by Jack Hardin
Peter looked back on Carl with such an unnatural passivity that the bigger man gave a frightening pause.
“Yeah—yeah, sure...I had better go.” He dug his keys out of his pocket. “You won’t need me for anything again, will you?”
“I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing each other again, Carl.”
“Okay.” Carl nodded and seemed unsure about turning his back on Peter while walking back to the car. But he did it anyway, trying to steal a casual look back over his shoulder that didn’t really come off as casual at all; more like a wary “you’re not going to get the sneak in on me, are you?” kind of glance. But he made it safely back into the driver’s seat and quickly started up the car. He circled back onto the road and, with a final glance, drove away.
Peter watched the car disappear around a curve in the treeline, listened to the car’s engine as it groaned a little harder across the potholes before it reached the main road and finally faded away altogether. All there was to hear now was the wind whispering high up in the pines.
He sighed happily, picked up the box of C-4, and headed back toward the barn.
The Nissan’s struts groaned across the potholes that punctuated the neglected dirt road. Carl white-knuckled the steering wheel as the front end of the car dipped into another rut and popped out again only after he fed the engine more gas. He started to wonder if there was actually a spare tire in the back. He wasn’t sure that there was, and way out here was about the last place he would want to be stranded without one. He finally reached the main asphalt road again. After checking in both directions, he turned south, allowing himself one more look down the dirt road to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
This was the second time he had met that Cody guy and the second time he got the willies doing it. Carl had spent three years in prison, three years living with the offscouring of humanity—murderers, drug dealers, rapists, abusers, and con artists, the latter of which had made great sport of swindling nursing-homebound retirees out of their hard-earned money. He had seen his fair share of bad dudes. In fact, he fancied himself to be among their ranks. But Cody—he seemed to be in a league all his own. There was something frosty and eerie about him, almost like a snake that had recently shed its skin or a wolf that had relinquished his disguise. In a way it made sense. The guy had been an elementary school math teacher and then decided the thing to do would be to set off a bomb on a public bus. It took a special kind of person to do something like that—special and probably a little perverse. The reality that Carl had been complicit by providing Cody with the C-4 hardly entered his mind. Still, he creeped Carl out. And just what the hell did that mean?—“Before I change my mind.” Carl didn’t really know, but he thought he might have a faint idea. A frigid shiver ran across his back, and he pressed the gas pedal a little harder, checking his rearview again for good measure.
Ten minutes later, he was passing through a small town and feeling a little better about the whole thing, glad to be done with Cody Weiland and good riddance to whatever he had planned. His nerves were just about all frayed at the ends, and he needed to chill. Carl worked his fingers into the inside pocket of his denim jacket and pulled out a baggie of good ol’ Oregonian grass. He took a quick look at the contents and growled to himself. He was out of joints. The baggie had a few slips of roll paper and plenty enough grass for several joints. But that meant he was going to have to pull over and roll one. He was in the middle of nowhere again and was about to move over to the shoulder when he navigated a bend in the road and there, off on the shoulder, was a cop, just waiting for some unsuspecting speedster like Carl to blaze on by.
Cody had already put Carl on edge, but seeing the cop car while he was clutching a baggie of pot and possibly speeding really did him in. He dropped the baggie in his lap and reached for the steering wheel so he could grip it with both hands like a good, traffic-obeying citizen, but in so doing he scattered the illegal substance all over his lap, his seat, and the dash. The cop car got off the blocks like an Olympic dasher and was nearly bumper to bumper with him in twenty seconds.
Carl thought he might throw up.
And that was when a pickup truck whizzed by—just a blue parallaxing streak in Carl’s periphery—and the cop car suddenly fell behind and whipped a U-turn right there in the center of the road. Carl watched with growing relief as the cruiser grew smaller in his rearview and finally disappeared around the bend.
