by JD Dutra
Mei-Lin finally got up, went to the restroom, showered and got dressed, everyone in the team was required to keep changes of clothes at the safe house for times like these. She put on a pair of jeans, black running shoes and a t-shirt that clung to her figure to still add an edge of sensuality. She slipped her compact .45 on the small of her back and squeezed another backup pistol in one of her side pockets.
Ping had left hours ago, but gave her strict instructions first. He told her to go see a man named Ivan, a Russian who ran Rus’ Pick and Pull, a car salvage yard outside of Phoenix. Ping would send cars, and sometimes people there in order to make them disappear. Mei-Lin wondered if that would become her own final ‘resting place’. She felt scared, but her anger towards Oneita and Raymond was a stronger emotion. She knew it would be better to reclaim her box rather than living a lifetime looking over her shoulder.
She went to the kitchen and ate a light breakfast of a Greek yogurt and an apple, and then finally made her way out the door. When she got back into her Mercedes she smiled softly to herself, this was the last vestige of a life she knew was gone forever.
She got on the road, which was strangely deserted, with an unusual amount of abandoned cars here and there. She followed the satellite navigation on her dashboard to Rus’ Pick and Pull, before getting there she passed a brand new gas station that was being boarded up by a family. They had their cars packed to the limit as if they were getting ready to bug out of town. Maybe this was a sign that she should do the same.
In the distance, the walls of cars of all colors, crushed and piled up on top of each other became visible, the sun reflecting off the shattered windshields and bent metal like a sea of broken glass. Right at the entrance, there was a billboard with the Russian coat of arms on it, a black double headed eagle, heads looking away from each other, one holding a scepter and another an orb. A white knight was slaying a dragon in the middle. For a moment she wondered what those symbols meant.
Welcome to Rus ‘Pick and Pull’ was written next to it in large black letters, with the tagline ‘We Got All Kinds Of Parts’. There were cameras pointing at the entrance and she wondered who might be watching her. She couldn’t see an office or any movement besides rows upon rows of broken cars of all kinds, her heart began to race as she looked in, wondering what would happen next. At least there was no sign of the police.
The air conditioner on her car was blowing cool air that now had a faint smell of rusty metal to it. She put her car in park but kept the engine going, she began to dial the phone number on the billboard, and after two rings, someone picked up.
“Rus Pick and Pull. This is Grisha, how can I help?” A man said, his Russian accent was heavy and slurred.
“Hi, can I speak with Ivan please?”
“Ivan’s not here right now, can I take your message please?”
“Okay, when will he be back?”
“I don’t know.”
“I see. Has Ivan been in today?”
“I, I am not sure.”
“Alright, can I please have his cell phone number?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“What do you know?” Asked Mei Lin, irritated at the man’s attempt at customer service.
“What do you want?” He answered, snapping back.
“This is Mei Lin, I need to talk to Ivan right now!”
There was a brief silence, and the man’s accented voice suddenly became smoother, “Your name is… Mei Lin?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, hold please.”
Mei Lin sighed and turned her car around, pointing it to where she came from, thinking contacting Ivan was perhaps a bad idea.
“This is Ivan,” came the smooth voice without a hint of a Russian accent to it.
“Ivan, this is Mei Lin.”
“Mei Lin, I’ve been expecting your call. Your friend called me earlier, said that you needed help locating some special parts is that right?”
“Yes,” she said, imagining the man behind the voice to probably be in his mid-forties.
“Come on in and we’ll do our best to get you taken care of, we’re open until 5pm,” he said with detached professionalism.
“I’m not sure I can drive in. My car stopped outside your entrance. Can you meet me out here?”
“Sure, be right there.”
The phone went dead and Mei Lin looked into down the long gravel road that was walled off by rows of cars in several stages of deconstruction. This was a rough and dirty kind of business, one she would never have gone to in her previous life.
After a few minutes, from deep within the rows of cars, a black golf cart made its way towards her, with one man at the wheel. Mei Lin reached the small of her back and pulled out her .45, racking a round into the chamber and held it on her lap. As the man got closer, he slowed down as if trying not to kick up to much dust. He carefully drove around Mei Lin’s car towards her driver side window. He parked right next to her Mercedes and nodded at her, with a warm smile on his face.
He was a man in his late 30s maybe early 40s, with a thick black beard and well groomed, slicked back hair. He had no tattoos or jewelry she could see, but he had a built athletic physique that stood out for someone of his age. He was wearing a gray overall with the name Ivan embroidered on his left chest.
Mei Lin lowered her window, slowly sliding a manicured fingertip around the trigger of her gun, now strategically pointed at Ivan, but still concealed behind the car door.
“Hi Mei Lin, I’m Ivan,” he said with his hands on the wheel of the golf cart, he had a smile that Mei Lin recognized on the faces of the men who were physically attracted to her.
“Hello Ivan, nice to meet you.”
“The pleasure is mine.”
Mei Lin offered a polite smile, not knowing which direction this would go.
