Banish said angrily, “Jesus Christ.”
“Fuckers,” Fagin spat. “Motherfuckers. We go in there now with night-vision, take them by surprise—”
“No,” Banish said. “Even if it isn’t booby-trapped, they’d hear you halfway through and be waiting.” He looked around. “Put two men in here, grab whatever crawls out. Why wasn’t all this broken down in the first place?”
“My fuck-up,” Fagin said. “Overlooked. Fuck.”
Banish looked around the barn, nodding. “He’s been waiting for this,” he said, then stepped away. He had said that a few times before.
Fagin checked the area around the tunnel hole. The opening was two feet square, the tunnel below much larger and the dirt walls brown and dark. He was thinking out loud, only half-talking to Banish. “They pulled the girl through here wrapped up in something else besides those sheets, then cleaned her up and took it back with them.” He kicked at the hard ground. “Dirt here’s tough. Must be the only tunnel. Took them all of two years just to push this fucking thing through.”
He dropped the wood board back down with the chunk of dirt on top and kicked the loose soil over it and slid the crate back into position. Then his voice rose, directed at Banish somewhere behind him. “I’ll have my people check the other buildings just in case. Can’t run too deep. Fucking tunnel rats,” he said, stepping back to shake his head. “Picked that up in Nam, huh? What do you say? Charlie could fucking dig. Honeycombs, they were, like those fucking ant farms you see into — storage rooms, kitchens, sleeping quarters. Had to be deep enough, though. I remember these cowboys in one of the units I was hooked up with, they’d take down a village rough, then pull aside all the remaining locals and bring in heavy equipment. They’d go riding in these big trucks, slow, all around the rice huts. That was how they celebrated. The weight of the trucks would cave in the shallow family tunnels, the local routes. You could hear the trapped VC screaming up through the dirt. Fucking ready-made graves, claustrophobic death traps.”
He was shaking his head, remembering the war-whooping farm boys wheeling around in circles. He turned in annoyance when Banish did not respond. Banish was standing across the barn, near where the Ables girl had been found. He was looking down. Fagin moved aside a rusted-out lawnmower and started across to him.
He saw that Banish was holding the corner of a cracked sheet of black tarp in his right hand. The tarp was caked with heavy, dark dirt. A good-sized body lay below.
Fagin stopped behind Banish’s shoulder, looking down. “Oh, fuck,” he said.
Banish dropped the tarp and walked away. He walked right out of the barn and into the rain.
Fagin picked up the tarp again. Charles Mellis’s eyes were still open. His face was drained white and his lips were wrinkled gray and curled back. There was a neat hole in his forehead and a dark spit-spray of dry brown blood on his cheek and much of his beard. Exit wound. Fagin tried to roll Mellis’s head over but rigor mortis was setting in. His neck turned as much as a board. Fagin felt the dead arm and found it still soft. He knelt down low and eyed the crusted, bloody pulp behind Mellis’s right ear, the burnt red hair and dislodged flap of exploded scalp.
Taber and Porter came in behind him, and Fagin stood. “Stay off the radio,” he said. “This one’s dead twelve hours. I’ll start back down and notify.” Then he pointed. “There’s a rat hole in back. Keep your eyes on it and stay fucking alert, both of you.”
Fagin exited into the blowing rain, the trees bending, his poncho whipping out hard. Banish was standing downhill from the barn.
“Flash burn at close range,” Fagin said, coming up behind him. “It wasn’t me. Whoever did it was standing right like I am here with you.” Fagin fashioned a gun with his fingers and pointed it at the back of Banish’s head above his right ear. Banish did not move. “Why would he do his own man?” Fagin said.
Banish said nothing. Fagin went around to see his face. Banish was looking far down land into the trees.
Bridge
Blood was headed back to his Bronco through the rain when he saw Banish standing up on the mountain road just at the point where it began to curve and climb. Blood watched him a moment — Banish seemed to be watching the clustered umbrellas of the hundreds of protesters beyond the bridge, his face shadowed by the ashen burn — then tucked the papers he was holding into his sheriff’s coat and started along the slicked road toward him.
“Just missed the show,” Blood said, coming up. “Someone from WAR and some others came to the bridge for you. Wanted to make a citizen’s arrest, they announced. Here’s the warrant.” He pulled out the papers. “I accepted it on your behalf. Not just you, though, it names as well the Director of the FBI, the head of the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the President of the United States, the Director of the CIA, the Governor of Montana, and, proud to say, yours truly.”
Banish looked from the crowd on the other side of the bridge to the typed papers getting wet in Blood’s hand.
Blood said, “That’s some pretty fast company for me. But it was all just a big show of foolishness for the cameras. The arresting party all shook hands afterward.”
Banish was looking straight at him. “Mellis is dead,” he said.
Blood’s lighthearted mood plummeted. His soul, what he thought of as the character of his person, seemed to vanish suddenly and his throat clucked under a swallow. The rain turned up a notch at that point, lashing him, finding a way through his clothes to his skin, raising gooseflesh. He was holding Banish’s gaze because there was nowhere else to look. The rain slapped on his hat and it was all he could hear. It fell between them in lines as they stared. It fell all around. Puffs of their breath swirled. Mellis was dead. Blood didn’t need to ask how.
He began to shiver. He experienced a weakening chill. He had tasted Banish’s world and now felt sick. For the first time in his forty years, Blood wanted to be somebody somewhere else entirely.
“What do we do about this?” he said.
Banish shook his head. “You don’t have to do a thing.”
Blood looked away. The sound of the rain smashing his hat and the trees and the road grew louder in his ears, and he grew heavier beneath it. He turned back. “Why did your wife and daughter leave you?” he said.
“What?”
“I need to know what kind of man I am dealing with. I don’t know anything about you beyond what I read in the papers. Why did your wife and daughter leave you?”
Banish’s eyes became distant, pulling away, as though either making up an answer or trying to fit the unsay able into words.
“They were afraid of me,” he said.
Any number of questions might have followed, but Blood found neither the strength nor the inclination. None of them anyway would have been delicate enough to broach that admission without breaking something that was already quite fragile. That was what Blood had tasted here. The sway of absolute power and the havoc it wreaked.
There were shouts now and then from the disorganized civil disturbance thriving beyond the bridge, yells sent up like bright flares. Then all at once the calls came in tandem and in force. Banish turned his attention past Blood, looking out over the vast mob with dark consternation.
“Ables,” he said.
Blood turned. The umbrellas were beginning to scatter. A marshal was starting off the gloomy bridge toward them at a brisk jog. Banish said behind Blood, “Have the marshal take a Jeep and pick me up on the way.”