Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [58]
The prominent ears sit equidistant between a fringe of light hair and a long chin, directly in line with the fair eyebrows and narrow eyes that appear to have been passed down through generations of con artists and thieves. His nose is flat and his lips are full (actresses would pay a lot of money for those plump lips), but on Slammer, they seem childlike, on the verge of lying—or, if that doesn’t work, blubbering.
Megan describes Slammer as “a feral animal” when Dick Stone recruited him from under the bridges of Portland. The boy, if you believe him, is a warrior without a soul. His mission is to “expose cowards.” Incorrigible since he was kicked out of day care for attacking other children, he set fire to his father’s house and ran away from a detention center at age fourteen, pissing all over a lumber town up in the state of Washington, for a half-starved squatter’s life with a street family of violent youth—exactly the kind of hot-blooded seventeen-year-old you want in your army.
And he is still uncontainable, shooting off guns, setting pesky little fires, stealing from the drugstore when they take him into town, flying down the sidewalk on a skateboard with his neck chains and do-rag and baggies that are halfway down his ass, a black-garbed neo-pirate, jumping the curb and flipping the bird to drivers too stupid to stop.
Sara goes back to kneading whole-wheat dough. It is 10:30 in the morning and we are starting dinner. It takes a while when you bake your own bread and extract your own almond milk. For some families, I guess, food is a pleasant ritual; on the lost farm, it is another form of slavery.
Everything is strictly vegan, and to Dick Stone’s specifications. The first night, I cut up sweet potatoes to be roasted in the oven, but Megan made me take them out, still sizzling with hot oil, and make the wedges smaller, because that’s the way Allfather likes them. The scorched fingertips were part of the initiation.
Yesterday, we had to hand-rake every twig and piece of bird dropping from the orchard floor, which must be kept “smooth as a pool table,” according to Stone, because when the nuts drop, you don’t want chaff in the harvester. That’s fine, except hazelnuts don’t drop until September, and it’s barely June. Abruptly, he told Slammer he did not appreciate his “work ethic,” and made us all run twenty laps around the trees in the afternoon heat.
Sara, not in any kind of shape, was struggling hard. Her legs were slow and rubbery and her face was hot pink.
In undercover school, they would have asked, “What is the lesson learned?”
“Sara’s getting heatstroke,” I told Stone on the pass. “She’s had enough.”
He put out his foot and tripped me.
The earth under my knees and in my mouth was soft. I got up and kept on running, so he could not see the look on my face. That was a killer moment, the hardest so far. To put aside your core values in order to accomplish the mission. I had to spit it out. I had to think about justice for Steve Crawford’s family. About the day the sky will be filled with helicopters, and Dick Stone will be in prison the rest of his life.
I stare at the zucchinis with distrust. They are fat as blimps. I will need a computer model to figure out how to dice them into the tiny squares that Megan demands. I sharpen the ancient blackened carbon steel knife for the umpteenth time.
“What’s up with Megan?” Slammer is asking. “Why is she in the basement all the time?”
Megan has been working on her quilt, stretched on a frame that takes up almost the entire room. Since the action at the BLM corrals, which she calls “a total disaster,” she has abandoned the kitchen to the children, and we have heard raised voices behind the closed door of the master bedroom.
“She’s sad.” Sara picks up the dough