Santi: The Devil's Pioneer

Chapter 31 - It Wasn't Obvious

He saw himself as a camera would, and often thought of himself in the third person as if an omniscient eye were looking down on him and his activities. It was no different than Halloween. night, as he prepared the syringes. He talked to himself-out loud narrating every carefully conceived action as if reading from a script. He could picture himself as one of those guys on the Discovery Channel or A&E.

"He moves with the utmost care as he makes his preparations, as skilled a technician as he is a hunter...."

The snow was falling to beat hell, which brought a twisted grin to his scrappy face. Virgin snow-the irony not lost on him, although his education had stopped in the ninth grade, and irony, per se, was unknown to him. Fresh-fallen snow erased tracks. No one knew this better than a tracker, and, according to the voice-over, he was among the most accomplished trackers in all of Idaho, all of the West, if you excluded Montana because there were guys up there who could follow wolves for three hundred miles on foot without a dog. Not him. He used his dogs and their radio collars whenever called for. "The final preparations almost complete, he anticipates the events in the hours to come with near-military precision..." On that night, he was scheduled for a twofer, a tricky bit of timing and complicated logistics, especially given the storm. He intended to get an early start for just this reason, the narrator in his head reminding him of the importance of meticulous preparation and execution. He arranged the five darts and two syringes, methodically checking dosages, storing them in two metal lunch boxes, the kind he'd once carried to school, the kind his daddy before him had carried into the mine. This one was lined with gray foam rubber, not a white napkin or sheet of paper towel. He double-checked the charge on the Taser. was half tempted to test the thing on one of the dogs, as he sometimes did. But with Santi’s staying behind, plump with a litter, he couldn't afford to have another one out of commission for the night.

Next came the firearms: the 22-gauge dart rifle; the MAC-10, with its three-speed taped magazines; the double-barreled sawed-off, for under the seat of the pickup. He was careful to separate the Bore Thunder/Flash Bang cartridges from the 12-gauge shot. The flashbangs performed like stun grenades but could be fired from the sawed-off. He kept the right barrel loaded with one of these in case of a run-in with law enforcement; he'd stun the bastard and then shoot him up with some ketamine and leave him by the side of the road, knowing he wouldn't remember what day it was, much less the make or registration of the truck he'd pulled over.

He attached the magnetic license plates over the pickup truck's existing ones-a a move as routine to him as brushing his teeth-a necessary precaution when working with his private clients. The plates were registered to a similar truck in Brighton Beach.

He stuffed some fresh chew behind his molars, hawking a gob of spit onto the garage's dirt floor. Even after being off of crystal meth for six months, at moments like this, he found the allure of it tough to resist.

He checked the straps on the wire cages for the dogs. The snow wouldn't hurt them any, and he was in too big a hurry to trade them out for the vinyl carriers that were better in bad weather. He put only one of the weatherproof carriers in the back, the biggest he had. He doubles- and triple-checked its electric mat, a black sheet of heavy rubber, a wire from which ran to a 12-volt outlet installed in the side paneling of the truck bed; it was warm to the touch-a good sign. The specially outfitted carrier was large enough to hold a mastiff or Bernese Mountain Dog, or a mature sheep. Beneath his stubble, he carried a hard scar on his chin, looking like a strip of stretched pink leather, the result of a meat hook slipping when transferring a she-cat from the pickup to the dressing shed. He scratched at it, a nervous habit, the result of too many hours with nothing to do. He spent far too much of his life waiting for others, a disappointing aspect of being a work-for-hire.

But now he had a purpose, a higher calling.

It was time to put things straight. There were enough assholes in Washington to fill a latrine. It was about time they remembered him and others who believed in their country.

"Do not rain," Emman chanted to himself, staring up through the car’s windshield. For an area that saw three hundred sun-filled days a year, the skies had picked this particular Monday to threaten, and it was in the low forties-the one time he was out searching for preexisting mud.

He could remember a time, not long ago, when the road out to the landfill had been a poorly maintained dirt track, leading to a giant, unsupervised pit in the ground. But now he drove on asphalt all the way out to a series of excavations, all surrounded by a chain-link fence, monitored by an attendant in an entrance booth.

"Hey, Em," Emman said, his elbow out the window, the Cherokee perched on a concrete slab, a vehicle scale large enough to weigh tractor-trailers.

"Emman."

"Just need a look around."

"Not dumping nothing?"

"No, ma'am."

"How're the guys?"

"Wild. More like teenagers every day."

"Sorry to hear it."

"How's Santi doing?" He asked.

"Same old same old. Nothing going to kill her."

"Nor should it."

"Second boyfriend in two months, but she's still flirting with other guys."

“The way it should be."

"I hope I'm that strong with men."

"Right there with you."

"Anything new on Peter and Kiki?"

“Working on it. Everyone in my class."

"Is that what brings you here?"

"No. I'm just sightseeing."

"Yeah. True beauty. And the smell is certainly worth a visit."

"An aroma coma. May I pass?"

"Be my guest." She tripped a button that lifted the red-and-white striped barricade, and Emman drove off the scale and onto the dirt. The surface was crushed granite, like nearly every road in the county, rock chips and sand mixed with a good deal of clay, the color of coffee with cream. He was no great judge, considered himself mostly color-blind, but the dried mud on Hannah Towski’s shoes had been a pale pasty brown, almost gray. The dirt he saw here wasn't close to that color.

The landfill pits were constantly being dug up, covered over, and reduce, bringing every kind of unwanted thing to the surface. He drove into a big, open field of dirt, patches of litter trapped on the surface, leading to a sharp edge, beyond which a well-graded ramp carried the big Caterpillar tractors and loaders fifty feet down into an organized mass of trash and household debris at the bottom.

A drizzle struck his windshield, and he cursed aloud in the confines of the car.

Several miles north of Brighton, New York, Emman arrived at the turn for the beach, a valley canyon running east of the highway and parallel to a like-named creek. Brighton Beach represented the dichotomy of the valley, a crossroads where the blue-collar community of Triumph, situated on an abandoned mine site, met the multimillion-dollar homes that bordered the creek.