by David Cole
“I’m beta testing this new PDA,” I said.
“PDA,” Meg muttered. “Beta testing. What language is that, anyway?”
“It’s more like, it’s like a new model cell phone,” I told LynnMay. “Plus, like a Palm Pilot. And some GPS. Mapping, web browser…”
Turning slightly toward her, I saw her smile, shrug her shoulders.
I’m beta testing this new Japanese product because Donald Ralph got me an amazing contract. Fifty thousand, up front. He’d been asked for the best computer hacker he knew, my name came up, I got the product.
A SmartPhone.
It had no brand name on it, but I knew it was a Fujiyama prototype. A new electronics company, rumored to be staffed by ex Sony and Fujitsu employees.
It was perfect for my rituals.
I could type in text, I could dictate, I could instantly add my thoughts, either from the past day or hour or just of the moment.
I needed a lot of rituals, quick ones. I had such a little attention span I needed to rehearse all my rituals to keep myself focused.
I swallowed another Ritalin.
“You’re making me really nervous,” LynnMay said.
“Why?”
“What are those drugs, those pills? What are you taking?”
“It’s a medical condition,” I said. “I have this condition, I have to take pills.”
Meg laid a hand on LynnMay’s shoulder, squeezed.
“It keeps her focused. Don’t worry about it.”
“Well, it’s making me nervous.”
Have a pill, I thought, but I didn’t want to say it out loud.
“Why do you take so many of them?”
She couldn’t let it go.
“She’s got a medical condition,” Meg said, squeezing my shoulder before putting her hand back around the trigger guard. “It’s just her history. Don’t worry about her, okay?”
LynnMay clamped her lips shut, tight, and fingered her rosary with plastic, pearl-colored beads.
“We’re cool here,” Kyle said casually. “No problems.”
I shot him a glance, but he was smiling at me, gave me a thumbs-up.
“What’s it like in New Zealand?” Meg asked, trying to make light conversation to chill us all down a bit.
“Like here.”
“Like Arizona?”
“Like your whole country. Hills, farms, mountains, grassy flatlands, water. Just the same as here. Except it’s all a lot closer together.”
“And sheep,” Meg said. “I hate sheep, I hate lamb, but you people eat it like the Navajos.”
“Yeah.”
It came out yeah-er.
“Sheep. Wine, lots of good wine. Deer farms. We like our venison.”
To shut out our attempt at casual banter, LynnMay started to intone a cycle of Hail Marys and Our Fathers and the rest of it. She saw me grinning, watched me bang out a rhythm on the steering wheel along with her Hail Marys. She closed her eyes, worked the beads harder.
We drove another forty miles in silence. Her comment about my talking a lot somehow riled me, but it was true. Too many hours alone at my computers.
Plus I have a very short attention span that makes me repeat things, a mnemonic talking routine to make things stick in my head.
It’s called Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. There are lists and lists and lists of symptoms. Failure to give close attention to details. Makes careless mistakes. Can’t sustain attention in whatever tasks or fun.
I sometimes don’t listen when spoken to directly.
And a real pain in the butt in terms of my being a high-paid computer hacker. I increasingly had difficulty organizing tasks and activities. I invented a thousand procrastinations to avoid computer tasks.
Easily distracted by extraneous stimuli.
I fidget. I don’t seem to spend much time in what my therapist calls leisure activity. Actually, she says I don’t have much fun.
I sometimes talk excessively, I have a motormouth, but this is one of my rituals when I realize that in some social situation I have real difficulty awaiting my turn to talk, so I wind up interrupting others.
To cope, that’s why I invent rituals.
I call them rituals because I hate my therapist’s phrase. “Behavioral coping habits.” Yeah. Well. I kept focused. You think you know me, I realize that, you think you understand my last three years. But really, you don’t understand why I was back on Ritalin after two years substance free.
It’s easy to explain.
