The Road To Deliverance

by James, Harper

  ‘Not without you in it, I won’t.’

  The situation was prevented from deteriorating further by the entrance of Martina Perez, a patrol officer Guillory had introduced to Evan on one of his previous investigations.

  ‘Hi Evan.’

  ‘Hi Martina.’

  Ryder looked as if he was about to be sick. Or burst. Guillory stared at Evan, her mouth slightly open, tongue lolling out. She made a circular motion with her finger at the side of her mouth: roll it up. Because Martina Perez looked as if she belonged on the catwalk, not in a police cruiser.

  ‘Run along now,’ Evan said to Ryder. ‘Don’t worry, Officer Perez will take good care of me.’

  That got him a big smile from Perez. And a scowl from Guillory that said wait until I get you home. She took hold of Ryder’s elbow, steered him back towards the door.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Perez said after they’d disappeared down the hall arguing about where they were going to get lunch. ‘Kate said she needed a favor.’

  ‘I need a ride.’

  ‘No problem. Is that all?’

  He kicked the toe of his shoe into the floor. As if he was embarrassed to ask.

  ‘Actually no. I need to borrow your gun. And some ammunition. A couple hundred rounds should do it.’

  Her mouth dropped open, eyes wide. Then she caught on, slapped him hard on the arm.

  ‘Damn. I forgot Kate’s Golden Rule. Don’t ever believe a word he says.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  She led him downstairs into the underground parking lot as they talked, then between the parked cars towards her vehicle.

  ‘She also says you like to play with the siren.’

  ‘And the lights.’

  They got to her car. She paused by the driver’s door without getting in when she noticed him loitering by the trunk. This time he looked genuinely embarrassed.

  ‘She never told me you like to ride in the trunk?’ The beginnings of a smile curled her lips.

  ‘If that’s okay.’

  She shrugged, the smile complete now. It made him wish they were both getting into the back seat. He was pretty sure he caught her glancing at it too.

  ‘If that’s what you want. You trying to hide from somebody?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Her smile grew wider still, her perfect teeth almost glowing in the dim light of the parking lot.

  ‘That’s okay then. For a moment I thought it was because you were embarrassed to be seen sitting up front with me.’

  He wasn’t sure what to say to that. Last time he met her she’d been happily married with kids. Now she was fishing for compliments, almost flirting. She popped the trunk to save him from saying anything.

  Climbing in made him feel stupid, made it all seem like overkill. But after what had happened in the Jerusalem Tavern the previous day, he wasn’t taking any chances. He had to work on the basis that he was being followed, that everything he did was being observed. It was also the reason he’d postponed the things he told Crow he had to do for Guillory before setting off. Because they weren’t the sort of things anybody wanted to do with somebody looking over their shoulder.

  He’d drawn two thousand dollars in cash in case they canceled his credit cards again as punishment for humiliating their man. And he’d come up with a plan to get them off his tail without all the tedious movie-style jumping on and off trains and buses as the doors closed.

  Kate Guillory hadn’t been happy at all. Not one little bit. At one point he’d been convinced she was about to march him back to her brother’s grave to repeat after her: I shall not be a pig-headed ass. But she couldn’t deny that the two of them heading off to Laredo in his car would be a bad idea. So she’d agreed to do her part, to ask Martina Perez for a favor, then to leave the building conspicuously with Ryder.

  None of that made it feel any less ridiculous now, about to ride out in Martina Perez’ trunk.

  ‘Where to?’ she said stifling a smirk, once he was squeezed in.

  ‘Laredo, please.’

  ‘What?’

  The lid of the trunk started closing towards him.

  ‘Nearest car rental.’ Then the lid banged tightly shut, plunging him into total darkness. He wasn’t to know it then but he was closer to his missing wife metaphysically than he had been for the past six years.

  ‘You miss any?’ he said to Perez when she let him out after a ten-minute ride. Her face creased in confusion. ‘Potholes.’

  ‘I know,’ she grinned, ‘suspension’s shot to hell. Gives me a sore butt riding around in this heap all day long.’

