by J K Ellem
As Shaw looked in the rearview mirror, waiting to pull out of the driveway and back onto the highway, he smiled.
He could see the back of the old woman as she hurriedly waddled toward their room at the end of the motel, key in hand. She was in for a shock, and it wasn’t because there was no tip left behind. Soon the place would be swarming with cops.
He hit the gas and pulled out onto the highway then rapidly accelerated.
Ten minutes later Jessie finally spoke. “I’m sorry,” she said feebly, her voice breaking. “I didn’t know. I heard a knock on the door saying it was housekeeping, and I thought—”
“Forget it, I shouldn’t have gone. What’s important is that you’re okay.”
Jessie was still processing what had happened. The shooting, the violence, so extreme. She hadn’t seen anything like it before. She led a quiet life. She enjoyed her work and going out with her friends. She never really strayed far from her routine when she was at home. She only went to safe places. But everything around her now was unsafe. She had been plucked from normality and dropped into a world alien to her. The landscape, the people who lived in it, the risks, the encounters, everything. She had flown over it but now was ploughing through it, living and breathing it. She felt like she was in a foreign country, but it was her country. She had led an insular existence up until now, had never really experienced anything else. She felt a tinge of guilt as she stared out of the window, realizing her life had been a bubble, her bubble, carefully controlled and deliberately repetitive.
The continent was huge, and she felt so small. It was uncivilized out here on the highway, like the wild frontier. There were the same rules and laws but who was around to enforce them? She looked sideways at Shaw as he drove, his eyes focused on the road.
How could he be so calm after what had just happened? She felt safe around him, and felt distinctly unsafe when he was out of her sight, even for the briefest of moments while she had sat in the car alone waiting for him to return the room keys.
She hadn’t seen many police. It was different in the city, she felt safe there where there were always police around. But out on the wide open road, anything could happen.
The landscape slid past, beautiful and brutal all at once. Jessie looked up at the skies and slowly worked her eyes down from blue skies to the distant mountains and plateaus and eventually the flat brown plains of red rocks. It was a harsh environment with its own dangers and perils.
“You just need to be more careful Jessie. It’s a different world out here,” Shaw said as though reading her thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Truly.”
She was a city girl, not used to traveling like this. There were people who travelled the open roads looking for trouble, bad people, like the bikers they had run into back at the motel.
People vanished out here but what Shaw knew was people never really just vanished. Either they didn’t want to be found so they retreated into the wide open expanse of the backroads, highways, and small towns or something bad happened to them, usually involving less than hospitable people. There were even some who roamed across the countryside, a law unto themselves. Killers and murderers roaming free.
“Did you get the cell phone?” Shaw asked. Jessie pulled it from her pocket and held it up. The signal was strong but the battery was down to less than half. “Did you find a charging cable?” she asked.
“No,” Shaw replied. “Just the knife, the gun, and the phone. He had a wallet and some cash and a fake driver’s license. Everything I need is in that phone.”
“How are we going to charge it?”
“They are close.”
“Who are close?” Jessie asked.
“The people he was going to meet; the ones he had been texting on the phone while you drove. Think about it. Rasul carried nothing else with him, no backpack, no charging cable for his phone. Just a wallet, knife, gun, and cell phone. He wasn’t planning a long journey with you. Twenty-four hours at the max. He was going to rendezvous with the rest of his group, then they would all disappear together.”
Jessie looked at the cell phone’s uncluttered screen. Her own cell phone screen was a sea of apps, yet this phone just carried the basics.
“A big phone like that with a big bright screen would chew through the battery life,” Shaw said. “Did you disable the screen and password lock?”
Jessie nodded.
“Good. I’m going to drop you off at the next gas station that has a bus pickup point. You can catch a bus back to the city.”
“No way!” Jessie protested. “I told you they killed people I know, friends, innocent people.”
“This isn’t your fight, Jessie. You nearly got killed back there.”
“But you saved me,” she replied. She touched his arm. “No one has ever stepped in or done anything like that for me before.”
“And if I hadn’t?” Shaw replied. “What would have happened then? In that room? With the three men?”
Jessie shivered. She couldn’t bear thinking about what might have been.
Suddenly she powered down her window and held the phone outside, the wind buffeting her hand and arm, the phone held precariously between her fingers. “I’m coming with you. Otherwise the phone goes, then you’ll have no chance of finding these people.”
Shaw’s eyes darted back and forth between the road and the phone Jessie had dangling from her fingers outside the window. “Don’t drop it!”
Jessie smiled. “Together?”
Shaw let out a deep breath of exasperation. With Rasul dead, the phone was the only link he had to finding the others who were behind the plane bombing. Now he felt like he was being kidnapped and held for ransom.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Just bring the phone back in.”
Jessie smiled, enjoying his discomfort. “Okay what?”
“Okay, we do this together.”
Jessie pulled her hand back in and closed the window. “Good.” Jessie felt good about herself, her new found determination. She wanted to help, to do something meaningful. She was changing, adapting, and she felt a surge of confidence.
