The Triggerman Dance

He went back to the stump where the dogs waited, sat down and lit another smoke. He jammed a rock inside the empty pack, crumpled it, then walked to the fence and tossed it over. Joshua's people would retrieve it—notes slipped between the cellophane and the paper—in the darkness of night, just as they would retrieve a used camera and replace it with a loaded one, using the hole to cross the fence. John looked at the ground beneath the fence post nearest the tree and the next post north, and could see nothing that indicated the three-foot by three-foot tunnel Joshua had dug beneath the links. It was only six feet long, running under the fence like a curve of bathroom pipe, with openings on each side of the chain. For a human, it was little more than a tube to wriggle into and out of. But it was a safe way to cross the line. The openings were covered with thin plywood onto which were glued a representative camouflage of dirt, leaves, rocks and sticks. With a few handfuls of the real stuff thrown on, they'll be invisible. But if someone steps on one, we're in trouble.

John returned to the stump, ground his cigarette out beside the first one, then put both butts in his pants pocket. The dogs lay in a row, all three with their heads on the ground, but all three eyeing him. He told them "stay" again, then walked around to the oak tree and approached the gnarled brown trunk.

He could hardly believe how loud the leaves under his feet were. Spider webs tickled his cheeks. He reached his hand up into the second V of the trunk and, with a sharp click, pulled down from its securing clasp the Colt .45 Joshua had promised. If you ever need it, you will probably die with it in your hand. It's the last resort, John. Your goal is to never touch it. Your goal is to leave it there to rust in the shade while Wayfarer rusts in a cell. If you say a prayer every night, and I recommend that you do—it should be that you never have to use the Colt.

He checked the empty chamber and the clip, then rose up on his toes again and wedged the automatic back into its seat. A fence lizard gazed down at him from the upper fork of the V, his eyes curious and alert. The idea crossed John's mind that the lizard was one of Joshua's operatives, keeping tabs on him. Wiping the sweat from his face, he ducked back out from the drooping branches and wiped the dirty webs from his arms and shirt.

A blast of hot wind greeted him as he stepped from the canopy, swirling the leaves up around his legs and roaring against his ears. Then the gust moved on and John stood and listened to it swooshing against the treetops and in the brush.

As always, the sound of the Santa Anas shot him back to his childhood. Now he felt the same way that he felt at age five with the big winds hitting: awestruck, surrounded by a power much larger than his own, immersed in the pure velocity of change. They had always made him think of time, and made him realize how the present passes so quickly into the past, how the present is just a series of future moments marching backward to meet you. He had always loved the way the wind made you feel each of those moments going by. He had always loved the way he could just stand there in that wind and let it blow right past him, flattening the grasses, bending the trees, lifting silver-green spray off the faces of advancing waves. It was like seeing time itself. Seeing himself within time, John had always felt small. But he had felt integral, too. With the wind blowing around him he understood that he was a part of larger things, like the grass, the trees and the waves. He remembered, age ten, jumping off the roof of his uncle's house in a high Santa Ana with bed sheets spread behind his outstretched arms, wanting not so much to fly as to dissolve into the wind and let it take him with it. He was hoping it might carry him to his mother and father.