by Blake Banner
He shouted, “I can’t see him!”
Then we were hit by a hail of bullets and he went quiet. I floored the gas pedal again. We were at the top of the hill, and up ahead on the right I could see a canyon. I pulled off the track doing fifty and we bounced and jumped across the brush and gnarled bushes. I heard Cyndi scream, slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt six inches from the edge of the canyon in a huge cloud of dust. I grabbed Jones’ rifle and a spare magazine, hollering, “Get out! Get out! Get out now!”
I scrambled, wrenched open the back door and dragged Cyndi out. The dust was swirling all around us. The thudding of the chopper was deafening and its downdraft was kicking up even more dust. I dragged Cyndi to the edge of the ravine and shouted “Lie down!”
She fell to the ground. I dropped on my belly and, as the rotors rose over the cloud of dust, I took aim. For a second the pilot saw me and we looked at each other. We were maybe twenty yards away. We looked at each other and he knew he was going to die. I riddled his upper body and his head with twelve rounds in three steady bursts of four. The chopper spun out of control, swung in a circle, lifted its tail in the air and smashed down face first onto the hillside.
I didn’t wait. I ran to the SUV, grabbed the spare gas can, doused the inside of the cab with it, then pushed it over the edge. It didn’t burst into flames when it hit the bottom. Cars don’t generally explode when they crash. But a hot round into the cab ignited the gasoline, and then it did explode, and it began to incinerate the two bodies inside it.
I glanced at my watch. It was five fifteen and evening was closing in. In the distance I could hear sirens. I grabbed Cyndi and dragged her to her feet.
“Come on, we have to run.”
“What?”
“Run! Down into that canyon! Now!”
And we ran, not to where the Dodge had exploded, but further on, stumbling down into the shadows, away from the burning wreckage that would be the focus of attention of the cops.
For now at least.
For now at least, we had some respite, too. By tonight Omega would know that Cyndi was not in the rear car. By tomorrow night they would know that the lead car had only two occupants, and that they were both burned beyond identification. It would be several days, maybe more, before they discovered that neither of them was Senator Cyndi McFarlane.
So, for the next couple of days at least, our own presumed deaths would allow us to live.
TEN
The moon had risen early and now hung huge, three dimensional and orange over the jagged black edge of the sierra. It was cold, freezing, and we were both shivering, huddled close for warmth. A mile away we could still see the desultory flash of red and blue light over the edge of the canyon, where the fire truck, the ambulance and the Highway Patrol had arrived to try and fathom what the hell had happened there. I had no doubt the Feds were there too, and even less doubt that Omega had a man on the spot.
And while those lights were flashing, we had no choice but to wait it out. Our problems had become very complicated. Not only were we without a vehicle to get us where we needed to go, I had no usable ID, no credit card, and we were practically out of cash. Yet, looking at Cyndi, I didn’t know how long we could wait. The cold was getting to her, she had low body mass, and pretty soon she would slip into hypothermia. Her teeth were chattering and she was getting a glassy look about her eyes. Sergeant Bradley, my Kiwi mentor from the Regiment, had a saying that had saved my ass more times than I could remember. I could see him now, swigging whiskey from his hip flask, with the camp fire washing his face with red and orange, making him look diabolical. “When the Devil is up your arse, mate, there’s only one thing you can do. Move your fuckin’ arse!”
I said, “OK, let’s go.” I got to my feet and pulled her up. I took my jacket and put it around her shoulders, over the top of her own.
She was trembling so bad she had trouble talking, but eventually she managed to ask, “Where are we going?”
I pointed roughly south, toward the dull glow of the freeway. “Garfield. It’s about two and a half miles away.”
We started stumbling and sliding down a slope into a deep ravine that threaded its way toward the I-25, a quarter of a mile away. It was a strange sight, like a bizarre, surreal stage set in the middle of the pitch-black desert: a long, dark gray strip of tarmacadam, illuminated by tall, spindly silver lamps. But I had spotted something that gave me hope. Where the road passed over the gulley, it was raised on a high bank. My bet was that when it rained, a lot of water would accumulate against that bank, so there would have to be some kind of drainage system to allow it to get through to the gully on the other side. If I was right, we would be able to cross the highway without ever being seen.
