by Jim Heskett
He drew back, then kissed him on both cheeks. “How was your flight?”
“From Cairo to Paris was quite bumpy, but smooth the rest of the way. I am glad to be on solid ground again, even if it is in Texas.”
Omar grinned. “Texas is glad to have you. And what name is on the passport you carry?”
Kareem took the passport from his coat pocket and flipped it open. “Talib Sameer, from Perth.” Kareem held the passport open to the photo page, showing a picture of a younger Kareem. “He is a handsome-looking man, don’t you agree?”
“I have always wanted to visit Australia,” Omar said.
“Perhaps someday we shall.”
“Well, Talib, should I show you my home?”
“Yes,” Kareem said, “of course.” He paused to wipe some sweat from his brow and remove his coat. “The heat here is quite stifling.”
“You have spent too much time in the north of Europe, I think. It is still early in the summer. You should experience August. Nothing like it in the world.”
“I have spent many summers in Texas, little brother, but the heat does always seem to surprise me.”
They crossed the street and Omar pointed out the trailers of people in the park he knew, walked Kareem by the laundry and the on-site manager’s office.
“There is where I live,” Omar said, pointing at a trailer with a wooden porch.
Kareem pursed his lips. “Let me take you to a hotel for a few days. I doubt there is room for me to stay with you in such a small house. Besides, we can talk freely and openly if we have more privacy. There are business matters we need to discuss.”
Omar took a step back and felt a sting of pain in his side. “But this is my home, brother. I do not want to stay somewhere else.”
Kareem hesitated, and then smiled. “Of course. I did not mean any offense. Please, show me where I will be sleeping this evening. Then I will take you out for lunch. Anywhere you like.”
Halfway to the trailer, Kareem leaned close to Omar. “Last week, I was visited by our mutual friend. Do you know who I mean when I say that?”
“Yes.”
“Not personally, but he sent someone to Cairo to kill me.” Kareem stopped, pivoted, and looked Omar in the eye. “Please be careful, brother. You are likely in danger.”
“Why should I worry,” Omar said with a smile, “when I have you to protect me?”
Kareem nodded, but Omar knew the look on his face. He fretted, as he always had. But Omar didn’t want this trip to be a discussion of grave matters.
“I will be careful,” Omar said. “No one knows I am here. I have no papers or credit cards to track me, now that I am no longer working for Cisco Systems.”
They entered the trailer and Omar flipped on the light. Double-wide, with the kitchen and bathroom on one end, and the two tiny bedrooms at the other end.
On the couch, Omar’s roommate stirred. He wore a stained white t-shirt over boxers. A collection of beer cans littered the coffee table in front of the couch, last night’s celebration/mourning. He’d been like this since losing his job.
The roommate opened his eyes. “What the hell?”
“This is my brother,” Omar said.
“But what the hell is he doing here?”
Omar frowned. “I told you he was coming to visit today.”
The roommate sat up and let loose a giant belch. “You did no such goddamn thing. You said you were going to clean out the gutters and peel the paint off the back side of the trailer today. We had a deal.”
“But my brother is here. Can I not do those things a few days from now?”
The roommate reached out and crushed a beer can in his hand, then flung it at the trash can. “Like hell you will. You’ll do your cleaning today, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
Kareem put a hand on Omar’s back. “Perhaps we should go.”
“And who in the fuck are you?” the roommate said, standing up. He balled his fists and widened his stance. “You’re gonna come in my home and start dictating orders to me?”
“I did not mean to give orders to anyone.”
The roommate crossed around the coffee table, puffing out his chest. “I’ve had just about all I’m going to take of your shit.” He jabbed a finger into Kareem’s chest.
“Enough!” shouted Omar. He leaped across the room and grabbed the man by the scruff of his dirty t-shirt.
“Omar, no,” Kareem said. “Don’t do this. Please, let him go.”
Omar felt rage whirl through him, unlike anything he’d ever experienced. His body tingled as one of his hands wrapped around the man’s throat.
He felt Kareem’s hands grab at him, trying to pull him off. But he was determined. Nothing was going to stop him from teaching this stupid American a lesson.
But then something happened. The room quieted, and his body felt tense, but light at the same time. Then a cold chill surfaced, and a strange sense of déjà vu filled him. His muscles weakened until he could no longer hold on to the man’s throat, and then he felt himself slipping. The world darkened.
He hit the floor as Kareem and the roommate shouted above him, and their voices sounded far away, as if coming from the end of a long tunnel.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I leaned back against the wall for a few seconds, taking in Omar’s story.
“Was that your first seizure?” I said.
He shook his head. “I have been having them since I was a teenager, but never that intense. That day, Kareem took me to the hospital, and my roommate told me never to come back. The police visited me at my hospital bed, so Kareem had to leave. It was Vanessa who helped me get into Palm Grove and get on medication. She aided me when everyone else had abandoned me.”
“Who was the mutual friend Kareem mentioned? The one who sent someone to Cairo to kill him.”
Omar pursed his lips. “Someone from IntelliCraft. That is all I will say on the matter.”
“The night I met your brother, he was wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and jeans. I had no idea he was such a globetrotter then.”
