by M C Rowley
Then, voices above me. Americans. Locals.
They were saying, “He alright?” and, “I just saw him. He fell right over.”
I rolled and opened my eyes. My throat was too dry to talk. The sun cast the people surrounding me as silhouettes.
Then I heard a lady say, “Let me call the officer from the mall over.”
I tried to say “No,” but my mouth didn’t work.
I rolled over onto my knees and heaved myself into doggy position. Someone grabbed me from under my stomach and pulled.
“Don’t worry, buddy, someone’s comin’ to help.”
“No,” I said, and together we stood. I was swaying. I felt drunk, but with a hangover already.
“No,” I said again.
And I started walking away. As I gathered my strength, I moved into a jog again. I ran away from the gathering of people, towards the buildings opposite where I had fallen over. Here, the sidewalk got wider and I was able to walk normally as more people flooded the street. I breathed. I tried to relax.
But all I heard was the thud.
Of flesh hitting concrete.
Twenty-foot drop.
Thud.
Crack.
And X03’s face. White. Void of life.
Life I had taken.
The town began to build up and the streets got a little wider. More cars.
I walked on, but stumbled as it dawned on me that I had no plan. No place to go.
Then the blare of cop sirens came from somewhere close. Rapid and different to Mexican ones. Louder, more defined. My heart went into overdrive; I swore I was going to die before I made it to wherever it was I was heading.
They got louder. I thought about running.
No. Not a good idea.
I kept walking. Passersby were staring at me. I must have looked like shit.
I kept walking.
The sirens got louder. They were on the same street now.
No place to go. I turned forward again. No place.
And then a tap on my shoulder. I spun fast and got ready to react. Pulling away from the grasp, I fell backwards and I hit the ground with my ass this time.
“Woah there, man. Relax.”
The guy who’d had touched my shoulder was already right over me.
“No,” I said. “No. I’m okay. Leave me.”
“You don’t look okay,” he said.
My eyes focused on him.
A handsome black man stared back at me. He had round features that were somehow rugged at the same time. Graying, short hair and a trimmed beard flecked with white. He was smiling with his mouth closed. He wore a smart dark-blue cotton shirt buttoned up to the top.
“What?”
“Well, you’re on the ground in the dust for a start,” he said.
I shook my head and got to my knees, and then my feet.
“I’m okay,” I said.
“Didn’t mean to scare you there.”
He was as tall as me. He was in good shape for a guy my age. His face was so friendly, I felt safe with him.
“You need some help?”
More sirens turned the corner and came on to our street. I had to judge this right. Safer to go with this stranger, or risk the cops picking up the stumbling weirdo in the street?
I nodded.
“Yeah?”
I nodded once more.
The friendly man said, “Look, today’s my day off. We closed the church for some repairs and the big boss let me take some spiritual time. But I got the keys. And I make a damn good coffee.”
I must have looked puzzled, because he immediately added, “Sorry, how rude of me. I’m Pastor Robert Duncan. Of this parish. Nice to meet you.”
He extended his hand and I took it. He had a strong grip.
He looked at me questioningly.
“Oh,” I said, and I nearly told him my real name. Then I scanned my memory for the name Luciana had given me back in Mexico City, before the jungle. “Cochran. Andrew,” I said.
“Good to meet you. Now, come. It’s just a couple of blocks.”
We walked across the main street and down a smaller side road full of mom-and-pop stores and jewelry places. In the middle was a white building on which silver letters spelled ALL SAINTS BAPTIST CHURCH. The pastor fumbled for a key and unlocked the door.
“After you,” he said.
I walked into an almost empty room, just wooden pews, a small alter at the top and a black cross on the wall. In stark contrast to the affluence projected by the Catholics south of the border.
“Thank you,” I said.
The pastor smiled as he walked past me. “No problem. Our Father in heaven wouldn’t be too happy with me if I let a lost and scared stranger pass by without acting. Come through. There’s a little lounge back here. You like coffee?”
I nodded and said yes a little too strongly. The pastor chuckled and showed me through to a kind of office, with red and gold carpet and a couple of white armchairs. There was a desk and a small kitchen area with a drip-through coffee machine.
“Take a seat,” he said.
I did and felt my heartbeat start to settle.
I watched the pastor take out a small tin with “illy” written on it and begin preparing the brew. I was happy to watch and do nothing else.
The coffee took about ten minutes to start dripping into the pot and the smell was divine. The pastor got up and grabbed some mugs from the cupboard above and some dried cream powder in a tin and poured it out.
“No sugar, I’m afraid,” he said. “But the bean in this one is quite delicious.”
He smiled and handed me a cup and I drank deeply.
The pastor drank his too.
After a time, he spoke. “Now, I’m not one to judge, but you looked a little flustered out there, my friend. May I call you Andrew?”
I nodded, planning my answer carefully.
“You can call me Robert.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He slurped his coffee and I hoped he’d forgotten his point. He hadn’t.
“You fell over when I touched you. You were jumpy as hell. Everything okay? You need to call someone?”
