Flashback

Begay nodded. “Yeah, Gauge said that you was going to ask me that. The answer’s yes… maybe. I’ll give you a week or two’s tryout, riding shotgun. Learning the gears. You can pay me as we go. Providing you got the NICC, of course.”

“I don’t,” said Val. He was very close to tears. If he started blubbering like a baby here, he thought he might throw himself out the door toward the white-watered Colorado churning by to their right. “I won’t have one,” he managed. “No fucking money to buy one with. And no fucking time.”

“Time?” said Begay.

“Devereaux says it takes weeks… sometimes a month… to get the NIC Card, even when you can pay for it. You guys are leaving… when? Sunday morning in the middle of the night sometime?”

“For Chrissakes, kid. I wasn’t talking about this weekend. I’m coming back through Denver in late October, right before Halloween. You got the NICC then, I’ll give you a week or two probation. No promises, though. You fuck up the way I think you probably will, I’ll leave you by the side of the goddamned road. That’s a damn promise.”

Val could only stare and keep himself from bawling after all.

Begay turned the radio up.

“… that president pursued a policy that flattered and encouraged our enemies, alienated our allies, and abandoned Israel to be destroyed by a country that had nuclear weapons that we could have prevented, my friends! The United States could have prevented the Islamic Republic of Iran… the heart of the current Global Caliphate… from ever having those weapons! Now that country… and that Caliphate… have thousands of atom bombs and this country, after our big deal with the Russians five years before that country went belly up, has, by the final START treaty, twenty-six bombs. Twenty-six! And no way to deliver ’em and no will to deliver ’em and…”

Val dozed off.

They came out of the mountains above Denver at about ten o’clock in the morning. The roar of gears and engine had wakened Val during the climb over Loveland Pass and it would always remain one of the most terrifying things he’d ever experienced.

The long 6 percent and steeper grade of the last dozen miles or so out of the mountains toward Denver, the high-rises gleaming in the midmorning light ahead, was all lower-gear, high-revving engines braking by compression, and the stink of overheated brakes. Two of the trucks in the convoy had to use runaway truck ramps.

And then they were down. Val could see other cars on I-70 and the adjoining roads and highways. It was the first real traffic they’d seen for hours. It made him dizzy.

“One thing I gotta ask you before we seal this maybe deal,” said Henry Big Horse Begay, switching off the radio. This close to a major city, it was NPR and the other official stations.

“What’s that?” asked Val. He was terrified that the Indian was going to renege on his offer. With a month to get the $200 old bucks—maybe steal it from the Old Man before shooting the bastard, although Val doubted that the old flashback addict would have that much anywhere—and then to get the NICC, he might just be ready for Begay.

“That piece you had in your belt in the back and been shiftin’ around, furtive-like, all night so it wouldn’t dig into your back or side or gut. You ever shoot it?”

Val hesitated. Finally, not knowing what the right answer was, he said, “Yeah.”

“Not at a goddamned target or rabbit or some such, I mean,” said Begay, taking his full attention off the road ahead and laying it on Val. “I mean at a living person. A man.”

“Yeah,” breathed Val.

“Hit him?”

“Yeah.”

“Kill him?” Begay’s eyes were flinty lie detectors.

Val tried to swallow. Couldn’t.

“Yeah.”

They were approaching the interchange with I-25, but the old one had been blown up. There was a temporary gravel ramp. The convoy was shifting down, bouncing down the grade in unison.

“Did he deserve it?” asked Henry Big Horse Begay.

Val started to answer with the same syllable he’d been using and then stopped. This question had been most of what had kept him awake at night the last week. He cleared his throat.

“I don’t know,” said Val. “Probably not. But I think it was either him or me. I chose me.”

Begay drove south on I-25 in silence for several minutes.