Twenty minutes of scrambling and stumbling down steep slopes, littered with rocks and shrubs, brought us to the foot of the bank, and the gaping maw of a vast tube, fifteen feet in diameter, that had been built into it. It was there to allow heavy rains and flash floods to flow beneath the interstate without damaging its foundations. Tonight it was going to allow us to do the same thing.
It was over a hundred yards from one end to the other. It was damp and full of garbage, and stygian dark. The only light we had to guide us was the dim circle of limpid blue moonlight at the far end, suspended in shapeless blackness. It told us where we wanted to go, but not the path, not how to get there.
I gave Cyndi my arm. “Hold on to me. Don’t let go. It’s going to be a hundred paces. We’ll count them off, and then we’ll be out the other side. I want you to make a noise, you understand? Don’t be shy and don’t be quiet. Let’s go.”
It was not pleasant. We could hear the rats scuttling and scurrying near our feet. They were not shy and they were not quiet. I could feel Cyndi’s fingers digging into my arm and her body going rigid, quivering. I could tell she wanted to run, but I knew if she ran she could fall, and then we might have a real problem, because two got you twenty that as well as rats, there could be snakes in that tube, hunting the rats. So I told her stupid stories about pranks we used to play in the army, what the Brits call jolly japes, everything from escaping through the back windows of whorehouses while the copse stormed in the front, to adding pure alcohol to one lieutenant’s intimate deodorant. I even sang her a song while she counted off the steps. The worst were from fifty to seventy five, because we’d gone too far to turn back, but we still had half way to go.
Eventually, finally, the circle of limpid blue moonlight began to swell and take shape, and we began to leave the small, poisonous creatures of the dark behind us. And then we were finally out, on the clean, dry sand and she was clinging to me, trembling violently and repeating through clenched teeth, “I will not cry again, Lacklan. I am done crying, but how many more people have to die? How much more horror do we have to go through?”
I held her tight, but I didn’t answer. I had no answer to those questions.
We followed the gully for about a mile and eventually came to a narrow road. There was some kind of tree plantation there, and a yard with trucks, but nothing I would want to use. So we turned south, onto the road, and followed it toward the small town of Garfield.
After three or four hundred yards we came to the first few scattered houses and I saw the one I wanted. You cannot hotwire modern cars, anything after the mid ’90s is impossible unless you have some pretty sophisticated electronic equipment. But fortunately, these days, a kid’s first car is still often pre-millennium, and that was exactly what I had been looking for, and what I had just seen: a mid ’90s Ford Taurus.
It was deathly quiet in the outskirts of Garfield, but through the stillness of the desert night you could hear the murmur of a TV through the lighted window at the front right of the house. The Taurus was parked at the left side, so there would be a room and a TV muffling the sound of the engine.
I took my jacket off Cyndi’s shoulders, wrapped it around the muzzle of the Sig and shot out the driver’s window. It didn’t silence it, but i
t muffled it enough not to raise an alarm. I opened the door, climbed in and opened the passenger door for trembling senator. To hotwire a car, you can mess around searching for the right wires, but they are different in each vehicle and you can waste a lot of time that way. It’s much easier to smash a screwdriver into the ignition. Ideally you would use a drill to break the pins, but failing that, if you’re desperate—and we were—brute force will do it.
Two minutes later, we were accelerating away from the town of Garfield and back onto the I-25, with the heater at full blast. As we hit the freeway, Cyndi was shaking her head. “Lacklan, we have almost a thousand miles to cover. How the hell are we going to do this?”
“I need to make one stop, in Socorro. After that, if you’re willing to share the driving, we can make it in fourteen hours. I figure we have two days, maybe more, before Omega figures out what they are looking for and where to look for it.”
