Redcourse was a disaster. He had not been familiar with New Mexico. That was a mistake. No one in Redcourse had much of a future to look forward to. There were few families, no industry, no police, and unreadable motivations behind every word and glance. Joe wasn't a step ahead for those torturous weeks; he was a ghost, a dreadnought striking deep, with precision, without mercy, and without hesitation from beyond all comprehensible range. Redcourse was an impossibility made real. He went in with a plan, with back up plans, with contigencies to the back up plans, but what good are plans that opperate within rules. He'd gotten too comfortable. He wouldn't slip again.


"It runs okay, yes? Nice more than others in town, but that says not much." He considered torturing her before then, but enough life was already leached from the towns open sewer of hope in the days preceding. They walked and talked across dry turf and cracked creek beds for almost an hour. Her broken English was difficult to follow but was also unabashed and honest for its sparseness. "He was here." They stood almost a mile outside of the slumped roofs of the farthest shacks from town on a mud flat that was baked nearly bone white. "Here, last night at home." She pointed back into town toward the brown lake near the center. "At my home." She paused for some time. Her jet black hair rested about her shoulders and caught the sunlight like a briar patch and reflected nothing. He passed her his box of 100 Blacks and she lit one with her own matchbook before continuing. "He was there. He take from me that car. I did not try to stop him." She held her hands up as though holding a shotgun and vigorously shook her head. "I don't care for car." She turned and started to walk back toward the sprawling array of hovels. "You take care of him. That's what I care." He watched her bronzed skin drift back into the hot wavering afternoon air before glancing down at the twin tire tracks pressed into the baked hard earth.

He walked the miles, counting each step along the way in his mind. Long before he took that walk he trained his body on walks like it back in the academy days, counting steps and gauging distances until he could do it down to within a yard or two. Coming back into camp with a wrong number, Joe would send him out again. "Negative," he would say. He never told him how far off he was or when he was getting close, but he learned. His body memorized its own mechanics and made his mind aware of every flexion of every fiber of his legs. Every degree of each swing of his arms was clear to him as the hands of a clock. He counted and conserved. Highpoint was supposed to be no more than eight miles out from Redcourse, so if he went too far he would know. He would need his strength when he caught up to Joe. He hadn't eaten well over the previous weeks, but Joe had. The bodies he was able to find attested fairly clearly to that fact. He didn't know what snapped Joe's mind until Redcourse. The children. The children without entrails. Without skin. The knives and nails. He knew now. The murders without suspects. They could all be closed, but not by Havermaye. Enough misery was enough. Some things should remain in the depths of night, blanketed in unknowable darkness, because to see them under the unflinching medical grade lights of penal justice, to attempts to put quanitfiable numbers on them, to even attempt to place a price on those crimes is madness enough. Enough invitations to the deepest circles of mental infirmity were already going around.

Havermaye was able, when he first arrived, to consult a yellowing map of Redcourse and the surrounding area. Highpoint lay to the north and a little west, sitting just beneath the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Just south was Redcourse New Mexico, and 92 miles south of Redcourse was a maximum security prison. Fifteen miles east of the prison was a minor military motor pool and scrap yard. Bordering these things on all sides were impassible deserts and artillery ranges, except for a single road, marked with a pencil, that lead directly to the Crown Mesa reservation and the end of an unmarked interstate. Joe's treads headed direclty to Highpoint, just across the New Mexico and Colorado state line.

The walk was long, but manageable, without water. Highpoint was even smaller than Redcourse and it did not take long to aquaint himself with the layout. There was a boarded up corner shop, "Margerie's," where the center must have been at some point. Most of homes had no glass in their windows. They gaped like gouged eye sockets. Very little stirred. Some of the homes had fallen in. Where two story establishment should have been were piles of rubble and sink holes. There was the splash of graffiti here and there, but chronic sand squalls had stripped much of the towns identity away decades before. Nothing grew. No one stirred. Everything reflected the tan hue of the thin sand that had worked its way into Haver's every pore. He lit a 100 Black and took a short breath of the pine tar taste. It was foul enough to purge the foulness that had gathered on the back of his tongue on the long walk. He resisted the tempation to attempt and old west style showdown. Not only would Joe not show himself, but it was also the likely fastest way to have two slugs parked in either chamber of his heart.

He skirted the smooth faced stone of the buildings one at a time. Peering quickly into the dark windows before moving on to the next. He darted down alleys and avoided main drags. On his side was the thought that Joe had a life with him. Four people disappeared in Redcourse. Four people he could not snatch from the maw of Joe's insatiable madness. Three were children. Of the three he found only one in Redcourse and even then only in parts. Whatever demons Joe was trying to dispatch in the blood of children Haver would send back to hell soon enough.

