Saving Jason

by Michael Sears

  Another police cruiser was waiting for us a half mile up the road. He pulled out from the grassy median, lights flashing, and pulled into the center of the highway. I had an instant in which to decide whether it was okay to hit him, attempt to get around, or stand on the brakes, risking another series of shots from behind.

  I stood on the brakes.

  The truck began to fishtail. I wasn’t going to have to worry about getting shot. No one could have hit that target, especially from the helm of a speeding semi. The wheel felt like there was nothing attached to it. I tried steering into the skid, but the truck immediately began to yaw in the other direction. Aimee flopped forward, the seat belt keeping her semierect. That was when the Mack clipped my right rear tire.

  There was a pop, followed immediately by a second. It sounded harmless enough. But the yawing immediately increased. I reached over and pulled up on the red brake handle. The truck began to hop and buck like a wild horse, throwing me sideways, where I landed on top of Aimee. I had strapped her in, but neglected my own seat belt. The truck leaned to the right and I tumbled down onto the floor at her feet, cracking both my nose and the back of my head in quick succession. I may have blacked out, but if I did, it was only for a split second. The horror hadn’t let up, but at least I didn’t have to watch it happen.

  Being crammed into that space saved my life. The truck ran off the highway on the right, toward the tree line. But before it hit, the truck lurched and rolled onto its side, plowing a wide swath through new grass, budding wildflowers, and saplings before coming to a rest twenty feet off the road.

  My feet were above me. The ground was somewhere behind me, just beyond the passenger door. Aimee, hanging from her seat belt, loomed down over me, her head twisted at a sharp angle from her shoulders. Her neck was broken. I could not imagine why mine wasn’t.

  I checked my fingers and toes for feeling, just to be sure. I hurt everywhere, but I could scrunch my toes and wiggle my fingers. The fact that I was extremely uncomfortable—all my weight was on the back of my neck—and unable to move were my greatest concerns. That was good. If I was complaining, I was alive.

  More sirens and flashing lights. Police. Rescue units. I lay there and waited. Aimee’s dead eyes stared down at me, but I couldn’t look back.

  PART II

  FOUR MONTHS LATER

  The black birds had gone quiet again. Devils. Eyes that could see movement from miles away. The coyote depended upon scent, and while he could smell carrion at a great distance, the damn crows always had the advantage.

  Coyote waited. He was hungry, but he could wait. He was good at waiting. The crows began to screech again. They were smart. They talked together, sharing greetings, warnings, and information about food, predators, weather. Coyote had learned to watch the crows for first signs of danger. Today they were talking about food, but they had not feasted yet. Something had them unsettled. Coyote crept to the top of the ridge far above the arroyo.

  Men had been there—truck smells, a crushed cigarette—but were gone. Nothing since. The smell was strong. Coyote almost turned and ran. Only the sick and desperate went near humans, usually to their deep regret. But mixed with the man smell was the smell of decay. Coyote waited and sifted the other scents on the wind.

  The crows rose up in a fluttering black cloud, squawking shrilly in anger and frustration. But not fear. Coyote moved to the lip of the dry riverbed and looked over the edge. Twenty feet below lay a naked man, spread-eagle on the bare ground. His arms and legs were staked down with loops of bent metal. A pool of dried blood had soaked into the sand around him. His face and body were red and blistered from the sun. He had lain there for more than a day. Deep wounds and bruises covered his torso. His manhood had been cut away and stuffed into his mouth. He should have been dead, but he was not.

  The man’s head moved. That was what had set the crows aflight. His body was already beginning to rot, yet he was still alive. But not for much longer. Coyote would wait. He was good at waiting.

  39

  Aimee’s dead eyes were still staring down at me. I awoke with that image two or three times a week. There was no point in trying to get back to sleep. Aimee would be there waiting for me. I rolled out of bed, hit the bathroom, and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. I had calls to make.

