by Ed Gaffney
But survival had to be our first priority. I couldn’t risk her life, or Erica’s or Henley’s. I had to get far away from here, so that if they ever found me, there would be no chance that they could ever find my family.
In short, I needed to vanish. If only Uncle Louis had taught me that magic trick.
I met my mother’s brother Louis just once, when he flew out to visit us from his home in Florida. I was ten years old.
What I remember most about my uncle’s visit was the magic. Card tricks, disappearing foam balls, pieces of rope that got longer even when you cut them—he was a wizard. And every time he did a trick, he’d say or do something that I thought was intensely funny. I don’t know if I ever laughed more than I did that weekend.
After he left, I asked my mother why Uncle Louis couldn’t come more often, and I was told that it was because he lived so far away, and because it was so expensive. I was too young to press the point, but even then, I doubted that was the whole story.
I suspect now that it had to do with the fact that Uncle Louis was gay, and that my mother’s family never accepted him for what he was—a very nice, very funny man, who enjoyed life perhaps more boisterously than others were comfortable with, and who died too young at a party in Miami.
But unfortunately my deceased uncle would provide no help that Sunday morning as I fled down the road. I was going to have to create my own disappearing act, and I was going to have to do it quick.
I had a bunch of money—probably two thousand dollars—but I was driving around in a car that couldn’t possibly be more noticeable. A yellow VW beetle with a blown-out windshield.
But even if I wanted to walk into a used-car dealership with a fistful of cash, it was Sunday morning. Nothing was open.
I considered renting a car, but they always wanted a credit card to use as a deposit. I needed to minimize the chances that whoever was looking for me could track my movements by payments. They’d be on me before I could get twenty miles down the road.
But the VW was so conspicuous that the drivers of almost every one of the few cars I passed did a double take at the damage to the windshield. As soon as the cops put the word out, I was dead. I had to switch vehicles immediately.
Then, I caught one of the few breaks I was to get during this entire surreal week. Ten miles south of Winston was Restful Creek, one of the northernmost suburbs of Scottsdale. I happened to know that there was a rental car place there, because on a Friday, three years ago, when both Amy’s car and my truck were in the shop, I’d loaned her Henley’s van. But then, out of the blue, I’d needed to drive to Tucson for an emergency hearing in a case I was handling.
The owner of this dealership—Fred Feenie was his name—had been terrific. He’d sent his only other employee on a long drive out to give me a ride to their office, where I rented the car.
But as I approached Fred’s place that Sunday morning, I had no intention of renting a car. In fact, I was hoping that they were closed. Because I had another plan.
When I’d rented the car from Fred, I was supposed to return it that evening. But I didn’t get out of the hearing until six, and by the time I got back to Restful Creek, it was after ten that night. Over two hours after Fred closed.
I’d called Fred when I knew I wouldn’t make the deadline, and he told me to just pull the car around to the lot behind the ancient adobe building he used for an office, leave the car unlocked, and leave the keys above the visor.
Seriously.
So that Sunday morning, I was banking on the fact that in the past three years, Fred Feenie hadn’t installed a nighttime drop slot in his door.
And that someone had rented a car from him and returned it late Saturday night.
If I’d known how to hot-wire cars, I probably wouldn’t have been operating with such a pathetic plan to get a different car, but I couldn’t think of anything else. So I drove into downtown Restful Creek that quiet morning. I parked the VW next to a Dumpster behind a restaurant a few blocks from Feenie’s place. I assumed that Fred was closed Sundays, and the earliest they’d discover the theft was Monday. By keeping the VW out of sight, I hoped to delay even further the suspicion that I was the one who’d stolen Fred’s car.
I walked the rest of the way to the Feenie lot. There were six cars there—all acceptably nondescript. I chose a Dodge first, but the doors were locked, and my hopes plunged. I went one by one down the row, only to find they were all locked.
Until I reached the last one. A white Mitsubishi Galant. I was so sure it was locked, too, that when the door actually opened, I almost fell backward onto my rear end.
I took a quick look around before I entered the car, but there was no one in sight. In retrospect, it was a foolish gesture. It wouldn’t have made any difference if I was being watched by the entire adult population of the town. I had to get a different car, and I had to get out of there immediately.
I hopped in, shut the door, and hoping that my luck hadn’t run out, I pulled on the driver’s-side sun visor.
Like a slot machine payoff, the keys jingled down into my lap.
It’s funny how quickly one’s perspective can change, especially under extreme circumstances. Here I was, in the middle of committing my first felony. Yet when those keys appeared, instead of guilt, I felt like it was Christmas morning.
I put the key in the ignition, started the car up, and drove out onto the street. A red light stopped me a block and a half from the rental lot. A quick check verified that the gas tank was full. And then when I looked up to adjust the angle of my rearview mirror, I got an unpleasant shock.
A state trooper had pulled in directly behind me.
My stomach did a sudden flip. Could he have seen me in Feenie’s lot? Did he see me pull out of there on a Sunday morning, when the place was obviously closed? Had he spotted the wrecked VW, called it in, and was now looking for someone in the area fitting my description?
