Saving Jason

by Michael Sears

  The computer survived the experience. So did I. I held it in my hands and felt the Kid’s presence. Emotion threatened to overwhelm me, and I forced myself back into front brain mode. I was going to find my son, and to do that I needed a clear head.

  I turned on the iPad and put in the Kid’s password—8, 1, 1, the number of our apartment at the Ansonia. His magic image-finder app was open and running. It hit me. It was too simple. Anyone could have taken my picture, run it through this app or one like it and found my true identity. I wasn’t exactly a celebrity, but my face had been in the news more than a few times, most recently thanks to Blackmore’s machinations. How that unknown person had known who to call to sic the Maras on me was a separate mystery, but I thought I had the first clue. Leaving the witness protection program was the wisest thing I had done. Nowhere was safe. Hiding didn’t work. If I had to live the rest of my life with a constant bodyguard, that was a better existence than cowering here at the end of the road. It all fit and made sense to me. The Kid and I were going home—just as soon as I found him. It took only another minute to find that all of my deductions were wrong.

  I swiped the page to see what pictures my son had last researched. Cars. The marshals’ Cuda. A swaybacked, bone-thin dog from Deming. An ancient Chevy pickup he had photographed on the street in Las Vegas. A blurred long shot of the valley that, after some manipulation, revealed four indistinct shapes that could have been javelinas. There was only one picture of a person. Only one. Willie. The Kid had caught Willie at the kitchen counter the previous morning, looking directly into the webcam. The picture must have been taken moments after I went out for some “outside air.” It was a good shot. It looked just like him. I touched the search button and waited.

  The app flashed rapidly, one image appearing instantly as the previous near miss was rejected. Sometimes the mistakes were ludicrous—women or old men—sometimes even humorous—a sleepy-eyed cartoon mule. The program began to slow. Fewer pictures appeared, but they were much closer to the original than any of the previous possibilities.

  “Ready to roll?” Robertson said.

  I looked up. He and Hal were standing by the door.

  “Give me one minute. I just came up with something,” I said.

  Robertson looked surprised. “Okay.”

  “I’m loading the off-roads,” Hal said, walking out with three bulging backpacks.

  The app continued to work. From the rejects, I could see why the program was being forced to work so hard. Willie had an unremarkable face. He looked like a thousand other men. There were too many faces that were almost a fit. Willie was the noncelebrity. The face that would disappear in any crowd.

  Then the screen stopped flashing and resolved into four quadrants. Each held a headshot of a face that could easily have been Willie. One man had a mustache, small and groomed, no bigger than a toothbrush, but it practically jumped off the screen. Another face was half covered with a thick black beard, but I could see why the app had chosen it. The shape of the eyes, the nose, and the forehead were an excellent match. They could all have been the same person.

  I kept staring. The fourth face looked the least like Willie. The nose longer, the cheeks less angular. But the eyes were very much like Willie’s. And then I saw why the computer had chosen that image.

  “Would you ask Hal to come back in here?” I said. “I want him to see this.” I clicked on the one face that was, without a shadow of a doubt, Willie’s.

  They were both back in less than a minute.

  “Take a look,” I said. “You know this guy?”

  Hal took the iPad. “What is this?”

  “This is the Kid’s iPad. That’s what he was playing with yesterday. Just before he took off.”

  “Well, they all look like Willie. But this guy is Willie. He’s had some work done since this picture was taken—the nose for sure—but there’s no doubt. It’s him. Look at the ears. There can’t be more than one set of ears like that in this world.”

  “Click on that face. See what you get.”

  He touched the screen. “Oh shit.”

  61

  Willie was a dead man.

  EX-DEA MAN KILLED IN METH LAB FIRE

  Huntingburg, Indiana—Justice finally caught up with the killer Walter Lee Collins this week. The ex–DEA agent and convicted murderer, currently under federal indictment in the Southern District of Florida for soliciting and accepting bribes, drug trafficking, money laundering, and a host of other related charges, was killed in an explosive fire that erupted during an eight-hour siege by U.S. Marshals, federal agents of the DEA, and Indiana state troopers of a farm in this rural section of southwest Indiana. According to ISP 1st Sgt. Adam Wheeler, “The farm was being used as a meth factory. We don’t yet know what initiated the explosion, but there were large containers of volatile chemicals on the premises.” Identification is pending on the bodies of two other individuals, assumed to be co-conspirators, found in the ashes of what had once been a hog-raising housing system on the property.

  Collins was a ten-year decorated veteran of the federal agency and a member of an elite task force that operated in Southern Florida. The team was restructured in 2008, and two senior members were allowed to resign after allegations of abusive and possibly illegal practices, though no charges were ever filed against either agent. After reassignment, Collins’s performance evaluations slipped dramatically, triggering an internal investigation that eventually revealed a pattern of criminal activities going back three years. Local authorities in Florida believe that Collins was tipped off to the investigation and was able to flee prior to arrest. Today’s events end a two-year nationwide search . . .

  “Your son could read this?” Hal said.

  “No. But he knows enough to get the gist.” He knew the word kill.

