“Well, we’ve plenty in Yorkshire. You’re not missing much.”
Sarah nodded out the front window towards town. “I hear you’re on your third room in two days.”
“News travels fast.”
“The Gage to the jail to the motel. Hard to miss.”
“I’ll start worrying if they move me into the mortuary.”
Sarah’s face turned to stone. “Don’t even joke about that. Around here, that’s not much of a stretch.”
Grant waved a hand to placate her. “Kid gloves, remember? Don’t think that involves putting me in the ground.”
“Until they change their minds.”
“I’ll look out for that. The old feller at the motel seems a decent type.”
“Hunter. Yes, he is.”
She didn’t reach up to her cheek but Grant sensed that’s what she was thinking. Steam rose from her coffee and mingled with his. The strands of smoke intertwined, then evaporated. There was a lot of history hiding behind her eyes, not much of it filled with smiles and laughter. Grant tested the water.
“Used to work with Doc Cruz. I didn’t know that.”
Sarah focused on her coffee. “Yes, he did. They looked after most of the town back in the day.”
“When they were together?”
“Yes. Before…”
Grant drummed his fingers up the side of his mug. “Before what?”
Sarah gulped down another mouthful of coffee and ignored the question.
“Hunter pulled his ticket after. Only stuck with the mortician job because it came with free transport.”
“Company car?”
“Company hearse. He can get all sorts of supplies in the back of that thing.”
“For his liquor cabinet?”
“It helps him forget.”
“Forgetting’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
Sarah let out a sigh. “Oh yes it is. There must be things you’d like to forget.”
That made Grant think. He wasn’t much for living in the past, but sometimes the past kept creeping up on you. After all, that’s what brought him here. He didn’t dwell on it, but he hadn’t forgotten it either. The past was history. You didn’t need to drag it around with you all the time. He reckoned for some people that wasn’t an option. That’s when they turned to drink. The great assuager.
The door from the street banged open and they both looked towards the sound. Sarah over her shoulder, Grant straight forward. A dust devil swirled around the floor as the door closed.
Grant nodded. “Well, talk of the devil and he will appear.”
Hunter Athey nursed his coffee like it was the last drink he’d ever have. He sat next to Sarah, opposite Grant. Three in a booth. The sun had moved around and was now blazing through the windows, making the vinyl seats hot.
Athey looked up from his coffee. “It’s hot as be-damn in here, girl. When you gonna invest in air conditioning?”
“When I get enough customers to pay for it.”
He noticed the awkward movement of her arm but didn’t reach out for it. Their eyes locked.
Sarah put added warmth into her voice. “He knows.”
Athey jerked his eyes to Grant, then back to Sarah. A brief moment of panic.
Sarah patted his hand on the table. “About the arm.”
Athey’s other hand covered hers. “Then he knows the best way to keep you safe is to get out of town.”
Grant pushed his empty cup across the table. “The best way to stay safe is to remove the danger.”
Athey turned to Grant, his eyes steadier than they had a right to be. “You are the danger.”
“I’m not the one did that to her arm.”
He paused for effect.
“Or her face.”
“You’re the one that caused it though. This time.”
Grant lowered his voice. “Man like that—there’ll always be a this time. The effect is another black eye or a bruised arm or worse.”
He leaned forward on his elbows.
“That’s the thing about cause and effect. You can’t have one without the other. Tripp Macready is a cause unto himself. Remove him.”
He leaned back in the booth. “Then no more midnight doctors.”
Athey leaned back too. He took a deep breath that puffed his chest out.
“You remove one Macready and you’re left with the other. Mean as a rattlesnake and twice as deadly. Won’t be a doctor you’ll need then. It’ll be a mortician.”
Grant wasn’t fazed. “Remove him too.”
Athey barked a laugh. “As simple as that.”
Grant shook his head. “Nothing worth having is simple.”
“Not achievable either.”
“Everything’s achievable.”