In the past year, I’d watched Meg shoot and kill three women. Right in front of my eyes, right in front of my body. Audrey, I could hardly remember Audrey’s last name, Max…uh, Max…Maxwell, that was her name, and I would never forget her blood spattering my kitchen walls.
The butcher and Taá Wheatley, that was a year ago. In my head, it seemed like yesterday, the butcher lunging at me with her boning knife, Meg pulling her Glock from the small of her back, whacking them both with her lunatic manic grin never wavering.
True, all three had been trying to kill me. Still…
That’s not totally all of it.
I couldn’t find my daughter, I couldn’t find Spider. Expert at finding people. Tracking them down. Locating the unlocatables. Couldn’t find the one that mattered most.
After New York City, after Rey and I spent three weeks looking…no traces.
So partly because of Meg’s killing ways, partly because of not finding my daughter, well…partly, but that’s not all of why I’m back on Ritalin.
Part of me likes the buzz. I’m addicted to the buzz. Addictions are fierce when you try to get rid of them.
And now Hannibal Lecter. It had to be a quirk, a disgruntled client, somebody who was nobody. Extraordinarily ordinary. Nothing to worry about.
LynnMay started moving her beads faster, and who could blame her, being around Meg and me, both of us on meds and really anxious. We tend to get anxious, that’s our nature, that’s why we’re perfect for contracts like delivering women from one safe house to another.
Meg carefully regulated her meds.
In anxious times, I just take more Ritalin without even thinking about it.
Like, whenever I saw Meg’s shotgun muzzle dip up and down in my rearview mirror, I wanted another one. But I knew I was already speeding. I couldn’t wait to get to Nogales and drop LynnMay off at the safe house.
10
“You see that other van again?” Meg asked.
“No.”
I’d been checking the mirrors.
“Nothing back there.”
“When did you first notice it?”
“At Perryville.”
“Jesus Christ, Laura. You didn’t tell me that.”
“There are a lot of vans, Meg. It’s delivery time, it’s early morning. It was outside a 7-Eleven, a guy was wheeling a dolly, probably delivering beer or whatever. This time of morning, there are a lot of vans on the road.”
Still, I thought I’d seen it about six times in the last hundred miles.
“Jesus! I depend on you, you’re my eyes, Laura.”
Yeah, sure.
Once through the whole Phoenix traffic zoo, the number of vehicles had thinned out rapidly as we caught US 10 and headed due south. We’d already moved quickly past the Tucson exits and caught US 19 to Nogales.
South of Tucson and off to our right, the San Xavier mission gleamed white in the morning sun. I looked away, as I always did when I saw the twin domes. Beautiful to many, horror to me with the memory of the boy’s body exploding into flame on that night I went with Rey Villaneuva to find Miguel Zepeda.
Rey and Meg, Meg and Rey. Husband and wife, ex-wife and ex-husband.
I repeated their names, tapping left and right index fingers on the steering wheel, working the naming mantra to avoid memories. That’s another of my rituals, and I really burrowed into the rhythm of the names all the way to the Green Valley exits.
I was saying the names aloud into my head mik
e.
“Exit sixty-nine. Duval Mine Road. Sixty-nine kilometers to the Mexican border. Esperanza Boulevard, exit sixty-five. Continental Road, exit sixty-three. Canoa Road, exit…”
“Jesus Christ!” Meg slapped my right shoulder. “Will you stop that?”
One more thing, about why I was so anxious.
Meg had gone into rehab, stabilizing her drug cocktail to make her bipolar symptoms readjust to normal. Whatever normal meant, I wasn’t sure, but Meg had really worked at stopping her manic phases. She loved to be manic. But she dreaded the downside, the intense depression. Six months of rehab and she was stable, but she still had a core of violence and I didn’t want her to ever go off her meds again.
Six months later, purged of drugs and alcohol, back on her bipolar medication, she rarely contacted me. Lunch or dinner on the Arizona Inn patio, abrupt messages on my answering machine, tentative, apologetic words, always wary of my refusal to see her.
