Randy White - Hunter's moon

My lungs were working again, the adrenaline circulating. I took an angling step toward him as he pulled a lighter-sized butane torch from his pocket, then a plastic squirt bottle filled with some kind of gel.

I was watching the man’s eyes. Excitement increases blood flow, eyes appear to glaze. With this freak, compulsion was pathology. He couldn’t stop himself. He had to see me burn.

“You are so goddamn sure of yourself. You know what I’d like? I want to see you run, Ford!” Lourdes lunged at me with the bottle, squirting a stream of gel as he snapped the torch’s flint trying to fire it.

It didn’t light-and he also dropped his pistol.

I blocked some of the goop with my gloves as I side-stepped, then dove at him. I hit him just below the knees, knocking his legs from beneath him. Lourdes weighed close to three hundred pounds and he came crashing down on me. But he didn’t let go of the torch, which still wouldn’t start.

“Goddamn thing!”

We got to our feet at the same time and I waited for him to lunge. I dropped to one knee when he tried to club me, ducked under his huge hands, and came up behind with my left elbow cradling his throat, my left leg threaded between his legs so he couldn’t move. I locked my fingers beneath his jaw, tilting his head back, and pinned my right knee against his spine. The gloves gave me a better grip.

Lourdes still had the butane torch and I snatched it from him. The gel was close enough for me to reach and I grabbed it.

“Ford… what are you doing?”

I was squirting a stream of gel down the back of his robe, that’s what I was doing. The goop smelled of soap and petroleum.

“Are you insane? Stop that!”

Lourdes, the psychopath, was also claustrophobic. The last time we’d met, I had told him I would bury him alive if he threatened my son again. Fire, as it burns, can also entomb. It was close enough.

I had the man’s head torqued so hard that he was looking over my shoulder. I could have broken his neck if I’d wanted. But I was furious… and he did not deserve a quick and painless ending that for me has become procedural.

Talking into his ear, I whispered, “Too bad, Prax, change of plans. You’ve got to run.”

As I started flicking the butane torch, I watched the one lidless blue eye grow wider in that terrible face. Then, abruptly, he stopped struggling. He seemed to be focusing on something behind me.

“Ford! Let him go. No fires.”

I waited until I heard, “Step away. That’s an order,” before I turned to confirm that the voice was familiar.

A man was coming down the hill toward me carrying a gun. It was Kal Wilson.

Wilson was wearing a navy-issue sweatsuit and ball cap pulled low on his head and pointing a pistol at Lourdes. It was the Russian silent pistol I’d seen earlier.

Vue was with him but several yards up the incline. The barrel of his submachine gun moved in synch with his eyes as he stood watch.

Lourdes appeared dazed. I felt the same. What was the president doing here?

“Step away,” Wilson said again. He used the pistol to wave me back as he marched toward Lourdes. Instead of tinted glasses, he was wearing contacts. Even so, he paused to focus on the man’s face. “Good God… I didn’t believe the photos. You really are a monster. But you did it to yourself.”

As I retrieved my pistol, then the revolver, I watched Lourdes touch his fingers to his face. “I didn’t do this. I was trying to rescue my family when I was burned. I was a child. ”

Sociopaths perfect multiple personalities as camouflage. Lourdes sounded childlike.

I started to warn “Don’t fall for it, Mr. President-” but Wilson silenced me with a look.

He took a step closer and studied the huge man’s face. It was a patchwork of skin and stitching. Cheeks, jaw, and lips were made up of rectangles and squares of varying colors, flesh sewn together over years by quack surgeons. It was a mosaic of brown skin, white skin, black skin, and pieces that were jaundiced.

The sections had been harvested from people he had murdered, stolen like scalps, then worn as medals. Finding a new face, a whole face, was a recent obsession.

Lourdes’s voice changed-now he was the good man wrongly accused. “You don’t understand. Ford attacked a woman here just a few minutes ago. She ran away screaming. Call the police; they’ll find her. I was just trying to protect her!”

Wilson’s expression changed. It was the wrong thing to say.

I tossed Lourdes’s revolver into the weeds as I pulled the semiautomatic from my belt. “Mr. President, I don’t know how you got here but you should leave now. Sir? Mr. President?”

Wilson brushed past me. He didn’t stop until he was a few feet from Lourdes. The pistol was pointed at the big man’s chest. “On the island, in Nicaragua. Why did you set fire to the plane? You had to know I wasn’t aboard. You murdered seven innocent people. Why? ”

“Fire? I didn’t-”

Wilson pulled the hammer back.

Lourdes made a quick personality change. “But it wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! I can tell you who did it, though. Ford-”

Lourdes must have recognized something familiar in Wilson’s eyes-perhaps seen in a mirror-because he began to back away.

“Did you see my wife? Did you speak to my wife?”

Lourdes was nodding. “She was a nice lady. We talked! She got off the plane to stretch her legs and we talked. But the last time I saw her, or any of them people, she was getting back aboard. She turned, gave me a big smile and waved when she heard me yell good-bye. And then I left. And that’s the God’s truth.”

The president snapped, “My wife was deaf, you son of a bitch,” and backhanded him. He still had the fast hands of a Naval Academy boxer. The sound of skin hitting skin cracked like two boards slapping together.

Lourdes went into a rage if someone touched his face. The transformation was chemical and abrupt. His fingers explored the place where he’d been hit, eyes glowing. The monster resurfaced. “The bitch was deaf? Lucky her. Maybe she couldn’t hear herself scream -”

Before he got the word out, Wilson shot him three times. The Russian pistol made a plink-plink-plink sound, no louder than the clicking of a telegraph key, or the refrain of a sonata.

The President stood over Lourdes for a moment, his chest heaving. But then he took a long breath, back in control. He turned to Vue. “Let’s go. I need to change.”

He pulled off the sweatshirt as he started up the hill. There was a white dress shirt beneath, the collar starched. As he handed the pistol to Vue, Vue handed him a gray suit coat from his shoulder pack, then a tie.

My brain was trying to assemble an explanation. “Mr. President? Did someone intercept my son’s e-mail?”

“Your son? What’s your son have to do with this?” Wilson was fitting the tie under his collar.

“How did you know I was here? That Lourdes would be here?”

Wilson said, “I knew because I told you about the Orchid Walk, remember? Lourdes knew because Rivera fed him the information.” Wilson stared up at the tree canopy for a moment, took another deep breath, and released it. “Wray and I used to walk this trail every chance we got. She loved orchids.” He paused as Vue knelt to retrieve something-the badek knife, short but balanced, with its curved blade. It was still on the ground.

Wilson recognized it. “Mind if I take that with me?”

“Of course. But why?”

“I have a speech to give.”

I said, “President Wilson… do you have to go through with this? You killed Lourdes. Isn’t that enough?”

Who was next? Thomas Farrish? Clerics? I hated the idea of him risking it. I nearly used the Panamanian cops with their metal detectors to dissuade him, but then I remembered that former presidents are not searched.