She shook her head again. “This car, and any car you steal tonight, is going to be reported stolen by tomorrow morning at the latest. We can’t keep doing this.”
“Not any car. Now, I’ve told you. Are you going to keep arguing with me? Or are you going to try something different?”
She sighed and rubbed her face with her hands. “Fine. Yes, you’re right. You have proved yourself right every time, and me wrong every time.” She was quiet for a moment, then added, “Poor Charles, and the others.”
“The others died because of Charles’ stupidity and arrogance. I know his type of soldier. If you have an enemy, you throw money and weapons at him until he lies down and dies. You can’t do that. You have to understand your enemy before you tackle him. That is where you and Charles, and many others, have gone wrong. You think your enemy is like you, like all the others, but he is not. He is different.”
We made it in just over an hour. Socorro is one of the most dangerous cities in the Southwest. It is physically connected to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and one of the main points of entry for Mexican heroin into the U.S.A. And it was going to provide me with exactly what I needed to get to Corpus Christi.
I took the I-10 down to a bar I knew called the Blue Flamingo. It was a mock Spanish villa set back from the road in a big, ugly concrete parking lot, and advertised itself with a big strip of neon showing a girl in a cowboy hat with her arms around a blue flamingo. It was very subtle.
I parked around back and told Cyndi to stay put. Then I crossed the lot, walked through the central patio, past the mock Louis XIV fountain, and pushed through the glass doors to the ‘Adult Entertainment Establishment’. There was a plush, red-carpeted lobby with two white staircases leading up to a second floor, where all the luxury bedrooms were. I had drunk champagne in a few of them when I was younger, and less wise. A second set of doors led me into a large, plush cocktail bar with carpets so deep you could lose your life in them, and corners so dark you could forget you cared.
I went to the bar like I was in a hurry. Delroy saw me and came over to shake my hand. “My man, we haven’t seen you around here in a while. How are you doing? Where’s your pal, Bat?”
“Trying to stay out of jail. Listen, I’ll be back to shoot the breeze and have a drink, but right now I need you to help me out.”
“Sure man. Name it.”
“I need to score some coke.”
He looked surprised. “You? I didn’t think you did that shit, man.”
I shook my head. “I don’t. It’s not for me. I’m on a date and I think the party could get interesting if I can do this for her.”
He laughed a lot. “Yeah man, sure.”
“What about some ‘H’?”
Now he looked unhappy. “Ah, no, man. That’s bad shit.”
I shrugged. “It’s what the lady likes, my friend.”
“Shit, man.” He shook his head. “OK, you gonna cross over the freeway. It’s on Bovee Road, right down by the wall.” He gave me the address. “Guy’s name is Slee. Don’t tell him I sent you. I don’t like that guy. Tell him Randy sent you.”
“Who’s Randy?”
He shrugged. “A pal of his. Another low life.” He laughed. “You know what? Don’t pay him. Break his legs instead. That piece of shit destroys lives. Think about what you’re doing, man.”
I gave him a wink. “I owe you. We’ll have a drink and catch up.”
I stepped back out into the night, through the elaborate patio and ran around to the Ford. Cyndi was still there, looking unhappy. I got in, hit the gas and accelerated away toward the underpass. I followed Horizon Boulevard, then at Bulford I came off and followed the back streets to the address he had given me. It was a single-story house surrounded by scrubland. The drapes were closed, but you could see slashes of light at the edges. I wasn’t surprised to see a BMW 2 series parked out front. I tucked the Ford behind it, killed the engine and turned to Cyndi. She was staring at me like she thought I was crazy. But she also remembered she had promised to stop questioning me, so she was biting her tongue.
“I’ll be ten minutes. Don’t move. We’ll be in Corpus Christi for breakfast.”
I climbed out, pulling on the latex gloves I still had in my pocket. I walked up the path to the front porch and knocked.
A voice spoke through the door. “What?”
“Hey, Slee, man, I’m a friend of Randy. Said you could fix me up.”
“What do you want?”
