Gideon's War/Hard Target (34 page)

But then the horse had begun eating, crunching away on the oats until they were gone. Minutes later the horse fell and began to twitch and scream.

As the horse writhed on the ground, he felt a power coursing through him and settling in his loins. He found himself standing there, mesmerized by his handiwork, thrilling with his newfound strength. The horse kicked and thrashed while Collier smiled, swelling with pride.

And then, he’d heard a noise. Turning around, he saw Wilmot standing silently in the doorway, a look of horror on his face. Collier’s eyes flicked toward the beaker of colorless liquid on the gatepost, then to the horse, then to Wilmot, then to the beaker again.

Collier froze, expecting Wilmot to leap into the stall, maybe start beating the crap out of him. Instead the man spoke in a quiet, measured voice that only seemed to underscore his rage.

“Get your things,” he said. “And get the hell out of here.”

Collier ran as fast as he could out the barn’s double-wide entrance.

His mother was sewing a torn garment when he stumbled back into the house. “What the hell did you go and do now?”

By way of answer, he had gone into the garage, locked the door, and smashed every beaker and pipette and test tube while his mother howled at him through the door. “What the hell’s wrong with you, you disgraceful little snot?”

Afterward, he’d shoved past her, packed his few belongings in an old army rucksack that he’d bought the previous summer down at the Army Navy down in Coeur d’Alene. He’d saved twenty-seven hundred bucks from his job at the Pack ’n Save. Enough to set him up down in Boise for a while.

That had been six years ago. In the meantime, he found his way to West Virginia, where he met Verhoven and began using his considerable chemistry talents to cook meth for him. He hadn’t seen Mr. Wilmot or Evan until the day Wilmot walked in unannounced at Verhoven’s packing store where Collier worked during the day in the back office handling the ordering and accounting. Evan had been hurt, Wilmot explained, and he needed Collier back at the house. Collier’s mother was dead, and hispasñ€† own life numb and meaningless, but Wilmot’s arrival was like a second chance, a new lease on the family he’d always wished he’d had.

He should have poisoned Evan.

Amalie sat in the Jeep, listening to the whirring of the heater. It seemed like Mr. Collier had pinched her. But now, looking back, she realized there had been something in Mr. Collier’s hand when he opened the door to the car, something that had stung her on the hip. For some reason, though, she was feeling a little confused. So she sat and waited patiently as Mr. Collier slammed the door and circled around to the driver’s side.

He started the Jeep and began to drive.

As the trees passed outside, it became very warm inside. With the warmth she began to relax. I’ve been so tense, she thought to herself. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve been tense.

But for all her worrying, nothing really bad had actually happened. Sure, Christiane had gotten sick. But people got the Konzo at home, too. It was one of those things that just happened. And now she was being treated by an American doctor. Back in Kama, there were no doctors at all. You had to take the boat forty kilometers downriver to see a doctor.

Soon Amalie began to feel a deep calm running through her, a sort of peace that she had only felt a few times in her life. She realized that she was very tired. She’d been working too hard, hadn’t she? So tired.

She could feel the sleep coming from a great distance, like a downpour on the horizon, the first blessed rain after the long dry season. She imagined flashes of lightning amid the dark boiling clouds, great winds whipping and tearing at the trees.

And then the black storm washed over her. And with it, came peace.

11

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

I prefer to work in a chair,” Lorene Verhoven said. “Maybe I’m lazy, I don’t know, but I get tired feet when I stand for too long.”

Ervin Mixon was himself sitting in a chair. Unlike Lorene Verhoven, he was secured at his wrists, feet, neck, and chest by black duct tape. His mouth, too, was covered by duct tape so he was unable to speak. The chair sat in a dark concrete bunker of a room. He was familiar with the room. It was the place where Jim Verhoven’s people cooked their meth—a cheerless but carefully built space that had been designed by John Collier. Forty feet belowground, you could yell until your throat bled and nobody would ever hear you.

He had been here for several hours, entirely alone. Until Lorene showed up.

