The Devil's Highway

by Timothy C. Phillips

  “Andrea,” I greeted her with a hug. “You disappeared after the funeral service.”

  “Yes, I did. Because I was texted by a contact of mine. Something very important had happened.” She was dressed for the road, I noticed, boots, jeans and a leather jacket.

  “Right back to the job for you, then.”

  “The job at hand isn’t over,” she said, her black eyes shining.

  “I know that. I plan to hunt Cushman down, just as soon as I can pick up his trail.”

  “That’s just what I’d hoped you’d say,” she said, and walked into the room. She set her backpack on the bed, unzipped it and pulled out a portable laptop. Then she produced a DVD from a sleeve and inserted it into the drive.

  “Watch this,” she said excitedly, and nodded towards the screen. The media player came up. This was a video, judging from the angle and scene in view, taken from a security camera behind the desk of an airport lobby. I saw the backs of slim women in blue airline uniforms, and large overhead placards in the distance with flight information in Spanish and English. There was the usual press of humanity, faces of people from many lands, the general hubbub that goes on in every major airport around the world. Suddenly, Andrea leaned forward and paused the video.

  “There.” I could see him, of course. A face at the desk, a man buying a ticket.

  “Cushman,” I said.

  “Yes.” Andrea’s eyes were wide, her voice shaking with excitement. “The minute we got back to Delgado after Cushman’s escape, I alerted all of my contacts to be on the lookout for me. The man who obtained this video for me is a worker in the Mexico City airport. He couldn’t get the exact information, but he did hear Cushman’s destination.”

  “Which was?”

  “Honduras.”

  I stood there, rocking on my heels, for just one second.

  “What are you thinking?” Andrea asked me.

  “I’m thinking it’s a good thing that I was packing, because it looks like I’m going to Mexico.”

  “We’re going to Mexico,” she corrected me.

  I nodded and smiled at her. “So we are,” I said.

  And so we were.

  Epilogue

  The hills were steep and covered with thousands of shanty houses. Millions of people lived here, on the steep wooded hills of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. It was night, warm and windy, as Andrea and I drove slowly through the streets, to an isolated casa on the edge of town. The street was quiet. Far away in the night, I heard laughter and music, echoing over the crowded harbor the city ringed around on the sloping hills.

  It was three months since I had said my goodbyes in Delgado, and seen young Brad Caldwell off to Atlanta, and home. Three long months since Andrea Herrera had shown up at my hotel room with video from airport surveillance cameras taken in Mexico City. We had traveled there, first, and talked to people in Mexico City who had talked with and seen Colonel Cushman. There we had found out that he had hired bodyguards. With fake papers identifying himself as a Canadian-born Mexican national, he had then taken a plane south, to Honduras.

  So we started out on Cushman’s trail. Weeks of searching followed. We learned of his travels, here and there, through a thousand different sources, some dubious, some trustworthy. We learned the story of the Colonel’s travels in bits and pieces. He had been detained briefly in Honduras, we learned, because the authenticity of his papers was suspect, but he was long gone before we arrived; a bribe had secured his freedom.

  Everywhere, Cushman shed identities, greased palms, and moved on. But we kept searching, through Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, on through the length of Central America, and on down to the large nations of South America, where Cushman hoped to vanish in the bustle of her vast cities.

  At first, it seemed to us that Cushman was wandering aimlessly, but after a while, a pattern developed. It became clear that he was visiting places where he had hidden away money, under the different names that he assumed as he travelled. Cushman was indeed a man who planned ahead, a man with many aliases, and all of those aliases were rich men. Once the money was safely transferred to Colonel Cushman’s account, the alias disappeared forever, one more discarded tool.

  Cushman travelled from country to country, collecting his blood money in person, his final destination already planned. However confusing his trail might seem to Andrea and me, one thing was certain; once he was through gathering it up, he planned to vanish into anonymity somewhere in the vastness of South America, and live out his days there, untouched by the hand of justice. That, we couldn’t allow.

