The High Desert
HANGTREE
It was the sort of hunger that turned whale ship sailors into cannibals. It had Luis fucked up bad. It racked his muscles. It chilled the Cali desert air until he shivered. It turned the faucet on in his nose. Call it junk hunger, aka dope sickness. It pushed everything else to the sides of his mind. The handcuffs biting into his wrists. The fact that he was in the backseat of a cop car headed to jail.
The hunger came with a load of irony: Luis’s stomach was stuffed with the very thing he hungered for. His gut swelled under his T-shirt thanks to fifty capsules packed with the heroin he craved.
Water, water everywhere.
Luis had gagged the capsules down one at a time in the back room of a Tecate bar. A couple of chuntaro cartel badasses in polyester shirts and Jesus Malverde cowboy boots mimed it out for him: take a condom stuffed with capsules, dip it in oil, swallow it, sip water, repeat. They left him with some works—a spike, a spoon, a lighter for cooking, a cotton ball to filter the cooked junk—and a good shot’s worth of Mexican brown. It would have been enough to keep Luis on even keel until he was back in the arms of Frogtown Rifa, back to the carnales who would fix him up good. It would have been enough if everything hadn’t gone to hell.
He’d been nailed thirty minutes past the border, just outside a shitkick Cali desert town called Hangtree. Hadn’t even been a speed trap. The cop car rolled out from a side street and pulled in behind him like it’d been waiting for him special. The cops ordered him out of the car without even putting on a show of running his driver’s license. They cuffed him and put him in the back of the squad car, leaving the car abandoned at the side of the road, the door still open.
Not an arrest. A vanishing.
The one with the badge that read sheriff houser had mirror shades for eyes, a gray bristle mustache, hands that could tear an apple in half. He gripped the wheel with scarred knuckles. The man made no wasted movements. He drove through red lights and stop signs like they were invisible.
The cop sitting shotgun looked like something escaped from the bowels of the earth, fat and pink and nearly hairless. Houser called him Jimmy. When Jimmy took off his sunglasses, his tiny squint eyes told Luis that the man had been called pig way before he ever pinned a badge to his chest. Jimmy snuck looks back at Luis and flashed a clown’s smile. The smile made Luis’s balls want to crawl up in his belly. His belly told his balls, no room at the inn. No room for anything but dope-filled condoms and the hunger.
The cruiser rolled through Hangtree, what town there was to roll through. The citizens stiffened as the cop car passed by—every soul in Hangtree looked to be riding dirty. Missing teeth. Tweaker eyes. The air that came through the car vents carried the rotten egg smell of meth brewing.
The cop station loomed ahead. Luis pictured kicking cold turkey in a jail cell. His one hope: somebody—La Eme, those crazy Nazi bastards in Aryan Steel, hell, even the mayates in the Black Guerrilla Family—had a source in the lockup.
The cruiser rolled past the cop station without slowing down. Maybe they were taking Luis straight to a hospital, get a doctor to stick a hose up his ass to wash the capsules right out of his intestines. But Luis’s junkie instincts said this whole deal was wrong—wrong far beyond getting pinched with class-A felony weight in his stomach.
They drove up into the high desert. The road twisted. They passed through some sort of encampment. Old concrete slabs set into the earth. Campers and homemade shacks set up on the slabs. The shacks and campers had chimneys. Spray-paint pentagrams. Green bottle glass shattered and set into concrete spelling out slabtown. A dead tree, its branches heavy with old shoes. The unmistakable smell of meth cooking overpowered everything. They passed a man naked but for a butcher’s apron, a surgical mask pushed down under his chin so he could smoke. He nodded at Houser like morning, boss. Houser touched the brim of his hat like howdy.
They came out the other side of the village. Houser turned the car onto a dirt road up into the hills. The bad vibes turned seismic.
“Where you taking me, man?” Luis asked.
Jimmy giggled. He wiped sweat off his head with a crusty handkerchief. The car kicked up dirt clouds as it climbed. Gravel churned under the tires. The road leveled off. Ahead of them Luis saw a fence, chain link and razor wire, around a windowless cinder-block building with a rusted metal door. Luis’s stomach dumped acid—what-the-fuck piled on top of the dope sickness.
“He’s not looking too good, boss.”
Luis looked up to see Jimmy eyefucking him.
“Reckon he’s got himself a thirst,” Houser said.
“Never know how a man lets himself get that way,” Jimmy said.
A pit dog—face scars, torn-off ears, death in its eyes—rounded the corner like something out of a detox nightmare. It came to the chain-link and stood man-height, huge paws poking through the chain-link.
“Don’t you?” Houser asked. “A fellow does something makes him feel good, so he does it again. Same way we trained the dog.”
“What the hell’s the dog got to do with it?”
Houser shut off the car, pointed at the monster behind the fence.
“Some folks dress their dogs in little outfits, talk to them, treat them like human beings. And some people point and laugh. They say dogs aren’t people. And they’re right. Dogs aren’t people.”
The old cop climbed out of the car. He walked through the desert heat like it was made for him. Lizards sunning themselves on the path fled from around his feet.
