Just because a man was capable of sadistic and horrifying crimes didn’t mean he couldn’t have a disarming smile. It could be just such a disarming smile which allowed him to get close enough to his victims to take control of them.
When they’d closed the gap to forty feet or so, Charlie raised his weapon and aimed it directly at the man.
Sara followed his lead, a split second behind him.
Charlie yelled in a loud voice, “Sheriff’s office! Drop everything and put your hands in the air!”
Several things happened almost simultaneously.
The smile left his face and was replaced by a look of terror.
The things he was carrying: a stringer of fish and a tackle box, went flying in two different directions.
And a wet spot suddenly appeared on the front of the young man’s blue jeans.
Sara realized almost immediately, as the man started sobbing uncontrollably, that this was not the man she’d seen walking down the road near Katie’s house three days before.
Yes, he bore a passing resemblance. But only that.
This man was younger, for one thing. The hair was different. Not just a different hair color, for that could be easily manipulated and couldn’t rule out a suspect.
No, this man’s hair was much longer, Long enough to be worn in a pony tail.
The suspect’s hair had been cut short.
Had it been the other way around she might have assumed her suspect knew he’d been spotted and cut his hair short to mask his identity.
But he couldn’t grow several inches of hair in three days.
The tell was the look on the man’s face.
He was genuinely terrifed.
He simply didn’t have the cold hard look the suspect had when he locked eyes with Sara.
“It’s not him,” Sara called over to her partner.
-28-
At the same time she placed her weapon back in her holster.
“Damn it! Are you sure?”
Charlie was sure they’d had their man. He wanted so badly to make an arrest and close the case his hands were shaking.
Not from fear, but from adrenaline.
From anticipation.
“I’m sure, Charlie.”
Now Charlie was just disappointed. He was the high school receiver who’d waited the whole game to score a touchdown. Who on the very last play was sent deep, into the end zone, to catch a Hail Mary pass. Only to turn around and see his quarterback sacked and the other team starting their victory dance.
He was on the cusp of closing the biggest case in his career.
Now he was crushed.
But Sara had no time or inclination to tend to Charlie.
She was busy trying to calm the man they’d frightened so badly he’d peed his own pants.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the young man pleaded. “I know I don’t got no fishing license. I used to, I promise I did, but I losted it. I’ll never do it again if you don’t arrest me, I promise I won’t.”
Sara placed a hand on his shoulder and tried to calm him, even as he blubbered on and on about how sorry he was… for catching fish to feed himself and his elderly grandmother.
She knew there was something not quite right about the man.
That he’d been cursed with some type of affliction which kept him on a different level than most other men.
He was what people once called a simpleton, back in the days before political correctness plastered more pleasing labels on people with disabilities.
A Forrest Gump type of character, if you will.
And a man who was no threat to anybody.
For several minutes Sara soothed his frayed nerves. Apologized for scaring him. Reassured him it was all a mistake. That they were searching for a very bad man and they didn’t mean to startle him.
As Charlie picked up his fish and tried to dust some of the dirt from them she tried to convey to him it was okay to catch and eat fish.
That nobody cared anymore whether he had a valid fishing license.
That she would never arrest him for something so trivial.
She wound up holding him in her arms as Charlie busied himself picking up the scattered contents of his shattered tackle box.
Comforting him as she did her young son Christopher, and sometimes with her adopted son Charles.
By this time the old woman was in the street with them, finally gaining the courage to go find out what in the dickens was going on.
She was certain her only grandson, the man she depended upon to feed and care for her, was going away to prison.
It turned out Mark had been in trouble with the law before.
There was the time he walked out of the supermarket with a pocketful of candy because, well, he didn’t have the money to pay for it.
And he didn’t think they’d mind. After all, they were all nice people who said “good morning” to him whenever he walked in.
Most people wouldn’t give him the time of day and would change sides of the street to avoid him.
Another time he picked up a dog from somebody’s front yard and carried it home, with the dog’s owner tailing him from a distance.
Because the dog looked lonely and he thought it needed a friend.
Probably the biggest trouble he’d been in was when he’d gone on one of the long walks he was known for, and wound up in a seedy section of Kerrville.
He saw a woman stumbling and trying to walk a straight line in ridiculously high heels. A kind soul by nature, he happened to have twenty dollars in his pocket he’d gotten for his birthday.
He pulled it out and handed it to the woman, suggesting she find a shoe store and purchase something a bit more suitable for walking.
A vice cop happened to be walking down the street and saw him giving the woman the bill.
Mark never quite understood what had happened. He found himself in handcuffs while the woman told the cop he was a sap, that the young man was just being kind, and that if the sap of a cop had a heart he’d understand that.
