-4-

Board found it hard to sleep that night. It was hot, so he had his windows open, but from the Los Huesos hills came a loud and constant trilling, metallic cicada-like sirens. It was the mutant bugs that dwelt in the scrub. Sometimes locals shot at them, but for the most part they were afraid to harm the creatures, thinking that the Guests might object even though the animals were not directly instruments of the Guests. Mostly they were left free to roam the hills and through people’s yards like sacred cows.

Louise had not come to him tonight.

He got up from bed, went to the window, stared out at the distant glowing letters that spelled BONELAND, rippled across the hills like a bioluminescent caterpillar.

Could Coltello really have thought that he would join his ranks as an Assassin? And film his crimes, besides? After knowing he had once worked for the police and cooperated with a prison warden? Or did they recruit from policemen themselves, for all he knew? Coltello was just so fearless, Board figured, that he could risk trying to recruit a man off the street like himself, a man he didn’t truly know much about. Coltello didn’t fear the authorities. And he didn’t fear John Board.

He had only the Guests to answer to. And to satisfy. The Guests’ needs must be met, and Coltello could not be shy about fulfilling his responsibilities.

Board wondered if he should have declined Coltello’s offer more politely, and asked the man for conventional work instead. But he knew that he could not live with himself if he worked for such a man. This man would have filmed Board’s mother’s hanging corpse and inserted it into a horror movie, so the audience could be repelled by her face (but ogle her nightgowned figure).

His disgust, his disapproval, meant nothing, he knew. An empty protest. He continued to refrain from pork, but pigs went on being killed. And cows died just as horribly as pigs but still he ate steak. He thought of all the men he had watched die at Max Pen, marched to slaughter like animals themselves. He felt many of those men had indeed deserved to die…so why should it be a problem if he had to watch that death take place? Did he think suffering wouldn’t occur if he didn’t personally witness it? He had followed the Iraq War in the newspaper as if it had been sports reports. If he saw a war in print instead of from a trench-eye view, did that make it clean? Okay? Soldiers marching into battle like cows along a ramp. It all blurred together in his mind…

Board finally dozed off for three hours on his sofa. In the morning, after forcing himself to shave and shower, he headed out for breakfast in his small 1924 Ford with its spoked wheels and dusty black paint. After breakfast at the diner he and Louise favored, he drove over to Espinal Boulevard where he had passed a pawnshop many times without stopping in. Today, he stopped in.

From the shop’s less than impressive offering of handguns, Board settled on a ten year old Colt Police Positive Special, a .38 revolver with a four inch barrel. Board was pleased that half a box of ammo came with it, so he wouldn’t have to venture to a gun shop for that. He also bought a scuffed shoulder holster, and the proprietor let him try the rig on so he could pose in front of a tarnished mirror to see how the pistol looked under his jacket.

Board felt foolish walking back out onto the street with the gun on him. It was too heavy, and he was still afraid that in the naked sunlight the gun’s parasitic bulge would be noticed, a strap of the shoulder holster would be seen if the breeze stirred his jacket’s flaps (he kept his hands in his pockets, tight to his sides). What if a cop stopped him? What would Louise think?

He was sure Coltello was not too concerned about him. With his power, why should he be? If he’d been worried about the cinematographer, he’d never have boldly offered him the job in the first place…

By the same token, Coltello might not be worried about insuring his silence, either. Board was sure he was a chief of Assassins, and Assassins assassinated. And Board had run afoul of them before. It was a pattern he seemed unable to avoid…as if fated to him, like a preordained history.