by M C Rowley
So not too bad, all things considered.
My feet pounded the dirt and I used the sound like a metronome, focusing on the progress, not the pain. To the right, shards of yellow and orange of the morning sun were cracking through the black curtain of sky. I looked forward and saw Jean coming to a stop. We’d made it to the highway.
I got to the barrier, the generic metal type used everywhere around the globe, and we climbed over and down a short bank to the blacktop.
Not a car in sight.
“Come on,” said Jean, who started off to the right.
I was glad for the walk and felt my body burn back to life. I started thinking about the plane and where it might have crashed. I promised myself I’d ask Jean that. But not now. We weren’t quite safe yet.
We walked for thirty minutes before the dim lights of a motel came into view. We walked up to it but held back as Jean indicated.
“Let me go,” she said. “Wait here.”
We nodded, grateful for the rest.
After fifteen minutes, Jean returned and threw a key to me and passed one to Jairo.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Jairo carried Luciana to the side of the building. It was built in the style of a Swiss ski chalet, but much smaller. Jean explained that the reception was manned by one guy and that his line of sight didn’t reach the far wall. So we stuck to the cheap wooden boarding and edged around the structure to the back side, where the rooms were laid out in a neat square, divided into two floors. I counted about twelve rooms, and only one car parked up, an old Nissan truck.
I glanced at my key. Etched into it was the number 103. I began hunting for my door.
Jean got to hers first, opened it, and slipped inside, closing the door behind her.
Jairo reached his next and did the same, carefully carrying Luciana through like some morbid wedding scene.
I walked up to the second floor and found my door.
I turned the key, walked in, and shut the door, locking it behind me.
The room was as generic as a motel room could get, with thick curtains drawn over lace white ones hanging down underneath. The carpet was worn and smelled vaguely of wet dog. The bed was made, but I didn’t bother pulling the sheets back. I slumped on it, and stared at the bare white walls and the cheap Rothko print. Strange choice for this type of joint, but who cared? My body was exhausted.
I was in the States. Now I had to find Eleanor.
But I had no reference, no idea where she was.
I tried to think, but it was no use.
And after what felt like ten seconds, I was fast asleep.
Chapter Thirty-Five
It was the same dream as always. Sometimes a different context, a different set of variables, or a different location with different players, but fundamentally, always the same.
Streams and streams of figures pushing past me, some with half-faces, like melted wax, others with blank skin where a face should have been. I felt scared, but not of them, of something else.
Not scared. Panicked.
The figures pushed into me from all around, looking at me, if they had eyes; stopping me.
That was it.
I’d been here before.
They wouldn’t let me get to it.
The middle.
A child. Our child.
The child we never got to name. The child who grew to become Jairo.
The more I tried to walk, the less my feet would move.
I looked down. The figures were below me now. Holding my legs.
They pushed me from the front, and held me from below.
A quicksand of people.
The baby was crying.
But the figures groaned and drowned out his wailing.
“Please,” I tried to say. “Please. Let me through. My son. Please.”
My eyes opened.
I was wet with sweat. And cold from the desert air.
The desert.
The current state of affairs flooded back to my mind.
I closed my eyes. Eleanor, where are you?
If it was the last thing I ever did, I would bring this family together. As it was supposed to be.
Me.
Jairo.
Eleanor.
Jairo’s girl.
And our granddaughter.
The light outside was strong and blazed through the cheap orange motel curtains.
I had slept for hours and felt a lot better for it.
I scanned the room. There was an open door leading to the en suite bathroom, a small table with a plastic flower on it, and the main door.
I closed my eyes. I had spoken to Eleanor about a week ago, or two?
I recalled the conversation now, back in the jungle.
What had she said?
She urged me to find her. To get to her. But she wasn’t able to say where she was.
She told me not to say where I was.
Like Reynolds was listening.
“You need to get here. Find me. And we find the girls.”
That was what she said.
Find me.
But where? I cursed and banged my fist on the bed.
Feeling like giving up, I got up and walked to the bathroom. It was small and dark, but the shower had hot water and I stripped and got in.
As the water cleansed my filthy skin, I felt better.
“You need to get here. Find me. And we find the girls.”
Eleanor’s words kept coming into my mind.
“Find me.”
“You need to get here.”
I finished up and dried with the standard motel towel and walked back to the bed.
She said something else.
I dug deep into my memory, remembering the call again.