The air went out of Athey and he collapsed like a pricked balloon.
“Not in Absolution it ain’t.”
Grant glanced at Sarah and blinked once, then looked back at Hunter Athey.
“Then leave Absolution.”
Sarah sat up straight. “We’ve already had this conversation.”
Grant softened his eyes. “No moss in Texas. I remember.”
The trio fell silent. Steam rose from Athey’s cup. The other two coffees were dead. Sunshine blazed through the windows and glinted off the chrome boiler behind the counter. The diner was heating up. The atmosphere was cooling down. Coffee smells and hot vinyl made for a cozy feeling. The silence cut through it like a serrated blade, turning it cold and hard and dangerous.
Athey broke the stalemate.
“You came down here to see Doc Cruz. Yeah?”
Grant nodded. “That’s right.”
“He ain’t here.”
“That’s what everybody keeps telling me.”
“So there’s no reason for you to stay.”
Grant turned his gaze on Sarah. Under different circumstances… He shook that thought aside. This wasn’t the time or the place. He was in Absolution for a reason. Now it seemed that reason was dead. He felt it in his bones. Question was, did he want to do anything about it? The answer was a no-brainer. Considering why he’d come all this way to see him.
Athey leaned forward, strength returning to his voice.
“I know where Eduardo is. And how to get there.”
thirteen
How to get there proved to be novel in the extreme. The hearse was big and heavy and a much softer ride than Sarah’s little foreign car. It hugged the road and smoothed out the bumps. Terlingua wasn’t on the map he’d read at the Gage Hotel. Grant had to check the larger map at the Absolution Motel when he picked up the hearse. It didn’t seem that far. Until he’d been driving for an hour.
A hundred miles as the crow flies. A lot more on the winding roads of West Texas. Across to Marathon, then south on the 385. The road was straight enough to begin with but quickly deteriorated into just another desert highway. It rose and fell with the gentle undulations of the landscape, then slowly began to rise more often than it fell. Into the foothills of Big Bend National Park before swinging west between towering buttes and mesas.
Grant thought about what Hunter Athey had told him. He wondered about a world where a man had to hide under a false name just to survive. Hiding in plain sight, true. Working at a half-assed medical center a hundred and twenty miles away but hiding all the same.
Texas. Not the best place to be a Mexican. Unless you were close to the Mexican border. Big Bend National Park ran right along the Mexican border. Terlingua wasn’t far from it either.
The 385 became the 170. The blacktop remained the same. Faded and dusty and as winding as Snake Pass back in Yorkshire. Grant kept his eyes on the road, but his peripheral vision couldn’t hide from the desert landscape sliding by on either side. He drove past Kathy’s Kosmic Kowgirl Kafe on th
e left, a florid pink barbecue shack and reconstituted schoolbus. The American equivalent of a roadside burger van. The road cut through Study Butte, then dropped down out of the foothills towards Terlingua. A blink-and- you’d-miss-it town so small it made Absolution look like New York.
Grant didn’t blink and he still nearly missed it. There was no bullet-riddled welcome to terlingua sign at the town limits. There was no sign at all. It was only the El Dorado Hotel where the road branched right that marked the beginning of anything. It was the first building he’d seen in twenty minutes. He pulled over and stopped amid a cloud of dust. Terlingua Ghost Town Road was a single-lane excuse for a road that didn’t look like it went anywhere. The only other building was a speck on the horizon. If Eduardo Cruz was hiding in plain sight, he couldn’t have picked a better place. The entire town was hiding in plain sight and Grant hadn’t found it yet.
He urged the hearse forward, taking the right-hand fork. The El Dorado drifted by. The dust cloud followed him like a cape. The place was so barren there weren’t even any cacti. The sun baked down from a hard blue sky. Sweat trickled from Grant’s hairline and down the back of his ears. His T-shirt was sticking to his back as the leather seat grew unbearably hot even with the windows open. He kept his pace slow. This wasn’t a place you rushed through. Not if you were looking for something. Not if you took the right-hand fork.
