An Absence of Principal

by Jimmy Patterson

  “But your office could have been bugged when you were talking early on about wanting to follow this path of the two kilos.”

  “I never mentioned it to anyone, in any conversations,” Alex said.

  It made no sense. Garrison knew the cartels and the drug operatives were the embodiment of evil, but they never had any supernatural ability to determine a person’s motives. The call to Alex had to come from her DEA superior, Garrison thought. Unless someone had broken into Alex’s hotel or her room at Maria’s house to obtain her cell number, her DEA boss was corrupt and a part of the bigger problem of trafficking. Alex’s husband, though, was still an unknown factor in the whole scheme of things.

  “What happened next?”

  Ben Doggett now knew what it felt like to be called to the principal’s office. His stomach churned as he drove to Superintendent Martin’s, wondering and worrying the whole way about just what his boss knew. Ben wondered whether the students on their way to his office ever worried this much on the walk down that they think they’re going to lose their lunch because of it. He would be more lenient on his students. If he was ever given a chance again, Ben thought.

  “Morning, Beau,” Ben said.

  “Come in, Ben. Have a seat.” Martin’s tone was all business. It made Doggett’s stomach lurch a little.

  Ben was clearly disheveled. He’d thrown on a shirt that he’d worn the day before. The wrinkles in his sleeves spoke more about how Ben’s life had started to unravel, but not nearly as much as did the red eyes he had and his inability to concentrate for long periods of time. Being hung over will do that to a person.

  “You OK? You look tired,” Martin said.

  “I’m good, good,” Ben assured, sounding somewhat unsure, as if he was trying to talk his boss into something he knew wasn’t true.

  “Ben, I got a call yesterday from an attorney who said he was representing Angela. You need to tell me anything?”

  “We’re just going through a rough patch,” Doggett responded quickly. “A little counseling and a few weeks separation and we should be fine.” Ben’s eyes darted around the room, down to his lap, and over Martin’s shoulder. He did all he could to avoid prolonged eye contact with the superintendent.

  “That’s not the impression I get, Ben,” Martin said. “We can’t be having our elementary school principals putting themselves in, shall we say, compromising situations. You and your mistress get that straight, you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Until you do, and until I am convinced that you have, I have no choice but to place you on administrative probation.” Martin said.

  “What exactly is administrative probation?”

  “Just understand, Ben, that I am aware of some serious conduct violations. At this stage, that knowledge is between you and me and the school board. It will be discussed in executive session, but for now, it will be kept quiet. If you don’t straighten this out fast, I’m afraid this will get a bit more complicated. I want it done and over. Principals who are sleeping around on their wives can’t be walking around 5-and 6-year olds. It’s bad form. And personally just between me and you, that sort of conduct makes me sick. Fix it. And do it now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said.

  Great, Ben thought when he had escaped into the hallway. Angela’s bulldog attorney had put him in his place. She must be serious. With every passing day Ben didn’t know how he could feel any lower. A little drink ought to calm his nerves.

  “You have a minute?” the question came from Aaron Sanchez, the information technology specialist for Midland ISD. Doggett had left the building by the time Sanchez had stuck his head into Martin’s office.

  “Come in, Aaron,” Martin said. “How can I help you?”

  “We may have a situation,” Sanchez said.

  “Like I need another one,” Martin said. “What’s up?”

  “I just finished the year-end computer usage logs for each of our campuses. Aside from the high incident of Facebook visits among a lot of our students and teachers, believe it or not, there was no notable misuse of equipment on our secondary campuses — and by that I mean no surfing of porn sites by either faculty or students — that I could detect. There was, however, what appears to be an inordinate amount of time spent at a number of online gaming sites at one particular campus.”

  “What kind of online gaming sites?” Martin asked.

  “Casinos. Gambling. Black Jack, poker, roulette, slots, that kind of stuff,” Sanchez reported.

  “How much misuse?”

  “Between September of last year and end of term last month, fifty hours, 35 minutes,” Sanchez said.

  “Were you able to pinpoint who might have this little problem?” Martin asked. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to know.

  “I can’t say for sure, Mr. Martin, no. But the originating IP address is from the unit inside an administrative office at Stephen F. Austin Elementary,” Sanchez said.

  “Which administrative office at Stephen F. Austin Elementary?” Martin asked.

  “Principal Doggett’s,” Sanchez said.

  Martin swiveled in his chair and looked out the window just as Doggett was speeding out of the central office parking lot.

  “And one other thing, Mr. Martin. I received an email from the Odessa Police Department this morning, asking for personal information on Tony Nail.”

  “Refresh my memory?” Martin said.

  “Head custodian at Stephen F. Austin,” Sanchez said.

  “Why’d OPD want that?”

  “Nail was arrested for murder yesterday. They tell me it looked like a drug deal gone bad. Said they had received a tip that he was in the area. Apparently he has a history we didn’t know about as thoroughly as we should have.”

  “Nail? Wait. Isn’t he the man we have who also ministers to the homeless over in West Odessa?”

  “That’s the word,” Sanchez said.

