The Devil's Highway

by Timothy C. Phillips

  If a traveler comes limping in off the desert, east of Van Horn, a vast plume of desert dust billowing behind him, the first thing he sees is the East Broadway Exit. On the left side of the off ramp there’s a service station; on the other, a friendly, low building with a sign that announced that it was the home of Rose’s Cantina and Travel Stop, Open 24 Hours.

  I checked at the service station first. If Brad had driven in, the last town of any size that he had passed was Saragosa, about seventy-five miles behind him on that lost highway. He’d have been ready for a rest, I bet, and knowing what I knew of Brad, a beer or two. But first he might need some gas. The girl at the counter recollected Brad immediately. Apparently strung out from hours of driving, he’d hung around the place both on the day he arrived, and the following day, chitchatting with the girl, a pretty girl with golden blond hair in her late teens by the name of Dorothy.

  She’d apparently taken somewhat of a liking to Brad, but was disconcerted by his plan to join the Redemption Army. He’d talked about that a lot. She told me what she knew about Brad in the same staccato rhythm and excited tone that Brad’s sister Briana had used, several days before, and most of two thousand miles away.

  “He seemed really nice, and he was smart, and you know, he was cute. I’m starting college next year, and he’d just graduated from a good school, so he was full of advice on how to be a success in school, you know? But then he started telling me about how there was going to be a big war, or something, and how life was going to change, and how I should get ready for that, and I got pretty weirded out. I couldn’t put that stuff together with the guy I was talking to, you know? It sounded like something for crazy people, not for a guy like that. So, I mean, the last night he was here, he asked me out, but I told him I was busy.”

  “Do you know where he went after that?”

  “I think he was upset with me for not going out with him. He didn’t say a whole lot after I begged off. All I know is he said he was headed to the Compound.”

  The Compound again. “Any idea where this ‘Compound’ is?”

  She shrugged, and once again it seemed to me the same teenage shrug and dismissive frown as Brad’s sister, Briana. “Sorry, mister.”

  That left Rose’s Cantina. Now, I had gotten too friendly with the bottle earlier in my life, and drinking alcohol was and is something that I just don’t do, but I still know my way around a bar. And my assumption was correct, Brad had gotten a little thirsty on his long trip west and had stopped in for a beer after his long sojourn.

  As I walked into the place, I had to let my eyes adjust from the direct Texas sun outside, to the permanent midnight of the Cantina’s interior. The place was a big, one-story structure, with a floor big enough to accommodate big line dances. At the other side was a bar big enough to accommodate a battalion of barflies. At the moment, the dance floor was empty, but the bar was home to a half-dozen or so people you could bet fairly safely were regulars. I crossed the wide floor and walked up to the bar.

  “What’ll it be?” A woman behind the bar asked as I approached. Her nametag identified her as Rose, though I could have guessed as much. She was an attractive older woman, with world-weary eyes and red hair that I suspected had long ago lost its original color to the years. I whipped out my picture of Brad and showed it to her.

  “Oh, boy.” She smiled at me. “What did Brad do?”

  “You know him?”

  She smiled at two older men who sat nursing mugs of beer at the end of the bar.

  “This guy’s looking for Brad!” she said, and they both laughed and muttered to each other.

  “Jose and Ernie here had to help him around to the hotel the night before he left,” Rose informed me, indicating two middle-aged men who were apparently regulars. They raised their beer mugs in a tandem greeting when their names were called.

  Rose smiled. “He was a cute kid, and really likable, so they took him over there, helped him rent a room from old Chester, who runs the place, and made sure he slept on his side. Like you do when somebody’s had more than enough.”

  How well I remembered, but I said nothing.

  “Did he come back?”

  “He sure did,” said one of the older men, who wore a blue mechanic shirt with a white patch embroidered Jose over his heart . He had a North Mexican accent, Juarez, maybe. “Came in the next day and bought everybody in the house a round, as thanks. He didn’t seem to want nothing to drink, himself that day, though.” Everyone present laughed at that.

  “He drove out of here pretty hungover.” And feeling rejected, I thought to myself. I was pretty sure Dorothy’s sudden disinterest was the cause of Brad’s alcohol thirst that night.

