I pawed through the stuff on the table and retrieved the only thing I really cared about: my mobile phone.
“If they weren’t thinking about charging me, why did they take my phone?”
“Because they found it on Plankinton’s body. It was one of the first things he glommed onto after he conked you and got you cuffed.”
“What?” I snapped my head around. “Plankinton didn’t bother with either my wallet or my keys, but he took the time to steal my phone?”
“Yep.” Rachel met my gaze without backing up. “So what?”
“This wasn’t just a revenge thing, to get back at me for giving him a couple of owies and a permanent limp. The revenge was window dressing. Something he threw in to make it look like he was acting alone. Chaladian is still after Thompson. He wanted to put me out of the game for sure, but he also wanted anything I had that might give him a lead on her.”
“So he’s still a danger to us.”
“Yep.”
“Does that mean you have to kill him?” Rachel asked this question without a hint of drama. Just your everyday conversation around the dining room table. My husband is a trained killer, and I like to show an interest in his work.
“Not an easy call.”
“You’re right, of course. Stupid question.”
I had a funny little disoriented feeling. The youngest prisoner I ever turned over to Iraqi soldiers was sixteen. He was Sunni, they were Shi’a, he was looking at an eleven mile drive in the back of a paneled truck, and it wasn’t going to be a good trip. Sometimes hard things have to be done. But doing them should be hard. Not routine. Turning that kid over had been routine for me. Item four to check off that day’s to-do list.
Three nights later I’d gotten my first nightmare about the kid. My first vision of him with his eyes gouged out and his bloody face grotesquely swollen and his balls jammed in his mouth. No idea if any of that stuff happened to him, but that’s what my subconscious dredged up to flog me with. I cherished that nightmare. Clung to it. It meant I hadn’t lost—yet.
I looked pointedly at Rachel. I wanted to be sure she’d understand exactly what I meant when I spoke.
“It wasn’t a stupid question.”
Chapter Forty-two
On the thirty-eighth rotation, just as the hammer was starting to feel heavy in my left hand, I heard the mailman stuffing mostly useless crap into our box. I was sitting at our kitchen table just after noon, not quite a week after I told Rachel her question wasn’t stupid. They’d taken the cast off twenty-four hours before. Turning the hammer to the left until it was parallel with the table and then back to the right was rehab.
I hurried compulsively through the last dozen rotations before I went to get the mail. Usual stuff. Bills. Flyers about big sales and bargain prices. A magazine for people who are into ballet. And—Hello. A battered, white business envelope. Dirty, dimpled, wrinkled, and torn a little at one corner. Mexican stamp. Postmarked the previous Friday. Addressed in droopy, loopy penmanship to Tall Dude.
My fingers shook a little as I opened the thing up. Inside I found a folded sheet of yellow paper:
Oasis Project. TALK it up to your friends.
Check One More Chance in El Paso.
Good time to TALK: 6/29 1715/courthouse.
June 29th was three days from now. I memorized the words and numbers, struck a kitchen match, and burned the slip of paper and the envelope over the sink.
Googling “Oasis Project” turned up nothing relevant. Putting “One More Chance” in the same box as “El Paso,” on the other hand, produced plenty of hits. They included references to a program for teenagers who, reading between the lines, were known to local law enforcement.
Could be a trap, of course. But 1715 made me think it wasn’t. To a grunt or a jarhead, 1715 is quarter after five. Chaladian would probably know that. But would he realize that Thompson would use military notation in writing to me? Couldn’t see it. Anyway, what difference did it make? I was going regardless.
I ambled back over to the butcher-block table. Another letter in a white business envelope lay there. Addressed to Proxy, that letter had my signature on it. My formal resignation. Effective, as far as I was concerned, the moment I dropped the envelope in a mailbox. I’d promised Proxy that I wouldn’t kill Chaladian as long as I was employed by Trans/Oxana. Instead of mailing it right away, I decided to take it to El Paso with me. Just in case.
I had the sense to bring a hat to El Paso. In high summer, a Stetson with a broad brim isn’t just a fashion statement in southwestern Texas. Especially if you’re standing outside the courthouse instead of inside. Given the Colt Trooper in my attaché case, inside the courthouse was out of the question.
I’d gotten to El Paso the night before. The two restaurants and one café where I’d eaten so far took pesos as well as dollars. Every professional sign I passed had two names, one Anglo and one Spanish: Frederick & Alvarez, Attorneys at Law; Hinojosa & Barnstable, CPAs. I’d checked the place out as thoroughly as I could, without noticing any sign of Chaladian. Now, at exactly 5:15, I stood on the courthouse steps, scanning the baking streets for some hint that Thompson might be in the vicinity. I felt reasonably safe. I figured that even Chaladian wasn’t crazy enough to try a drive-by shooting under the noses of people with badges and guns.
“Are you Tall Dude?”
The question came from a couple of steps above me, in a voice that was gentle and skeptical at the same time. Turning toward it, I saw an Anglo woman in her early fifties. Her curly hair clocked in at maybe one or two shades grayer than the scarf that covered it. The smile she showed me was guarded and probationary, the kind you get at the beginning of a new school year from a teacher who’s heard that you were a royal pain in the butt the year before.
