He plunged out of the cab and onto the ground to take cover behind the Econoline’s left-front end, the engine and front tires. He didn’t even hear the shots, thought he’d been hit in the ear. Gone deaf. He had to move. He dove back inside the cab and reached for the .45 on the seat, but the gun wouldn’t come. His arm, his hand, was slick. He had no grip. He looked at his hand like you would an empty pen. Blood everywhere. The entire right side of him bloody and wet, leaking.
He peeked into a pocket of clear glass in the windshield and saw the nephew walking from across the street, squared up, gun flashing as he advanced on the van. Fifteen meters away and closing.
Tomás tried his other hand, the left, but the gun slid onto the floor. He wiped his palm on his lap. He leaned and reached into the console for the other pistol. He put it under his right armpit and was able to hold it there and cock it. He looked at the blood all over and tried to gauge how much he’d lost. Really had no idea.
He looked around the open driver’s-side door and then around the front bumper, the small nose of the van not giving him much cover. The nephew was angling, taking a semicircle path to get a better shot. The shock had worn off, and Tomás could hear the shots now. Pop. Pop. Pop. He scrambled backward as the headlights exploded, the front tire exhaled, and the van slumped.
He took a step sideways away from the van and fired in the man’s direction, just to ward him off, slow him down. The nephew veered, the van between them again. Even now, Tomás thought they might talk. He stepped back to the cab and set the pistol on the driver’s seat, picked up the .45, was able to hold on to it this time, stuffed it in his waistband and then with the other pistol fired two wild shots through the windshield at the nephew. His right arm was limp. He had to go.
Through the spiderwebbed windshield, Tomás saw the nephew running sidelong to get in front of the van. Tomás threw another wild one around the bumper and then crouched and backwalked along the side toward the rear of the van. Liquid bubbled, the radiator hissed.
The nephew came around the front of the van shaking a plastic bag off a fresh gun and fired as Tomás leapt behind the van. Bullets dimpled the rear door after penetrating the sidewall. Tomás slunk around the rear of the van to the passenger side. The vehicle pinged like some kind of busted saxophone playing quarter notes. Then quiet.
The pain focused him for a moment and he realized his right arm was a mess, he was shot through the tricep, maybe also in the heel of that same hand but that might be glass. He could only fire one gun at a time. He didn’t think he’d bleed to death, but he didn’t know it.
He felt the other man bump up against the other side of the vehicle. A chance to parley.
“Hey!” Tomás called out. “Let’s talk. We don’t have to do this.”
No reply.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “I’m not here to kill you.”
He could hear the nephew edge along the side of the van, corner, and lean against the back of it. So close they could hear one another breathing. The only sound on the deserted street.
Tomás stepped back, dropped the pistol on the ground so he could open the passenger door with his good left hand, and then removed the .45 from his pants and squared up behind the door. He aimed at the back corner of the van.
“I’m only here to talk, that’s all. I’m alone.”
No reply.
“You fucking shot me, man. Come out. I wanna talk.”
Nothing.
And then the nephew swung around the back of the van.
Tomás let four shots go—the .45 heavy and violent in his palm—all right into the man’s chest.
The nephew fell, his legs bending beneath him, his shoulder hitting the ground, and then his body flopped up and sprung over, leaving him chest-down in the dirt. Blood spread on his shirt. Like the man was a bag of wine poked full of holes. Near his head lay a boot sole.
Soft steps behind him. He turned and was immediately slapped backward and he was looking up at the sky and those cottony clouds, that’s what he saw, somehow he was seeing anything at all, how did that happen, where was he.
He tried to move, but all he could manage was lifting his head. The DEA woman stood there, barefoot, maybe ten meters away with the pistol in both hands aimed at him. She was looking at him and then past him at the dead man, which is when he leveled his gun at her. As best he could.
“I just wanted to talk to the crazy fucker!”
He was speaking Spanish, and he wasn’t sure hers was any good. He could feel his focus ebbing, couldn’t see her eyes, her intentions. He fired and fired. His head fell back from the effort. He expected to be shot again, but then all he heard were soft steps, receding receding receding.
Sky. He had to close his eyes against it. He’d been out for a minute, less, more, he did not know. The warm pain in his right hip. When he opened his eyes again, he lifted his left leg and twisted himself into some momentum and then used his good arm to launch himself into a roll to his stomach. He propped himself with his elbow and then the pistol to stand. He’d been shot in the hip, maybe his groin, he just knew he had to move. He couldn’t walk really, but he could stand on his good strong leg and he dragged the bad one, hopping across the empty street to the tavern. When he got to the corner, he turned and held himself against the wall. He breathed, wondering what next. He made for the backside of the building, dragging his foot in the gravel. He crossed to a convenience store.
A car at one of the gas pumps. He looked inside the store. The people in there scattered when he saw them. He looked in the car, a brown mid-1980s Honda. The keys were in it. Automatic, fortunately.