  She arched her back, worked the heels of her hands into the tops of her buttocks. In case he didn’t know what she meant by butt. Maybe he’d become disorientated in the dark, bouncing around, banged his head a couple times. Because if it wasn’t that, he’d have sworn he just heard an invite to provide some relief.

  ‘Lucky Mr Perez is there to rub it better, eh.’

  She shook her head, the corners of her mouth turning down.

  ‘There is no Mr Perez. Not anymore.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’m not. Hey, maybe you can return the favor some time, take me out in that fancy sports car of yours. And I don’t mean in the trunk.’ She was talking about his ‘69 Corvette Stingray. ‘I always keep an eye out for it, you know. In case I need to pull you over for speeding.’ She suddenly put her hand to her mouth to stifle a snort of laughter. He knew what was coming. ‘Except that’s not likely to happen is it? Not if what Kate says about your driving is true.’

  Then she was gone, a quick blast on the siren as she pulled away.

  He turned to walk away from the car rental office, almost bumped into a middle-aged couple standing behind him on the sidewalk. Frozen to the spot, their mouths hung loosely open. They’d watched the whole thing.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  Then he walked around them to get to the bus stop that would take him to the airport. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Martina Perez. But you can never be too careful.

  Chapter 7

  EVAN GOT INTO Laredo International shortly after six p.m. He rented a nondescript gray compact, then drove two miles north to a Holiday Inn Express just off US-59. The hotel ticked the only box he was concerned about—it was cheap—and it had one major advantage over its competitors. It was less than a quarter mile from Lakeside, an up-market residential subdivision on the banks of Lake Casa Blanca. Abe Dalton, the journalist who’d written the online article on the shooting of Cole Nix lived in one of the properties backing directly onto the lake.

  That pretty much made them neighbors. So he dumped his backpack in his room and went to be neighborly. The property he was looking for was a large single-family home with a red tile roof. There was a double attached garage with maid’s quarters above and he’d bet that if he was to cut through the vacant lot further down the street and double back, he’d find a large covered patio and a swimming pool and a Jacuzzi and maybe a big palapa with a chimney for barbequing. There’d be a boat back there too. Dalton had done okay for himself.

  Or, looking at it another way, he had a lot to lose. A lot more than Evan. And as far as Evan could see, nothing to gain.

  He rang the bell, heard it chime way back in the house. Then the quick patter of a small woman’s footsteps on a tiled floor approaching. The door swung open noiselessly to reveal a short Mexican woman in a maid’s uniform.

  ‘I’m here to see Abe Dalton,’ he said before she got a word out.

  ‘Mr Dalton is not here.’

  ‘Do you know when he’ll be back.’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  Then a woman’s voice called from the back of the house.

  ‘Who is it Maria?’

  Maria turned away from Evan.

  ‘Someone for Mr Dalton.’

  ‘Tell him he’s not here.’

  The look on Maria’s face when she turned back to Eva
n said it all. It was lucky she had Mrs Dalton to tell her what to say. Clearly Mrs Dalton was of the opinion that when she wasn’t at home, Maria stood mute in the corner awaiting her return. The other woman’s tone of voice had clearly irritated the maid. Instead of closing the door in Evan’s face, she stepped lightly through it, pulled it shut behind her. Then she took him by the elbow, walked him down to the sidewalk.

  ‘He is walking the dogs by the lake.’ She suddenly smiled, nodded her head backwards at the house. ‘He goes to get away from her.’ Leaning in towards him in case Mrs Dalton’s hearing was every bit as acute as that of the dogs, she whispered, ‘No dogs need that much exercise.’

  He nodded like he knew how it was. Still with one hand on his elbow, she pointed down the street.

  ‘Go through the vacant lot there. You can get down to the water.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  Maria shrugged as if to say all Anglos looked the same to her.

  ‘He has two boxer dogs. You can’t miss them. Don’t tell him I told you where he is.’

  She gave him a little shove then, as if she was eager to get whatever mischief she had set in motion underway. He reckoned if he looked back at the house when he got down to the lakeside, he’d see her face at the window of her quarters above the garage.

