Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

A once-red Land Rover, one of the old ones, came to a stop perpendicular to the tiger-striped Buick, blocking us in. The windows were too deeply tinted to see inside. The back door closest to us opened slightly. I pulled it toward us, gently. The back seat was empty. I got in first, Gem right behind. The driver didn’t turn around. All I could see was that he was wearing an Australian Akruba hat. And next to him, on the passenger seat, was a mammoth pit bull, a brindle with white markings. The dog turned and regarded us with the flat, confident stare of someone who knows, no matter what you’re holding, he’s packing something a lot heavier.

The Land Rover pulled off. Gem opened her mouth, but I put two fingers across her lips before any sound came out. I knew what the problem was … just not how the driver was going to handle it.

We exited at the gate, turned left, and proceeded at a leisurely pace through the city. From where I was sitting, the only gauges I could see were navigational. I spotted a small-screen GPS unit, as well as a large mechanical compass and altimeter—whoever put that rig together was a heavy believer in backups. We were driving east on a complicated highway system. After a while, we got off and curled back so that we were going north. And climbing. When the altimeter got past six thousand feet, the driver suddenly pulled over and stopped.

Nothing happened for a minute or two. Then he dismounted. I waited for him to come around and open up the back doors, but all he did was let the monster pit bull out, leaving that door wide open. Through the window, I could see him step back a few yards, but the dog didn’t move, holding its ground. The driver took off his hat, tossed it aside, then made a “come toward me” gesture with his hand. I knew better than to exit from the door out of the driver’s vision, so I reached across Gem, opened her door, and guided her out, with me right behind.

“Close enough,” the driver said, as soon as both of us were on the ground. I could see he was an Indian—heavy cheekbones, dark eyes, thick black hair combed straight back and worn close to his skull, a calm interior stillness radiating off him. His skin had a faint coppery tone, but the shade was too light for his features—I figured him for a mixed-blood.

It was close enough for me to see the heavy semi-auto that materialized in his right hand, too. He held it way high up on the butt, against the curved grip-safety, just short of where the web of skin between the thumb and trigger finger would catch the slide. The barrel was pointed at the empty ground between us, as if he were just showing the pistol to me, not threatening me with it.

I zoomed in on his hand. His thumb was held extended and absolutely parallel to the slide. On the other side of the pistol, his trigger finger was positioned the same way, parallel to the slide, from the knuckle to the first joint. A hardcore pro. And holding all the cards.

But then he moved the pistol just enough so that I could see the tip of his finger curled down, inside the trigger guard. That last part hit me like an aftershock— inside the trigger guard. The Indian was standing quiet, his face stony. But he was overamped. Pre-visualizing, ready to shoot.

I moved my hands away from my body. Slowly, sending out gentle waves.

The Indian nodded as if he understood my gesture. “Tell the woman to get your bags and bring them out,” he said. His voice was more twangy than I’d expected, New Orleans in there somewhere. Exaggerated maybe by his nose—looked like he’d broken it one time and they hadn’t done a great job in the ER.

“Do it,” I told Gem, not taking my eyes off the Indian.

He said something to the dog in a language I didn’t understand. It jumped back onto the front seat as easy as a beagle climbing a curb. When Gem came back out with our bags, the dog was right behind her.

“Put them over there,” the Indian told her, gesturing with his free hand toward a clearing to his right.

Gem did it. The pit bull trotted alongside her like they were going to the park to play Frisbee.

“Go back with him,” the Indian told her, moving so he was between us and the bags. Then he moved a few steps closer, held my eyes: “There was only supposed to be one person.”

“It was a one-way communication,” I told him. “There wasn’t any way for me to say I was bringing my—”

“Who are you?” he asked, as if it was a test.

“Burke.”

“Why are you here?”

“To see Lune.”

“Can you prove who you are?”

“I don’t know. It depends on what would be proof to you.”

The Indian nodded as if that made perfect sense. “We are in the Sandia Mountains,” he said. “About a mile and a half up. Sound carries in the thin air. But nobody pays attention. Another mile or so straight up that road, it’s snowing. I have to be satisfied with who you are or we all drive up there and I come back alone, understand?”

“Yeah, I understand. What I don’t understand is what you want me to do about it. He wouldn’t recognize my face. I was—”

“Shot, it looks like,” he interrupted.

“Right. You want to take my fingerprints? Would that do it?”

“No. I have to ask you a question.”

But he didn’t ask one. Just stood there, as if waiting for the question to come to him. When I heard the cell phone trill in his breast pocket, I realized that maybe it would.

“We’re here,” he answered.

He listened for a second, then said: “He is not alone.”

More silence, then: “No.”

He listened for another minute, closed the phone, and slipped it back into his pocket.

“What was the name of your problem?” he asked me.

The name of my problem? If I knew that, I wouldn’t need to … And then I snapped on it. He didn’t mean now, he meant then . Back when Lune and I were … “Hunsaker,” I told him. “Eugene Hunsaker.”

The Indian nodded his head slightly. And put the pistol back inside his coat. “I still have to go through your bags,” he said. “I can’t watch you and do that at the same time. But Indeh will. Just stay in one spot, and he won’t bother you.”

The pit moved a few steps toward us, but he stayed as relaxed as he’d been all along, the hair on the back of his neck nice and flat.

“Help yourself,” I said.

The Indian did a thorough job. Took out every single item and laid it on the ground, then checked the bags for seams and compartments before he went through the contents.

“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll let you repack your own stuff—I wouldn’t want to mess it up.”

When Gem and I were done, we all piled back in the Land Rover. The Indian turned it around and headed down the mountain.

The Land Rover’s compass told me we were heading north, and the highway signs said we were on I-25. The Sandia Mountains remained a looming presence on our right, but to the left was a vast open space, mostly flat except for some scattered mesas … and another mountain range off in the far distance. The Indian saw me looking in that direction. “The San Mateos,” he said.

As the Land Rover rolled past a landscape of sand and low scrub growth, we were buffeted by gusts of wind that vanished as suddenly as they appeared … then came again.

“That’s the biggest pit I’ve ever seen,” I said to the Indian, trying to engage him. “What is he, a bandog?”

“Indeh is not a pit bull,” he said, pride deep in his voice. “He is a purebred Perro de Presa Canario.”

“I never heard of—”

“They were originally bred in the Canary Islands, so some call them Canary dogs,” the Indian said, his tone reverent, as if reciting a tribal legend. “They were a cross between an indigenous breed, which is now extinct, and the English mastiff.”