“But Marty,” Debbie said, stating the obvious. “How are you going to get the Hummer off the base? The gates are all locked and the road is blocked by abandoned cars.”
Marty smiled.
“Well, you’re half right. There are a bunch of abandoned cars out there. That’s why I’m not taking the Hummer. I’m walking. Mary gave me an address and drew me a map. Her cousin’s place is only a mile and half, maybe two miles away. I can be back before sunset.
“As for the gate being shut and locked, I’ve been watching it.
“This is the first time it’s been open in days. See for yourself.”
Debbie walked to the open window.
He was right.
From the window she could see the main gate, half a mile or so in the distance.
Though still barricaded by cars, the chain link gate was indeed open, a couple of security policemen milling about.
“This may be my only chance to get out of here,” Marty said. “They may decide to shut it again tomorrow. Who knows when it will open again?”
He finished zipping and buttoning his parka and stood up, saying “It’ll be nice getting out of here and into the fresh air, even as cold as it is out there. I was getting cabin fever in here.
“Wish me luck!”
And with that he was out the door and heading for the stairwell.
There’s nothing worse than setting off on a mission and thinking you’ve planned for everything. That you’ve done your research and anticipated any problems and you're ready for any obstacles which might stand in your way.
People who do so are frequently hit broadside by something they never expected.
It turned out that Marty was in the terrible position of, as the old saying goes, not knowing what he did not know.
He did not know, for example, that the main gate was still closed.
Yes, it didn’t appear that way; since it was currently standing wide open.
But it was still officially closed, meaning that after the security policemen finished their task at hand it would be padlocked again.
Another thing he did not know was that a base civil engineering employee fell off a ladder just a couple of hours before.
He fell onto a piece of equipment which caused him to start bleeding internally.
Marty didn’t know that the siren he heard wailing an hour before was the ambulance bringing the man to the emergency room, or that he was in surgery three floors beneath him.
Marty didn’t know… couldn’t have known… that the patient just happened to have type AB-negative blood.
Or that AB-negative is the most rare of blood types, and that only one in every two hundred people have the type.
Wilford Hall had none of the rare blood in their emergency blood bank.
St. Mary’s Hospital in San Antonio happened to have some.
It was on its way by ambulance.
Marty had no way of knowing, but the security policemen had been ordered to open the gate, but just long enough to take the blood from the ambulance crew and to rush it to Wilford Hall’s emergency surgical clinic, where it would be used to save a man’s life.
Now, if the weather conditions had been different, Marty never would have made it.
If the roads were dry and free of ice, the ambulance would have been there and gone already.
But the roads were treacherous.
And Interstate 37, the most direct route out of the downtown area, was blocked by a jack-knifed semi.
And as luck would have it State Highway 90, which connected I-37 to JB Lackland, was blocked by another accident.
It was one of those situations where everything which could go wrong did go wrong.
Marty didn’t know any of that. But all those things converging at the same time gave him ample time to make good his escape.
-10-
As it happened, Marty and the ambulance from St. Mary’s arrived at the gate at almost exactly the same time.
Marty had to skate his way down icy roads and slog through heavy snow to get there.
The ambulance had to slip and slide on its own slippery roads and take several detours, but made it as well.
The first two lanes of traffic were blocked with old cars, their bumpers kissing front and rear.
The ambulance had to park in the third lane, its siren off but lights still flashing.
An EMT climbed over the abandoned cars carrying a small container emblazoned with a bio-hazard label.
He handed the container to one of the security policemen, apologizing for taking so long to get there.
The airman thanked him and turned around with his partner, just in time to see Marty scurry through the base gate and jog north along the shoulder of Military Drive.
His partner’s first inclination was to chase him, but he resisted the urge.
If the man had committed a crime on a federal installation, by default it would have been a federal offense. The policeman would have legal authority to pursue him, even though he’d have to leave the base boundaries to do it. It was a longstanding rule of law honored by cities which host military bases.
But there was no indication the man they saw was a criminal. They’d gotten no calls about robberies or shootings or any other type of crime.
It appeared to be just a man who’d tired of being on base and who wanted to leave.
And that in itself was no crime.
So instead of chasing Marty down and apprehending him, they let him go but yelled after him.
“Hey,” the staff sergeant yelled. “”We’re getting ready to lock the gate. You won’t be able to get back in!”
Their call elicited no response at all from Marty, who continued to jog up the shoulder and widen the gap between them by the second.
One policeman looked at the other, who just shrugged.
They had better things to do than cater to a man who wanted off the base and wouldn’t heed their warnings.
Like deliver life-saving blood to the base hospital, for example.
They secured the gate, jumped in their patrol car, and went off with siren blaring toward Wilford Hall Medical Center.