He hunted in the blaring sunlight, finding even the rusted hulk of a pick-up truck with its fuel gauge clearly on empty. The dust on the shift knob and steering wheel was gone, but more important than that was a stain in the passenger seat that was still relatively wet. Whoever the kid was he was still alive when Joe reached Highpoint. But where! Havermaye turned now east, now west. Up and down street after street, but the only signs of life he could find was a dog. Then, nearly spinning in circles in the open streets and racking his brain he saw it. A shallow dune, speckled with a few yellow tendrils of dead grasses, and atop that dune a cottage. He quickly circled the little hill of sand. It was hardly a dune at all and a few bounding steps brought him up to the blind side of the cottage that he now could see up close was more of a storage shack. "Probably for that general store," he whispered to himself. He hadn't sweat much all afternoon, but now he found himself wiping his suddenly moist palm and his loose gray jeans. He swallowed hard and listened harder. This had to be it, unless that woman lied. "No time for second guesses," he thought.

He could hear him now even over the light wind that began to rattle tiny flecks of sand against the windward planks of the shack. Not the child. He could hear the soft, almost imperceptible, sigh of nylon against nylon. Joe was walking, maybe pacing, inside. He might have seen the map too. He might know the only way out of Highpoint is back through Redcourse. If he didn't know before he took off, he probably knew now. With deadly earnestness, Haver flit from the shack to scope the surrounding area. He took stock. "Shed, with fuel. Basement, locked from the outside, but tools inside. Abandoned in a hurry. No attic or loft discernible from outside," he counted these things off in his mind and with ease his mind began to pick its course of action. He would need to act quickly. The demons might not wait. He took a long shallow breath and climbed silently over a low window sill into what must have been an office. He took another longer shallower breath and drew the sun heated .45 from its holster at the small of his back and stepped quickly around the empty gray green desk huddling in the center of the room. Each footstep he took felt out the weak points in the floor boards and avoided them before any of his weight shifted. His action was more fluid than the articulations of a side winder at full tilt.

He felt sure, his movements rooted down through his heavy boots like bridge piers in a hurricane. He could feel the tightness of Joe's psyche in the air. He could hear his movements. Could nearly feel his torment. He should have killed him long ago. But how could he have known what either one of them would turn into. Like a water droplet hugging the lip of a pitcher he spun around the door frame into the even darker main room and raised the still hot, keen, edge of his weapon to his line of sight. Joe, feeling a shift in the air currents almost instantly spun, but stopped himself. His gun, a beastly .657 was no where to be seen. On the floor was an unassuming blade, a simple box cutter. The child was no where to be seen, but nothing could erase what Haver already saw in Redcourse. He approached Joe slowly to within ten feet to swiftly kick the blade to a corner of the dimly lit space.

For several long seconds neither one spoke. Haver knew Joe's instincts must be wreaking havoc on his every fiber. He released him from his burden. "Turn around. Face me. Do not move your hands at all." He watched Joe slowly turn, his teeth set hard, and his eyes that much harder. His nylon jacket was still somehow perfectly pristine despite the attrocities, despite the terrors, of the previous days. His eyes, though, spoke volumes. "I'm not going to let you continue this," he whispered, his voice just above the muted rattle of the windward wall planks. "You're not well. You haven't been for some time."

"I know. But I still have work to do," he offered with all the coolness of a man who knew the score and did not fear. "We don't choose ourselves you know. Someone has to pick the right ones," he continued, his voice flattening. "You didn't come to us because you loved your country. Or because you wanted to serve," a spark leapt from his eye and into Haver's.

"I did what I needed to do-"

"-to survive," Joe finished sharply. Involuntarily Haver's finger tensed on the trigger, his thumb tripping the safety catch in a movement only Joe's eyes could follow. "I took you in specifically because you couldn't love. But I didn't make you that way..." he was beginning to babble. Haver could feel Joe's grip on the real loosening. "Someone else chose you. Forced you out of that world of feeling, response, relationships. Humanness. That's where we come from. But none of us chooses."

"Its what we have to do to," Havermaye let him talk, softly depressing the resistance spring in the trigger to ninety percent compression. He would likely only have an instant to act, should Joe decide to act first. "I needed you Joe. Nothing made sense then."

"I know. It never does in the beginning. But I figured it out after you came along." His eyes softened for a moment, but the inferno of hate did not diminish. "You showed me the truth. Someone has to choose for you," he spread his feet shoulder width apart, one lightly before the other in the neutral attack stance. "And that's all I've been up to these years. Our ranks have grown thin and I, for one, have some work to do yet, understand? " His hands went slack, but it was the slackness of preparedness and infinite utility. Joe's breathing evened, and then leveled off into his deep well of a chest. The breath of combat readiness. As Havermaye watched him transform it felt like long minutes but it was only seconds, and like a fool Haver had stood nearly transfixed by the liquid perfection and control demonstrated in every instant of time.