by Steven Gould
It was only four kilometers from the hotel.
They should have felt it.
Felt, but could they track it? Did they feel the direction?
Would they come?
The briefcase had two three-digit combination locks and they were engaged. Two sets of a thousand possible combinations, solvable, I suppose, with enough time and patience. Just start at 000 and work your way up to 999.
I sat on the little beach and hit the locks with a rock, which not only opened it eventually, but greatly relieved the tension while I waited, especially when I screamed as I did it.
Every few minutes I’d take a break and jump to the four quarters of the compass, the east, north, south, and west shores of the island, to see if they were coming yet, and with the jumping, let them know I was still here.
The suitcase popped open eventually but it flared bright and hot and I had to throw it away from myself. I was surprised I hadn’t set it off earlier, with all the banging, but it was only meant to self-destruct, not designed to kill, clearly, or I’d be dead.
The contents were ash and melted plastic and blackened metal. There was a charred corner of a passport, but it was the most recognizable thing I found. The flare had been really bright and the afterimage floated in my field of vision.
Magnesium, maybe. That had been one of the more memorable homeschool science experiments—the thin ribbon of metal that went right on burning after Mum dropped it in the water.
They came in two boats—one that went directly to the beach, avoiding the rocks that dotted the mouth of the cove, and another that tried to do something on the seaward side. They could have landed a swimmer but it would’ve meant writing off the boat to come any closer to the jagged lava. The waves would’ve smashed it into the cliff. In the end, that boat, too, circled the island and put in at the cove.
There were only three of them—Ortiz from the AFI, Kemp from Bristol, and a bearded man who towered over the other two. He hadn’t been at San Diego, I would’ve remembered a man that tall.
That meant they’d left someone at the house.
Maybe more than one. Don’t assume you saw them all.
I thought about Alejandra, then, and the rest of the Monjarraz family. I wanted to go check, but nothing would lead the bastards to her—to them all—faster than me jumping there.
Phone, I thought. Later.
Meanwhile, I had questions.
They had fishing poles and an ice chest. I felt my ears get red and my throat got tight.
Did they think I was stupid?
I don’t know why this made me so mad. Hell, it would probably have been a great deal of help if they thought I was some dumb kid.
I watched them from the higher part of the island, where the brush began, just inland from where the spit that formed the cove joined the main part of the island. I was sitting down in the shade, having found a flat rock to park my arse on. Except for the sandy beach, every place else I’d sat on the whole island seemed to consist of poky bits of lava.
I wondered if they knew the difference between someone jumping to a spot versus jumping away or if it was all the same to them. It’s not like they sensed me when I wasn’t jumping, or I’d never have been able to get onto that balcony.
They left Ortiz by the boats, with one of the rods, and they headed down the beach, toward me. They also brought fishing rods, carried in their left hands, but their right hands stayed close to the bags slung over their right shoulders. I jumped ten feet to the right, my eyes watching them.
Both of them reacted, looking right at where my head now poked above the brush … but Ortiz hadn’t flinched a bit. He was still pretending to fish from the beach, by the boats.
Ah. He doesn’t feel it. They do.
I turned around and ran briskly off, straight up the middle of the island. Well, straight as the brush and boulders let me. The shrubs tore at my shirt and I ended up with a few scratches on my bare forearms but I was probably doing better than them. They were bigger and would have to force their way through and they’d dressed like tourists.
Shorts, for God’s sake.
I was out of line of sight in thirty seconds. They’d still been working their way up the rising rock at the end of the beach—not quite a cliff—but not something you go up without grabbing a handhold here and there. I pushed on until I was at the far end, right at the edge of a real cliff. There was a boulder that stuck up a bit from all the rest and I climbed up its backside and peered over. I needed the visual cues—the waves hitting the cliff below drowned out any chance of hearing them move through the brush.
They came, Kemp right down the middle, like I’d come, but the other man, the big one, came along the cliff’s edge, from the right. He’d come quickly and I guess there wasn’t as much brush to fight through, but he’d also come along the edge.
I jumped right there, right beside him, and he flinched off the edge. I didn’t have to touch him but he almost snagged me, going over the edge; he was so much taller, his clawing hand whipping through my hair as I stepped back.
He didn’t land on the rocks, though it was only a matter of luck. A wave hit just before he did, and he was kicking and splashing, head mostly above the water, as he washed back out over the tide pools at the bottom of the cliff.
One.
If I’d hesitated, Ortiz would’ve been warned. His radio was crackling as I brought the rock down from behind, and Kemp’s voice said, “Ortiz, look out!” as Ortiz dropped to his knees. I’m sure it’s a crimen federal to strike an agent of the AFT. I didn’t succeed in knocking him completely unconscious but I had his own handcuffs on his wrists before he was able to do more than moan.
I towed the second boat away from shore with the first, making a bad job of it going out between the rocks. My boat cleared but a swell swung the second craft into the rocks and scraped paint and fiberglass down the side.
Too bad. Maybe they’ll lose their deposit.
I dropped the anchor in the lee of the island, halfway between it and the headland opposite. It was deep there, over forty meters, but by using the anchor line from both boats, I was able to reach the bottom with some line to spare. It would drag, though, if there was any change in the wind.
