Once More to Die

by Jim Johnson

  She was beginning to understand his cryptic personality. “Yes, dear,” she said sarcastically.

  Interstate 19 south to Nogales on the border. And she’d always thought south Florida was hot.

  “Lesson eight or whatever,” Tommy said as she drove. Heat shimmered off the roadway and adjacent scrub land. “Always pay attention. Situational awareness. Know exits of anywhere you enter, eyeball them immediately. Paying attention, soon you’ll notice people or things out of place, odd stuff going on you might not ordinarily notice. Like triggers, clues, and soon that stuff will shout ‘beware’ to you. You develop a sixth sense after a while, and pretty soon it becomes automatic.”

  Almost to the border town of Nogales, Atkins directed her to drive off I-19 onto Algeria Road. They took it to the end. “Looks like Algeria all right,” María Elena muttered as the SUV rocked and bounced.

  `“Don’t worry about it,” he told her, “this car’s not going much farther.”

  Way down Algeria Road they turned on a faint double track outline. Tommy pointed and she turned onto it. Half a dozen miles later, they teed off that gravel road onto another, less obvious trail.

  “Line’s are blurry here,” Atkins said, “Coronado National Forest property interspersed with state land and private property all over hereabouts. Both sides of the Interstate. Few people come back this far.”

  The terrain was rough, hardpan and gravel on the trail. Sometimes they drove through small canyons with sheer or sculpted rock. “Some of these arroyos you don’t want to be in when a storm comes,” he continued. She was surprised at the underbrush. Probably meant there was sufficient water here. Not exactly desert. Mesquite. Big, round skeletal bushes she guessed were sage, which dried up and blew through ghost towns in Western movies. Saguaro cacti were the large ones, and scattered small cacti, round or Mickey Mouse-eared.

  A flock of turkey vultures scattered and leapt into the air. Just like vultures on road kill in the ’Glades.

  Then she recognized it: it was the same as Tommy Atkins’ hideout in the Everglades: hidden, almost inaccessible, inhospitable. She drove on with determination, finally garnering his plan.

  They rounded a turn and dipped into a greener valley of a few acres, towered over by rock face. Dust which had followed settled behind them.

  Tucked under a cliff overhang was an adobe house. It looked almost cool in the shadows. Alongside it sat a brand new Jeep.

  “We need a four-wheel drive next, Pocahontas. A safe ride. A vehicle that can navigate this God-forsaken land if we have to go off the road.”

  “Off the road?” she asked rhetorically.

  “Don’t get too close. Kill the engine and stay in the vehicle.” Tommy leaned into the back seat and retrieved a briefcase. He pulled out one of the envelopes of money. “Twenty-five ought to do it.” He climbed out and María Elena triggered her window down before she shut off the engine.

  He went around to the back of the SUV and took two boxes of books out and carried them toward the adobe house. About fifty feet away from the house he dropped the books at his feet and stood waiting. “Charley?”

  “The fuck you want?” came a voice from an open window.

  “It’s Atkins. From Florida. How about we talk for a minute.”

  “What’s in the boxes?”

  “Books.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “What’s that in your hand?” The voice was reedy now, peeved at the intrusion.

  “An envelope with twenty-five grand in it.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Your vacation in Vegas. Four weeks paid vacation. Rent money for your place for that four weeks.”

  “The books?”

  “I read your reviews on Amazon and know what you like. They’re my bonefides.” Tommy opened his arms innocently. “How long since you been outa here, Charley?”

  “Too fuckin’ long, Tom. Too fuckin’ long.”

  “We all need to get away once in a while.”

  “Ain’t that right.” A tall, scrawny man with a beard came out the front door, rifle cradled in his arms. He peered at the SUV and then back to Tommy. “You on the run?”

  “There was a little trouble down in south Florida.”

  “You ain’t alone.”

  “Nope.”

