And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  “So you saw her,” Pyle says, not asks.

  “Didn’t say.”

  “She was here first thing when you opened yesterday morning.”

  The waitress lifts a drawn eyebrow. “How would you know?”

  “Go ahead,” Daugherty says, not hiding his curiosity about Pyle’s insight.

  Pyle, kind of sadly, looks at his partner, the stolid hopeless investigator who, unless he collapses on the job, will be locked into field work until retirement. “It takes about twenty hours to drive here from California. We know Aldridge left the garage in Redlands in the morning. That means her truck broke down late at night. She wouldn’t have walked an unlit desert highway. She would have waited until dawn.” Pyle looks back at the waitress. “Right here is the first open shithole she would have reached.”

  Right, Daugherty thinks. He could have put all that together, given another few minutes and a distance calculator. But Pyle is the one who suggested they not stop at the other two restaurants they passed entering Cairo because neither served breakfast.

  “She a deserter?” the waitress asks.

  “She’ll be the chicken in my chicken sandwich,” says Pyle.

  “Uh-huh. I get it. None of my damn business. So what’re you boys eating for real? Or are we just going to chat?”

  Pyle takes out his notepad and clicks a pen. This, Daugherty knows, is just for show because Pyle remembers everything. “Rita,” he says, stretching out the name. Though the woman wears no name tag, Pyle’s leap isn’t much of a mystery. The sign outside says RITA’S and aside from her there’s only a cook working the joint. Pyle, writing in his pad, points his chin at a lipstick-stained water glass on the table. “I don’t think your dishwater’s hot enough. And that ticking exhaust fan is probably dropping metal flakes onto your grill. There’s a lot here an inspector might thumbs down, even in South Texas. Probably cost you ten grand to make it all right.”

  Rita keeps her defiant stance a few seconds more before she sighs and slides her knuckles off the table. “She came in yesterday. Not in uniform but carrying a knapsack. I gave her a bowl to water her dog and served her some eggs.”

  “Then what?”

  “Asked about the post office.” She nods to a clock behind the counter. “Closes in ten minutes. Up the street. Left at the Exxon.”

  Daugherty leaves a five-dollar tip for the water and follows Pyle out the door to the Taurus. “Was it necessary to crawl up her ass like that?” Daugherty says.

  “That or I could have stuck my finger up yours and mine. I’m from Arkansas, but this is still my territory. These people hate feds in a way you don’t want to imagine.”

  At the post office Daugherty and Pyle get no hassles from the local postmaster—being a government employee he’s amenable to cooperation. They learn that after buying a postage-paid postcard, Aldridge had inquired about transportation out of town and that takes the agents next door to the Western Union, which serves as the bus depot. There Aldridge learned she couldn’t buy a ticket for her dog on any bus line or even for the Amtrak that stops nearby in Alpine.

  “She asked if there was a pet-friendly motel in town,” the Western Union man says.

  At the Thunderbird Inn, Aldridge with her dog had checked out seven hours before, at the same time as a couple with a Subaru Outback and a Labrador. But this is all the kid at the front desk is willing to reveal.

  Pyle gestures the boy nearer and Daugherty can barely hear his partner’s schoolmasterish warning. “Now, either we subpoena you as an uncooperative witness or you accidentally print a duplicate of Mr. and Mrs. Subaru’s hotel bill and put it in the trash. Then go for a slow walk around the block. When you come back, we’ll be gone and all will be forgiven.”

  The desk clerk begins stroking his fuzzy upper lip as if it’s a pet mouse. Meanwhile Pyle and Daugherty exit to watch dust devils in the street. When the clerk walks by them, they go back to the unattended desk, which is monitored by a camera.

  “Where’d he go?” Pyle asks loudly. After a little pretend waiting, he moves to the side of the desk and takes a wad of Kleenex from a box. “Fricking desert dust,” he says and makes a show of blowing his nose and looking behind the desk for a place to dump the tissue. He tosses and misses the trash. But he’s conscientious and cleans up the mess.

  Out in the dust again, Pyle removes a crumpled sheet of paper from his jacket sleeve.

  “HOW DID I get your cell number? Well, Mr. Clayton . . .”