Now, Marty was a reasonable individual and a law-abiding citizen.
Under normal circumstances he’d never have ignored an officer of the law calling for him to stop.
But these weren’t normal circumstances.
Marty had the fur-lined hood of his parka pulled up and covering his head.
Rabbit fur provides outstanding insulation, both against the cold… and with sound as well.
Add to that the stiff icy breeze coming out of the east on that particular day, and doing an excellent job of carrying the policeman’s warning away from Marty.
Last of all, Marty was in his late forties now.
His hearing just wasn’t what it used to be.
It was true that Marty was a stubborn old cuss.
And true that he was intensely proud of his ability to complete a mission for a friend.
If he had heard the policeman’s warning that the gate was about to be locked behind him, there was a better than even chance he’d keep running.
He might well see it that he owed more to his friend Mary Hightower than he did a random cop.
Maybe.
But he never had a chance to weigh his choices.
Never had a chance to evaluate whether to keep moving or to go back.
Because he never heard the warning.
It was what it was.
The policemen left the gate and continued upon their mission.
Marty left the same gate and continued on his own.
And Debbie, watching from the same window Marty had peered through twenty minutes earlier, said, “Oh my. I hope he can find a way back in.”
-11-
Marty, having no clue the sentries yelled to get his attention, and having no clue the gate closed behind him, went on his merry way.
He was blissfully unaware that when he returned a few hours
later he’d be locked out, quite literally out in the cold.
As he trudged along the snow started falling again.
His mind went back to the days when he actually enjoyed the stuff.
When he was a kid he’d sit in the back of the classroom, trying his best not to doze off while the teacher explained what algebra was and what it was used for.
Algebra always made his head hurt.
He’d turn his attention to the windows and watch the snow falling outside, longing to be out in it.
Sometimes, when the snow fell in the morning, he’d feign illness and profess to have a headache, or a stomach ache, or mysterious dizziness.
He found out a secret that school kids aren’t supposed to know: the real reason schools take roll call in the morning.
Someone told him the only reason schools call morning roll is because they get federal funding for every little bottom sitting in their desks each morning. School districts need such funding to operate. And when a little bottom is missing they get a little less money that day.
“They don’t really care if you’re there or not,” Marty was told by a friend several years older, and who by little kid standards must know everything. “They just want to get paid for you being there.”
That may have been true. Or maybe it wasn’t.
Whether it was true or not, Marty found that it was ridiculously easy to get sent home after they called the roll each morning.
In his fourth grade year he went home early no less than fourteen times.
He had his method down to a science.
First he raised his hand and made Miss Holland roll her eyes.
She always rolled her eyes when Marty raised his hand.
“Yes, Martin?”
Marty always hated it when she called him Martin.
“Miss Holland, I don’t feel good. Can I go see the nurse?”
“What’s the matter now?”
He paused long enough to consider which ailment might seem more plausible.
If it was after lunch and he’d already eaten the disgusting green gunk the cafeteria served, a stomach ache was very believable.
If it was winter and cold outside, flu symptoms were more appropriate.
If Miss Holland was in the middle of an algebra lesson, a terrible headache was certainly the ailment of the day.
Marty was convinced Miss Holland hated his guts.
Mrs. Tatum, on the other hand, liked him just fine.
Mrs. Tatum was the school nurse. She never rolled her eyes at him when he walked into her office.
She merely asked what was bothering him on that particular day. She listened to his complaint, took his blood pressure and temperature, and said, “Hmmm… you don’t seem sick. Are you sure?”
“Yes ma’am. Definitely.”
She was prohibited from distributing medication by the school district, so her standard treatment protocol was to call a parent and have the student picked up, with or without a recommendation the student see a doctor.
Marty was always able to talk her into just releasing him.
“My parents both work, and they really can’t afford to take off to come and get me,” he’d plead. “And I live only four blocks from the school. It’s close enough to walk.”
Their conversation from that point was always the same.
“Are you sure you can walk that far in your condition?”
“Oh, yes ma’am. For sure.”
“Will you promise me you’ll go straight home, and stay in bed until your parents get home?”
“Oh, yes ma’am. For sure.”
“All right, then. You’d better not break your promise.”
“No, ma’am. I won’t.”
But he always did.
Oh, he was smart enough not to make it obvious. He’d wait until he was far enough away from the school not to be spotted.
Otherwise jealous classmates would rat him out.
“Mr. Johnson, Marty’s out there playing in the snow.”
No, Marty always went home before playing in the snow. There he’d typically build a mountain of snowballs, which he’d use to clobber his friends when they walked home from school at the end of the day.
He never went upstairs and crawled into bed, as he promised Mrs. Tatum. These days, as a grown man, he prided himself on keeping all his promises.
