Redheads

by Jonathan Moore

“It’s kinda stiff, but it’ll be okay. Nothing this boat can’t handle.”

  Julissa steered to the right side of the channel as a sport fishing boat came in from the sea. The two vessels passed port to port, thirty feet apart. The men on the flying bridge of the other boat were looking at Julissa and not the bulging fish bag on the swim platform. The man driving the other boat, a local charter captain whose face was familiar but whose name Chris couldn’t remember, flashed them a shaka sign. Chris returned it, thumb and pinkie out, a quick shake of the wrist.

  “Is it true you can track a person with his cell phone, even if it’s not being used?”

  “I already threw mine over the side, while you were getting the boat ready,” Julissa said. “If that answers your question.”

  Chris took his cell out, checking to be sure it wasn’t the satellite phone. Then he tossed it over the rail.

  “Cell phones and credit cards, most bank transactions. Smart phones are the worst because they have GPS installed, so if anyone hacks your phone, they can figure out exactly where you are. They can track you with your email if you don’t take precautions. You mentioned you had a laptop on the boat, but don’t bother bringing it. We can find a new one somewhere, with a unique ID number not already associated with you.”

  “Okay. You should be an FBI agent or something.”

  “I do contract work for the FBI. Or I used to. I don’t know how that’s going to work out after all this.”

  “One thing at a time, I guess. You okay with steering?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chris sat next to Julissa on the bench behind the helm. For a while, he just sat there, his eyes closed and his thumbs on his throbbing temples. He felt Julissa’s hand on his left shoulder. When he looked, she was crying noiselessly. He nodded and she leaned against him, resting her cheek on his shoulder.

  They didn’t speak because everything that mattered was unspeakable. Allison and Cheryl. Mike and his family. The dozens or hundreds of murdered women; the dark path ahead. After a moment, Julissa lifted her head from his shoulder and corrected their course, centering Sailfish in the channel.

  Chris counted his breaths and watched the boat’s progress. If he’d been calculating and cold for this long, he could keep it up a little longer. There’d be time later, but only if they made it out of Hawaii. For now they had a difficult sail in front of them, and he still had to find a way out of the islands. Chris took the satellite phone from his pocket and showed it to her.

  “It’s an Iridium I bought a couple years ago. Paid cash and set up an account under a false name, billed to a credit card that’s also under a false name. That card gets paid from an offshore account under the same name. There’s nothing to trace it to me.”

  “You set this all up—for what?”

  “I’ve spent years tracking someone down to murder him. So at some point I started planning what happens the day after I get him.”

  “We pick up the rest of our lives. In a world without him. Without it.”

  “What if we murder him in broad daylight in front of a crowd of witnesses? Or get caught on video? Or we don’t have time to hide the body, and the police start following the traces we leave? Or his hit men are still looking for us even after we’ve killed him?”

  “So you’ve been planning all along to disappear afterward, under a fake name.”

  Chris nodded.

  “For the short term, I have an ID you can use. We probably shouldn’t count on using it too long, but it’ll get us out of the country.”

  “What ID?”

  “Cheryl’s passport. It’s in the galley. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “She was twenty-nine when the picture was taken. You look almost exactly like her.”

  “It’s still valid?”

  “For two more years. They don’t cancel a passport when a person dies. A lot of countries do, but the U.S. doesn’t.”

  “Because we have no national ID database, so there’d be no way to keep track.” She nodded her head, understanding his plan. “It’ll work, if I really look like her. What about you, what’s your new name?”

  “Jarrett Gardner.”

  Chris held up the Iridium phone. “Let me take care of our flight.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was half an hour to midnight when Westfield pulled off Interstate 10 at a truck stop sixty miles east of San Antonio. He drove to the far corner of the lot, out of the glare of the bright fluorescent lights that lit the pumps and the area around the diner. He parked on gravel next to a dark tractor-trailer rig. He leaned back in his seat and looked at the stars through the bug-dotted windshield, listening to the hood and the engine tick as the hot metal cooled and contracted in the night breeze. He’d been driving across Texas in the dark with the windows down and the radio off, keeping to the speed limit and watching the rear-view mirror for state troopers. For the last two hours there had been hardly any traffic on the road at all. Just the amber eyes of deer reflecting his headlights back at him from the side of the highway. In the hours since leaving Galveston, he’d had plenty of time to think about everything that might have gone wrong.