Que lástima.
Even in the sheltered lee of the island, the pitch of the boat, especially jerked up hard by the anchor line, was making me ill. I jumped to the opposite shore where a two-hundred-meter beach called Playa de Mixteca was tucked into the east side of the headland. Its north end was bordered by a beach pavilion but I went to the other end and looked across at the island, only two hundred meters, two soccer fields, away. I could cross back instantly, but Kemp would be a while if he tried to reach me. He’d have to swim at least as far as the boats.
I spoke into Ortiz’s radio.
“Mr. Kemp,” I said. “Are you there?”
“Who is this?” He didn’t know my voice and he wasn’t certain, but he probably suspected.
“It’s the orphan.” That really said it all. They probably had my name. Names. But I wasn’t going to hand them anything. I just needed to know why. “How’s the tummy? Still got the squirts?”
“Griffin,” he said. “You made a mess o’things.”
“Ortiz was conscious when I left.”
“Bit o’ concussion. Might hemorrhage.”
“Hard luck. What about the big man?”
“He’s pissed.”
“And wet?”
“Oh, aye.” He paused. “What you want, boy?”
There it was. “I want to know why. What did my parents ever do to you? Why did you kill them? Why are you trying to kill me?”
He paused, then said, “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” The carrier cut off with a hiss of static.
“Kemp?”
No answer. I tried a few more times, then swore and switched down through the channels.
Kemp’s voice: “—to the map, it’s Mixteca beach, got it?”
“I’m movi
ng.”
“Good, we’re going to quarter the island. He might have a base. Or a supply depot. Had to have some reason for being here.”
I wanted to transmit: To lure you gullible assholes away from people I care about. But that would just tell them to go after Alejandra. Instead I pushed the button down and said, “Best of luck with that, wankers. I’m leaving this town—I ever see any of you again, I’ll do more than hit you with a rock.”
I tossed the radio in the water.
I wanted to check on Alejandra, but I jumped away to Sam’s ranch, sat down by the spring, and ground the heels of my palms into my eyes.
Consuelo checked on Alejandra for me, long distance. She was going to call her directly but I said they might trace that call, so she checked through one of her other nieces.
Alejandra had locked up the agency and, in the dark of the night, joined her current boyfriend at the Santa Cruz marina.
A sixteen-meter sailboat, laying over on a trip from California to Florida via the Panama Canal, left that night, having acquired needed expertise in local waters and language.
“Good,” I said. “Muy bien.”
I was still furious. Two homes gone. But she was safe for now and that lifted serious weight from my shoulders.
“What are you gonna do?” Sam asked. “Seems like jumpin’ is just gonna bring ’em down on you.”
“And if I don’t jump, they also come after me. They didn’t find me by my jumping. It was my teeth. My dental records. I can jump all right. Just can’t be around people when I do. That is, when I jump to a place. Doesn’t hurt to jump away around people. Don’t care if they know where I was. Just where I am—where I stay, where I live.”
Sam considered this for a while. “Okay. I know some places people don’t go. Places that are too rough, too hot, no water.”
I nodded. “That’s the right idea. But not a place you know. Better you should be able to say, ‘I don’t know where he is.’” I kicked at the floor. “They could still trace back to Consuelo from her family. If they tried hard enough. It’s too many people to keep a secret.”
He frowned at that and glanced toward the kitchen where Consuelo was cooking dinner. “Fair enough. Think on it, though. There are places you can go where no one else can, right? I mean, once you’ve been there? Think on that.”
The INS came for Consuelo two days after I left Oaxaca.
Her green card was good—she was ostensibly employed by Sam at over 125 percent of the mandated poverty line—but someone said she was actively engaged in smuggling illegal aliens into the country.
I watched this from the old stable, my fist clenching and unclenching. I thought about jumping into the dusty driveway and snatching her back to Oaxaca, but that was probably no safer. Sam, knowing where I was, held his hand behind his back and shook it side to side.
Later, after they’d left, he wandered back by the stable but didn’t come in. He talked to the air.
“I knew the agent in uniform but those two in the suits—never saw them before, and I’ve met most of the local boys. I think you might want to take a hike, after dark, down the spring wash. There’s an old backpack up in the hayrick—I’ll leave some food and a canteen by the spring. Walk a long way before you jump, right?”
“What about Consuelo?”
He spat in the dirt. “They’ll either deport her or not. I really think they’re trying to flush you. ¿Sabe?”
“I could pull Consuelo out.”
“And then they’d know, wouldn’t they? We know some pretty high-powered immigration lawyers. I’ll get them on it.”
“Shit!”
He spat again. “Yeah. Shit and shinola. But you’d only make it worse.”
I spent the afternoon packing my clothes and my money and a sketchbook. I hid the rest of the stuff under an old feed trough.
I walked three hours, briskly, heading south. I’m pretty sure I was at least six miles away, but I kept walking, anyway.
Where was I to go? They had to have people down in Huatulco. They might still have people around Sam’s place. Probably someone in San Diego, but I had lots of places I could jump to there. They couldn’t be everywhere, could they?
