“Not over here,” Willie called.
“Check the bathroom,” I called back. If I was down to pinning my hopes on his having hidden in the bathroom, I was getting desperate.
He was not in the bathroom. I called Hal and the marshals. I assigned roles and we began to search in earnest. The house was small. In less than two minutes, we had an answer. He was not inside.
“The kitchen door,” Hal called.
We ran to join him. He was already heading outside. “It was unlocked,” he yelled over his shoulder.
The only time the rear door was unlocked was when one of the adults was going through it. Otherwise we all used the front door—which we kept locked as well. My head—and heart—were circling back through the panic mode, leaving the amused relief to fend for itself for the moment.
Some previous occupant of the house had installed a vinyl-coated chain-link fence surrounding the backyard—most likely to be used as a dog run, judging by the burnt yellow splotches in the sparse lawn—with a lockable gate leading to the garage and driveway. I had installed a trampoline with netted sides for the Kid to let off steam. Otherwise the yard was bare, not a tree or a shrub, nowhere to hide. The Kid was not there. The gate was locked.
“He must have climbed out,” Hal yelled. He vaulted the five-foot-high fence—an impressive feat. I didn’t wait to see if the two marshals could duplicate it.
“Follow me,” I said to Willie, and ran back through the house to the front door. The door was open. The Kid had sandbagged me twice.
We burst out the door and across the parched and dusty front yard. Hal and the marshals had beaten us to the curb. They stood there in indecision, their heads whipping to and fro, their eyes squinting against the midday glare, looking for any sign of the Kid.
“Just spread out and run,” I yelled. “He’s fast, but he won’t last.”
Hal gave orders. I waited. The neighborhood was a quiet suburban street with too many green lawns and deciduous trees that sucked up precious water like sponges. The families were all working-class of either Anglo or Mexican heritage. Two-car families, but one of the vehicles was most likely a pickup. Many of the wives worked. At noon on a school day, it was as deserted as a ghost town. All it needed was some rolling tumbleweeds and a mangy coyote to resemble a film shoot for a southwestern apocalypse. Nevertheless, five grown men running through the streets, obviously hunting or chasing someone or -thing, would soon be noticed. One of my neighbors, a good citizen, would be calling the police sometime soon.
Willie had the presence of mind to hop into the Lexus and search via car. I stood by the marshal’s car and waited.
They had arrived in a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda, the product, no doubt, of a civil forfeiture, our legal system’s middle finger to the Fourth Amendment. The Cuda had the big 440-cubic-inch engine with the Six Pak exhaust. When the marshals first pulled up, it had sounded like a cross between an army tank and one of those cigarette boats. Though 1970 wasn’t a great year for American muscle cars, as emission standards became more stringent and safety standards added weight, a seven-liter engine made up for a lot of deficiencies. The car had been repainted at some point, in a nonstock electric-blue metal flake, destroying the value for any serious collector, but the Kid wouldn’t have cared.
What sight would have driven all fear from my son’s mind and left him in slack-jawed amazement? Only a small dog or a big-engine car. I opened the passenger door and slid in next to him. He was in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, too short to see over the dash, but not caring—his eyes were focused on the instruments, his mind adrift in some private fantasy. He was humming a single note. It was his happy hum, not the pre-meltdown one. Not the one that led to tantrums or trances. No, this was the hum that he sometimes made when communing with a furry animal—a dog or a sheep. He was as much at peace as this world ever allowed him.
“Hey, guy,” I said.
He hummed.
“We’re going to have to move again. Today. Can you stay here while I go pack?”
He kept humming.
“Well, okay. I’ll get Willie or Hal to sit with you until we’re ready to go. You’ll be okay.”
The humming stuttered and I thought I might have gone a step too far. He blinked rapidly.
“Okay. I’ll ask Hal.”
The humming continued.
I got out of the car and dialed Willie. “C’mon back,” I said into the phone. “See if you can get the others. The Kid’s here. He’s okay.”
“I see the marshals,” he said. “You better call Hal, otherwise he’ll just keep hunting. He’s like a coonhound.”
I called Hal. He took longer to answer and longer to convince that both the Kid and I were all right. While we were talking, he came in sight around the corner.
“Come sit with him while I get started packing.”
We loaded the back of the Lexus. The wrestling mats and our bedding took up a lot of the space.
“The Kid can ride with the two of you,” I said to the marshals. “It’ll be a treat for him. He’ll behave. He’ll probably hum until he gets tired and then he’ll sleep. Call my cell if you need anything. We’ll be right behind you.”
“You’re the snitch, not your son. You should ride with us, too.”
“That puts one adult in the backseat of a Barracuda with the Kid. Which one of you two is going to sit there for the next seven hours, because I can goddamn guarantee you that it’s not going to be me.”
The two of them did their mind-reading look again. I gave them a few seconds while they silently debated.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to have local police stopping by sometime soon to find out why men with guns on their hips were running all over the neighborhood not too long ago.” I flashed them the smile that Skeli calls my Wall Street Asshole Grin.
