Page 67 of Three-Inch Teeth

“I think so,” Cates said. “His house is to the south up there on that bluff. What about the north?”

Soledad shifted his gaze from his phone to the video screen mounted in the dashboard. “I can’t see a thing.”

“Put the truck’s transmission into reverse, but don’t go anywhere,” Cates said.

Soledad did so and the screen lit up with a view from the backup camera. “Perfect,” he said. “I can see anyone coming down the path from the north.”

Cates tapped on the sheet metal of the door to indicate his approval, then he pushed along the length of the pickup to the back again. The brush and branches clawed at him as he did so, and one branch tried to take his hat off. When he got to the tailgate, he twisted the handle of the hatchback window and let the pneumatic gas springs raise it up. The inside was crammed with equipment. LOR, who was on his side in the bed of the truck checking the fittings in a snarl of thick rubber hoses, looked up and the beam from the flashlight in his mouth hit Cates in the eyes and made him recoil.

“Sorry,” LOR said.

“Does everything look okay?”

“It does. I found an air leak a minute ago on one of the hose fittings that goes to the device, but I tightened it up and all is good.”

“What’s our pressure?” Cates asked. He wasn’t at a good angle at the back of the truck to see the gauge that was mounted on the bed wall between the air tanks. LOR contorted himself so he could see it behind him.

“Right at twelve hundred PSI.”

“Great,” Cates said. “Keep an eye on it and watch the gauge. We can’t let it go over two thousand, and nineteen hundred would be perfect.”

LOR grunted and grumbled. He hated it when anyone told him how his own device should be armed and deployed. Cates knew that, but he didn’t care.

“Now move aside so I can get in there and get to the controls,” Cates said as he stepped on the bumper and began to climb into the back.

*

ON HIS WAY to the metal bucket-chair seat that had been liberated from an old tractor left in a field outside of Jeffrey City, Cates shouldered past the complicated device. He was again struck by the Rube Goldberg–style engineering LOR employed when designing mechanical devices.

There were tangles of electrical wire and thick coils of pneumatic hoses looped in the bed of the pickup as well as zip-tied to the interior walls. Inside, it smelled of rubber, machine oil, and Lee Ogburn-Russell’s flatulence.

The device, which Cates had dubbed “Zeus II,” took up most of the back and stretched from the tractor seat on one end to the massive shooting head aimed out the open back window on the other. Cates shimmied along the side of it toward the seat, which was mounted on the inside of the front wall. As he passed the gaping wide-open steel jaws attached to the telescopic scissor jib, he reached over and touched the tips of the original Zeus’s teeth, which had been fastened to the jaws with stainless steel screws. The teeth were yellowed but extremely sharp. Cates cleaned out the rind of a cantaloupe wedged between two of the long incisors before proceeding.

“I told you to clean the teeth,” Cates said to LOR, who grunted an uninterested response.

“Seriously,” Cates said as he swung up into the seat. “What if the wounds are contaminated by fruit? That wouldn’t look very good.”

“Not my problem,” LOR said. “My problem is to make sure this thing works perfectly. You can brush its teeth. Or better yet, make Bobbi do it.”

Cates settled into the seat and grasped the joystick with his right hand. LOR had looted an old video game setup and repurposed the controller.

With his left hand, he reached back and closed his fingers around the grip of a wooden thirty-four-inch Louisville Slugger baseball bat propped in the inside corner of the bed. The barrel of the bat bristled with wicked curved bear claws embedded in the wood with the points out. It was a vicious-looking weapon, and the sharp claws ripped through fabric and flesh like a scythe.

Then he sat back, feeling fully prepared.

The air compressor hummed, and Cates used the light from his burner phone to check the numbers. They were at seventeen hundred PSI in the tanks. “Move aside,” he said to LOR. “Let’s get ready.”

*

ZEUS II WAS a marvel, Cates thought. Complicated, ugly, and temperamental, yes. But still a marvel that only someone like LOR could build. It had exceeded Cates’s expectations.

Hidden behind the smoked windows of the cab-over so no one outside could see it from the outside, Zeus II weighed over eight hundred pounds and consisted of scrap metal and industrial wire and tubing originally designed for heavy diesel land-moving equipment. The scissored jib arm, which could shoot out to exactly fifteen feet in a straight line, came from an old wheeled device that had been used by the mining company to retrieve heavy fallen tools and parts from deep inside crevices and shafts.

At the end of the jib was the shooting head, a wide-open set of steel jaws cut and refashioned from the rims of an abandoned heavy-duty utility truck. The rims had been cut in half and polished by LOR and shaped to become the two oblong, tooth-filled, U-shaped jaws.

Zeus II was powered by an explosive release of compressed air pressure from the two welding tanks within the cab. When it was deployed, it created enough velocity to rock the truck on its springs. At the push of the red button on the top of the joystick, the head would blast out and, at the apex of the extension, the steel jaws would clamp down with twelve hundred pounds per square inch of pressure. With the remaining air in the tanks, Cates could jerk the joystick and shake the victim like a rag doll.

They’d addressed the problem of aiming because the point of impact had to be exactly fifteen feet. Any closer, and the open jaws would simply be a high-powered battering ram. It would bludgeon the target but not clamp down. And if the target was farther away than fifteen feet, the jaws would snap down on air with a terrifying hollow clacking noise.

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