Ham
Page 18
Chapter Forty-Six
Mud lines Hector Lima’s fingernails. Peat moss clings to the sweat and hairs lining the lower half of his arms. Midday sunlight glistens from his wet forehead, the temperature already well into the eighties and threatening to climb higher.
Standing tall, he balls his hands into fists and presses them just behind his hips, leaning far back at the waist.
A few feet away, Bocco is on his knees. Pulling the black plastic pot from the root base of a shrub, he uses a knife to score the outside of it before jamming his fingers into the dark soil and giving it a shake. Once the roots have been relaxed, he drops it into the hole he has already dug, a pile of sandy soil sitting beside it.
Working in silence, the back of the gray T-shirt he wears is already stained with sweat.
Just like those of the other half-dozen or so men scattered around the shelter house, all busy tending the ground before them.
“Place looks wonderful,” says a forty-something woman with dark-brown skin and wavy hair pulled back into a ponytail. Standing no taller than five-five, she is dressed in jeans and a canvas shirt, a pair of gloves flopping from her back pocket.
She is carrying a plastic tray with enough plastic cups of water for each of the workers on it. Offering it up to Lima, she smiles, a flash of oversized teeth and bright red lipstick.
“Thank you,” Lima says. Snatching two, he hands one down to Bocco before taking a drink himself. Even without ice, it is just a degree or two above frigid, able to be felt as it travels the entire length of his throat and chest.
“Thank you,” Bocco echoes, lifting his cup to the woman as he pushes himself upright to stand beside Lima.
“No, thank you guys,” she replies. “We’d have never been able to do this on our own.”
The name of the woman is Anjelah Brandeis, acting pastor of the United Church of God. Located just three blocks from the building Lima and his crew now use as a base, it is a place that they all have been by no less than a thousand times in their lives.
Even if they’ve only been inside a couple of times before.
None of which were by choice.
Occupying the corner lot on an intersection of two of the larger thoroughfares in the area, the church has more than an acre of ground at its disposal. Outside of the main sanctuary and the small parking lot beside it, much of the land has sat unused for years.
Something Lima and the others first set about wanting to rectify with the construction of the shelter house a month before.
“We appreciate what you did,” Lima replies, taking a second drink. Beside him, Bocco nods in silence.
“We were glad to help,” Brandeis replies, a hint of embarrassment on her face. “You guys certainly didn’t have to build this place or come back and landscape it for us.”
When Luis was killed ten months before, it had been Brandeis and the church that had offered to help. They had allowed the funeral to be held there, had made arrangements for his body to be buried at the associated cemetery a block away.
Brandeis herself had even performed the service, doing so free of charge.
An act that had first planted the seeds for everything Lima was now doing.
“A small payment for what you did for us,” Lima replies.
“With much appreciation,” Bocco adds.
Nearby, Dwayne looks up from the plant he is wrestling into position and nods, sweat streaming down his face.
Appearing like she might say something, Brandeis lets it go with a grunt. Returning to her task, she offers water to Dwayne before slowly working her way around the group.
Fishing a rag from the waistband of his shorts, Lima passes it over his face, mopping his skin dry. He watches as Brandeis continues doling out the water, each of the men accepting with thanks.
Moments like this are what he envisioned when he first put this into action. When he was finally able to raise his head after what happened to Luis, seeing past the pain and anger he felt.
It was why he was now pushing so hard on Spiers, both for the financial backing it provided and for the fact that it was actually serving to clean up the areas that could eventually infect theirs.
Even more so why he wouldn’t let up, the effects he was hoping to have just starting to become visible.
“He would have liked this place,” Lima whispers, seeing the drab sandy lot starting to take form around them.
Bocco grunts, nodding once in agreement. “I think he would have just liked seeing us all out here together like this. Didn’t matter what we were doing.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Turning out of Murph’s, I don’t bother heading back to the farm. I don’t even bother turning south, instead jogging north away from the place before taking the first road I can to the west. A simple two-lane state route, I let it wrap us away from Ketchum, heading toward the enormous expanse of open space that stretches all the way to Boise.
Or, with the exception of my spread in Mexico, pretty much the most desolate stretch of land in all of North America.
My body’s every physiological system is redlined, maxed out on a cocktail of anger and apprehension and adrenaline. Jerking my gaze between the two side mirrors and the rearview mounted above, I check everything fanatically for more than ten minutes, the sole sounds the road beneath us and my loud breathing.
One after another, I shove breaths in and out through my nose, running the last half hour through my head.
There was no way those men just happened to find their way to Idaho, not all the way from Los Angeles and damned sure not in just over a day. Something had led them here, the list of possibilities preciously thin.
The first — and most obvious — was that the car was tagged. Maybe it had a tracking device somewhere in the undercarriage transmitting our location.
The problem with that would mean it had to have come from Mikey on the Forester that he had personally driven out to Victorville, well after the encounter at The Sundowner.