  It had all started on an old highway in West Texas, long ago, it seemed, the Devil’s Highway, whether you used that term to refer to old Highway 666, or the lonely stretch of road that bisected the tiny town of Delgado, or the hateful stretch of pavement that Cushman and his men used to traffic human beings into the USA and beyond for the most fallen of purposes. But the Devil’s Highway had many tributaries, and it ran into a thousand small towns in hearts of the ancient nations of South America, wherever the innocent were duped or kidnapped, or otherwise enslaved, and started on their long and sorrowful journey north.

  Everywhere that Cushman had gone before us, we dogged his tracks, putting the word out on the streets that we were searching for a man named Cushman, or whatever name he was calling himself on a given day. People on the street had heard of us, the big black man and the beautiful Latina, searching for the Gringo who had done something unspeakable in the North.

  One day Cushman was said to have been seen in Colombia; another, Peru. We always went where the reports led us, but frequently there was either no one, the wrong person, or, worst of all, he had indeed been there, and we were too late. So it had gone, in all those long weeks.

  But now it was tonight, and the country was Brazil, and the Colonel was definitely in. A man who had preferred to remain nameless had taken a wad of Brazilian Reals from us and pointed out the place to Andrea and me. I had watched the house from across the bay the day before, through binoculars. Cushman’s hideout was a big, low house with plenty of shade trees. I spotted men on the premises, casually dressed but obviously armed guards. The house was on the shoulder of a hill off the bay, in one of the quieter sections of the city. Such an arrangement must have cost a lot of money, but as we now knew, Cushman had plenty of that.

  I took a deep breath and looked at Andrea. It had been a long, exhausting search, hard on us both. But Andrea was a fighter. I ticked off in my head the human cost to her alone: Fernando Mendoza, Deputy Hughes and Ira Greywolf. She had lost three friends to Cushman. That’s why she never gave up, I knew. She had once told me that at night their faces came out of the darkness to her, and she knew their killer was still walking the earth. She also thought about all the Latinas like herself that he had herded like cattle northward, and that enormous crime against women deserved justice, too.

  I was the man with the gun in his hand, though. No one had forced me to come there. I was there because I had made promises, and when I made a promise, I did my best to keep it. And the person I had made this particular promise to, I dared not fail. Sure, I had made a vow to Garrett, but I had also made a promise to myself, a promise that I was going to ferret out Cushman and bring him in, and see that he was held accountable for all of his crimes.

  “Let’s get this over with,” I said.

  I got out of the car. Andrea waited behind the wheel, motor running, with the headlights off. I walked to the corner, and spotted one of Cushman’s men. He was looking in the wrong direction. I knocked him out with a lead-loaded sap, and dragged him into the shadows. I took his gun and radio.

  The radio meant he had a friend somewhere nearby. I searched in his pockets and found some keys. At the gate, the third key let me in. I closed the gate quietly, but left it unlocked behind me. I silently crossed the yard toward a lighted pool; no one was about.

  There were few lights on in the house, but the front door opened when I turned the knob. The other man was in
the kitchen, making himself a sandwich, when I walked in. He looked up just as I chopped him in the neck. Then I wrapped him up in a half Nelson and put him in a sleeper hold, one arm bent around the neck, the other bracing behind. A couple of half-second squeezes to cut off blood flow to the brain, and he sagged in my arms. I left him there, napping on the marble tile. His sandwich would have to wait.

  I walked up the hall, gun in hand I went around each corner, gun first, in case another man waited inside. I walked through an open door and into a large room, part library, part living room. The sliding doors were open along one side, leading out onto a balcony. Thin, floor-length white curtains billowed in the warm night breeze.

  Cushman was standing with his back to me, a tumbler with two fingers of yellowy Irish whiskey in his right hand. I made no sound as I came in, but somehow, he sensed me, and he turned, his eyes widening slightly when he registered who I was.

  “So, Longville. It’s you.”

  “You’ve got a lot to answer for, Cushman.”

  Like he didn’t hear me, Cushman turned and walked slowly across the room. I heard the ice clink as he swirled his drink.

  “Stop where you are. You’re coming with me.”

  Cushman sipped his drink and shook his head.

  “It’s you who have things to answer for, Longville. You ruined my operation. You, that hick sheriff, Garrett, and your friends. But I intend to start over, here in South America. I have connections down here, people who will fund my operations.”

  He looked suddenly over my shoulder, but I wasn’t falling for it.

  “Your guards are going to be asleep for a while,” I informed him.