  Just before sunrise was best. New Yorkers rise early—even pregnant physical therapists—and in order to catch Skeli before her workday started, I called soon after four, Tucson time. There were stars at that hour. And planets. Venus, Mars, and Jupiter were all up and easily identifiable, and the star guide app I used informed me that Neptune was at its most prominent point of the year. I also learned, after much frustration, that I would need a telescope to see it.

  Skeli and I met each morning in the online chat room designed by Mr. Hannay, who now went by the name of Manny Balestrero. The security for our meeting place was, according to Manny, “some of my finest work.” It needed to be. There had been a second attempt on my life even before the emergency room sent me home that night. Hospital security had detained a young man in a dark windbreaker who had been asking “what room” I had been assigned. When the Suffolk County Police took a look, they immediately arrested him for criminal trespass and possession of a handgun without a proper permit. Special Agent Brady got the wheels rolling, and by noon the next day, the Kid and I were in WITSEC and on our way to the Grand Canyon State.

  The Kid and I were in the program until Wallace Ashton Blackmore closed his investigation or brought me back to testify. Depending on the results of a future court proceeding, we might one day return to our old lives, or live out our days hiding in the Great American Desert. Blackmore was the gatekeeper and his prime motivation was media attention. He had garnered plenty of that by arresting Virgil—though he was released the next morning without being charged—and he would earn much more when he put the final pieces of a racketeering case together. But if some other case came up that would result in national attention, he might easily chase off in another direction.

  Gino was going to do serious time. The only question was where he was going to do it. Ballistics had matched the bullets from the Barstow crime scene and the single bullet in Aimee’s back to the gun he had with him when his truck went into the trees. Nassau County wanted him for the Barstow shootout and Suffolk County wanted to indict him for Aimee’s murder. But Blackmore wanted to try him in federal court as part of the racketeering case he was trying to build. So the delay worked for the U.S. Attorney as well as for the defendant. The Suffolk County DA knew it was a layup for his team, but was content to wait and spend the rest of the summer on the beach at Davis Park. The only losers were the Kid and me. Stuck in limbo—hiding out in the desert. Waiting to find out whether I was to risk my life and testify or abandon any hope of ever returning to our past life. Every delay was both a relief and a stake in my heart.

  The problem for all the prosecutors involved—county and federal—was what to do with Joseph Scott. Everyone knew he was involved—no one doubted my story—but the evidence to convict wasn’t there—yet. The boiler-room pump-and-dump operation in New Jersey had been rolled up, but Scott’s connection was tenuous. Worst case, he’d get a slap on the wrist for the securities parking. The most serious charges—ordering the hits and the kidnapping—were going to be a hard sell because none of the thugs were talking. I could place him at the scene, but nothing more substantial.

  Blackmore wasn’t giving up. He was one of the most underhanded, self-promoting U.S. Attorneys Larry had ever seen—and that included some truly infamous ones—but he was tenacious and a true believer that behind every coincidence there lurked a conspiracy. He held the threat of my testimony over Scott’s head as though it were a weapon of mass destruction. I didn’t know whether Scott or his lawyer believed I was a real threat or not, but I wasn’t willing to bet my life on it.

  “What news, my love?” Skeli greeted me. Manny had set up the p
rogram so we could see each other as well as hear. She looked like heaven.

  “I miss you.”

  “That’s news?”

  “Nothing changes here. What do you hear?”

  “Not a lot,” she said. “Your father is now down twelve pounds and very proud of himself. They stopped by the office late yesterday.” My father and his new wife had recently returned from a six-month around-the-world honeymoon cruise. Pops had put on twenty pounds. Estrella hadn’t gained an ounce. I had not spoken to either of them since the wedding. “What else? Nothing, really. I’ve got a checkup appointment this Friday and your daughter has been very active. If this is any sign of things to come, she’s going to be a soccer player. What’s up? How’s the Kid?”