And the lie came to me right there and then.
“It’s my wife,” I said. “She’s missing. And I was here on work. I got robbed and I have no way of getting back to where my wife should be.”
Robert frowned, trying to patch the story together. I realized how stupid it sounded as soon as it tumbled out of my mouth. But here’s the thing about deception: Once you start, consistency is critical.
“Missing, you say?”
“Well,” I said, racking my brain, “we had a fight. She usually calls me after a day or so. But this time, it’s been longer.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“Hang on, you’re foreign, right?”
I nodded. “British.”
“Man,” he said, smiling. “I love that accent.” And he flung one arm into the air. It was in that moment I realized his left hand was false. It was an old yellow, not far off real flesh color. He caught my gaze lingering a little too long on the prosthetic limb and looked at me.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” he said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to stare.”
“That’s alright. I don’t even think about it anymore. It’s up to my elbow. It was cut off by war lords in southern Somalia. I was captured on a missionary project. They thought I was a spy for the rival gang. I fought back. This was my punishment.”
“Jesus,” I said.
He frowned at me, then smirked.
“Sorry,” I said. “Again.”
“Relax, Andrew.” Then he cupped his palm to his mouth and whispered like a grandfather would to his grandchild, “Church is being renovated anyway. The big boss is too busy to notice.” And he winked.
I smiled and sipped the coffee some more.
“So, your w
ife is in trouble?”
“No, nothing like that. At least I hope not. We had a fight. I had to come here on business. Then I got robbed.”
Robert raised his eyebrows.
“I work for a paper company.”
“Where were you staying?”
My brain was in overdrive as the lies built up. I thought about the motel. But that was a no-go. That was a crime scene.
“I haven’t got a hotel. I just arrived in town and got mugged as soon as I got off the bus.”
“Well, I would say call the police,” said Robert. “But I don’t think they’ll be any good.”
I breathed a sigh of relief and hoped it wasn’t too obvious.
Robert didn’t seem to notice as he continued. “Last night there was some sort of plane crash out in the desert. Military, they say. The whole precinct is over there, apart from transit here in town. Crazy stuff.”
“I heard something about that on the bus in.”
Robert nodded. “Yeah, everyone’s freaking about it.”
“Sure.”
“So where you got to get to, Andrew?”
“New York State,” I said.
A look of surprise came over Robert’s face.
“You’re kidding right?”
I just looked at him.
“It’s the piety of the Lord,” he said, smiling and getting up.
“Huh?”
“New York State? You won’t believe it. I’m a New York native. And guess where I’m going to visit my family while the church is being fixed up? You just hit the jackpot, my friend. You just hit the jackpot.”
Chapter Thirty Seven
Pastor Robert told me all about his family in New York State and how he hadn’t seen his brother in over three years. They’d had some sort of feud and he didn’t get on with his sister-in-law all that well. This trip, he told me, was the first attempt at patching up their differences. He seemed to believe that my arrival in his life was a message from God, confirming to him that this trip, about which he had been stalling and deliberating, must go ahead.
“Let me call my brother and tell him now. You grab a shower, Andrew,” he said.
And so I was shown into another back room, which had a single bed, a solitary cross on the wall, plain metal like the main one in the church, and a minuscule bathroom with shower.
Robert brought me a change of clothes from what he told me was the donation pile. I felt bad for taking them but he insisted, and I promised to donate to the church when I got my money back. He gave me a pair of well-looked-after and heavily washed Dickies bootcut jeans that would cover the top half of my stolen police footwear perfectly, a red t-shirt from the Gap, and a heavy sweater for when we got north.
I showered, taking my time about it, watching the water stream off my body. Then I used the small, hard bar of soap to cleanse my skin, and found a little bottle of generic hotel shampoo to wash my short hair. I had grown a good two millimeters of beard since escaping Mexico too, but couldn’t see a razor.
I dried off and got into the new clothes. They felt softer than anything I had worn since back in Lujano, back when $3,000 suits were my garb.
Once done, I returned to the office where Robert had made the coffee to find him with two brown bags of takeaway food. They smelled of meat.
“Burger?”
I nodded and sat with him and we ate. The burgers were Carl’s Jr. and tasted exquisite, although I’d have eaten horse burgers if they’d been the sole option. Robert had bought me two, plus extra-large fries and a liter of Coke. I demolished it all in less than five minutes.
Once we cleaned up, Robert took out his phone, checked it and placed it on the table and tapped it. To my surprise, it was a very modern model of smartphone, lightweight and with a huge screen. Not what I would have thought a pastor in Texas might have chosen, but hell, everyone had them these days.
Robert sat back down at the table across from me and said, “So I called Brian—that’s my brother—and we had a good chat. He told me to come right away. We can be there in two days if the roads play ball.”
I nodded and listened as he explained the route. I didn’t care really; I was just grateful for him. I couldn’t believe my luck, and when he asked me to pray with him for a safe journey, I did so with gusto.
