Solomon Creed

A doctor leaned in, his face filling his vision. His mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear what he was saying. Too much noise. Someone screaming close by. Someone in pain. At least he didn’t feel nuthin’. That was good, wasn’t it? Surely that was a good thing.

A penlight snapped on, shining in his eye and making the world turn bright and milky, like everyone was wrapped in white smoke … smoke …

The fire …

He had seen the flames curling towards him, the desert writhing in heat like the surface of the sun. The fire running alongside him, chased by the wind, leaping from shrub to shrub like a living thing. Never seen fire race so fast, faster than that old grader, that was for sure, but not as fast as that Dodge he’d had his eye on, the silver-grey one with the smoked windows and the V8 under the hood. That would have evened the race out some. Would have bought it too, taken the hit on the finance and all, if he hadn’t been saving for something else. He wanted to see old man Tucker’s face at summer’s end when he cashed in all the extra shift hours he was pulling and slipped that big ole ring on to Ellie’s finger. Eighteen-carat yellow-gold band with a one-carat, heart-cut diamond right in the centre: three and a half grand cold, every cent he had in the world and all of it for Ellie – fuck old man Tucker, the way he treated him, like he wasn’t good enough to even speak his daughter’s name.

The penlight snapped off and the doctor leaned in, his mouth moving again, everything slow like he was underwater. Still couldn’t hear a damn thing, what with that howling. He’d heard something like it before and the memory of it needled into making him shake with more than cold.

When he was eight his daddy had taken him hunting. They’d tracked a big old mule deer out into the desert for almost three hours and when they caught up with it his daddy had handed him the rifle. It was that old Remington, the one that hung above the fire with the walnut stock worn smooth at the neck by the bristled cheeks of his daddy and his daddy before that: beautiful rifle, but heavy, and tight on the trigger.

Maybe it had been the weight of it or the excitement of being handed something he’d only ever seen in a man’s hand before, but when he beaded up on that big old bull his heart had pounded so hard he felt sure the deer must be able to hear it even with him two hundred yards away. It had lifted its head and sniffed the air, its haunches tightening as it readied to run. He snatched the shot just as it moved, missed the heart and punched a hole right through its belly. Gut shot or not, that thing took off, blood pumping out all over the desert, innards flyin’ out behind it like streamers. His daddy said nothing, just grabbed that rifle back and took off after it, carrying it as easy in his hand as it had sat so heavy in his.

The blood trail was wet and bright against the dry orange earth. And the deer howled as it ran, a great bellowing noise, like fury and pain mixed together. Ever after, when he sat on the hard wooden pews in the cool dark of the church and heard the reverend deliver his ‘hell and damnation’ sermons he would remember that noise. It was like he imagined hell must sound, the echoing tormented howl of a soul trapped deep underground – the same thing he was hearing now.

The doctor leaned in again, swimming down through the milky air. He still couldn’t catch what he was saying. He tried to tell him he couldn’t hear above the howling, managed to snatch a ragged breath and the noise stopped. He made to speak and it started up again even louder than before, so loud he could feel it deep within his chest. Then he realized where the sound was coming from, and began to cry.

They had caught up with the deer not so far up the track from where he’d shot it, down on its front knees like it was praying. He wanted to shoot it and put it out of its pain, but his daddy had the gun and he daren’t ask him for it. They stood a ways back, watching it trying to get up and run, eyes rolling in its skull, and that awful sound coming out of it. He had turned to look away but his daddy put his hand on the top of his head and twisted it back round again.

You need to watch this, he’d said. You need to watch this and remember. This is what happens when you don’t do a thing right. This is what happens when you fuck somethin’ up.

The jolt of him cussing like that, his best-suit-on-a-Sunday daddy who he’d never even heard say ‘damn’ before that day had been more shocking than the sight of the dying deer or the noise it made while it was about it.

I’m sorry, Daddy, he whispered now, and the faces moved closer as the howl took the rough form of his words.

I think he’s calling for his daddy, the doctor said.

Bobby, we’re doing everything we can for you, OK? Just hang in there.

