April Smith - Judas Horse

“Really? I’m hurt. What kind of trees are these?” “Ornamental filberts.”

“Megan said they were hazelnuts.”

“Hazelnuts are filberts,” he says impatiently. “One and the same. We just don’t use the word filberts anymore. People don’t like the sound of it.” “Kind of like ‘You’re trespassing’?” I smile. “That doesn’t sound very friendly.” “How do I know you’re a friend?”

I give him flirty. “I can’t believe you don’t remember — I stole three hundred bucks from the till and gave it to the cause, when I could have gone shopping.” I pretend to be entranced by the willowy branches just sprouting tiny leaves. “This is amazing. How do you do it? Every tree is the same.” His big developed shoulders shrug. His hair is in a dirty rat tail down the back. He wears a T-shirt under a grimy hooded sweatshirt, and a blue nylon jacket with a stripe down the arm. It was cold this morning. His light-colored jeans are dirt-stained at the knees.

“That’s the way my mind works,” he says.

I let him watch as I take in his eyes. I see a luminous intelligence. Seeking. Perching at a distance. Holding back.

“I brought the ducks.”

“What ducks?”

“They were stolen from a foie gras farm last night. Megan is expecting me.” “When?”

In the muffled silence of the orchard, our voices are undistorted and strangely intimate.

“She said as soon as possible. One is sick. She was going to get a vet.” His eyes skim my unzipped windbreaker.

“I need to pat you down.”

“Excuse me?”

“Security check. In case you’re wearing a wire.” “A wire ?”

Electric shock goes through me, as if I really am wearing a listening device and he can tell. I stare at the crows walking cocksure across the rows and shrug with absolute wonder.

“What am I, the bird police? Why would I wear a wire? I wouldn’t even know how.” Don’t make a thing out of it.

“Give me your backpack.”

“Megan didn’t say I’d have to go through a metal detector.” “Megan likes to think the world’s a happy place.” He finds a wallet. “Darcy DeGuzman?” “Yes.”

He finds my cell phone and slips it in his pocket.

“Hey! I drove down here in the frigging middle of the night! Megan’s very upset, in case you didn’t know. There’s a sick bird in the car! ” “Open your arms and legs.”

I comply, but if my heart keeps going like this, it will kill me.

“May I ask what you’re doing?”

“I’m just an old bandit,” he says. “Just doing my thing. If I touch you inappropriately, you have permission to kick me in the balls.” “If I have permission, it won’t be any fun.”

His hands are expert, like I’m a perp spread-eagled on the hood of a car.

“Are you done?” I ask Julius. “Okay?”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“You can leave the animals and go.”

“I need my cell phone back.” I stamp my foot.

He replies with a sardonic smile. If I’m reading it right, the subtext is, I could have you right now in the dirt.

“Let me tell you something, darlin’. I am not the one who made me paranoid.” An instinctive part of him was watching from the moment I drove down the road. And it did not have to be his eyes.

I am not the one who made me paranoid. Then who did?

He flips my cell phone open.

A screen door slams and Megan strides angrily across the yard, followed by a tall young woman in hip-sucking jeans, with a perfect face and boyishly cut blond hair.

“Where are they?” Megan demands.

Julius’s smile fades. “She says in the car.”

“Why are you standing around playing games?”

“We don’t have a clue who she is.” He’s scrolling through my cell phone.

Megan rips it from his hands and gives it back to me. “Oh please. We have an emergency.” “Watch your mouth,” Julius says, his voice hard. “Before you say something we all regret.” “I could give a damn,” Megan mutters, already pulling at the door of my car. “Thank you for doing this, Darcy. Sara, help me out here.” Sara, the long-legged rescuing angel, shoos the ducks out of the car as Megan lifts the bin. The sick one is too weak to raise its head.

“I am really, really afraid for this one,” Megan says.

The girl strokes it. “He’s not going to make it, is he?” The screen door slams again, and a young man about seventeen, a baby neo-Nazi with a buzzed head, appears holding a shotgun.

It’s the kid who streaked through the rally carrying the blood bomb.

“What the fuck?” he announces.

“Slammer!” Julius says. “Get back in the house.” Lower the gun, knucklebrain.

“Thought you needed help,” he says.

“I’ll tell you when I need help, pal.”

In response, Slammer fires the gun into the trees. It is as if every living being on the farm is hit with the reverberation. Ducks flee in panic, dogs bark insanely, and I have the impression a herd of cows is trying to get out of the barn.

Sheared-off branches fall onto the roof, then drop to the garden in slow motion.

“He didn’t mean it,” Sara says, shaking visibly.

Megan puts the bin with the dying duck on her hip, an arm around the girl, and walks them both away.

Julius has taken the gun from Slammer, who surrenders it with a smirk.

“We have a visitor,” he says quietly. To me: “You can leave now.” “What about the vet?”

Julius’s voice is military, clipped. “Get back on the road and forget how you got here.” The inside of the car smells like a sour old pillow. Pinfeathers and droppings are everywhere. I turn on the engine and wobble off. Less than a quarter mile from the farm, I hear the chilling echo of a second shot. I could assign importance to it, or accept that I will never know.

I am still reeling with a kind of exhilaration, still dumbly clutching the cell phone, when it vibrates in my hand.

“You’re not there yet, I hope,” Donnato says.

“Where?”

“The farm.”

“On my way back. Why?”

He curses urgently. “Headquarters did not want you to make contact at this time.” “Headquarters?” My stomach lurches. “How did I mess up now?” My fingers tighten on the wheel in anticipation of the chastising to come. The mocking clown head on a stick is out there, a couple of miles down the road.

Thrillville.

“We have identified Julius Emerson Phelps,” Donnato says. “We believe his real name is Dick Stone. And he’s one of us. A former FBI agent who went bad in the seventies. If this is the guy, we have a potential problem.”

Everyone sits down in a conference room in Los Angeles. It is a discreet briefing, with shades lowered. The major players in Operation Wildcat have been assembled, including the FBI’s second in command from Washington, Deputy Director Peter Abbott. All of FBIHQ reports to him. Son of a former congressman from Oregon, a decorated Vietnam veteran with a degree in international law, he’s the guy who travels in an armored limousine, ready to assume authority if the director takes a bullet. From the sound of him, he can hardly wait. Beneath the crisp gray suit and red silk tie, you can almost hear the purring motor of ambition.

The deputy director seems to have a personal interest in Operation Wildcat. The Abbotts are a founding Portland family that made a fortune in railroads and diversified to construction and technology. Over the past thirty years, their real estate holdings in the Northwest have skyrocketed by developing the right-of-ways for defunct train tracks. Institutions like the Abbotts find it bad for the business climate when insurgent ecoterrorist groups blow up concrete trucks and laboratories. Almost as long as Peter Abbott has been with the Bureau, his family has pressured Washington to deal with FAN and ELF. Now that he is Washington, you can imagine the tone of drinks with Dad on the deck of the summer compound in the San Juan Islands.