Swimming with the Angels
Page 3
“I don’t have a clue. All I know is that I don’t have much time.”
“You need to disappear,” she said. “Don’t go to your family or friends. You will put them all in danger. I know because this is how I lived before coming here from Colombia as a little girl.”
She looked like she wanted to disappear, too. Maybe run to an administrator, call the police, something. Anything but stay here with me. And who could blame her? I was bad news on steroids.
“Help me find my clothes and I’ll be out of here before trouble arrives.”
She retrieved my clothes from a plastic bag in the closet. The shorts and shirt were caked with dried blood. She threw them in the trash.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll borrow a set of scrubs from one of the male nurses.”
Changing clothes was not easy. Fortunately, Ximena was eager to help me.
“I’m sorry, but you need to hurry,” she said. “We are all in danger while you are here.”
“How do I get out of here?” I asked when I could breathe again.
“The hospital will not be happy about your leaving, but I think I can make them understand your special situation.” She frowned again. “You will need to sign consent forms, of course, and then you can go.”
Ximena was evidently quite persuasive. Less than ten minutes later, she wheeled me downstairs to the exit where an off-duty security cop was waiting for me.
“Thank you,” I said.
She squeezed my hand. “Vaya con Dios, my friend.”
The security cop drove me home and helped me out of his car. In my haste to leave, I realized I had forgotten to ask Ximena for a prescription of pain pills. I stepped into the sunlight and swore from the stabbing pain in my ribs. I could already feel the oxycodone wearing off. A headache bloomed behind my eyes.
A Newport Beach cop sitting in his cruiser in the parking lot of our apartment with the engine running and air conditioner howling let me into the apartment after I showed him my driver’s license.
“Not going to find much left,” he said as he followed me inside. “The FBI confiscated your laptops, cellphones, and whatever else they could find. You want them back, you just need to hang around for six months and file a request with the court.”
“Of course, by then I’d be dead,” I said.
“More than likely.”
I realized that I could not have kept the electronic items anyway. Anything with Wi-Fi or GPS could be tracked.
The apartment was a disaster. It was obvious that not only the police and the FBI, but possibly the cartel had been there, too. Not only were my MacBook and Heide’s Dell laptop missing, but it looked like the closet and every drawer and cabinet had been thoroughly examined.
I spotted a hundred-year-old Kodak camera that had once belonged to my great grandfather in India, with brass gears and fittings and a wooden frame. What had until today been one of my few treasures now lay in pieces, scattered in the middle of the living room floor.
“Shit.”
“Funny ain’t it?” the cop said. “One day, you’re you. The next day, it’s like you’re suddenly a fuckin’ nobody. I have seen people end up homeless, living on the streets, all because they got sick and did not have insurance, or caught a run of bad luck and had no family or savings to fall back on. Sad.”
I stared at him, the realization that I was now alone was overwhelming. Stripped of everything I had loved and worked hard for, including my wife, my identity, and my dream of a career in marketing. My life was gone, stolen from me in a matter of hours.
Nor was I feeling at the top of my game physically. I almost did not recognize the unshaven, haggard, pale face of the pitiful wretch who stared back at me as I searched the medicine cabinet for aspirin.
“I’ll be downstairs in the cruiser for another twenty minutes,” the cop said as he reappeared from the living room. “If I were you, I’d try to be out of here by then. We’ll do a drive-by later tonight, but that ain’t going to protect you if the cartel wants to kill you. I hear stories all the time of the crazy things they do to people who try to rip them off.”
I nodded. The fact that I was an innocent bystander was unimportant to the sociopaths who kept their money and secrets closely guarded against threats real or imagined.
The question of where to go suddenly loomed large. Family and friends were out. According to Catania, anyone found with me would likely be executed, too.
Changing from the borrowed scrubs into a shirt and jeans was a painful ordeal that took longer than it should have. Taking the laces out allowed me to slip my feet into my boots without bending over.