His heart was beating hard in his throat now, and he figured this was the luckiest break he’d had since the time he beat up that hooker in Jacksonville. He had been on the street corner, working her over, when a police cruiser happened to be driving by. Its rambler siren sounded, and a crazed Carl had glanced over his shoulder to see two cops exiting their vehicle and running toward him. Carl bolted off the street corner and down an alley, but a sudden flurry of bullets stopped the cops in their tracks. Carl never did find out what that was all about and had since decided that he had never run so fast in his life and never wanted to again. He was pretty sure that the user manual for an out of shape man like himself didn’t recommend that he move faster than three miles an hour. And two was better.
Now, he double-checked his speed and did his best to slowly refill the baggie, alternating his eyes between the asphalt ahead and the scattered pieces of dried grass strewn about the car. He wanted a smoke even more now, but the warning flashers in the back of his mind told him he’d better wait.
So he did, and an hour later he was rumbling down another, albeit much smoother, dirt road, passing up the occasional mobile home or old country house. He checked the maps app on his phone and took the next left, finally arriving at an overgrown lot where a mobile home was set back, nearly hidden among a stand of pines and oaks. He turned the car onto the overgrown driveway, and the grass brushed the car’s undercarriage all the way to the front steps. Carl turned off the car and stepped out into a thicket of grass and weeds that came up past his waist.
The place belonged to a friend who was still in the slammer, who told Carl he was free to use it anytime, and now that Carl was down this way, he figured it was better than spending money he didn’t have on a hotel he didn’t want to stay in.
He got to the top of the steps and located the spare key under a heavy ashtray on the railing. After opening the door and stepping inside, he was hit with a hot, steamy blast of what smelled like a horribly unsavory combination of rancid meat and spoiled dairy. His stomach flipped, and Carl felt a bilious surge of hot liquid hit the back of his throat. He quickly located a blanket on the couch and wrapped his face in it, leaving just enough space for his eyes to see. He found the light switch and headed toward the most obvious culprit, and what Carl found inside the refrigerator was the closest thing he had ever witnessed to an alien species.
A thick mound of green fuzz was heaped up, and a bright pink spot stared up at him like a wounded eye. A dark pool of (algae?) sat on the bottom with little white colonies of mold dressing the surface. A full gallon of milk—or what had been a full gallon of milk—sat on a shelf inside the door, and he could see a dark substance shadowed inside the opaque jug. Carl slammed the door shut and cursed. He took a peek behind it. The damn refrigerator was unplugged. There was no way he could stay here with the place smelling like Gehenna. And he sure as hell didn’t come all the way out here just to play janitor. Nope, the way he saw it, there was only one way to solve this.
With the blanket still around his face, Carl set his hands on either side of the refrigerator and worked it away from the counter. Then he tilted it and walked backward. The refrigerator's feet scraped two long gashes into the linoleum as though it knew what was coming and was holding on for dear life. Reaching the back door, Carl set the fridge down, opened the door, grabbed it again, and worked it through the doorway and onto the tiny back deck. Then, with a final heave, he sent it over the lip of the deck and into the yard where it was nearly swallowed up by the untamed jungle.
That done, he went back inside, returned the blanket to t
he couch, and plopped down. He rolled a joint and felt the jitters exit stage left as he smoked it all the way down. Then he fell asleep.
Carl woke three hours later. It was late afternoon and he was hungry, so he grabbed his keys and headed out, leaving the front door open so the place hopefully didn’t still smell like a heated mortuary when he got back. He checked his phone for restaurants and then suddenly realized exactly where he was. An old friend lived less than an hour away and, he decided, it would nearly be a crime not to stop by and say hello.
He took his time getting there, paying close attention to the posted speed limits and using his blinker at every turn. The cops could just stay away. As he drew closer to his destination, things started looking familiar, and fond memories danced in his head. Arriving, he pulled into the driveway next to a red Ford Explorer. He got out, stretched again, and cracked his knuckles. Another hankering for a Bud Light Lime rolled through him. Those things, they just hit the spot. Every time. He had passed a few bars on the way in. He’d have to stop at one on his way back out.
There were no steps leading up to the front door, just a sidewalk that took you right to the flat porch. Carl rapped on the wood-framed screen door and waited. Then he decided it might make for a better reacquaintance if he didn’t have to look through the screen. So he pulled it back, and the spring gave an old familiar groan. The front door opened a moment later, and he smiled when he saw her surprised, fearful expression. He threw her a wink, and his words came out in a mocking, derisive tone.
