An Absence of Principal

by Jimmy Patterson

  To be on the safe side, Trask opened his cell phone and called Alex.

  “I need you to find us a ballistic report on the Junior Walker murder. I’m specifically looking for information on entry wounds, how far the shooter was away. Stuff like that,” Trask told her. “I have a sneaking suspicion it might just come in handy sooner than we think.”

  “Where are you?” Alex asked.

  “JoJos. With Tony.”

  “I’m around the corner,” Alex said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  JoJo’s was a no-frills, real meat-and-potatoes place where actual cooks prepared the food low on preservatives and high in real meat and potatoes content. JoJo’s was the unofficial diner of the unassuming legal types in town, the ones who preferred simplicity, small talk and visiting with peers, to the often-times pretentious moments one must engage in over a few slices of prime rib at The Derrick. While the conversation at The Derrick was often golf games and society shindigs, the talk at JoJos was more given to high school football and whether West Texas would survive the great drought of the 21st century.

  Trask could tell Alex was nervous about something by the sound of her voice.

  She walked into the diner looking every bit as frazzled as she had sounded on the phone.

  “What’s going on?” Trask asked her.

  Alex glanced at Nail, uncertain if she should continue. She had only told Trask about her other life.

  “If you’re worried about Tony repeating your story, don’t,” Trask said. “The attorney-client privilege goes both ways. Right, Tony?”

  Nail nodded yes.

  It had been weeks since Alex Wallace had shared the secret details of her trek through Central and South America. Garrison often wondered when the next part of the story would come. He knew he didn’t want to ask matter-of-factly, ‘So, what happened next?’ Not after the latest chapter, which included her nightmarish train ride through Mexico, imprisoned in a box car with sadistic drug runners; almost sub-human men who had stowed themselves away en route to their next ‘assignment.’ The beatings and violations Alex suffered would have been enough to institutionalize weaker people. That she was able to escape and regroup in time to continue her effort to follow the drugs was nothing short of miraculous.

  “What’s up?” Garrison asked, knowing something was amiss.

  She was shaking.

  “Just got a phone call. I don’t know who it was on the other end. A man about forty, it sounded like. Latino accent. ‘We know where you are,’ he said. And then he hung up.”

  “Bluffing, maybe?” Garrison tried to reassure.

  “How’d whoever this was get my phone number?”

  Garrison didn’t know the answer to that, but obviously someone was involved in Alex’s little fact-finding mission and they were able to get her number and track her down; someone who played for the other side. Someone who didn’t want her to go on without knowing that she had been found out. What would come next, Garrison wondered for a moment. But his time was growing short.

  Nail’s trial was upon them. He and Alex had built a strong case for Tony’s freedom, but they were without the one thing they needed: a suddenly gone-missing elementary school principal with an overzealous knack for gambling, women, and as it was beginning to look like, booze. Now all Trask had to do was point an accusatory finger in Doggett’s direction to implicate him in Junior Walker’s murder.

  He looked at Alex.

  “I don’t want to have to go through what I went through on that train again,” Alex suddenly stammered, her usual self-assuredness replaced by an uncertainty. A fear was there, where it hadn’t been before. “They told me I would be safe here. They told me no one would know me. Or know where I was. Or what I looked like. They promised.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Garrison asked.

  “I don’t know. Not yet, at least.”

  She was making no sense, but clearly something had happened relative to her journey that had led her to the fright she was now experiencing.

  Alex began to calm down the more she talked. Knowing that she was in the presence of Trask and Tony and the other locals seemed to allay her fears, for the time being, at least.

  Three-hundred miles east, the Mexican man from an office high atop the First American Bank building in downtown Fort Worth closed his smart phone.

  “Good. Very good,” the man on the other side of the Mexican’s desk said. “Now we wait.”

  The two men in the room came from vastly different backgrounds and cultures. But they both had one objective in mind: putting a stop to Alex Wallace’s unfinished mission.

  “I remember my first morning after the train pulled into the station, after the trip that I thought would never end finally did. I rented a car and a hotel room near the rail yard. I remember how beautiful the morning was. Maybe it was because of what all I had been through, and I realized how lucky I was to be alive then. The sunrise was beautiful and there was a cool feel to the air. I kept an eye on the boxcar that contained the cocaine that I had been following all along. The hotel I had checked into was across the street from the train yard where freight and passenger cars docked all day and all night.

  “Just like clockwork, a couple of hours after I checked into the hotel, and right before the sun came up that first morning, a white van drove up next to the box car I had been in. Three men off-loaded the cocaine, including the kilos I had been following since I was in Aguileres. They shoved the coke quickly into the back of the van and the four men, two of whom had been with me and had brutalized me in the boxcar, went, too.”

  Alex told Garrison she couldn’t be absolutely certain, but it felt like she was somewhere in northern Mexico. She said the next few minutes had the typical big-city congestion you would expect to find in one of the world’s most populous cities.