She placed the phone on the middle console and turned back to Shaw. “So you think I’m worth just sixty bucks? What you said back there? In the motel room?” She was just curious. Maybe it was a little more than just curious. There was something magnetic about him, and the violence he was capable of to protect her compounded the attraction a hundred fold. She couldn’t explain it, maybe it was in a woman’s chemistry or embedded deep in their DNA. But when a man stepped up and took control, stepped in to protect you from harm, it lit a slow-burning fuse in you, something deep and primal in your womanhood. Just thinking about it and looking at him made her feel special, wanted, needed, cared for. It was a powerful feeling, a feeling she couldn’t ignore.
“We’ll see just how much you are really worth,” Shaw replied. “But you’re not worth getting me killed over.”
Jessie smiled and settled into her seat, content at her victory over Shaw. He had a certain way about him that made all her fear and worry disappear, and she liked that a lot.
19
By noon the highway was a ripple of shimmering heat. Jessie scrolled through a series of text messages on the cell phone while Shaw continued driving south. She worked backwards through the list.
For the duration of the trip from Salt Lake City until they pulled into the gas station, there were twelve text messages sent back and forth between Rasul and an unknown recipient whose number and contact details were withheld. The first text message was sent by Rasul when he stepped out of the airport and was making his way across the parking lot looking for a likely victim to abduct. Jessie just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were no other text messages prior to that.
“That tells us a lot,” Shaw said, his eyes on the road.
“It tells us I’m an unlucky person, that’s what it tells us,” Jessie mumbled to herself.
“First,�
� Shaw replied, “it tells us the cell phone was given to Rasul as a means of communication after the event, to keep in contact as he left the airport. It means the others, those pulling the strings, were sitting safe and sound away from the airport.”
“So it’s a new phone, he has no other, like his own personal phone.”
“No, this cell was meant to be discarded after Rasul met up with the others.”
“Okay, what else?”
“Second, Rasul can’t drive or if he can he prefers not to. Why else would he kidnap you and force you to drive?”
Jessie thought for a moment. It made sense. Surely it would be easier for Rasul to drive to work each day, park in the staff parking lot like Jessie had, and get in his own car and drive away. “So he’s a foot soldier—like you said, unimportant.”
“Expendable,” Shaw said. “Small fish. So he lived close to the airport, on a bus link so he could get to and from work. Small apartment, living alone, small footprint. He was heavily reliant on others, a network. So they gave him some training, a false identity, then stuck him in an apartment and set him up in a new job at the airport.”
Jessie scrolled through the messages. The last text was sent by Rasul just before the gas station stop last night. There was no response from whoever Rasul was communicating with.
“So where are they? These people? His network?”
“Close, in this state, within a day or two driving distance.”
“Because he carried nothing, no bag, nothing, just the phone, a gun, and his knife.”
Shaw smiled. “Correct.”
Jessie told Shaw that the back and forth messages were deliberately short and almost in some sort of shorthand or code, revealing nothing about a location or meeting point.
Shaw had expected this given the incredible reach authorities like the NSA had in monitoring all cellular traffic. Rasul and his buddies had been extremely cautious not to divulge any detail in their texts that would draw unwanted attention.
An hour ago Shaw had instructed Jessie to send a short text: felt ill, stopped for the night. Back on the road. He hoped it would explain to the people on the other end why Rasul was off the air for so long. There was no guarantee they would fall for it. And now an hour later, there had been no response and this worried Shaw. They were flying blind, heading south, the same direction Jessie had driven last night. They had nothing better to go on. Rasul was going somewhere south, to a prearranged location, but Shaw had no idea where.
The cell phone battery was also slowly draining. The little battery symbol on the screen was down to ten percent and the charger Jessie had for her destroyed phone was incompatible. They had already stopped at two small gas stations hoping to find a charger. Both times Shaw had pulled up, and Jessie had dashed in to the shop, wearing Shaw’s baseball cap pulled low and a pair of dark glasses. Both times she emerged minutes later disappointed. The inventory at these small, family-owned gas stations was so old and outdated that most of the blister packs on the display were covered in dust.
Jessie’s heart sank as she watched the battery symbol drop down to five percent.
They were about to give up when in the distance a small town came into view. A cluster of low buildings and squat structures appeared on the horizon, the black ribbon of highway bisecting the outline, running through the middle like a vein carrying the lifeblood of money to the small community.
Shaw slowed the car.
On the left was a spread of low duplexes, dusty and faded. Next to those was a strip of boarded-up tenements, old stores that had stood for decades servicing the small community until progress and changing consumer habits passed them by. A once upon a time fruit store from an era when fruit was the fast food of the day. A convenience store before it had become inconvenient. The sagging carcass of a family gas station where a teenager at his first job would fill your car for you, clean your windshield, give you Green Stamps with your change, smile, and tip his cap as you drove off. The old gas pumps, solid and blemished with rust stood out in the front with their thick stout hoses, the large black and white dials frozen on the last gallon they pumped back when the price of gas was counted in cents not dollars and when every car they filled was American-made.