“But how do we find you?”
I asked that. Now I remembered her reply.
“I can’t say. There are places I would never go here. And there are places I know I’d be safe.”
I froze.
“There are places I would never go here.”
Of course. She had been giving me a message. There was one place in the United States of America she would never visit. Not normally. Not before.
But now, things had changed.
And I knew where to find her.
I got ready quickly, putting on the same old blue cop’s t-shirt we pillaged from the jungle. It stank and I promised myself I’d find new clothes as soon as possible. But the discomfort of my garments in no way inhibited my renewed hope of finding Eleanor, and then Jairo’s young family. Our family.
I tied up my boots and leapt out of the door.
I reached the door Jairo had entered first and pounded on the cheap wooden frame.
Nothing.
Must be out cold, I thought.
I knocked and knocked but no one answered.
So I walked two doors down to Jean’s room.
By the third knock I realized: They’d gone. I’d been stupid, short-sighted not to see it before. I kept looking, around the motel complex, the car park, the lobby, where a teenage boy was manning the front desk, absorbed by his cell phone.
I ran back to my room, my mind processing the situation at full pelt, trying to figure out my next step. I wasn’t safe here. I was a wanted man in Mexico, and that made it doubly bad stateside. I also had no papers or money.
But I knew where to find Eleanor now. That was one thing.
I got to my room, fumbled the door open, and stepped in—and almost didn’t notice the folded slip of paper on the floor. I was sure it hadn’t been there before. I picked it up. It was lined legal paper with a rough scrawl on one side. I skipped to the bottom and saw my son’s name signed, Jairo.
After closing the door, I walked to the bed and slumped down and started to read.
In Spanish it said:
I got you here. That was my only promise. You can find your family now and go and live a life. You should never have tried to find me. I have a complicated situation and am more tied up in shit
than you could ever imagine. Agent Santos doesn’t know I left this note. Please destroy it as soon as you’ve read it. It’s not safe to know the things I know. You’ve been witness to some of it too, so I can only presume you’re not safe either.
I have an agreement with the CIA. They need to find Reynolds and they want to use me as bait. I will be killed as soon as their use for me is up. I know that and have been told that in so many words.
I don’t know where your wife is, but now you’re here, you can find her.
It’s best you leave me and my family alone now.
Jairo Morales
Perhaps it was his infantile handwriting or the way he’d put his surname at the end, or just the fact he was telling me to get out of his life, but a giant lump swam up my throat and I had to swallow to stop the tears coming.
The room swirled around me and I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. All this bullshit, and for what? The fire of anger began to spit and burn in my stomach. If I’d left him alone back in Lujano, none of this would have gone down. Eleanor and I could have gone to England. Or the States. He was better off dead. I got up and screwed the note into a little ball. I was chucking it into the garbage can when suddenly a gunshot sounded outside.
I sat up.
Crouching, I made my way to the only window, which looked out onto the yard and reception. Pulling back the net curtain as slowly as my adrenalin would allow, I peered out.
The sound of the gun was still ringing from below.
And the perpetrator remained too.
There, holding a smoking pistol aimed at where the young lad had been on reception, was the leader of Código X, X03.
Chapter Thirty-Six
X03 was roaming around the central faux-plaza of the motel, his eyes glued to the reception desk where the kid should have been, entranced by his phone, as I had seen him not long ago.
The sound of a door opening below reached my ears, and a man ran across the plaza, fleeing. X03 turned and, with chilling precision, aimed his pistol at the moving target. One resounding boom brought him down to the floor. A scream came from the door the latest victim had come from, and X03 turned his attention and his gun and shot again.
I held my breath. My viewpoint was incomplete; the bottom half of my window looked out from the terrace down to two thirds of the plaza. The likelihood of X03 seeing me was slim. But that didn’t matter. He was here for me. Well, more for Jairo, but I would do.
I turned from the window and slumped down to sit on the floor, my head resting on the sill. I felt a sudden fury toward my son. He would have known that this animal was after us, and yet he chose to leave me here, knowing that Eleanor was lost elsewhere.
Boom.
Another shot fired. More screams followed by more shots, and then silence.
My ribcage shuddered and my breaths sounded like blasts of a hairdryer as I tried to calm my puffing.
Boom.
Another shot. This time closer. On this floor.
My mind went into overdrive. I gauged the sound of the shot. Four doors down? Yes, about that.