  “I was able to hop in my rental and stay fairly close to the van with the cocaine. We sat in traffic for almost an hour before making our way from the northeast to the far southwest side of town. Traffic really never lessened the farther west out of town we reached. We drove into the desert and twenty minutes later the white van exited onto a desolate, thin ribbon of a road that led back toward the north toward the U.S. border. I pulled to the side of the road because I really didn’t want to be noticed. Traffic by now had begun to thin out. I watched the van as it took a valley road back to the west, then off to the north. There were hills on either side of the road, and when the van disappeared, I pulled onto a dirt road where the van had disappeared between the two rises. I parked on the shoulder just down the road from what looked like an abandoned used car lot. No one noticed I was there.

  “I walked about half a mile, out to a building where I saw the van had pulled up. There were enough abandoned businesses and scattered vegetation to where it was easy to avoid detection. The men were inside an old garage at a service station that had closed down when gas was 79 cents a gallon. There was a hole about four inches wide in one of the garage doors at the station. I pulled my mirror from my purse and positioned it to where I could see what was going on inside. By the time I had arrived, the four men were in a heated discussion. The two men who had assaulted me on the train were tied to chairs next to each other.”

  “We’re missing some of the stuff, amigo,” one of the men in charge said to the men tied up. “And we think you know where it is. How we gonna solve this situation?”

  “We don’t know nothing. We brought everything we had here.”

  “No, no,” the other man tied to the chair said. “It was the woman. There was a woman on the train with us, stowed away like we were. She had to have taken it when we were asleep.”

  Alex’s stomach lurched when she heard herself brought into the argument. If anyone ever saw her listening in, she was dead.

  The men who held the guns in the service station had no bo
sses on this day; no one to question their authority. They were in charge. And they would do whatever they wanted. They laughed off the notion of a woman in the boxcar taking the cocaine, which she was sure had never been taken in the first place. She knew the men in charge had made the claims just to mess with the mules, the lowest of the low lifes of the drug world. Taunting them, belittling them was sport to the lieutenants in the underworld.

  Alex paused. Garrison looked at her. He didn’t have to be a genius to know what was coming.

  “What happened next was the most disturbing thing I have ever seen, even after all my years with DEA,” Alex said.

  Alex looked at Garrison after taking several seconds to compose herself. She tried to pick up where she had left off, positioned outside the abandoned service station, holding a mirror, looking through a hole in a door at the two men who had beaten her. They were now being beaten themselves.

  “I heard a scuffle, some screaming. I had taken the mirror down because I didn’t want to see whatever was about to happen to these two men, even if they had almost killed me themselves. A few seconds later, I heard a car engine start, and the van that had driven into the garage pulled out again. One of the men from inside the van took the time to get out and close the garage door. Before he closed the door though, he ran back inside the garage and sprayed the two men in the chairs with bullets. I must have heard fifty shots. AR-15 assault rifles from what I could tell. They sped away. After what seemed like an eternity.”

  Alex paused again to collect her thoughts. Garrison noticed the palms of this hardened DEA veteran’s hands were shaking. He studied her carefully wondering what she would offer next. Her eyes would barely fix on anything other than her cup of coffee.

  Then she looked up at Garrison.

  “After the van sped away and was out of sight, I walked into the garage. The two men who had beaten me were still bleeding out. They had been beheaded. Then shot as many as fifty times.”

  Garrison hung on her every word.

  “We are dealing with a brutality that we have little experience with, Garrison. The animals that run the cartels, they have no moral compass. No clue about what is right or wrong. They are bottom-line driven. Totally. It is a bloody, sickening war. With the results that I saw on that garage floor that day, I really fear that we have no way of winning this.”

  “I don’t disagree with that,” Garrison finally said. He sat in his chair squirming, hoping she was finished with her horror story.

  “Maybe the most unusual piece of the story, Garrison, is that those two animals, who obviously were the henchmen for one of the drug cartels, left all that cocaine in the garage. Closed the door and walked away from it. Whoever found it uncovered a gruesome site.”

  Garrison shook his head in disbelief.

  “Two lives gone for nothing,” Trask said.

  Alex refilled what had to be her fifth cup during this long lunch.

  “Welcome to Juarez,” she said.

  CHAPTER 13

  Weeks went by. Angela heard nothing from her husband. There had been a call from his mother, asking if everything was all right with the two of them, several days after Ben’s pop-in visit to his mom’s Tulsa home.

  “Are the two of you doing all right?” Doggett’s mom asked Angela.

  Angela thought for a moment and finally admitted what she should have long ago.

  “Velma, we were divorced two weeks ago. Ben didn’t show up to sign the papers, so I guess we’re not officially divorced. I have no clue where he is or how to get in touch with him. It’s over, Velma. He’s been seeing another woman. The officials with the school district say they have evidence that he was also deep into online gambling, all of which explains his disappearances from home every night.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. Velma had hung up. Not out of rudeness. Out of shame. Something like this had never happened before in the long line of Doggetts, who had all come through life with the highest quality of character and integrity. To think that her own son, who raised two children of high character himself, would do this, left Velma Doggett speechless.

