Allie was sitting on the floor of a bathroom stall hunkered over a fifth of Jack. Tearstained and tear-strained. From three miles away she saw the flash off the white subway tile wall. When she saw the fireball, she knew.
The several-thousand-degree heat was so intense that Allie—along with all the partygoers—were forced to stand outside the half-mile barrier and helplessly inhale the smell of burning rubber. They did this throughout the night. By early morning the fire had spent its fury, allowing the water trucks to move in. By then not much was left. A few steel beams. One wheel had been blown off and rolled a quarter mile into the marsh. The back end of the tank looked like a soda can ripped in two. At the blast site, the only thing that remained was a scorched spot on the highway.
Closed-circuit television cameras positioned on the flashing light poles a mile before the curve recorded Jake at the wheel. Facial recognition software, as well as Allie’s own viewing of the recording, proved that faithful Jake Gibson with his characteristic oiled ball cap was driving the truck and shifting gears as it ventured north on 30E.
No part of Jake Gibson was ever found.
Not a belt buckle. Not a heel of his boot. Not his titanium watch. Not his platinum wedding ring. Not his teeth. Not the bronzed head of his walking cane. Like much of the truck, Jake had been vaporized. The horrific nature of his death led to a lot of speculating. Theories abounded. The most commonly believed was that Jake fell asleep long before the turn, slumping forward, thereby pressing his bad leg and portly weight forward. This is their only justification for the unjustifiable speed. Second is the suggestion that four days of caffeine overdosing exploded Jake’s heart and he was dead long before the turn—also causing him to slump forward. The least whispered but still quite possible was the notion that Jake had an aneurysm, thereby producing the same result. No one really knows. All they knew with certainty was that he went out with a bang so violent that it registered on military satellites, bringing in the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, who both raised eyebrows at the enormity of the blast area. “Shame.”
With the site surrounded in yellow tape and flashing lights, it was still too hot to approach. Firemen said it’d take a week to cool off the core and allow anyone near the blast site. Onlookers shook their heads, thought of Allie, and muttered in their best backstabbing whisper, “That woman is cursed. Everything she touches dies.”
Rescue and coast guard crews searched the ocean and the shoreline throughout the night. They thought maybe if Jake had been thrown through the windshield at that speed, his body would have shot out across the rocks and into the ocean on the other side, where there’s a known rip tide. If so, he’d have been sucked out to sea.
Like everything else, the search turned up nothing. And like everything else, each failed search reinforced the excruciating notion that Jake died a horrible, painful death.
The weight of this on Allie was crushing. Jake, the affable husband who simply worked hard enough to put food on the table and laughter in his wife’s heart, was not coming back. Ever. The last year or two or even three had not been easy. He had worked more than he’d been at home, staying gone weeks at a time, months even. Allie knew what people thought . . . that she was just tough to live with.
She was left to plan the funeral and decide what to put in the box. But every time she tried to tell his memory that she was sorry, she was met with the haunting and deafening echo that the final three words she spoke to Jake were not “I love you.” Instead, her last words to him had been spoken in a spit-filled tirade of anger.
And for those words, there was no remedy.
2
Five hundred sixty-five miles northeast of Cape San Blas on the shoulders of Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, Juan Pedro Perez lit a cigarette. His knuckles were scarred, as was his forehead, and beneath his shirt were twenty more. He had long prized his ability with a knife, but his education came at a cost. Born in Juarez, he’d first walked across the border when he was six, and most of that distance he’d carried his sister. Now thirty, he’d lost count of his crossings. Raised in the fields, and tired of endless hours in the sun and countless unmet expectations, he’d robbed a border farmer, taken his gun, and learned to use it. Soon, he was hiring it out. A drug runner with a guerrilla fighter’s pedigree. Such talent and disregard got him noticed. Those atop the food chain took him under their wing, making him well connected. While hunted, he was also protected. Pretty soon he brokered his own power.
He sat in the front seat of an old flatbed Ford, left hand loosely cupped over his mouth, cheeks drawn, eyes dark and cold. Cigarette smoke exited his nose and trailed up and out the car window. He spun the brass Zippo lighter on his right thigh. With every spin he’d flip it open, flick it lit, then slam it shut. Spin it again, repeat. The woman next to him in the front seat didn’t watch the lighter so much as the hand that held it.