He had been trying to steer away from the fire but the damn grader could only run over the flat land and the contours had kept him too close. He’d seen a place to turn ahead of him and he’d kept his eyes focused on it, too focused to notice the wall of flame sweeping in from his left. He could have jumped and run but he didn’t. He knew they needed the grader to draw the fire line and help save the town. Might be old man Tucker would show him some respect if he came out of this a hero.

The heat had closed round him like a fist, the skin on his knuckles bubbling where they curled around the wheel. He’d kept his eyes ahead of him and his foot on the gas, holding his breath like he was deep underwater and kicking for the surface. He’d known that if he breathed in, the flames would get inside him and he would drown in that fire, so he had held on, thoughts of Ellie and diamond rings running through his head until he reached the turn and steered the grader away and out of the fire. He didn’t remember much else.

He looked up into the doctor’s face now and realized that the fact he could feel no pain was actually a very bad thing. He didn’t care for himself. It was Ellie he felt bad for. Maybe old man Tucker was right, maybe she was better off without him. He had spent his life running away from that sound, the sound of failure and pain, and now it was coming out of him.

I’m sorry, he said, I messed up. I messed it all up.

Then the pale man stepped into view.

20

Mulcahy moved to the door, keeping as far from the wounded driver as he could. He checked outside, scanning the parking lot and all the curtained windows to see if any were twitching.

Nothing.

He closed the door. Pulled the heavy drapes across the window then turned his attention back to the man on the floor.

The driver was lying on his back, lit by the glow from the TV, the flickering-fire images making it appear he was smouldering. He moaned softly, a slow creaking sound that came from somewhere deep inside him. His hands clutched at his chest wound, working at the sodden material of his shirt and squeezing foamy blood between his fingers. A second wound oozed in his gut, soaking his shirt further, the blood looking black in the darkness of the room.

Mulcahy crouched down, keeping his gun pointed at the man’s head. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘can you hear me?’ The man’s eyes opened a little. ‘What’s your name?’

The driver’s lips pulled back in a grimace. ‘Luis,’ he said through bloodied teeth.

‘Hi, Luis, I’m Mike. Listen, I’m not going to dick you around and tell you everything’s going to be fine, because it’s not. You’ve been hit in the chest and the stomach and you’re bleeding out fast. The good news is the blood loss won’t kill you, but that’s only because the stomach acids leaking into your body cavity or the blood filling your lungs will get you first. But if you get medical help in the next ten minutes or so I reckon you have a pretty good chance of surviving.’ He took his phone from his pocket and held it where Luis could see it. ‘You want me to call an ambulance, Luis?’

Luis shivered like he was cold, though the room was hot from the door standing open so long. He managed another nod.

‘Good.’ Mulcahy leaned down. ‘Then tell me who sent you.’

Luis closed his eyes tight and a groan wheezed from his throat. He took a breath and the wound made a slurping sound as it sucked air. ‘Fuck you,’ he said, then pain clamped his mouth shut again.

Mulcahy nodded slowly. ‘Look at you. Big strong guy, sucking up the pain, keeping it together in the face of death. It’s impressive, really. Impressive but pointless. Because if you don’t talk to me you’ll die right here in this room and I’ll put the word out that you talked anyway. So you can either talk and live a little longer, maybe a lot longer, or you can hang tough, stay silent and die right here for nothing.’

Luis stared out through the wet slits of his eyelids, weighing up what Mulcahy had said. Mulcahy knew from the many situations he’d been in before that they had reached a tipping point, the moment when a subject would decide to talk or clam up for good. Sometimes the best thing to do was shut up and let the subject slide into talking; other people needed a little help, one last nudge to push them over on to the side of cooperation. The trick was knowing what sort of person you were dealing with. Luis was clearly the strong silent type, a man of few words, probably the sort who was happy to stay silent while others did the talking. So that’s exactly what Mulcahy did.

‘Tell you what,’ he said, speaking low and intimate. ‘I’ll say a name and you nod if it’s the right one, OK? That way if you get out of this alive and anyone asks, you can tell them you never talked and you won’t be lying.’ Luis’s eyes were starting to glaze. In a minute or two he wouldn’t be able to say anything at all. ‘Was it Tío? Did Papa Tío send you?’