“Likely, he was in disguise. He did so often. Playing a normal American Muslim, so to speak. That day at the trailer park, I had never been violent to anyone before. Kareem was always the one protecting me, but something snapped when I saw my brother in danger. I could not take it. Maybe I knew that I would only see him one more time after that, and we would never be close again.”
“I’m sorry, Omar. I didn’t know.”
“Many things should have been different, but that is life, yes? There is the way things are, then there is the way you wish things would be.”
“I can’t argue with that.” I kneeled on the floor next to him. “We’re going to get you somewhere safe, somewhere you can get the medications you need, and you won’t be in danger anymore.”
“Maybe we should not have left the car at the motel,” Omar said. “Because now we are stuck.”
That was a fair point, but I didn’t want to bring up the fact that being here was his idea. Our relationship still felt a bit tenuous. “Getting you a passport has to be our top priority. We’ll worry about transportation after. There’s got to be a passport office nearby, maybe not in Three Rivers, but the next bigger town. You’ll just need two forms of ID, and we’ll have to pay the rush job penalty…”
I trailed off when I noticed the blank look in his eyes. “You do have two forms of ID, right?”
He shook his head. “I do not have anything.”
“Aw, crap, you’re not an illegal, are you?”
“That is a matter of perspective.”
I paced around the room, listening to the floorboards creak under my feet. “I don’t need your Haddadi family riddles right now, okay? We have to get you to Mexico, and how the hell are we supposed to do that if you have no ID? We can’t just walk across the border with nothing but good intentions.”
Omar shrugged, with a blank look on his face. Either he didn’t understand the gravity o
f this situation or he didn’t care. Maybe he was the kind of person who thought everything would work itself out.
“Maybe we can still fix this,” I said. “These people here are probably criminals, right? I mean, it’s obvious that they don’t want us to go into that garage because it’s filled with weed or a meth lab or something. So they’ve got to know people who can get us a fake passport.”
Omar sat on the bed, staring at the framed picture of him and his brother. “I can ask Vanessa.”
“Good. That’s a start. I have to figure out how the hell I’m going to check in with Grace with no internet and no cell reception.”
The roar of a motorcycle drowned out our conversation. I peeked through the blinds covering the window at a Harley and a truck screaming up the dirt road toward the house. A cloud of dirt fogged the area behind the vehicles. When they got close enough, I could see that the truck’s tires were so big it was bordering on Gravedigger monster truck territory.
The fog of dirt settled as the vehicles stopped. A man in a duster got out of the truck, said something to the leather-jacketed motorcycle rider, then went into the barn.
The motorcycle man lifted the leg of his jeans and pulled a pistol from an ankle holster. He cast a look around, snorted, hacked a glob of green spit on the ground, then entered the forbidden garage.
***
Omar and I went downstairs to find Vanessa sitting at the kitchen table with the man from the monster truck. He had jet-black hair and stringy sideburns like velcro. When we stepped into the kitchen, they clinked beer bottles together, chatting about something under their breath.
They both turned. “What the fuck?” said the man in a voice so hoarse it was barely above a whisper.
“This is Omar, and… what’s your name?” Vanessa said, squinting at me.
“Candle,” I said.
“Candle, this is Jed.”
“Hi, Jed.”
Jed set his beer down on the table and swept his duster back and off the floor. “Why the hell are you in my house, Candle?”
“I, uh…”
“Omar and me go way back,” Vanessa said. “They needed a place to crash for a couple days. Don’t you go making a capital case of it.”
Jed glared at Vanessa. “Are you shitting me? With what we got…” he jerked his head, indicating something, “going on right now?”
In a second, it came to me. He’d jerked his head toward the garage outside. Even though I figured I knew what was in there, I had a burning desire to see it firsthand.
“And,” Jed continued, “you’re bringing a god damned Jihadi terrorist into our house?”
Omar dipped his head, with his eyes on the floor.
Vanessa scoffed. “He’s not a terrorist, he’s a friend of mine.”
Jed sipped his beer, eyeing us. He let a belch out the side of his mouth. “I don’t like this, Van.”
“And I don’t give two shits what you like or don’t like,” she said. “It’s just going to be a couple of days. You can keep your mouth shut for that long, can’t ya?”
I hoped it would be less than a couple days, but that was out of my hands.
The front door opened, and the motorcycle man entered. He still had that pistol in his hand, and when he saw me, he raised it. The gun danced in his grip. He was nervous, or tweaking on meth, or both. Not a good combination.
I raised my hands in surrender.
“What in the holy hell? Jed!” From where he was standing, I didn’t think he could see Jed and Vanessa.
“We’re in here, Carl,” Vanessa said. “Everything’s cool. I know these guys.”
Carl, a bald-headed wiry stalk of a man, didn’t lower the gun. He walked in a wide arc in front of us until he was in the kitchen and standing next to the other two. I caught the stench of cigarette smoke on him.
“You can put away the piece,” Vanessa said. “These two are friends. No need to do anything stupid.”
“Like hell,” Carl said. “I oughta shoot these fuckers in the face and kill you too for bringing them here. This is not a good time.”
