FINN woke to the stench of vomit. He realized it was his own. He could feel it down the side of his face. It was pitch-black. He tried to move. He couldn’t. His hands and feet were bound with what felt like zip ties. He heard the warning beep of the hydraulic lift close and realized he was on the floor in the back of the truck. The truck started moving. His head throbbed.
The truck tilted, and Finn surmised they were going up a slope—probably onto an on-ramp. A moment later, the truck leveled out, and he heard the driver shift into top gear. It felt like they were traveling at highway speed.
Finn tried to make out his surroundings, but there was no point; he was in total darkness. To stay sane, he started counting breaths. It was a mindfulness exercise he’d learned from his AA sponsor.
Finn counted, and counted, and counted. His mind settled. An hour passed. Finally, he heard the driver gearing down, and then the truck slowed to a stop. A moment later, he heard the beeping sound that indicated the truck was backing up. Then the engine cut out, and the truck stopped rattling. He heard more beeping: the lift coming down, letting in light. Flashlight guy and wand guy appeared. Flashlight guy grabbed Finn’s ankles. Wand guy grabbed his wrists. They weren’t so polite anymore. They carried him out like a side of meat.
Finn immediately recognized where they were: the AmeriCo warehouse in Anaheim.
The two goons carried Finn into the center of the warehouse and sat him down on a chair set up on its own in the middle of the room on some black-and-yellow forklift markings on the concrete floor. LED lights high above filled the place with pasty light.
The two goons started walking away. Finn asked where they were going. One of them turned around, walked back to Finn, and punched him in the jaw—a big, heavy hook that knocked Finn off the chair to the floor and left him with a throbbing pain in his head. The goon picked Finn up, put him back on the chair, then walked off without answering the question. Finn’s head throbbed. He closed his eyes. He heard steps. He opened his eyes. Then he closed them again and laughed. “You didn’t need to dress up,” he said.
Klein was wearing his dress uniform. His shoes were polished to a military gleam.
“It’s my birthday,” he said. “They’re giving me my retirement dinner tonight.”
He stopped in front of Finn, sighed, and shook his head. “Jesus H. Christ, Finn. Why’d you have to be so good? First, you intercept the go-fast in the corridor, so I take you off the water. Then I send you to AMOC to get you out of the way, and you find the goddamned corridor. You’re the best damn marine interdiction agent I’ve ever seen, Finn. The best I’ve ever seen. That’s what makes this so”—Klein paused as if searching for the appropriate word—“so regrettable. The agency needs men like you. Like us. Now more than ever. I mean, look who’s coming up behind us. Kids like Leela Santos, God rest her soul, staring at a screen all day? Figueroa, who can’t step off a dock without throwing up? This younger generation, they’re too soft. They can’t defend the line like you and I did, Finn.”
Finn shook his head. “Figueroa never filed a complaint,” he said.
“Can you imagine that bonehead writing a complaint to the OIG? I’d be surprised if he can spell his own name.”
“There was never any investigation.”
“Of course not. I just needed to get you off the water. You were about to ruin everything.”
Finn thought of the box truck in which he had met Soto.
“Santos…”
“Motorcycles are so terribly dangerous, aren’t they?” said Klein with a sigh. “Such a tragedy. You think they’ll ever find the driver of the box truck that veered into her?”
“A condo in Baja … that dual cab F-350 … how much are they paying you, Klein? To murder your colleagues?”
“I told you already, Finn, I don’t care about the money. I’m doing this to stop the invasion. Our country is disappearing before our eyes, don’t you see that? We’re on the front line, you and me. The last line of defense. I did what I had to do. Do you know how many illegals we intercepted in the last twelve months at Long Beach Station? One hundred and twenty-nine. I turned us into the most effective border station in the country, Finn. And now they’re making me retire. They’re forcing me out. The most successful border station in the country. Can you believe that? It’s not right.”
Klein shook his head and sighed.
“At least when Marvin’s confirmed, he’s going to ask the president to give me the Medal of Freedom,” he said. “It’s the least they could do, if you ask me. After all I’ve done.”
