Page 6 of The Maverick
He laughed. Harder than the joke deserved. He hadn't laughed easily in a while, I could tell. The fitness kick had taken the indulgence out of his life and left him hungry in ways he didn't recognize.
I picked up a sandwich. Held it out.
"I always pack extra. PB&J. Made them this morning."
"Oh, no, I couldn't?—"
"Suit yourself."
I started to bring it back.
"Actually," he said, "yeah. Yeah, sure. Thank you."
He took it. Smiled.
I did one slow scan—up the canyon, down the canyon, up the cliff. No movement. The next group I'd clocked coming in was at least fifteen minutes out, at the pace they'd been keeping.
I had my window.
Davari pulled the sandwich out of the bag, lifting it toward his mouth.
I came off the rock like a falling tree.
My knee took him square in the nose. I'd loaded my whole weight into it and dropped from my higher perch, and his face met it the way a melon meets a baseball bat. He went down backwards into the shallows, the sandwich in one hand, the water bottle in the other, his nose flat across his face, blood already sheeting down into the river in a long red ribbon that pinked and dispersed.
Don't die yet,I thought.
He didn't. His chest was still working, ragged. His eyes were rolling but tracking. Stunned, not gone.
I knelt beside him in the water. Grabbed a fistful of his hair. Pulled his face up close to mine.
"My country doesn't like Iranian weapons dealers posing as Beverly Hills playboys," I said. "We leave that to guys like Hugh Hefner."
He tried to speak. Nothing came out except blood.
I dragged him to the deeper pool at the base of the slab. Knee-deep. Cold. His hands came up weakly, fingers scrabbling at my wrist, but his strength was gym-strength and mine was the strength of a man who'd thrown bales of hay across a Texas pasture before he was eleven. There was no contest.
I bent down close to his ear.
"America, motherfucker."
I put his face in the water and held it there.
It didn't take long. It rarely does. The ones who'd been afraid of dying their whole lives went the easiest. The ones who'd never thought about it—men like Davari, men with money, men who'd come to believe they were the kind of person things did not happen to—they panicked into it instead of through it, and panic was the fastest road to drowning a man could take.
I felt the moment he went. The small tremor, then the stillness, then the slack weight of a body returning to the river.
I let him stay under another thirty seconds to be sure.
Then, I moved.
I carried him through the shallows to a side pool I'd flagged on my recon, where two boulders met underwater at a shape I'd been thinking about for a week. Positioned him face down between them. Wedged his right ankle hard between the rocks and gave it a twist with the heel of my boot. The bone gave with a soft, wet crunch. From above, the geometry would read clean—aman lost his footing, fell, caught his ankle in the boulders, struck his face on the way down, drowned where he lay.
Tragic. Unfortunate. Avoidable. The kind of thing the National Park Service put a paragraph about in next year's safety brochure.
I rinsed my hands. Picked up my pack. Wrapped what was left of my lunch. I was buckling my pack when I heard them—voices coming up the canyon. Three, maybe four. Female, mostly. Cheerful.
I let my face fall into the shape I needed.