I couldn’t think of anything. Just curse words raging in my ears. Desperate.
Boom.
That was next door. He was here.
I closed my eyes.
My breathing calmed. A somber and morbid acceptance washed over me, there in that cheap, dirty motel. I’d never find Eleanor and keep her safe from Reynolds. Or Jairo. The son I’d lost too many times to keep count. He hated me anyway.
These were to be my last thoughts.
And I couldn’t let that happen.
If I was going to die, damn it, I might as well make myself useful.
I picked myself up and stood and faced the door. Two stick shadows came from the bottom. I stepped backwards as lightly as my weight would allow to the wall facing the door, where the coat pegs were. There was a generic white hotel towel hanging on one of the pegs and I lifted it over my face so that I could see the door no more. I was six feet from the door. I had my heel pressed on the wall, ready to provide some thrust and crouched slightly, in a sort of variation on the 100-meter sprinter starting pose.
The door handle rattled. Then the door creaked.
When I was in my teens, I attended a private school called Bricklewood Manor for just under one calendar year. My mother had saved enough money to cover a couple of semesters, hoping that I might do well academically and secure a scholarship. Instead, I fell in with what many regarded as a bad crowd and ended up being kicked out for smoking. Such a cliché. But though my eventual fate was trite, I did enjoy at least one activity the school put on. Rugby. Especially the tackling. My tall and gaunt frame was not ideal for the sport, but at a young age I grew into a half-decent loosehead prop, playing in the front row of Bricklewood Manor’s team. And now, at exactly the right time, like some lizard instinct, my brain was coaching my muscles and tendons and bones on how to take someone down hard.
The door opened and X03 stood there in the sunlight, just an outline. He held up his gun and fired. I barely felt the pressure hit the back of my head from the blast in the wall above and behind me before I leapt into a short and fast sprint, aiming for just below his gut, where he wouldn’t want to get kicked.
I jumped from under the towel and across the space between us in less than two seconds.
I slammed into his thighs and, locking my arms around them, followed my momentum until I felt his frame smash into the barrier of the terrace. I lifted with every bit of strength I had until I felt his feet whip past my head. Suddenly, he felt light as he flipped backwards over the railing. He fell the twenty feet to the concrete ground of the plaza below, letting out a huge groan.
I stood up, panting, my heart going berserk in my chest, and looked over. Blood was puddling out of the back of X03’s cranium and his eyes, although open still, were void of life.
And just like that, I had killed another human being.
I ran into the room to grab everything I owned. I emptied the pockets and found, to my surprise, the phone Luciana had given me before the crash. I re-pocketed it and left: down the stairs, out into the parking lot, running as fast as I could.
The motel was at the side of a quiet highway, and I ran across it like a maniac. On the other side, there was a thin and weak-looking brick wall, and beyond that, multiple yellow-painted condos. I got to the wall, where the ground sank down a little from the viewpoint of the highway, and jogged parallel to the enclosed neighborhood.
Graffiti and trash accompanied my three-kilometer journey. I realized I was in the rough part of town. My heart, now fueled by both adrenalin and exhaustion, had moved into a kind of autopilot thumping, steady and violent and unrelenting. My mind kept flashing to the image of X03 lying on the ground below me.
I had killed a man.
The cops would be everywhere soon too. He had been firing shots; surely one of the guests would have called 911.
I got to the corner of the neighborhood and stopped and panted, hands on my knees, for a good ten minutes. My heart would not calm down but my breathing returned to a manageable rhythm. I used it to chant swear words to myself.
When I peered around the brick wall, I saw the main road of a town, dusty and empty besides a couple of guys sitting on tires outside a grubby roadside mechanic’s shop. I walked past them as calmly as I could, praying they didn’t notice anything weird about my boots and dark-blue pants and shirt. A Mexican cop’s uniform in Texas. Not exactly inconspicuous.
They didn’t pay me much attention, so I kept on.
I felt dizzy. I tasted blood in my mouth. And X03’s body sprawled on the concrete filled my mind’s eye. The look on his inert face. The ring of blood oozing from behind his head. And the sound of the thud when he landed.
The swearing under my breath got worse.
I was lost.
I stumbled as my foot hit a curb that I didn’t see and I fell over.
I knew I had to get back up and keep on, but I couldn’t. My bod
y went into some sort of paralysis. Fear and pain and exhaustion, all rolled up into one feeling: impotency.
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.
