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Baxter had helped Letty set up the drum set on the first night, and while she was changing into jeans and a tee-shirt, he tookcharge of setting it up in the room. That done, they both went to their laptops.
The laptops had been supplied by the spooks and both had encrypted mail caches hidden on the hard drives that worked both sending and receiving. Letty had mail from Johnson asking for a report; Baxter had the same thing. They both shut down the mail without replying and Letty moved over to the drum set with a pair of sticks.
“What are we doing tomorrow?” Baxter asked. He’d shed his jeans and shirt and was crawling into bed in his underwear.
“I’m going to find Harp and ask the question.”
“You’re going to tell him the Big Lie? We’re on the run?”
“If it seems... appropriate.”
“I’d feel bad about blackmailing him, if that’s what we do,” Baxter said.
“I understand,” Letty said. “I’d feel bad about it, too, but I’d feel worse if Ordinary People killed a few hundred people in the Twin Cities because we had qualms about blackmail.”
Letty plugged her headphones into the iPad, called up the video of Twenty One Pilots’ “Ride” and began drumming along, and followed that with the Preoccupations’ “Bunker Buster.”
Thinking it out. Considering her qualms.
Getting her rhythm on.
Five
Early the next morning, right at daybreak in the Mojave Desert, more or less 160 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, California:
An obsidian black Mercedes-Benz G-Class, aGeländewagen,rocked and rolled down an arroyo, kicking up wheel-high dust as it went. At the base of a stony bluff, it stopped, and two men got out, while a third man remained in the backseat.
The two men, dressed comfortably in tee-shirts, cargo pants, and cross-training shoes, walked around to the back of the vehicle, popped the hatch, and dragged a living body out.
The body was that of a youngish man or woman, though it was hard to tell exactly what he or she might look like, or even its sex, since the body had long brown hair and the lower part of its face was heavily wrapped in silver duct tape.
The men dragged the tape-wrapped body to the bluff, and propped it in a seated position, its head against the rock.
When the body was in position, the third man got out of the truck. Unlike the two hard men, he wore a pale yellow dress shirt under a linen sport coat, light blue chinos, and tasseled loafers, suitable for lunch at a country club.
He walked to the bluff, picking up his feet, to keep the dust off the shine of his shoes, then squatted to look at the body. The body looked back at him, its face wet with sweat, although the day was not that hot. The man reached out and pulled tape off the mouth of the body.
“We would not be here, Daniel,” he said in excellent but accented English, “if you had given me the names back in LA. Now we’re going to give you a painful demonstration of what your very short future looks like. No questions, just the demonstration.”
He pressed the tape back across Daniel’s mouth, and gestured to one of the other men, who went to the SUV and came back with a red two-gallon gas can. The man in the yellow slacks stepped back and the man with the gas can poured a pint of gas on Daniel’s lower legs, and asked, “How’s that, Mr. Step?”
“That should do it.”
He leaned toward Daniel and said, “You should have talked to us last night.”
Daniel grunted something and Step pulled the tape off his mouth. “What?”
“Fuck you.”
“All right,” Step said. He took an antique Zippo lighter from his pocket, clicked open the top, and sparked up a flame. Daniel said, “Please...”
Step put the flame next to the gas-soaked legs and the flame leaped across them and Daniel began screaming and screamed for a long time, as the smell of gas fumes and burning pork spread across the desert landscape.
Step gestured to one of the other men, who stepped up with a fire extinguisher and sprayed it on Daniel’s legs; Daniel moaned and began to weep.
Step said to the man with the gas can, “Do it.”
The man poured the rest of the can over Daniel’s entire body, started with his head and hair, then down across his face, chest, and hips.