“Jim gave me this chair. It’s made by Steelcase, and you can roll around on it.” Lorene demonstrated, pushing off with her feet and propelling herself across the polished concrete floor. “Isn’t this fun?”

“Fuck you,” Ervin tried to say. But his mouth was covered by the same duct tape that secured him to the chair so it came out, &# roooo t‡8220;Mmmm-mwoooo.”

“Oh, Ervin,” she said. “Do you have to? You know, I was raised in an atmosphere of constant profanity. But Jim took me away from that. I haven’t cursed in eight years. Not once. Jim showed me how much better you feel when you stop swearing. You should try it.”

She rolled the chair back toward him, step by step, until finally she was sitting face-to-face with Ervin, their knees nearly touching. She was dressed, as usual, in a crisp white cotton blouse, buttoned to the neck, and a black sheath skirt that Ervin might have found sexy under other circumstances. Over the blouse, she wore an incongruous tan vest, apparently homemade, which was covered with numerous oddly shaped little pockets.

“I was always good at art,” she said. “After I got together with Jim, I discovered my talent for taxidermy. My favorite thing? Squirrels. They’re so small. The work requires real devotion. Precision. The face especially. The eyes. The lips. The skin is just paper thin.”

Ervin felt sick, terrified. He was afraid he might vomit inside the tape and choke to death. He needed a hit. But it was more than that. As much as Jim Verhoven scared Ervin Mixon, it was his wife who truly terrified him. Although he’d never seen her do anything especially evil, there was a cruel violence in her eyes, those two different colors like a schizo-psychopath, shining too brightly as she came near.

“I made this vest myself, Ervin,” she continued. “It’s for my taxidermy tools. Each tool that I use has its own little pocket. It saves so much time to know exactly where each and every tool is.” She began pulling out tools. “Rasp. Needle. Thread. Various little rotary grinder attachments for my Dremel. Caping knife. Smaller caping knife. Even smaller.” She pulled out a tiny curved knife. “I had this one custom made by a knife maker in Arkansas. It’s an eyelid knife. That’s the hardest part, the eyelids of a squirrel. I love squirrels. Their little teeth?” She curled back her upper lip and mimicked a squirrel munching on a nut.

Then she rolled her chair around to his side, bringing the tiny little knife close to Ervin Mixon’s face. He could smell her, a clean soapy scent. Ervin’s heart began to pound with terror.

“Don’t move,” she said softly, pressing one finger delicately against his cheekbone. “Wouldn’t want you to get cut inadvertently.” Then, with a small noise like the opening of a zipper, she cut a slit in the tape from one side of his mouth to the other. The cut was so perfect that he didn’t even feel the knife. He gasped with relief.

“See?” she said. “Didn’t spill a single drop of blood.”

A figure separated itself from the darkness. Mixon recognized it as Jim Verhoven. How long had he been there? Mixon hadn’t even seen him enter.

“I’d ask you not to speak to my wife that way,” Verhoven said.

Ervin Mixon didn’t even look at him, though. He couldn’t take his gaze off Lorene’s face. She returned his stare with a faint smile, her eyes wide and fixed.

Verhoven put his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

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“Who have you told about our little operation?” Verhoven asked.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” Ervin Mixon heard his own voice, high and shaky. He was trying to control his terror. But there was nothing he could do.

Verhoven held up the recording Mixon had made of his conversation. That’s when Mixon knew he was truly fucked.

“Eyelids,” Verhoven said mildly. “I think we’ll save his eyes for later.” She reached toward him with her blade.

“Wait!” Ervin Mixon tried to thrash around, but he was secured so tightly with the tape that he could barely move. “I’ll tell you what you want to know—”

But before he could continue, Lorene made one quick stroke with her blade, slicing open his left eyelid. Before the searing pain had even begun, blood pooled in his eye, obscuring half his vision.

Ervin Mixon began to scream.

12

ANDERSON, WEST VIRGINIA

Tillman drove his fifteen-year-old Dodge pickup around the rear of Circle Seven Packing Company. With the hog tied to the hood, he backed up to the loading dock and parked with the engine idling. He honked once, and the metal door scrolled slowly open.