  He cut through the vacant lot as instructed, made his way across the open ground to the water’s edge. He looked west towards the setting sun, didn’t see any signs of life in that direction. Looking the other way, he saw a man standing right at the water’s edge about a quarter mile away. The dogs were nowhere in sight. He started walking towards him.

  When he was fifty yards away from Dalton the two dogs exploded out of the trees and bushes on the other side of him. One hundred and forty pounds of excited boxer dog bounded towards him, eating up the distance in a matter of seconds. They raced directly at him only inches apart, powerful muscles rippling under the smooth, sleek fur, drool flying from their slobbering jaws. At the last second, they parted, whipped past him as closely as the slipstream passing over the wing of an aircraft, melding together on the other side of him into a mass of tan and white bouncing dog.

  Dalton stopped gazing out over the lake to see what had excited them. Seeing Evan, he called out the dog walker’s customary greeting.

  ‘Don’t worry. They’re only playing.’

  Tell that to the bunny wunnies, Evan thought to himself as the dogs jumped excitedly at him.

  Dalton was walking towards him now.

  ‘Buddy! Duke!’

  The dogs bounded away towards their master, and then they were off again into the scrub they’d come from.

  ‘You must be new around here,’ Dalton said. ‘I know pretty well everyone by sight if not name.’

  Evan stuck out his hand.

  ‘Evan Buckley.’

  Dalton swapped a soggy, drool-soaked tennis ball into his left hand, wiped his right on his pants leg, shook hands.

  ‘Abe Dalton.’ His eyes lit up as the dogs came tearing back towards them. ‘You’ve met Buddy and Duke already.’

  ‘Nice dogs.’ Evan extended his hand for them to sniff at, hopefully not bite. ‘They must be quite a handful.’

  ‘They wouldn’t fit in an old lady’s handbag, that’s for sure.’

  They shared a men-talking-about-men’s-dogs laugh, then Evan spoiled it all.

  ‘I was actually looking for you, Mr Dalton.’

  Dalton’s smile slipped a notch.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. I called at the house. They said you weren’t at home. So I thought I’d take a walk by the lake seeing as it’s such a beautiful evening. And here you are.’

  He gave a big, lucky-break smile, hoped it was enough to get Maria off the hook. Dalton was looking dubious.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not selling anything.’

  They laughed at that too, even if Dalton’s was a little strained. Then Evan went for the jugular.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about Cole Nix.’

  If he hadn’t been watching for it, he would have missed the flash of recognition that went through Dalton’s eyes. It was gone in the blink of an eye, replaced by something that looked a lot like fear.

  Dalton shook his head, his bottom lip pushed out.

  ‘Cole Nix? Doesn’t mean anything to me I’m afraid. It’s not the sort of name you’d forget either.’ He lifted his chin to look over Evan’s shoulder, back towards the house. ‘I can see Maria waving. Dinner must be ready. Sorry I can’t help you.’

  ‘He was shot and killed at the side of the road somewhere around here about six years ago.’

  Dalton was still shaking his head, starting to move around Evan.

  ‘I only moved here a couple years ago. I’ve got to go now.’

  He turned, whistled for the dogs who had disappeared once again.

  ‘You wrote an article for the local newspaper about it. Unless that was a different Abe Dalton. Except the name isn’t particularly common either. Like Cole Nix.’

  Dalton looked around nervously.

  ‘Where the hell are those damn dogs?’

  ‘Look, I’ve got two options here. Either we can have a quiet word out here’—he looked both ways up and down the lake shore—‘without another person for miles, or I’ll have to go back to digging around online. I don’t want to do that because of what happened last time I tried it. The only difference is, this time they’re going to see somebody snooping around from an IP address that they’ll link to the free wifi in the Holiday Inn over there. That’s where I’m staying.’

  Dalton went to say something but Evan talked over him.

