An Absence of Principal

by Jimmy Patterson

  “Ben? Our Ben Doggett?”

  Stein nodded and looked out the window at the garden in back of the bed and breakfast.

  “There’s more,” Stein said. “Ben may be somehow involved in the murder of a drug dealer in Odessa. No one seems to know how yet, but a defense attorney investigator tracked Angela down at Ben’s mother’s house in Tulsa yesterday.”

  “Oh my,” Marge said.

  “I told Angela we’d help her look for Ben tomorrow,” Stein said.

  “Bill, honey, I don’t know if we should get mixed up in this. It concerns me.”

  “It concerns me, too, honey, but we have to help. They’re our friends. They need us.”

  On the other side of Fredericksburg, Ben Doggett was hunkered down in his hotel where he slept at night between shifts at the gas plant that had given him work as a shift foreman. He’d spent the night throwing back a six-pack of his favorite beer. On the table in front of him was a line of cocaine. He stared at it. Despite his involvement in the drug world to try to recoup some of his gambling losses, he had never actually tried the drug. He was in so deep now he thought one simple high off the coke wouldn’t hurt. How could it after all he’d done? It was the same type of mind game he often played with himself when gambling online.

  Ben leaned down and put his nose up to the line of coke.

  Five-hundred miles to the west, in the dark desert stretches of West Texas, the black SUV sped down the interstate, its driver pushing 90. Out here, 80 is legal, so an extra 10 mph is hardly enough to wake up a radar. In this part of Texas, there was nothing to run into or catch up with. Even 90 can seem too slow. The man barreled into the dusty, creaky outpost of Van Horn, famous only for being the town nearest to where interstate 10 and 20 split, or come together, depending on which way you are driving.

  The man pulled into an all-purpose truck stop. He ran the pump on his SUV. It would take awhile to fill. He walked inside for a taquito and a bottle of water, grabbing some chocolate on his way to the register. While he was gone, his passenger in the back end of the vehicle stirred. She lifted her head to see where she was but saw only the occasional 18-wheeler that pulled out of a bay and back out on to the highway. She had no idea where she was and was too groggy to care. She dropped her head back down, moaning.

  The man put the pump handle back and secured the gas cap before he climbed into the front seat, ready to pull away. As he unwrapped his dinner — if a greasy taquito that had been sitting on a hot burner for eight hours could somehow pass for dinner — he heard the woman stir in the back of the SUV and even thought he saw her raise her head. The man grabbed the handkerchief, soaked it in another few drops of liquid and made his way to the back of the car.

  “Beautiful night, don’t you think?”

  The voice, rich with a West Texas accent, came from somewhere nearby, but the man in the SUV wasn’t sure where. He continued walking to the back of the vehicle, ignoring the stranger’s attempts at pleasantries.

  The woman lying in the back was too drugged to move or care what was about to happen next. The man opened the back end, covered her mouth and nose with the handkerchief and kept it there until she was again motionless.

  “That ought to keep you for awhile,” he said.

  The man closed the door and turned to walk back to the driver’s side door. Standing between him and his driver’s door was a tall man wearing a cowboy hat. And a cleanly pressed and pleated tan uniform.

  “Everything all right back there, sir?” the man in the hat said.

  “Yes, officer, just adjusting some cargo in the back end. A few things fell over back up the road a ways.”

  “That’ll happen if things aren’t tied down tight out here. These long stretches, if you have anything stacked up, they’ll just shift over and fall sooner or later.”

  “I should have thought of that,” the man returned the meaningless chit chat to the officer.

  “Where you comin’ from?” the DPS officer asked.

  “Been driving all night from Tulsa. Have some family up there, but have to get back to work first thing in the morning,” the man said, his nerves on edge.

  “Tulsa’s a beautiful place,” the trooper said. “I was born there. Couple of years ago it was named the cleanest town in America, you know that?”

  “No, officer, I didn’t,” the man continued, wishing this night was over. Sweat began to appear through the arms of his shirt. The officer looked at his face and noticed a bead of sweat rolling down his face.

  “You OK?”

  “Excuse me?” the man said.

  “You feeling all right? I noticed you look like you might be feeling a little warm. Pretty chilly out here at night. Unusual for someone to sweat like that, all of a sudden like. Thought you might be feeling poorly.”

  “Had a stomach bug a couple of days ago,” the man said. “Still feeling a little puny, I guess. Thought I’d shook it, but maybe it’s trying to come back.”

  The man was doing a horrible job of lying, it was obvious to anyone who’d been in law enforcement for even half a day. He swallowed hard, hoping to somehow suppress the nervousness he was feeling. As many times as he had been on the opposite side of law abiding, it always made him a little nervous when he had to lie his way through a situation on the spur of the moment. He was a trained killer, a seasoned killer, and had probably gunned down eight or nine people in his narco-terrorist career. Killing didn’t bother him quite so much, but he was a lousy liar. It must have had everything to do with his upbringing; his devoutly religious mother instilling in him the evils of breaking the commandments, of which, by now, he had broken all ten. The man, oddly enough, didn’t consider murder one of the commandments. Not if it was work related. Not that his mother ever had occasion to preach on the evils of murder. Why should she? Such a good boy she raised.