  First there was the clean-up job he’d done in his hotel room. The hydrogen peroxide got the smaller stains out of the carpet, but the biggest one, from the man’s bleeding head, had been impossible. Westfield used half the bottle of peroxide, half a gallon of hot water from the sink, and all the washcloths in the room. He called it quits when the stain started to look like someone had spilled a pot of coffee on the rug. Inspired by that, he brewed a pot of coffee with the little machine next to the TV, took a few sips for himself, and dumped the rest onto the stain. Maybe the smell would throw the maids off for a while.

  There was no hope of fixing the hole in the rug from the bullet that barely missed his head when he’d hit his attacker with the stun gun. Instead he pried loose the slug with his pocket knife, then used a cigarette lighter to burn the edges of the hole. He’d picked up a cigarette butt in the parking lot and he left it in the burned spot. The room was going to look like a rock band stayed overnight.

  After that, he took care of the body. He wrapped it in the futon’s plastic covering, tossed in the dirty washcloths and the blood-soaked pillow, and then wrapped everything in the bedspread. He used a couple of wraps of clear packing tape to keep everything in place before sliding the body into the futon’s cardboard shipping box. He closed the flaps of the box, taped them shut, and then taped a blank piece of paper to the front of the box. With a red permanent marker he wrote, ANTIQUES—FRAGILE.

  Getting the box onto the dolly had been difficult. Eventually he realized the man’s legs were lighter than his upper body, and the solution was to stand the box on its end with the man’s head facing down. If that caused more bleeding, so be it. The plastic, the pillow and towels, and the bedspread would catch it all before it started to leak out of the box. He gave the room a once-over to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind, then wheeled the dolly to the elevators. He had to favor his left leg while walking, and his right knee could hold his weight only a few seconds at a time before the pain got to be too much. In the elevator, he leaned against the handrail at the back. The car stopped at the sixth floor and an old woman in a mauve-colored pantsuit got on. She studied Westfield and the box carefully until they reached the lobby. He waited for the woman to exit. Then he wheeled the dolly out, limping to the front entrance. The teenaged valet opened the door for him and Westfield came out into the late-afternoon heat.

  “You need some help, sir?”

  “No thanks.”

  Now he was in the parking lot of the truck stop. He had been thinking about murder pretty much nonstop since 1978. But he’d never given any thought to hiding bodies because that wasn’t something Tara’s killer did. For the first couple of hours, while driving through Houston, he’d planned to dump the box in a ditch on a quiet stretch of highway. That seemed like a good, no-nonsense plan until he realized his fi
ngerprints were all over it. He was into dry country now, far from any deep water, and sinking the body in a rancher’s pond or a shallow creek wouldn’t do any good. It would likely be found in a matter of weeks. The clear packing tape binding the dead man inside his wrappings would probably hold on to Westfield’s fingerprints for months underwater. Burying the body on the side of the road wasn’t going to work either. Out here the topsoil was just a thin layer over the limestone bedrock. He didn’t have a shovel in the van, and digging with a bad knee injury didn’t sound too good either. He’d dropped off the dolly at the U-Haul store on his way out of Galveston, so whatever he did with the box was going to have to be within a few feet of the back of the van. The last thing he wanted was a state trooper to roll up behind him while he was using a hubcap to scrape out a grave next to the highway. That would raise an eyebrow.

  If he lived here and knew the country, he’d be able to think of a better plan. He’d know a cave or an abandoned well. If he went a few more hours west of San Antonio, there might even be an old mineshaft in a ghost town tucked back in the shadow of a mesa. But he couldn’t find these things because they weren’t marked on the highway map. The only good option was to get somewhere isolated, pull the box out of the van, douse it with a couple of gallons of gasoline, throw a match, and take off. The fire might not destroy the body but it would certainly eradicate every trace of Westfield on the box. Someone would probably find the fire in half an hour, but by the time they put it out, Westfield would be over the horizon and the fingerprints would be history.