“Yes, I’m Jay Davidovich. Also known as Tall Dude.”
“I’m Amber Hilliard with One More Chance. Katrina asked me to meet you here.” She held out her hand and I shook it.
“Great. Can you take me to her?”
“That remains to be seen. My Jeep is this way.”
The Jeep was a big rugged thing, fifteen years old if it was a day. Clean but battered. Had a little sticker on the windshield that showed a palm tree rising out of cool, blue water surrounded by sand. She’d parked it two blocks away, in an asphalt lot surrounded by an eight-foot chain link fence topped by razor wire. She had to flash a card at a black box to click the service gate open. I stashed my gym bag in the cargo bay. I had to pick up a small Bible to make room for myself on the front seat.
“Are you, like, a sister?”
“Not a nun, which is what I think you mean. I belong to the Society of Friends. Quakers. We call each other ‘sister’ and ‘brother,’ but it’s not the same thing.”
She started the thing and headed toward the exit. It rode like a tank in a bad mood. I’ve had smoother going in armored personnel carriers.
“Why do you want to see Katrina?”
“So I can try to talk her into going back to LA for a few weeks. There’s someone out there who wants to see her.”
“The actor?”
I nodded. We were bumping down a street lined with working class shops now, stores with big sale signs on most of their windows: PEPSI .89; KIDS SHOES 6.99.
“Katrina left Los Angeles for a reason.”
“Yes she did. And I’m not kidding anyone. That reason is still around. He’s been paid off, but that doesn’t mean he’s been neutralized.’”
I had a funny feeling that lying to Hilliard would be pointless. We turned a corner. Same kind of street, except the shops were smaller and darker inside.
“Given that, would you go back if you were she?”
I blinked. If you were SHE? That’s the kind of thing Proxy would say.
“I don’t know, to tell you the truth. She
’s done her bit, that’s for sure. On the other hand, the guy needs her. Then there’s the whole no-such-thing-as-an-ex-Marine thing.”
“I hope she’s gotten bravely over that by now.”
“Maybe.”
As we neared the corner, she suddenly wrenched the Jeep into a tire-squealing turn that brought us across the street. She double-parked T-style next to an ancient Omni that half shielded eight or nine adolescents hanging out in a smoky group in front of a bodega. Hilliard was instantly out and striding up to the group. A girl who was maybe sixteen watched with a deer-in-the-headlights face as Hilliard approached. She dropped her right hand straight down to her side, as if that would keep anyone from noticing the can of Coors she was holding.
Hilliard walked up to within eight inches of the girl and, without a word, held out her hand. Looking like she didn’t know whether to cuss or cry, the girl handed her beer to Hilliard, who turned the can upside down and emptied the beer into the street. Slumping, the girl studied the soles of her shoes. Hilliard handed the empty can back to the girl.
“Throw this away, Maria.”
The girl shuffled a few yards to the head of an alley running beside the store. She dropped the can in a rusty, fifty-five gallon oil drum. Then she glanced back at Hilliard, as if hoping she could stay right there for awhile.
“Come back here.”
Head bowed, the girl came back over. On the way, she murmured something that I couldn’t hear. Judging from what I could see of her expression, my guess would be, “I’m sorry.”
“Get your phone out.”
The girl’s head snapped up and her dark brown eyes widened. Her mouth formed a “no” without saying it, but she fished into the left pocket of her pink shorts and worried a phone out.
“Now call your mother and tell her what you did. Right now.”
“No! Please! She’ll beat me! She’ll slap me silly!”
“I’ll pray that she won’t.” Hilliard’s voice softened, to the same gentle-but-skeptical tone I’d heard in her first words to me. “But you have to report yourself, Maria. While I’m standing here. It won’t get any easier. Do it now.”
Close to tears, the girl hit a single key on the phone as she lifted it toward her ear and mouth. She said something in Spanish, paused, looked like she wanted to throw up, said something else, listened in obvious discomfort for a few more seconds, then lowered the phone.
“She said to come home right now.”
“Then that’s what you’d better do.”
Maria worked her way to the other end of the group. As soon as she was clear, she started running. A couple of the others giggled at her haste. Hilliard gave them your basic paradeground stare, and the giggles stopped. She turned, came back to the Jeep at a stately pace, and got in. Six seconds later we were back on our way.
“Sorry about that. Maria is one of my girls.”
“I’d say she’s in good hands.”
“She has a marijuana bust on her sheet from a pot party last year, and her dad is an unauthorized entrant. Deferred prosecution, so no-harm/no-foul on the happy hay if she keeps her nose clean. A couple of months back, though, our local sheriff went on one of his periodic zero-tolerance binges. If Maria gets run in for underage drinking, that prosecution won’t be deferred, the pot thing will come back to life, and she’ll have something a lot worse than a slap or two to worry about.”
“‘Unauthorized entrant’ is the politically correct term for ‘illegal alien’ these days?”
“It’s my term. Conduct is illegal; people aren’t.”
“The U.S. Attorney down here must be seriously under-worked if he’s got time to worry about juvenile pot smoking.”