  “How old is this article?”

  “Three years. Our Willie has managed to fly under the radar for quite a while.”

  “We have to get the marshals back here.”

  “I have to get up into that backcountry and save my son.”

  “And I need to protect my people,” Robertson said.

  “Then let’s move,” I said. “No radio. He might be listening in. Cell phones only.”

  62

  From the air, the foothills had appeared desolate and unmarked, but coming up on the ATVs, we followed well-used trails through a forest of short trees. I understood much better the problems of tracking someone through this wilderness. Off the trail, the ground was rough, rocky, and as dry as moondust. Tracks might show up in the sand or be filled in by the merest puff of wind. Outcroppings of rock might be a single large stone, or the tip of an underground mountain.

  Two miles up a series of dusty trails was the LKP camp. It would have taken us an hour to hike up to it. The ATVs got us from the canyon where the road petered out and up to the camp in ten minutes.

  They had set up self-supporting tents in a semicircle. A rope was stretched between two trees, and six horses were tied to it. They looked miserable. Facing the tents was a canopy about ten feet a side. Hanging from it, like a decoration at a Brooklyn block party, were strings of multicolored Christmas tree lights. Underneath it—the only shade in sight—was a long folding table and camp chairs. Betty sat there with a handheld radio, a cell phone, and a map. All the tools she needed.

  “I’ve called all of my teams,” she said as we approached. “Your man is out along this area here.” She pointed at the map.

  Robertson and I huddled over it. The lines of elevation through that section were close together, indicating a steep series of inclines.

  “They don’t get much signal over there, unless they’re up on a rise.”

  “Can you show me where you found the yellow threads?” I asked.

  She dug in a backpack and retrieved a large plastic ziplock freezer bag. “Here they are. The patch of stickers where we
found it is just down that trail—maybe ten meters.”

  They were the same color as his shirt. “We’ll start there,” I said.

  “Hold up,” Robertson said. “I don’t want to bump into this nutter stumbling down the swash of some gully over here.”

  “I’ll be with you every step,” Hal said.

  Robertson smiled at him. “That goes without saying. But I want to avoid trouble. We’re here to get the child. Let the marshals come back and take on the bad guy. It’s their job.”

  “I think we now know who called in those Mexican shooters,” Hal said. “If I get a chance to take him out, I will do it.”

  “Well, let’s hope you don’t,” I said. “Who takes point?”

  “I do,” said Robertson. “You two stay close. Betty, if you hear shots, call all your people in and get them back down to the house. I don’t want any of our volunteers taking a stray bullet.”

  “Clear,” she said.

  Robertson led the way. I followed a few steps back, with Hal not far behind me. We strode quickly at first. That section of the trail had been covered extensively already.

  “Let your eyes relax. You’re not looking for something specific. You’re trying to find an anomaly. Broken twigs, bits of color that don’t belong, marks on the ground. We stop and look at anything.”

  A quarter of an hour later, I was already feeling the effects of dehydration. Sweat evaporated faster than it ran, so it was hard to explain why my lips felt like they were cracking and my brain was working at half speed. How had the Kid survived twenty hours of this? There was something about that question that began working on me. How had he survived? Answer that, and I had a good chance of finding him.

  We stopped for a drink of water and a quick planning session.

  “I want to cover this section from this cliff to the arroyo over here,” Robertson said, pointing them out on the map. “Once we get over this next rise, you’ll be able to see the cliff. It’s a big rock face due south of us.”

  “It’s the biggest chunk of rock out here,” I said.

  “We’ll hike down to the arroyo. It runs roughly parallel. We can then do diagonal sweeps between the two, working our way up toward the end of the valley. Questions?”

  “The cliff faces north. The base will be in at least partial shade all day.” I was trying to think like a lost child. My lost child.

  “Good point, Mr. Stafford.”

  Crossing the top of the next rise, we were hit by the full heat of the morning sun. I pulled my cap lower, but it was like looking into a furnace. Color disappeared. My eyes were so dry it hurt to blink.

  “How’s everybody?” Robertson said. “It gets hotter, if you can believe it. I started doing cave rescues years ago, because climbing down into dark, rattlesnake-infested holes in the ground beat walking around in a hundred-and-twenty-degree desert heat.”

  He was talking to keep us alert. It was too easy in that heat to let the mind drift and concentration slip. It worked. I shook off the lethargy and focused on the Kid.

  We came to the arroyo. The sides had once been steep, but too many dry seasons had caused them to collapse. Vegetation had spread across the wide, dry creek bed. We stuck to the trail.

  “Javelinas probably cut this. There’s deer and elk farther up in the mountains, but they don’t get down this way much. Nothing for them. But if you see a family of those pigs coming through, don’t hesitate. Jump off the path or they’ll run you right over. They’re aggressive sons-a-bitches and they’ve got tusks. They’ll hurt ya.”

  “There are a lot of them here, too. We’ve been seeing small herds of them every day since we arrived,” I said.

  “Could be the same group. They move around a lot. You probably saw them most in the morning and late afternoon. Watch your step. There’s a rattler under that tree.”

