David Lindsey: The Rules of Silence

In the early morning darkness, Chalmers told the rancher he'd have to tidy up a few things on his trailer before he drove away, said adios to him, and watched the headlights of the last pickup ascend the caliche road that climbed out of the shallow valley.

Then Chalmers turned and heaved his heavy body up on the rails of his trailer and climbed to the top. With a small ratchet he unscrewed two bolts and lifted out the panel that concealed the two cubicles.

“Esta bien, ” he said, and climbed down the rails again.

From the ground he watched as the first man wriggled from his cubicle in the near dark. He was no longer hooded, which immediately set Chalmers's antennae to quivering. As the first man helped the second one-also without his hood now-negotiate the difficult exit onto the sides of the cattle trailer, Chalmers noticed that the first man was clearly younger and more muscular. Bodyguard.

They were stiff and moved slowly, but eventually they made their way to the ground. Even though it was dark, Chalmers deliberately kept his head down as the bodyguard produced a cell phone and placed a call. The older man walked a little ways from the truck, unzipped his pants, and pissed into the darkness, his back to them.

Chalmers made a big deal of being busy putting something in order on the tail end of the truck, but he kept a wary eye on the younger man's hands. This was where Chalmers became a liability instead of a necessity. When the man finished his conversation, he came over to Chalmers.

“Which way's the road? ”he asked in English.

“Right behind you, ”Chalmers said, his eyes averted, tilting his head toward the caliche track into the brush. His own rig pointed straight at it.

“Okay, ”the man said, his voice saying a kind of thanks and a kind of good-bye. “Wait half hour, ”he added, then turned and walked away toward the other man, who was pacing back and forth.

They exchanged a few words and then, without turning around, walked away into the cobalt darkness, headed for the only road out of the valley.

Slowly Chalmers eased over to a toolbox under the steps of his rig and took out a pair of binoculars. He moved away from the truck and sat on the ground, his legs pulled up, and rested his elbows on his knees. He put the binoculars to his eyes and focused it on the two men. The nightvision lenses illuminated them in a slightly fuzzy, green world. They were still together. They didn't look back.

He sensed it a millisecond before he felt it, the cold, thick tube eased firmly against his right ear. He knew. He went weightless, and his heavy, weary body levitated slowly and then stopped a few inches above the ground, the cold tube pressed against his ear keeping him from tilting. He was still watching the two men walking away in a green world when his head exploded.

The Lincoln Navigator climbed over the caliche track to a larger caliche road, this one wider, flatter, and graded. The Navigator turned right and quickly picked up speed to a fast clip. Behind the SUV the dust churned up into the cloudless darkness, where the glow of the three-quarter moon caught it and turned it into a plume of powdered silver that hung momentarily in the night and then slowly sank and settled away into the dark landscape.

When the Navigator hit the highway, it turned left and headed west. The man in the front passenger seat handed back two paper sacks with hamburgers to the men behind him, who hadn't had anything to eat except a few mangoes and oranges during the past twelve hours.

As the Navigator sailed over the rolling, winding highway through the Hill Country, the two men in the backseat ate, staring out through the windshield at the headlights threading the darkness. They all listened to the terse transmissions in Spanish coming over the complex of equipment stuffed under the dashboard and in the console between the two front seats. The space was so cramped that it resembled a cockpit.

Wearing headphones and a mike, the front-seat passenger occasionally spoke a word or two in flat, dispassionate Spanish, often changing frequencies. A computer screen in the center console displayed a map with remarkably sharp resolution and a stationary bright red spot in the upper right corner. The Navigator's progress was represented in the lower left center of the screen by a green pulsing dot, jerking its way on an irregular trajectory toward the upper right corner.

They turned north.

“What about those guys? ”the older man said in English, referring to something he'd heard on the radio. He wanted to speak in English now. Get his head into it. His neck was stiff, and he could smell cow shit in his clothes. Riding in the top of a cattle truck was not his usual mode of travel.

“They're in place, both of them.”

“You've checked with them, about the techniques?”

“Many times.”

The older man sighed in disgust and dropped the rest of his hamburger into the sack. Fucking hamburger. He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin. It would sit like a stone in his stomach. He tossed the sack onto the floor. Fucking stupid American hamburgers.

“And the other two? ”he asked.

“The same.”

“The same what? ”he snapped.

“They're ready. Their techniques are well planned. They are waiting to hear from you.”

Outside, the countryside was lighted by the waxing moon that raced along beside them. Hills rose up the size of pyramids, mounded and disguised by time, mile after mile of them. Occasionally they would fall away and a valley would open up, and sometimes fields, and sometimes meadows, rolled out under the moonlight. Now and then, in the distance, the windows of a solitary ranch house burned like isolated embers.

“Planning something like this, on this side, ”he said to no one in particular, looking out the window, “we can't be too careful. This time there's no such thing as too much planning.”

The men listened. They were already nervous, all of them. The stakes this time were higher than they had ever been, and everyone knew that the older man behind them had a short and deadly fuse when the stakes were high. They had been planning this a long time, and now with the arrival of the cattle truck, there was no turning back.

The Navigator turned west again.

The older man liked the sounds of the radio transmissions. It meant his men were tending to business. There was always something to double-check. There was always a tiny, bothersome oversight to eliminate. He settled into the corner of his seat.

“This guy's going to think the devil's got him by the huevos, ” he said. “He's going to wish his mother had choked him to death the minute he was born, right there between her legs.”

Titus Cain and Charlie Thrush were at the far half of the onemile course when they decided to stop jogging and walk the rest of the way back. They'd done three and a half miles, and the temperature was a hundred and two. It was six-fifteen in the afternoon.

They loped to a walk, sweat streaming from them, their athletic gray T-shirts and shorts stained dark with it. They strode through the misters flanking either side of the cinder track at fifty-yard intervals, head-high sprayers that formed a wet cloud of ten or twelve feet in diameter that Titus had installed for a distance of several hundred yards on the back half of the track.

Charlie, a tall, lanky man in his early sixties, turned and went back to the mister and stood in the cloud of spray.

“Damn, this's saving my life, ”he gasped, bending over and putting his hands on his knees as he caught his breath, the fine spray beading on his silver hair.

Titus, breathing heavily, too, paced back and forth through the cloud.