Illegal

SEVENTY

I'm not like Simeon Rutledge.

Sure, we're both members of the human race, but that's where the resemblance ends.

Still, Payne was on his way to kill a man. To snuff out a life with what the law calls "premeditation and malice aforethought."

A nice phrase. "Malice aforethought." He'd surely aforethoughted a truckload of malice in the last year.

An hour after sundown, Payne drove past fields of cotton and alfalfa, swarms of gnats committing suicide on his windshield. There had once been a large lake in these parts, fed by the Tule River, but it had long ago been drained by Ezekiel Rutledge's ambition to go from merely rich to incredibly wealthy. Nothing changes. The rich get richer, Payne thought, and the poor still live in Weedpatch Barracks.

He skirted the town of Corcoran with its massive state prison, home to Charles Manson, among several thousand other miscreants. Powerful lights curdled the night sky into a sickly shade of green. Payne couldn't fight off the notion that someone who committed a murder in these parts might himself spend the rest of his days inside those walls.

He fiddled with the radio dial. The strongest signal was an oldies rock station, and he picked up Link Wray's "Rumble" with its slow, tantalizing guitar licks. Another few miles and Payne found the side road Rutledge had described. A dusty, one-lane, unpaved path through tomato and onion fields. Darkened shacks, propped on cinder blocks, abandoned and forlorn. The road grew bumpier and narrower, the fields smaller and less tended. The Sierra Nevadas were silhouetted to the east, the Diablo Range to the west, the stars a countless sprinkling of sugar on a black velvet cake. He spotted the Big Dipper, traced a path upward from the two stars that formed the cup's far end. Found Polaris, the North Star, glowing more fiercely than it ever did in the city.

He looked back to the road just in time to avoid a waddling possum, then swerved again, barely missing a rough-barked sycamore encroaching on the narrow road. Then he saw it. A small aluminum trailer, one end protruding from a thicket of scrub oak trees.

Payne pulled off the road and killed the engine. From somewhere in the darkened fields, birds cried like frightened children, and insects played a hundred different symphonies. Sounds came from inside the trailer, too. Voices with a metallic edge. Judging from the cathode glow on the porthole window, a television set.

Payne got out of the Mustang, Adam's Louisville Slugger in hand. Metal alloy. Only eighteen ounces. It made a metallic clonk hitting a baseball. Payne wondered for the thousandth time just what sound would it make crushing a skull.

He took a few swings, as if in the on-deck circle. Two-handed, level and strong. A line drive swing. Then, one-handed. A fine whoosh through the warm night air.

Payne crept toward the half-hidden trailer. An Airstream about twenty feet long, a silver sausage. Propane tank leaning against the hitch. Metal poles cockeyed in the ground, propping up a torn, green-striped awning. A muddy Chevy half-ton pickup sat alongside. Someone had taken the trouble to back it into the trees. Faster exit, maybe?

Ten feet from the door, Payne could clearly hear the television. Music and the high-pitched voices of a cartoon. The smell of cooked pork drifted from the trailer's open windows.

Payne thought about Rutledge and his smug assumptions.

"Hell, if someone killed Javier I'd gut the bastard like a hog."

"And you think I'm like you?"

"More than you know."

Payne figured that, under the right circumstances, everyone is capable of killing. No great revelation there. Just the searing awareness that homicide is grafted onto our genes.

Payne's murderous intent came with a promise attached. He had looked Rutledge squarely in his flinty eyes and given an oath along with a bloody handshake. In return for the whereabouts of Manuel Garcia, he would give up the search for Marisol. He would kill tonight and go home tomorrow.

But I lied.

Not for one moment, not for the infinitesimal blink of a faraway star, would he let Tino down. It was easy to choose which promise to break.

To hell with you, Rutledge.

Approaching the trailer, Payne tripped. He caught his balance and realized he'd just trampled Our Lady of Guadalupe, or at least a knee-high statue of her, jammed into the dust just outside the front door. Her eyes were lowered in prayer. Pink blossoms grew at her feet, and her dainty shoulders were covered with a turquoise shroud.

The Virgin won't protect you, Garcia. She's got a higher calling than hit-and-run drivers.

Now, standing on the doorstep of the old trailer, Payne felt exhilarated, a weight lifting from his body like a Zeppelin untethered from its port. Gripping the baseball bat in one hand, he drew his foot back and smashed in the flimsy screen door.

"I'm here, Garcia! Goddammit, I'm here at last!"