“Fine,” Marshal Reyes finally answered. “But you and your buddies stay right behind us. You drop back more than a football field and you’re riding the rest of the way in the backseat with your son.”
“We can do that,” I said. I moved the Kid’s car seat to the back of the Barracuda, gave him the Matchbox cars from my pocket, and told him I’d see him for lunch. “We’ll find you a place with really good grilled cheese.”
We were packed and gone in another six minutes. Hal left the house keys under the mat.
45
Travel out west is not so different from what it was two hundred years ago. You steer toward the horizon and stop when you need to sleep. The choices for a map-obsessed Easterner were remarkably few and dictated by geographic obstacles—mountain ranges, bottomless gorges, or rivers that were either flooded or dry, never in-between—or the sheer vastness of empty space. Drive three hours from New York City and you can see ocean beaches, mountains, rivers, forests, and deepwater lakes. Three hours from Tucson we had yet to see anything but cacti. A car passing in the other direction was an event.
“Did you notice anything about that little escape hatch in the closet?” Willie asked. He was driving. Hal was playing with his phone.
“Like what?” There was a shimmer like sunlight on water on the road up ahead. It had been there, at about the same distance from us, for a half hour. At what point does a mirage cross over into hallucination?
“He took that section of the wall apart. It would have taken him quite a while to cut through that old drywall and clean up the mess so we wouldn’t find it. He didn’t do all that in the few minutes he was in his room after breakfast.”
The Kid was so frightened—of something, of someone, or of everything—that he had felt it necessary to create that back door. And, to keep it a secret, even from me. That thought gave me a shock of conflicting emotions—none of them happy ones. On the other hand, he had carried it off successfully, created it, used it, and evaded five grown men until he had been distracted by a vintage Barracuda.
&nb
sp; “How long do you think it took him?”
“I wouldn’t guess.”
“We’re coming up to Deming. We should stop and eat,” Hal said.
I pulled my eyes away from the contemplation of a mesa—or butte, I did not know how to tell one from the other—that vaguely resembled the front of a locomotive, if you squinted enough. Getting out of the Tucson area had been the priority. Lunch had been forgotten. The Kid would be hungry. “I’ll call them,” I offered.
Cell phone service had been spotty out where the nearest tower was well over the horizon, but the signal was strong as we approached the town.
“Your son’s been asleep for the past two hours,” Deputy Marshal Geary said. “Are you sure you want to wake him?”
“He does that after a panic attack. He’ll wake up as soon as you start to slow down—and he’ll need to eat.” He would be ravenous. The attacks, whether seizures or bursts of running or other activity, left him exhausted and calorie depleted. He might even eat a green vegetable.
“Does he have any food preferences? Special diets?”
“Any place that’ll make him a grilled cheese and French fries will be just fine,” I said.
Hal looked up from his smartphone. “There’s a Denny’s.”
I spoke into the phone. “Hal found a Denny’s.”
“He’s joking, right?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We’ll find something better. Just stay right behind us.”
I relayed the order to Willie, who nodded and kept driving.
“Denny’s not high-class enough for you?” Hal said with just enough of an edge to his voice that I couldn’t tell whether he was truly offended or attempting a joke.
“Do they make a good green sauce at Denny’s?” I responded.
“Denny’s feeds America,” he said.
“I think we can all agree on that.”
—
Willie followed the Cuda off the highway and we began threading our way through the main street of Deming, New Mexico.
“So who was this Castillo that got axed? How do you know him?” Hal asked.
Willie looked at him in surprise. I was surprised, too. Hal was the first bodyguard to ask any question that might pertain to my past. And this was the first time he had done it. As far as they were concerned, I was John Slater—now Sauerman—who had sprung into existence in May of that year and I needed constant protection. End of story.
I tried answering with the bare minimum. “He was a banker who got involved with the wrong people. A drug cartel from Honduras. He chose to testify rather than go to prison.” I elected not to go into the details of how I had helped put Castillo in the position where he was forced to make that choice.
“Sinaloas? Don’t they run everything down there?” Willie asked. The taboo had been broken. My past was now fair game.
“From what I understand, it’s more like a free-for-all these days. Maras versus Zetas versus Zacapas versus Sinaloas. The DEA took out some major players, thanks to Castillo, but it seems that just makes room for some other bunch of crazies to take their place.”
“So which group would have come after the banker, do you think?” Hal said, his eyes concentrating on his phone.
Every bit of information that I knew about the heroin smugglers came from Special Agent Marcus Brady. It had been shared with me on a confidential basis, and I did not want to give it away in casual conversation. “Why the interest?”
“I’d like to know who I’m protecting you from.”
“Or what we might be in for,” Willie added.
That made sense and helped to alleviate my quandary. “Fair enough. The people he helped put away were from different groups all over Central America. But the main group called themselves Mijos. They’re an offshoot from the Honduran MS-13 branch. With Castillo’s information the United States and Honduras were able to crack down on them. Hard. If there are any of them left, they’ve been reabsorbed back into the Mara.”