  “Kid is unchanged. He doesn’t hate it here, he just hates that it’s not there, if you know what I mean. I suppose we are identical in that regard. I handle it better, that’s all.” And we both missed Heather. Most days, we were each other’s only company—except for the two live-in bodyguards. “I talked to Larry.” I spoke to Larry almost as often as I did to Skeli. “Nothing new. Blackmore drags his heels. The case goes nowhere. Same old, same old.” I hated to hear myself sound so discouraged—and discouraging. “Let me see. There’s a new bodyguard coming today.” Virgil was paying for the guards. Occasionally, one or the other would rotate out.

  “Who’s leaving?”

  “The good one.”

  “Josh?”

  Josh was ex-army, having served a full twenty years. He had a wife and two kids in Baltimore and had never taken to Tucson. He hated the heat, the food, the sports teams, and the fact that, as a six-foot-five, two-hundred-and-eighty-pound black man, he stood out in a town that was almost one-half white and one-half Latino. There were more Native Americans around than brothers. He and the Kid got along well, and we would miss him.

  He would be leaving me with Hal. Hal was a sad man. A loner. Unmarried and, at forty-four, he was reaching the effective end of his current career, with no plan for the future. He was alert and, I assumed, competent at his job, but he had a black hole where his personality should have been. He had been with us for a month, and I could not remember a single sentence of conversation with him that revealed any emotion, sense of humor, likes or dislikes, thoughts, dreams, hopes or regrets. The man was a cipher.

  “Josh wants to take some time at home for a bit. Who knows, he might be back.” That last bit stood as my attempt to look more on the bright side. I gave up trying and just let myself feast on looking at Skeli. “You look lovely. Did you have your hair done?”

  She was just out of the shower and still had a white fluffy towel wrapped around her head. “Hah! I’m thinking of cutting it all off. Just until she’s done breast-feeding. Dawn tells me that babies get distracted by hair and don’t feed well, so they suck in a lot of air and get colicky later.” She had met Dawn in a parenting class. Dawn was also a first-time mother, and fifteen years younger than Skeli, but she had read every book on the subject. So, while she had an encyclopedic cache of information, much of it was contradictory, outdated, or so speculative and unscientific as to be downright dangerous.

  “I think that’s only with girl babies,” I said. “You put a breast in a man’s mouth—at any age—and he will not get distracted, I can pretty much guarantee.”

  “This is a girl baby, sport. And I don’t want you thinking about women’s breasts.”

  “Just yours. I haven’t been able to touch you for four months.”

  “One hundred sixteen days,” she said. “Hey, I just got a text.” She picked up her cell phone. “Virgil. He says, ‘Nine-thirty.’ He means you, right? What should I tell him?”

  Virgil and I had burner cell phones that we very rarely used to speak to each other. We never called anyone else and, as both phones were purchased with cash, neither could be traced back to us.

  “Just say ‘Okay’ and then delete the whole conversation.”

  “Will do.” She looked deep into my eyes—or where it looked like my eyes were. It was more than a little strange. The cameras were inches above our images so that our eyes never really met. It worked a little better if we sat farther back from the computer, but that tended to allow in too much background and cut the sense of intimacy. No matter what, it was a poor substitute for a hug. “I love you,” she said. “Come on home soon. And safe.”

  “I love you, too. Have a great day.”

  “Give my love to the Kid, too.”

  “Always.”

  She closed out first. The screen went fuzzy with vibrating diagonal stripes the way old tube televisions sometimes acted, or the way messages from outer space always began in black-and-white sci-fi movies.

  I checked the time. Too early for Larry. Virgil’s call wasn’t for another hour and a half. I put on a kettle for tea, filled the coffee machine and set the timer, and went out front to watch the nighttime sky show come to an end.

  Twilight begins about an hour and a half before sunrise. In New York, that sentence would have no relevance. It never had for me. During a brief period in my early twenties, that time was bookmarked by the bars all closing at four and the delis and bodegas opening at six. The streets were quiet, except for the late-cruising Town Cars and the first wave of yellow cabs haunting the hotels and hoping for an early fare out to the airport. Commercial garbage trucks and bread trucks made their respective pickups and deliveries at the same restaurants and cafés, which would not open for hours to come.