“Ping asked me to contact you, but we haven’t met before so I don’t know what he meant by it,” she said, her eyes noticing his facial expressions and his body language from behind her dark sunglasses.
He seems more relaxed than he should be.
“If you know Ping, you know it’s hard to imagine what he is thinking most of the time,” he chuckled. “I don’t know how much he has told you about us, but we were the ones who took care of the alarm guy and his truck. We’ve been doing business with Ping and his people for many years now.”
“I see,” Mei Lin said nervously, praying no one was recording this conversation.
“Ping said that you need to recover a box that some people stole?” Asked Ivan, his dark eyes moving from gazing into the blackness of her sunglasses down to her full lips.
“Yes, it’s a long story, but now they are blackmailing me with this item. I of course don’t want to pay, but I’ve got to have it all back as soon as possible.”
“By this item, you mean this?” He casually reached into his overall pockets, and Mei Lin readied her gun from behind the door, planning to fire through it and into his stomach if needed.
He pulled out a smartphone and began to thumb through some pictures, his large calloused hands showing off the eternal dirt stains ever present on the skin of those who worked with metal, oil and grease for a living. He showed her the screen of his phone, the picture displayed was that of her safe box. It laid opened and the different passports were neatly organized inside of it and five memory sticks were leaning on the box. Everything was neatly displayed as if for sale on an old kitchen table of a dark apartment.
“How did you get that picture?” Asked Mei Lin, her mind going in different directions, trying to understand what was really happening.
“I think things will start to get interesting from this point on,” said Ivan with a wolfish smile, his dark eyebrows furrowing with hidden meaning.
Chapter 24
Arizona Fairgrounds, Phoenix, Arizona
Saturday, October 24th, 2020
11:48 A.M.
Nathan, Isabella and their children stood in line, at the gates of the Arizona County
Fair. Little Emily was in Nathan’s arms, reaching up to touch the cooling mist that clouded above her, giggling and smiling happily.
“It was so nice of your boss to give us those tickets Nathan. I like Tom and his wife, they are so wonderful,” said Isabella, purposefully trying to strike up a conversation with her husband, who’d been quiet all morning.
“Yeah… I guess.”
Nathan kept on looking straight, towards the people who stood in line in front of them. The Fairgrounds was hot, crowded and noisy, but Nathan had never seemed so cold, alone and quiet.
Isabella wondered why he had been so distant. She came back from breaking things off with Daniel and picking up the girls from school around 4pm the day before, and Nathan was gone. He didn’t come back until late that night, and when he did, he barely spoke a word to her. That conversation she thought she’d have to have with him, about staying together and making things work never took place. Part of her didn’t mind, since putting everything on hold with Daniel had taken so much out of her. She had to give her marriage one final try, at least for the girl’s sake.
They didn’t say another word to each other and Nathan handed the tickets to the staff member and walked in, then his older daughter dragged him by the hand to the nearest ride. It was the first time he had smiled all day.
They went from one ride to another, the entire time Nathan only talking to Isabella when it was absolutely necessary, his daughters getting all his attention. When lunch time came, Nathan made conversations with his daughters only, completely ignoring his wife. She got more and more fed up by the minute, and when Nathan decided to buy the girls hot dogs and soda instead of siding with her and make them eat the healthier lunch Isabella had put together, she just stormed off on her own.
“Where is mommy going, Daddy?” Asked Emily, inhaling the delicious smell of fresh hot dogs and fixings with a smile.
“I think she is going to go see if her favorite ride is available,” he said with a forced smile, imagining her on her phone again trying to contact Daniel. He didn’t care where Isabella was going. It didn’t matter, after this family day at the fair was over, he’d get home, throw it all on her face and walk away from their marriage. He thought money was an issue at first, but under the circumstances, he could just sell the house or let the bank take it, Isabella could just get herself a job, he didn’t care. From this point on, he would take care of his daughters and them only.
I poured my heart out to her, the mother of my children, and begged her to stay with me. Instead she leaves me talking to myself to go have a conjugal visit in a damn jail.
She had gone straight to see Daniel Cross. The image of his visitor log on Nathan’s phone screen kept coming over and over again.
What a great idea that was, he thought.
He felt bad for his little girls, but his relationship with his wife was just too broken to be mended, the family life he risked himself over and over again to preserve was now a toxic web of lies and mistrust. She was right, it was time for them to part ways. Whatever happened in the future, however, he would make sure his girls wanted for nothing.
“Dad look! The police are here!” Said Julia, his oldest. He looked at her first and pinched her cheek, she was too young to be so interested in the adult world.
“Yeah, they’re taping off the entrance, I wonder what’s going on,” he said, blocking the sun with one hand. He counted eight officers in total, cordoning things off with a yellow police tape, right where he had come through hours earlier with his family. That meant he’d have to walk all the way around the park to exit it.
Several annoyed patrons had to leave without coming in, even after staying in line for several minutes. The staff at the fair ushered them out and redirected them to other gates and soon the entire entrance had cleared. Several people still stood nearby, watching the police set up.