  The grandfather clock hung on the wall in the hallway at Velma’s house. It was the only sound that morning except for the soft click of Velma’s slippers as she walked across the wooden floor and into what had, 30 years earlier, been Ben’s bedroom.

  She looked at the pictures hanging on the wall. She sat on the side of the bed that Ben had slept in for most all of his 18 years before heading off to college, and she looked about, catching whatever moment of the past she could remember. There was a coat hanging from a rack in the corner, and she never had the heart to take down the poster he had hung up of Roberto Clemente, his favorite baseball player. She had, through all the years, kept his baseball glove laying on top of his dresser drawers, which immediately brought her a soft chuckle as she remembered she often never had room enough to fit his socks in the top drawer, because Ben had stuffed it full of baseballs.

  “Find another home for those baseballs, Benny.” The memory of the phrase replayed in her mind. She remembered he never found another home for the baseballs, so one day she woke and stopped nagging him. It was just a little thing. Life is too short. Not worth complaining about. Pick your battles, Velma often told herself.

  Velma lifted her frail body off of her son’s bed and walked to the dresser.

  She pulled open the top drawer but didn’t find a drawer full of baseballs. Instead she found a .38-caliber nickel-plated revolver. She looked away quickly, hoping that she had not seen what she had just seen. If she had touched the gun she would have found two bullets in the chamber. But she was shaking too violently to pick it up. She started for the phone to call the police, but wasn’t sure what she would tell them. My grown son left a gun here? I found a gun but don’t know whose it is? Which was a lie, she knew, because she never went into the bedroom, and the only other person to have done so, probably in the last year, was Ben.

  Thirty minutes later, after thinking about what to do but never really arriving at a good answer, Velma reached for the phone to call Ben.

  “Ben, this is your mama. I found something in the top drawer of your dresser. I want to know if it’s yours, Ben. I’m scared. I don’t know what to do. Please call me back when you get this.”

  Velma didn’t care much for voice mail because she didn’t know how it worked, and she never knew if she was successful in leaving her messages. When Ben listened from his hotel room moments later, he began to perspire. He rubbed his hands together, but any answers on what he should do next did not magically come to him.

  Doggett picked up his cell phone to call his mother but changed his mind before it connected. It was five minutes until four. It was time for his first full day of his new job.

  Ben’s sister Venita, the youngest of the three children and mother to Frankie, Velma’s grandchild prodigy violinist, dropped everything when she heard the sound of her mom’s voice. Venita would be at her childhood home in five minutes.

  When she arrived, Venita walked into the family room and saw her mother sitting in her chair, clutching a crossword puzzle book and watching her soap opera on television. She had tears in her eyes.

  “There’s a gun,” was all Velma could muster.

  “Where, mama?” Venita asked.

  “Top drawer. The dresser in Ben’s room. Where he used to keep all his baseballs. You remember how I used to get on to him for that?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Venita said. “Was he here? Did he put it there? Did Ben leave it?”

  “He was here a couple of days ago,” Velma said. “I can’t get him to answer his cell. I called Angie. They’ve been split up for weeks, but he’s disappeared. Something’s wrong, Venita. Bad wrong. I just know it.”

  Venita walked into her brother’s childhood bedroom. Plain as day, the gun was in the to
p drawer.

  For twenty-five years Venita worked for Tulsa PD. Most recently as a lieutenant in charge of homicide. She picked the gun up with a pen, careful not to contaminate it with fingerprints. She called the station and listed it with the property department, reading off its serial number. Ten seconds later, the computer returned information that the gun belonged to Ben. At least it wasn’t stolen. But neither had it been properly registered and, the computer return indicated, neither had Doggett registered to carry a concealed weapon.

  Venita left her mother’s house to report the discovery and do all the necessary paperwork at the stationhouse.

  She had been gone only three or four minutes when Velma walked back to her chair in the living room, reached for the phone, and called Angela back.

  “Angie?” Venita said. “We found a gun in Ben’s old bedroom. We ran a check on it and found it belongs to Ben. Not sure why he would ditch it at Mama’s house, but you know that doesn’t look really good when someone leaves the scene of a crime, drives 500 miles like Ben has, and unloads a gun where he thinks no one will find it.”

  “I know you’re scared,” Trask said. “But we have someone’s freedom to win right now, and I don’t have all I need in order to make that happen.”

  Trask knew Doggett’s absence spoke volumes about his involvement in, or at least knowledge of, the crime. Until they had him sitting as a subpoenaed witness on the stand, the jury would never be swayed.

  “I think the best medicine for you, now, Alex, is to get out of town for awhile. Book a flight tomorrow and go see what Velma Doggett has to say. We’ve got to find Ben.”

  Alex agreed.

  “The scare these little creeps are putting into you is just that: a scare. They’re not going to touch you. When you leave town, they won’t know where you are and you’ll feel safer. You’ll be safer.”