  CHAPTER 7

  Alex Wallace woke up in the seaside Chilean village of Valparaiso on the first full day of the second leg of her trip. She had been at it only a few weeks and had already lost a friend and watched a family die horribly. She knew well that she had the stomach for following the journey of these two kilos of cocaine, but still, death was a difficult thing to watch, especially when it happened to friends and children. And more so when it happened so close.

  “I remember thinking how industrial Valparaiso looked and I had no idea this existed in coastal South America. You think cliffs or resorts, palm trees and gently rolling waves coming in. This was as industrial as any of the docks on New York’s East River,” she would later tell Trask during one of their routine debriefing sessions.

  Alex was still spooked about the phone call the night before and was suddenly skeptical about her plan. Even more unsure that she should step outside her hotel room. Who had called her? Was someone watching her every move?

  Alex instead set up surveillance from her second floor hotel room. She had taken a pair of binoculars with night vision and a digital sensor from the DEA property locker that allowed her to focus on movements that might otherwise be difficult to pick up on.

  Alex wasn’t certain just how she would know where the cocaine would be loaded or when; she was fairly certain anything that happened would come at night. The first day she noticed a north-south train that pulled through the dock area frequently. It annoyed her because it was constantly blocking her view of the workers on the boats and their loading and unloading cargo.

  The boats at the dock ranged from small skiffs and tugboats that bobbed up and down as the waves pounded the docks, to the larger cabin cruisers, which always looked out of place to her, to ferries and the huge barges that carried oil around the Strait of Magellan. The strait separated Chile from the southern tip of the continent and provided a shortcut for boats tra
veling from the Pacific to the Atlantic or vice versa. The shortcut through the strait not only shaved a good day off of most trans-oceanic trips, but it also saved boat captains from what traditionally was some of the roughest weather on the high seas around the southern tip of the continent.

  Garrison was listening to Alex’s explanation, hanging on her every word, wondering what surprise might come next.

  “I sat in that hotel room every day for three weeks. I would slip out once a day for food and water, always worried I would be seen, but I was always quick to get back. I had no contact with any other human beings other than for the woman at the market who sold me my tamales and corn and beans every day. And let me tell you, three weeks of tamales and corn and beans gets old really quick.”

  Garrison smiled but his curiosity continued.

  “I was overjoyed that on the second leg of this bizarre journey I had so far avoided anything that resembled violence. That was the good news. I don’t know if it was the nature of the cocaine’s journey that this particular phase was one that was violence free, or if I just caught the killers at a generous time in their lives.

  “As I said, three weeks sitting in a dingy motel room in Valparaiso, Chile, isn’t a lot of fun, especially when most of your time is spent squinting through a pair of binoculars. On the 22nd day that I was there a bobcat truck rolled up across the street from the motel. When it stopped, its brakes caused a loud squealing. I remembered that I had heard the same squeal before, and always at about the same time – three in the morning. This time, though, it was midnight.

  “Five men got out of the cab. I noticed that they went to the rear of the truck, and as three of them hopped in the back end, the two others seemed to be standing watch. Several minutes later they tossed large, cloth bags into a pickup that sped off toward a waiting skiff in the harbor. And then several minutes later, the two men in the truck unloaded several large boxes onto a flat loading dock. A forklift came and carried the boxes to an area about 100 feet from where the bobcat had pulled to a stop. Five minutes later, a northbound train rolled to a stop. Five minutes after that, it rolled out of Valparaiso and the forklift was empty.”

  “Certainly you found that a little strange?” Garrison asked.

  “Well, of course, yes. Another week went by, and like clockwork the bobcat would show up with its squeaky brakes across from the motel at three in the morning, and every day it would do the same thing. On the seventh day, it arrived at midnight. Another week passed by, every morning at 3, and then another seventh day, and it was back to midnight.”

  “You ever see any cops during any of this?”

  “Never. It was almost as if Valparaiso had no cops. I think I saw three, maybe four in the time I ended up being there. On that last day that the bobcat showed up at midnight, the five men unloaded thirty boxes. They were bright yellow boxes marked La Familia de Puente 03785. They were the exact same boxes stacked in the storeroom near where Maria and Ruben lived in Aguileres. I knew then the next leg of my journey, wherever I was headed, was about to begin.”

  “C’mon baby, let’s just go for it,” Ben said to Shanna. By now, she had locked the bathroom door and would never think of coming out until Doggett was gone.

  “Go away or I’m callin’ the police,” she said through the cheap hollow door.

  With just one moment’s worth of brute force, Ben’s shoulder knocked the door down.

  Shanna screamed and curled up in the corner of the bathroom, unable to escape. He started toward her and for the next several minutes he would do all he could to try to make sure his hidden desire became hers, too. Instead, for Shanna, Ben’s unspoken desires were nothing she had ever desired in her wildest imagination.

  But Shanna continued to scream and the neighbors in the next apartment began beating on the wall, yelling something muffled about calling the cops.