The woman and the sap cop made some kind of arrangement, the cuffs were taken off, and Mark was told to skedaddle while the woman and the sap cop disappeared together into a nearby alley.
“Oh,” the sap cop added as he took the cuffs off. “Don’t ever give a strange woman money again.”
He never did.
One thing about Mark… he made a lot of mistakes, but he never made the same one twice.
When the deputies finally left Mark and his “Nana” an hour later, the ruffled feathers had all been smoothed. Mark’s pants were well on their way to drying, and the old woman was finally able to draw deep breaths again.
Mark was assured that he could fish in the stream any time he wanted, and that nobody would ever give him a hassle about it.
And Sara promised him that someday, when they weren’t so busy, she’d come by and pick him up and let him ride in her pickup truck.
She’d take him out on patrol with her for an afternoon, she said.
“Oh boy! Can I wear a badge and carry a gun and help you catch bad guys?”
Um… no.
-29-
Maria smiled as she told the story of how their hotel was constructed, and it was obvious to John she’d told the tale many times before.
“They built the Palacio Del Rio for the 1968 Hemisfair, which took place right across the street.
“But they were crunched for time. There was no way they could use traditional construction techniques to build a twenty-one story high-rise in less than a year. So they had to try something new and untested.
“Something nobody else had ever done before.
They built the first four floors as a base.
But all the rooms above the fourth floor were built elsewhere, and were brought in on long flatbed trucks.
“I was a little girl at the time, and we lived over on Quincy Avenue. My mom didn’t work, which was okay because back then most women didn’t. Back then it was pretty much standard practice
for men to work outside the home and their wives to stay at home and do the cooking and cleaning and grocery shopping.
“I wasn’t in school yet, so I would walk with her up to the Handy Andy supermarket not far from Santa Rosa Hospital a couple of times a week.
“I remember one day we saw this huge truck parked and waiting its turn to be unloaded. It was hauling the oddest thing. It looked like a huge pipe, but it wasn’t round. It was square.
“It was open at both ends, and plenty big enough for an adult to stand inside.
“And the kicker was, it was full of furniture.
“Well, we didn’t know what it was, and as you can imagine it caused quite a stir.
“There were several other people looking at it too and a man asked the truck driver what it was.
“He said it was a fully-furnished hotel room.
“My mom didn’t believe him, so we delayed our shopping trip and took the steps down to the Riverwalk about fifty yards away. We walked along the river until we got to the site of this hotel, and sure enough there was a huge crane in the street out front.
“There were several other trucks lined up just like the one we saw, and the crane was picking up the hotel rooms and stacking them onto the building, just as a child would stack up blocks.”
Julio interrupted her and continued.
“It was just like an erector set on a huge scale. The crane put each room into place and workers bolted it and welded it to the steel framework. Then the next room was lifted in.
“They made each section at a site not far from here, and put the furniture and everything else into them before they were moved to save time.
“It was said they even had telephones, ash trays and trash cans in each room as it was lifted up and put into place. And each of the beds was made.
“I heard all they had to do was to go into each room to straighten everything up and to remove plastic they’d placed on the beds to keep them from getting dusty.
“They called the whole thing a ‘modular building,’ and it was the rage of the construction industry for a long time. There are still hotels being constructed all over the world using the same methods.”
“Were they able to finish construction in time?”
“Yes. They opened a week before the Hemisfair did. And the hotel was so unique everybody wanted to stay here. They were booked solid for a very long time.”
“Anyway, I’m not just telling you this story to give you a history lesson,” Maria said.
“That’s okay. I love learning more about San Antonio.”
“I’m actually telling you the story to put your mind at ease. You were concerned about Julio setting fires directly on the balcony floor to boil our water and cook our food.
“But this hotel wasn’t constructed the way most hotels were. These walls and floors have no wooden studs in them. These walls and floors are made from a molded concrete composite.
“And concrete doesn’t burn.”
John looked around.
Inside the hotel room where Julio built his fires were several tall stacks of carpet, cut into pieces about twelve inches square.
There were hundreds of them.
“Now I see where all the carpet’s gone,” John said.
“Yeah, I was pretty stupid at first,” Julio said.
“How so?”
“Well, in the early days of the blackout, when all the guests moved out, the management was at a loss as to what to do with it.
“The rumors were already going around the dollar had crashed and the power was never coming on again.
“It was obvious the tourists wouldn’t be back any time soon, and as you can probably guess hotels live and die on the tourist market.
“Management wanted to just plywood over the doors and windows on the lower floors and to abandon the property until the world got normal again.
“We talked them into putting it in caretaker status, with us as the caretakers, instead. You see, we lived in an apartment building in a shady neighborhood so this was much better for us.
“When we moved onto the ninth floor I started burning our own carpet and furniture.