  Before being stonewalled Pyle had extracted from his call that Mr. T. Everett Clayton, recent guest at the Thunderbird Inn, was returning to San Antonio with his wife from the Marfa Lights Festival and a few days of hiking in Big Bend. Pyle relayed the information to Daugherty, still at the wheel, by rephrasing Clayton’s statements as if they were especially fascinating. Then T. Everett drops his bombshell: he’s a semi-retired attorney.

  “Mr. Clayton, let me pass you on to my superior,” Pyle says. He smirks while offering Daugherty his cell phone and Daugherty gives him the finger. Since they’d gotten Clayton’s details from the Thunderbird via theft rather than warrant, Daugherty was leery about cold calling the man. But Pyle won the coin toss. Now they’ve hit the jackpot—a lawyer with too much time on his hands.

  “Agent Daugherty here,” he says to the phone.

  “Ah, Agent Daugherty,” says a self-satisfied, cross-examining voice. Daugherty pictures a fit man of seventy-one with flowing gray hair and a North Face jacket. “Why, exactly, is the FBI interested in my movements across South Texas.”

  Daugherty reverts to Dragnet mode. “Sir, this is not about you. We’re interested in a Jessica Aldridge, though she may be using an alias. Mid- twenties. Heavily tattooed. Severely underweight. Traveling with a German shepherd. Sound familiar?”

  “And what’s she guilty of?” Clayton asks a little too quickly.

  This stumps Daugherty because Jessica is not actually wanted for any crime. “You should know that among other things, she’s a car thief.” Technically this is true—the truck Aldridge abandoned is registered to one Brian Newton, deceased.

  A silence over the phone gives Daugherty seconds to consider the invasion of privacy suit Clayton might file against the FBI . . . and the possibility of losing his pension. Then a barking breaks from the receiver and another dog starts up in syncopation.

  “Sorry, Daugherty,” Clayton says through the hubbub. “I’m going to have to call you back.”

  “Don’t hang up,” Daugherty shouts. “Sir!” There is dead air. After he redials and gets Clayton’s voicemail he tosses Pyle’s BlackBerry into his lap. “Keep trying till you get an answer.” Fleeing dusk, Daugherty drives them out of Cairo.

  Finally, after forty minutes, during which Pyle has been pressing his phone’s redial key, Daugherty sees him cup the BlackBerry to speak through the road noise. With the speedometer hovering at 110, the Taurus is vibrating in Daugherty’s clenched hands like the space shuttle during reentry. He can’t hear a damn thing his partner is saying. “That Clayton?” Daugherty mouths.

  Pyle uncups the phone. “His dumb bitch wife! I got through on the home number!”

  Daugherty slows the car to eighty and angrily gestures for Pyle’s BlackBerry, wondering how he’ll explain his partner’s crack to Mrs. Clayton.

  “Don’t sweat it. She’s getting T. Everett,” Pyle says as Daugherty puts the phone to his ear. “Plus it’s on mute.”

  Fumbling with the device Daugherty nearly drives off the highway. He can hear Clayton helloing as he tries to unmute the call. “Fuck this fucker!”

  “Pardon?” T. Everett says.

  “Nothing, sir. Just talking to my partner. Agent Daugherty here.”

  “Ah, yes. About that dropped call. There aren’t many cell towers out on 90.”

  Steadying the Taurus Daugherty cuts to the chase, “Regarding Jessica Aldridge.”

  “Oh, right. Jessica. Yes. We gave her a ride. Sweet girl. You said she stole a truck. But she says a friend bequ
eathed the vehicle to her. There seems to be a misunderstanding, probably on your part.”

  “Mr. Clayton, I didn’t want to panic you when I called earlier, but this young woman, I’m afraid, has killed several people. In cold blood.” Daugherty doesn’t elaborate that this was when Aldridge flew drones. He’s learning from Pyle how plastic facts can be.

  “Jesus,” Clayton whispers, his self-satisfaction dissolving.

  Daugherty hears a woman’s voice, Mrs. Clayton no doubt, “What’s wrong, Teddy?”

  “That girl,” says Clayton. “She’s wanted for multiple murders.”

  “Oh my God!” says Mrs. Clayton. “She knows our address.”

  Daugherty lets the couple’s anxiety rise before refocusing them. “I’m assuming you dropped her off since we spoke.”

  “Not five minutes away.”

  The wife’s voice becomes shrill. “I hear someone outside. We have to call 911—”

  “Dammit, let go of my arm,” Mr. Clayton says. “I’m helping them get her!”