  “Mind if I take a look?” the trooper said.

  “I’m in kind of a hurry, officer, and really need to be going. I think I’ve got it all well in hand, but I appreciate it.”

  “I really don’t think it was a yes or no question, sir. I’d like to see what you have in the back of your truck here,” the trooper said more pointedly.

  “I really hope we can do this quickly, I’ve got to be in El Paso by 6.”

  “Shouldn’t take long sir. I’d just like to have a little look-see and then you can be on your way,” the trooper said as he waited for the man to open the back door of the SUV. When he did, he saw Alex Wallace lying unconscious. The trooper reached for his gun, but as he did a shot muffled by a silencer sounded, hitting the trooper square in the back. The officer tumbled to the ground, losing consciousness and blood at an alarmingly fast rate. The man nudged the officer’s limp body out of the way of one of the wheels, shut the back door and skidded away. By that time, there was no one at the pumps at the Flying J. No one to see what had happened, and no one to see the black SUV speed away. There was only the sound of a police radio in the background.

  “236, registration return on Paul Edward 8389 Queen, on a 2003 black Chevy Suburban, shows vehicle belongs to a Cruz Valencia out of El Paso. Cross check 27 and 29 shows Valencia does have priors for weapons and drugs. Please use caution. Back-up en route code three,” the dispatcher said.

  The hot desert air blew the sound of the dispatcher’s transmission around the gas pumps at the Flying J at Van Horn, but no one would hear the information.

  Five minutes west of Van Horn on Interstate 10, Cruz Valencia pulled his SUV to the shoulder. He reached in the glove box and retrieved a set of license plates, which he always kept handy just in case. Two minutes later, Paul Edward 8389 Queen had been replaced by a new set. HOMBRE 8, the Texas vanity plates read. Cruz was uncomfortable because he couldn’t splash a new paint job on his SUV but he forged ahead, west on I-10, toward home.

  The mist was thick and soupy
enough for the intermittent wipers to not get the job done and the low speed wipers to be too much. It seldom rained in Midland, Doggett thought to himself, wishing suddenly he could go back and have everything be like it was in April, before everything had started to unravel. It was an unusually cool Texas summer morning and Doggett was just moments away from stepping on to the platform where he had taken on work as a shift supervisor for Yellow Dog Drilling Company, an outfit that asked few questions when he was hired on Friday. The foreman in human resources was impressed with Doggett’s background. He had checked a reference from the college that he had listed, and a former employer from the Tulsa school system that Doggett had called briefly on his way through town two weeks earlier. He didn’t dare mention his most recent employment, which would have gotten him into even more trouble than he cared to emotionally deal with at this point in his life.

  Doggett showed up fifteen minutes early, his routine back at his real job as a principal.

  “Morning, sir,” Doggett said with confidence to the floor foreman, the man who would be his immediate superior.

  Curly Ascot was a career roughneck who finally reached his life’s dream when he was promoted to tool pusher. Oil and gas had been the family business for four generations, since the early days. Curly was nursing a hangover like most every other man on the platform that morning, like most every other morning. The oil business was not for the faint of heart. They were good men, true to their wives and families but hard partiers, especially on the weekends. Curly gave Doggett a grunt and a glance.

  “Go on in the office, Mr. Gamble,” Curly said, calling Doggett by his second fake name in less than a week. “You’ve still got some forms to complete.”

  Doggett would spend his first few days learning the ropes in a job that he would have never envisioned himself in two weeks earlier. Doggett faked his way through the motions, itching for the opportunity to bolt, and try somewhere else yet again, a sure sign his life was unraveling by the minute. He wanted out. He wanted to go home to Midland. He wanted to drive forever, then get on a boat and sail forever. And when that was done he would fly around the world in a hot air balloon and hope that would take forever, too. And when he touched back down he would buy a knapsack and hike cross-country and hope that took forever too. He had never been so miserable. Doggett, who had minored in psychology at Tech, knew he was in the middle of a depressive state; something he couldn’t shake and for which he saw no end.

  As day broke, Doggett climbed into a grubby pair of work pants and boots, buttoned his shirt and stumbled out the door. His eyes were slow to focus, and the crust in their corners gave him cause to stop and try to remember where he was and what he was doing here. He wiped a sticky patch of sleep from his face and groaned. His watch told him it was 8:15. After impressing Curly with his first-day-of-work promptness, he spent the next three days rolling into the job site fifteen to thirty minutes late.

  When he drove up to the job site, Ascot met him.

  “Don’t even bother, Gamble. I can’t afford to keep someone who can’t seem to get here when he’s supposed to. I’m going to have to let you go. You need to get some help for your problem, Buddy. Do that for me, will ya? Do that and I’ll have something for you. But more than for me, do it for you. I think you’ve got a serious problem, man.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Tony Nail was obviously in some degree of discomfort with a tie and a shirt buttoned all the way to the top. Garrison saw him tug at his collar, squirm and flash a look of discomfort on his otherwise happy face.

