Saving Jason

by Michael Sears

  But we planned on leaving right after breakfast, driving there in the Lexus LX. I made up water bottles while the Kid cleaned up and got dressed. Willie and Hal both wore light windbreakers, so I knew they were armed. No sane human wears a jacket of any kind in Tucson in late August.

  The deep rumble of an automobile came to a stop out front and a moment later there was a knock at the door.

  “Somebody get that,” I called out, wondering who it could possibly be. The sales guy from DirecTV? I thought we had permanently discouraged him. The gas man? Hadn’t we just seen him the previous week? Wrong time of year for Girl Scout cookies.

  Hal stuck his head around the corner.

  “I think you should get out here, sir.”

  Two U.S. Marshals had come to visit. Their news wouldn’t be good.

  The living room wasn’t a small room, but the presence of two more tall, broad-shouldered, and grim-faced men made it feel that way. I was a touch over six feet and the shortest man in the room. I was wearing my habitual frown, but for once I had a good reason.

  They wanted me to move. Not to return to New York, but to scurry to another hideout—someplace more remote and therefore safer, so they said. The story came out in drips of coveted information, as though they expected me to obey their directive simply because they said so. They were scaring me.

  “I’m not trying to scare you. I’m telling you how it is. You might not want to hear it, but we believe you’re in danger. It makes sense to move. As soon as possible.” The marshal who was speaking had introduced himself as Marshal Reyes. He wore black, silver-toed cowboy boots with his suit. The other man, Deputy Marshal Geary, wore khakis, a loose polo shirt, and boat shoes. He had to be the only man in Arizona wearing boat shoes. It didn’t matter. Except for the clothes and hair color, all marshals looked alike to me. Call it an ex-con’s predilection.

  The mutilated body of a murdered man had been found in the desert. He had gone missing from the program. The service was reviewing all of their clients’ cases, looking for connections or possible leaks.

  I craned my neck back and looked down the hall. The door to the Kid’s room was still closed. I had been trying to get him to come out all week and now I dreaded his overhearing any of the conversation.

  “How did the killers find him?” I asked. “I was told you fellas had a perfect record.”

  “That’s true. We have never lost a client who followed the rules. That tells you that our guy wasn’t following the rules.”

  There’s really only one rule while in the WITSEC program: Do not contact any former friends or associates. All the other rules are variations on the theme.

  I wasn’t very good at following the rule. The secure chat room that Manny had set up was violation number one. Skeli and Larry also had access. Virgil and I had the bat phone. Skeli sometimes read me messages from Roger, so he was aware that we were in touch. None of them knew exactly where I was, or any other way to contact me, but according to the letter—and the spirit—of THE RULE, I was in daily violation.

  The bodyguards knew about the chat room. The marshals did not.

  “I don’t want to move. I don’t want to move my son. He doesn’t do well with change. He’s having a hard enough time as it is.”

  It certainly wasn’t my love of Tucson. I had absolutely nothing against the town, except for the heat, the food, and the sports teams, but it wasn’t home and never would be.

  Hal, with one month’s seniority over Willie and hence the spokesperson, leaned in and cleared his throat. He had been clearing his throat before speaking ever since he arrived in Tucson. It must have been either the dust or the pollen, because it certainly wasn’t the humidity. “If the marshals recommend a move, we are contractually bound to go along with it, Mr. Slater.”

  Slater was my WITSEC name. John Slater, known as Jack. I had asked for John Slaughter—the local version of Myles Standish or Daniel Boone—but the marshals vetoed it. They intimated that I wasn’t taking the process seriously. That wasn’t it at all; I was simply too terrified, confused, and concerned for my son in order to make any intelligent decisions.

  Hal continued. “And if you don’t take their advice, we are required to cancel your contract.” Hal was always polite, but he was a big guy and he rarely smiled. That lent an air of restrained anger to everything he said. He wasn’t angry, but he was serious. As serious as a loaded weapon.

