Page 1

CHAPTER 1

MYA

Russ Harlan made the worst coffee in New Mexico, and I told him so every trip.

“Then quit drinking it,” he said.

“I’m a pilot, Russ. I’ll drink anything hot.”

He snorted and filled his own cup from the thermos, which proved he’d never tasted it. He’d been in a good mood since we left Midland. He’d whistled, laughed with the fuel guy and spent half the flight telling me about a bass boat he had his eye on, which was a lot of talking for Russ. He usually stayed home in Las Cruces and let me fly this run on my own. Today he’d said he had business with the customer and climbed in beside me with a gym bag on his knees.

Russ didn’t fly. He did the deals, the books and the coffee, and I did the flying. That suited us both fine.

Below us the Bootheel spread out brown and gold all the way to Mexico. It’s the bottom corner of New Mexico, right on the border, and there’s nothing down there but hills, scrub and cattle. From up here on a cold, bright morning, it was the prettiest nothing I’d ever seen. I loved it. I loved every minute up here.

The wings on my jacket sleeve had been my grandfather’s. He taught me to fly when I was sixteen, in a little plane older than he was, and I’d never wanted to do anything else since.

“There it is,” Russ said.

The airstrip came up out of the scrub right where it always did, a long stripe of hard-packed dirt with a white pickup and a box truck parked at the far end. I’d flown this run every couple of weeks since spring. I picked up crates of oilfield parts outside Midland, flew them down here to a cattle ranch that belonged to one of his customers, watched the crew unload them and flew home. Russ paid me cash for it, but Russ paid everybody cash. He paid the fuel guy cash. He’d have paid the IRS in cash if they’d let him.

I brought her down nice and gentle, rolled to the end and swung her around ready for home.

“Show-off,” Russ said.

“You’re welcome.”

By the time I’d shut everything down and climbed out, the crew already had the big cargo door open.

Four men. Same as always. Two of them handed the long black crates down out of the plane and the other two carried them to the box truck. They never said hello, never said much of anything, and I’d always figured ranch hands were just shy.

Russ was over by the pickup with the man in charge. That one was older than the rest of them and a lot heavier, with gray in his mustache and a right arm he held tucked against his side, like the wrist on it had been broken once and healed wrong. Russ had his gym bag over his shoulder, and he was talking with his hands the way he did when he was haggling.

I stretched until my back cracked and dug a granola bar out of my jacket. It was cold enough that my breath smoked.

Russ’s voice carried across the dirt. “A year I’ve been doing this. A whole year, and the price hasn’t moved.”

The heavy man answered too low for me to hear.

“Then find yourself another plane,” Russ said.

I figured it was money. With Russ it was always money. I leaned on the side of the plane, ate my granola bar and stayed out of it.

The youngest of the crew couldn’t have been more than twenty. He lifted the next crate out of the doorway, turned with it and caught the corner on the edge of the door.

It slipped out of his hands and landed on its end. Both catches popped, and the lid fell open.

Three rifles slid out into the dirt at my feet.

Black, ugly, with long curved magazines tucked into the foam beside them. My grandfather hunted deer with a rifle. I knew what a gun looked like. But these were the kind you see on the news.

“What the fuck?”

I said it loud. Everybody heard it. The kid froze with his hands still out in front of him, and every man on that strip turned and looked at me.

I stared down at the rifles. Then I looked over at Russ.

I wanted him to look as shocked as I was. I wanted him to yell, to march over and demand to know what the hell this was. Instead he looked at the kid, annoyed, like he’d dropped a box of eggs.