  In the desert, twilight belongs to the birds. The bigger owls were finishing their nighttime forays, and the smaller ones were just coming out to do their hunting. Next came the doves—the mourning and white-winged. A family of quail crossed through the alley behind the house, the mother peeping Keep up. Keep up. Keep up to her scurrying chicks.

  The kettle whistled and I went back into the kitchen and made a cup of Earl Grey, and toasted a single piece of rye bread on the griddle. I ate it plain—no butter or jam. My sense of taste had somehow diminished. Not an entirely unsurprising event, considering the assaults that my palate had been forced to endure. I understood that spicy food helps you sweat, and that’s a way of keeping cool in a hot environment. But everyone in Tucson had air-conditioning. It was impossible to avoid it, even if you were the type who enjoyed seeing the thermometer cross over into the hundred-degree-or-greater zone on a daily basis. So why were there jalapeños on everything from appetizer to dessert?

  The most egregious attack had been an accident and entirely my own fault. If I’d been paying attention, it could all have been avoided.

  I steered clear of making personal contacts, believing that three grown men living together in a house with a single, very weird child was enough of an oddity without having to draw further attention to myself by refusing to discuss anything about my past—or my son’s—with neighbors, storekeepers, or service industry employees. But I had made one exception—taking the Kid to the local library and letting the adult-section librarian help him research car books.

  Ms. Claire Wood was my age, a widow for the last eight years, with a son just starting on Wall Street, and not much else to tie her to southern Arizona but the fact that she loved it there. All this she told me in the first five minutes after the Kid got settled in the reading room. She was obviously lonely, quietly attractive, and had made immediate note of my naked ring finger. I let my guard down—more because I felt a bit sorry for her than because I had any real plan—and accepted her invitation to attend an art opening—“Just some wine and cheese and a few of the local artists”—later that week.

  I showed up in jeans and a white button-down shirt, as square and unremarkable as I could make myself, and already regretting venturing out. Someone—probably the artists themselves—had sprung for better than the expected wine and there was a table of interesting-looking appetizers, too. I was wearing my computer glasses, both as an accessory to my disgu
ise as the world’s most boring man, and because, if I was going to be looking at artwork, I could always fiddle with the glasses when I needed to avoid making a comment. The glasses, though, tended to distort images at a distance, around the periphery of my vision, and items very close up. They were only good for staring at a computer monitor for long periods, which was when I normally used them.

  After making my way around the room, I noticed that the artists much preferred painting at sunset than at any other time of day—possibly due to the declining temperature, or possibly due to the approach of cocktail hour. One woman artist had broken with the rest and had included native fauna in her compositions. She concentrated on rabid-looking coyotes, curled rattlesnakes poised to strike, giant tarantulas, and evilly grinning Gila monsters. Even her sole sunset featured a pair of savage javelinas, tusks glinting red in the dying light. The javelinas we had seen at the Desert Museum looked more like smallish feral pigs. Harmless, but not quite Disneyesque. Peccaries. Who could fear an animal called a peccary? But this artist’s peccaries looked like the man-eating kind. More Marvel Comics than Lion King.

  Though I was tempted by the chilled bottles of Mumm Napa sparkling Brut Rose and Jordan Russian River Chardonnay, I stuck with the seltzer from Costco. I played with my glasses, sipped my ersatz cocktail, and successfully circled the room without having to engage in conversation with any of the other guests.

  Our host, the widowed librarian, was no longer quietly attractive. She had gone all out with a loose caftan that did nothing for either her shape or her complexion. About a hundred tiny bracelets jingled on her forearms and her oversized hoop earrings brushed her shoulders. I imagined that the look she was going for was “artsy,” but the wild assortment of colors and shapes in the fabric of her garment upstaged every painting on the walls.