epitaph.’ He paused with a wicked smile. ‘An end to all the evil they have done since time began. Death to the Jews, my friend.’
Chambers leaned and thrust his gnarled fingers toward the cabinet.
Griff slipped his hand through the Velcroed seam in his shirt. ‘FBI!’ he shouted.
Faster than he had any right to be, Chambers brought out a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun from the cabinet. In an instant he had it cocked. The blued-steel barrel gleamed as it swung.
Griff’s gun was out and he shot Chambers four times. The shotgun barrel swayed and dropped an inch, the old man’s finger still trying to pull the trigger. Griff squeezed off two more rounds. Chambers let go of the stock and the shotgun fell. Its butt thumped heavily on the floor. The barrel sang against the stones of the fireplace. The old man’s lungs gurgled air through new holes in his chest and neck and his eyes twitched back in their sockets. His voice was liquid and bubbled like a frog’s and he said, ‘Lord, Lord.’ Then, barely audible, eyes quivering but trained on Griff, ‘Fuck you.’
After that his eyes went flat and he was dead but his movement continued, legs and one arm shivering as he slumped in the chair and finally hung half-in, half-out. His trigger finger jerked like a snake. Stopped.
Griff raised the SIG and with a grunt rolled the old man over, quickly and rudely palped him, then turned out his pockets looking for IED or remotes or timers. He pulled a plastic restraint cord from his pants pocket and cinched the limp, bony wrists. Only then did he check the old man’s pulse, mostly avoiding the slick smear of blood around the floor and the last of the flow from the nicked carotid.
He swallowed hard, trying to focus on the remaining danger, trying to keep the nervous crime-comedy voices out of his forebrain and back in the rear cages where they belonged. Papa has left the premises.
Suicide by cop. At his age. Preaching and then trying me on. I don’t believe it.
Griff quickly moved through the house, swinging along the walls, down the hall, into the rooms. He opened the closets just to make sure; very likely with kids so recently in the house they were not booby-trapped but he was still taking a chance. The house was clean and neat, beds made in each of the four small bedrooms, the single office with its roll-top desk prim in ordered austerity.
He passed the Patriarch on the way out. Erwin Griffin hated dead bodies. He had never admitted that to anyone; agents were supposed to be hardcore. Bodies made him feel sick.
Only then did he remember he was on the grid and that since the shooting, other than shouting out his affiliation, he had said nothing—maybe grunted, maybe cursed. Back up by the main road, they should have heard and seen everything that had happened inside the house and especially the shots and he did not want hordes of people up here or near the barn, not yet.
As he stepped through the door and out on the porch, peering left and then right, he said, ‘Chambers is dead. I’m fine. Keep everyone back.’
He faced north and saw agents and police running toward the house. How long had it taken him to search, two or three minutes? It had seemed like at least ten.
‘Get the hell back!’ he shouted from the porch, his voice cracking as he waved them off. They stopped. ‘Get back, you idiots!’ They turned and retreated with equal haste.
He had blood on his arm. The tattoos were smeared. He sat on the porch, letting his heart slow from Krupa to oompah, wishing to hell he had a cigarette, before deciding he would have to take a turn about the yard, around the house, just to make sure.
By that time, he saw vans and more people up by the edge of the clearing.
The farm was no longer quiet.
CHAPTER EIGHT El Centro, California
‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying,’ Charlene told the tall blond man. It was past noon. Her eyes were puffy. They had made love and slept a little and then talked into the morning. Now they were having breakfast in a Coco’s restaurant. ‘I just can’t be that cynical. I need hope. Even when I know what I’m doing and think about where my husband is, I still want to be a Christian.’
The blond man glanced at his skinned knuckles. They had already scabbed over. He had told Charlene that he had barked them while changing a tire. In fact, he had slipped in a ditch after shooting an Arizona patrol officer.
The waitress brought another glass of orange juice. Charlene drank the second glass with equal speed—three quick gulps—sniffed, and looked around the Coco’s: Scotchgarded print fabric on the booth seats, scarred oak table top, one knife magnetically stuck to a fork beside a plate smeared with yolk and bacon grease. Outside, bleached by the sun, El Centro, California: warehouses and auto repair businesses and trucks roaring by. The blond man was in his late forties, thin, run-down. He had put on sunglasses after leaving the Day’s Inn to hide his eyes—one green, one blue.
‘You’re so quiet,’ Charlene told him.
‘Sorry. I’ve probably said too much already.’
Charlene had driven the green Ford van from Highway 10, where she had picked him up by the side of the road, to El Centro, stopping at a Day’s Inn. They had both taken rooms. She had met him in the lobby after midnight and asked what his name was and he had told her it was Jim Thorpe. Charlene had been needy. Even after she had fallen asleep, Jim Thorpe had stayed awake. He looked as if he had not slept for weeks.
Charlene looked through the low window beside the booth, out to the dry lawn and the street beyond. ‘I’m ready to believe in Jesus, just give myself up to something that I know is totally good,’ Charlene said. ‘I mean, I can see Jesus so clearly and he is beautiful and compassionate and he has a lovely smile—just like yours.’ She looked at him with real longing. ‘I do not know why men have to act so tough. You certainly don’t need to be bitter…I mean, you’re an attractive older guy. You can travel the whole world, no responsibilities…’ She stopped, confused, and looked at the table.
Charlene’s husband had gone to West Point. After 10-4, he had signed up for infantry, taking the idiot sticks, the emblem of crossed rifles, over more plum army opportunities. Charlene had wanted him to stay home and be a husband and a father. He had enlisted for a second tour to kill ragheads and stay with his buddies. His name was Jason. She had shown Jim Thorpe a picture. Her guy was upright, young, strong, bullnecked, laser-eyed. He wondered what Jason was seeing right now.
‘I think about him being God knows where because the damned army won’t tell the families anything and I wonder, what is Jesus really up to? What is He thinking, making all of us suffer? But I can’t blame Jesus. It’s us, isn’t it?’ Charlene tapped the juice glass on the table. Made it do a little dance. Made as if to smile bravely, but too late. Women liked confessing to him. It was the one thing that they gave him that he would have gladly dispensed with.
But hadn’t he confessed to her—just a little, and started her flow? Opened up about his innermost opinions? If she only knew the half of it.
‘I know you’re a good man,’ she said. ‘But being so hopeless…I can’t feel that way. It’s just the way the world treats us. We’re being tested.’
His nerves were starting to jangle. He needed to move on or the
