Phoenix Noir

He fell against me and was shouting in my ear and there was nowhere I could go. “You want Amapola? You want to marry my sobrina? Just like that? Really? Pendejo.” He grabbed my shirt. “Can you fly, gringo? Can you fly?” I was shaking. I was trying to shrink away from him, but I could not. I was trapped in my seat. His breath stank, and his lips were at my ear like hers might have been, and he was screaming, “Can you fly, chingado? Because you got a choice! You fly, or you do what we do.”

I kept shouting, “What? What?” It was like one of those dreams where nothing makes sense. “What?”

“You do what we do, I let you live, cabrón.”

“What?”

“I let you live. Or you fly. Decide.”

“I don’t want to die!” I yelled. I was close to wetting my pants. The Huey was nose-down and sweeping in a circle. I could see people below us, running. A few small huts. Horses or mules. A pickup started to speed out of the big poppy field. Arnulfo talked into his mike and the helicopter heaved after it. Oh no, oh no. He took up the .60 caliber and braced himself. I put my fingers in my ears. And he ripped a long stream of bullets out the door. It was the loudest thing I’d ever heard. Louder than the loudest thing you can imagine. So loud your insides jump, but it all becomes an endless rip of noise, like thunder cracking inside your bladder and your teeth hurt from gritting against it.

The truck just tattered, if metal can tatter. The roof of the cab blew apart and the smoking ruin of the vehicle spun away below us and vanished in dust and smoke and steam.

I was crying.

“Be a man!” Arnulfo yelled.

We were hovering. The crew members were all turned toward me, staring.

Arnie unsnapped my seat webbing.

“Choose,” he said.

“I want to live.”

“Choose.”

You know how it goes in Die Hard movies. How the hero kicks the bad guy out the door and sprays the Mexican crew with the .60 and survives a crash landing. But that’s not what happened. That didn’t even cross my mind. Not even close. No, I got up on terribly shaky legs, so shaky I might have pitched out the open door all by myself to discover that I could not, in fact, fly. I said, “What do I do?” And the door gunner grabbed me and shoved me up to the hot gun. The ground was wobbling far below us, and I could see the Indian workers down there. Six men and a woman. And they were running. I was praying and begging God to get me out of this somehow and I was thinking of my beautiful lover and I told myself I didn’t know how I got there and the door gunner came up behind me now, he slammed himself against my ass, and he said, “Hold it, lean into it. It’s gonna kick, okay? Finger on the trigger. I got you.” And I braced the .60 and I tried to close my eyes and prayed I’d miss them and I was saying, Ama-pola, Amapola, over and over in my mind, and the gunner was hard against me, he was erect and pressing it into my buttocks and he shouted, “For love!” and I squeezed the trigger.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

BY LEE CHILD

Chandler

He said he wouldn’t talk to me. I asked him why. He said because he was a cop and I was a journalist. I said he sounded like a guy with something to hide. He said no, he had nothing to hide.

“So talk to me,” I said, and I knew he would.

He scuffed around for a minute more, hands on the top of the bar, drumming his fingers, moving a little on his stool. I knew him fairly well. He was edging out of the summer of his career and entering the autumn. His best years were behind him. He was in the valley, facing a long ten years before his pension. He liked winning, but losing didn’t worry him too much. He was a realistic man. But he liked to be sure. What he hated was not really knowing whether he had won or lost.

“From the top,” I said.

He shrugged and took a sip of his beer and sighed and blew fumes toward the mirror facing us. Then he started with the 911 call. The house, out beyond Chandler, south and east of the city. A long low ranch, prosperous, walled in, the unlit pool, the darkness. The parents, arriving home from a party. The silence. The busted window, the empty bed. The trail of blood through the hallway. The daughter’s body, all ripped up. Fourteen years old, damaged in a way he still wasn’t prepared to discuss.

I said, “There were details that you withheld.”

He asked, “How do you know?”

“You guys always do that. To evaluate the confessions.”

He nodded.

I asked, “How many confessions did you get?”

“A hundred and eight.”

“All phony?”

“Of course.”

“What information did you withhold?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“Why not? You not sure you got the right guy?”

He didn’t answer.

“Keep going,” I said.