Bad to the Bones(26)
It worked. Some of the anger fell from the idiot’s face and voice. “Yes. We got a whole box from Costco in Phoenix. You want a bottle?”
“Yes. Hand me one.”
The naco had to slip his hand under the curtain of his sleeper cab. Knoxie made a big show of sliding back the action on his Glock to chamber a round, and angling the barrel at the guy’s brains. No funny business would be allowed in here.
The curtain was knocked ajar just enough for Knoxie to briefly glimpse a f*cking Bible, of all things. This irritated him beyond belief. He was already cynical of the crass hypocrisies of Catholicism. For this naco to be toting a Bible while transporting some sort of illegal drugs for a cult that enslaved and suppressed vulnerable women, well…
Knoxie snatched the stupid box of OTC drugs he didn’t even want from the moron’s hand just as Lytton strode back up the side of the truck toward the cab. Knoxie didn’t remove his barrel from the naco’s head while Lytton approached, his own Glock readied alongside his thigh.
Lytton lifted his chin. “You wanna ask this cholo in Mexcrement language why he’s transporting approximately twenty keys of Sinaloa White, not-so-swiftly hidden underneath a pallet of garbanzo beans?”
Through clenched teeth, Knoxie told the naco in Spanish, “I’m gonna need you to get out now.”
The naco swore under his breath to his partner while Turk, at the other window, motioned for the passenger to disembark, too. So the granola, the “knockout drops” the Bihari vagrant had rattled on about, was some form of heroin they’d been dosing people with, no doubt cheese heroin from the looks of the PMs. Rage flooded Knoxie so acidly he literally saw red. The scarlet-orange color rose in his field of vision like some theological flood, tinting everything he saw with the angry filter.
So when the naco started his slow-mo reach for the door handle, it was as though in a bad “south of the border” porno duro film. Knoxie smashed his torso flat against the door so he could control how fast the naco exited the vehicle. Lytton, too, warily pressed himself flat against the tire while gripping his Glock near his ear with the barrel pointed skyward.
“Despacio, naco, despacio,” Knoxie warned the hayseed.
But fatefully, the naco did not heed Knoxie. Maybe being a Presención, he had to do things the gangster way. Maybe he wasn’t going to give up his truckload of horse without putting up a fight. But the odds were already stacked against him, and when he made a sudden lunge for the console between the two seats, Knoxie was faster. He’d hadn’t killed a man since Special Ops, when he’d had a few confrontations with high value targets in the Persian Gulf. It was a no-brainer, anyway, at this point blank range—the guy was going for his iron, so Knoxie rested his wrists on the edge of the truck’s window and squeezed the trigger.
Adrenaline rushed through him as everything happened at once. The splash of crimson in the naco’s temple was much smaller than the explosion out the other side. However, he fell back peacefully against the head rest as though he’d taken one too many PMs. The whoosh of traffic roaring past drowned out any gunshot sound to all but the closest and most perceptive outlaws.
“Down on the ground, pendejo!” Turk bellowed and yanked open the passenger’s door. In a flash the guy rolled out. Lytton gestured to Ziggy in the chase cage, his arm a wide, welcoming arc, telling him to approach the truck.
“Jesus Roosevelt Christ!” yelled Knoxie, tearing open the driver’s door. He hoisted himself into the cab as he shoved his piece back into his waistband. He was operating on sheer adrenaline now, allowing his automatic caveman instincts to lift the naco driver by the shirtfront and drag him up and over the seat, depositing him in the sleeper cab.
His next task was to rip the Virgin from the rearview mirror. It came off in a furious shower of white beads. He started to angrily toss it out the window, but realized that would be evidence left behind, so he chucked it over his shoulder. In the rearview, he saw it land in the naco’s lap. He was propped up there in the sleeper like a ventriloquist’s dummy. The Bible that was halfway sticking out beneath the thigh of his Dickies pants irritated Knoxie even farther. He knew he couldn’t toss it, so he snatched the book up and swiftly turned to the Book of Matthew.
When he found the part that said, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye,” he tore that page out, along with several others before and after it. With a rage he didn’t often allow to bubble to the surface, he stuffed the pages into the naco’s mouth while Lytton and Ziggy thudded items around in the back of the truck. Presumably they were taking possession of the horse, but Knoxie didn’t want them to take it all.
He wanted to have something to deliver to Bihari.
He shuffled around in the console through fistfuls of trucking documents and receipts. He saw from an earlier Driver’s Daily Log that a guy named Stuart Grillo had done the Nogales to Phoenix run, when Mr. Presención had taken over. Stuart Grillo. That name sounded f*cking familiar. Stuart Grillo had been stupid enough to leave a Motel 6 receipt from Nogales in the console with his name handwritten on it, so on a hunch Knoxie folded it and stuck it in his jeans pocket.
Knoxie got out, going around the front of the cab in order to tell Turk, “Keep that one. He didn’t do nothing, and I might need him.”
Turk had an amused look on his painfully handsome face. He held his pistol at the Sinaloan’s head with the gangster side grip. “Yes, master.” Turk had been calling people that ever since they’d discussed Bellamy’s “master” up in Disneyland. “You think I’ll make it back in time for my date with Carrie Gunslinger?”