J. Jance: Kiss the Bees

In the darkness he wrestled with the reality of being fifty years old and let out to pasture. On his fortieth birthday, he had counted himself as one of the luckiest men in the world. He had a wife who loved him and, according to his lights, a reasonably well-blended family-his two sons, Diana's son, Davy, and the baby, Lani. The icing on the cake had been his job. The chance to be elected sheriff had fallen into his lap in a way he hadn't anticipated, but the job had suited him. He had been damn good at it.

Now, ten years later, most of his "dream" life was gone, wiped out of existence as if it had never existed in the first place. The job had disappeared with the results of the last election. Bill Forsythe was the new Pima County sheriff now, leaving Brandon Walker as an unemployed fifty-year-old has-been. He still had Diana, of course, but there was a cool distance between them now-probably one of his own making and one he doubted they'd ever bridge again. Careerwise, she had moved beyond him-beyond anything either one of them had anticipated. She no longer needed him, certainly not the way she had in the beginning. As for the kids-the boys were pretty much lost to him. Tommy was gone-dead, most likely; Quentin was a lying, cheating, boozing ex-con; and Davy was off in Chicago being beguiled by his paternal grandmother's money and the myth of his long-dead father. In this bleak landscape, Brandon Walker's only consolation, his sole ray of sunshine, was Lani-the baby he had once argued fiercely against adopting.

Now, though, laboring over the wood, he felt the need to distance himself from her as well. She was sixteen and still dependent, but she wouldn't be for long. She had a job now and a driver's license. It was only a matter of time before she, too, would grow up and slip away from him.

And when that happened, Brandon wondered, would there be anything left for him, anything at all? Well, maybe that never-ending mountain of wood, waiting to be chopped and stacked and salvaged. There would probably always be plenty of that.

He worked until it was too hot to continue, then he went in, showered, and threw himself onto the bed. Only then, at eleven o'clock in the morning, was he able to fall asleep.

From his perch high up on the mountain, Mitch Johnson had a perfect view of the Walkers' river-rock compound in Gates Pass. He liked to think of it as a God's-eye view. If he'd had a rifle in his hand right about then instead of a damned stupid sketch pad, Brandon Walker standing out by his woodpile would have been an easy shot. Bang, bang, you're dead. But as Andy had pointed out, killing Brandon Walker wasn't the point. Destroying him was. If the United States was going to continue to survive as a nation, people who contributed to that destruction-people who helped the job-eating illegal scum-had to be destroyed themselves.

"Mr. Johnson," Andy had asked him once, early on, "why do you suppose the cat toys with the mouse?"

Mitch Johnson had already learned that Andrew Carlisle was sometimes an irascible teacher. Even his most oddball question required a thoughtful response. "I suppose because it's fun," he had answered.

"For whom?" Andy had persisted.

"Certainly not for the mouse."

"Don't be so sure. You see, in those moments, the mouse must have some moments of clarity, when it may possibly see through its own terror and imagine surviving. Continuing. There's a real beauty in that, a sort of dance. The mouse tries to escape. The cat blocks it. The mouse tries again, and the same thing happens. As long as the mouse keeps trying, it hasn't lost hope. Once it does, the cat becomes bored and simply eats it. End of story."

They lay on their bunks in silence for a while, Mitch Johnson in the upper bunk and Carlisle in the lower so he could get to the toilet more easily during the night.

Mitch didn't want to seem stupid, but he couldn't see where Andy was going on this one. "So what's the point?" he finally asked.

"Did you enjoy shooting those guys in the back?" Andy asked.

A peculiar intimacy existed between the two men that Mitch Johnson was hard-pressed to understand. If somebody else had asked that question, Mitch would have decked the guy, but because it was Andy asking, Mitch simply answered. "Yes," he said.

"But wouldn't it have been better," Andrew Carlisle asked, "if they'd had the chance to ask you-to beg you-not to do it and you did it anyway? Wouldn't that have been more fun? Have you ever done it that way?"

"What do you mean?" Mitch said. "I did it the way I did it. I shot them and that's it."

"But it doesn't have to be," Andrew Carlisle told him. "You have a mind, an imagination. All you have to do is rewrite the scenario. Change your mind and change your reality. Close your eyes and see them walking again. Only this time, instead of pulling the trigger, you call out to them. You order them on their hands and knees. It was hot, wasn't it? The middle of summer?"

"Yes, almost the end of June."

"So imagine them on their hands and knees in the sand, with the hot earth blistering their skin. They're going to beg you not to shoot them. Plead with you to let them stand up again so they'll have the protection of their shoe leather between their skin and the sand. But if you wait, if you don't let them up off their hands and knees, eventually, they'll belong to you in the same way the mouse belongs to the cat, you see. In exactly the same way."

In the upper bunk, Mitch Johnson closed his eyes and let Andrew Carlisle's almost hypnotic voice flow over him. Mitch was right there again, standing on the bank of Brawley Wash, calling down to the wetbacks marching ahead of him.

"Stop," he shouted at them, and they did.

"Down!" he ordered. "Get down on your hands and knees." And they did that, too, all three of them groveling in the burning sand before him, all of them scraping their faces in the dirt. This must be what it feels like to be a king, Mitch thought. Or maybe even a god.

"Please," the older one said, speaking to Mitch in English rather than in Spanish. "Please, let my grandsons be. I'll do whatever you want. Just let my daughter's boys go free. Let them go."

"What would you do, old man?" Mitch asked him.

"Anything. Whatever you say."

"Put the barrel in your mouth."

For Mitch, that was such a sexually charged image that it almost broke the spell, but Andy's voice, washing over the whole scene, kept the images in play. Reaching up tentatively, the old man took the barrel of the gun and lovingly, almost reverentially, put it into his own mouth. And with the grandsons cowering there on the ground, and with the old man's eyes full on his face, Mitch Johnson pulled the trigger.

"And this time," Andrew Carlisle finished, "you can be sure the bastard is dead. What do you think?"

Mitch opened his eyes, unsure of what had happened but with the tracks of a wet dream still hot on his belly and between his legs.

"It beats jacking off, doesn't it?" Andrew Carlisle asked.

Yes, it does,Mitch meant to say, but, for some strange reason, he was already asleep.

Diana Ladd Walker was at work in her study. On that Friday morning she was supposed to be writing, working on the outline for her next book, Den of Iniquity. What she was doing instead was fielding phone calls. The month before her previous book, Shadow of Death, had won a Pulitzer. Even though the book had been out for nine months, the whirl of publicity surrounding the prize had pushed the book into numerous reprints. Not only that, it was back on the New York Times Best Sellers list as well, sitting at number eight, for the third week in a row.

Which is why, at a time when Diana should have been writing, she had been sucked instead back into book-promotion mode. She had left her desk and was on her way to shower when the phone rang again.