  Westfield opened the door and got out, bringing his crutches with him. He wished he could talk to Chris, Julissa and Mike. He was sure there was something to learn from what happened today. Before he’d shot the man in the forehead, he’d said he worked for the killer, that he paid well.

  The man didn’t sound like a contract killer. Maybe he was something more like a fulltime employee. That suggested what all of them had already suspected: whoever or whatever they were looking for was wealthy. Wealthy enough to send the fulltime hired help on a business trip to Galveston to eliminate a potential threat. Wealthy enough to pay to have someone tracked by his credit transactions—maybe by the same person who was hacking into the FBI.

  Westfield got to the convenience store and found the aisle with automotive supplies. He took a two-gallon portable gas can, then went to the cashier. There were open coolers full of ice and soft drinks next to the register and he picked up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of beef jerky. He could eat better later. He prepaid in cash for two gallons of gas, then went outside to the pumps. He was running low on cash but hadn’t used his credit card since Galveston. He supposed the best thing would be to stop at a bank in the morning, take out a few thousand dollars, and then drive like hell in a new direction.

  He figured he’d drive another three hours past San Antonio and get off the main road before he dumped the body and burned it. The interstate would be quiet at three a.m. in West Texas; a rural road would be plain dead. Back on the highway, he opened his bottle of Mountain Dew and took a long swallow. He wished he could use his credit card and check into a motel. He’d take a long shower, turn down the air conditioner, and sleep. Whenever he slept in a dark room with the air conditioner blasting, he could fall asleep pretending he was in his bunk aboard White Plains—in an hour he’d relieve the watch officer, steering the ship as close as it could go to the Chinese line without crossing. And in those thoughts, just before dreams, the radio telegram would never come. The ship’s XO would not take the folded paper from the radio ensign, would not read it silently and ask Second Lieutenant Westfield to step away from his station and come out on deck for a quick talk. Of course, replaying the moment in his mind wouldn’t change anything. Neither would wishing for a shower and a night in a motel.

  “I’m still not sorry I shot you, you son of a bitch,” he said.

  After another thirty minutes, he finally broke down and tried to find something besides Jesus or country western on the radio.

  San Antonio was asleep when he passed through it just before one in the morning. A police car came down the entrance ramp after the Alamo Dome and stayed on his tail for a mile and a half. Westfield kept the van at exactly fifty-five miles an hour. The cop was just coasting along in his draft, maybe waiting for dispatch to come back with a report on his plates. Then, without signaling, the cop pulled into the far left lane and shot past Westfield’s van. In another ten minutes he was out of the city and back into the darkness of the dry countryside. He stopped at a rest area, walked to the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the mown grass, and relieved himself into a scraggly live oak growing at the fence line. The stars were bright and the air was as dry as the rocks. He could smell some kind of night-blooming flower, a cactus maybe.

  He walked back to the van and drove an hour until he turned onto U.S. 277 in Sonora. He went north on this smaller highway, winding between eroded buttes and mesas, and after ten miles veered west onto an unpaved, unmarked county road. After a mile he stopped, turned the van around, and parked on the side of the road, facing the way he’d come. He got out of the van and went around to the back, not using his crutches. There were no lights and no houses in view. Each side of the road was closed off by a barbed-wire fence. Low cedars and scrubby oaks and mesquite trees grew in the pasture land spread between the mesas silhouetted against the stars. The grass along the side of the road was so dry it crunched when he stepped on it. He opened the back doors of the van and took hold of the cardboard box with the body. He slid it along the bed of the van and then let gravity do the rest. The box fell onto the grass, balanced briefly on its end, then tipped onto the gravel road. He closed the doors, got back into the van, and drove three hundred feet towards US 277. As a kid, he’d seen one of the dumber children in his Scout troop pour about a cup of gasoline into a camp fire. The explosion from a cup was bad enough; the kid lived, but did it without eyebrows for a good while. Westfield didn’t want to end up stuck on a back road because he’d accidentally blown up his van.