How many of them were there, anyway? I meant the ones who could actually sense when I jumped. I had no idea. A secret organization can only get so big before it stops being a secret, right?
I slept on a bit of sandy ground between two south-facing boulders. I used the bottom of the backpack, the part with my clothes in it, as a pillow, and the boulders were still warm from the day’s sun.
In the morning, after eating and drinking and a pee against a rock, I felt better. I walked another three miles before I decided I was far enough.
I jumped to the east, back to the Empty Quarter, a place I was pretty sure was clear. There was a sheltered crack up the ridge, not big enough for me, but big enough to hide the pack in. It wasn’t easy to get to—wasn’t too high—but there was nasty jumping cholla all around it. I could jump past the spines to a ledge below the crack, and shove the pack in where it was pretty much invisible.
I jumped into San Diego, my old place under the hedge at the elementary school. I figured there was a chance they had someone within range who had felt me arrive, but the odds of them being right there seemed pretty slim.
I figured I was safe, especially if I got out of the neighborhood quickly. It took me a half hour to walk across Balboa Park and into downtown, to the library.
I found what I wanted in a book on mining history. It was in the desert east of the San Diego Mountains—the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Getting there took me two days.
I started by jumping onto a Greyhound bus while the driver was still examining the boarding passengers’ tickets. I sat in the row before the toilet, hunched over, making myself even shorter than I normally was. Fortunately, the bus was only half full and no one wanted to sit near the loo.
The bus was westbound for Tucson and El Paso, but I left it at the turnoff for Plaster City, just west of El Centro. The bus didn’t stop there, but it slowed on a slight hill and I was gone.
I considered hitching from there, but I wanted no trace of my presence in the vicinity—nobody who could remember my face. I worked my way toward the little town after once jumping back to San Diego for Gatorade. Took me two hours to walk the seven miles.
Plaster City gets its name from the U.S. Gypsum plant there. They make wallboard and ship it east and west on regular rail but the interesting thing was the twenty-seven-mile-long narrow-gage railroad they operate to reach their quarry in the Fish Creek Mountains.
And that was where I wanted to go.
I rode one of the empty gypsum haulers up the line and used my T-shirt across my face to keep from breathing the dust. The crusher was up at the quarry and even though they’d dumped the hauler at Plaster City, the swirling dust was still something awful and I kept thinking the doors in the bottom of the car would swing open and dump me under the wheels.
When we got there, I walked away from the quarry, up a ravine, then jumped back to Sam’s and had a long shower, but I was still sneezing up dust that evening.
The next morning I went back to San Diego and changed all my pesos to American at Baja Mex Insurance & Currency Exchange. Next I took the crosstown bus out to a Home Depot and bought rope, flashlights, batteries, and a hard hat. Then it was back to the Fish Creek Mountains.
There were several old mines farther up in the mountains, most of them with danger signs and blocked off by welded steel grates put up by the park service.
Obviously the grates gave me no trouble but most of the mines went back only a little bit, useless to me, or had caved in after a mere twenty feet.
The one that worked was more extensive, a copper/gold mine long abandoned, but much more developed. That one had a vertical shaft, though the platform holding the steampowered lift had long rotted away. An old iron ladder, though, still went down the side, and once I jumped past the grill, I chanced i
t. But I was prepared to jump, if it gave way.
A hundred feet below, horizontal shafts followed played-out veins. One of these had broken through into a natural cavern, perhaps sixty feet across, and air moved from the cavern into the shaft. At the far end of the chamber, a rivulet of water flowed out of the rock face, splashed down through a series of sink-sized basins, and then flowed out again through a crack at the base of a flowstone wall. There was a natural passage that dead-ended in a smaller chamber but the air flowed out of fist-sized cracks near the water wall.
This was good. This would do.
I wasn’t out of money yet—I would’ve been glad to buy the stuff—but there was no way the gun shop would sell a kid smokeless powder. Hell, they didn’t even want me in the shop. As soon as they saw me, they asked, “Where’s your dad, son? You here with an adult?”
I had a choice of getting mad or getting sad.
“Wrong door,” I said, and left.
I got furious.
It helped to be mad at them. Made it easier to do what I needed to do.
They had massive locks and pull-down bars to close the shop up. And this affected me how? I cleaned out their supply of smokeless powder, fifty-three metal cans. Dynamite would’ve been more efficient but that required detonators and all that, and I didn’t know where to get it, much less how to use it.
I stacked the cans in the horizontal shaft leading to the cavern, but at the end next to the old lift shaft. I concentrated on four of the timber pillars supporting roof beams. I used a can opener, punching a hole in each one of the cans. The second-to-last can I laid on its side, and the very last can I used in my best pirate-movie fashion, pouring a trail of powder that ran from the mouth of the can on its side to thirty feet down the tunnel.
Didn’t know it would burn so fast.
My intention had been to jump to the surface, to listen to the explosion, but I flinched away to the Empty Quarter instead, and missed it.
The air was full of dust and chemical smell when I jumped back into the cave, worse than my trip in the gypsum hauler, so I left and didn’t return until the next day.