The man behind the wheel, the older one, had a face that sucked up the light, his eyes red-rimmed and sleepy, but the look he gave Sten was unmistakable. Sten had seen it all his life, on the football field, in the service, from the punks at the high school who thought they were men when they didn’t have the faintest notion of what a man was, the look that said, Don’t fuck with me. Five seconds, that was all there was to it. Nobody said a word, though the windows were down and the one in the passenger’s seat was close enough to spit on, and then the tires jumped and the pickup shot up the road to vanish round the next turn.
“Call the sheriff,” Sten said, and in that instant he had the car in gear and he was lurching out onto the roadway, pedal to the floor, something gone awry in him now, the switch thrown, and he could no more have turned around and gone back home than cut off his own hand. This was America, this was his turf, where he’d been born and raised, not some shithole in the jungle somewhere. “Son of a bitch,” he said.
And Carey? Carey was clutching at the passenger’s strap with one hand and trying to work his phone with the other. “Slow down!” he shouted. “It’s not worth it. Jesus, Sten, you’re going to kill us.”
The trees careened past, tight turns here, the coast far below them now, dips and rises, timberland, better than fifty inches of rain up here on the slopes each winter and thirty-nine below, rain that swelled the streams and percolated into the soil and pushed the biggest trees in the world — living fossils — up into the sky. The tires shrieked. Air beat in the window to slap at his face. “I can’t get any reception,” Carey said, as if it mattered, and then the white flash of the truck’s tailgate shone through the treetrunks up ahead and he eased off on the gas, in control now, because they might have had the advantage on the open highway, but here the smaller vehicle was more than a match for them.
He settled in behind them, giving them space — fifty feet, as if the Prius was equipped with an invisible tape measure, as if it was one of those super cars out of a James Bond movie. The one in back, his face a sharp blade of light beneath the upthrust bill of his cap, stared right through them as if it was all nothing to him, as if he wasn’t a criminal, as if he wasn’t going to go out there and open up cans of tuna and sardines laced with carbofuran to poison the bears and raccoons and fishers and anything else that dared get in his way. Well, all right. He was past caring about niceties now. He was going to follow them till the wheels fell off — or they ran out of gas. Yes. Right. And that was another advantage of the Prius.
Carey said nothing. He kept fiddling with his phone, though it was futile, any fool could see that. There was no reception here — they were in the middle of nowhere, what did he expect? Ten minutes drifted by, fifteen. Sten focused on the shifting white tailgate so fiercely it began to blur, swelling and receding, a ghostly thing, almost illusory, a thing that floated out ahead of him, snaking through the turns, vanishing in the dips and emerging again, no rhythm, no logic, just movement. He kept hoping for some traffic, for another car, for anyone to signal to or flag down, but there were no other cars on the road, not this far up, not today. The road narrowed, became a channel through a sea of redwood and fir, and still the pickup rolled on and still Sten sat fifty feet behind it.
And then, abruptly, the Mexicans pulled off on the shoulder and Sten hit the brakes, put on his blinker — pointlessly, but it was an old habit — and followed suit. There was a logging road off to the left and a hundred feet on and he wondered if that was their destination, if they had their camp somewhere in there and didn’t want to give it away. They were stuck, that was what he was thinking. Couldn’t go forward, couldn’t retreat. Check and mate.
After a while, the driver of the pickup shut down the engine. The sun climbed higher by degrees. Shadows shortened. A jay called from the woods. “What are they doing?” Carey asked. “Why are they stopping here?”
“See that road up ahead?” He indicated it with a thrust of his chin.
“You think that’s where they’re headed?”
Sten shrugged. His stomach rumbled. “They’re in a spot now. They hadn’t counted on us being here, that’s for shit sure.”
Another fifteen minutes ticked by on the dashboard clock. And then finally, inevitably, the driver’s door of the pickup flashed open and the older Mexican stepped out and started back down the road toward them, his steps slow and measured, the cap still at the same jaunty angle. His face was flat, boneless, almost as if it had been scooped hollow, and his nose was flat too so that Sten wondered if he’d once been a boxer. Or a rodeo clown.
The man came up to the window and leaned down to look in at him. “You need help?” he asked, his accent slow and stopped-up so that “help” came out as “hell.”
“No,” Sten said, shaking his head for emphasis. “No, we’re fine.”
The man seemed to consider this a moment, his look unwavering, a hint of menace seeping like a tincture into his squinting brown eyes.
“How about you?” Sten said. “You need help?”
Sighing, the man drew himself up and said, “No, we doan need no hell,” and then he looked off in the distance as if to find the words there for whatever was to come next.
Carbofuran. It was one of the deadliest pesticides known to man. A couple drops of it would kill you. And what happened to the bears? They died clawing at themselves, their guts on fire.
“You sure?” Sten said.
Another sigh. The man bent to look in the window again, his eyes hardening. It was then that he let the flap of his shirt fall open so that Sten could see the polished wooden handle of the revolver tucked in his waistband, but that was a mistake and it was going to cost him because he didn’t know who he was dealing with here.
Sten shoved open the door so suddenly the man had to step back, and then he was out on the naked strip of pavement, unfurling himself to his full height so that now he was the one looking down. “You know what this is?” he demanded and he could feel it coming up in him all over again and there was no stopping it, though the man shot a look to his compatriots, who flung open the doors of the pickup even as the acrobat in back sprang out and began coming down the road toward them and Carey hissed, Sten, come on, it’s not worth it, let’s go. “This is America, you son of a bitch. The United States of America. You get that?”
The man rocked back on his heels, his eyes locked on Sten’s, and for a moment Sten thought he was going to spit at him the way the prisoner had in Costa Rica, but that didn’t happen and a good thing too because he was a beat away from losing it. Here was guilt. Here was the shit of the world come home to roost right here in the redwoods. The man scuffed his boots on the pavement, then swung round without a word and started back for the truck, his arms outstretched to usher the other three along with him. Sten watched them climb back in. The doors slammed. Sun glinted off chrome. And the truck sat there — and so did Sten — till the minutes became hours and Carey, in over his head, talked himself hoarse on the theme of giving it up, of getting out of there before somebody got hurt, because they weren’t vigilantes, were they?
Finally, and by now it was past noon, the pickup’s engine roared to life and the driver cut the wheels hard even as the man in back — the acrobat — leapt down and started up the road on foot. He was lithe, tall, rabbity, and by the time the driver had turned the truck around and started back down the hill, he was jogging up the road, the bill of his cap pulled down tight now, fashion sacrificed to exigency. “Where’s he going?” Carey wondered aloud.