“Fine.”
“You look a little less green than you did,” said Walter. “Thought you’d be puking again.”
East snapped, “It don’t hurt so much if you don’t talk about it.”
A light drizzle speckled the windshield.
“How you doing, Ty?” Walter called.
The reply came, “Fabulous.”
“You psyched, man? Getting your hands on more guns?”
“Yeah. All I ever think about,” said Ty drolly. “Guns. Guns. Guns.”
Something, East thought. Something Walter knew about talking to his brother that he didn’t. Even jiving him. As if they knew each other, when they didn’t.
He and Ty, they didn’t know each other, when they did.
Then, from behind the grocery store, a small black pickup tiptoed out near them, not a glance from the driver, no signal, almost indifferent.
“Is that it?” said East.
Walter’s eyes were buzzing. The truck’s turn signal pulsed once. Toward the road.
Walter pulsed the light back, and the pickup revved and began to crawl out. “We’re in business.”
Walter crouched over the wheel, maintaining the distance between the van and the little black truck. Back down the highway the van unwound them, past the houses and signs and fields they’d already seen, then onto an eastbound route. Here, fewer houses and no maintenance—the pavement was lined by dropouts, potholes the size of dinner plates chipping off onto the shoulder. Both vehicles nosed along the center line.
“You set this up too, Walt?” said East.
“No. They did,” said Walter. “I mean, there’s a guy. A broker. Guy they call Frederick. He does it all by phone. He never handles a gun.”
“Is he here? Or in LA?”
“This ain’t my bailiwick.”
“It ain’t what?”
“I don’t know where the man is. I didn’t set this up,” Walter said through gritted teeth. “Ask me a few more questions, why don’t you?”
“All right,” said East. “All right.”
Another road, wider, ran straight between two fields dressed in stubble. The headlights touched the white, embarrassed carcass of a deer. Then the pickup slewed diagonally and stopped astride the center line. It surprised Walter: he chirped the tires stopping.
A passenger leapt out. Blue sweatshirt, hood knotted tight around his face. Just a nose, a white nose, a pair of eyes like coal-black holes. Walter grabbed the shift lever. But there was no time to do anything, nowhere to go.
“Be cool,” East cautioned.
The passenger strode past them into the field, up the beginning of a beaten two-track. He popped a bolt on a metal gate. Then, turning, he beckoned.
“This freaks me out,” said Walter. “They could lock us in.”
“Well, that fence ain’t much,” East murmured.
Walter swung the van toward the track. The hooded passenger motioned to roll down the window.
“Grim reaper–looking motherfucker,” Walter said under his breath, and cranked the window down.
The air pushed in, starry-cold. They saw the ball of the boy’s head turning but not the face, heard his words but nothing in his voice. He could have been the grim reaper. He could have been anyone. “You’re going to go till you hit a barn that’s got two Harvestores. Tall blue silos,” the voice came. “It’s about a mile up over the hill.”
Courteously Walter said, “What hill?”
The passenger gave no sign Walter had spoken. “Follow that trail. On the other side, you will find it, down the hollow. You can’t miss. Understand?”
Walter and East both nodded in a daze.
The boy’s nod back was a single chop of his nose.
“You can get back out this way,” the nose said. “Or there’s a drive out the other side if you can find it.” He pushed the long gate and it creaked open before them.
The boys sat stricken. Not sure of the etiquette. Like being little at Halloween, at the weird house, when somebody’s dad answers the door in a costume and offers you a pull off his whiskey—what you do then.
“Go,” the nose said. “It ain’t no good out here waiting.” He scented something up the road and tossed his head: In.
Walter touched the accelerator and the van lurched through. In the taillights the boy swung the gate shut and departed. His small taillights moved away like tiny stamps.
Walter stopped, distracted, the van idling, working his chin with his fingertips.
“I don’t know, man.”
“What?”
“Do you like the feel of it?”
“The feel of it?” East sized up Walter. Got this far before he decided it was scary? “Like you said, it’s set. It’s all ready. No time to change our mind.” More gently he said, “Go on, man.”
Walter strapped his fingers around the wheel again.
But the van pitched this way and that, as if carried by hand. The track was a rough bargain between tires and ground—polished in places but muscled and bushy with weeds in others. The headlights danced ahead in the mangled fields. After a short time they made a shallow climb on a long, triangular bulge in the earth.