There should have been vultures circling overhead. If this had been a movie, there’d be tumbleweeds blowing across the road. Neither was true. Terlingua was dry and empty and silent as the grave.
Grant reached over and touched the scarred velvet case on the passenger seat. Long and narrow. Solid. He could almost feel the stethoscope inside even though he couldn’t touch it. Hadn’t touched it for many years. The hard land sucked all the color out of the day. No greenery. No shade. As Sean Connery had said in The Wind and the Lion, “Where there is no shade from the sun, there is only desert. The desert I know very well.” Or something like that. In a Scottish accent. The main point was the bit about knowing the desert. Grant knew desert country. The landscape here was similar but different. The difference was people weren’t shooting at him or trying to carve him up. Those were his overriding memories of the desert. Where his mind took him now.
the past
What the fuck? You aren’t gonna outrun ’em.
—Cooper
fourteen
The stethoscope lasted half an hour before common sense prevailed. Half an hour after sunrise. Half an hour after Grant checked the downed Chinook to confirm the obvious. Wheeler, Carlino, and Adams hadn’t made it out of the chopper. The pilots were dead too. Grant didn’t say any words over the deceased. He didn’t waste time trying to recover the bodies. Two of them were half buried under the wreckage. The others were in pieces. While there was a certain amount of honor in the old maxim “Leave no man behind,” it made no sense to sacrifice the rest so that families would have body parts at the funeral. Grant’s duty now was to the survivors.
He darted back across the dusty street, keeping low and light on his feet. He moved fast and silent and barely scuffed the dirt to raise a dust cloud behind him. Voices sounded in the distance. The mob was gathering. The sun broke the skyline of damaged rooftops and crumbling boundary walls. A crackle of small arms fire joined the shouts of indignation from down the road. Gunshots fired into the sky like a call for celebration. They’d downed a helicopter after all.
Grant threw himself against the wall in the yard across the road from the crash site. Mack was nursing a bloodied leg. Cooper kept his assault rifle aimed along the street. Both glanced over at Grant. He shook his head and raised three fingers before folding them down with his other hand. Then he held up one finger and shrugged his shoulders.
“No sign of Bond. Any ideas?”
Mack pressed a bloody rag into the leg wound. “He made it to the ramp. Didn’t see him after that.”
Cooper turned his attention back to the street. “He lost his grip after the second bounce. Could have landed anywhere.”
Cruz kept quiet. She wasn’t part of the team. The bond they shared wasn’t her bond. Instead, she busied herself applying a field dressing to Mack’s leg. This wasn’t the time or place to make a full assessment. They all realized that. First order of business was to put distance between them and the wreckage. Buy some time before planning a strategy.
Grant knew what the priority was.
“Weapons check.”
Mack and Cooper followed his lead. They both checked their weapons and ammunition. An M16 each. An ugly black .45 automatic holstered in their webbing. They counted the spare magazines strapped to their belts. Mack had lost his commando knife. It had been torn from his leg scabbard along with a chunk of flesh and muscle. Grant had a .45 and a sniper’s rifle. He pulled his knife but only an inch of broken blade came out. The impact had snapped it in half. His leg felt bruised and sore but at least it was mobile.
Cruz tightened the dressing around Mack’s leg. Mack gritted his teeth but made no sound. Cruz was unarmed. She was the medic, supposed to be surrounded by armed men while she tranquilized the target package for easy transport. She focused on the job at hand: stopping the bleeding and getting Mack ready to move. There would be time for a more thorough examination once they’d found a safe location. In the desert township a safe location meant anywhere they weren’t shooting at you. If they didn’t move soon, the enclosed yard would become a shooting gallery. Dawn light glinted off the stethoscope swinging from her neck.
Grant spun a finger in her direction.