I knew that my cut-up and bloody face would raise anyone’s suspicions, so I looked down, and turned on the radio. I flipped through station after station reminding me that God was watching me every time I sinned, finally settling on a country oldies station, which just happened to be playing a song about a cheating wife.
I flashed a glance back into the mirror, but the cop’s strobe lights weren’t on, and he wasn’t signaling for me to pull over. In fact, when the light turned green, I pulled straight through the intersection, and he turned right.
I took a huge shaky breath in, and then I let it out. With any luck, Fred Feenie would be closed all day, and the car wouldn’t be reported as stolen for another twenty-four hours. I had an entire day to put hundreds of miles behind me. By the time the authorities finally put two and two together, it wouldn’t matter.
I followed the road south toward Scottsdale, then I connected with the loop highway around Phoenix. Twenty-five minutes later I merged onto I-10 east, heading for Tucson. My plan was to drive into New Mexico, and then find a road headed north. I had a vague plan to end up in Kansas City, or Chicago. I didn’t think there was any chance Amy would go there.
After I’d driven for a while, I pulled off at a rest area. I really needed to stop the bleeding from the cut on my head. I’d been pressing my T-shirt against it, but that hadn’t done the trick. I’ve since been told that what I really needed was stitches, but even if I’d realized that at the time, going to a hospital was out of the question. It would have been far too easy for the police to learn my location. I would have settled for some ice, but I was even afraid to pull into a truck stop. All I needed was for a well-intentioned clerk to call 911 to assist the accident victim who had just staggered in to buy a bag of ice, a cup of coffee, and a box of Fig Newtons, and I’d be sunk.
The rest area proved to be a reasonable, if crude, substitute.
I was able to find a parking spot between two campers that helped shield me and my car from view. And on my way to the bathroom, I saw a soda machine. I made a purchase—the first time I’d ever
bought Mountain Dew for medicinal purposes—and brought it back to the car. The chilled aluminum can, combined with pressure from the part of my shirt that wasn’t entirely blood-soaked, helped somewhat. About forty minutes later, the flow had weakened considerably. It was down to a very stubborn trickle from the edge of the cut nearest my eye, and I got back on the road.
At five minutes after three, about six hours from the time I’d left the cabin that morning, and somewhere south and east of Tucson, my cell phone rang.
The voice on the other end of the line spoke with no greeting, but I didn’t need one. I recognized the voice. It was Beta.
And as if that weren’t bad enough, he said, simply, “Tom. This is Dale. You need to turn around.”
TWENTY-NINE
BETA WAS DALE? Impossible. I refused to believe it.
“Dale is dead,” I said. “I have no idea who you are, but you aren’t my brother. That’s for damn sure.”
There was a pause. “Fine. You don’t want to believe me? I can understand that. But you better stop running away.”
The big green sign I was passing as he spoke read NEW MEXICO BORDER—109 MILES. I don’t know how he knew it, but I was most definitely running away. In fact, if I could have snapped my fingers and instantly transported myself anywhere, the sign would have read WELCOME TO OHIO. Unless he really was Dale. But that didn’t make any sense. “What the hell is going on? Who are you?”
“I didn’t tell you before because I was afraid you’d get distracted. This is much bigger than both of us, Tom. They’re going to kill you if they can. The only way to stop them is to get back to the Gomez trial.”
The more I heard, the less I believed. “That’s a bunch of crap, and you know it.”
“You know, if I were you, I’d probably think that if somebody tried to kill my father by burning down my house, that would be about as bad as it could get. I’d probably think it was a good idea to give up any involvement I had in the Juan Gomez trial, and get out of town, so there’d be no chance anyone would come after me or my father again.”
So he knew about the arson. But the rest of it—the stuff about me running away—could well have been a guess. I checked my rearview mirror. There was only one car in sight, and it had entered the interstate only one exit back. It had never gotten close enough to me to know anything about my car other than its color. As far as I could tell, I was completely free of any tail.
Still, I played it cagey. “That doesn’t mean that I bolted.”
There was a pause, and then Beta, or Dale, or whoever he was, said, “That’s true, but I can’t think of another reason why you’d be heading east, on Interstate 10, about twenty miles outside of Tucson.”
My gaze shot to the mirror again. The single car was still way back there. It had been joined by another car, but neither was anywhere near close enough to know that I was in Fred Feenie’s white Mitsubishi a half mile ahead of them. And from what Iris had told me on the day she confirmed that Landry had bugged me, minutes had to pass before they could trace the location of a cell phone.
“How do you know that?” I snapped.
“Relax, Tom. I’m the only one who knows where you are.” There was a slight delay. “And I know a lot more than that, too.”
I really don’t know what it was that gave it away. The ominous pause, the tone of Beta’s voice, or perhaps my recently acquired fluency in the language of threats, thanks to my introductory lesson in the men’s room five days earlier. It’s possible that a week prior to this conversation, I wouldn’t have attached anything of importance to that last statement. But as soon as I heard it, I knew something bad was coming. I just didn’t know how bad. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Come on, Tom,” Beta chided. “Do you really think Landry is the only one who knows how to start a fire?”