“Then after a few months I decided that was stupid. That I have twelve floors above me and I should burn that stuff instead.
“So now whenever I get bored or low on burnables I go up a floor and start breaking the wood furniture with an ax, or cutting the carpet and padding with a linoleum knife.
“But I only do the floors above us,” he said as he winked. “It’s much easier lugging everything downstairs than up.”
“I have one more thing to ask you,” John said.
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s more a favor than anything else. And I very seldom ask for favors, so this is kind of hard for me.”
Maria said, “Ask away, John. The worst that can happen is we’ll say no.”
Julio corrected her: “No, the worst that can happen is we’ll say no and then I’ll throw you off the building for asking.”
“I’m getting ready to retire from the force. I promised my family more than a year ago that I’d move them out of the city and to someplace a little less stressful.”
“Oh? And where would that be?”
“I’ve got good friends who live up near Junction.”
“I know where that is. We’ve got friends close by, in Menard.”
“My friends grow their own crops. But there are certain things they don’t have.”
“Like what?”
“Like potatoes and peanuts. And coffee and tobacco.”
“Not a problem. As I said before, we don’t mind sharing our seeds or potatoes. The more people out there growing them the better off we’ll all be.
“When are you making the big move?”
“Next week. If it’s okay, I’ll bring my replacement by to meet you, and he can coordinate with you for the seed donations.
“He’s a nice guy. You’ll like him a lot.
“His name is Rhett Butler.”
Maria stifled a smile. Julio just looked at him, not sure whether John was pulling his leg.
“So, did you draft this replacement of yours off a movie lot somewhere?”
“No. His parents were big movie fans.”
When it came time to leave, John walked down nine flights of stairs with a backpack full of seed potatoes and miscellaneous seeds.
Maria and Julio followed him down on their way to the Alamo for their daily boxed meal.
Maria hugged her new friend goodbye.
Julio didn’t go that far. But he did shake John’s hand and said, “Semper Fi, brother. Safe travels to you.”
-30-
John delayed his departure and decided it would be a good time to go to the Alamo himself.
Not to get a meal, although he might as well while he was there.
Officially, though, he’d check with two of his officers working there undercover.
A week earlier he’d been in a shootout with a gang banger in the hallway of another Riverwalk hotel.
John won the gun battle, and as the victor won the right to go through the dead man’s pockets.
He wasn’t looking for treasures, though. He was looking for ID, and it turned out the man had way more than his share. In addition to a drivers license bearing his own likeness he also had the licenses of three elderly women.
John investigated the matter and found the thug had murdered the three women for their daily food rations.
The new world was an ugly one in so many ways.
John was told by the people who ran the Alamo food distribution project Lamar Taylor wasn’t the only one who presented the identification cards of “invalids” so he could pick up their food for them.
They said several other men did likewise.
Officers Mike McMillan and Robert Thomas were assigned the case.
John told them to go undercover in civilian clothing and to volunteer their services at the operation.
They we
re to watch out for anyone picking up food to deliver to the elderly or infirm, and to make sure they were really doing so.
And to arrest them if they weren’t.
They’d been on assignment for four days now, and it was about time for John to check on their progress.
He found Thomas inside the old chapel, preparing containers of food alongside four nuns. His job was to spoon macaroni and cheese into Styrofoam food containers, which he then passed to the nun on his left.
It was a monotonous and pretty much thankless job, but in addition to helping catch bad guys he was also performing a vital service to the city’s survivors.
John thought it was rather fitting for the Alamo to be used in such a manner.
Yes, it was the scene of a historic battle. Yes, it was the shrine of Texas liberty.
But before Santa Ana brought his brutal forces to bear on the tiny building it had more humble beginnings… as a chapel. Early residents of San Antonio worshipped there. They prayed for their own souls and the souls of others.
In a way the structure returned to its roots. It was back under the control of the Catholic church and was once again serving its community.
Robert Thomas and the nuns weren’t serving gourmet food. But the meatloaf, macaroni and cheese and green beans they were passing out on this particular day was helping to sustain life in the Alamo City.
For many of the survivors, the once-daily meal was all they got for sustenance.
Survivors came from near and far to pick up their daily ration.
Many were so famished by the time they arrived they sat down in the street in front of the Alamo and ate their meal on the spot.
Others carried theirs away.
Many walked to the San Antonio River a block away to sit under the huge cottonwood trees on the river’s banks.
The river was now littered with empty Styrofoam food containers, but a different set of volunteers came through every few days to collect those.
Thomas’ partner, Mike McMillan, was sitting at a small table, checking the identification cards of those standing in line waiting for their meals.
John stood in that line, behind his new friends Julio and Maria.
A Troubling Turn of Events Page 10
