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Chapter 5

A baby’s sputtering cry split the night air, rising from the basket placed on the front porch. Folds of fluffy blue blanket poked up from the woven straw. All was still, save the flecks of circling gnats in the yellow smudge of the porch light. Night-blooming jasmine, trellised up the porch, perfumed the air. SUV bumpers gleamed up and down the street. Every third house was being remodeled, the lowboy Dumpsters as much a mark of the neighborhood’s affluence as the Boxsters slumbering beneath car covers.

The intermittent cries strengthened into a wail. Finally footsteps came audible within the house, then the beep of an alarm being turned off. The front door cracked so far as the security chain allowed, and a woman’s sleep-heavy face peered down. A gasp, then the door closed, the chain unclasped, and she stepped out onto the porch. A well-kept woman in her fifties, she clasped a blue bathrobe shut at her throat. Stunned. Her knees cracked as she crouched to grab the basket with trembling hands.

The blanket was twisted over itself, and she tugged at the folds frantically but gently, the cries growing louder, until finally she pulled back the last edge of fabric and stared down, dumbfounded.

A microcassette recorder.

The red ‘play’ light beamed up at her, the baby’s squawks issuing from the tiny speakers.

The crunch of a dead leaf floated over from the darkness of the front lawn, and then a man’s massive form melted into the cone of porch light. A gloved fist the size of a dumbbell flew at her, shattering her eye socket and knocking her back into the front door, rocketing it inward so hard the handle stuck in the drywall.

A moment of tranquillity. Even the crickets were awed into silence.

The large man stood at the edge of the porch, breath misting, shoulders slumped, his very presence an affront to the quiet suburban street. His plain, handsome face was oddly smooth, almost generic, as if his features were pressed through latex. He held a black duffel bag.

Another set of footsteps padded across the moist lawn, a second man finally entering the light. He was lean and of normal height, but he looked tiny next to his counterpart. He shuffled as he walked, one foot curled slightly inward, matching the awkward angle of his right wrist. As he finished tugging on his black gloves, his arms jerked ever so slightly, a symptom of the illness.

Ellen Rogers grunted on the foyer floor where she’d landed, one eye screwed off center, the skin dipping in the indentation where her cheekbone used to be. Her nose was split along the bridge, a glittering black seam. One leg was raised off the tile, paddling as if she were swimming. Her breaths were low, animal.

The men stepped inside, closed the door behind them, stared down at her. The lean one, William, said gently, ‘I know, honey, I know. Dodge can put some muscle behind a punch. I’m sorry for your face. Don’t think we wanted this any more than you.’

She whimpered and drooled blood onto the tile.

When Dodge dropped the duffel, it gave a metallic clank. He placed two cigarettes in his mouth, cocked his head, got them going with a cheap plastic lighter plucked from his shirt pocket, and passed one to his colleague. William sucked an inhale past yellowed teeth, closed his eyes, let a ghostly sheet of smoke rise from his parted lips.

‘Mr Rogers,’ he called down the hall. ‘Can we please have a word?’

The muted light thrown from the Tiffany lamp seemed the only thing holding darkness at bay. The office’s mallard-green walls dissolved into black; they might as well have not been there at all. Beyond the lip of the desk, a stock-ticker screen saver glowed out of nowhere. An artful photograph framed on the sofa’s console table showed the family a few years earlier posed cute-casual on the rear deck: proud parents leaning over beaming teenage son and daughter, matching smiles and pastel polo shirts. A nautical motif suffused the room – burnished brass compass, gold-plated telescope, antique loupe pinning down the parchment pages of a leather-bound atlas. It was the office of a man who fancied himself the captain of his own destiny. But William and Dodge hadn’t chosen the room for the design.

They’d chosen it because it was soundproof.

Ted Rogers propped up his wife on the distressed-leather couch, which Dodge had covered entirely with a plastic tarp. Ted had a softness befitting a man his age and circumstances. A fine, well-fed belly, spectacles accenting a round face, a close-trimmed white-gray beard – all jiggling now with grief and terror. When William had asked him into the study, he’d taken one look at Dodge and complied with all instructions.

Ellen shuddered in her husband’s arms, murmuring incomprehensibly. Her neck kept going slack, Ted’s plump hands fussing to keep her head upright.