  “Did he mention where he was headed?”

  “Oh, sure, plenty of times, some kind of paramilitary group, got their own enclave out in the desert. The car never made it, though.”

  “What? Why do you say that?”

  Jose tipped his mug, finished his beer, and wiped his mouth with a bar napkin.

  “Come with me. I show you.”

  A few minutes later, we were standing in Jose’s shop. Jose had an artifact of the highway resting in his fenced-in back lot—a car its owner wouldn’t be using any more. It was Brad’s $650 gray Subaru hatchback, and it had seen better days. That is, I was assuming it was in much better repair when he had set out from Jacksonville, Florida some weeks before. Presently, it had a badly dented right front quarter panel, and was missing the front right tire. The windshield glass was also spider-webbed with fractures on the passenger side; the vehicle had clearly overturned and rested on its left side, after some mishap.

  “Brad, he had himself a blowout,” Jose confirmed, “he must have been running at a pretty good clip. He went over on one side, slid a ways, hit an earth embankment.”

  “Where did you find the car?”

  “About ten miles down Highway 191.”

  “Did Brad call you when he had the accident?”

  “Oh, no, when I got there he was long gone. He just abandon it, you know.”

  “But I don’t understand. How did you even know it was there?”

  “Donnie, the truck driver tell me.”

  “Truck driver?”

  “Yes, the one that picked Brad up and gave him a ride.”

  “A ride to where?”

  “Donnie told me he took Brad to Delgado.”

  Delgado. At last. “How do I get there?”

  “Easy.” Jose grinned; it was a magnificent grin, as he had about half a dozen golden teeth. “You just take the Devil’s Highway.”

  Chapter 7

  Donnie Mackey was an over-the-road trucker for a local firm called Van Horn Van Lines. He hauled frozen meat in a refrigerated rig from a warehouse in Van Horn to restaurants in the towns of Valentine, Marfa, Alpine, and other towns along Highway 90 as she ran south out of Van Horn. He had picked up Brad about thirty minutes after the accident, and taken him to the small town of Delgado, which was on his route, he explained.

  “I deliver frozen steaks and patties, stuff like that, to May’s Place, a diner over in Delgado, once a month. That’s where I left him, though that wasn’t really my delivery day for them, and Highway 191, the old Devil’s Highway, was way off my rounds, that day.”

  “Was he injured in the accident?”

  “I didn’t really think so, just a little shook up. I made sure he was okay before I dropped him off. There’s a doctor there in Delgado, if he needed one.”

  “So how do I find this Devil’s Highway I keep hearing about?”

  “Old Route 666 got broken up a long time ago, right before they renamed it Highway 191. There’s a stretch of it that runs into Highway 90, about halfway to Valentine. It’ll be on your left. It’s a good long way after the turn, about thirty-five minutes, and it’s right smack dab out in the middle of nothing much.”

  “No wonder Google’s never been there.” I mused aloud.

  “Say what?” Mackey asked with a nervous chuckle.
/>
  I talked with Mackey a bit more, then set out on my journey. A little more than a half hour later, I turned onto Highway 191. This had been part of old Highway 666 and it was, indeed, the Devil’s Highway. It was an innocuous stretch of highway, one that stretches from one burning desert horizon to the next, dagger straight and flanked on either side by blank oblivion. Mackey had explained the highway’s history to me well enough. The powers that be had renamed the highway a few years back. For half a century, it had been Highway 666, the so-called Devil’s Highway. The state had gotten tired of replacing the signs, which were popular collector’s items for teenagers, Satanists, and middle-aged tourists. In local lore, however, it was still the Devil’s Highway, with stretches reputed to be haunted by phantom hitchhikers and the ghosts of serial killer victims.

  South of the Town of Van Horn, on the lonely stretch of Highway that was now 191, I found the tiny West Texas town of Delgado. It hadn’t even appeared on Google maps; I guess the good folks at Google hadn’t even heard of the place, let alone dispatched one of their Streetview cars there. Delgado, I later learned, is Spanish for Slender Man, so named for a local boogieman legend that tells of a tall, skinny, spider-like creature that spirits away children who misbehave.