  ‘I don’t know much about this sort of stuff, don’t know how accurate the tracking is. Maybe they’d think the snooping isn’t coming from the Holiday Inn at all, that it’s coming from a house that’s only a quarter mile away. Your house.’

  All of the good-natured, neighborly friendliness was gone from Dalton’s face now. It looked a lot like he’d swapped heads with one of his dogs.

  ‘You made your point. Have you any idea what these people are like?’

  ‘Yep. I’ve had that pleasure already.’

  Dalton pulled a small hip flask from his pocket, sat on a large rock at the water’s edge. He unscrewed the cap, took a quick swallow. Evan shook his head when he held it towards him.

  ‘Look at that,’ Dalton said, a rueful smile on his lips. ‘I can have the same thing for dinner as my wife’s having without even being in the house.’

  Evan sat on another rock opposite him, didn’t say anything.

  ‘You’ve seen my house,’ Dalton said. It was a statement rather than a question. ‘I worked hard for all that.’

  ‘I know what they can do to people. That’s why I really don’t want to put the name Cole Nix into an internet search engine again. From anywhere.’

  Dalton took another pull on the flask, held it out again.

  ‘You sure?’

  Evan shook his head.

  ‘Why are you interested?’ Dalton said.

  ‘It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later if you like.’

  The two dogs chose that moment to come bounding back. Dalton retrieved the tennis ball from where he’d dropped it, threw it far out into the lake. Both dogs leapt in, an explosion of water and legs and un-docked tails.

  ‘Cole Nix getting shot was the best thing ever happened to me,’ Dalton said after they’d watched the dogs swimming for a minute. ‘In a manner of speaking.’ He realized what he’d just said. His face fell. ‘Sorry. He wasn’t a friend of yours, was he?’

  ‘No. I never met him. Never heard of him until I read your article.’

  The mention of the article made Dalton’s face fall further. He took a deep breath, stared out over the water to where the dogs were fighting over the tennis ball.

  ‘If you dived in and swam straight across to the other side, climbed out and kept going straight, you’d pretty much get to where it happened.’

&n
bsp; ‘You must be able to see it from your bedroom.’

  Dalton let out a short cough of a laugh.

  ‘Yeah. I’d never thought of that. I ought to get up every morning and look over there to remind myself of how I’ve got what I’ve got. It wasn’t always like this.’

  He made a broad sweep with his arm, took in the expensive homes behind them. His gaze settled on his own house. And when it did, it was clear from his face that not everything was perfect with his lifestyle. The crack he’d made about his wife’s choice for dinner came back to Evan.

  ‘I was a reporter on the local rag at the time,’ Dalton continued. ‘More importantly, my Uncle Bill was the chief deputy sheriff at the time. He’s retired now.’

  Evan made a note to look up Bill Dalton, ex-chief deputy sheriff. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face as the name registered in his mind, the words of the Eagle’s song Doolin-Dalton going through his mind.

  Dalton saw the smile.

  ‘I know. Bad name for a lawman, named after the leader of the Doolin-Dalton gang. Anyway, I was over having dinner with them when the call came in. There’d been an incident out on US-59. He didn’t want to, but I persuaded Uncle Bill to let me ride with him. On the condition that I didn’t get in the way or contaminate the scene, blah, blah, blah. In fact, he didn’t even let me get out of the car. Not that there was a lot to see. Just this guy, Cole Nix, leaning up against a tree. He was dead. Shot in the gut.’

  ‘There weren’t any vehicles or anything?’

  ‘Nope. They said later that there’d been at least two vehicles there. Oh, one other thing—somebody had spilled a packet of crystal meth on the ground.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it. Exactly as I wrote it.’

  ‘I seem to remember something about a woman.’

  Dalton thought about it.

  ‘Yeah, they found a button off a woman’s blouse, I think. I don’t know what you want me for, you seem to know more than I do.’

  They sat in silence for a while as Evan tried to think how best to ask about what didn’t make it into the article, if anything. Dalton beat him to it, nodding to himself as the thought occurred to him.

  ‘You want to know if there was anything else. Some detail that I wasn’t allowed to write about.’