“What did I say?”
“Blow up their shit,” I replied.
CLETE AND I began walking toward the work sheds that were located on the far side of two cherry orchards that sloped from the two-lane down to the water’s edge. The bandolier of .30-06 clips clinked softly against my back. He was carrying the AR-15 with his right hand wrapped in the pistol grip, the butt against his hip. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this place, Streak.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know how to put it. It’s ancient country. It’s like it’s full of ghosts, like we stumbled into something a lot bigger than us.”
“Don’t think that way. A perp is a perp. Like you always said, bust them or dust them. We’re the good guys; they’re not.”
“Sounds good. Except you know better,” he said. “Surrette is the real deal, Dave.”
“What do you mean?”
“A guy you can’t put a label on. A guy who was allowed to go on killing people for over twenty years. How’d we get into this shit? Why us? It’s like we didn’t have a choice, like we were supposed to meet up with this guy.”
I did not want to dwell on the implications. Clete was not one given to extravagant rhetoric. The fact that he had said what he said made my breath come short in my chest.
We continued through the orchard, fifteen feet apart. The first shed was a long weathered building shaped like a boxcar, with a peaked, shingled roof. Through the trees, I could see two SUVs and a Chrysler parked on a gravel roadway. Eight or nine men had gathered by the car. Both Clete and I sank to one knee and remained motionless inside the orchard, the branches waving above us, shadows shifting back and forth on our bodies.
The wind is the enemy of every infiltrator in a wooded area; when it blows, everything moves except the infiltrator. The other enemy is the reflection of light on your face. Clete and I lowered our heads and stared at the ground. We could hear one man addressing the others. There was no mistaking the imperious tone and its implicit sense of entitlement and authority. I’m sure that in Caspian Younger’s mind he was not only a leader of men with the bodies of gladiators whose lives had been characterized by hardship and the violent ethos of mercenaries; he was also their brother-in-arms and knew their needs and commanded their respect. I am sure that Caspian Younger believed he was a man among men.
As I looked at his Australian flop hat, and the cargo pants tucked into his fur-lined suede boots, and the long-sleeved flannel shirt and quilted vest, and his arms that were like pipe cleaners, I wondered if he had any idea at all of the ridiculous figure he cut. His subordinates probably laughed at him behind his back. His hands were on his hips as if he were a senior officer addressing his troops. We could hear every word he said.
“Listen up, you guys. You are now in my employ as licensed private investigators and security personnel,” he said. “We are stopping a crime in progress. We are rescuing two innocent teenage girls. I believe my wife is already dead. Before the sun rises, everyone on this property except the two girls may be dead also. That is not our intention, but that is probably what will happen.”
Up on the highway, a pair of headlights came over the rise and descended the grade, the high beams tunneling through the darkness between the orchards and the slope of the mountain. Caspian was disconcerted for only a moment. “No matter what else happens, there is one man who will not leave this property. That man is Asa Surrette,” he said. “The men who take him out will divide a twenty-thousand-dollar credit line in Las Vegas. I want him blown apart. Does everyone understand?”
The wind dropped and the night was still. A pickup truck on the highway was slowing as it came down the grade, as though the driver were looking for a turnoff. The pickup passed under a light pole that had been left on over a cherry stand. The truck was painted metallic orange; a camper shell was snugged into the bed.
“One other thing,” Caspian said. “There’s a fat guy out here named Purcel. He’s a disgraced cop from New Orleans who abused my wife. I want him alive. You can put some holes in him, but he doesn’t do the big exit before I have a chat with him. Are there any questions?”
“What if some IPs go down?” one man asked.
“Innocent persons?” Caspian said. “There are no innocent persons. That’s why people get baptized. You didn’t know that? You break eggs to make an omelet. One baby dies, another lives. A whole society is destroyed when one of us steps on an anthill. A hundred thousand die to control the benchmark price on a barrel of oil. That’s how the world operates. We didn’t make the rules. Any other questions?”
He was smiling. I wondered what Clete was thinking. I also wondered how an execrable creature like Caspian Younger, whose sneer and arrogance were like none I had ever seen, could be given the power to make decisions about the life and death of other people.
“All right, start your sweep,” he said. “If in doubt, take it out.”
“That truck up on the highway?” one man said.
“What about it?” Caspian asked.
“It just stopped and turned around.”
CLETE PURCEL’S NIGHT vision was not of an ordinary kind. He did not see the external world more clearly than anyone else during the nocturnal hours, nor did he see it with any less clarity; he simply saw it in a different fashion. After his return from Southeast Asia, he realized that a fundamental change had taken place inside his neurological makeup. The change was not one he understood, at least not until he read an article in a town-and-country magazine about the way horses see the world. According to the article, horses have two visual screens in their heads and watch both simultaneously.
Unlike the horse, Clete did not have two screens in his head; he had two transmitters, and they contended for space on a single screen. Any number of triggers could send him back in time and click on a live feed from the years 1966 to 1968 and force him to watch scenes from a horror show that never had a good ending.
He had not moved or even raised his eyelids while Caspian addressed his men. Inside his head, he saw a valley swirling with elephant grass that was never green but always gray or yellow or brown, as though the land had been systemically poisoned and could not follow the dictates of the season. At the far end of the valley were hills that had the softly contoured shape of a woman’s breasts, and in order to reach them, he had to follow the banks of a muddy stream coated with mosquitoes and strung with the feces of water buffalo. The only sounds in the valley were the sucking noises of his boots in the mud and the thropping of helicopters in a sky the color of brass. Even though Clete was now crouched inside a fruit orchard on an alpine lake, he could smell the jungle rot in his feet and the body stink in his utilities and feel sweat running down his sides like lines of black ants.
“A couple of you guys check out that truck and tell the guy to mind his own business,” Clete heard Caspian say.
“I’ve seen that truck,” one man said. “You know who that is?”
“No, I don’t,” Caspian said. “That’s why I told you to check him out.”