Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  I heard the sound of Carolyn starting the engine, watched the smoke blowing out the pipes as the revving truck rocked on its springs. Gabe was launching kids up into the trailer as I arrived. One of the older boys reached down and, with the aid of a friend, took one of the little kids from me. Gabe grabbed the other and hoisted him up.

  I jumped and grabbed the door, using both hands and all my body weight to roll it closed. Gabe snapped the latch. We jammed the ramp back into the back of the trailer and then I started sprinting up the side of the truck.

  “Go, go,” I was screaming. “Go, go . . .”

  Carolyn didn’t require further encouragement. The cab’s tires chattered and then burned serious rubber as the engine strained to get the trailer in motion. I watched the big rig bounce across the yard, shifting up, gaining speed as it approached the side gate. The prospect of a closed gate failed to dim Carolyn’s ardor. She not only took out the gate but about six feet of adobe wall on either side of the opening. Damn thing exploded like it had taken a mortar shell.

  I watched, breathless, as she crimped the wheel hard to the right and skidded the cab around the corner. The trailer swung wildly one way and then the other, looked maybe like it was going to roll up onto its side but straightened itself in the last second and roared off, trailer’s ass end shimmying like a hula dancer.

  In my peripheral vision, a running figure bolted into view. Must have been the guy from the front gate. I snapped a shot off in that direction but missed. The guy dropped to one knee and returned fire. So close to my face, I felt the buzz on my cheek as it passed.

  A loud report numbed my right ear. The guy out in the yard went down in an irregular heap. I looked left. Gabe was reloading. When I snapped my eyes back to the yard, the front gate guy was back up. Moving in slow motion, dragging one leg behind him like a stubborn puppy as he inched back out of view.

  Carolyn had downshifted into granny gear and was roaring up the hill at all of three miles an hour. A sudden fuselage of fire erupted from the other end of the building. I hit the deck as the garage door frame began to come apart. Pieces of wood and metal filled the air around my head. I crawled out the entrance, keeping the trucks between me and the yawning garage door. Another volley sent me diving to the ground, hands covering my head like some caveman ducking a shillelagh.

  The gatekeeper limped back into view. I rested my arm on the dirt, took a deep breath, and touched off a round. He went down again. This time he stayed there.

  Gabe crawled out from under the other semi and stood up. Carolyn was about two-thirds of the way up the hill when suddenly the brake lights came on. The trailer stopped moving. Then the white backup lights. And then that fucking beeping they do when they’re backing up. I could hear it all the way from down here.

  She was backing the truck into somebody’s driveway. That was as far as I got before Gabe sidestepped over, grabbed me by the collar, and started dragging me toward the front yard. Shouts echoed in the night air. The sound of an engine starting. Another volley. More shouts and shots rang from the darkness.

  I twisted loose, ran over, and knelt by the gatekeeper’s side. I rolled him over and separated him from the big black automatic he’d been carrying.

  “How many you got left?” I asked Gabe.

  “Two.”

  I tossed Gabe the gatekeeper’s gun. “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” I said.

  We took off running for the front gate. Halfway across the yard, the lights hissed on. We were lit up like a birthday cake. Not only that, but the gate was closed. Bullets buzzed through the air like angry wasps as we hurled ourselves forward, running past the front gate, over to the enormous ficus tree at the front corner of the yard.

  The base of the tree must have been five feet across. No bark. Smooth as a baby’s ass. I lay on my stomach as they began pouring ammo in our direction. I steadied myself and touched off a round at the next muzzle flash I saw. And then another.

  Must have hit something, because the second one sure pissed somebody off. A few seconds later they started throwing enough fire our way to start a military coup. I rolled over behind the tree trunk and let them exercise their trigger fingers. The tree was très stout. You could have worked it over with a howitzer and it wouldn’t have given an inch. I felt like apologizing to all the ficus plants I’d mistreated over the years.