  The little pine was about six feet off the trail and only about knee-high. It was almost bare of needles and looked more dead than alive. The snake was curled around the base, hugging the sparse shade, and so well camouflaged I had to stare hard to make out the triangle-shaped head against the mottled, dusty brown soil. It was smaller than I expected—only three feet long or so.

  “Keep moving and he won’t mind you. Most people get snakebit because of curiosity. That or stupidity.”

  I was not curious. Neither was Hal. We both stayed on the far side of the trail as we moved past it.

  The Kid would have been curious, I thought. Not stupid, but not knowing any better. That cold hollow returned to the pit of my stomach. I refused to answer the question of what I would do if we didn’t find him.

  63

  We swept back and forth across that section of the valley four times. We saw no more snakes, but, according to Roy Robertson, that was due to our failure to see them rather than there being only one rattlesnake in the whole valley. We took a break in the shade of the cliff each time we reached it. We drank water—“rehydrated” was how Robertson put it—and let a film of sweat appear. Then, stepping back out into the sunlight, the sweat instantly evaporated, and for a minute it felt as cool as springtime.

  “Coyote,” he said, pointing at the ground.

  I saw what looked like dog tracks in the sand. There seemed to be a lot of them.

  “We may be near a den,” Robertson continued. “Keep an eye out.”

  “I thought you said they weren’t dangerous.”

  “All wild animals are dangerous. What I said was they rarely attack. But they will defend a den.”

  “It looks like there were a lot of them here,” I said.

  He smiled. “Does it? Or it could be just a few moving around—agitated over something.”

  I looked up. The cliff looked like a single rock, the face smooth and weathered. Two-thirds of the way up—some twenty feet over our heads—the rock was split laterally in a long gash, creating a recess that in spots was two feet tall but dwindled down to nothing.

  The crevasse was well-shaded from the sun. I imagined the rock would still be cool in there. If I’d been a child looking for cover, that’s where I would have headed.

  “Could the Kid have climbed up there?” I asked.

  Hal looked up and ran his hands over the smooth rock. “I’ve done some rock climbing and I know I couldn’t do it.”

  Robertson stood back and eyed the whole wall. “We should check. I don’t see how the boy could have managed it, but I don’t like not looking into every possibility.”

  The cliff was a lot taller than any of the rocks in Central Park, but no steeper or smoother. I didn’t know how the Kid could have done it, or where he’d get the confidence to try, but in my mind I could easily picture him creeping up the face of a mountain. Coming down was a different story entirely.

  “If he’s up there, he has no idea of how to get down,” I said. “He’d be like a cat in a tree.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Hal said.

  “Hey, Kid!” I called out. “It’s your dad. It’s Jason. Come on out. I want to take you home. Your real home, okay?” I didn’t expect an answer, so I wasn’t disappointed when I failed to get one. “How do we get up there?” I asked. “Anybody got a ladder?”

  “No, but we can rappel down,” Robertson said. “We’ll hike around the base and come up the back side. According to the map, the land flattens out up there. I’ve rope and some equipment in my pack.”

  “Now?” Hal asked. We had only covered about half of the valley.

  “I don’t think he’s there, because I don’t see how he could get up there,” Robertson said. “But it’s out of the sun and safe from everything that walks, runs, or slithers down here. If I could climb up there, that’s where I’d want to be. Let’s go. We can come back and finish our sweep later in the day.”

  The lines on the map appeared in my mind. “Head up to the east. It looks steeper, but it’s not. The
west-side approach goes through much rougher country.”

  Robertson checked his map and a moment later agreed. “He’s right.”

  For the next half hour, we made our way up a steep incline at the upper end of the valley. All three of us were reeling with exhaustion by the time we got to the top of the rise, but looking back we could see that the top of the rock was now slightly beneath us. We rested for a minute while Robertson scanned the valley with his binoculars.

  “There’s a group of searchers a bit to the west. I can’t tell if your man Willie is one of them or not.”

  There seemed to be a lot of vegetation for a desert. A lone man could have hidden nearby and easily followed us without being seen. “He could be anywhere,” I said. “We can’t worry about him. Let’s just stay alert and find the Kid. The sooner we’re out of these hills, the better.”

  “Agreed,” Hal said, but he didn’t stop looking.

  It took us only minutes to hike back down to the top of the cliff.

  “Hey, Kid. Can you hear me?” Still no answer.

  The rock was solid up top with no place to dig in anchors. We dropped our backpacks and executed a quick reconnaissance of the cliff.

  “Can you two take my weight?” Robertson asked.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “He doesn’t know you. And besides, if anyone is going to fall, I’d rather it was me.”

  Robertson ignored every maniacal word I said. “Can you take my weight?”

  “Yes.” I would.

  “I’ve done this kind of thing a hundred times or more. Follow my instructions and we’ll do just fine.”

  Hal and I each took the end of a line and wrapped it around our waists. Robertson hooked both ropes to his harness and made sure they ran free and stopped when he squeezed the clamp.