Mercy Street(79)

He parked and walked a discreet distance from the empty building before lighting the pipe. Immediately his brain cooled. He saw clearly the task ahead: daunting, yes, but not complicated. He’d driven I-95 more times than he could count. The fuckload of weed in the trunk was not important; it did not change the basic nature of the task. All he had to do was drive.

The little pipe was quickly exhausted. As Timmy shook the dregs onto the ground, he heard a noise behind him, a rustle of grass. He turned and saw a guy pissing into the bushes, a little meatball of a guy with a shaved head. The man shook himself and zipped and for no reason turned his head. Timmy saw, then, that he was wearing a uniform.

He hurried back to the Civic, faster than was prudent. He should have taken his time. He peeled out of the parking lot. Idling nearby was another car, a late-model Dodge Charger—solid black, with an elaborate antenna. He had smoked his bowl next to a pissing Georgia statie.

The Civic was sweltering, reeking of weed. As Timmy pulled onto 95, he discovered that its windows would no longer open. Except for the rear passenger-side window, which opened maybe three inches, they were now sealed shut.

As he drove, the car got hotter and hotter. He tried to think cold thoughts. Junior high hockey with frostbitten feet. Passing a flask at the boatyard with Dennis Link and Andy Stasko, freezing his nuts off. Claudia’s cold hands on his back, his face, his shoulders and chest.

HE’D DRIVEN MAYBE TEN MILES WHEN HE SAW THE BLUE LIGHTS in his rearview. He pulled over to the shoulder and waited in a pool of his own sweat.

The cop stepped out of his Tahoe. It was the same bald guy he’d seen pissing behind the gas station. He motioned for Timmy to roll down his window.

“I can’t,” Timmy said.

The cop seemed not to hear him.

“I can’t,” he said, louder this time. How did you pantomime, My windows won’t open?

In a gesture of helplessness, he raised his hands.

He understood later that raising his hands had saved him. Reflexively, the cop reached for his weapon.

Timmy sat very still, his hands in plain sight, until the cop opened the driver’s-side door.

“Sir, please step out of the car.”





22


The world is full of signs.

This happened many years ago, in the early 1990s, somewhere in northern Nevada. Victor Prine was moving a load from Indy to Sacramento, a half day ahead of schedule, when he spotted a billboard along the highway.

ANNUAL EXPO GUNS AND AMMO

WEAPONS OF ALL KINDS

The hall, when he found it, was a low-slung bunker the size of an airline hangar. Who’d built it there, beside a barren stretch of road between Reno and Winnemucca, and for what purpose, were questions he didn’t ponder. The cavernous structure seemed randomly placed in the desert, as though it had fallen from the sky.

Inside, he walked the perimeter. The first person he met was a tall hatchet-faced kid in desert fatigues. He stood behind a card table piled with pamphlets and bumper stickers. Victor was then in his early forties. The kid was maybe twenty-five years old.

He handed Victor a business card.

“Is this you?” Victor asked, studying it. “Lon . . . Haruchi?”

The kid studied him intently, as though trying to determine whether the old guy was messing with him. “Do I look like my name is Horiuchi?”

When Victor laughed, the kid didn’t even smile. His gaze was level, unflinching. “Seriously, man. That name means nothing to you?”

“Should it?” Victor said.

“Lon Horiuchi is an agent of your government, paid with your tax dollars. On August twenty-second, he gunned down an American citizen on private property while she was holding her child in her arms. Hor-i-uchi,” he repeated, enunciating very clearly. “Remember that name.”

His crew cut was fresh, mown short as velvet. Victor said, “Where’d you serve, son?”

“The Persian Gulf, sir.” He spoke with a soldier’s uninflected precision, a studied blankness.

Victor offered his hand. “Thank you for your service. I bet you did all right over there.”

“I did my job.” The kid had a grip like a tourniquet. His hand seemed to be made of solid bone.

Victor studied the printed card. “Why’d you give me this?”

“I give it to everyone. Every citizen needs to know what this government is capable of. I figure somebody sooner or later is going to be moved to do something about it.”

It took Victor a moment to catch his meaning.

“That’s the guy’s home address?”

“Affirmative,” the kid said.

There was a pointed silence, in which Victor studied the pamphlets on the card table. “What else have you got here?”

The kid handed him a bumper sticker: WHEN GUNS ARE OUTLAWED, I WILL BECOME AN OUTLAW.

Immediately Victor handed it back. “I’m with you, man. I heartily agree with that sentiment. But I’m a convicted felon, and I’ll tell you right now, I’m not going to put this on my truck.”

He never saw the kid again, though he believed, at the time, that he’d met plenty like him: young men just out of the service, trying to remember how the civilian world worked, if they’d ever known in the first place. It was the parallax of middle age—part laziness, part blindness. You assumed, always, that you’d seen it all before.