  They would pack up and go. They were both there twenty-four seven, on duty even while sleeping. I accepted their presence as a cold necessity. I felt safer with them around. I just didn’t like the necessity.

  “So, you lost one of your clients.” I waited for Reyes’s response.

  “Essentially, he left the program.”

  The distinction mattered much more to him and his superiors than it did to the rest of the world. The guy was dead either way.

  “Being beaten, stabbed, tortured, and left for dead out in the desert is not how I want to end my days, but I don’t see the connection.”

  Reyes and Geary gave each other that We know much more than we’re telling, but maybe we have to say a little something more look. Every time you got two or more cops in a setting, you were guaranteed to see it at least once. “The client was very high profile.”

  “Yes, but you’re not moving every man, woman, and child in the program, are you? What does this ‘high profile’ guy have to do with me?”

  Hal looked out the window as though he had suddenly lost interest in the conversation. I realized that he knew the answer. Willie tried to catch his eye, but Hal was focused on a big Spartan Air Force cargo plane coming in to Davis-Monthan. The air force mothballs them there and they’re about as common in Tucson as cactus wrens.

  I waited. Eventually someone would fill the silence.

  Deputy Marshal Geary surprised me. He broke first.

  “According to your file, Mr. Slater, you had previous contact with the snitch.”

  Everybody in the program is a snitch. That’s what they call us and why they’ll never understand that, no matter what they do for us, it is always going to be “they” or “them” and “us.” Never “we.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Hal? You have anything you want to add to that?”

  He shifted his gaze back to me. “I had a message about it first thing this morning. HQ isn’t sure if there’s any correlation. They’re getting back to me.” The security firm that Hal and Willie worked for did their own research.

  “They make any recommendations?”

  “Maintain, pending further developments.”

  I did not have a large circle of friends or acquaintances who might be somewhere in the program. In fact, I could think of only one possibility. He wasn’t a friend. He was instrumental in my ex-wife’s murder. He didn’t order it, but he could have stopped it.

  “This wasn’t a certain South American banker, was it? I thought someone told me he was in a cheese shop in Florida.”

  When witnesses are also federal prisoners, they’re protected from a potentially murderous and revengeful general population by being housed in special facilities throughout the BOP—Federal Bureau of Prisons. These secluded wings where the “rats” are kept are known as “cheese shops.” It’s not just the inmates who call them that. Every employee of the justice system uses the same nomenclature.

  “His family pulled strings and cut him a deal. He was relocated to Sacramento with a new identity.”

  Castillo was his name. Tulio Botero Castillo. We had met while I was chasing down some missing money for Virgil. Castillo came from a prominent banking family in Colombia. I had engineered the ploy that forced him to choose between testifying or getting killed in prison. He wasn’t a nice man—though he had impeccable manners—and he would have felt no remorse if it had been me who was found half eaten by coyotes and other scavengers, but I felt another notch carve
itself into my battered psyche. Someday I would have to come to terms with all of the ghosts from my past.

  “California? What was he doing in Arizona?”

  “He drove to Phoenix two weeks ago, after checking in with his handlers for his biweekly. He checked into the Valley Ho in Scottsdale, but checked out three days later. Then he went off the grid.”

  That was what I called an unsatisfactory response. It had great detail, but no pertinent information.

  “What happened? How’d you lose him?”

  The two marshals shared another quick look. “We have reason to believe that he was using the Internet to contact members of his family.”

  That sent an electric charge through my brain. It zapped a few million nerve cells, and I was sure my body jerked. None of the men in the room reacted, but they must have caught my distress.

  “There are ways to cloak that,” I said.

  Deputy Geary spoke. “And I’m sure there are ways to get around the cloaking. The thing is, he didn’t follow the rules.”

