The speaker crackled. “We got to see them. For safety’s sake. Nothing funny. That’s the deal we made.”
“That’s a problem,” Walter said. “They’re asleep.”
“No matter about that,” the voice said. “You come back when they wake up. Or you can even wake them up, can’t you?”
“We don’t want to wake them up.”
“Seems strange, you’d drive out here,” the voice said. “And then you aren’t willing to wake them up.”
“Well,” Walter said. He bugged his eyes at East.
East had nothing.
“The deal is one, two, three, four. We done our part of the deal. I got a package here for you, exactly what you asked. And I’ll be here when your boys wake up,” the voice said.
“Hold on.” East stepped back from the dark-tinted window and studied the barn. The wind-blasted house, the two anonymous silos. Every window and shadow too dark to read. There may have been half a dozen gunners covering them. Or no one at all.
The cold prickled on his bare arms.
Walter retreated with him and leaned in close.
“Like he’s trying to trap us,” said Walter. “Bank robbery: you put all the people together so you can cover them.”
“Why’d you make it so we have to have four?” East hissed.
“I didn’t make it, I told you,” said Walter. “Be different if I did. I would have been happy doing the deal back there at the grocery store.”
East rubbed his cold palms together and cursed.
“Old people,” Walter said. “Country-ass religious people. Somebody told them four, now that’s the scripture. I dealt with people like this before.”
“You dealt with everyone.”
“Tell you a story sometime. You want to fetch your brother out?”
East said, “He ain’t gonna make four.”
Shivering now, again they approached the window. The speaker shot a burst of static as they neared it, then cleared.
“Hello again.”
Walter cleared his throat. A burst of mist rolling out. “We put one out on the road,” he said. “So we’re down to three. That’s all we have.”
“I seen you talking it over,” came the voice. “I just do what I’m told.”
“Come out and look. Ain’t no fourth to see.”
“I ain’t stupid,” said the voice. “And I cain’t change on the plan. We agreed it was four. You show me four and I place your order in the drawer.”
“The plan changed,” Walter said. “Let me make a phone call.”
The static came thick, like fry grease. “Go ahead.”
Crestfallen, Walter said: “I mean, if we can use your phone.”
“No phone,” said the voice of the man.
East eyed the hard glass, the reflected blur of the van, the frost-lit world. His lips and skin were shrinking, emptying of blood. Black sky, taunting stars.
“Search us,” Walter was saying. “We got three. That’s all. Tell me what you need. But don’t waste the whole day.”
“I do what I’m told,” the voice came back, unruffled.
“This is a whole organization we’re here for,” Walter tried. “You are stopping it up. I don’t know how or why you got put in the way. But you got to understand that you are now a problem.”
The old man coughed into the microphone. “That’s why I sit in here, where it’s safe.”
“Can I make a new arrangement somehow?”
“Yes,” said the voice. “You made an arrangement before. Follow it again.”
“Can’t you call your boss, whoever that is?”
The crackle insisted, without annoyance: “No phone.”
In his shirt in the cold air, East had detached from the moment, detached from responsibility for it. Their strangeness in this wind-whipped Iowa farm field was plain—three black boys, deal gone bad, needing guns and knowing nobody. He watched Walter, watched the fat boy solving problems, inventing. Walter was an option man. He played around a thought, discarded it, played around another. That was what a furnace-size body afforded him, the time to try every key.
You could see what people liked about him.
East himself, he had been cold before. Never this cold. Back in the van there were sweaters. But he didn’t want to break off from this old man. To credit the cold that the old man seemed the soldier of.
He wasn’t sure he cared to stay. He wasn’t sure he cared to win this. Guns, after all. Never had he cared for them. The noise, the mess. He’d held a gun before but never felt safer for it.
All the same, he was no fool. He knew guns made his world go round.
He shivered, and the air inside his mouth was no warmer than the outside. The bite inside his cheek stood out like a wound.
This black man, this judge they had come all these roads to shoot, the mission he had defended: he couldn’t see it. Couldn’t imagine. The bullets, the body. Not shooting him, he saw that now. Not going on, not succeeding: that was real. That was a bone in his freezing body now. There was no getting it out.
This old man saying no made that bone hurt. Made it harden.