Back then, though, as a little kid, he just didn’t see the need.
It was well over forty years since those days he talked his way out of school, and he could think of at least two indisputable truths.
The first was that the snow he once loved was now a disgusting thing. It was pure evil and he hated it with as much hate as anyone has ever hated anything, in the long history of hatred.
The second thing was that he was right when he told Miss Holland, way back then, that algebra was dumb and was something he’d never use.
For in all the years since he’d graduated from high school, no one had ever asked Marty to solve an algebraic equation.
Not even once.
-12-
The term “DOC” means different things to different people.
For many people it’s a term of endearment, or at least a means to address, a favorite doctor. Most doctors will say it’s the most common form of greeting used by their patients.
For someone who’s done time in the prison system it’s not so endearing, for it’s an acronym for “Department of Corrections.”
For those still doing time, there’s a very good chance such letters adorn the brightly colored jumpsuit they’re wearing at this very moment.
For junkies, “DOC” means drug of choice. It’s the very first question any time they’re pulled over by the cops, any time they’re booked into jail, any time they’re sent to the hospital for an overdose.
“What’s your DOC, man? What did you take?”
The question is important, for it determines the way a junkie is handled, and the type of medical treatment he’s given.
Someone addicted to ecstasy, for example, is more likely to be calm and compliant. “Mellowed out,” to use an old drug slang term.
Another person who uses spice (or synthetic marijuana) might not be treated with kid gloves. He might be fitted with heavy constraints. For he’s much more likely to get violent and lash out at the officers trying to arrest him or the medics trying to treat him.
Every junkie has a DOC. If they can’t get it they’ll try anything else to get them high, to ease their pain. But they all have a drug of choice. Something they prefer over all other poisons.
Johnny Connolly’s DOC was heroin. The dirty brown powder was better than gold dust, more valuable than any jewel. He loved it more than he’d ever loved anyone or anything in his entire life.
As for his girlfriend Tina, her preferred method of poisoning her body and sending herself on a slow path to death was crystal methamphetamine.
Ice. Speed. White misery.
One could tell how popular street drugs were by the number of nicknames they had.
Johnny was living on borrowed time. By all rights he should have been killed a long time before. He was only alive because he was the luckiest son of a gun ever to walk the dirt of west Texas.
Johnny was the low-life dirt bag who dealt drugs in Lubbock, Texas on the night the drug wars came to town.
One Mexican cartel took revenge on another for reasons only cartel members knew. When the final shot was fired and the smoke cleared three men lay dead, riddled with holes.
Johnny flattened himself in the weeds, wishing he were somewhere else. Anywhere else. Anywhere where pieces of lead weren’t flying in all directions.
Somehow, his body didn’t catch any of the bullets.
That was lucky enough in itself.
But just by being there he committed a cardinal sin.
For he was a witness to a cartel murder.
Witnesses to cartel murders have very short life expectancies.
To make matters worse, Johnn
y was an opportunist extraordinaire. He couldn’t help himself. He’d always been that way.
He saw the chance for the “big score” that most people dream about but seldom encounter.
That fateful evening started when he shoved a fat fistful of fifty and hundred dollar bills into a beer can and dropped it in a vacant lot on the bad side of town.
It ended when he walked into the abandoned house he shared with Tina and tossed three backpacks in front of her.
She was unimpressed.
She’d just shot up a syringe full of crushed crystal meth mixed with water and filtered through a piece of cotton.
She was feeling no pain and was in a zombie-like state. A herd of stampeding cattle rushing through the house would elicit the same response she gave Johnny…
“Whassup?”
With glazed eyes she looked at the backpacks, trying to make sense of them.
After a few seconds they finally seemed to register.
At least that they were there.
She still had no clue what they contained, or that it meant their lives had just changed dramatically.
She coughed mightily, for the drug dried her throat and left her mouth parched, making it difficult to speak.
“Where did those come from?”
He had no answer for her.
Just a statement.
“We’ve got to hide this crap.”
-13-
Under normal circumstances Johnny would have had a huge target upon his back by witnessing a team of cartel thugs ambushing a competitor’s soldiers.
Stealing dope from the cartel went ten steps further.
No one stole from the cartel and expected to live.
That’s why few people ever summoned up the courage to try.
Now it was true that Johnny wasn’t the sharpest marble in the bag. He wasn’t exactly known for his thinking, nor his resistance to temptation.
But even he should have known better than to steal from the cartel.
Yet he did anyway.
By the time he got back to the abandoned house, by the time he burst in and tossed the backpacks in front of Tina, he knew he’d screwed up.
He knew he’d be dead within days.
The Blockade Page 4