Before preparing to leave, I checked the “whatever” drawer in the kitchen. Everybody has one. It’s for whatever isn’t easily categorized or comes in too small a quantity to deserve its own space. Loose change, business cards, miscellaneous screws, old restaurant matchbooks, phone numbers for people you have not talked to in years scribbled on wrinkled Post-It Notes, cheap pens from hotels, keys to things you cannot remember, rubber bands you will never use, et cetera. And there it was—the size and thickness of a thumbnail and so small it was easy to miss. But this was a 64GB memory card containing over a thousand photos: our wedding, honeymoon, birthdays, holidays, my best shots, and a hundred more memorable events. I might never again look at the now-painful highlights of my life taken over the past several months. But there was that one photo taken of Heide working on her laptop on our last night together that I wanted to examine carefully. I stuck the tiny card in the change pocket of my jeans.
Then I heard the front door squeak and nearly croaked from a heart attack. Still foggy from the pain medication, I was not sure if the cop had come back, or if I had left the door unlocked. I grabbed a butcher knife from the knife block and tiptoed into the front room to investigate. Sunlight now streamed through the gaping doorway, an imprudent invitation to the cartel killers sent to blot out the sole survivor of their carnage.
“Who’s there?” I shouted as I gripped the knife tighter.
No one answered. Then I felt something brush against my leg. It was the neighbor’s cat, the one who thought he owned the place.
“Don’t scare me like that, Mister Tibbs.”
He jumped onto the sofa and purred while I scratched between his ears.
Moving to the bedroom, I was bludgeoned by self-pity. Heide’s robe lay on the floor. I pressed it to my face, drinking in her smell. My favorite photo of her smiled shyly up at me from the dresser. I stared for a minute at her glass-protected visage, considering whether to take it with me. Then, as tears began obscuring my vision, I laid it gently face down in a half-opened drawer of her underwear. In the same drawer, I spotted an unsigned birthday card, a reminder that I would be twenty-three years old in a few days. If I lived that long.
Part of me wanted revenge, to lie in wait with a baseball bat and see who showed up. But nothing I could do was going to bring my wife back, and picking a fight with a Mexican drug cartel would not be “astute,” as my father had liked to say. According to Catania, my only hope was to disappear without a trace before they found me and resumed their lethal vengeance.
A half-hour later, I closed the door behind me, carrying only a large gym bag into which I had stuffed a handful of shirts, jacket, a spare pair of jeans, shorts, a few toiletries, and the bottle of aspirin from the bathroom medicine cabinet. In my present condition, it was all I could do to drag the bag to my Ford pickup and crawl in.
The truck presented yet another problem I was unprepared for. I could not very well drive a vehicle licensed to me and hope to remain incognito for very long. Even with different plates and the GPS turned off, it would still be possible to track. I had no choice but to get rid of it.
Less than a mile from home, I spotted a gardener mowing a lawn while a battered white Toyota pickup waited by the curb. He inspected me incredulously as I explained that I was ready to trade him my five-year-old F150 for his twenty-year-old rust bucket. He kept turning
from me to stare at my truck as he stood with crossed arms over his broad chest while I sweated in the hot sun trying to convince him that it was paid for and that I had not stolen it.
Fifteen minutes later, I was headed north on the 405. I had no idea where I was going. I just needed to get away. Thinking would come later.
As I quickly learned, the Toyota had no air conditioning or radio. It squeaked and squealed like a creature was being tortured beneath the floorboards, and top speed was under sixty-five miles per hour. There were a lot of things in hindsight I might have done better, but with a mushroom cloud forming in my head and the pain in my ribs growing incrementally with each mile, it was all I could do to keep one foot on the gas pedal and steer.
Traffic is never light in L.A. Even in the bowels of the night, the freeways and arterials are alive with the lights of cars scurrying somewhere. Fortunately, it was late morning, there were no accidents and traffic was as light as it gets in this over-populated part of the world.