The man standing on the loading dock was the owner of the shop, Jim Verhoven. As usual, he was dressed in BDUs and combat boots. Circle Seven was a thinly veiled front for Verhoven’s real business, a way for him to pay the minimum in taxes to avoid federal inquiry. Everyone knew his employees were busy distributing meth while Verhoven tended to the occasional slaughterhouse and meat-processing business.

“My goodness,” Verhoven said as Tillman climbed out of the cab, “that is one monster hog.”

His speech was excessively formal, Tillman noted, as if he were a foreigner who had learned English from a book. Tillman looked into the bed of his truck and nodded. “Yup,” he said.

“What’d you take him with?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Tillman said.

Verhoven raised one eyebrow.

“I was shooting a longbow,” Tillman said. “He spooked, I blew my shot, and I ended up going hand-to-hand with the sumbitch. Lost my knife in the scuffle, finally had to stab him to death with an arrow.”

There was a steel track extending out over the loading dock, with a chain and a hook attached to it. Verhoven pulled the chain down and hooked it to the rear legs of the hog. “Look at those tusks!” he said as he hoisted the carcass up by the legs. “Lucky he didn’t gut you like a fish.”

Tillman laughed. “Wasn’t for want of trying.” He pulled up his pant leg to show off the eight-inch-long bandage on his calf.

“My, my,” Verhoven saids sssssch-lo. Then he turned and hauled the hog down the steel runner back into the little slaughterhouse. After a moment he came back out and said, “Normally it’d take until tomorrow around noon.” Verhoven studied Tillman impassively for a moment. “Might could do it while you wait, if you was to keep me company.”

Tillman looked at his watch. He knew that Verhoven was interested in him—and had been for a while. Guys with Tillman’s résumé didn’t come around every day. Members of Verhoven’s militia group had spoken to Tillman in the past, inviting him to come over for briefings or maneuvers or training now and then. But Tillman had always put them off—and not always politely.

This time he wanted an invitation he could accept. But he didn’t want to press or seem overeager. He needed to let Verhoven come to him.

“Sure,” Tillman said. “I guess I could stay a little.”

He followed Verhoven inside, watched in silence as the “colonel” sharpened a long boning knife on an Arkansas stone. There was something sinister about the room. Everything was sparkling clean, and the fluorescent fixtures overhead flooded the room with pale, shadowless light. Chains and hooks and cutting implements lined the stainless steel walls, everything gleaming and sharp and purposeful.

With one swift stroke Verhoven slit the boar from pelvis to breastbone, the guts spilling out onto the floor in a glistening blue pile.

“Sorry I didn’t field dress it,” Tillman said. “I was pretty much whipped by the time I got the bastard home last night.”

“Truth be told, I’d rather do it myself.” Verhoven cut the anus out of the pig in two swift motions, then yanked the intestines free of the body. “I can’t tell you how many times a day I end up spoiling a great deal of meat because some cretin poked a hole in the guts and flooded the body cavity with fecal matter.”

Verhoven worked silently for almost a minute before he said, “I know who you are.”

Tillman gave Verhoven a long, hard look. “The reason I moved up here was to be left alone.”

“I would, too,” Verhoven said, “if I’d been as wronged by the United States of America as you’ve been.”

Tillman let the comment pass.

“I don’t know if you know it,” Verhoven continued, “but to people like me, people who believe in the true America, the pure and unspoiled America that our founders envisioned, the name Tillman Davis epitomizes true heroism.”

“Kind of you to say,” Tillman said. “But whatever I did or didn’t do for the United States, it’s in my past. I’m just trying to get on with my life.”

This was not a pose. Tillman knew that he had become a sort of Rorschach blot during his trial. Those on the far left of the political spectrum saw him as a rogue military adventurer, while those on the far right claimed him as a kind of folk hero, a scapegoat for a failed foreign policy. For a while after he’d gotten out of prison, he’d been assailed by self-serving people who’d wanted him to speak or to write or appear on television or otherwise serve their oned my wn ends by either making him into a whipping boy, or by holding him up as the victim of a tyrannical government. Neither had been a role he was willing to play. So one day he’d simply thrown his cell phone in a ditch and driven him up here, where he could live unmolested.