He threw the pistol on the passenger seat. He started it awkwardly with his left hand, his right arm screaming.
The rumble of the engine like his father’s voice on a black-eye afternoon.
The shock had burned completely off and his hip was afire and so was his arm.
He put the car in gear and pressed the gas with his left foot and drove across the road and through a wire fence. He set out east across a field.
Tomás stopped the car after going through more than a few fields and across three paved roads. He searched through the back but there was nothing except sweatpants and a half bottle of water. In the trunk a few spare tools, a gigantic monkey wrench, a bunch of plastic bags and bottles of motor oil, a child’s backpack graced by a blue genie—Aladdin, he remembered seeing it when he was a child—and PVC pipe fittings and sockets, a jar of plumber’s putty, and, at the bottom, a smushed and nearly-gone roll of duct tape. He could hear sirens. Distant, faint. He could hear seagulls. He could use the duct tape.
With his teeth and buck knife he tore the sweatpants and then fashioned a tourniquet with the waistband elastic. He surprised himself crying out, and sweat popped his skin.
His hip had ceased bleeding, it seemed, but he couldn’t put much weight on it. The bone was shot to hell, he could feel bits of it. He hacked away at the passenger seat and pulled out pieces of cushion and held them onto his hip and side as he wrapped the last of the tape around his body. Cursing and calling out the whole time until he finally stuck a piece of car-seat vinyl between his teeth just so he could bite down and not have to listen to himself anymore. What he’d rigged ended up looking like demented padding for a player of some kind of junkyard American football.
He drank from the water, left himself a couple of swallows. As soon as he could manage sitting in the driver’s seat again, he put the car in gear and crossed his left foot over to the gas pedal again and pushed down on it and drove on. He went through fields and muddy drainages and over a bridge and down easements and backroads and he had much trouble and kept finding himself with his eyes closed. Times he found himself coming to.
The Honda gave out in a ditch bottomed with old telephone poles. He pushed down on the gas and threw the gear down into low, but there was no going forward anymore.
It got dark quickly, or maybe he’d passed out, or both perhaps. He was able to pull himself out of the car and crawl up the embankment into another field. He made his way along furrows, dragging his left leg, sometimes pulling it forward with his good arm, setting it forward again and again as if he were transporting a heavy pillar in fits and starts. He could see police flashers drive past where he’d left the car, they’d missed it in the ditch. Felt like his last dregs of luck. Bottoms up.
He went on hobbling under starlight, globs of blood swinging from his arm like tree moss.
At first he thought the black mass he found before him and was heading toward was a house or barn. Realizing almost as he came to it that it was a tractor. When he got to it he sat on the plow, heaving. He could hear ship horns far out in the gulf. He sat there and imagined the lights of buoys or boats since he couldn’t actually see any from this vantage. It was hard to tell how far away the water was, how far anything was.
With his good hand he felt at the plow blades. The tractor dark and towering above him.
He reached out to start climbing up into the cab. When he made his first step, his foothold went away from him. He was falling and wasn’t falling and the stars were upside down and he wasn’t sure where the tractor went and then he wasn’t able to wonder about that or look for it.
BAGRAM AFB, PARWAN PROVINCE, AFGHANISTAN | |
MARCH 19, 2004, 21:33 | |
CARVER: |
We went to Karachi to figure out a way to keep Abdul Kalali’s operation stable. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
How? |
CARVER: |
He used to run his heroin through Iran. But now that Defense wasn’t sharing any op intel with us, there wasn’t a safe route to Iran. We had to go through Pakistan. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
And how did you enlist the DEA’s help? |
CARVER: |
The Karachi office had a decade of diligent surveillance on the heroin trade in Pakistan. They had informants all through the police, army, intelligence. Pakistan’s gangsters wear army uniforms—the DEA couldn’t touch any of them. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
But the pursuit teams could. |
CARVER: |
We could nab anybody. The DEA gave us a name, we’d have him strapped to a waterboard in forty-eight hours. We took a few dirty colonels off the chess board—those DEA guys couldn’t get off Shipley’s dick after that. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
But how did that help move Abdul Kalali’s heroin? |
CARVER: |
It cleared the decks. Shipley helped the DEA bag a few of Abdul Kalali’s rivals. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
Which consolidated his power. |
CARVER: |
And then we turned the spigot back on. The heroin flowed south. Fuck Iran. Fuck the Pentagon’s battlespace. Pretty soon Abdul Kalali was the undisputed boss in Paktika. Poppy production up, al-Qaeda production down. First time that had happened. Ever. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
But it didn’t last. |
CARVER: |
Nope. |
POLYGRAPHER: |
What changed? |
CARVER: |
The DEA got informants in Abdul Kalali’s operation. That really dicked everything up. |