“Lose the stethoscope.”
Cruz turned an angry stare on Grant, then realized he was right. She finished tying off the bandage before slipping the stethoscope from her neck. She held it gently in both hands, her face telling an unspoken tale. The stethoscope was more than a piece of medical equipment. It had value. Memories. She swung the backpack off her shoulder and unsnapped the fastenings. Her hands rummaged inside and took out a long velvet case. She opened it and folded the stethoscope along its length. She snapped it shut and put it in the backpack. Her eyes told Grant not to argue. He didn’t.
“Mack. You good to go?”
Mack flexed his leg. It didn’t flex very far. He nodded. “I’m good.”
“Coop.”
Grant forked fingers at his eyes, then to the rear of the yard. Cooper shuffled back from his position covering the street and went in search of an exit strategy. Grant took Cooper’s place, scouting the street for the first signs of enemy activity. Enemy activity was coming. The gunshots and triumphant shouts were getting closer. The first wave was surging along the street towards the crash site. The downed Chinook was drawing their attention. That gave Grant a window of opportunity.
Cooper came back through a gap in the wall.
“Back alley. Parallels the street.”
Grant checked the crowd one last time, then scrambled to the rear of the yard. The gap in the wall was wide enough to climb through sideways. He stuck his head out and looked both ways. More derelict buildings. Some with washing hanging outside. Most with bars over the windows. Not many with glass left in the frames. No activity. Good. If they moved quickly, they might be able to flank the crowd and head towards the safe zone. A long walk in hostile territory. He drew his head back and hunkered down.
“Doc. You help Mack.”
Cruz nodded.
“Coop. Rear guard.”
Cooper didn’t need to nod. He was already in position to be last man out.
Grant focused on Cruz.
“Follow my lead. If Bond made it, he’ll be doing the same.”
Cruz kept her recriminations to herself. This wasn’t her unit. She’d have to abide by their rules. Under fire, survival was key. In combat, strong leadership made survival more likely. Grant was a strong leader.
“Let’s go.”
But he wa
sn’t infallible. The moment he squeezed through the gap into the alley, he knew he’d waited too long. The mob wasn’t just swarming down the main street, it was filtering through the network of back streets and alleyways like water finding the easiest route. Chanting and gunfire came from the left—the direction Grant wanted to go. Not in sight yet but closing fast. If Grant stayed here, the squad would be overrun. He needed to put some distance between his group and the mob. In the wrong direction.
He turned right and moved fast along the alley. Mack came out next, then Cruz, forming a human crutch. Cooper brought up the rear, eyes peeled for the first signs that they’d been discovered. The alley wasn’t straight. Nothing in the township was straight. That played in their favor. The approaching mob could be heard but not seen.
Yet.
Grant led the way. Steady movement, not sprinting. If he went too fast, Mack wouldn’t be able to keep up, and if Mack went down, it would delay them all. He didn’t. The alley doglegged left, then right. Once they’d rounded the corners, the sightlines were broken, but the noise was getting louder. Fifty yards was all Grant dared risk. Then he found another crumbling building and ducked in through a hole in the wall. Cruz helped Mack through the gap. Cooper waited until they were all through, then backed in, never taking his eyes off the previous corner.
They immediately took up a defensive formation, Cooper covering the back, Mack leaning against a wall but still covering the middle, Grant at the front window focusing on the street. The mob was congregating around the Chinook and the building it had destroyed, but they were ragged and stretched out at the rear and sides. That’s where Grant was looking. What he saw through his peripheral vision turned his blood cold.
Bond had made it as far along the street as Grant’s team—but on the opposite side. Behind a low wall with a view directly into the house Grant was hiding in. Bond was injured. He was leaning heavily to one side, blood clotting in a mass of red and black down his left sleeve. He glanced towards the crowd, then made his decision. The wrong one. To risk darting across the street while the mob was engaged dragging the bodies out of the chopper.
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