I put my mouth close to the door. “I don’t wanna be shouting out here, man. He said you had some ‘H’. Money’s no problem, man. I need some coke, too. We’re having a party.”
He opened the door. He was tall, heavy, going to fat. He had a white vest, a baseball cap and jeans that looked like they’d been designed for a malformed hippopotamus. “Where’d you see Randy?”
I shoved the Sig into his belly. “Here.”
He went pasty gray and held up his hands. His eyes bulged and a vein started to throb in his temple. I said, “Back up, do as I say, and you won’t get hurt.”
He backed up. He wasn’t about to give anyone any trouble. I stepped in and closed the door behind me.
He was shaking his head. “Y’all making a big mistake, man. You don’t wanna do this to me. I got friends over the border, man. You feel me? You know what that means?”
I nodded. “Yup. Now, this goes down one of two ways. You give me what I want, I leave and you live. Or you give me what I want after I have blown your kneecaps off. Where is your cash? I’m going to count to three. On three I start shooting kneecaps. One…”
“No, man, I have to give that to… You know what they’ll do to me if I don’t pay…”
“Two…”
“No, listen to me, man…”
I shot him in the left kneecap. He gave a high-pitched squeal, did a funny, one-legged jumping dance and fell over. He was sobbing and clawing at his leg. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who deal in heroin. I hunkered down next to him.
“You might just save the leg, Slee, if you get to a hospital on time. Your best plan now is to call the cops, make a deal and sell out your Mexican friends. But that’s for you to decide. Where is the cash?”
He started shaking his head. His face was wet with tears. I pressed the muzzle against his right kneecap. His eyes started and he shook his head more violently.
I said, “One…”
“OK! OK! OK! I’ll tell you. In the bedroom! In the wardrobe! In a sports bag!” I walked into the bedroom, opened the wardrobe and found the sports bag. I opened it. There must have been fifty grand in there. A testament to people’s enduring stupidity. I went back into the filthy living room. There was a cell phone on the coffee table. I picked it up, went and squatted down next to Slee again.
“That your BMW outside?” He nodded. He was looking bad. He’d lost a lot of blood from his knee. “Key.”
“In my pocket. Please, gimme the phone, man. I’m dying.”
I reached in his pocket and pulled out the key. Then I looked at him and shook my head. “You’re not dying,
Slee. You’re dead.”
I put a round through the center of his forehead. He didn’t deserve to be put out of his misery, but I couldn’t afford to have him talking, either.
I took the bag out, stuffed five grand in my pocket and threw the rest in the trunk. Then we spent ten minutes wiping our prints off the Ford, transferred our stuff to the BMW and took off, once again, for Texas and Corpus Christi.
ELEVEN
It was a seven hundred mile drive. Ten hours, so long as we stuck to the speed limit, and with fifty grand in a hold all in the trunk of a car stolen from a drug dealer, it made sense to stick to the speed limit. We stopped at the first gas station outside Socorro, filled her up and bought food: bread, cheese, ham and chocolate. And then we drove. We took it in turns. Five hour shifts. I took it as far as Sonora while she slept, and from Sonora to Corpus Christi, she drove while I slept.
It was a tedious, exhausting drive. But after the violence and constant threat of the previous days, it was a relief to know that we had total anonymity for the next few hours.
There was practically no traffic, and the endless, straight road under the immense, clear Texan sky was hypnotic. Occasionally a truck would pass on the westbound road. It would appear as a bright light in the distance, slowly swell, then flash past, leaving just silence in the darkened cab, aside from the quiet hum of the engine.
Towns, clusters of houses with sleeping windows and sleeping cars, motels and gas stations, they would all pass in their still pools of dull light, shut down for the dark, nocturnal hours, when only predators and their victims were abroad.
After Sonora I tried to sleep, but it wasn’t easy. I knew that in the morning I would be seeing Marni. I knew that she wanted something from me, and I knew that I no longer wanted to give it to her. I knew I was going to tell her it was all over: with me and Omega, and with me and her. Because a relationship with Marni meant a relationship with Omega. And I couldn’t do that anymore.