  Leaves were floating down upon us like green hail. A sudden flash of headlights swung across the yard. Looked like a prison break. The shattered gate yawned as a pair of cars came sweeping out from behind the house. Two of them. One behind the other, coming hard in our direction. A gleaming burgundy Jag was leading the way across the yard. Backlit by the second car’s headlights, the driver’s thick silhouette told me it hadda be Reeves behind the wheel.

  I used the tree to steady my hand and put two through the Jag’s windshield. Passenger side. Both of them. Damn. The phalanx veered sharp right, starting a wide circle of the front yard, swinging around so’s they could have a straight run at the gate.

  I stepped out from behind the tree. I only had four rounds left in the gun. I looked over my shoulder, out through the jagged gate. A line of white caught my eye.

  Carolyn was unloading the kids. Probably at the gardening lady’s house. Way in the distance, the wail of a siren began. I saw Carolyn run along the side of the trailer and hop up into the driver’s seat. Heard the roar of the big diesel.

  The screeching of tires pulled my eyes back to the yard. The cars were negotiating a one-eighty, dodging among the dead trees and concrete planters as they swung back this way. The last car didn’t quite make it. It hit one of the planters head-on. Blew the planter to pieces but really fucked up the car. They lurched forward another six feet and then got lodged on a concrete shard. The Toyota wagon was billowing steam and smoke like a calliope. I watched as all four doors swung open and a quartet of long shadows began hightailing it for the darkness of the side gate.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that the other vehicle had successfully slalomed through the grove, gotten itself lined up on the gate, and was now rolling at it like a ground-to-ground missile.

  Gabe stepped around me. Feet planted wide. Weapon pointing straight up at the sky. The Mount Rushmore facial expression told me all I needed to know.

  “Let ’em go,” I said. “Sounds like the cops are on the way.”

  “Motherfucker tried to kill us,” Gabe said.

  “Ain’t worth dying over,” I said through clenched teeth.

  The scream of shredding metal jerked my attention back up the hill. If the agonized grinding sound were not sufficient, then the eight-foot fountain of sparks following the truck down the hill erased all doubt.

  Carolyn was barreling down the hill. She hadn’t bothered to slide the ramp back into the truck, creating a tongue of sparks and fire lapping at the ass of the trailer as it roared down the slope. When I heard her shift into high gear, I grabbed Gabe by the belt and began struggling back toward the ficus tree. Gabe dug in and turned fierce eyes on me. For a second, I thought I might get shot, but the fountain of sparks and fire rocketing our way kidnapped Gabe’s attention. I watched Gabe’s head swing from the hill to the yard and back. A small crooked smile showed itself.

  “Crazy bitch is gonna kill ’em all,” Gabe said.

  We ran like hell and threw ourselves behind the tree trunk about five seconds before the eighteen-wheeler met the Jag about six feet outside the gate. Sounded like a bomb went off. The impact catapulted the Jag into the air, somersaulting it backward, crushing the roof in the second before the oncoming truck smashed into it again, driving it back into the yard like waste before the wind, rolling the car over longwise a couple of times. The yard was filled with torn metal, swirling dust, and the maniacal glinting safety glass.

  The front half of the Jag was crushed flat. What remained was wedged under the front bumper of the truck, which showed no signs of losing momentum. I caught a glimpse of Carolyn in the driver’s seat as she
roared by. The set of her jaw told me she still had the pedal to the metal.

  Gabe and I stepped out from behind the tree and began trotting along behind the screeching pile of moving magma. The car’s carcass was shedding wheels and plastic and pieces of metal, forcing Gabe and me to bob and weave to avoid getting clipped by a piece of flying debris.

  When the big rig drove the car completely through the corrugated front wall of the building, the truck finally began to slow. The nearest section of the building’s roof collapsed; the truck slammed into the pile of broken debris and finally bumped to a halt. The air brakes heaved a hissy sigh. Something metal fell to the floor with a clang. And then it went quiet.