Klein looked at Finn as though an idea had just occurred to him. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to ask him to give you one, too. Posthumously, of course.”
Finn’s mind raced. “Marvin,” he said.
“Yes, Marvin. Imagine what this country will be like when he’s in charge. How great it will be again. Long Beach is just a trial run. He’s planning to do the same thing from coast to coast. Isn’t it beautiful? All those fucking subhuman beaners, paying the cartel to sneak them into our country, only to end up in our big, beautiful prisons.”
Finn thought about Mona—about all she had said about Marvin. A terrifying truth was dawning on him.
“I can tell from the look on your face that you’re beginning to see the whole picture now,” said Klein. “It’s really too bad, you know. You could’ve been part of it.”
Klein fell into a moment of quiet reflection. Then he said, “Well, goodbye, Finn. It wouldn’t do for the guest of honor to be late to his own farewell dinner.”
Finn braced himself. He expected Klein to put a bullet in his head.
Instead, Klein walked away and disappeared through a door.
Finn felt an indescribable surge of relief.
Then he heard a forklift approaching.
On the fork was a skid. On the skid was a drum. The driver stopped a foot from Finn, then lowered the skid to the ground. Soto stepped out from the forklift’s cabin. He fetched the White Queen’s box from a little platform behind the driver’s seat.
Soto stood in front of Finn and stared at him for a good minute like a scavenger watching a dead animal, making sure no other creatures were moving in on its kill. Finn could feel his jaw swelling from where the goon had socked him. Soto set down the White Queen on the floor a few feet to the left of Finn’s legs. Then he walked over to the drum on the forklift—a standard, fifty-five-gallon steel drum stenciled with cooking oil. He unthreaded a bolt and removed the ring securing the drum head. He removed the head. Then he fetched a snake hook from the forklift’s cab and reached into the drum.
Soto lifted up his hook. Coiled around it was a large, dark-gray snake with a coffin-shaped head, flicking a black forked tongue. Soto let her hang for a moment, a look of childish delight on his face. Then, with his left hand, he took hold of her tail and worked out the snake hook until she was hanging only from his hand. Soto lifted her, coiling and writhing, and held her inches from Finn’s face. Finn didn’t flinch. But he was clenching his fists, his wrists straining against the zip ties.
“You know what this is?” said Soto.
“A kitten?” said Finn.
Soto didn’t smile. He placed the snake right at Finn’s feet and let go. Then he whacked his metal hook into a nearby drum, making a sound so loud Finn would’ve jumped had he not been tied up. The snake reared up the top third of its body. It darted side to side with astonishing speed. It opened its jaws, revealing white fangs set well forward against the otherwise entirely black interior of its mouth. Finn knew what it was. He stared at the drum that Soto had taken the snake from. He remembered how Mona had told him about the oily film on Carmen’s skin when she’d seen her body at the coroner’s. Finn joined the dots. He looked at Soto.
“That’s how you killed her,” he said quietly. “You used AmeriCo to get the barrel into the detention center. You put Carmen in the barrel. You put her in the barrel with the snake.”
Soto grinned. “I told her I was going to get her out. I told her to hide in the barrel. When I closed the lid, you could barely hear her screams.”
The grin slipped from his face. “You’re with that bitch lawyer, aren’t you? The one I left a surprise for in her car.”
Soto used his stick to corral the black mamba toward Finn. The snake flattened its neck, hissed, and lunged. “When she is finished with you, I’ll introduce her to your wife,” said Soto. “I’ll put them in a barrel together, like I did with Carmen.”
Finn was not a religious man in any conventional sense. He did not subscribe to a notion of evil. He did not think there existed some supernatural force that can get the better of us and make us do bad things. He did, however, feel on some gut level that the space he had ventured into, this warehouse, containing this barrel, this snake at his feet, and this man standing over him, was in some sense a forsaken place. He had known this intuitively when he had set out that day. He had left the house intending to kill a man, and that intention had led him out of the garden and into this dark wood. Finn thought, This might be the last place I see. He was fine with that. But he could not let Soto get to Mona. He had to survive, for her sake.
“I don’t get it. Why torture Carmen?” he said. “Why not just a bullet?”