  A momentary spark of common sense breached the alcoholic daze that had descended on Ben. It was a brief moment of clarity, but it was long enough to convince himself that no matter how many times he and Shanna had talked about going into forbidden areas with their illicit behavior, it was all talk, and she wanted nothing of it. It didn’t help any that Doggett was drunk — the first time she had ever seen him like that. He pulled back from his threats in the bathroom that night. No more screaming. No more sinister talk from him. No more muffled shouts from the neighbors. Doggett simply stopped his threatening behavior. As if he had never even started it in the first place.

  Ben quickly tossed his belongings in his suitcase, being careful not to forget anything. He heard soft weeping from Shanna, still crouched, fetal-like, in the corner.

  “I’m leaving. I won’t come back,” he assured her. She said nothing and just continued her soft sobbing.

  “I’m sorry, Shanna,” Doggett said. “I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

  Had it been a different situation, Ben figured Shanna would have come out of the bathroom and told him not to leave. Begged. Pleaded even. But Ben knew now that there was quite possibly no one left in his world who cared about him at all. Angela and the kids hadn’t called him in two weeks. And why should they, the way he had destroyed their lives. With Shanna crying in the bathroom, there was no one left who would even know he was gone.

  Ben walked into the darkness of the apartment complex parking lot and found his car. He had just enough Corona in his system to have a good buzz for a couple of hours down the road. He pointed his car in the direction of Oklahoma. Once the beer wore off he knew he was home free. No one would suspect him of anything. Not Ben, a college-degreed educator; a public school administrator. Were it not for Angela and the messy divorce that was no doubt looming, he could easily go anywhere and simply start his life over. In a heartbeat, that’s precisely what he had to do. It may have been only a momentary whim, a fleeting thought turned into an action that would change everything in his life. And he was just irrational enough at this point that he felt that such a change would fix everything that had happened. Ben Doggett, he thought, would cease being the old Ben Doggett from this moment forward. He would simply start over. That should fix everything. Well, everything except his self-esteem, which took a hit right between the eyes every time he remembered that he had done a drug deal with a complete stranger and then stole sixty large in bags of dirty money from the worthless Junior Walker. The now dead, worthless Junior Walker.

  In those moments that Ben wanted to believe everything was going to be all right, something always seemed to jump up and bite him, reminding him that it would be a long, long time before anything was right again.

  The next morning broke dreary and cloudy in Midland, the way things broke for most anyone left in Ben’s path these days.

  Angela arrived at her lawyer’s office for a scheduled appointment. It was 10:15 before it became clear that the other party in the divorce proceedings had no intention of appearing.

  “Any idea where your husband might be?” Tom Chaney asked Angela.

  “I haven’t seen him or talked to him in a couple of weeks. If I had to guess, he’d be at his mistress’s apartment,” Mr. Chaney.

  “Where would that be, I wonder?” Chaney asked.

  “Don’t get me to lyin’,” Angela said. “I don’t make it a habit of checkin’ in on my husband’s lady friends.”

  “Is this not the first time?”

  “I have no idea, Mr. Chaney. I’ve never noticed anything until recently.”

  Angela picked up the phone and tried to call Ben.

  “No answer,” she told Chaney as she excused herself to step into the hallway and leave a voice mail that was better left in private.

  At a rest stop on the interstate, twenty miles north of the Texas-Oklahoma border, Ben Doggett rolled over at the sound of a Barry White song, his voice mail alert tone.

  He recognized Angela’s number. When he saw it
, he didn’t know what it was about, but he knew it couldn’t be good.

  “Ben, where are you? I have been waiting at Tom Chaney’s office for 30 minutes. This is the day we’re supposed to sign the divorce papers and like always, you let me down again. You’d best call me when you get this.”

  Ben looked for a water bottle in the console of his Honda to try to wash back the dryness in his mouth from the beers he had when he pulled over at the rest stop six hours earlier. His shirt was untucked and wrinkled, his pants undone just enough to let his middle aged beer belly (a fairly recent acquisition) spill over. He was somehow able to avoid detection by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and catch a decent night’s sleep. He would spend the rest of Monday morning making his way to his hometown of Tulsa. With the exception of his mother he was no longer close to anyone there, probably for the best since no one there would want to know him these days. All he could think about was what an ideal place Tulsa, his hometown, would be for a new start to his new life.

  CHAPTER 8

  “I’ve always loved my freedom, never taken it for granted,” Tony told Trask and Alex. “Even so, I never loved it like I do now. Not when I realize it could be taken from me. I still don’t know how I got here.”

  Garrison had rarely heard a client proclaim his innocence so steadfastly as Nail. Rarely were any of them actually as innocent as they claimed to be.

  “Tony, I’m not going to let you go to jail. Alex and I won’t let that happen. We know you didn’t do it. We believe that,” Garrison said.

  Tony expressed reservations in Alex’s attitude, which wavered from day to day. Some mornings she seemed to believe what he said, other mornings he wasn’t so sure. But if Tony had learned anything in life it was not to judge people based on their appearances or even their attitude. He didn’t know anything about Alex’s life. Why she might have been less receptive to his story or what she had been through to get her to this point.