Catalina was twenty-eight—or so she thought. The two had met, oddly enough, at church. She was attending her husband’s funeral while Juan Pedro was running a load and using the church as both a cover and a safe haven. She had no idea. Diego, her husband of five years, had been a good man and she had loved him. They married when she was eighteen and he twenty-eight. He was a dentist, and given his honesty, underinflated prices, and twenty-four-hour house calls, he had a lot of patients but little money.
Juan Pedro stared at her long dress and beautiful black eyes, then at the simple wooden box that held her husband. He pointed north, toward the border. “America?”
She looked at her two children, who were looking blankly at the box. Then she looked at the hell spread around her and figured it couldn’t get any worse.
She had been way bad wrong.
Five years later, she had America, an oil-leaking, mufflerless truck for a home, and Juan Pedro’s pistol for a pillow. His process was consistent—he would drive her and the kids to a community ripe for harvest, drop them at a shack, and disappear for weeks or months while a couple of his lieutenants kept an eye on them until he reappeared without warning, flush with cash and half a bottle of tequila. Thus far she’d lived in Texas, New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South and North Carolina. She’d seen him in two dozen angry and bloody knife fights. He liked to stand over the other men as they quivered and bled out. A sly smile. His blade dripping. His weapon of choice was a Dexter-Russell six-inch skinning knife. A butcher’s knife. He’d first learned to use it at the meat-packing houses. Curved blade. Wooden handle. Carbon steel. Razor sharp. If his pistol was close, that blade was closer.
The first two times she’d tried to escape had not gone well. It took her nearly a month to be able to take a deep breath. The third time he almost killed her while the two children watched. Had it been just her, she’d have closed her eyes and let Diego welcome her home, but the terror in her children’s eyes proved too much. So she pulled herself off the floor and yielded. Even now her left eye was still blurry from the impact.
Juan Pedro didn’t like her children. He didn’t like any children. As long as they weren’t much trouble or expense he would let her keep them around, but Catalina knew time was running short. In his world, evil people bought children, and she suspected that Juan Pedro had already collected the deposit.
Diego was ten. Cropped jet-black hair. Black-rimmed glasses with lenses on the thick side. Square jaw. The gentleness in his eyes favored his father. He sat cross-legged in the back seat, a coverless Louis L’Amour paperback in his hand, silently biting his bottom lip, about to pee in his pants. In public he called Juan Pedro Papa. In private, he didn’t call him at all.
Gabriela was seven. Long black hair hanging in matted knots below her shoulders. Her skin was dirty; it’d been three weeks since she’d had a bath, and she had a rash she didn’t want to talk about. She sat on her heels, silently biting her top lip and about to scratch her skin off.
In addition to the shiny pistol just below his belly button, Juan Pedro kept a revolver at the base of his back. A third
handgun was taped below the front seat, a fourth wedged up behind the dash. Two shotguns lay across the floorboard of the back seat, and three automatic weapons were stashed beneath the kids’ seat. Behind them, the bed of the truck had been built with a false floor containing several thousand rounds of ammunition and cash. While Juan Pedro was hated and wanted by many, he was not stupid, and if he was going out, it would be in a blaze of glory.
The temperature hovered in the thirties. Catalina stared out the window as the freezing rain stuck to the windshield. They had driven through the night. And the night before. There would be no harvest in this weather, but she dared not state the obvious. Juan Pedro had been sent either to pick up or drop off. Their life had become a series of aimless destinations.
She placed her hand gently on his forearm and whispered, “Juan, the kids no have clothes for this.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye, then at the back seat, where Gabriela had started to shiver. He cranked the engine, flicked his cigarette butt out the window, and dropped the stick into drive. Catalina whispered again. “Diego has to go.”