  The town was the only feature apparent for miles in any direction, a circular grid of buildings on a flat yellow cake of sandy loam a couple of miles across. Baking under the direct light of the sun, the rugged plain that surrounded the town was bordered to the west by the berm of a high plateau. US 191 was a ruler-straight blue ribbon, with flat shoulders decorated only by the occasional cactus or dead armadillo. The highway passed through the town straight as a pin, and on to places more worthy of its commerce. This was indeed a lonely place.

  I came straight into town on the highway, because that was the only way in or out. The highway skewered the town, bisecting it neatly in half; there were no other apparent routes, in or out, that led to any destination of notice to the outside world. All the town’s main buildings were situated on the main street, which was really just the 191 as it passed through town. All in all, Delgado was a smaller, more forlorn version of Van Horn.

  I decided to make straight for the police station, which I found squatting there in the center of town on my right, a low, unimposing building with a large badge decal in the front window. The caption above the badge read “County Sheriff,” but I knew that out here in Texas there were some very big, and some very small, Sheriff’s Offices. This looked to be one of the smallest. Delgado was probably the largest, perhaps the only community in Delgado County.

  I walked in and suppressed a smile when a bell above the door tinkled. Small towns have their ways. A mature, but strikingly attractive woman with golden-red hair sat behind a bullet-proof glass cubicle at the other end of the room. She looked up and smiled. She was dressed in a brown and khaki County Sheriff uniform, but, in a family touch characteristic of southern places, her name tag read simply, “Claire.”

  I greeted her and smiled back. “Hi, Claire. Is the Sheriff in? I’m Roland Longville, a private investigator. I need to speak with him about a missing person case that has brought me to your town.” I showed her my identification as I spoke.

  “Sheriff Garrett is out on the road,” she informed me in a soft Southwest Texas accent. “Let me radio him, and I’ll see if he can come in to speak with you, Mr. Longville.”

  I could see that she was the combination desk clerk/dispatcher for the office. She sat at a desk covered with three telephones, two computers, and the base station for the department’s radio dispatch. There was also a television tuned to a cable news station playing silently on a bracket in the corner behind her. A very busy lady. Back in Birmingham they might call her the head bottle washer.

  The Sheriff, it turned out, was just coming back into town when Claire called out to him on the radio. He appeared around fifteen minutes later, a figure from another time. He was everything a West Texas Sheriff is in Hollywood’s imagination, a tall, serious-looking man with a strong jaw and broad shoulders, and a star on his chest. He was also wearing a cowboy hat and boots, and they fit him well.

  After I gave him a brief rundown on my quest, he reflected silently, nodded to himself, and looked me in the eye when he spoke.

  “We’ve had our run-ins with the Army of Redemption, to be sure. The old man—Colonel Tolbert—you could reason with him. He was pretty out there, mind you. He had his strange ideas, to my way of thinking, but he kept the other nuts on the compound in line. They were out there getting ready for the End of Time, but they were a fairly quiet bunch.”

  Garrett smiled in recollection, but then his face darkened and his tone altered.

  “Since his death, though, there have been some incidents. The situation has become rather worrying at times. When Tolbert was alive, The Department of Homeland Security kept agents out here, monitoring the group. That was one big reason they kept so quiet, I suppose. He was a real dissident, you might say. He’d written a book that a lot of extreme types took as the gospel, so the Feds thought he was worth keeping an eye on. After his death, though, the feds went away. Seems they don’t care if the news media doesn’t, either.”

  “I’ve read his book, and I agree with you, he was a real kook.” I said, and Garrett laughed. “Is there no leader now?” I asked.

  “Most definitely, and that’s our biggest problem. The new leader is Tolbert’s former right hand man. Now he calls himself Colonel Cushman, and if you ask me, he’s a dozen times worse than old Tolbert ever was. The problem is, Cushman likes to stay out of the spotlight. He’s smart, too. He hasn’t written any crazy “Redemption Manifesto” like Tolbert did, to bring him to the attention of the Feds. He gives his speeches with a big picture of Tolbert on the wall, reads from Tolbert’s book, keeping the old man’s paranoid gospel alive . . . but Cushman does what he wants, and doesn’t care if it contradicts the old man’s teachings now and again.”