“Dogs ain’t people, no shit,” Jimmy said as he pulled Luis from the backseat.
The dog eyed Luis hungrily. Grinding rocks burbled deep in its chest. Houser unlocked the fence. He made a signal with his hand. The pit dog sat. He chained the pit dog to the shaded side of the building.
“No,” Houser said. “Don’t you see? Dogs aren’t people. People are dogs. They come when you snap. They run wild when no one’s looking. Feel shame when they’re done. They lick the hands of the strong and snap at the weak. They destroy because they are bored. They chew up the things they love. They need the pack. They hump what they can, eat and drink what they can even when they’ll sick it up later. They give love to those who show them love, even if the giver is no good and rotten and mean. Dogs aren’t people. People are dogs.”
“That include me?” Jimmy asked.
“Indeed it does.”
Houser unlocked the door of the building.
“It include you, boss?”
“No. I’m not people.” And Houser gave Luis a smile that proved the point. Oh shit oh shit, Luis screamed inside his skull.
Inside the shed was dark, sweatbox hot. The heat punched him heavyweight hard. He dropped to his knees on a cracked concrete floor. The piggy one laughed. Luis pictured a dozen deaths for the bastard. He wished on them. But they did not come true.
“Cut his hands loose,” Houser said to Jimmy. Jimmy yanked up Luis’s hands behind his back until his shoulder blades ached, sawed him loose from the plastic cuffs with a utility knife. Houser took Luis’s hands in his own, dwarfing them.
“You know who you’re fucking with?” Luis asked them. “Come on, you got to know. I’m with Frogtown Rifa. We kick straight up to La Eme. You don’t steal from the Mexican Mafia ’less you stupid.”
Houser took off his mirror shades, his eyes underneath somehow colder.
“They know where I’m at,” Houser said. “They’re welcome to come see me any time.”
There it was. Luis knew what Houser knew. No one, not even La Eme, hell, not even the Sinaloa cartel, would order a hit on a cop this side of the border. Mexican cop lives were cheap, cheap as junkies like Luis. But a U.S. cop was untouchable. Only way to take out a dirty cop was another cop arresting them, and when did that ever happen? This ice-cold son of a bitch was bulletproof.
Only good part of that: maybe it meant Luis could walk away. Maybe Houser was so balls-out sure of himself that he could let Luis live. Why not? Who could Luis tell? What trouble could he bring? Then Luis remembered that smile and the hope left him.
“You’re on the take, man.” Luis wished his voice wouldn’t tremble like that. “We rolled past a dozen labs on the way up here, and you don’t give a shit. So there’s got to be a deal we can work out.”
“You tryin’ to bribe a cop, son?”
“You a cop, then take me to fuckin’ jail, man.”
“Yeah,” Houser said. “I’m a cop, all right. I protect those who pay me against those who don’t. There’s never been a cop in history where that wasn’t the gig. And it turns out that the folks who pay me the best ain’t too big on the competition. Especially brown folk like yourself.”
He took Luis’s head in his massive hands.
“All they care about is that you Mexi boys learn this part of the desert ain’t for you.”
Jimmy had something in his hand. A plastic sandwich bag with something like twisted twigs at the bottom.
“Can we feed him?” Jimmy asked. His eyes all excited pleading. “MK-Ultra his ass.”
“We got business,” Houser said. “We don’t got all day.”
“These magic mushrooms I took off one of them Joshua Tree hippies,” Jimmy said. “Gonna learn how to mind-control people. Like the CIA MK-Ultra.”
“It’s what’s in his belly now that we’re after.”
“But boss—”
Houser cut Jimmy off with a look.
“Now we know what you got stowed away in you, boy, and we’re going to have it. So you’re going to do what you need to do to produce it for us right now, or we’re going to have to deal with it the other way.”
Luis got the picture. He pulled away from Houser. One hand on the floor to steady himself, two fingers of the other hand down his throat. His throat jerked around his fingers. His stomach rebelled, emptied on the floor. Bile and slop. No capsules. He tried again. He coughed thick ropes and sour acid. His nose ran. Tears welled. He heaved. Dry. He tried again. Dry.
“Reckon they’re too far down the road to turn back,” Houser said. “Like the rest of us. Jimmy, get the lights, huh?”
Green-glow fluorescents stuttered to life overhead. Luis saw a table set in the center of the room, manacles at both ends. He saw a second table with knives, scalpels, a bone saw curved like a bladed smile. He saw rubber gloves and plastic bags. He saw a hose ran from a sink to the table.
A homemade surgery theater.
“Jesus,” he said. He rose swinging. Houser caught his wrists, forced him down to the ground. Jimmy got an arm around Luis’s throat. He fought back on autopilot, pointless. He burned out fast. He flopped back in Jimmy’s arms.
“Sorry, we just don’t got the time for your load to come out the other end,” Houser said. “Going to have to head it off at the pass.”
Jimmy giggled at this as he moved his arm off Luis’s throat to make room for his knife. The last thing Luis knew was the pain and the hunger leaving his body, just one second of peace before the nothing kicked in . . .