Soto’s face wrinkled up. “The whore betrayed me. She had to pay.”
Soto smashed the ground again with his hook, and the snake lunged again. It was swaying fast now, visibly upset, just inches from Finn’s calf. Finn remembered a tip that Butterfield had given him: if confronted with an angry, striking snake, don’t move. Well, thought Finn, he couldn’t help but follow Butterfield’s advice: his arms and legs were bound. But it occurred to him that the more relaxed he was, the less of a threat the snake would perceive him to be. If Finn exuded fear, he reasoned, the snake would sense it; if he felt anxious, the snake would know. Finn looked at the snake at his feet. The snake was angry, but it was facing Soto, not him. Soto was the one whacking the snake hook into the ground; Soto was the threat it was guarding against.
Finn closed his eyes. He resumed his breathing exercise, breathing deliberately through his nose and exhaling gently out of his mouth, not forcing anything, just focusing on his breath. Whenever the snake’s hiss triggered a rush of adrenaline, Finn gently nudged his focus back to his breath. His entire body began to relax. The muscles around his eyes and jaw slackened. His neck unwound. His shoulders dropped. The muscles in his forearms loosened. Slowly, keeping his eyes closed and his focus on his breath, Finn put his palms together as though he were a penitent in prayer. He started sliding his right hand back. He did not open his eyes. He worked his right hand back, staying focused but relaxed. The goons hadn’t tightened the zip ties as far as they could go. Finn detected a millimeter, maybe two, of give between the zip tie and his skin. He started wriggling the thumb of his right hand back.
Whenever Soto whacked the ground with his stick, trying to aggravate the snake into attacking Finn, Finn felt his muscles tense up, and he stopped his efforts and returned his focus to his breath. When his mind relaxed again, the tension slipped from his hands. Little by little, he wriggled his right thumb farther and farther back. The zip tie caught the hairs on his hand and ripped them out, but he didn’t allow himself to hold on to the pain. After twenty breaths, Finn worked the thumb of his right hand out of the zip tie. He could hear Soto still moving around, still hitting the ground with his stick. He could hear the black mamba hissing. He kept his eyes closed. The mamba on the ground was free; that was its advantage over him. Finn had eyelids; that was his advantage over the snake, which, like all snakes, could not close its eyes. By removing his own sense of sight, Finn had sharpened his sense of hearing. By listening attentively, he had surmised what was going on in the room. He knew by the proximity of its hiss and the direction it was coming from that the snake was next to his right foot. He knew from the clank of the snake hook against the concrete floor that Soto was just to the left, trying to provoke the snake to bite him.
Finn could tell by the increased number of clanks that Soto was growing frustrated with the snake’s refusal to bite Finn. Finn had a sense of where all the pieces were now, like a chess player playing blind who can see the whole board and not just the piece his opponent has just played. He remembered the savage nature show that Butterfield had put on for him, putting the green snake in the White Queen’s cage, the way the snake had raised itself, had smelled the air with its tongue, had swayed gently for a long moment before striking with such speed that the kill had happened in a blur.
Finn swayed slightly in his chair, bringing his attention to all the muscles in his body. He counted out five, long deliberate breaths.
Then he struck.
In one motion, he opened his eyes, stepped with his bound feet on the snake hook to his left, slipped his hands from the zip tie and pushed a startled Soto as hard as he could, so that the murderer dropped his hook and fell on his butt. Finn felt a prick on his right leg but didn’t pay it any attention. He stayed focused on Soto, who was scrambling away from Finn toward his gym bag. Finn picked up the snake hook, lunged forward, and whipped the hook down. The hook pierced the soft part of Soto’s larynx right below his Adam’s apple.