  “So, you break into my house and harm my employees? Perhaps I should call the police,” he said indignantly.

  “Call them,” I said. He didn’t move, though. He tried another approach.

  “You aren’t a Federal Agent. You’re a private detective, from the United States, I might add. That means you have no authority here, and I don’t have to go anywhere with you. Kindly leave the premises.”

  “Not a chance, Cushman.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you, Longville.”

  “If I have to tie you up and carry you out of here, you’re going.”

  Cushman frowned and went over to the bar and set his drink down. He laughed and shrugged, like this was all just some misunderstanding.

  “Let’s start over,” he said, smiling and rubbing his hands together. “Surely we can come to some kind of arrangement. I am, after all, a man of considerable means. I know that you and the Herrera woman have been searching for me. As you have doubtlessly learned, Longville, I have money. Plenty of money. Let us be civil about this, Longville. I am willing to discuss your terms.”

  “There aren’t any terms to discuss.”

  “Well then, I have another solution.”

  He was quicker than I would have given him credit for. He had a slender black automatic there under the bar, and he snatched it up, and actually got a shot off that went past my head, before I squeezed the trigger and put a .45 slug into the left side of his chest. Cushman looked amazed, and slowly slumped to the floor.

  Outside, the night creatures paused. Then, far away, a dog started barking, and the crickets started chirping, and the night closed in around Cushman for the final time.

  * * *

  I walked out to the car, where Andrea was waiting. She merely nodded at me; I could read everything in her eyes. She might have preferred to see Cushman in the dock, see him stand trial and be judged for all of his many crimes, but this would do—an end to him for once and for all And at long last, an end to the many wrongs that the man had brought into the world. Though his one miserable life alone would never pay for all his crimes, it was revenge, and sometimes, revenge is all you get.

  The beginning of this hellish journey, it seemed to me now, had started a long time ago. Way back then it had begun with a short night’s sleep, a rushed drive to Atlanta, a flurry of visits to various locales in Florida and West Texas, the intrigue, and finally the battle and the death and dying. But still fresh in my memory are the names of the dead, and time and distance will never remove them from my mind.

  Brad Caldwell, the lost college boy, was safe at home tonight. His fantasy about being part of a post-Apocalyptic militia had been the beginning of this affair. He was very lucky to be at home, unlike the thousands of unwilling human beings that Colonel Cushman and his spiteful, death-worshipping army of misanthropes had moved from this continent to its wealthier northern neighbor.

  Most of the people Cushman had affected would never go home again. Like a Mexican documentary director named Fernando Mendoza, and a Sheriff’s Deputy named Hughes and an old army veteran named Ira Greywolf. And because of those and other deaths, Cushman was dead, now, too. Call that vengeance, if you like.

  Andrea pulled out onto the quiet night time street, and we headed for the lights of Rio De Janeiro, a vast, throbbing, never-sleeping great city along the southern coast of a vibrant and colorful nation. But for all that, a country not my home.

  Andrea drove toward the moonlit bay. There, we could catch the night ferry and cross the water to where there was an airport and a redeye flight to somewhere far, far away.

  I finally let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in. It was all over.

  At last, it was time for that long ride home.

  – THE END –

  Author’s Note: There really was a Highway 666, and it was commonly referred to as “The Devil’s Highway.” Highway 666 was renamed Highway 191 for various reasons. However, this highway does not run into Texas, or anywhere near the town of Van Horn.

  The name “Devil’s Highway” has also been used, for apparent reasons, to describe the routes used by human traffickers and drug smugglers, from South America to the United States. This coincidence gave me the inspiration for this novel.

  There is no real town named Delgado in Texas.

  Also, the Redemption Army is my own fictional creation, and is not meant to depict any real militia group or movement.

  — Timothy C. Phillips

  Timothy C. Phillips was born in a small town at the foot of the Appalachians. Youngest of seven children, he attended colleges in Alabama and Louisiana, and holds degrees in English, Forensics and Political Science. He lives in Alabama, where he writes and dabbles in music.

  To date there are seven titles in the

  Roland Longville Mystery Series:

  Season of the Witch • Magician

  Dead Birmingham • Medusa

  Lady Midnight • The Burning Day

  The Devil’s Highway