Heavy Weather

Alex didn't run, but he left the yurt at a brisk walk and looked. There was an almost silent, spanking-new civilian truck outside the camp, a big cream-colored four-wheeler with tinted windows and an air-conditioned camper. The truck stopped well outside the perimeter in a spew of dust, exciting the goats, who bounded off timidly among the tepees.

Alex ducked back inside the command yurt. "Somebody's here, man! Some kind of fancy truck with a big aerial."

"Hell!" Buzzard looked a

"Okay," Alex said. "I get it. No problem."

He walked deliberately into the open outside the yurt, waved his paper hat at the truck, and waited for them to open fire on him.

The strangers didn't shoot. Two men clñnbed peaceably out of their nice truck and stood there. His heart rate slowed. Life would go on.

Alex began to feel almost fond of the two men. It seemed very decent of them to be so obligingly normal, to just be a couple of guys in a truck, instead of nightmarish maniac structure-hit bandits randomly shooting up the camp while everyone else was in Oklahoma. Alex put his hat back on and strolled toward the strangers, slowly and with his hands in plain sight. He deliberately hopped the wire around the perimeter posts.

As he walked slowly closer he recognized one of the men. It was the black Ranger bush tracker, one member of the Ranger posse who'd visited camp a couple weeks earlier. The Ranger was in civilian gear, ragged jean cutoffs and a beat-to-shit yellow T-shirt with the legend NAVAJO NA11ON RODEO on it. No rifle this time, apparently.

To Alex's considerable surprise, he recognized the other man as well.

The circumstances came back at him with a sharp chemical rush.

He'd been in a backroom of the Gato Negro in Monterrey, with four of his dope-vaquero acquaintances. They were on a field trip from Matamoros, where Alex had been undergoing treatment at the time. The vaqueros were killing time waiting for their man from Monterrey to show with some of the medically necessary. So they were doing lines of cocaine off the marble café table, cocaine cut with one of Don Aldo's home-brewed memory stimulants, one of those blazingly effective smart-drug concoctions that bad so thoroughly fucked the ability of government and business leaders to function in the longer term.

Being dope vaqueros, their idea of a good time was to get really wired on this shit and then play a big-stakes tournament of the Spanish-language version of Trivial Pursuit. Cocaine gave Alex heart fibrillations, and he didn't drink, either, and thanks to enormous gaps in his education and his general life experience, he was dog meat at any kind of Trivial Pursuit, much less a Mexican version. But Don Aldo had favored him with a thumbnail's worth of the smart drug, and Alex hadn't quite dared to spurn the good Don's hospitality. He snorted it up and began placing little side bets on the progress of the game. Alex was a very good loser. It was the key to his popularity in these circles.

After about twenty minutes, everything in the Gato Negro had started to take on that false but radiant sense of deep meaning that always accompanied chemical memory enhancement, and then these other guys had come in. Three of them, very well dressed. They breezed past the muscle guy at the door, without being patted down for weapons. And this caused Don Aldo, and Juan, and Paco, and Snoopy immediate concern, for Monterrey was not their turf, and their own ceramic Saturday-night specials were in the possession of the house.

The three strangers had regally ignored the vaqueros and had sat down at the room's far corner, and had ordered café con leche and immediately plunged into low, intense conversation.

Don Aldo had beckoned a waiter over with a brisk gesture of somebody else's hot-wired platinum debit card, and had a few words with the waiter, in a border Spanish so twisted with criminal argot that even Alex, something of a co

Except that one of El General's friends was the very gentleman who had just stepped out of the helicopter. He'd been of no special relevance to Alex at the time, but thanks to that snort of mnemonics, the guy's face and ma

"~Qué pasa?" he said.

"How do you do?" said the stranger politely. "I'm Leo Mulcahey, and this is my traveling companion, Mr. Smithers."

"How do you do, Mr. Smithers?" said Alex, sliding instinctively into parody. "How pleasant to see you again."

"Yo," grunted Smithers.

"And you are?" said Mukahey.

Alex looked up at the thin rose-quartz lenses of Mulcahey's shades, and felt instantly, with deep and total conviction, that this encounter was not in the best interests of himself or his friends. The tall, charming, and distinguished Leo Mulcahey was exuding a bone-chilling reek of narc atmosphere. Rangers were bad, bad enough anyway, but the well-groomed spook friend of El General was not the sort of person who should ever be in the camp of the Storm Troupe, for any reason, under any circumstances.

"Mr. Leo Mukahey," Alex said. "Any relation?"

"I'm Jerry's big brother," said Leo Mulcahey, with a gentle smile.

"Must feel pretty special to have a little brother who could break your back like a twig."

Mulcahey twitched. Not a big reaction, but a definite startled twitch. "Is Jerry here? May I speak to Jerry?"

"Sorry to tell you that Jerry's out of camp, he's off doing storm pursuit."

"It was my understanding that Jerry always coordinated the pursuits. That he stayed in camp as the group's... I forget the term."

"Nowcaster. Yeah, that's the usual, all right, but right now Jerry's off chasing spikes somewhere in Oklahoma, so under the circumstances I'm afraid I can't allow you into the camp."

"I see," said Leo.

"What the hick you talkin' about?" said Smithers suddenly. "Kid, we were just in your camp three weeks ago and I been lookin' forward to more o' that jerky."

"No problema," Alex said. "Give me some positioning coords and I'll route you all the jerky you want. Today. No charge."

"Is there someone else we can talk to?" Leo said.

"No," Alex said. Brasseur would temporize. Buzzard would knuckle under. Sam Moncrieff would do whatever seemed best. "No, there isn't."

"Kid, don't be this way," said Smithers. "I'm the heat!"

"You're the heat when you're ru

"I'm not a police officer, for heaven's sake," Leo said, chidingly. "I happen to be a developmental, economist."

Smithers, surprised, looked at Leo in frank disbelief, then back at Alex again. "Kid, you got some cojones pullin' that city-boy crap out here. Where's your goddamn ID?"

Alex began to sweat. The fear only made him angry. "Look, Smithers, or whatever the hell your real name is, I thought you were a heavier guy than this. How come you're shaking me down for this fucking narc? This guy's not even a cop! How much is he paying you?"

"That's my name!" objected Smithers, wounded. "Nathan R. Smithers."

"I don't understand why this has become so unpleasant," said Leo, reasonably.