A few feet from where they were enjoying lunch, there was a staff member sweeping the ground, a thin Hispanic old lady with even thinner hair that had more white than black in it, she looked way past 70 years old. She stopped her work to look in the direction of the entrance, that was now sealed off and crawling with police and other Fair staff members. She mumbled something in Spanish to herself and poked the sign of the cross on her old, frail body. It was right when she faced the sky with eyes closed and brought two wrinkled hands to her praying lips, that a Hispanic couple about Nathan’s own age approached her and started to talk to her in Spanish. Nathan didn’t know the language, but after watching the exchange for just a few seconds, he wished he did.
The old lady’s leathery hands waved in the air and her prune face was filled with horror as she told her story in bursts of whispers. The couple chatting with her looked at each other with their mouths open, the woman consoling the older lady with a hand on her shoulder, the man just shook his head repeatedly with a frown on his tan face. There was something in their body language that Nathan knew very well what it was.
Nathan waited until the conversation was done and the older lady had moved along. He told the girls to stay seated and keep eating before he stood up and approached the couple, keeping an eye on the children from a few feet away, making sure they were enjoying their churros and cotton candy without anyone bothering them.
“Excuse me,” he greeted the couple with a smile.
“How you doing?” Said the tan man before extending a friendly hand.
Nathan shook it firmly and cleared his voice.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help notice that old lady telling you guys what happened at the entrance gates there, the way she was going about it made me so curious. What happened?” Asked Nathan with a warm smile, trying not to get to close to make them feel uncomfortable.
The couple looked at each other, the woman had a mouthful of pizza and just motioned with her head for her husband to tell the story.
The man raised his eyebrows and began to speak, his voice had the light musical tones of a Spanish accent.
“Well that old lady said that all of the sudden her boss started blowing up everyone’s radio a while ago, wondering if anyone had lost a finger, or if they knew anyone in the staff who did,” the man said before sipping the foam of his beer.
“A finger? Ouch,” Nathan said with a chuckle.
“Yeah a finger. She asked her boss what happened, he told her he didn’t know. The older lady got so spooked, that she radioed her son who is the head of maintenance here, to ask him what happened. He told her they found a finger in the tank that feeds the misters that were blowing on everyone. Then there was something about some bloody rocks, she thought it was some kind of Brujeria, you know, black magic. Her son told her to keep it quiet, but she thought it was too wrong to keep that from people, so she called her priest, then she called the cops herself,” the man looked at his wife and both of them laughed.
His wife jumped in.
“She was worried because the kids who were working that gate yesterday evening all called in sick this morning… She is really scared.”
“That’s crazy,” said Nathan, who looked up from them to see Isabella at the table with his daughters, she was holding their hands and chatting.
“I’m going to jump in my salt water pool for a while when I get home that’s all I wanna do right now,” said the man, shivering and laughing.
“Me too,” said his wife, getting up.
“Well folks, thanks for letting me know, the curiosity was killing me but now I wish I hadn’t asked. We’re all going to die from voodoo,” said Nathan and the three of them chuckled.
The couple said their brief goodbyes to Nathan and he walked back to the table where his family was, unsure of how he felt about the situation.
“Isabella, I’m going to ask those officers what happened there, go take the girls out for some more fun, I’ll catch up with you.” He sounded like he was placing an order for a pizza.
“Sure,” she said, wiping her fingers clean from eating and putting a zip lock bag of
carrots away. Now she was the one who wouldn’t look at him.
He knew that face, that breathing. This time her guilt trips wouldn’t work. He didn’t care, his mind was made up.
Maybe she knew.
Nathan walked over to a young African American police officer who was standing in front of the police tape, calmly guiding people to other exits in the park.
“Excuse me officer, may I ask what happened here?”
“I don’t really know, I was just tasked with keeping people away,” said the officer, he had the face of a kid and his attempt to grow a mustache to add some years to his looks failed miserably.
“You don’t know? Can you ask the officers who are going back and forth at the entrance to find out?”
“I can’t, sorry. This is nothing serious, if it were, you’d now,” said the officer, his hands were open as if he were redirecting Nathan’s body too and not only his questions.
“Is this a drill or is this a serious call?” Nathan asked.
“It’s not a drill, now move along, please,” the cop asked while waving his hand at Nathan and at other curious people, hoping that his tone would discourage any more questions.
Nathan wished he had been given a CIA badge to flash around, but as far as he knew he wasn’t even on payroll, the money just appeared on his account, each and every month, it was simply annotated as cash deposits on his bank statements.
He stood there for a moment, watching, and suddenly the Sheriff was there and some guys in suits that he was sure were FBI. Now the urge to go home, log into his laptop and read some police reports was too overwhelming. He dialed his boss Tom, but he didn’t pick up. He called Isabella, she didn’t pick up either. Something in his gut told him he had to find out what happened. Perhaps then he would know that the bloody rocks they found here had nothing to do with the bloody rocks that were now baking in the Texan desert.