  Charley scratched under his beard. “I could use a professional shave. Lissen, lemme do the math. Thirty days expenses, that’d be maybe fifteen K. I feel like doing some gambling; I like the women and the shows, and some 21. Generous, that would cost maybe ten K a week. So, you got another twenty?”

  “Yeah, I got it, Charley.”

  Charley laughed, almost a loud cough. “What do you bet that’s not as much as the reward.”

  “I don’t know reward, Charley.” Tommy’s voice became dangerous.

  Charley shook his head. “You got me wrong, Atkins. This old vet ain’t gonna look it up. We don’t operate thataway. Just pulling your leg. Gimme the extra twenty and I’ll leave right fucking now. If I get lucky, maybe I won’t come back. I been out here a long time. This shit gets old. Fuck being a recluse. I signed out during Vietnam and ain’t regretted it. Well, not often.”

  “Charley, show me your generator, water pump, and systems. Then you can go. And Charley? I need you to lay out what weapons you got. I won’t take ’em, but I gotta know what’s here and what’s not.”

  “You start a fuckin’ war, Atkins, and we’re all fucked.”

  “Yeah, I know the drill. Boy Scout motto.”

  Charley grinned. “Me, too. Always. Be prepared.”

  María Elena stayed in the SUV for twenty minutes while the two went inside.

  She wondered how many veterans were peppered across the land, playing the recluse. She’d heard of them in places like Montana and Alaska. But not here or the Everglades.

  She wondered if there were a website for hermits where you registered and then you could network amongst each other. Tommy was certainly knowledgeable. On the other hand, Tommy paid attention to everything. He would cultivate these kinds of distant friends. Maybe it was a hermit-guy thing.

  Then Charley came out with a bag, climbed in his Jeep and pulled out. Tommy got another package of money and handed it to the man as he drove up.

  Charley eyed María Elena with surprise. “Goddamn,” he told Tommy. “You dog, you.” He grinned and gunned the Jeep out of the shadows.

  Tommy led her into the house. “Home sweet home,” he said.

  “What’s with him?” she asked.

  “Charley, he’s an old mob guy. Ran afoul of the feds and this is the mob’s version of the Witness Protection Program. He could have been set up in a city, but he prefers to hide out here. He’s an old vet.”

  One bedroom, of course. One open central room. In the corner, a kitchenette. Book cases on the walls. Television and desk with computer. Fireplace on the outside wall. Small bathroom, no shower. Meticulous housekeeping. Maybe all these hermits took the same class in hermiting.

  “He’s got satellite dishes on top of that cliff. Television and Internet, too. Something called WildBlue Satellite System. On top of this house is what they call a swamp cooler. Big fan sucks air in through filters which have water pumped over them all the time it’s on.”

  “It’s plenty cool in here.”

  “He also has got a whole house fan. Sucker blows some air. Generator and water pump. Septic with a good field way away from the water source. Outside shower, tough in the winter, okay now.”

  “Just your basic hermitage?”

  “So to speak.” He pointed at a back door. “Deep rock pool out there, fed from a seep. You can swim in it if you take short strokes.”

  Tommy slept on the couch. She got up at dawn, put her hair in a pony tail and went for a run back down the track to get familiar with the lay of the land. She jogged two miles getting the kinks out; it had been a long time. Then she ran back a
t double the speed.

  When she rounded the curve and came to a stop at the house, Tommy was sitting in a lawn chair sipping a cup of coffee. Next to him atop an upside down bucket was his .380.

  “Hi honey, I’m home,” she said.

  He smiled. “I put soap and towels at the shower out back. The setup is just like my old shower in the Everglades, this one with a pump from the pool to the overhead barrel. Or you can hop in the rock pool.” At her look, he said, “Don’t worry. I’m already familiar with your fair young unclad body.” He grinned. “And I admit it is an attractive one, even though your hips are a shade wide.”

  “My hips?”

  “I think they’re very attractive that way.”

  Her breathing was returning to normal. She took his coffee cup and drank deeply. “My hips are too wide?” She missed good, thick Cuban coffee.