  So much for the Claytons’ empathy. Jessica is no longer Jessica to them. She’s a she and a her. She’s no longer the unjustly accused car thief but a transient killer ready to serve them up with fava beans and Chianti. Something bangs, perhaps a door. Daugherty can no longer hear the wife’s screeching.

  “Agent Daugherty . . .”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My disconnect earlier. I didn’t know the seriousness of this woman’s offenses.” Clearly T. Everett’s lawyerly brain has taken over. He has grasped that his earlier silence could make him guilty of aiding a fugitive, of obstructing a federal officer on a capital case.

  Daugherty gives him his out. “Like I said, I hadn’t told you anything, sir.”

  “When you called she wanted me to drop her off right away, at Castroville. But I shut off my phone. She’s here in San Antonio. The Motel 6 in Market Square. It’s pet friendly. That’s how she met us. Because of Skittles.”

  “Skittles?”

  “Her shepherd. She was stuck in Cairo because none of the bus lines allowed dogs. She said there was no way she was going to leave Skittles behind. Of course we would give a ride to a person like that, an animal lover.”

  “Of course.”

  “I was a defense attorney once. I know liars when I hear them. But maybe I’ve gotten rusty. To me, this girl did not read at all like a criminal.”

  “Don’t feel bad, Mr. Clayton. She’s clever. She’s been eluding us for a while.”

  “In hindsight I can see she’s a drifter. How many people did she kill?”

  “I can’t go into the specifics. We’ll take care of things from here.”

  “I understand, but . . . she’s still out there. And I mean, is she like that Wuornos woman, that Florida highway killer?”

  “Sir, I can almost guarantee that she won’t bother you. Just keep your doors locked tonight. Also, Mr. Clayton, you do own a gun, don’t you?”

  SOON AFTER DAUGHERTY disconnects from T. Everett, Pyle crashes—probably his Red Bull overdose is on the wane. He’s like a dead man, mouth open, flopped in the passenger’s seat. Beside him, under a lulling half-moon, Daugherty is barely keeping the Taurus on the blacktop, even through flatland. And then he either long blinks or dozes and finds himself gliding over an even flatter blackness. They are crossing a lake on a low bridge and ahead the sky glows like a giant tunnel of light.

  “Del Rio coming up, Pyle. Your shift.”

  The slower Daugherty goes the more conscious Pyle gets. When their car is crawling at the in-town speed limit, Pyle opens his mouth. “Burger King,” he yawns at a sign and Daugherty pulls up. Pyle goes for coffee and Whoppers while Daugherty switches to the passenger’s seat, warm with Pyle’s imprint. Pyle returns carrying a fast-food sack in one hand and a coffee he’s sipping in the other. Inside the car he shakes his head and grins at Daugherty. “ ‘You do have a gun, don’t you, Mr. Clayton?’ ” Pyle is fully awake now, recaffeinating.

  “T. Everett earned a sleepless night,” Daugherty says.

  Pyle points his fist at Daugherty, who takes a moment to comprehend that his partner wants a fist bump. Daugherty bumps. It’s a brave new world and one that Daugherty is less adapted to every day. But after Pyle puts the car in gear and they’ve passed the outskirts of Del Rio east—doing ninety in a thirty-five zone—Daugherty thinks about Jessica Aldridge. It’s one thing to give headaches to people like T. Everett who deserve it, another to slander the person you’re charged with bringing in. Aldridge is no murderer. Her file describes her as an ex-serviceperson with posttraumatic stress and a knowledge of military secrets. In other words, she qualifies as a low-level national security risk. Last November she had disappeared from a VA hospital in Loma Linda and Daugherty’s job at the time was to return her there. But his former partner and he may as well have been sifting for a body vaporized by an H-bomb. Aldridge was that gone. Then, with the new year approaching and pressed by other duties, he finalized an interim report on the missing woman.