“Katie...hey. What’s happenin’?” His chin lifted as he looked past her dismayed expression and scanned the inside of the house, as though looking for someone specific. “How’s my daughter? How’s Chloe?”
Chapter Sixteen
Katie O’Conner stood at her threshold with a hospitable smile quickly dissolving before the one person on the planet she hoped she would never see again. Carl’s hair was thick and wild, graying on the sides. He had filled out with an additional twenty or thirty pounds, and his neglected beard was thick and bushy, unkempt. The pungent smell of marijuana drifted off him, like the noxious smell of a skunk, and a suffocating odor of unwashed sweat cut through even that. His pale blue and sleeveless denim jacket made him look like he had raided someone’s attic and dipped into the box marked “1980s - Do Not Open.” He stood inside dry and cracked cowboy boots. His bottom lip protruded past his upper. That, combined with an unshowered appearance and the lazy slump of his shoulders, caused a flurry of revulsion to erupt inside her.
She had slept with this man. Had a baby with this man.
“What are you doing here?” she barked.
“I was—my god, you look good.” His bloodshot eyes roved hungrily over her body. He licked his lips. “I was in the area. Thought it would be the thing to do to stop by and say hello to my daughter.”
“She’s not here.” Katie’s voice was frigid.
“Not here? Well, where is she?”
“She just left for summer camp. She won’t be back until the end of next week.”
“That’s too bad.” His eyes fell to her chest, and he licked at his lips again. “You going to invite me in?”
“No. I’m not. I don’t have anything to say to you. You know how this works. If you want to see her, you have to coordinate that through me and DCF.” She proceeded to slam the door, but Carl stuck a boot out and set his weight into it. When she pulled back on the door, he pushed past her and stepped inside.
“Carl! Get out of here.”
“Place looks about the same. Still living with your dad, huh?”
She had no intention of telling him that her father wasn’t here, that she lived here alone with Chloe. “Where have you been?” she snapped. “You’re gone for years and then think you can just pop back up like this?” Katie scowled and crossed her arms over her chest. “That’s not how this works.”
“I don’t see why not. I’m here. I want to see her. What’s so bad about that?”
“If I need to explain that, then you’ve got a screw loose that I can’t tighten.”
“I’m hungry. How about we go get something to eat? We can catch up and you can tell me what you’re up to these days. How old is Chloe anyway? Five, six?”
Katie glared at him. “You don’t even know how old your own kid is. She’s seven, Carl. Seven. Now leave before I call the cops.” She brought her phone out from her shorts’ pockets and held it like she meant business, her brows raised, her jaw set tight.
Carl smiled large and laughed. He was about to call her bluff when he remembered that he’d already had one potential run-in with the cops today. Probably best not to make it a sure thing. He raised his hands like she was pointing a gun at him. “All right. All right, you win. I’ll leave.” He stepped to the door. “I’d hoped maybe you would have been glad to see me. We did have some good times back then, didn’t we? Remember when Toby—”
“Out. Now.”
He chuckled his way back across the threshold. “I’ll give you a little time to come around, but then I—”
Katie slammed the door behind him, her fingers quick with a twist that sent the deadbolt home. She waited motionless with her ear near the door, her heart pounding. Finally, she heard his boot heels clocking proudly down the front walkway. His car started up. By the time the noise of the engine faded down the street, her hands were shaking and she could feel waves of heat rising off her face.
Chloe didn’t need this. She didn’t need this selfish deadbeat maneuvering his way back into her life. All he would ever do is leave her disappointed and feeling neglected, putting Katie in the position of having to explain why her father hadn’t shown up for her birthday party or why his girlfriend was hardly wearing any clothes or had blue streaks down her forearms.
Katie made her way into the kitchen and opened the pantry door. She reached up and grabbed a bottle of Ketel One and had the cap unscrewed before she made it to the cabinet and brought out a mug. She poured herself a generous amount and then threw back the vodka, wiping her lips before doing it again. She took a seat at the kitchen table and closed her eyes, trying to relax as the alcohol began to do its job and calm her nerves.