Sometime after transitioning to I-5, my brain began functioning again, albeit at half-speed. Against a vibrant blue sky, thin tendrils from wispy clouds and the contrail from a military jet led me north. I needed a new name and a job and money. Stopping at a bank, however, would leave a trail marker for the cartel to follow. Catania said they were good at tracking. Maybe as good as—or better than—the FBI, which was a daunting thought to consider.
My mother liked to mix truths, half-truths, and outright fiction into stories she told me as a child. One of them was about a great-great-something-or-other of mixed race, the son of a lieutenant in the Scottish Highlanders and an Indian princess. She spoke proudly of this distant relative being a Risaldar in the 2nd Bengal Lancers who fought with distinction during World War I, earning an Indian Order of Merit. I always liked the sound of his name. From henceforth, I decided I would be Grayson Reynolds.
Without identification or a social security number, finding a job—even as a dayworker—would not be easy. As my previous employer had learned the hard way, both the federal and state governments were only too happy to seize assets including cash, vehicles, and even homes if they found you were paying workers under the table. More than income, however, I needed a place to stay that was “off the grid” as Agent Catania had suggested. Having witnessed their savagery firsthand, I had no doubts about what would happen if the cartel found me.
The anger at Heide’s killers that had helped me overcome the pain of my injury, as well as the physical and emotional loss, was wearing off. I had not even begun to sort out all the ramifications. The sudden shock of not only losing my wife and partner, but my identity and future was devastating.
“Fuck.” With money running low and killers possibly on my trail, there was no time to grieve.
I spent a few of my precious dollars on lunch at a Denny’s Restaurant. A server directed me to the Bakersfield city library where, for a dollar an hour, I was able to get on a public computer.
Searching for jobs was more difficult than you might guess. I could not risk a background check that could trigger a pursuit by the cartel which eliminated 98% of employment opportunities. Within the remaining 2%, I looked for something off the beaten track, something remote that did not require a lot of experience. At the end of the hour, I had found one possibility that sounded promising.
CHAPTER FIVE
In my overwrought state caused by delay and pain, I drove right by it the first time. The second time, I spotted the gravel parking lot and ranch-style home, half-hidden behind a thick row of rain-stooped evergreens that separated it from the road, and the small wooden sign with “Trout Fishing” in hand-painted letters. I sat for a moment, listening to the rain drumming on the Toyota pickup’s hood. It was a long way from L.A. Three days, fourteen hundred miles, four quarts of oil, and a large bottle of aspirin had transported me to a remote location in the foothills of the North Cascade Mountains, two hours north of Seattle.
Unfortunately, my appointment had been scheduled for noon and it was now after three. Difficulty getting showered and dressed, followed by getting stuck in outrageously bad Seattle traffic—and I thought L.A. was bad!—had contributed to the delay.
I had just begun to ease myself down from the driver’s seat toward the ground when a brilliant flash lit up the sky. Thunder, majestic and heavy with reproach, boomed a moment later, echoing off the nearby mountains. My left foot, numbed by the long drive, slipped on the wet door sill. Unable to recover, I pitched to the ground. Pain erupted in my left side where the bullet had shattered a rib. Rain pelted me. As if that was not humiliation enough, I heard the screen door bang.
I struggled to stand, using the truck door to pull myself up, but had succeeded only in getting to my knees when a golden retriever began snuffling determinedly at my crotch.
Anger and frustration added to my sour mood. “Get away, pervert.”
The dog backed off and tilted her head as if questioning how crazy someone must be to be kneeling on a gravel driveway in the pouring rain. After staring at me for a good thirty seconds and deciding I was no threat, the dog barked and wagged her tail.