‘Boss Man is displeased.’ William scratched calmly at the patchy scruff on his neck. ‘That little move of yours, it’s gonna prove costly to him.’

Old cigar smoke had settled into the furnishings, sweet and comforting.

‘I… Listen, please, tell him I’m sorry,’ Ted said. ‘I understand, now, the gravity-’

William held up a finger. ‘What did Boss Man tell you?’

‘I can get it all back first thing tomorrow. I swear to you.’

‘What. Did. Boss. Man. Tell. You?’

Ted’s chest jerked beneath his bathrobe. ‘If I did anything to betray his trust, he’d kill me.’

William moved his hand in a circle, prompting, cigarette smoke swirling like a ribbon. ‘How would he kill you?’

Ted leaned forward, gagged a bit, wiped his mouth. His voice came out unnaturally high. ‘Painfully.’ His hand rose, chubby fingers splayed, a man used to resolving conflict, to meeting halfway, to finding sensible solutions. ‘Look’ – his rolling eyes found William again – ‘you can take anything. Whatever this has cost him, I can set right. I mean, he can’t possibly prefer to… to…’ He sputtered to a stop, an engine winding down.

William and Dodge just stared down at him.

Ted’s tongue poked at the inside of his lip, making that well-trimmed beard undulate. ‘I was in some trouble and made a stupid decision. But I can undo it. I will pay for whatever the costs of the fallout will be. I can take a third mortgage on the house. I have equity in… in-’

Beside him his wife keeled over, her bruised face pushed into the cushion. Ted began to weep. ‘Look at her. Let me get her to a hospital. Let me call 911. We won’t say what happened. There’s still time. We can still get everything straightened out.’

William turned the cigarette inward, studying the cherry. Then he ground it out against his front tooth. He placed the butt carefully into a Ziploc bag, which he returned to his pocket, then continued as if there had been no interruption. ‘My uncle used to tell me: All we have is our word. All we have is what we promise we will do. Our employer is a man of his word. And I’m a man of mine. Ethics, see? So we’re in a predicament here. We don’t like hurtin’ folks, but we have to do what we say. Following orders, like in the armed services, or the whole damn thing falls apart. It’s a sad business all around, but that’s how it’s gotta be.’ His close-set eyes never faltered. Strands of facial hair, strawberry blond and wiry, fringed the sallow skin of his jawline. The smell coming off him was medicinal and sour. ‘In our business you gotta make sure a man’s promise to you is upheld. If it’s not, you gotta set precedent. You, Ted, are that precedent.’

Ted thumbed back Ellen’s eyelid. The pupil, dark and dilated. ‘Can you, please, please’ – his hand tightened into a fist – ‘take her to the hospital? She had nothing to do with this. She knew nothing about-’

The gunshot, even muffled, brought him upright on the couch. Ellen’s head bobbed, and then, through the fresh tear in the drop cloth, a single feather floated up from the cushion, flecked crimson. Shock at the sight overtook Ted instantly – glazed eyes, spread mouth, ice-water tremble of his muscles, like a horse flank shuddering off flies. A small, shapeless noise escaped him, a vowel sound drawn out and out.

Dodge leaned over, reached into the unzipped duffel, and rummaged inside. Objects clanked.

‘We need to take pictures,’ William explained. ‘At various stages. So we can show them to the next guy, see, who thinks he can get one over on Boss Man.’

When Dodge’s gloved hand emerged from the duffel, it was gripping a ball-peen hammer.

Ted moaned softly.

William said, ‘I need you to sit over here. So we have room. The angle, you see. No, here. There you go. Thank you.’ Stunned, Ted complied. William stepped back, admired his positioning. ‘Dodge here, he gets impatient. So we’re gonna get going. Dodge, where you want to start?’

Dodge hefted the ball peen, let it slap the leather of his palm.

‘Joints,’ he said.

The white van rattled up the dirt road, veering side to side on wide, trash-littered switchbacks. The ground finally leveled off, the headlights sweeping past an endless chain-link guarding a disused auto-wrecking yard. Vehicles smashed into neat rectangular bales were stacked treetop high, the unlit aisles running as long and true as cornrows. Caught wrappers and plastic bags wagged in the barbed wire. Rust ground into the hilltop dirt had turned the soil an Indian red.