The past came back to her, easily and undesired. A rebellious streak that began in high school and was precipitated by bad friends and poor decisions had lasted entirely too long. She had been on a party boat down near Marco Island, nursing a strong buzz, when a bowrider came along their port side and she saw Carl, a full decade older than her. Back then, nine years ago, his features were more angular, and he carried himself with an air of confidence that Katie hadn’t been able to resist. He invited her onto his boat, with his friends, and that evening she spent the night with him. And then the next, and the next, until one day it occurred to her that they were a couple. He was fun and lived without a care in the world. As the days ticked off, the only commitment Katie maintained was not listening to the wise and discerning warnings from her father or Major. She was having fun and, as if she were a late-born child of the 60s, groovy fun was her modus operandi. But as it can be with a rebel who willingly shuts their eyes to good counsel, Katie had finally seen the truth in Major’s and Frank O’Conner’s warnings one pregnancy stick too late. Carl was pissed and left her three weeks later. That was when the scales finally fell from her eyes and she saw him for the self-centered ass that he was.
The years had clearly caused him to degenerate. He was nothing short of gross now, and the confidence she had been so attracted to at the beginning had seemed to fester into a bloated and insipid arrogance. Carl was different, and seeing him show up like this only confirmed Katie’s commitment to not let him near her daughter.
She stood up from her seat at the kitchen table and went out the back door. She crossed the well-manicured lawn and put her weight into one of the swings. Katie’s father had built this swing set three decades earlier with the eager help of his two well-meaning little girls. She wished Ellie were here. Katie could handle this without her, but
having your big sister around sure helped when life pitched you a curveball like this. As it stood now, she wasn’t sure what to do.
And she was fairly certain she had not seen the last of Carl.
Chapter Seventeen
The Mexican sunrise came early and bright, quickly heating the sand and the rocks and the roads and purging any semblance of moisture that had tried to accumulate during the night.
After leaving the mountain slums last night, armed with the information Marco had provided, Cooper dropped Ellie and Hailey off at the Fresnillo Marriott, where they managed to get a few hours of sleep before their alarms woke them at 6 AM.
Now, they were back in the SUV, headed across another stretch of barren desert toward La Cajetilla. Ellie was hopeful, albeit not entirely optimistic, that they would find the Russian arms dealer. If she knew anything about the man at all, it was that he was skilled at hiding and an expert at planning his getaway. If the cartels had any interest at all in helping him stay out of the searching gaze of the U.S. government, then Ellie knew that it might be near impossible to find him. But then she had always been drawn to a good challenge.
Cooper took a sip of his coffee, returned his travel mug to the cup holder, and then slipped a CD from a canvas case. He pushed it into the Suburban’s CD player, and Black Sabbath’s War Pigs started up. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, “I’m about done with Tejano and Mexican pop. And my phone doesn’t get good enough reception out here for my damn Spotify to work right.” He started drumming his fingers on the steering wheel to the building beat.
“Cooper,” Hailey said, “our office issued us a short brief on Rafael Félix. It looks like he hasn’t been in power for very long.”
Cooper shook his head. “Just under two years, or thereabouts. The bastard who started Colonia Nueva Generacio was a man named Joaquín Plancarte. He grew up in the mountains of Sinaloa and started off in petty crime, but saw his chance one day when a truck moving a half-ton of cocaine broke down outside his village. He killed the driver and used the truck’s cargo to finance a little posse. Apparently, Plancarte had a natural knack for business. Within a few years, he was a growing threat to the cartels in Sinaloa, so rather than start an all-out war, he moved to Zacatecas. He put fear in the locals real quick: hangings, beheadings, rapes, even wiped out an entire village of about three hundred people just a little north of here. That kind of stuff probably doesn’t even make news back in the States. Hell, it hardly makes news around here anymore.” Cooper slowed and merged onto another two-lane road before accelerating again. On the stereo, Ozzy started singing “Paranoid.”