I was still very early in processing my anger and frustration at being forced to flee from my family. And as impossible as I knew it to be, I was now wrestling with the bizarre suggestion that my brother was alive, and apparently threatening me. My head still ached from the injury I’d received from Landry. I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. “What are you saying? You’re going to burn down my house again?”
I didn’t hear anything for a second, and I thought that the cell phone signal might have given out. But then Beta cleared his throat, and said the words that still live in my nightmares to this day: “I’m not talking about Dad and Mom’s house, Tom. I’m talking about the one Amy and Erica and Dad are staying in right now.”
My mind was a hundred different places at once, most of them in conflict. Dale was one of the very few people who knew where Cliff’s and my house was. But Dale would never threaten his own family’s life. It couldn’t be Dale.
So whoever this was had to be bluffing. There was absolutely no way he knew where we had gone to hide. And if he did, how did he find out? Were Cliff and Iris in on this? Impossible. But what about Cliff’s friends, the West brothers? I’d never seen them before in my life. But if they were involved, then why did they take up a position on the road as I passed, clearly designed to assist me in escaping from whoever had shot up my car?
As far as I knew, that was the entire population of the people who knew where Amy and I had fled to. So I was willing to bet that Beta was playing his last card here. For whatever reason, he felt like he had to manipulate me back into that courtroom, and he knew there was nothing he could use to get me there except Amy and Erica. So he gambled with an empty threat, hoping I’d believe that he could get to them.
He lost.
“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing,” I said. “But Amy and Erica are fine, and the only way I know to keep them fine is to stay away from the Juan Gomez trial. Which is exactly what I intend to do.”
The silence that followed this statement was even longer than the last one. Was I being traced? I didn’t think it made any difference. He knew exactly where I was at the beginning of the phone call. If he was intending to kill me, then he’d do it. I’d take my chances.
But dragging Amy and Erica into this thing was not an option.
“Okay, Tom. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you where Amy and Erica are. And I’m going to tell you what they’re wearing. And I’m going to tell you what they’re doing.”
I still didn’t believe he had them. I couldn’t afford to believe it. The road whizzed by under my tires. The sky was blue, and its bright color contrasted sharply with the browns and yellows on the horizon. Amy and Erica had to be safe.
“Amy is wearing jeans and a blue-green pullover with a wide neckline,” he began. I felt a squeezing in my chest. “She’s walking out of the house with Erica, who is wearing a T-shirt and shorts. The T-shirt says ‘Grandpa Rocks’ on it. I bet Dad loves that. They’re both carrying backpacks.”
I eased up on the accelerator. Either he had them, or he had seen them before, and was just making up a good story. I was banking on the latter.
“Amy is talking to Dad—he’s at the door in his wheelchair. Now she’s going to her car, and I wonder if she’ll—yeah, she sees it. I let the air out of her front tire. She realizes she’s not going anywhere. Now she’s looking around, but she doesn’t see anything. And now she’s grabbing Erica, and running inside. Smart girl.”
He still hadn’t described the hideout—so for all the detail in his story, it still might be a fabrication.
“And by the way, Tom, I love what you’ve done with the place. Wood and stone cabin on the southeast corner of the Navajo reservation, blue curtains in the windows on either side of the red front door, ramp leading down to the gravel parking area at the end of the driveway…Should I go on?”
The headache I’d had five minutes earlier had been replaced by a blinding pain across my forehead, as if a steel band had been wrapped around my skull and drawn tight. There was a rest stop about a half mile down the road, and I pulled into it, parking at the first space I saw. I closed my eyes, and sat
back against the headrest. I was at least four hours away. I refused to believe this creep on the phone was Dale. But at this point, it didn’t really matter anymore. If I managed to get hold of Amy by phone to tell her to run, her car was disabled. If Beta—or Dale, God help me—wanted to do anything to them, there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“You okay there, Tom?”
The false sympathy sickened me, and I couldn’t have hidden my disgust if I tried. “If you hurt any of them, I will spend the rest of my life hunting you down, and then I will kill you.”
The jerk actually chuckled. “Whoa there, Tommy boy, easy does it.” If the pseudo-concern was nauseating, the condescension was infuriating. “Everybody’s fine, and nobody’s going to hurt anybody, as long as you take care of your end of this. I gave up way too much for you to back out now. I’m sorry about this, but your family is my only leverage left. You run away, and I’ll kill them right here and right now. But you turn that car around, meet me so I can give you what you need for tomorrow, finish up the Gomez trial, and I promise you, everything is going to be just fine.”
Things were as far from “just fine” as they’d ever been in my life. But we both knew it was all about Amy and Erica—if they were really in danger, I was going to do whatever he wanted. “How do I know you haven’t already done something to them?” I asked.
“Call them right now,” he said. “You’ve still got your old phone with you, right? Call Amy while I’m on the phone with you.”
“How did you know—”
“Never mind,” he interrupted. “Just call her. And be quick about it. Make sure she’s okay, and tell her you’re okay, and then hang up. Anything else and I’ll get nervous. Don’t make me nervous, Tom.”
I took a deep breath. The constant, implied intimidation was taking its toll.
I had a little more time on my old cell phone, and I used it to call Amy. She answered right away.