  We were running now. The symphony of sirens filled my head. The hill was ablaze with red-and-blue light bars. All the cops in the world. At least two fire trucks. I turned back and began to pull twisted metal siding out of my way. Pitching things aside as we worked our way up the cab of the truck. Gabe squatted beneath a fallen roof beam, lifting it high enough for me to sneak beneath on my hands and knees. I crawled along the side of the trailer until I came to the cab step, then stood up and grabbed the door handle. Locked.

  I climbed up onto the step, pulled off my shirt, wrapped it around my arm, and slammed it into the glass. Hurt like hell. On the third blow, the window disintegrated. I reached through and opened the door from the inside. I grabbed the steering wheel and pulled myself up into the cab.

  She was still strapped in. Out cold. Big bruised knot glowing purple on her forehead. Broken nose hosing thick blood down her shirtfront. I put my hand on her chest. She was breathing evenly. I unsnapped her seat belt harness and laid her down on the seat. I slid her over and sat down on the seat next to her.

  I heaved a sigh and tried to compose myself. I was doing pretty well. Breathing deep and massaging the back of my neck, until I looked out through the truck’s cracked windshield. The scene was like a crimson jigsaw puzzle—fragmented—some assembly required.

  The Jag’s roof had been torn off sometime during the crash. What looked like two bags of stew meat were seeping their bloody way through the back seats. The only thing recognizable inside the Jag was sitting behind the wheel. Looked like the initial impact had driven the steering column completely through Reeves’s chest, pinning him to the seat like an insect specimen. The horrified look on his face told the tale. He’d seen it coming. He’d had one of those come to Jesus moments right before he got kabobbed. Probably didn’t say much about me as a person, but I was glad.

  Garrett paid the cab driver and was waving bye-bye when his wife came bouncing down the front steps. She threw an arm around his waist as they watched the driver back out into the street and motor off.

  The lawn was a carpet of fallen leaves. He made a mental note to call the gardener first thing in the morning.

  “The kids?” Garrett asked.

  “At my mom’s.”

  “Did the . . .”

  “FedEx brought the package this morning. It’s in your office.”

  “Good.”

  “Quite a bit more than we anticipated,” she commented.

  “Things got a little hinky,” he told her. “A service charge became necessary.”

  Garrett had his suitcase in one hand and his wife in the other as they climbed the front stairs and went into the house. He stopped by the master bedroom and put his suitcase on the padded leather bench at the end of the bed, then headed across the hall to his office.

  “What time is the parent-teacher conference?” he asked as he snapped on the overhead light. She told him it was at seven.

  “Great. Plenty of time.”

  He pulled the office chair back from the desk and peeled back the clear plastic runner that kept the chair from ruining the carpet. He used his fingertips to take hold of the carpet pile and lift a square section of carpet, revealing a small safe built into the concrete floor. He sat in the chair, twisted the knob left and right, and pulled open the door. A flat pile of documents covered the bottom of the space; the overnight envelope was wedged in diagonally. He wiggled it out.

  He dropped the overnight delivery envelope onto the desktop.

  “Sixty-three thousand and fifteen dollars,” his wife said.

  “There won’t be any more calls from Mr. Marshall,” he said as he thumbed through the contents without removing them from the envelope.

  “Was he dissatisfied with the service?”

  “He was just another guy who wanted something for nothing,” Garrett said. “Like most of the people in the country these days.”

  “The world is becoming so uncaring. It’s like nobody gives a darn about doing a good job anymore,” she said. “If there were more men like you . . .”

  He chuckled, replaced the runner and the carpet, and crossed the hall back to the bedroom. “If there were more men like me, there wouldn’t be a rush hour anymore.”

  His wife followed. “Oh . . . stop it,” she tittered.

  He began removing his clothes and arranging them geometrically on the foot of the bed.

  “Run it through your internet company a little bit at a time. Make it disappear.”

  “I’ve already started,” she assured him.

  “I’m going to hop in the shower.”

  “I got your blue suit back from the cleaners.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No place like home,” she trilled.