  “By choosing to remain here, you will, in effect, be removing yourself from WITSEC. You understand that, don’t you?” Hal was a by-the-rules kind of guy. I didn’t like him or dislike him. Personality was not what he was good at—or there for. If you were stuck sitting next to him on a long bus ride, you’d want to have a good book to read. But when he weighed in on something, he was direct. There was no bullshit with Hal.

  I didn’t want to move. The Kid didn’t want to move—unless it meant going back to his school, Heather, the Greek coffee shop across Amsterdam, and all the other markers of his old home in New York. But if I stayed, I was not just risking my life, I was risking his as well. There really was no other way to decide it.

  “Ah, screw it,” I said. “Where’re we going?”

  “We were thinking Las Vegas,” Marshal Reyes said.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me. Las Vegas?”

  “New Mexico.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s a college town,” Geary said in what I thought was supposed to be a cheery contribution.

  “I’ve been there,” I said. “I bought gas there once.”

  “What’d you think?” Geary said.

  “They kept a clean restroom.”

  “It’s quiet,” Reyes said. “It’s a little more rural than Tucson.”

  If that was meant to sound reassuring, it failed the test. Did I have a choice? No.

  “How far is it from Il Mulino?”

  They looked at each other. “I don’t know,” Reyes said. “What’s Il Mulino?”

  “An Italian restaurant in Manhattan. I miss it sometimes.”

  Reyes smiled. “Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ve heard of pizza in New Mexico.”

  “I will attempt to keep an open mind,” I said. “New identities?”

  Geary handed me a thick envelope. “John Sauerman. We kept your initials.”

  “When do we leave?”

  “As soon as you’re packed.”

  “Let me go break the news to my son.”

  44

  I walked through the dining room toward the back of the house. The hall was the darkest—and coolest—point in the house. With all the doors closed, the AC vent overhead blasted the small space. It could be over one hundred on the front stoop and eighty in the kitchen, but the hall would feel like a meat locker. Only a bit of reflected sunlight made it into the hall, and the overhead light got a workout, night and day. We had already been through a box of bulbs in the few months living there.

  I hit the switch, more out of habit than necessity, and was not terribly surprised to find that, once again, the bulb was shot. I ignored it and continued down the hall. My foot brushed something on the floor, and before I could stop myself I had sent a line of five Matchbox cars flying. Standard response was muffled anger and the delivery of a monologue to my unresponsive son on the hazards of leaving his toys in the middle of a thoroughfare. But I found that I didn’t have the heart for it. I scooped up the cars and filled my pockets.

  “Kid!” I called to the closed door. I knocked, counted to ten, and knocked again. “Kid, I’m coming in.”

  I tried the knob. The door was locked. That was forbidden. When I discovered that his bedroom could be locked from the inside, I attempted to replace the whole assembly. I removed the knobs and all the metal bits inside and brought them to a locksmith, who informed me that I would have to change the door. The door, I learned when I then went to a window and door purveyor, was a custom size and delivery of a new one ordered on the spot might be early October, with luck, and would cost as much as two months’ rent. I put the pieces back—thrilled with myself that the mechanism still worked—and sat my son down for another one-sided talk. He reluctantly agreed that his safety was of primary importance, and that it therefore made sense to Never Lock the Door. Now he had locked it again.

  Frustration—and parental anger—had blinded me. There was a thru-line and I had missed the connection. The Kid had been lining up his cars—an activity that straddled the border between play and compulsion—in the hallway. From the hall it was possible to hear even a muted conversation in the living room, and none of us had been trying to be quiet. Therefore, the Kid had heard us. He had then run into his room, upset enough to abandon his cars, and locked the door.

  Those were all conjectures, but the evidence, cause and effect, and two years of history with my son led me to those conclusions.

  I reviewed the conversation we had been having in the living room. The description of the body had been detailed. At least two assailants, and possibly as many as four, had beaten and tortured the man for hours before crucifying him in the sand. Then the local fauna had gone to work. Explicit references to body parts and bite marks had been mentioned. All this while I had stupidly assumed the Kid was in his room and well out of earshot.