Like I’ve said before, I don’t consider the man a friend, but his position as an operator is unassailable. Never could I see him selling out someone in his employ, knowing it would be putting a target on his own back and submarine his livelihood within weeks.
Still, I can’t dismiss it out of hand. The possibilities that Spiers has something on him or that he has a bigger reason to play with them than fear me do exist.
However remote.
The second choice would be that Spiers somehow knows about this place. That he saw a phone record or a mailing address or heard Amy talking about it one day and was able to piece it together.
Much like the first one, though, the holes with that theory are too big to ignore. For the men to have showed up at Murph’s would mean they had followed us there, something that simply wasn’t possible. Not with me driving, and not on those narrow back roads.
The man I took down and the sedan he was in were just too glaringly obvious.
“You good?” I ask, flicking my gaze over to Glenda, the first words since driving away.
“All good,” Glenda replies, glancing my way.
Whether Amber even knows exactly what just happened, how close things came, I can’t be sure. Right now, I don’t really want to drag her into the conversation and open the floor to an interminable bunch of questions, instead leaving Glenda to answer for the both of them.
“You see the partner?” I ask.
Nodding once, Glenda says, “Light-skinned black man, hair cropped short. Tall, calisthenics build. Clothes that look how LA thinks Idaho dresses.”
With the exception of the man’s race, it sounds like a close approximation of the one I put down.
“Sheepdog,” Glenda adds, leaving it at that.
The tag means that he was the one in charge of herding them toward the other. That’s why I didn’t see him. The guy probably looped in behind and worked to funnel them forward, he and his partner meeting in the middle.
“Give chase?” I ask.
Later, if she wants to know, I’ll be glad to tell her what happened. I imagine she might even garner a bit of enjoyment from hearing about the crunch of the man’s knee as it cratered in on itself.
Not in front of the kid, though, and definitely not with more pressing matters to consider.
“Never even looked my way,” I say, both of us speaking in half sentences, allowing mutual understanding and situational inference to fill in the rest.
Nodding once, Glenda extends a hand before her. Pointing with her middle and index fingers, she motions to the right, saying, “There’s a turnoff up here in a mile or so. Little lake with a picnic area beside it.”
Accepting the information in silence, I lean on the gas, goosing it slightly. Keeping our speed up, I go until I see what she was alluding to and make the turn.
After leaving the main road, the view narrows considerably. Tall pine trees line either side, like a cramped canyon towering over the path. Rising more than twenty feet above, they have the optical illusion of bowing inward, blocking much of the sky from view.
Darkness settles in around us, the temperature dropping considerably.
Flipping on the headlights, I follow the single-track lane more than a quarter mile before the woods open up. To our left, they give way to a mountain lake, the water wrapping around into the distance. In front of it sits a small awning with a pair of picnic tables and aging charcoal grill pits.
All the makings of an idyllic family Sunday on the water.
Or a place for the three of us to sit and figure out what the hell just happened.
Easing off the side of the lane, I pull onto a turnout comprised of mud and rock, the sound of the tires biting into it assaulting our ears. Coming to a stop, I slam the gear shift into park and snatch up my cell phone from the middle console, barely killing the ignition before stepping out.
“Give me five. I have to make a call.”
Leaving it at that, I don’t bother waiting for a response. Slamming the door shut behind me, I stride toward the edge of the water, knowing the opening in the tree canopy will be my best shot at getting reception.
Walking fast, I call the phone to life and hit the sole number in the log, hearing it ring a handful of times before being snatched up.
“Ham.”
I don’t even have the patience to utter his name in reply. “Is there any way the vehicle you gave me is tagged?”
Shoved out through gritted teeth, the words aren’t an accusation, but they aren’t far south of it.
A moment of silence is his immediate response, no doubt a mix of contemplating a response and letting me know he doesn’t appreciate the insinuation.
“You’ve got company.”
“Big time.”
“Do you still have the bag I gave you?”
Not once does his voice rise above conversational in volume, though the tone is unmistakable.
As I said, light until it’s time to go dark.
“It’s at the house,” I reply. “Why?”
“There’s a wand in it,” he says, not needing to clarify what he’s referring to. “The truck was clean when we made the drop. The wand will tell if you’ve been compromised since.”
Squeezing the phone intermittently, I lift my gaze to the water, staring out over the surface. As much as I’d known Mikey wasn’t the source even before calling, a small part of me had kind of wanted him to be.
Not because I relished the thought of going up against him later but because it would at least tell me how the hell those two cops found us so fast.
His supplying me with a wand tells me there’s zero chance of that. If he was trying to follow me, he wouldn’t give me a piece of technology designed to search for bugs.
Yet another item my dumb ass left back at the house, casting aside common sense in favor of making some extra space for chicken feed.
“You good?” he asks, drawing my focus from the mirror-calm water and the sun dancing off its surface.
“Straight,” I reply, mind already working to the next thing in order.