“That’s a nasty crowd,” Willie said. “They get kids—young kids, preteen—and train them to be sicarios. They feed them on cocaine and hate. By the time they get turned out, they’d kill their own mothers on orders.”
I did not want to think about teenage hit men on my trail. Luckily, just then the Cuda pulled to the curb in front of a washed-out-looking café that advertised both SOUTHWESTERN AND AMERICAN CUISINE and Hal said, “Lunch.” We pulled in next to the marshals and I saw the Kid peeking over the edge of the rear passenger window, looking for me. I gave him a wave. He looked worried and still half asleep.
Willie got out and went over to talk to the marshals. He and Reyes went inside the café to see that it was safe—and, I hoped, to check that the chef could put together a good grilled cheese. The rest of us waited in the cars.
“That was a bit of a surprise,” I said.
“What’s that?” Hal asked.
“You’ve been here more than a month and never asked any of those kinds of questions.”
He stared straight ahead. “I’m just being cautious.”
“And your partner?”
“It’s the first time we worked together. I think he enjoys fraternizing more than necessary, but that’s not a bad thing in our business.”
I regretted saying anything. I’d been looking for words to calm my uneasiness and I’d gotten them. Only to discover that I needed more.
“I’m going to check on my son,” I said, reaching for the door handle.
Hal held up a hand. “Don’t exit the vehicle until Willie gives the all clear. Please,” he added a beat later. That barely qualified as a request.
There’s not much point to having bodyguards if you don’t pay any attention to their advice. I didn’t like taking orders—just on general principles—but I stayed in the car. I watched the Kid. He wasn’t in distress; his worry was his natural “at rest” state. He sometimes lost the look when he felt safe in his own space, but I hadn’t seen him without it since we came west.
Willie stuck his head out the door and, with a big grin, waved us in.
46
The house in New Mexico was not in Las Vegas proper, it was a few miles out of town, up a long serpentine valley that cut through the foothills, and just north of a place called Devil’s Gulch. As the marshal had said, it was distinctly more rural than Tucson. And a long way from Seventy-third Street.
It was a bigger house, with four bedrooms and three baths on two floors, and a professional kitchen—which made Willie happy, and by extension, Hal and me, too. The Kid and I shared the upper floor and a balcony that ran the full length of the front of the building. My room had a sliding glass door that opened onto the balcony overlooking a barn and corral. I showed the Kid that if he was ever so afraid that he needed to find me, he could come down the hall, or go out the window onto the porch and come into my room by our “secret passage.” We tried it out together a couple of times so he’d know how to do it. I made it a game, but he wasn’t fooled. It was serious preparation.
The balcony was the only spot in the house that had any kind of a view. My room faced west, but the hill behind the house blocked everything but the tops of the Bear and Barillas Mountains. The front of the house looked out onto a rust-brown valley that felt more like a border than a vista. If the house had been higher on the ridge, we might have been able to see the town down below and the beginning of the Great Plains, which seemed to begin just the other side of Route 25. If you dropped a tennis ball down our driveway, it might have rolled east all the way to the Mississippi, ending up somewhere near Memphis. In back of the house stood the small corral and a lean-to, where the property owner had warehoused his small herd of cattle. The long drought had done in his entrepreneurial dreams. The house—and the outbuilding—had been empty for over a year.
Willie took charge of making the house livable, o
verseeing two short Latinas from town who worked harder and faster than any team of eight men, cleaning every surface and disposing of the desiccated dead mice we found in the traps that had been left behind. Willie said the presence of the mice was a good sign. It meant that no snakes had taken up residence.
Hal, the Kid, and I took a drive farther up into the foothills. To an Easterner, the flora and the land looked sparse and sere. Dwarf-sized pinyon trees, too water-starved to grow much over four or five feet tall, shared the landscape with sagebrush and a spiky plant that I didn’t recognize. To a grown-up city kid like me, it looked like an alien planet. The nearest house was down in the hollow on the far side of the next hill. I thought it strange that, rather than build on a site with a view, this homeowner, like the man who owned the house we were renting, had chosen to place his home in the shadow of these bleak mounds. I said so to Hal.
“Water,” he said. “There’s little enough of it up here. You don’t want to have to drill an extra hundred feet or more, just so you can see a whole lot of nothing.”
It was an alien planet.
The road petered out halfway up a canyon. Beyond that point was nothing but wilderness. Well to the west, blue mountains colored the horizon. Santa Fe was over in that direction—beyond one and a half million acres of mountain forest. I was as out of my comfort zone as I was ever likely to be in my lifetime.
“Let’s go back to the house,” I said.
The Kid looked at me. He’d picked up on it, too.
“Tell you what, son. We stay here long enough, we’ll open a New York–style kosher deli. Steam our own corned beef and pastrami. We’ll introduce these folks to latkes and tzimmes. Too much? Maybe you’re right. Okay, then we’ll open a bakery and get rich selling black-and-white cookies and semolina bread. Just think, these people have been living their whole lives without fresh-baked seeded rye. We’re going to show ’em what they’ve been missing.”
Saving Jason Page 21