his own spit.
August brought up the baton again, but Ricardo caught his wrist. “Wait.”
“What? But I’m—”
“Let him catch his breath.”
“Let him…” August shot him a plaintive look. He lowered the baton and flailed a hand at Bubba. “Dude, I just got him talking!”
“Uh-huh. And you did good.” Ricardo clapped August’s shoulder. “But if we give him a few minutes, the endorphins will wear off, so anything we do will hurt even more.”
August’s eyes widened.
Ricardo shrugged. “Work smarter, not harder.”
August blinked. “I am so turned on right now.”
“Shut up.” Ricardo rolled his eyes. He stepped closer to their captive, and he leaned in so he was glaring right into Bubba’s tear-filled eyes. “Hurts, doesn’t it?”
Bubba was clearly trying to keep his stoic tough-guy persona in place. His jaw worked, and Ricard jabbed a finger at him, almost hitting him with it.
“Spit on me again,” he growled, “and the next thing you spit out will be your teeth. Am I clear?”
Bubba, in a moment of unusual intelligence, swallowed.
“That’s what I thought.” Ricardo leaned in until their noses were almost touching, and he narrowed his eyes. “For the record, you racist fuck, no wall was ever going to keep me out. I’m a citizen. And I’m a veteran.”
Bubba’s eyes were huge.
“That’s right.” Ricardo’s lips peeled back, and he glared harder. “I’m not illegal. I’m not even Mexican.” He leaned in close until they were nearly nose to nose, and dropped his voice to a menacing whisper. “But I was trained by the U.S. Army to do everything I still might do to you before we let you go. If we let you go. Got it?”
With satisfying terror written all over his face, Bubba nodded.
“Good. And that letting you go part is completely contingent on you telling us what we want to know. Understood?”
Another nod.
“That’s what I thought.” Ricardo gave Bubba’s knee—the one August had hit with the baton—a firm smack, drawing a nauseated grunt out of the man. “Now how about we start talking?”
Bubba turned out to be a typical white supremacist—loud and tough on the outside, but nothing more than a spineless coward once the metaphorical hood was removed. In the end, he wasn’t going to be walking comfortably until that knee healed, but he wisely hadn’t put August’s fortune cookie theory to the test before telling them everything he could.
They blindfolded him again, took him back out to the stolen van, and dumped him in a random parking lot before returning to the safehouse beneath the meth lab. They’d even charitably left him with some gauze and medical tape for those tender areas that used to be decorated by skinhead ink. August had been serious about feeding those disembodied tattoos to Bubba, but Ricardo had decided they’d gotten their point across. And besides, the place would just smell worse if the fucker threw up again.
Sitting at the table beside the kitchenette half an hour or so after they’d dumped off their friendly neighborhood Neo-Nazi, August absently stirred a half-eaten bowl of cereal. “Okay, so, he talked. But I think this is a dead-end lead.”
“It’s a lead, though.” Ricardo closed the refrigerator and popped the tab on his beer can. Sitting across from August, he added, “It’s more than we had yesterday.”
August grunted unhappily. “I just think we’re going to chase this lead, and realize it’s turtles all the way down.”
Ricardo arched an eyebrow. “Turtles? What?”
“You know.” August shrugged. “That old timey story where some lady tells… I don’t know, somebody important that the earth is held up on elephants that are standing on the back of a turtle? And when that important whoever asks what’s under the turtle, she says it’s another turtle. It’s just turtles all the way down.”
Ricardo was pretty sure that a few days ago, he’d have shaken his head and dismissed August’s clumsy analogy as the idiot spouting bullshit. But much like his fortune cookie comments from earlier, there was some truth to it. Snapping bones did indeed have a habit of magically producing answers, and there was a chance this particular lead—the man who’d given Bubba the job to off Heidi—would be the first of many turtles. Middlemen were inefficient as hell, but they also put distance between someone giving an order and the order being carried out. It made law enforcement’s job a bitch because they had to firmly connect each and every turtle all the way back to the elephant. Or something. God, was he really starting to think like August?
He took a deep