That was the limit of our friendship. I helped transfer abused women from one of Meg’s safe houses to another. But when she first called me about this trip, she didn’t tell me anything about who LynnMay was, and why we were moving her. She didn’t dare tell me LynnMay’s name since it was all over the Arizona newspapers.
All in all, I was extraordinarily anxious.
Freaked out. That’s really how I felt, way beyond anxious. Last trip with Meg. Like tripping on acid. I couldn’t wait for afternoon, couldn’t wait to get back to my house, couldn’t wait to give Michelle Gilbert everything she wanted, and then…and then, bye bye Tucson.
At exit four in Nogales, I pulled off US 10 onto Mariposa Road and headed toward the truck border crossing into Mexico.
After that, everything happened so fast I have to tell it all at once.
11
Nogales is a fairly small city filled with huge trucks.
Goods came across the border from Mexico and headed directly into industrial parks to be transferred to U.S. trucks. Headed south, into Mexico, traffic at the border crossings was rarely a problem. Coming north from Sonora, trucks often backed up for miles, depending on how strict the U.S. Customs officials wanted to search cargoes. Even though it was barely past seven in the morning, a steady line of trucks trickled north.
Two hundred yards north of the border crossing, I braked as a dark green Chevy Tahoe jumped across four lanes and pulled directly in front of me. A large Tostaco delivery van came alongside me on the left, and about ten vehicles ahead of us I saw the Sky Harbor shuttle van, heard Meg rustling in the backseat, swinging from left window to right as we slowed down to a crawl. I looked over my shoulder, saw her flicking open her cell, punching in numbers and hitting the Send button.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
Fifty feet from the border crossing, traffic was diverted into three lanes past the U.S. Customs sheds. The Tahoe drifted to my right, dropped back. Slightly tinted windows. Inside, we could see six men in business suits and ties, sitting erect, two of them smiling at us.
Young boys rapped on my driver’s window, holding up rolls of toilet paper. Others appeared, selling boot-leg cassette tapes of Britney Spears and Eminem, food, sweet cakes, sugared tortillas.
Rolling over the speed humps, I headed slowly toward the Mexican Custom officials and at that moment they closed one of the lanes, forcing traffic to narrow into the two remaining lanes. Directly ahead, the inspection light flickered green for each car. A battered Dodge RAM pickup, loaded with hay bales, moved past the inspection light, and I suddenly realized we were directly behind the Sky Harbor shuttle van, the Tahoe close to our left, and the Tostaco delivery truck just behind us.
The inspection light abruptly flicked from green to red and a bell clanged. The four Customs officials stopped the Sky Harbor van, motioned for it to pull over.
“Jesus!” Meg shouted. “Watch out!”
Instead of pulling over, the van’s brake lights glowed briefly red and then it accelerated past the officials and stopped completely at exactly the same time a dark green GMC Expedition accelerated out of the northbound lanes, crashing through barricades and headed directly at us.
“What!” I said, confused. “What’s wrong?”
One of the officials whistled loudly at three soldiers standing idly over coffee. One started to unsling his M-16, the other two frozen, uncertain what to do.
I stared at the sign on the back of the shuttle van.
“It’s a hit,” Meg shouted, always one for overstatement.
“Come on,” I said. “What are you talking…a hit…what does that mean?”
Forgeus Airport Shuttle
Phoenix—Tucson—Nogales
1-800-103-4827
“That number’s a fake.”
“What number?”
“On the van.”
“The van? What—”
“The phone number, Laura.”
“—are you talking about?”
“It’s fake.”
“How do you know it’s fake?” I shouted.
“There are no area codes that start with one-zero.”
The Tostaco truck accelerated to smash into our back bumper and crumpled the entire rear end inward at least a foot. Kyle lurched sideways, ramming his head against the doorframe and knocking him immediately unconscious. The shotgun flew out of Meg’s hands, the barrel shattering the windshield. She jumped over the rear seatback, trying to open the security panel, but it was jammed shut.
