Paul Levine: Illegal

"Toss the knife down," Cardenas ordered. "Then step away."

Fighting off dizziness, his arm bleeding, Payne obeyed. In his mind, he saw the last seconds of his life ticking away, his body buried in a levee alongside an old Chevy. Strangely calm, he accepted his own death in a way he had never accepted Adam's.

"About goddamn time you got here, Javie." Rutledge spat blood, then wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

"Now, there's a thank you, Tio Sim."

"Don't be so damn prickly." Rutledge picked up the. 45 and slid it into his holster. "Payne don't have the guts. If he couldn't do the pollo who killed his boy, he sure as hell couldn't do me."

"Give me back the knife," Payne said, "and we'll see."

"You had your chance. Just like with your own boy. You blew it then and you blew it now."

Payne felt a molten wave of heat flow through his chest. He could bull-rush Rutledge, knock him down, go for the gun. Then what? Get shot by Cardenas. That wouldn't help Tino or his mother.

The chief motioned with his gun. "Move on down, both of you."

Marisol and Tino angled across the levee like skiers carving their way down a slope.

"You okay, kiddo?" Payne asked, pressing his right hand against the wound on his left arm.

"I'm good, Himmy. I got mi mami. "

Payne looked toward Marisol. All this time, he felt he knew her, but he was setting eyes on her for the first time. Soaking wet. Hair tangled. Face bruised. Still a beautiful woman, with a stubborn jaw carved from stone.

"Marisol, you've got a great son. You're gonna be really proud of him."

As if the boy would grow up. As if she'd be around to see him.

"Tino has told me all about you, Mr. Payne. You are a wonderful man." A strong woman with a tender voice. "Bless you."

Something passed between them. The mother who feared for her son and the man who had watched his own son die.

"Tino's a real valiente, " Payne continued.

"Very fucking touching." Rutledge tore strips of cloth from his shirt and jammed them up his nostrils. "Take care of those two, Javie." His voice was hollow as a foghorn. "I'll handle Payne myself."

Cardenas scratched a knuckle against his chin, as if checking to see if he had shaved. "I've done a lot of shit, Sim. But I never killed anyone. Much less a woman and a boy."

"About time you got your hands dirty."

"Not this way."

"Don't fuck with me, Javie. You want to see that puta on the witness stand?"

Tino's hands balled into fists. "Don't talk that way about mi mami!"

"Hush, Tino," Marisol ordered.

"So what are you saying, Sim?" Cardenas asked. "We kill three people to keep you out of prison?"

"You're goddamn right we do."

"Problem is, you're gonna do time, anyway." Cardenas swung his 9mm toward Rutledge. "Keep your hands where I can see them, Sim."

"What the fuck?"

Stunned, Payne tried to figure out what was going on. The police chief defying the man he called "mi tio." It made no sense.

Rutledge kept his right hand perched just above the walnut grip of his holstered revolver. The men were staring each other down, two cowboys itching for a shootout. But what was the fight about?

Marisol looked at Payne, her dark eyes alert, as if asking what to do. The Marine knife lay in the mud. Adam's baseball bat nearby. But there were two men with guns. Payne chose to wait it out.

"Javie, I got plans for you," Rutledge said. "Always did, ever since you were a baby."

"I've got my own plans."

"What the hell's that mean?"

"I know about the indictments and the plea you turned down. About your will, too."

"Whitehurst?" The realization seemed to nail Rutledge to the ground with a railroad spike. "That shyster. The going gets tough, and that damn lawyer turns yellow. Hell, you both do."

"Your time has passed, Sim."

"Not while I'm still standing, you little pecker. So you'd better put a bullet in my heart or lay your gun down."

Rutledge didn't want to kill Javie, though he knew he could.

Just look at him. Stiff as a scarecrow. A death grip on his gun.

Rutledge would prefer to talk Javie down. Hell, he liked the boy. Always had. "Jesus, Javie. Haven't I treated you like my own son?"

That brought a rueful smile. "In school, the kids thought so. Told me I was your son."

"Bullshit. Not that I didn't wish it was true."

"I remember coming into Mami 's bedroom in the morning and finding you there."

"Only after your daddy died." Watching the barrel of the Glock.

Are your hands shaking, Javie?

"At the very end, in the hospital, she told me you'd been taking her to the barn long before that. Even before I was born. 'Me monto como un caballo.' Her exact words. 'He mounted me like a horse.' "

"The woman was on morphine, for Christ's sake."

"She didn't want to fuck you, but you let her know Papi wouldn't have a job otherwise."

"Not the way it happened." Rutledge thinking Javie would get off the first shot.

But you'll miss. Most gunshots do.

Keeping his eyes on Rutledge, Cardenas said, "Hey, Payne. Did mi tio ever tell you about his first fuck?"

"Yeah. Some girl in the barn with hands stained from picking grapes."

"He tell you her name?"

"Maria something. He couldn't remember her last name."

"Sure he could. My mother, Sim! You fucked my mother when she was just a kid."

Goddamn Maria, Rutledge thought.

Quiet all those years, then she opens up like she's confessing to Jesus.

"She couldn't turn down the boss's son, could she?" Cardenas taunted him. "Then you turned her over to your father. You're poison, Sim. A degenerate. You and your father and your grandfather. A family of sick, twisted bastards."

"Fuck you, Javie."

"Yeah. Fuck me for selling out. Fuck me for being a coward." Cardenas exhaled a long, sad breath and his eyes went dark, embers turning to ash. He looked toward the sluice pipe.

"My mother told me something else in the hospital," the chief said. "She told me what happened the night of the flood."

"She wasn't here. She can't know."

" Mami harangued Zaga about it for years. It took a lot of tequila to loosen his tongue."

"Jesus on the cross! Your father drowned in the flood. I saw it happen." Rutledge thinking he would have no choice.

I'm gonna have to kill you, Javie.

"Why not just admit it, Sim? After all this time, say it once before you die. Say it, goddammit!"

Rutledge kept his right hand poised above the big revolver. He hacked up a viscous wad of bloody snot and spat into the mud. The memories came flowing back, like hot lava down a steep slope.

"Not tonight, Javie," he whispered. "Not fucking tonight."

A December wind drives the cold rain in great sweeping arcs across the valley. Three hell-raising Pacific storms, back-to-back, have pummeled the state for the past week.

Wearing a poncho and fishing boots, Simeon Rutledge, in his forties, stands knee-deep in mud. The rain falls hard and fast, like buckshot piercing the skin. Atop the earthen levee, he gauges the depth of the stream and the strength of the soil holding it back. A single fissure and one hundred thousand acres will flood. Crops lost, equipment destroyed, loans called. Three generations of sweating and bleeding, of clawing and scratching. All undone by Mother Fucking Nature in one week of gales and floods.

"Faster! Drop the damn chassis!" Shouting at the crane operator, guiding a Plymouth Duster along the ridge of the levee. "No style points, Luis! Just drop the damn thing!"

Thank God for Hector Cardenas. It was his idea to use junked cars to shore up the levee. One chassis worth two hundred sandbags.