Soto opened his mouth wide and made a silent scream. He grasped at the handle of the snake hook now embedded in his throat. Blood pumped out of his neck, all over his shirt, all over the floor, and now it started gushing from his mouth, too, making a strange gurgling sound. He desperately tried to remove the hook from his throat, desperately wrestled Finn, but Finn held the hook firm. He looked in Soto’s eyes, waiting for the light in them to go out. Finn could feel the strength draining from his adversary. He was almost done. Which was just as well, because Finn was starting to feel weak himself; a strange numbness was spreading over his lips and face. A moment later, Soto’s hands slipped off the hook, and his head slumped back to the concrete floor. Finn let go of the hook. He turned and looked for the black mamba, but it was gone. He noticed that in the tumult, the White Queen’s box had been upended, and she was gone, too. He looked down at his still-bound feet. He hauled himself over to the forklift’s cabin, foraged around in its glove box, and found a box cutter. He used it to cut the zip tie around his ankles. The throbbing pain in his right calf was getting worse. Then he pulled up the hem of his jeans and saw the bite marks.
The burn in Finn’s ankle traveled up his leg. His lips and tongue felt numb, and he had a metallic taste in his mouth, like after receiving a local anesthetic from a dentist. He thought of Mona recounting Butterfield’s explanation of how venom works, of why the black mamba’s venom was so especially toxic: it poisons not only the blood but the nervous system. That growing numbness he felt was his nerve cells dying. He needed antivenin, fast.
But first, he had to deal with the two goons outside. Finn noticed the gym bag with the money on the floor of the forklift. He unzipped it and found Soto’s weapon: an FN Five-SeveN semiautomatic. He checked the magazine: fully loaded. The numbness in his right calf kept spreading. He was sweating profusely yet felt a chill so pervasive it was making him shake. He knew he was running out of time. He walked over to Soto’s body and pulled the bloodied snake hook from his neck. Then he went over to the forklift, hobbled around to the cab, and turned it on. He maneuvered the machine to face the door where the two goons had exited the warehouse. He raised the forks with the barrel on it. He wedged the snake hook between the accelerator and the seat. The forklift sped toward the door. Finn limped after it.
The forklift smashed through the door, knocking out the drywall around it. It crushed through the reception desk Finn knew was on the other side and kept careening toward the smoked-glass front, which it promptly shattered. The barrel on its forks fell off and rolled. Finn hobbled as quickly as he could in the forklift’s trail of destruction. To the goons, he must’ve appeared like a figure out of hell, his silhouette emerging from the cloud of dust kicked up by the forklift crashing through the wall. The dust triggered a fire alarm, while at that exact moment the city of Anaheim released into the sky the first of dozens of volleys of its Fourth of July fireworks, adding to the bewildering cacophony. Finn had Soto’s semiautomatic held out in front of him in a two-handed grip. He spotted flashlight goon to his left. Finn fired off two shots. Flashlight guy crumpled. Finn swung his arms, scanning for wand guy. He found him over to the right, his gun drawn and pointed at Finn. Both men fired. Wand guy missed. Finn didn’t. Wand guy’s head snapped back, and his body flopped to the ground.
Finn had the cold sweats now. The gun suddenly felt heavy in his hands, and he dropped it. He walked over to where the reception desk had been, found the desk phone on the ground, and dialed 911.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“I’ve been bitten by a black mamba. I need antivenin.” Finn felt woozy. He realized his speech was becoming slurred. He needed to speak up against the crackling of the fireworks.
“Could you repeat that, sir?”
Finn’s head whirled.
“Snake bit me. Call Butterfield. Antivenin.”
Somewhere in the fog, Finn understood that he wasn’t making sense. But he was still coherent enough to know that the most important detail was his location. He took a deep breath and made an effort to enunciate clearly.
“Ambulance. AmeriCo. Warehouse. Chapman. Avenue. Anaheim.” He heard rapid typing on a keyboard in the background. He felt his legs giving way.
“Sir? Are you still there?”
Finn slumped to the ground.
“Yes.”
“Sir, you say it was a black mamba that bit you?”
“Yes.”
“Is the snake still in the vicinity, sir?”
Finn scanned the room. And though his vision was beginning to blur, he saw, through the hole in the wall that he’d just made with the forklift, in the pool of blood besides Soto’s body, the White Queen, her jaws opened wide, swallowing the black mamba.
“It’s. Okay. The. Cobra. Ate. Her.”
The last thing he heard before losing consciousness was the dispatcher’s voice asking him to say that again.