But that was long ago, before the big chain moved in and built the behemoth on the westbound side of the highway to capitalize on the day when the tide of traffic would turn west, towards Reno and Las Vegas.
“How’s the phone?” Shaw asked.
“Down to five percent. If it turns off I don’t have the unlock code to open it again.”
Shaw pulled into the huge truck stop. It looked like a mini-town. There was a large separate diner and store. Farther back past the six rows of gas pumps was a wide expanse of open ground for long-haul trucks to park. Several trucks of varying sizes were parked, their drivers inside the diner or asleep in the rear cab.
“Let’s go.”
“What about the CCTV cameras?”
From where they parked Shaw could see three cameras along the front of the store and three more on high pylons near the pumps. “Makes no difference,” Shaw replied. “They only record footage. No one really looks at it unless there is a robbery or a fuel theft. So they will keep recording and probably in four or five days they will automatically overwrite themselves.”
They both got out, no hat, no disguise, heads held high, acting normal like everyone else.
The store was huge and Jessie quickly found three displays full of chargers and phone accessories. “Thank God.” Jessie pulled off a blister pack and held it to the phone she had in her hand. “This is it.”
The phone beeped. “Shit.” Jessie stared at the screen. The battery symbol was flashing red. They hurried to the counter, paid, and ripped open the pack. The charging cable was the type that had both a USB and wall plug adaptor. Shaw found an unused charging station near the food displays, plugged the phone in, and it started to recharge. He waited for ten minutes until the battery symbol climbed back up to twenty percent. “Let’s get something to eat.” Shaw pulled out the cable.
They walked through a large arched passageway that connected the main retail section of the truck stop to the food area. Shaw walked past a newsstand, a bundle of newspapers stacked at the front, on the cover the blank face of Abasi Rasul staring back, almost like his eyes were following them as they walked past.
In the diner they found a window booth that had a charging station on the wall under the table. Jessie plugged the phone in and was relieved when the charging symbol appeared on the screen. She placed the cell phone on the table in front of her and opened the menu. “That was close.”
Shaw sat across from her, his attention on the nearest exits and the other patrons. Through the window he had a clear view of the entire plaza, the truck parking lot in the distance, the highway, and entrances and exits.
The waitress came over, poured coffee, and took their order. Shaw ordered steel cut oats and Jessie ordered eggs.
Shaw took the phone and started scrolling back through the text messages, looking for any possible clue as to a destination Rasul was heading toward. The mention of a town or address, anything. But as Shaw read each message it was obvious that Rasul and the others were very carefully not divulging specifics.
The food arrived and they began to eat. It was just after ten o’clock and the diner was only about a third full with the typical patrons who loitered in the overlap between late breakfast and early lunch. Shaw had deliberately chosen a booth closest the exit, thankful it also happened to have a charging station. There were a few single older men, tired looking and disheveled. Shaw took them for truck drivers, making a well-earned rest stop. He could see no police around. Nor did he seem to notice an older man sitting on the other side of the diner, his eyes every so often falling on Jessie.
20
Sam sat by himself, drinking coffee and eating breakfast. Despite the fact he had driven for eight hours straight, he was alert and awake. For the last fifteen minutes, hi
s gaze shifted between the stack of pancakes and fried chicken on his plate and the young African American woman who had walked in with a man and sat at a booth on the far side. The man had his back to Sam but he could clearly see the woman.
Beautiful, he thought as he watched her over the rim of his coffee cup. She definitely was not from around here, too good-looking, too refined. She had a natural beauty not found in these parts. Along this stretch of highway the women tended to be hard-faced drifters, junkies, or hookers hitching a ride to the next town or big city fleeing an abusive relationship. He hadn’t yet picked up someone from these parts and that had left him with an empty feeling inside.
Until he had seen her.
A waitress arrived, coffee pot in hand, and stood in front of him, momentarily blocking his view of the woman.
“Top-off?” Sally Monk smiled down at the man.
“Thanks, Sal.” Sam Pritchard wiped his mouth with a napkin and smiled back at Sally. “You’re too good for this place Sal, and you know it.”
Sally filled the cup then stood with her hand on hip. “Sam Pritchard, you’ve been coming here for how long now?”
Pritchard gave a grin, “Must be darn on three years.”
“Three years, and every time you say the same thing.”
“What can I say, Sally? You’re a good woman. Hardworking, kind-hearted, you deserve better.”
Sally shrugged, “I need every dollar I can get. I want my son to go to college.”
“How’s Freddy doing? He’s a good kid.”
Sally placed the coffee pot down on the table and took a moment. She felt a pang in her chest, like she always did whenever she had a spare moment in her hectic day to think about her son. “He’s a good kid, he just needs some guidance.” It was obvious Freddy was her world, an only child who had been through the wars and the tough times with her. There was always that special bond between mother and son, but what they had endured together made that bond ever so special. Sam could see it in her eyes that were glassy with tears. He could hear it in her voice. She choked up whenever the subject of her son was brought up.
