Marcus felt hollow, like a trap door had opened up inside of him and everything that he was had fallen out. He felt like an empty shell. Ever since Maggie had gone missing, he had been walking through a nightmare that kept getting worse and worse. But he couldn’t imagine possibly feeling any more broken than he did now. Even his rage couldn’t seem to claw its way to top of the bottomless pit that had taken residence inside of him. His soul had been murdered so many times, but he feared that this was the final break, the moment from which he would have nothing left inside but a cold hollow void.
Marcus had positioned himself in the back seat behind Yazzie, as the captain occupied the driver’s seat of his Ford Explorer patrol vehicle. The main reason he had chosen to sit directly behind Yazzie was that he didn’t want the his captive to see him crying.
He would never truly be satisfied that she was gone until he saw a body, but after what Yazzie had told him in the basement of the ranch, he felt that seeing the corpse with his own eyes was merely a formality now.
Yazzie had explained how he had confronted Canyon about the whereabouts of the missing agent. Canyon simply replied that he had taken her up into the hills and disposed of her. He’d gone on to say that she had warned him that “The Brothers” would be coming for him. At the time, Canyon hadn’t considered much of the threat. But then a crazy man had walked into his police station covered in blood.
Marcus still wasn’t sure he could trust the police captain, but there was something about the story that rang true. Maybe it was that he had always known. Or maybe it was the warning she had allegedly given Canyon about brothers, a phrase she often used to refer to Ackerman and himself. But whatever it was, until he learned different, Marcus believed Yazzie’s story.
With a submachine gun sitting across his lap and tears in his eyes, he watched the desert landscape, lit by a slowly waking sun, fly past.
From the front seat, Yazzie said, “May I ask you a question, Agent Williams?”
In Marcus’s head, Yazzie’s voice carried a strange dreamlike quality. He responded, “Keep your mouth shut and drive.”
Ignoring him, Yazzie asked, “You didn’t mention my eyes. You didn’t even seem to notice.”
Of course he had noticed. Marcus noticed everything. But why would he say anything? Yazzie obviously was born with partial ocular albinism, which Marcus knew to mean that one of his eyes lacked normal pigment. He was familiar with several eye conditions like this that he had researched because of his own abnormality called sectoral heterochromia, in which one eye contains two different colors. Of course, he didn’t care to share all that information with Yazzie. He merely replied, “Why would I?”
“I don’t know, I guess it just seems to make people uneasy. Always has. That’s why I wear the glasses all the time now or colored contacts if I know that I’m going to be in a situation where I have to take them off. But when you had me tied to that chair, my glasses were off and you were looking right into my eyes. You didn’t even flinch. It’s actually been a very long time since any man has looked me in the eyes. My real eyes.”
“Is there a point to any of this?”
“I’m just trying to say that I appreciate that you didn’t make anything out of it. I was bullied a lot when I was a kid because of what they called my ‘ghost eyes,’ and it wasn’t until I was a teenager and started working for John that I was able to afford colored contacts.”
Marcus could definitely understand that. He had experienced the effects of bullying and psychological abuse firsthand, and he knew the kind of scars that such trauma could leave on one’s psyche. He said, “Being bullied isn’t an excuse for becoming a bully yourself.”
“Maybe you’re right, but I learned early on that you are either meat for the grinder or the butcher doing the grinding.”
Marcus said nothing.
Yazzie continued, “It seems pretty strange to me that your Agent Carlisle would come out here all by herself. Is conducting an investigation without any kind of backup typical for you feds?”
“Just shut up and drive.”
Yazzie said, “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“If you say another word, I’m going to hogtie you to the luggage rack.”