  The rest of winter, spring, and half the summer passed before the higher-ups reprioritized the Aldridge case. The waiting worked, for like a psychic’s trick, an electronics records search reconstituted her ghost out of the void. She hadn’t started using ATMs or credit cards but had reactivated her military savings account. Unfortunately the information she gave the bank led him and Pyle, his new partner at winter’s end, to a nonexistent address. A day later they traced her largest account debit to a bank draft written to a nursing home. The home’s accounting department stonewalled them with claims of patient confidentiality. But on their way out Pyle took aside a nurse’s aide with a prison teardrop tattoo. According to the ex-con, whom Pyle coerced by asking the name of his parole officer, only one young woman about Jessica Aldridge’s age visited regularly—visited, in fact, almost every day. She came to see a dying woman whom the aide called Miss Shelly. At this point, an RN asked Daugherty and Pyle to return to the premises with a warrant.

  He and Pyle set up a stake out in front of the facility and by midafternoon had followed the most likely suspect to a cinderblock one-story in a rough San Bernardino neighborhood. Then came the over-the-fence confrontation with the dog they now know as Skittles and the suspect.

  To Daugherty, the skinny, tattooed girl looked at best to be a dissolute cousin to the uniformed Aldridge he knew from photos. And so he stopped Pyle from taking her down. Big mistake. Overnight Aldridge submerged again. But at least they’d taken her truck’s plate numbers. Those have gotten the agents this far, so far.

  Pyle has driven them beyond Del Rio’s halo of light and now Daugherty is able to stare at the million stars piercing the southerly night over Mexico. There, over the border, is where Jessica Aldridge would be right now if she were really guilty of something.

  “So what’s her crime?” Daugherty asks himself, realizing too late that he’s mumbled this aloud.

  “You still awake?” Pyle says. Then, after two mile markers pass, Pyle responds to the question. “She probably emailed secrets to WikiLeaks.”

  Despite all the trouble she’s caused them, Pyle’s crack irritates Daugherty. “I doubt that. She got an honorable discharge.”

  “She’s still a skank, boss. You going sentimental on me?”

  “Yeah,” Daugherty says, dissembling.

  “So, shall we just let her go?”

  “Sure. But let’s catch her first. If she’s too small, we’ll throw her back.” Pyle’s badass attitude is infectious. And maybe anyway he doesn’t trust the sympathy he’s beginning to feel for their fugitive.

  Pyle starts in again, talking over the tires’ hum. “I’ll give her that she conned a dumbass lawyer into giving her a ride. The bitch is clever.”

  In the windshield a distance sign appears. Daugherty calculates they’ll reach San Antonio in forty minutes, if their engine doesn’t blow or a tire burst. “More than clever. Smart enough, according to her file, to make drone pilot,” he says.

  “And
that’s why she’s in for a world of hurt after we catch her,” Pyle says.

  “How do you figure?”

  “First of all, the case file DC gave us is Swiss cheese redacted, so we know that whatever she’s wanted for is big.”

  “You mean, over-our-security-level big?”

  “I mean, congressional-hearing big.”

  Again, Daugherty finds himself defending Jessica. “If it was that serious, DC would have told us.”

  “Not if the CIA’s behind it. Think about it. We know that Langley directs the Air Force’s drone ops. And we know it can’t run all the ops it wants because there’s a pilot shortage. My guess is they’re trying to develop a program to put more drones in the air. That’s where ex – Technical Sergeant Aldridge comes in.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe she fucked up a mission she was pilot on, which if word got out would put the drone program under scrutiny. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she is Julian Assange’s latest pen pal.”

  Daugherty doesn’t buy the latter scenario. “If she sent secrets to WikiLeaks, it would be news already.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Pyle says.

  Groggy from their twenty-hour chase, they are speculating like conspiracy-minded bloggers. But all they factually know is that somebody up the food chain wants, wants badly, Jessica Aldridge brought in.

  “Could be she’s not guilty of a damn thing,” Daugherty says, ready to end the conversation.

  “Right,” Pyle says as they overtake a livestock trailer. “I’m sure she’s a real innocent.”

  A POSTER OUTSIDE the McDonald’s in San Antonio’s Market Square offers Daugherty a McRib—which sounds like how he feels, double punched in the kidneys. He tells Pyle to pull up by the sign so he can use the restroom. Inside, gray faced, he cups his palm under the running faucet and slurps down a Cardioquin for his arrhythmia.

  He’d been a healthy subject until his divorce six years ago. At least he’d had no major complaints. Now, at forty-seven, he also takes pills for his prostate and blood pressure. And once a year something new blows up on him. If his knees keep aching the way they do, he’ll probably be due for replacements before the next national election.