With Fido’s encouragement, I made a desperate effort to stand. The combination of the loose gravel and the Velcro bandage wrapped around my damaged rib cage left me gasping with pain. I held onto my side and surrendered to the rain. When it rained in Southern California, the sky opened with a blitzkrieg of watery bullets. Knowing the propensity for mudslides and flash floods, people ran for their lives. Here in the foothills of the North Cascades, as I was learning, the rain was a persistent, monotonous thing that you could not escape.
The dog pressed her nose into my wet hand. “All right then. Friends?”
The retriever moved quickly toward the house, eager to gain shelter from the rain, and I followed a good deal more slowly. I climbed the porch and found the screen door partially closed, but the door was open, and the dog was already inside. Loud arguing came from inside the house. I knocked. There was a shriek followed by a crash.
“Hello?” I called out anxiously. When no one answered, I opened the screen door and peered inside. Something whirled toward my face. I jerked my head back just as a plate shattered against the door jamb. Shards littered the floor.
A hand caught my arm and pulled me down behind a couch. I found myself staring into the green eyes of a blond woman, a few years older than me. “Do you have a death wish or are you just feeble-minded?” she asked.
Very possibly true on both counts, I realized.
“Who are you talking to?” a second female demanded from the other side of the room.
Ignoring the question, the woman with green eyes smiled and stuck out a hand. “I’m Vonda. What’s your name?”
“Gray.”
She ducked as another plate sailed over the couch. “You missed!” She giggled.
“Tell me who’s there or the next throw I make will be for you,” the voice called out. “I’m warning you: I don’t miss.”
“Says his name is Gray,” Vonda replied. I noticed she wore only a man’s plaid flannel shirt.
“What? You’ve never seen a woman’s legs before?”
I admit I might have been staring. Between the pain and anxiety, I was not sure of anything.
“Grayson Reynolds,” I answered the other woman.
***
I recognized his voice instantly. He was the one who had called from a public phone three days earlier. Said he had found the job posted on the internet. From the strain in his voice and the noise in the background, it had sounded like he was near a busy street.
“Where are you?”
“I’m just north of Los Angeles, but I can be there in two days.”
I thought about this. I have never driven a car, but this did not sound right based on what I knew about geography.
“Hello? Are you still there?” he said.
“Are you flying, driving, or taking the bus?”
“Driving.”
“Isn’t that a
long way to drive in two days?”
“Yeah, it is. But I don’t want the job to go to someone else while I’m on my way there.” He sounded nervous and a bit desperate. But he also sounded intelligent and very different from the low life’s around here.
And now, here he was—three hours late. Daddy had long since given up and gone to town. Vonda and I were fighting—something we did with tiresome regularity—when he came to the door.
“You’re so late, we figured you came to your senses and decided not to show,” Vonda said.
I could smell the rain in his hair and clothing which helped to mask a faint odor of sweat and medicine. Having spent a lot of time at Momma’s hospital bedside, I recognized the betadine smell instantly. I might not be able to see, but I can smell and hear all kinds of things—even things people are thinking, but do not say. There was a roll of distant thunder and I shivered in delicious anticipation.
***
“Hold your fire.” I used the couch to stand and grunted from the effort.
“Did I hurt you?” The plate thrower was younger, brown-haired, and wore a long-sleeved top and overalls over a petite figure that was at least five inches shorter than the blond woman. Her alert posture reminded me of a hummingbird, ready to fly away in a millisecond.
I moved closer and stuck out my hand by way of introduction. “You must be Valerie, the one I spoke to.”
Ignoring my extended hand, she cocked her head in the same way the dog had. Large violet eyes swept the ceiling as if they were searching in another realm and I wondered if she was blind. If so, her aim was downright scary. Supernatural even.
We were standing at the entrance to the family room. Beyond it, separated by a dining room table and chairs, was the kitchen. The sound of a car in the driveway caused everyone to turn. Through one of the rain-streaked picture windows that framed the room, I saw an older Cadillac roll by on its way toward the larger of the metal-roofed outbuildings.
“Oh, crap,” Vonda said. “Just when we were having fun.”