There had to be some way these guys had been on us. They hadn’t tracked the SUV and they hadn’t gotten anything from me. Amy and Amber had both left their bags sitting back at The Sundowner when they ran out of there.
I’d checked all of their clothes myself when I had hours to kill at Shag’s.
“Mikey, I’ve been out of the game a while,” I concede. “If someone was looking to do some tracking these days, how else would they go about it?”
“Ham,” he replies, “you haven’t been out for a while. You’ve been out for three years. And you know as well as I do, when it comes to this kind of shit, that’s a lifetime.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
The clothes Amber was wearing in the hotel room and on the drive up have been discarded. Right now they are probably already washed and folded, waiting on the dresser beside the bed in the bunkhouse she spent last night on.
Depending on which of the girls is in charge of laundry this week and how they feel about Amber, that may be as far as it went.
There is also the distinct possibility that there was an accident involving bleach, or Icy Hot, or maybe even whatever large insects could be procured on a moment’s notice.
Despite every girl that makes her way to Glenda’s having trauma of some sort in her background, there is no way to suddenly make them all get along. Human nature is for some people to accept their fate and for others to lash out, needing to blame or transfer their pain onto others.
None worse than teenage girls, a tradition going back even to when I still called the place home.
Or, rather, a mistake that they only had the misfortune of making once.
Out of her own clothes, Amber is dressed in jeans and a tank top. An unbuttoned flannel hangs over it, all of the colors faded, the clothes likely coming from the community pile, washed too many times to count over the years.
An ensemble that in Los Angeles would go for over two hundred dollars, such things labeled as trendy or chic or vintage.
Right now, all it means to me is that there is no way anything she was wearing at The Sundowner was marked with a tracker. If so, the men at Murph’s would have gone to the farm and would currently be breaching an empty bunkhouse.
Working my way through it, I can’t help but hear the last thing Mikey told me before I hung up. Exactly no part of me even wants to consider what he said, though with each new piece I examine and discard, the odds of the truth being anything else narrows.
Seated on the top of one of the picnic tables beneath the shingled awning, Amber’s feet rest on the bench seat below. Leaning forward, her elbows are on her knees, fingers laced. Eyes wide, she glances between Glenda and I, trying to decipher the drawn looks on our faces.
“What happened back there?” she eventually asks.
“What did you see happen?” Glenda counters.
Unlocking her fingers, Amber lifts her palms toward the sky before returning them to place. “Nothing. We spent all that time lugging those bags, then we just ran off and left them there.”
Casting her gaze to me, I can tell there is much more she wants to say. I have no way of knowing if she saw what I did to the man or if the glance is merely based on my stare and posture, the anger I feel still simmering just beneath the surface.
Hiding it has never been what one might call a strong suit.
“Amber, I want you to think back to the hotel room the other day,” I say, jumping right in. With Mikey’s words in the front of my mind and the fact that we left Amy alone with a bunch of kids at the ranch not far behind it, I don’t have it in me to mince words right now.
And it’s not like there’s any way to sugarcoat what is likely about to happen.
“Did your stepdad or the man in the bathroom spray you with anything?”
A trench cleaves through the space b
etween her brows, confusion rising to the fore. “Spray me with anything? You mean like a hose?”
“No,” I say, casting a glance over to Glenda, seeing the same confusion on her face. “Something much smaller than that.”
Holding up my hands, I place one atop the other, no more than four or five inches separating them. “Like a bottle about this size? One you might use in the kitchen or for putting water on your hair.”
The cleft along the bridge of her nose remains as she thinks on it, trying to remember. “Definitely not him,” she says, the disdain she has for her stepfather palpable. “He never got close enough.”
“What about the other guy? While you were in the bathroom maybe?”
“Maybe,” she replies, raising one hand and touching it to the back of her neck. “I don’t remember seeing anything, but I remember something cool hitting me back here, like mist or something.”
Flicking a glance to Glenda, I loop out to the side. Bending at the waist, I lean out to the side, checking the spot where she is pointing.
Much like Mikey said, there is nothing visible on the surface, no more than pale skin and a few stray wisps of blond hair.
“How big would say you it was?”
“Big?” she asks, turning to look at me, obscuring the spot from view. “Not very. Maybe like a quarter or so?”
Not very would be a dime. A quarter is gigantic, much worse than I was hoping for.
“Did it run or drip at all?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” Amber replies, raising her shoulders in a shrug. “But I don’t really remember. It’s been a long time, and I wasn’t really paying attention.”
Nodding, I retreat back a step.
She’s right. The fact that she remembers anything at all is a blessing, likely the difference between she and her mother surviving or not. At her age, and under the circumstances, I have no right to ask for anything more.
“Give us just a second, okay?” I say. Turning back to Glenda, I jut my chin toward the water’s edge, walking that direction without looking back, my thumbs hooked into the rear pockets of my jeans.