  “Don’t worry about it, Pocahontas. You’ll get plenty of exercise here.”

  “My hips?” He grinned.

  She stuck her tongue out at him and returned his coffee and went to take a shower.

  While showering, she realized she was comfortable for the first time in a very long time. She found their situation was almost domestic and tranquil. Strange: here in the middle of nowhere living with a professional killer, she liked what she was doing. She realized then that she was very fond of Tommy. Sure, he’d saved her life a few times, but he wasn’t an overwhelming presence, a demanding person. In fact he was very easy to get along with. She recognized she’d been learning, in essence, a new lifestyle from him. Even if she returned to Miami, she’d never be the same again; her perspective had changed significantly. And she was intellectually engaged with him and she could not deny they had a gut level attachment which was growing every day.

  After all the violence and running and hiding, she almost hoped they could stay here and ignore the rest of the world.

  In a week, they drove back to Tucson. They picked up the passports and other ID’s. From there, they went to a self-storage facility off Speedway. In a small unit, she watched as he rolled up the door. Against a far wall sat a small suitcase.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “Money.”

  “Yep. Another hundred grand.”

  “You must be rich.”

  “Now that I have you I am.”

  “Wow.”

  “Shit,” he said regretfully and his face grew red. “Sorry, Pocahontas, that one just slipped out.”

  “It kind of makes me feel good, Tommy.”

  “I mean, now I enjoy the wealth of your company and all that other shit, I have an abundance of riches.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “I always stash money. Well, I used to. Don’t have an income any longer which produces so much money.” He cleared his throat self-consciously.

  They went to a seedy used car lot and bought a four-wheel drive Jeep. For an extra couple of hundred dollars, the salesman took care of their lack of insurance and found them an untraceable license. “Give me a week, and I’ll have the real tag from the state.” He said it like he knew they wouldn’t be back.

  “Can you drive a floor-shift?” Tommy asked.

  “I can drive anything. I drove Jeeps and four-wheel trucks with those giant tires and motorcycles, too, all on the 13 training ground outside of Miami. There were mud pits and bogs and little hills we made with backhoes and front-end loaders for training.”

  Back at Charley’s cabin, Tommy parked the SUV in front and directed her to park the Jeep in a shadowy overhang of the mesa above some quarter of a mile on the far side of the cabin opposite the approach road.

  “If we need it,” he told her, “we can hop in and go across country since there is only one so-called roadway in and out of here.” He put some canned food and bottled water in a bag and dumped that in the back seat. He wrapped a .22 rifle, two .38 revolvers, and ammunition in towels and covered them up on the floor of the back seat.

  “I know,” she said, “Boy Scout motto.”

  That night, she fixed arroz con pollo. “Cuban yellow rice and chicken,” she explained. Even she thought it was very good.

  But he barely ate his, just picking at it.

  “You don’t like it?” she asked.

  “It’s good, it really is. I’m just not hungry.”

  “You’re always hungry, like a growing boy.”

  “Not tonight. I feel like I got the flu.”

  In an hour he was feverish. He did not complain, but she could tell he had nausea. He vomited in the bathroom. He took a cold shower outside.

  When he came in from that, he looked pale.

  María Elena was becoming concerned. “That bug took hold quickly.”

  “Stay away from me, you might catch it.”

  “No, I don’t get sick. Here, lie down.” She led him to the bed she’d been sleeping in.

  He collapsed on it and began shivering violently.

  “Tommy? This doesn’t appear to be the flu.” She tucked sheets and a blanket around him.

  “I’m freezing.” His teeth chattered. He was sweating profusely.

  She found another blanket in a closet. He continued to shiver. She felt his forehead and he was cool, very cool. Maybe the body sweats, she thought, when temperature falls.

  His eyes bled misery and his body shook. He curled up on his side in a fetal position.

  She thought a moment and then pulled her shirt over her head and stripped off her jeans. She stood for a second watching him.