Juan Pedro glanced in the rearview in disapproval. He believed the boy to be soft, so he was toughening him up a bit. He eased into Spruce Pine and pulled over at the Blue Ridge Thrift Store. He slid a roll of hundreds from his front pocket and thumbed through the wad until he found a twenty. He handed it to Catalina and nodded toward the door. When she motioned for the kids to follow, he extended his arm and shook his head once. The kids didn’t move.
Catalina quickly found two matching used men’s down jackets and two pairs of ladies’ fleece sweat pants. They were too big and too long, but the kids could roll them up. She laid the bundle quietly on the counter, and the clerk, whose name tag identified her as Myrtle, rang up the order.
“Twenty-nine dollars and ninety-six cents.”
With her back turned to the truck, and with motions that could not be seen from the sidewalk, Catalina slid seven dollars from just inside the waistline of her underwear, unfolded it, and without a word offered Myrtle twenty-seven dollars. Myrtle looked over the rim of her reading glasses and eyed Catalina for the first time. She did not look impressed. She tapped her teeth with a pencil, then glanced at the idling truck where the red glow of the single cigarette pulsated just above the steering wheel. Then she noticed the kids. She raised an eyebrow, scratched her scalp hidden beneath a beehive, then busily mashed several buttons.
“Sorry, darling, been a long day. Numbers are running together.” She counted the twenty-seven dollars, reached inside the cash drawer, and gently slid a crisp ten-dollar bill back across the counter. While she took her time folding and bagging the clothes, Catalina rolled the ten into the size of a toothpick and slid it back into the waistband of her frayed underwear. When she had finished, Myrtle handed her the bag and said, “Sweet thing, you need anything else, you holler now.”
When Catalina returned to the car, she found Diego trembling, a tear cascading down his cheek. She pleaded, “Juan . . . please?”
Juan Pedro snatched the bag of clothes, filtered through it, then tossed it into the back seat, where the kids did not touch it. He motioned to Catalina, who sat down and quietly closed the door. Juan Pedro waited for a car to pass and then pulled slowly out onto the highway. He was cautious. No need to spin the tires and speed off. Those inside the truck knew he was a bad hombre. There was nothing to be gained by reconvincing them. Those outside the truck didn’t need to know it. Least not yet. One of the reasons he had survived as long as he had on this side was his cunning. His ability to not think rashly. He was a master at looking the part of the tired, poor migrant worker.
Juan Pedro had four cell phones, one of which contained the map that held his attention. He drove west on 19E out of Micaville and turned south on Highway 80 in front of the post office heading toward Busick. The small two-lane mountain road wound out of town, past the elementary school and the mattress spring plant. Juan Pedro saw the police officer sitting in his car alongside the road, but paid him no visible attention. He smiled slightly to himself as they drove by, his right hand sliding to his waistband. His left rear taillight was burned out, but he had a pretty good idea that the police officer liked being dry and warm. He tapped the fake ivory grips of his automatic. If the cop wanted to make it an issue, he’d get all the discussion he could handle. And then some.
The freezing rain did little to improve conditions. The roads were mushy and muddy. And the windshield wiper blades had quit working about ten years ago. Juan Pedro drove slowly, wiping the back side of the windshield with a dirty white T-shirt.
In the back seat, Diego trembled.
Juan Pedro followed the map through Bowditch, then Celo, and when the road made a hard right turn at the South Toe River, he let off the gas and began looking for signs. He turned right at Gibson Cemetery and downshifted into first as the big truck rattled onto the dirt road. Diego winced. Juan Pedro hesitated just slightly at the No Outlet sign. He didn’t like being penned in.
They wound up the slowly increasing grade, passing the occasional house or cabin. It was growing dark. Passing a run-down geodesic dome where wood smoke puffed from a chimney, Juan Pedro rolled down the window, letting in the cold and rain, and stared off into the trees. A light flashed twice, then again once. Juan Pedro whistled and turned left onto the muddy road, where rhododendron limbs smacked the windshield.
He parked, left the truck idling, and carried a black bag through the dark toward a guy holding a flashlight in front of a metal barnlike building. Incoherent screaming rock music could be heard from within. As soon as Juan Pedro was out of sight, Catalina handed Diego an empty water bottle. Diego knelt on the back seat and furiously unbuckled his pants. Over the next minute and fifty-six seconds, Diego filled the twenty-ounce bottle, trying not to spill it. Screwing the cap back on, Catalina took the bottle and wedged it beneath her seat. Diego took a deep breath and all three watched the warehouse, hoping, praying Juan Pedro would not return.