Although the only thing that came into my head was X03’s skull smashing on concrete.
Robert asked me to lock up the office while he went to get the car, which he said was parked in a lot close-by. He took a while and I sat on a church pew, waiting.
After thirty minutes, he came to the door of the church, stuck his head around it, and said, “Good to go.”
We locked up and stepped out onto the street. I glanced left and right for cops, but no one was around. The car was a nearly new VW Jetta, white and shiny.
“Nice ride,” I said, and Robert nodded.
“Yeah, I always lease.”
I thought that was funny, for a holy man on a holy man’s salary, but dismissed the notion. Things had changed in the West since I’d been south of the border.
We got in and got comfortable, with the A/C on max, and began rolling through the streets.
The town was a grid of wide, gray four-lane strips. Nothing like the cramped, cracked thoroughfares of Mexico. Robert drove with caution, stopping when the lights went orange, not even red, and letting people cross whenever they approached the curb. He drove like a grandad.
The town we were in was called Deming. And it turned out we weren’t in Texas at all, but on the border, about 120 kilometers away from El Paso, according to Robert. Our plan was to head north, past Rock Canyon, up to Albuquerque, then east to Oklahoma.
Robert reckoned we needed two days. I didn’t have a clue. I glanced, as surreptitiously as I could, left and right for cops and wondered if we’d see the desert where the plane crashed on our way out, but we didn’t. To my relief, after five minutes Robert was revving the Jetta out onto the blacktop of the highway and we were off.
The roll of the road and the burgers digesting in my stomach sent me into a lull, and I asked Robert if it was okay to sleep awhile. He nodded and said, “O’ course,” and I laid my head sideways into the seatbelt, forehead on the glass, and closed my eyes.
All I could see and hear was X03 hitting that concrete. How had I pushed him like that? I asked myself. How could he have died at the hands of a regular guy, and not in some drive-by or hit by a rival gang? I failed to fathom it. I had killed another human being.
I shuddered and tried to push it from my mind and think of Eleanor instead. I knew where she was.
I can’t say. There are places I would never go here. And there are places I know I’d be safe.
New York State was where the officials had made us place a memorial stone for our lost son. We never named him, so it just had his date of birth and a few lines of poetry. Eleanor fought it and fought it and refused to visit it. I had to organize the stone, made from polished pink marble and I was there when they placed it, but Eleanor refused to go. She refused to believe he was dead.
The gravestone represented a massive betrayal of our son, Eleanor believed. She would never visit it, she always said.
Until now.
I must have drifted off fast and gone into a deep slumber, because when I awoke the sky was twilight and it was cold. Desert cold. I’d traveled in the north of Mexico more times than I could remember and I could never forget how cold it got in desert land at night. The cool air turned sharp about an hour after sundown and bit into your lungs, where earlier the same day the air had baked them from the inside. I awoke to see a clear night sky above us through the passenger window. My body ached from the sleeping position and I was shivering with cold. I stirred and turned around for my sweater, and saw Robert intent on the road ahead.
I slipped on the sweater and instantly felt more comfortable.
“Helluva sleep there, Andrew,” said Robert.
I sighed as my brain clicked into gear and up to pace
again.
“Yeah, damn tired.”
“You mind if we stop soon for a quick break and you take the wheel for a spell?”
I nodded and said, “Of course.”
Robert smiled and drove on for another ten kilometers before a city began to sprout up from the ground. We were arriving in Albuquerque.
Robert spotted a roadside diner with a bunch of heavy loaded trailers outside and lights glowing from within. He pulled over and found a spot right by the door.
We got out of the Jetta, locked it, and walked into what Edward Hopper would have regarded as prime source material. Three heavy-set guys who matched their heavy-set trailers were sitting on benches a space apart from each other, hunched over large plates of steak. The diner stank of coffee and chip-pan oil.
I was starving, and after Robert and I had visited the small and relatively clean WC to relieve ourselves, we ordered dinner. I had ham and eggs with extra fries while Robert ordered a steak with mashed potatoes.
We ate in silence and then ordered coffee. The diner emptied out. I looked at the clock; it was just after ten.
“I reckon we’ll get there the day after tomorrow. Friday morning.”
I nodded. Today was Wednesday.
“We can stop to sleep tonight, but that’ll put us back. Think you can drive to the early morn?”
I nodded again. The food and coffee had refueled me, and being away from the crash site and my victim’s body made me feel a whole lot more relaxed. Silently, I marveled at the size of the States.
After another two cups of coffee, Robert paid. I apologized for not having any money and promised again to make a donation to his church as soon as possible. Robert told me he was just grateful for the help with the driving.
This time, I took the driver’s seat and put the new VW into gear. Its clutch bit like only those on new cars do and we pulled out of the parking lot.
Robert rested his head much the same way I had and before long he was snoring quietly against the glass.
The night was a deep purple and now littered with stars. I picked up the freeway around the city, and after twenty minutes we were back on the open road. Next stop: Oklahoma.