  “No toilet like your own,” he sighed as he padded off to the en suite.

  Took the better part of two weeks for the dust to settle. In the end, what saved our asses is that it involved little kids. Seems like rescuing twenty-three children from probable sexual slavery more or less absolves a body from any random felonies they may have committed along the way. Also, for once, there was no other side of the argument. Even white supremacists hated baby rapers. Turned out half the people who lived on the Lemon Grove street with Reeves had security cameras, so the cops ended up with the license numbers of everybody who’d picked up a kid and were presently in the process of running them down.

  The problem for Gabe and me revolved around that same lack of middle ground. In a case like this, only heroes or villains need apply. There was no door number three. It was the kind of unsophisticated story arc that made for good TV but was a number of nuances short of a meaningful existence. Seemed like the only choices we had were to circle the wagons and try to fade into the background or to accept the white hat accolades of the news media, who were all over us like a cheap suit as soon as the cops released our names, claiming that under the astute direction of one of their own, the erstwhile and heroically gallant Sergeant Carolyn Saunders, we had minimally aided in the rescue of twenty-three children and in the destruction of a human trafficking ring.

  And then, of course, there was the fact that nobody in charge had a clue. Despite assurances that they’d get to the bottom of things and the constant refusal to answer specific questions because it was an open investigation. Truth was, nobody was exactly sure what in hell had happened. And nobody had any idea how to get those children home either, but there was no way they could say that out loud.

  From what we gathered from Carolyn and the squad of assistant district attorneys they’d unleashed on us, in addition to the kabobbed Mr. Reeves, the other two piles of meat in the Jaguar belonged to a guy named Hector Pometta, a small-time armed robber who, not coincidentally, had also served time at Brushy Mountain, and to an unidentified mangled male wearing an expensive pair of Valentino trousers. A man whose DNA profile was not on file anywhere and whose hands, at some point, must have been pulled under the body of the skidding car, rendering them a pair of ragged mittens unfit for the taking of fingerprints.

  So we squinted knowingly into the cameras, stuck out our chins, and did our best impression of humble heroes. Took the newshounds about a week to move on to other things. By that time, the cops had figured out that they were probably never going to get definitive answers because the only people who knew them for
sure were no longer on the same side of the turf as the rest of us—that and the fact that they found the unfortunate Mr. Pickett’s withered corpse right where we’d told them they would. Seemed like finding bodies did wonders for our credibility.

  The only one of the conspirators unaccounted for was Corinna Cisneros, who’d crossed the border and then dropped completely out of sight. The Federales claimed they were giving chase, but nobody was holding their collective breath.

  The forensic accounting geeks reported that early returns from their digital bean counting suggested that Jack Haller’s description of the situation had more or less been on point. That the guy known as Pemberton had, in some nefarious manner or another, managed to wrest control of Allied Investments from Mrs. Haller’s grasp and into his own, at which point he’d begun to liquidate all of the estate’s assets, transferring the proceeds into a Caribbean bank account that the forensics squad had subsequently located, only to learn that the account had been frozen by Jack Haller’s legal team the year before.

  They theorized that when Pemberton’s ill-gotten gains suddenly became unavailable to them, and the golden opportunity to clean out the Haller trust seemed to be slipping from their grasp, they hit upon the idea of using the trucks supposedly containing fishing gear to traffic children across the border.

  U.S. Immigration Services confirmed that because the return of the supposed fishing gear was part of a multinational agreement between Mexico and the U.S.—an agreement that quite generously had allowed Mexico to collect sales tax on the sale of the Haller fleet—the trucks had been exempted from normal border inspections and issued Global Entry status.

  As far as the Feds could determine, this had been going on for about a year and a half. How many kids they’d sold, to whom, and where the kids were now was anybody’s guess, but, as might have been expected, authorities vowed to neither eat nor sleep until every one of these children had been accounted for and returned to his or her rightful family. Something that Gabe and I knew wasn’t going to happen.