“Would you be interested in mounting this fine specimen?” Verhoven asked, indicating the boar’s massive head.

“Wouldn’t have any use for it.”

“Shame for it to go to waste. A hog like this, I’d mount it here in the shop as a conversation piece.”

“It’s yours for the mounting.”

“Much obliged. I’ll give you my services for free in exchange.”

Tillman nodded. He could feel Verhoven working his way around to something. But he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Maybe it was just an invitation to come up and play soldier with his militia group. But Tillman had a feeling that there was something more in the wind than just that.

Verhoven caped the boar silently, his movements slow and methodical as he cut the delicate skin of the head free from the skull. Occasionally he stopped to sharpen one of the small knives, shaving off little patches of hair on his arm to test the keenness of the edge.

“You have to be especially careful around the eyes,” Verhoven said finally. “One slip, and the entire effort is wasted. I’m not bad at this, but I’m just a butcher compared to my wife. You’ll have to meet her sometime. She’s an extraordinary woman.”

Tillman folded his arms, leaned against the concrete wall.

“Would I be prying if I inquired as to how you make a living?” Verhoven said. “I only ask because I read that you were robbed of your military pension.”

Tillman didn’t speak for a while. “I live pretty simple. Hunt, fish, grow a little corn, some tomatoes, some beans.”

Verhoven continued scraping the skin free of the pig’s eyes.

“Now and again, though,” Tillman continued. “Now and again, I’ll take an assignment for somebody I trust. Or maybe put one person I trust in touch with another person I trust.”

Verhoven didn’t look up from his work, his face a mask of concentration. “I only mention it because I’ve recently come into a rather pressing need for several unusual items. Items that one can’t just buy off eBay.”

“And, what—you think I might be the kind of guy who could help you get them?”

Verhoven pulled the cape free of the boar, covered the interior surfaces with a heavy coating of salt, then set it carefully inside a large plastic bin. He began butchering the hog in earnest now.

“There’s a good deal of markup when one sells things that the federal government finds objectionable,” Verhoven said. “I only mention this in the context of what seems to be the unfairness of your circumstances.”

“It gets better by the day, too,” Tillman said bitterly. “I recently had my righght f st to get treated at the VA hospital taken away from me. Got a form letter in the mail. Fifteen years honorable service in the US Army, then another ten with a certain agency that shall go nameless, and the federal government just . . .” He rubbed his palms together like he was washing his hands.

Verhoven’s face grew pinched and angry. “Goddamn traitorous bastards,” he said. Then his face relaxed again. “I’m sorry, but it angers me.”

Tillman felt briefly as though something very cold had been permitted to melt inside him. He realized how lonely it had been, how hard it had been to stand up straight every day when he’d been accused of betraying the trust of the very country he risked his life to serve. For a moment he felt terribly grateful to Verhoven.

The moment passed, though. He was here for a purpose, and he knew he needed to stay focused on that. He had promised Gideon.

“You get to where you have a hard time trusting anybody,” Tillman said. “I want to trust people. I do. And yet I can’t afford the luxury.”

Verhoven shook his head sadly. “That is a very, very keen insight, sir,” he said. “I feel much the same way myself.” He sliced a long section of backstrap free of the big beast, set it on a package. “It seems to me to be the central tragedy of our nation. We need to trust each other. We need to feel a sense of brotherhood. We have such a hunger for it. And yet, we are surrounded by enemies in our midst.” He chopped the ribs free with a small hatchet. When he was finished chopping, he added, “I sense a bond between us, sir. And so I’m going to take a leap and trust you. The items I spoke of . . . I need them quite soon. A gentleman promised me these items and then welshed on the deal. It’s put me in a very, very uncomfortable position.”

Tillman said nothing.

Verhoven took the last bones off the hook, tossed them in the garbage, and then began hosing down the concrete floor. “If I were to give you a list of items I needed, would you be able to get them for me? Would you extend me that trust?”