Behind us, all six men poured out of the Expedition and began firing automatic pistols. The three soldiers fell quickly. The Customs officials watched in astonishment as the front doors of the shuttle van flew open and Mickey and Minnie Mouse jumped out and moved directly back toward us.
I hit the auto door lock button and released my seatbelt. Mickey came up alongside my door and I looked directly into the barrel of a TEC10 machine pistol. Mickey tapped the barrel against the window, motioning for me to roll it down. His left ear suddenly exploded, bits of flesh and blood spattering the window. He turned to the Customs officials, one of whom was down on one knee, both hands on a Beretta as he emptied the clip. Mickey clapped his free hand to the ear, howling with pain. Minnie turned sideways, firing on auto at a stream of soldiers coming from the northbound side of the inspection plaza.
“Get out!” Meg screamed.
She reached past me and unlocked all the doors.
“Run. Run!”
LynnMay started to open her door, but hadn’t unfastened her seatbelt. Meg was out and sprinting toward the fallen soldiers. Two men from the Expedition saw her and started shooting, but Meg dived behind one of the bodies and brought up his M-16. Two bullets slammed into Mickey’s chest, knocking him against my door. He grabbed at the handle and the door swung open, but another bullet shattered his right knee and he dropped like a stone to the pavement, swinging on the door handle as I slid past him. Bart Simpson stepped out of the Tostaco van, racking and reracking a shotgun slide, trying to free the jam. He angrily flung it aside and started to pull a handgun from underneath his white overalls. I lowered my shoulder and knocked him solidly, the handgun flying as he grunted. He tried to trip me as I sprinted past, but I skipped and hopped over his leg, got behind the truck, and ran hard for fifty feet.
“Laura!” I heard Meg scream.
I stopped to look back. Two men stood over her, one taking up the M-16 by the barrel and flinging it away. The second man had plastic quick-tie handcuffs and slapped them around Meg’s arms, pulling the cinch strap tight. He threw his TEC10 aside, put one hand into her thick black hair, the other on the handcuff strap, and brutally pulled her to her feet and started dragging her toward the Expedition.
Minnie Mouse looked back and forth, undecided what to do, just as LynnMay unfastened her seatbelt and jumped out. Without hesitation, Minnie quickly walked directly to her, put his pistol against her left temple, and fired twice. LynnMay’s body swayed against the car as she fell halfway back into the front seat.
Running for the Expedition, Mickey waved at the other men. They all stopped shooting, took out hand grenades, pulled the pins, and hurled them in all directions. One landed directly on top of the hay bales and exploded, strands of hay bouncing into the air like confetti.
And it was over.
I moved back to the Tahoe in a daze and eased Lynn May out of the front seat, gently lowered her to the pavement, but her body slumped sideways and we fell to the ground with her bloodied head in my lap. Around the plaza, six dead soldiers, three Customs officials.
“Laura!”
Meg screamed at me from thirty feet away, stumbling backward as the man pulled relentlessly on her hair, on the plastic handcuffs, forcing her along.
“Laura. Find me, promise you’ll come find me!”
Two bullets whapped near my ear. I ducked instinctively, thinking, What do I do, what do I say? The man stumbled and she lunged forward to get away, but he viciously yanked on the handcuffs, her face to me one last moment, neck muscles taut as she screamed for help before the man punched her in the stomach and jaw, knocking her unconscious. He dragged her off to the car and threw her inside.
“I promise,” I said, a pledge to myself, because Meg was gone.
laura
A pledge, a promise…
What did I do?
I pledge to…to…I made a promise to Meg for…what?
Grabbing a McDonald’s bag from one of the Customs guards, I dumped his french fries on the ground, ignored his protest, and turned the bag inside out so I could write this down, I have to remember this…pledge?…promise?
I am a passive person. I am a computer forensics analyst. I sit in dark rooms, I work databases, I provide information to clients, I do not actively work as a private investigator, like Rey Villaneuva. I do not go looking for people, looking for trouble, I do not go looking, I leave that to others.