Vanessa stood and squared off against Carl. She probably outweighed him, and her arms were as thick as his legs. “So help me God, if you don’t put that gun away, I’m gonna crack this bottle over your head.”
This seemed to get Carl’s attention. He slipped the gun back into his ankle holster. “Sweet Jesus, Van, you can’t be bringing strangers up in here. Not right now.”
“I already told her,” Jed said.
“I tried to call you,” Vanessa said. “Both of y’all. But you been gone two days and your phones are off. What in the hell was I supposed to do? Send out a god damned carrier pigeon?”
So, at least these two did have cell phones. I also doubted that claim about no internet access, either. Who didn’t have internet access anymore?
Jed got a beer for Carl, then tossed the bottle cap on the floor, where it scattered across the linoleum and joined a few wadded-up paper towels and some other random trash. Everyone sipped their beers in silence. Couldn’t help but notice that nobody offered me a beer, but I wasn’t going to complain.
Carl stepped to me, sniffed, wrinkled his nose. He took a swig, then swished the beer around in his mouth. I noted the dark circles under his eyes. “What’s your business?”
“My business, as in my line of work?”
“No, dumbass,” he said, “what’s your business in Three Rivers? What are you doing here?”
“We are merely passing through,” Omar said. “Trying to go south.”
“Travelers weary from the road,” Carl said, “or seeking refuge from a storm?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Well,” Carl said, “okay then. Welcome to my humble abode. If you’re going to be a guest here, I expect you to behave yourself.”
“Vanessa already gave me the rules,” I said.
“Well then, you just mind your p’s and q’s, and we don’t got anything to worry about.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Omar went to talk to Vanessa about our passport problem, and I drifted back upstairs to the room. Tried desperately to get reception on my phone so I could call Grace. I did everything I could think of: hanging out the window, holding it up toward the ceiling, wrapping the top of the phone in some tinfoil I found in the closet. I considered walking back down the dirt road for a while but figured that was probably against the rules.
After an hour alone, I got restless. Started worrying about Grace. I should have been at home with my pregnant wife, helping her recover from the terrible ordeal she’d been through. Instead, I was stuck in redneck hell with gun-toting Texas biker meth-heads. Given how my last few weeks had progressed, I couldn’t be all that surprised.
When Omar didn’t return soon, boredom overtook me and I napped. I dreamed of my ride-share friend Zeke. As I moved in and out of a restless sleep, I wondered if he was okay, if he was still following White Widow on tour, or if IntelliCraft had him bound and gagged in a warehouse somewhere.
I had to stop thinking that IntelliCraft would kill everyone I came in contact with. After all, they’d never done anything to Grace’s boss Rodrick, and I’d involved him more than once in that mess back in Colorado.
When I woke up from my nap in that strange creaky bed in Three Rivers, another hour had passed, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Grace. I had to contact her. I had to tell her where I was and what I was doing. The idea of keeping details of my situation from her to protect her from worry was beginning to seem selfish.
No more pretending everything was fine. Maybe I had no cell service, but with internet access, I could at least send her an instant message to let her know I was still alive. She was probably worried about me, going this long without checking in.
The claim that these people had no internet access was crap. Had to be. While I couldn’t find a WiFi signal in range, that didn’t mean they didn’t have a mobile hotspot device stashed around here somewhere.
> If I were careful, they’d never know I looked around a bit.
As I left the room, the TV blared from down below, and I heard bottles clinking together. I figured as long as I stayed upstairs, they had no reason to mess with me. But I also knew this was not the smartest idea I’d ever had.
Besides our bedroom, three other doors lined the upstairs hallway. I tried the first. Bathroom. I tried the second one, and that opened to a closet full of towels, blankets, and a box of Christmas decorations. Just one door left. It creaked a bit as I swung it open, so I paused, holding it still.
I crept back to the stairs, waiting for either Jed or Carl to get up and check out the noise. Nothing but the TV and the sound of those two yokels arguing about some NASCAR driver came back. I waited for thirty seconds to be sure they’d stay put.
I opened the door and entered the room. Saw a closet, a bed with a patchwork quilt like my grandmother used to make, a dresser, and a nightstand. About as spartan as things could get. I checked the nightstand first, and found a bible and a glass pipe, darkened almost black with sticky resin. Maybe I hadn’t smoked pot in a long time, but you never forget that grungy smell of the gunky leftover byproduct in weed paraphernalia.
At first glance, the dresser contained nothing but men’s clothes, but I found a fat money roll underneath a pair of jeans. An odd impulse to slip the cash in my pocket overcame me. But I had no reason to steal from these people. Why was I thinking like this?
I left the money where it was and sighed, thinking that searching for a WiFi hotspot may have been a fruitless idea. But I decided to check the closet, just in case.
When I opened the door, my first thought was that it seemed awfully small. Only about two feet deep, with two slim racks of clothes on either side and nothing against the back wall. Then I realized that back wall was actually a door made to look like a false wall, covered in the same wallpaper as the rest of the closet. A padlock hung unlocked from a latch near the top. I slipped this off and opened the door as my breath caught in my throat.
