The Savage(78)

Cotto sat, waited. Manny would’ve been proud, proud to see what his son had accomplished. At his skills of tracking. And what he would do next to build his strength for ruling.

Careful and quiet, from his pack, Cotto pulled a leather-bound tablet of unruled pages. Began making drawings of the area. From the direction he’d traveled. Roads he’d crossed. Where the Pentecost lived. How far he’d trekked to this location. Then began sketching a profile of Dorn. Lean. Muscular for his age. The darkness to his locks and the bone structure of his face. Sharp as a Bellota cane knife. There was a rugged purity to his form. Stopping. Taking a deep inhale, Cotto placed the bound booklet back into his pack. Waited. His stomach ached for nourishment, felt hollow as he watched evening sway in. Movement came from afar, it was the powdery pigmented female. She was accompanied by two men, each armed with pistols and shotguns. They walked through the woods in a southeasterly direction. Cotto followed. Stayed hidden amongst the brush of briar and rotted tree. Halted every so often. Kept his trounce and distance unnoticed. Waited for the falls of foot to quiet, then pick back up. Feeling as though he were being watched, the paranoia of being ripped open by unknown carbine, blade, or booby trap.

Limbs pained and Cotto’s mind ran with madness; he was jonesing for a fix. Had run out of cocaine. Stopping, he watched the female and her men squat at a run-down cabin the shade of weathered barn wood. Looked to have been standing since the 1800s, with a roof of thick bark. She sat upon the small porch, a door in the frame’s center, windows on each side. The two men bent to her left and right flanks, each homing in on the landscape; one chewed and spit tobacco as the other sprinkled the same into a crease of tissue. Then rolled and licked the length. Lit a cancer stick with a wooden match. Through his field glasses, Cotto tuned in a close-up of the female. Recognized her to be Scar, McGill’s daughter. He’d met her only once when visiting Manny. The Pentecost was correct in his intel. There was a bunker of people. And they were being led by Bellmont’s daughter.

Sweat grained down Cotto’s brow with the swarm of gnats, heat weighing just as heavy as the wait to overthrow her and capture Dorn and Sheldon. Cotto grew manic as he lay on his gut, torso buttering over the ground, watching. Then came the tromp of footing through the woods. From the right of the cabin it sounded like a freight train pushing over tracks, growing louder and louder. Scar’s men raised their rifles. One stood, the other kept kneeled. From the green and tan brush sprung a man who stopped just ten feet from the aiming men. Cotto’s heart tightened with anger. He blinked repeatedly through his bloodshot sight. Adjusted the focus on his binoculars.

Remembering those he’d brought across the border. Those whom he employed, those whom he dealt into the United States. This man he viewed was one of his own. Handpicked. Sergio. A mole. A fucking mole.

Cotto’s belly burned a rage so deep and repulsed, his blood bubbled acidic and oxidized. Questions engulfed his thoughts. As he balled his fist, a slobber foamed from his jaws, and he reassured himself these questions would be answered not with queries but with spasms and distress.





ANGUS

There was the grunt, pant, and heave from the nameless gouge of disfigured man who charged Angus with a lineman’s power. Standing upon the dead bodies until the last second, Angus circled to his right, pruned a hooking left uppercut to the man’s ribs. The man’s face met the dirt wall. He chewed and spit soil. Angus shuffled around to the man’s back. Dug a cross behind his ear. Then a hook to his kidney. Legs gave. The man dropped. Lungs hugged for air. Snorted and slobbered like a heifer.

Coming forward, Angus hammered the man’s shoulder with his knee. Felt the stoutness of skin, muscle, and bone give.

The man growled and barked on all fours. Twisted into Angus, reared on his knees, clamped hold of Angus’s legs beneath his pits. Dug his footing into the mounds of flesh, muscle, and dirt, charged Angus into the ground flat. Eyes blinked and the wind was removed from Angus’s lungs.

The man pressed to standing, taking with him Angus’s legs, which wrapped around the man’s waist, with both arms bent at the elbows and shelling his head. Angus’s neck careened into the rot of the soil and body parts, the man dropped his weight down into Angus, punched wild and crazed at Angus’s face.

Deflecting the attacks, Angus felt the swelling ache of bruise, reached through the ground-and-pound assault, caught the man’s wrist, pulled it to his chin, tucked and tugged, swiveled his hips, hooked his legs around the side of the man’s neck and shoulder, arm-barred the man’s left between knees, applied pressure until cartilage creaked, muscle tore, and the bone snapped like a stick being stomped for kindling.

The man went soft as a cotton pillow, bared his teeth and rage with sounds that held no structure for words, only syllables of hurt, “Aghhh! Arrrr!” and the spittle that grossed through his teeth and down his lips.

Angus rolled from the man, stood up. Watched the man work to standing, holding on to his limp appendage. Let it hang, swivel back and forth like a cat’s broken tail; he lifted his right hand into a fist. “Come now, you heathen fuck!”

Do or die, adrenaline was all Angus held within his cavities. He shook his head, offering the sentiment of no, don’t do it. The beast of man came forward once again. Angus counted the short steps. Waited till the stench of flesh filled his inhale. Weighted his senses with presence. Grabbed his arm, went across the man’s throat, curved to his neck’s rear, clamped down, bent the man to him as if he were headless, cranked hard. Kept the man’s throat beneath his pit, until the gagging for wind quit and the man was dead weight.