A minute later, an expressionless Juan Pedro exited the warehouse with a different black bag, hopped into the truck, dropped the stick into reverse, and circled backward and slowly out the drive. When he glanced in the rearview and noticed Diego was no longer sweating, he slammed on the brakes. The sudden movement jolted everyone forward. The pee bottle as well. Juan Pedro eyed it and, as if loosed from a spring, backhanded Catalina, rocketing her head against the headrest. As blood trickled out the side of her split lip, he lit a cigarette, looked into the rearview, and growled out of the corner of his mouth, “That’s your fault.” He lit a cigarette. “Apologize.”
Diego whimpered, “I’m sorry, Mama.”
Catalina wiped the blood away and shook her head slightly.
Taking a deep draw on his cigarette, Juan Pedro continued down the dirt road. As he made the wide bend toward the asphalt, the headlights of the old flatbed Ford were met head-on by a waiting police officer parked perpendicular to the No Outlet sign.
The officer stood in his rain slicker, water dripping off his hat, a flashlight in his hand. He shined the high-powered LED light in Juan Pedro’s eyes and held out his left hand like a stop sign.
Juan Pedro smiled, waved, and never even hesitated. He slammed the accelerator to the floor, roaring the big block V-8 to life, and, turning the wheel slightly to the left, slammed into the police officer, who spun out through the night air like a helicopter blade.
When Juan Pedro cleared the bright white dot from his pupils, he noticed that the police officer had been smart and not come alone. A second officer knelt alongside his car, pointing a rifle at the Ford’s windshield. His door-mounted Q-Beam lit the entire front and back seating areas, which explained why he had not emptied the entire thirty-round magazine into the truck. The officer maintained his aim while wildly yelling into his shoulder-mounted radio mic. Juan Pedro drew the automatic from his waistline and, knowing the officer would not return fire, emptied his seventeen-round magazine through the officer’s car doo
r. When the smoke cleared, the officer lay on his back in the mud. One leg crossed oddly beneath the other.
While little surprised Juan Pedro, the third officer did when he moved around behind the first officer’s car, trying to get a clear shot without endangering those inside the car. Using the truck as his backstop, Juan Pedro drew the revolver at the base of his back, exited the truck, and walked toward the officer, pulling the trigger six times. When he’d emptied the revolver, he returned to his truck and methodically dropped the stick into drive.
When he let off the clutch, he was met by his first unsolvable problem. All four tires were flat.
He eyed the police cars, but he knew they were equipped with highly sensitive GPS units that would allow someone sitting at a dry desk to track his every turn. His options were few.
Grabbing the bag, a backpack packed for just such an eventuality, and several weapons, he shoved Catalina and the children out of the truck and force-marched them back toward the metal shack.
Drenched and freezing in only a T-shirt, Catalina worked hurriedly to get the stumbling kids into their jackets. The fleece pants would have to wait.
Juan Pedro ushered them through the darkness, prodding them with the muzzle of his rifle. Reaching the side of the building, he slipped through the darkness like a shadow. Ten head-banging, wannabe rockers stood cooking dope inside. The four who sat guard outside were passing something back and forth and stoned out of their minds. Juan Pedro forced Catalina and the kids around the cookshack and up the small hill behind, then sat them next to a giant boulder and, with a clear view of everything below him, waited.
Ninety seconds later, Catalina watched him smile as the sound of sirens reached their ears. Thirty seconds later the night sky was filled with flashing red and blue lights as the entire Burnsville and Spruce Pine police departments descended on the cookshack. Stoking the fire, Juan Pedro fired four shots through the windshield of the first car and seven through the windshield of the second. Doing so brought all twelve vehicles to a rapid stop, whereby a hail of bullets passed between the cookshack, now in utter chaos, and the twelve officers who believed three of their fellow deputies were dead.
Send Down the Rain Page 2