“Maria is a state case. I do both state and federal.”
“How does that work? Most places, the feds and the state boys barely even talk to each other.”
“I’m privately funded. Grant from the One More Chance Foundation and some help now and then from my fellow Quakers.” She held up her right hand as I started to respond. “Give me just a minute. I want to say the prayer I promised Maria before I forget.”
I shut my mouth. Hilliard’s lips moved silently. It must’ve been one hell of a prayer. It took a good minute-and-a-half. As the seconds ticked by, I thought of this woman—this smart, together lady—having a little chat with God about getting Maria through her latest delinquency without a beating. I rolled the idea around in my head. I wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“Okay,” Hilliard said when she’d wrapped up her God-talk. “Here’s the deal. You ready?”
“Ready.”
“You’re who you say you are and I think you’re playing straight with me. At least if I were lying I’d come up with a better line than you did. I’m going to drop you at your hotel. I need to think over what you told me, and pray about it a bit. And talk to Katrina.”
“Then what?”
“Then I’ll give you a call. Write down your mobile phone number for me.”
I wrote the number on the back of a Trans/Oxana business card. I reached up to stick the card in the visor, but there wasn’t any visor on my side. I opened her Bible at random and stuck the card somewhere near the end of Psalms.
“Which hotel are you staying at?”
“Radisson. But maybe you should drop me at the Hyatt instead and I’ll take a cab from there to the Radisson. That way if someone has my hotel staked out they won’t associate me with your Jeep.”
She shot me an intrigued look as she found a major street and turned left.
“Katrina said you were careful.”
I was still holding the Bible where I’d stuck my card. Wells’ dad had said something about seeking consolation in Psalm one-forty-nine. I don’t know the Psalms the way a good Jew should. Twenty-third, of course, which everybody knows, and the twenty-second, because Uncle Morty gave me five dollars to memorize it when I was eight. That’s about it.
On a pure whim I opened the Bible up to where my card was, and then paged a few leaves over to Psalm one-forty-nine. The first few verses seemed like pretty conventional stuff, but then it reached out and grabbed me:
Let the praise of God be on their lips
and a two-edged sword in their hand,
to deal out vengeance to the nations
and punishment on all the peoples;
to bind their kings in chains
and their nobles in fetters of iron;
to carry out the sentence pre-ordained.
Hmmm. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s when I really started putting it together. Looking back on it, I already knew basically what I was going to do and how I was going to do it—and that’s the way it would have gone down except for a piece or two of bad luck.
Chapter Forty-three
An alarm bell went off in my head a little after six the next morning when I got a look at the cargo bay in Hilliard’s Jeep. A tarp was covering a load of something or other, and whatever it was there was a lot of it. That wasn’t what set the bell off. Anchoring the four corners of the tarp were two five-gallon jugs of water and two five-gallon gas cans secured with cargo netting. That told me the Jeep was headed for someplace lonely and desolate. I did not pat my right rear hip to check for the Colt Trooper. I knew it was there.
Hilliard had called me a little after 9:30 the night before. She’d given me an address and asked if I could be there around six. My answer was yes and here I was, at a storefront on a street near downtown where you could tell people in suits didn’t go except by accident. Someone had given the place’s outside walls and trim a fresh coat of paint in the last six months or so, but aside from that it had the old-fashioned, slapped-together-in-a-hurry look of something in a sepia-toned photograph. Lettering on the front window read SOF COMMUNITY MISSION.
“So,” Hilliard
said, “you up for a ride?”
“As long as Thompson is at the other end of it.”
“Here’s hoping. No guarantees.”
A boy—young man, I guess, eighteen or nineteen—came out the front door, carrying a Stanley stainless steel thermos and two one-liter plastic bottles of water.
“Tom, this is Jay. Jay, Tom.” Hilliard took the load from Tom and stashed the stuff in the Jeep’s front seat while Tom and I shook hands. He looked more like a Tommy than a Tom to me. Said he was glad to meet me in a polite voice with a mid-Atlantic accent. I decided he must be a Quaker doing a mission stint out here between high school and college.
“I should be back before dark. Hold the fort. Don’t try to reach me. If something big comes up, call Ben in San Antonio.”
“Okay, Amber.”
“All right, then.” Hilliard circled the Jeep and climbed into the driver’s seat. “We’re off.”
Six hours of driving took us from an interstate freeway to a state highway—a New Mexico state highway—to a county road and then off-road. The thermos held tea. Hilliard had two cups in the first couple of hours, before the temperature got too high, and talked me into trying one. She said something about how Pony Express riders used to carry tea in their canteens instead of water because it was more bracing.
I tried not to be too obvious about checking behind us now and then once we left the county road, but Hilliard noticed me.
“Don’t worry too much. I know the country, and checking to see if I-C-E wants to play hide-and-seek is second nature by now. If something is back there that’s out of place, I’ll spot it.”
“Would you care to elaborate?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
That was actually a fairly good question. I thought about it for a few seconds before I answered.
“I don’t need all the gory details. Just a rough idea of how many years I’ll be looking at if we find a welcoming committee when we get wherever we’re going.”
Jail Coach Page 19
