I needed to locate them. In as low a crouch as I could get without proceeding in a duck-walk, I moved from the twenty-fourth tree to the twenty-fifth, leaning to the left, to the right, trying to tune in to their conversation.
They fell silent. Back pressed to the almond tree, I waited, hoping that they hadn’t gone quiet because they’d seen or heard me.
My eyes were well adjusted to the dark again, which meant only that now I was merely half blind. If money could buy anything, I would have called Mrs. Fischer and asked her to buy off the cloud cover and bring back the moon.
Judging by the tone of their voices, when they spoke again, the unseen men were irritated.
I eased forward to the twenty-sixth tree, to the twenty-seventh.
Halfway to the twenty-eighth, I saw them. On the right. Two figures dressed in black. Ahead of me, at the end of the alley between this row and the next. So close.
They evidently were supposed to be scanning the ten feet of open ground that separated the almond trees from the fence that marked the southern perimeter of Maravilla Valley Orchards. They didn’t seem to be deeply committed to the task.
I kept moving, afraid one of them would look toward me at any moment. I put my back to the twenty-eighth tree, two from the end, and found that I was now close enough to hear what they said.
“Damn it, Emory, that freak never come this way.”
“Yeah,” Emory said, “but this is where they want us.”
“You’d break your own neck tryin’ to kiss your own ass if one of the inner circle said so.”
“I’m not afraid of the inner circle.”
“Hell you ain’t. Come on. I wanna be where the action is.”
“Me, too, Carl. Who doesn’t?”
“Well,” Carl said, “it ain’t here.”
Emory didn’t respond.
“Five or six minutes till maybe they blow that church.”
“They’ll blow whatever they find.”
“If it’s the church, I gotta see it.”
“You don’t care about the church.”
“Don’t tell me what I don’t care about.”
Emory said, “It’s the farmhouse that has you hot.”
“You, too. You seen the pictures — them two girls, their mother.”
“They aren’t for us, anyway.”
“But we can watch it bein’ done.”
“I’ve already seen it done. Lots of times.”
“This is bullshit, man.”
“We don’t want to get in trouble.”
“All we do want is trouble.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, you’re a chickenshit.”
Emory didn’t reply.
Frustrated, Carl said, “Ain’t we anarchyists?”
“It’s pronounced an-are-kists. And no, we aren’t.”
“I thought we was.”
“We rule through chaos. That’s different.”
Carl sounded like a pouting child. “We need to be doin’ some anarchyism.”
Intellectual arguments between satanists were less witty than I had expected.
“You hear them sirens?” Carl asked.
“Of course I hear them. Fire trucks.”
“And cops close behind.”
“Shouldn’t be here for the cops,” Emory said.
“Finally you said a smart thing.”
“It’s maybe ten minutes before the farmhouse.”
“So let’s go, let’s get in the action.”
“All right. You’re right.”
“Bet your ass I’m right.”
I heard footsteps, the rustle of clothing. Looking past the tree behind which I sheltered, I saw them moving away, toward the fence.
Prudence suggested that I should let them go. There were two of them, and they were heavily armed. The element of surprise might not be sufficient to get me into a confrontation and out the other side alive.
This was the night of nights, however, and too much prudence might result in the forfeiture of the game.
Forty
I stepped away from the line of trees that I had been following, into the alley between this row and the next, directly behind Emory and Carl as they approached the fence.
One of them had some kind of combat rifle strap-slung over his shoulder. The other, carrying a rifle of his own, shouldered it, too, as they drew near the fence.
My stomach seemed as if it were full of cocoons from which a flock of butterflies were emerging with still-wet wings: the fluttery feeling of nervous anticipation combined with nausea.
I moved with them, wanting a point-blank situation. They didn’t hear anything. I was so close, they should have smelled me.
With the Glock in a two-hand grip, arms thrust forward, taking an isosceles stance, I waited until the first man started to climb before I said, “Freeze.”
They froze, for a moment, anyway, and then the guy with two feet on the ground started to pivot, sliding the rifle off his shoulder as he turned, and I saw that he was indeed wearing goggles as I shot him twice.
At the crack of the pistol, the guy on the fence looked in my direction, and after the second shot, as his companion dropped, I said, “I only want information.”
In his black clothes and ski mask and goggles, he looked like an extraterrestrial geared up for Earth’s hostile atmosphere.
“Information,” I repeated. “Don’t want to have to kill you.”
“Shit you don’t.” He turned away from me, clinging to the fence.
“What farmhouse?” I asked. “What’s happening there?”
The fool went for it, tried for the top of the fence, because he could not unsling the rifle in his position and would rather die than tell me about their intentions with the dam or anything else.
I couldn’t let him get away. I shot him in the back. It didn’t feel like the worst thing I’d ever had to do, but it felt like one of the worst and equal to many others.
He fell off the fence, onto his back, not dead yet, gazing up at me through his goggles as I stepped forward and stood over him. Between clenched teeth, a thick guttural expression of pain escaped him, as if he didn’t want to give me the satisfaction of hearing him suffer.
There was no satisfaction in it for me.
“Just tell me what’s going to happen tonight. What’s all this about?” My solid-state digital watch didn’t tick. And yet I heard it ticking.
Instead, he told me to perform a sexual act with myself that no one with a basic understanding of human anatomy would have believed possible.
He was no longer able to bite off his pain. A squeal of agony escaped him.
I shot him in the head and put an end to it.
Closing my eyes, shuddering, I asked for a sign that what I had done was necessary. Just one small sign. Nothing big. One small but incontestable sign. I opened my eyes. There was no sign. It doesn’t work that way and never did.
I knelt beside the first dead man and removed his goggles. A rubber-sheathed wire connected them to a power pack clipped to his utility belt. I hooked the pack to my belt and put on the goggles.
The night glowed green. There was darkness in the green night, plenty of it, but not as much as before this vision assist. Getting used to the eerie color and distorted perceptions arising from it would take a few minutes.
The sirens weren’t distant anymore. The fire trucks sounded as if they were near the orchard, perhaps already turning off the county road. Police might be following close in the wake of the trucks. The firemen and cops would know within two minutes that the explosions hadn’t been related to gas-line problems or to any other accidental causes. The blast evidence could be easily read. Chief Porter would ask the state highway patrol to lend some manpower. Soon this usually quiet rural area of Pico Mundo would be swarming with police, perhaps some of them manning roadblocks. Not all of them would be officers who knew me and would vouch for me.