Luis didn’t move. He just kept staring through the slits of his eyes.

‘You hear what I said: did Papa Tío send you?’

Luis took a sucking breath, closed his eyes against the pain, then shook his head, a slow movement that made him screw his eyes tight with the effort.

Mulcahy sat back on his heels and glanced over at Carlos lying nearby, a surprised expression on his dead face. Ever since Carlos had appeared in the doorway with a gun in his hand he had suspected Papa Tío was not behind this. Tío would never trust a stranger over a blood relative for something like this.

He turned back to Luis to try a new name on him but saw it was already too late. The man’s eyes had rolled back into his head, his mouth opening and closing but the wound in his chest no longer sucking. He was drowning or suffocating, trying to breathe but getting nothing. He breathed out one last rattling breath and his mouth went slack. Mulcahy pressed two fingers into his neck and felt nothing.

He lifted Luis’s left arm and pulled the sleeve of his jacket back as far as it would go. His left forearm was almost entirely covered by a large, colourful tattoo of Santa Muerte – the saint of death – her grinning skeletal face framed by the hood of a long robe, her bony hands holding a globe and a scythe. This told him nothing; plenty of Mexican gang members had tattoos of Santa Muerte – but his right arm told a different story.

The wrist was encircled by a barbed-wire design, showing Luis had served jail time, and above it was a carefully inked column of Roman numerals – one to four – next to the outline of a gun with the barrel pointing down towards the hand. It showed that Luis was a shooter, a dedicated hit man for the cartels, and the numerals showed how many high-level hits he had carried out. There were notches on the barrel too: fifteen marks scratched into the skin with a needle and ink showing lesser kills, soldiers and civilians taken out in the usual course of business and recorded in a casual way that reflected their lesser importance. They reminded Mulcahy of the mission decals he’d seen on the planes earlier – same principle, different war. Only one gang used Roman numerals to record their high-level kills, a nod to the Catholic faith they professed to defend and honour: the Latin Saints – Papa Tío’s main rivals.

Mulcahy took his phone from his pocket to take a photo and saw he had one message – Pop: Missed Call. He breathed a little easier when he read it. Once he was clear of this mess he’d call him back, but first he had to clean up.

He took a picture of Luis’s forearm then checked to make sure it was in focus. The first three numerals were solid black but the fourth was only an outline, ready to be inked once the hit had been carried out. There was only one person who would warrant the high status of a numeral and it wasn’t him or Javier.

It all made sense now – Carlos being the insider instead of Javier. Carlos wasn’t the hit man, he was a plant, a human homing beacon with his phone transmitting their location to the real kill crew. That’s why he had been so edgy. He had known what was coming. He was probably only doing it to pay off some debt, betraying one set of killers to appease another and trading one shitty situation for a slightly less shitty one. Mulcahy knew all about that kind of deal. He slid his phone back into his pocket and rose to his feet.

He worked quickly by the flickering glow of the TV, pulled the duster from his back pocket and wiped down all the places he’d touched since entering the room. He took a few more pictures then grabbed Javier’s gold- and jewel-encrusted phone and a plastic laundry sack from the closet and started collecting the guns.

Luis and Tyson had both been carrying FN Five-sevens, known as Mata policiers or cop killers because of their ability to penetrate body-armour. They had two spare magazines each in their jacket pockets and almost a thousand dollars in cash. He found the keys to the other Jeep in Luis’s pocket and took those too. Javier had a knife tucked inside his boot. Mulcahy dropped it into the sack with the rest of the weapons, twisted it closed then pulled his phone from his pocket, found the missed call message and selected ‘recall’.

He stood by the door a moment, scanning the room and checking it over for anything he might have overlooked. His eyes settled on the TV screen where the desert still burned. A reporter was talking about the plane crash that had caused it. The strap beneath him said they were getting reports of a possible survivor. Mulcahy took an involuntary step forward, not quite believing what he was reading, then the phone clicked and someone picked up.

‘Hello,’ a voice said. It was not his father.

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