ardachu’s house, she realized that it had all been a waste.
He didn’t speak for nearly two hours, and when he did, it was to demand that she drop him off at a bus station.
“A bus station,” she said. “That’s your idea of where you should go now? Only a few hundred miles from being a part of this, you want to stop and get on a bus?”
“Yes. I don’t want any part of this. Not anymore. Not with you.”
She gripped the wheel tighter. “You are not going to a bus station. We are going to finish the journey.”
“You can do what you want. I won’t be along for the ride.”
In the hours of silence, he’d managed to locate some confidence to fill in the places where before shock and horror had existed. He was sitting taller, his shoulders back and his big chest filling. Trying to make himself larger, the thing they told you to do if you stumbled across a mountain lion in the woods.
She wanted to laugh.
“No bus station,” she said. “You want out, you can pick your place on our route, but I’m not changing course.”
But she knew she’d have to.
The group Eli was gathering all believed a narrative of nonviolence. That was the great irony of the first strike force-they were mostly peaceful by nature, shepherded together by their opposition to oil drilling, fracking, big business, and pollution, all the tedious minutiae of those who believed the earth was worth saving. Janell’s understanding was that, with the notable exception of bodyguards recruited from some meth runners, the tribes, as Eli called them, would recoil at the idea of murder.
Now she was driving Doug and his new story to their doorstep. That could not happen. It would be safer to take him to the bus station as he wished than to deliver him to anyone whose resolve could shatter.
She hated to lose him, though. Through Doug, they had reached dozens of potential players. To a man, they feared the government, believed in shadow conspiracies, and were firmly convinced that the U.S. military was looking for any excuse to claim first the guns and then the freedoms of Americans. Doug had facilitated contact with three different militia groups, an arm of the Ku Klux Klan, and a team of Texas preppers who were better armed than most third-world militaries.
All this energy expended preparing for a nonexistent war, and a single dead man had brought Doug to his knees.
“There are casualties in any worthy mission,” she said. “You’ve always known this.”
He shook his head. “This is exactly what the police want us to do. They won’t even have to lie about us now. You’ve made it the truth.”
She fought for patience, for the right words. There was no time to waste finding the right words, though. Recruiting days were done. They were in action now, and she had neither the time nor the energy to return to the wars of rhetoric.
“You understand that’s all a lie, don’t you?” she said.
“What is?”
“Every word we’ve ever said. Every…single…word.”
She looked away from the road, at his face, and he blinked at her, utterly oblivious, and her frustration swelled to something deeper and darker.