  Garrett tilted his hat back and his voice lowered a bit, looking and sounding more than a little like Gary Cooper.

  “Back before the Compound became so isolated from the town, his people and ours did some trading and talked some. From what we know, Cushman rules the compound with an iron fist. When he took charge, he brought in this South African guy, a man named Johannes Kiker, to be his own right hand. I’ve been in Law Enforcement for twenty-odd years, and I’ve seen some bad apples, but I can tell you, that man Kiker is bad through and through. One of the kind who would kill on orders and wouldn’t let it trouble his sleep. Wherever he’s from, I’ll bet he’s got some bad history there.”

  Kiker. I filed the name away for future reference. I’d seen the type, and a militia compound would surely be haven for someone like Sheriff Garrett described.

  “You say you’ve had trouble with the Redemption Army, here in Delgado.”

  Garrett paused, as if weighing the wisdom of discussing the subject with me.

  “There have been some fights between the Redemption Army members and the townies, to be sure, but that was a while back. When Tolbert first moved in here with his first few hardcore supporters, we had some incidents. There was some tension every time they came to town. There were a few bar brawls for the most part, no worse than the type of thing we see any given weekend. That all changed when Tolbert died. When Cushman took over, he put the bars here in Delgado off limits. I had several of his people in the jail overnight, more than once. It started to look like the Redemption Army was starting its own bail bonds service. Cushman got tired of that, and set up his own bar, out on the compound. Now they can get hammered on the Compound on their day off, and that keeps them out of Delgado.”

  “So the only problems you’ve had with the Redemption Army people is bar fights? That’s all?”

  He looked very pensive, “No, it’s not. I thought you would already know about the Mendoza murder.”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t heard anything about a murder. Who was this Mendoza?”

 
“Well, it’s all public knowledge now, so I’ll tell you about it. Fernando Mendoza was the murdered man’s name. He was part of an award-winning documentary filmmaking team, and that’s how he introduced himself to me when he blew in here, three months ago. They’d won some kind of big award for a documentary he made on Ethnic Cleansing in Darfur. I’ve seen it, and knew who he was.”

  That rang a bell with me. “I’ve seen the Darfur piece. I didn’t know the man who made it was dead.”

  “He wasn’t, until about six weeks ago. He showed up out here, like I said, with a Mexican-Indian woman named Andrea Herrera, who was his filmmaking partner. Gorgeous woman, and a trouble-maker, let me tell you. They were intent on making some kind of movie about the Army of Redemption, Tolbert’s legacy, Cushman, the whole ball of wax.”

  “What happened?”

  “Like I said, somebody killed him.”

  “Do you have any idea who?”

  “The Army of Redemption, if you ask me. I believe they acted on Cushman’s orders, more specifically. That’s my theory. I can’t prove that, of course. And nowadays, they keep to themselves, out there on the compound.”

  “What kind of compound is it?” I asked.

  “Colonel Cushman’s got money coming in from somewhere. He has to have anonymous supporters or something lucrative on the side. I’ve seen some militia compounds, a few years back, out in Oklahoma. They were just small clusters of buildings, out in the boonies, most of them without even a fence. They relied on their remote locations for security. Not so with Cushman, although the Redemption Army compound is certainly isolated.”

  “So Cushman is well set up out there?”

  Garrett looked dour for a moment, then he smiled slightly. “Know what they say about Texas, everything is bigger out here? Well, the Redemption Army has a big spread, it’s a real base. They’ve got a security perimeter, guard towers, and around-the-clock guards. They’ve even got a helipad out there. Cushman’s got all the licenses he needs, as well as a fake security company set up, to make their automatic weapons and paramilitary equipment legal on paper. The feds were sniffing around when Tolbert was here, but since Cushman’s taken over, he’s stayed quiet or greased some palms, because I haven’t seen a Fed out here in well over a year.”