  “Got no business in this monkey suit,” Tony muttered mostly to himself, but loud enough to where Garrison smiled at the thought of it. He had never seen Tony in a suit and tie.

  Trask said nothing, no sense in making his friend and client even more self-conscious than he already was.

  The jury filed into Judge Halfmann’s courtroom on what was to be the second day of testimony and the third day of the trial. Tony saw them come in and stood up. As nervous as he was, what was just ahead for Nail was a critical point in the trial to win back his freedom. It was important convey a look of confidence.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” the judge greeted the jury. “Mr. Trask, I believe you are to open the proceedings this morning.”

  “Thank you, your honor. If the court pleases, I’d like to call the defendant, Tony Nail,” Trask said.

  “Mr. Nail, good morning,” Trask said.

  Tony nodded at Trask, looking every bit as nervous as Trask knew he would be. So much for confidence. Trask would have his work cut out for him.

  “Your honor, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, at the conclusion of yesterday’s proceedings, the prosecution introduced what it said was evidence that my client, Mr. Nail, is someone who in their estimation is an expert marksman. The state even introduced evidence of target scores at a local shooting range. And while I admire the government for its tenacity in digging up this information thinking that it would help fight its case against my client, Mr. Midkiff and the rest of his crack prosecution team failed to uncover the remainder of the story.”

  Midkiff showed no reaction to Trask’s news and felt it was simply another example of grandstanding by his counterpart.

  “Tony, can you tell the jury how often you have shot a gun?”

  “Too many times to count.”

  Murmuring came from the gallery, which had grown in numbers as the trial progressed thanks to increasing local media interest.

  Finally something of interest to the prosecution. Where could Trask possibly be going with this?

  Garrison looked again at Tony and gave him a private thumbs up and wink.

  “Go on, Tony,” Garrison said. “Tell the jury how you learned how to shoot.”

  “When I was a boy, my daddy took me out to the shooting range almost every day. He was a preacher but he had a sense of the need to learn how to use firearms as a form of protection,” Nail said.

  “Why’s that?” Garrison asked.

  “Daddy was away on a mission trip. I was probably 14. Two men came in the back door of our house in the middle of the night and raped my mother. I was upstairs asleep and never heard a thing. But my big brother and sister had stayed awake late that night talking. They heard everything. They couldn’t do anything about it because they were unarmed and untrained. And so they sat and listened to Mama going through that torture. They couldn’t or wouldn’t move toward her because she had told them to always stay in their room if they ever thought someone was in the house who shouldn’t be. This was in the days before cell phones, so all my brother and sister could do was stay there and listen, scared to death. They told me it was the worst thing they had ever been through in their lives. Sometimes to this day it still torments them when the conversation turns to Mama and Daddy. When Daddy got home from his mission trip he vowed he would teach all of us about how to handle a gun so that we would never be caught in that kind of situation again.”

  “Did they catch the men who assaulted your mother, Tony?”

  “Yes, sir, they did. They were given five years. They’ve been out for a long time. We’ve never really had much of a sense of peace with them being out. But we at least all know how to handle the situation if they should ever show back up at any of our homes again.”

  “I bet you do,” Garrison agreed.

  “You ever used a gun against anyone, Tony?” Trask asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “Do you own a gun?”

  “I do, yes, but a few weeks ago, there was a break-in at my house. Someone jimmied the vault and took the gun.”

  “And what date was that, Mr. Nail?” Trask asked.

  “May 28.”

  “Had you let anyone in your house before the break in? Someone you hadn’t let in before?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So, some
one you don’t know, at least to your knowledge, broke in and took your gun?”

  “That’s correct, yes,” Nail said.

  “Your honor, I submit into evidence Item 403, a copy of Midland Police records indicating the theft of Mr. Nail’s .44 Magnum handgun. Date of offense, May 28.”

  “So noted,” Judge Halfmann said.

  “And let the record also reflect that ballistics reports confirm the deceased, Junior Walker, was killed on June 3, a full week after the theft of Mr. Nail’s gun. And let the record also reflect that ballistics indicate that Mr. Walker was killed by a bullet from a .44 Magnum handgun.”

  Trask paused.

  “Pass the witness,” he finally said.

  “That’s a great story, ladies and gentlemen. I have no question that Mr. Nail suffered an unfortunate theft of his property on or about May 28. But a lot can happen in a week. Mr. Nail, did you ever find your gun?”

  “No, sir, it’s still gone,” Nail said.

  “Of course it is,” Midkiff launched back.

  “Objection!” Trask hurried with his interruption.

  “Sustained. Mr. Midkiff, let’s hurry this along, shall we? And try not to be so condescending, OK?”

  Midkiff didn’t respond to the judge’s request, and was preparing to continue with his questioning.

  “Mr. Midkiff? Did you hear me? Let’s try to put some shackles on the snarkiness, OK?”

  “Yes, your honor, I’m sorry,” Midkiff said.

  “Mr. Nail, have the Midland police ever indicated to you if they have any leads on where your gun might be or who might have it?” Midkiff asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “You mentioned that you always kept a gun since the attack on your mother many years ago. Now that you have been without your gun for several weeks, do you feel less safe? Like someone might attack you in the middle of the night?”