  He got out and limped back along the road with the gas can. If they came out here with fire trucks and squad cars, they’d likely drive all over his foot prints. Otherwise, if they had a tracker, they’d be able to study his tracks in the dust and figure out they were looking for a tall guy with a limp. He got to the box, unscrewed the top of the gas can, and emptied it onto the cardboard, covering it from end to end. He was careful to keep the gas from splashing onto his legs and feet. He left the gas can on top of the box. No need to get pulled over in the next couple of hours with an empty gas can in the back.

  He walked back to the van and lifted the ancient, ratty carpet covering the spare tire compartment. In there, amongst the jack, the tire iron, and the reflective triangle, was a red flare, probably as old as the van itself. He took it, shut the door, and went back towards the box until he was standing a hundred feet from it. It was as far as he thought he’d be able to throw the flare with any kind of accuracy, but closer than he’d like to be. If he’d had time to plan this, he’d have a remote detonator or some tracer rounds for his pistol.

  Then again, if he’d had time to plan this, he wouldn’t be in West Texas in the middle of the night with a man he’d murdered.

  He pulled the plastic cap off the flare, pointed it away from his face, and struck the tip of the flare against the sandpaper on the end of the plastic cap. The flare sputtered like an old match, but then caught. Its flame was red and smoky. He put the cap in his pocket so he wouldn’t drop it in the chaos he was about to set off. He considered the distance to the box, looked at the wind in the branches of the trees, and then threw the flare overhand. It spun in an arc through the air, its fire tracing a curving cycloid line as it went. Westfield figured it would do the job if it landed anywhere within twenty feet of the box. It hit the ground five feet from the body. The result was an instant explosion. Flames erupted fifty feet into the air and then mushroomed into an expanding ball. A circle of bl
ue flame shot from the box and expanded along the ground, igniting the grass, trees and fence posts on both sides of the road. Westfield himself was nearly knocked down by the heat and shock of the explosion. Before he even saw how far the flames would spread, he turned and hobbled for the van, ignoring the pain in his right knee. When he reached the van he patted at his back and the back of his head to make sure he wasn’t on fire. His shirt was so hot it may have been smoking. The keys were still in the ignition and the engine was running. He got in, slammed the door, dropped the transmission into gear and floored the accelerator.

  The road ahead was bright as midmorning from the fire; the van cast a long shadow ahead of itself. He didn’t need his headlights until he reached U.S. 277. He spun the wheel and skidded onto the pavement, heading south towards Interstate 10. The fire was still visible out his right window. He pushed the van to ninety. It wouldn’t go any faster. No cars came from the other direction and he couldn’t hear any sirens. When he saw the sign for the interstate, he slowed, signaled for the entrance ramp, and merged onto I-10 doing sixty-five miles an hour. He could still see the fire on the horizon, miles away. It took him ten miles to stop shaking and twenty miles after that to stop looking in his rear-view mirror every couple of seconds. His face felt like he’d been out in the desert all day and he realized the initial blast had given him an instant sunburn.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Almost any other day of her life, Julissa would have enjoyed every minute sailing across the channel to Molokai. Sailfish was fast and powerful, heeling from the force of the wind in her unfurled mainsail and genoa, her sharp hull easily slicing through the ocean waves. Behind them, Oahu had receded steadily, revealing the curves of its shoreline and the serrated cliffs of its mountain ranges as they drew far enough away to see it in its entirety. Sea birds raced alongside the boat, angling their wings to the wind before diving into the clear water. When they hit the surface, schools of flying fish were scared up into flight, skimming the wave tops for a hundred feet or more. She listened to the sounds of the wind in the rigging and the foaming wake that started on the lee side of the hull, and felt the warm touch of Chris’s hand on her shoulder as he taught her how to steer up into the wind gusts. Mid-channel, when she should have been enjoying it most, Chris left her alone in the cockpit to find the spare anchor.