  María Elena climbed into bed and got under the covers with him. His back to her, she spooned with him and wrapped her arms around him.

  She held him tightly as he continued to shake with chills.

  “God, you…feel…good,” he said, voice plaintive. “I…am…soooo…cold.”

  His muscles trembled. She could only hold him.

  “S’not flu,” he gasped. He squirmed back into her.

  “Not good, Tommy,” she said into the back of his neck.

  “N…nope. Malaria.… relapse.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she said, voice muffled against his shoulder as his whole body shook. She felt a puckered scar etch into her cheek.

  He gasped, which she thought was an attempt at laughing.

  “Where did you get malaria?”

  “F…fucking Angola. Or the fucking Congo. Some fucking place.” Suddenly, he rolled over on his back and pulled her on top of him. Even incapacitated, he was so very strong. He was shaking badly, but it did not even mimic sex as she would’ve thought. “So nice…warm.” His breath was sour, his skin clammy.

  “Angola? In Africa?” What was he doing?

  “Is…there…another…?”

  “What were you doing in Angola, Tommy?” He did not appear excited, so maybe he wasn’t looking for sex. But he wrapped his arms around her and held her tighter. He still shivered uncontrollably.

  He laughed again through clinched and chattering teeth. “Killing…Cubans.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE: HER

  Shortly, Tommy stopped shaking and began breathing deeply, as if in a fast sleep. He didn’t seem inclined to move her off of him, but she felt that he was warming. This fact gave her some chills of her own. “Chills and fever” were a term commonly used. She slipped off of him and rearranged the blankets over him.

  She took the opportunity to hustle to the laptop. She went on the Internet to look up malaria.

  “Oh, shit.” She’d known they were in trouble, but until now she hadn’t admitted it to herself. He needed hospitalization. And sooner rather than later.

  She read on and found possible things that could happen without treatment: liver and kidney failure, dehydration of course, fluid in the lungs, and something about an enlarged spleen. She didn’t exactly know what the hell a spleen was and what function it performed in the body, but she didn’t look it up, either.

  Maybe they’d be lucky and it would be a minor episode. But one look at him negated that thought. He was sweating again, and threw o
ff his bedclothes. She felt his forehead again, and touched his shoulders and chest. He was burning up.

  Though she searched, she found no thermometer or first aid kit. She did find some aspirin and forced them into his mouth. He choked them down with water she virtually poured into his mouth. She continued giving him water as long as he tolerated it—not long at all. His eyes opened infrequently. Sometimes he seemed to know who she was and what was going on, other times it was as if he were in a coma. She bathed his head with a wet cloth, and then his chest and legs. It seemed to cool him a bit, but he continued to have a high fever. His skin felt hot to her touch.

  Then he fell into what she thought was a coma, though in fairness she knew nothing about medicine or comas. He became unresponsive about five hours into the attack. His temperature stayed high and he was sweating again, though not as much. She thought this might be due to dehydration. She continued to bathe him. She got all the ice from the freezer and chilled water with it and bathed him again.

  María Elena became intimately familiar with the cicatrix of scars on his body. His thigh had what she thought was a bullet wound scar. There was a long slash on his left side. Another bullet hole on the shoulder she had felt hours ago. Two other areas where she could tell where he’d gotten stitches—not very professional jobs, either, as the scars remained.

  At two in the morning, his fever seemed to reach a new and higher plateau and she became more scared than she had in a long time. She didn’t want to lose this man.

  “God damn it, Tommy!” She shook him and his eyes opened, rolled up, then returned and focused.

  “Pocahontas…”

  “Tommy. We gotta get you up, right now. C’mon.” She dragged on his arm and snaked under it and put her other arm around his torso. “Get up. Now, damn it.”

  “Don’t wanna.”

  “I am going to put you under the shower.”

  “’Kay.”

  Shakily, he got his feet under him and sat upright on the bed. María Elena squatted and lifted him with her legs.