Page 68 of Making His Bones

Gray didn’t seem to notice or care that I tip-toed behind him at ten paces. Wolf did, though, and he kept shooing me away with a fluttering hand. I almost giggled, he looked so frazzled. True, I had no gun. I never did, though I’d taken a few self-defense courses to please Booker Maverick before coming to Arizona. No, maybe I giggled because I was light-hearted in a way I hadn’t been in ten years. The person who had murdered my daughter was dead.

I was lighthearted because I’d just witnessed someone being murdered in cold blood.

And it didn’t bother me.

The air was heavy with silence aside from a buzz of cicadas, like summertime tinnitus. I crept behind Gray like his shadow. He approached the trailer door from one side, the frustrated Wolf at the other side. It was up to Gray to reach over and twist the door handle, swinging it so wide open we both had to jump back, and he stomped on the toes of my shoes.

He jumped to level his barrel inside the trailer, as did Wolf. They had good FBI fighting stances, square to their targets, feet at shoulder width.

“All right, Pitchfork!” yelled Gray, loud and resonant. “What’d you do with Tiag—oh, God.”

Wolf even lowered his gun in order to rub his eyes. He looked about to puke with disgust, coughing into his hand.

I had to peek around Gray’s shoulder. Dios mío.

Only Pitchfork’s back was in view, his pants down to his knees. He humped some young man as smooth as coffee. Grunting and squeezing his buttocks, his disgusting ball sac was full and primed, and the boy emitted no noise at all, as though he were holding his breath.

Reflexively, I reached to grab Gray’s pistol. I wanted to shoot that motherfucker who ran Barnyard Productions, who paid boys shit wages to allow old men to suck their dicks. But Gray, maybe surprised that I was there, yanked his arm in the other direction, squeezing off a shot into the trailer’s roof.

“Elektra!” he yelled. “I told you to stand behind that tree!”

I walked around to his side, pointing into the room. “This man is a disgusting pig who needs to be taken out immediately!”

Meanwhile, Pitchfork had disengaged with the poor young man, who ran behind a filing cabinet and held his pants to his chest. I can never unsee the image of Pitchfork, his gut hanging over his thighs, his mouth hanging open. What a fucking worthless hypocrite. He left me alive to witness his granddaughter’s death, then he went and took advantage of defenseless boys.

Gray strong-armed me against the outside of the trailer. “Stay, Elektra!” To Wolf he yelled, “Let’s get him out here!”

“Sure,” said Wolf in a choked voice. His eyes were watery as though he’d just run from a smoky building. He visibly gathered up the nerve to face Pitchfork, level his gun at him, and yell, “Out! Get out here, you colossal asswad! You’re helping us find our kid, the one you tied up at your grandson’s!”

Bud Pitchfork stumbled from his trailer. The new cast to his face told me that, for the first time I’d known him, he was scared.

He held his stupid pants up with one hand—it was probably hard to buckle the belt under that gut—as he stumbled toward the fish truck, prodded with my boys’ gun barrels.

Wolf yelled, “You’re a sick, twisted dirtbag, you know that, Pitchfork?”

“What do you have to say about that?” shouted Gray.

“It’s my life!” shouted Pitchfork, voice trembling. “I’ve been this way since I was a boy! You can’t fault a man for liking other men, can you?”

Wolf and Gray rolled their eyes at one another. We had a brother club, The Bent Zealots MC, composed almost entirely of gay men. We could care less.

Gray yelled, “You’re taking advantage of underage kids! You’re not gay—you’re a pedophile! You damage them with your fucking porn. You know how that makes a kid feel, to be clawed and pawed all over by some guy old enough to be his grandpa? You hate yourself! You fucking hate yourself!”

Pitchfork paused in front of the box truck. “It’s not my fault! This is how I was born.”

“Oh, God,” said Gray. Keeping his piece leveled on the old preacher, with his left hand he unlatched the rollup door and shoved it open.

My Tiago! It must’ve been a hundred in that fucking truck, and he was still gagged and blindfolded!

I jumped in and crawled on all fours to embrace him in my arms. Wolf came, too, with his box cutter. He handed it to me so he could keep his piece on Pitchfork. I cut the gag first so Tiago could breathe. Putting my hand on his chest, I felt that his heart was beating extremely fast and hard. I hoped Maddy or Gudrun were around to take a look at him.

“You’re a pig, Pitchfork,” Gray was saying. “You’re the lowest asswad of Twatville. You’re a fucking murderer, do you know that? You drive these kids into the desert to fucking die and you don’t give a flying fuck, do you?”

“You fucking lowlife!” spat Wolf. I mean, he literally spat. Drool was spraying from his mouth with every disgusted word.

I simultaneously cradled Tiago and dragged him to the edge of the truck. He was sitting up by now, blinking, wetting his lips with his tongue. I had water for him back at the bike.

Pitchfork was getting angry now, self-righteous in a way he shouldn’t be. “What do you expect? These kids get used up, done for. Nobody wants to see a kid over the age of eighteen. And they’re no good anymore for drug mules so we can’t send them back. Sending them into the desert is biblical, man! Who wants to suck an old eighteen-year-old dick? No one wants to! And look, face facts. They’re Mexican, man!”