Past the wrecking yard, beyond a massive setback of dead weeds, rose a two-story clapboard house. It had settled westward, resigning itself to the wind. A blue oak twisted up out of the brown earth like something from a painting.

The van halted in front of the house, dust clouding around the tires. The breeze picked up to a faint moan. Dodge climbed out, slammed his door, stretched his spine. It was early-morning dark, the hilltop as desolate as an abandoned mine.

A light clicked on upstairs in the house.

William was a bit slower getting out. Wincing, he fumbled a pill from his pocket and downed it dry, then rubbed at the backs of his legs. He palmed a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth, his jaw shifting with machine precision, then spit a few hulls in the dirt. He’d started at eleven years old with tobacco dip, but a few years ago someone had shown him a video of people with holes in their lips and cheeks, and so sunflower seeds it was. He had enough problems already without a sieve for a jaw.

He walked around the van, running a hand along the chipped white paint, and opened the back door. Ted lunged out, bellowing, his voice strained through the pillowcase tied over his head. William sidestepped, his wilted leg nearly buckling, and Ted tumbled off the rear bumper into the dirt. He screamed, arms flopping boneless at his sides, shattered at the shoulders and elbows.

He used his chin to shove himself up, shuffling and grunting like a blind bear, then bolted. The pillowcase was spotted red around the mouth where William had punched a knife through to give him some air; it was hard to be precise when they struggled.

About twenty yards away, Ted tripped and fell. Found his feet. Kept on.

William’s brother, Hanley, emerged from the front door and paused on the rickety porch, staring out across the Sacramento Valley. Morning edged over the horizon, a thin plane of gold. Hanley gave a half nod to the new day, stepped down, and peered into the back of the van. A body neatly wrapped in plastic drop cloth, one leather couch cushion seared from a bullet, rags soaked with bleach strong enough to make the eyes sting. When Hanley nudged the couch cushion to explore the bullet hole, the microcassette beside it clicked to life, a few baby squalls escaping until he stopped the recording again.

The footing of the sprawling front yard was uneven, ground squirrels doing their work beneath cover of the weeds. Ted ran, tripped, knee-crawled, ran. He blazed a frantic, meandering path, making poor progress. The three men paid him no mind.

Hanley drew a hand across his mouth, his stubble giving off a rasp. The family resemblance was apparent, though Hanley was clearly a healthier version of his older brother. Well-defined muscles, smooth pale skin, no kink in the posture or tweak in the limbs. ‘Nice work, brother,’ he said. ‘Dodge do his thing?’ Eagerness showed in his voice. This was new for him, and more than a little exciting.

‘He did indeed,’ William said.

Dodge was rooting in the duffel bag. He’d donned a rubber butcher’s apron and slaughterhouse goggles. The apron, pulled tight across his massive chest, held the marks of jobs past. He paused from cataloging his implements and drew himself upright, towering a full head above the van’s roof. That mannequin face, blank as a turned-off TV.

Behind them Ted collided with the trunk of the oak and went down hard with a grunt, vanishing into the waving foxtails. He struggled back up and stumbled onward at a new trajectory.

William nodded, bunched his lips. ‘We’ll prep the cellar,’ he said.

The brothers started toward the house, Hanley helping William up the stairs.

Somehow Ted had navigated his way across the giant stretch of yard. His ragged breaths carried back on the wind. He was sobbing something unintelligible, trying to form words.

Dodge shouldered the duffel and started calmly after him.

Leaning heavily on his brother, William dragged his lame leg up, one step at a time. They reached the porch, and he glanced down at a plastic-wrapped edition of the Sacramento Bee. He jerked to a halt.

Hanley said, ‘What, brother? You all right?’

William’s cheek twitched to one side, a dagger of teeth showing in the wire of his beard. He pointed down at the newspaper’s front-page photograph. ‘The face,’ he said.

Hanley looked down. Dumbstruck. ‘It’s not possible. It can’t be.’

William’s eyes hardened. He spit seeds across the black-and-white print. ‘Sure as hell looks like it. We’ll find out. We’ll make sure.’

‘And then?’

Down below they heard Dodge catch up to Ted. A crunch of bone and tendon, followed by a thin, wavering scream. A grunt as Ted was hoisted onto a shoulder and then the scrabble of arms flailing weakly against Dodge’s back.

‘Coming,’ Dodge said.