  So, the Kid had obviously heard the horror of what had been done to Castillo and then run into his room and barricaded himself against a similar fate. That was my working hypothesis. It fit all the known facts. It just happened to be wrong.

  —

  A thump sounded on the other side of the door. I put my ear to it. A minute later, there was another thump. The mats. A suggestion of Heather’s, passed through Skeli when she heard that the Kid was not transitioning well. I had hung a big wrestling mat on his wall and placed another on the floor below it. The Kid loved the arrangement. He rolled, jumped, fell, and threw himself against the padded wall and floor until he staggered with exhaustion. It had terrified me at first, but I quickly learned that it was less harmful than letting him bump into furniture or leap off the landing on the basement stairs, and it usually led to a long nap, which was my reward.

  “Kid, you need to unlock the door. I’m here to help you.”

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Maybe I could get one of the marshals to shoot the lock.

  Thump.

  “Kid!”

  Thump.

  I took out my wallet and scrounged through it for my library card. It was thinner than a credit card, flexible, yet sturdy. It slipped between door and jamb and I swept it down to the catch. There were two more thumps while I jiggled the fittings, bending the card and forcing it harder against resistance. I felt the card snap in half.

  “Willie! Give me a hand. The Kid’s locked himself in.”

  Willie, in addition to his culinary skills, we had quickly learned, was, of the four males living in the house, the one most handy with tools. I didn’t bother calling a marshal because I associated them with locking things up rather than breaking in.

  Willie arrived in a moment with a long, thin screwdriver. He forced it under the jamb next to the knob and jimmied the door. We winced in unison at the sound of splitting wood.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, don’t thin
k about it. Just do it.”

  He did. The door swung open.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  “Kid? Kid? It’s me. Your dad. I was worried about you, guy. I’m coming in. I’m not mad about the door. I understand. You’re scared and I don’t blame you.” I repeated those words as I walked in and looked around his room. He had heard us and had gone into hiding.

  I looked under the bed, though it was the most unlikely spot. Nine out of ten kids would have hid under the bed, but not my guy. Too dirty. Dusty. Not a chance. But I looked anyway because I’m an NT (neurotypical) and what the hell do we know. I checked the closet, the bathroom, the shower, the laundry hamper, and under the drawing table. He wasn’t anywhere. I began to feel the first stirrings of panic.

  “Willie, get in here. You look. He’s not here.”

  Willie repeated my steps. I felt like screaming at him “He’s NOT under the goddamn bed, you idiot!” but I held it back.

  Willie found the Kid’s escape hatch. In the back of the closet, a panel of loose drywall had been shifted aside. Through the gap we could see into the closet of the adjoining bedroom. The twin-bed guest room the bodyguards shared.

  I couldn’t help but give a silent “Attaboy!” for my son’s ingenuity. He had created a blind with the locked door, making me and Willie waste valuable time while he escaped into the other bedroom. It was a ploy. It required multipart strategy, an understanding of my patterns and responses, and a good bit of chutzpah. Nicely done. I was less concerned rather than more. It meant that he was somehow in control.

  “Check your bedroom,” I said. “I’ll look in mine.” The odds of the Kid having hidden in the shared bathroom were down around zero. A single errant pubic hair or smear of toothpaste left in the sink would have had him sobbing with anxiety.

  It took me seconds to search my room. I had a few suits in the closet and some shirts on hangers, a bed with no head- or footboard, and two large plastic baskets—one held clean underwear and socks, the other held dirty. I lived simply when in hiding. The windows were all shut, the blinds down and closed. The room was cool and in twilight. I felt a wave of exhaustion and wanted to sink onto the bed and put a pillow over my head. Could I just have one hour, a half hour, an uninterrupted ten minutes where I did not have to cope? Where I could just relax and let all cares go? Obviously not.