Back inside the room, she had only a few more tasks to take care of with the camera, and then she changed into her long blue jeans, her black hooded sweatshirt, and her cross trainers. She adjusted Ramos’s web belt so that it fit snugly around her waist. The .45 was a comfort to her in its black nylon holster. It was cocked and locked, with a round chambered, the safety engaged and the hammer back. She looked around the room again, at Basilio passed out on top of the dead professor. With her folding knife, she sliced through the four nylons that still held him to the bed, lest he wind up strangling himself tonight if he tossed and twisted around.
Then it was time to go. She took the bags and the rifle outside and quietly closed the two glass doors behind her. She crouched on the left side of the balcony and lifted the backpack over the low stone wall. A rope made of neckties was already tied to the grab handle on top of the pack. She leaned over on her stomach and lowered it down hand over hand. It slid behind the bushes with just a rustle and nudged the ground, and she let go of the necktie rope, dropping it down as well. She was fully committed now: there was no turning back. Next over the stone parapet went the green canvas zipper bag and the rifle, tied together. She was careful not to let the weapon bang or scrape against the walls on the way down.
One more glance over the right side of the balcony: the guard was still leaning back against the front doors. Nothing left to do now but slide out over the ledge, hanging down by her fingers, and find the first foot holds where the rocky walls joined in a corner between the balcony and the house. The uneven stones made easy hand and toe holds. It was no problem pushing against the two rock walls, spread ninety degrees apart, and inching her way down.
After a few rock-climbing moves, feeling with her fingers and probing with the tips of her shoes, she settled the outside edge of her right foot against the top of a protruding stone. She moved her hands to new positions, shifted her weight to the new foothold—and the tiny ledge crumbled and snapped. She pushed away as she fell so that she wouldn’t scrape her way down the rocky corner, and landed on her back with a loud crash, in the middle of the dry bush.
The wind was knocked out of her; she lay still and clumsily drew the pistol from its holster even while she gasped for air. The dozing front door guard was only yards away on the other side of the window room, and she expected to hear a cry of alarm. After a few moments to recover her breath, she extricated herself from the hedge, rolled and lay prone on her stomach in the space next to the house. She allowed a minute to pass, waiting in the hidden spot for her heart to stop racing, and then she raised herself to a crouch, and continued with her escape.
She bunched up the necktie ropes, and stuffed them into side pockets on both bags. There was just adequate space to move along the wall concealed by the hedge, so she slipped the rifle over her back with its necktie sling, barrel down, and picked up a bag with each hand, and slowly, hunched over and turned sideways, she carried them a yard at a time toward the garages, twenty feet away.
After a few careful, silent minutes, she was at the end of the shrubbery near the first garage. Basilio’s black Jeep was behind this door, but it might as well not have existed. The professor’s little Solaris wagon was only thirty feet away now, across the asphalt driveway. It wasn’t parked in complete darkness, but neither was it bathed in the spotlight shining from the other side of the balcony above the window room.
***
Take a deep breath, shoulders back. Muscles primed. One heavy bag in each hand. She told herself that there was no way to be perfectly, invisibly stealthy now, even wearing dark clothes, with a black hood pulled up over her head. Just do it! She slipped away from the shrubbery by the first garage door, and covered the thirty feet to Professor Johnson’s Solaris in a few seconds, stopping on the far side, away from the front door of the house and the driveway gate. The driver’s side door was unlocked, thank God. There was no need to fumble with the key.
She pushed her heavy backpack over into the passenger side foot well. The rifle and the other bag went into the back, and she slipped in behind the wheel. She closed the door, firmly but quietly. No alarms, no guards, no notice at all…so far. She unfastened the web belt, and took the pistol out of its holster, sliding it into the gap between her right thigh and the center console. If she had to, if they stopped her at the closed gate, she’d shoot the guards and try to open it herself. But with only eight bullets in the .45…the odds were very long.
She found the keyhole on the side of the steering wheel and turned on the car. There was no motor noise, but the digital dashboard display instantly lit up. Softly glowing red numbers and letters informed her that the battery bank was at 27% charge. After a few fumbling moments, she found the anemic headlights and turned them on, sending their light away from the house. She pushed the centerline shifter into reverse, and gently depressed the accelerator pedal. The car eased back as she turned the wheel to head out the driveway. She could handle it. Electric or not, a car was a car.
The guards, having recently opened the gate for Wayne Parker’s entourage, were ready when they saw another vehicle approaching. On the way out, the guard shack was on the right side of the driveway, away from her. Two bereted Milicianos with slung M-16 rifles were standing together by it, smoking and having a conversation. They had been opening the gate for departing guests for several hours, and they didn’t hesitate for one more. The automatic twin gates pivoted outward and she was through, heading out of the Sandia Heights neighborhood toward Tramway Road, the miniature electric car easily getting up to 50 miles an hour rolling down hill.
Once on level ground, southbound on Tramway, the display informed her that she was at 22% charge, and the car could travel thirty more miles at the current power output. Well, Brian lived only five miles away, so this would be plenty. After taking down his “parents,” Ranya’s evolving plan now called for her to escape with Brian in one of their gasoline-powered vehicles. She could ditch the professor’s crummy electric car somewhere near Brian’s house.
With luck, if all of them were home, she could break in and catch his two “parents” together in bed. Alexandro Garabanda was an FBI agent, so without a doubt he would have some type of a security system in place, and of course, he would have a weapon close at hand. It wouldn’t be easy, it would take some study, take some care. Perhaps she could lure him outside with some type of ruse. She would have to see his house, and study its layout. Until then, all she could do was think up hypothetical situations, and plan to use the element of surprise to the maximum.
22
Sunday June 29
Professor Johnson’s electric car was painfully slow and it was running out of battery power, but it did have one superb quality: it was virtually silent. No one, no matter how alert, could hear it as it prowled around the Glenwood Hills subdivision in the early Sunday morning hours. Only a few of the local streetlights were functioning, which was another plus during Ranya’s stealthy reconnaissance. The little wagon might have been detected if someone was already outside, but there was no one. Camino Del Cielo was abandoned, it was hers alone. She had no difficulty finding the Garabanda’s house—a single dim porch light illuminated the number 4875 near the front door.
Many of the houses in the neighborhood appeared to be unoccupied. There was an obviously vacant home diagonally across the street from 4875 Camino Del Cielo. The front yard was knee high with dry weeds, and there was not even a hint of light from inside. No cars were parked at the curb out front, or in the driveway. The place was worth a look on foot. The garage door was rolled open and the space within was empty. She checked it with a little penlight she had taken from the top of Basilio’s dresser. She found a broken ladder, canvas drop-cloths, empty paint cans and other trash littering the interior. After clearing away sufficient open space, she backed the Solaris into the garage, parking it just far enough inside to be able to observe the Garabanda residence from the driver’s seat.
By the collection of junk and debris in the garage aro
und her, it appeared that home renovations had been aborted mid-stream. Was the owner tying to sell the house when it had been foreclosed, or was it another “walk away,” a product of the broken economy? She remembered the older black couple in the RV, who had given her a lift in Texas. They said they had given up on trying to live in Houston and walked out on their mortgage, giving their house back to the bank.
A white plastic bucket in the front corner of the garage was identical to the one used to throw gasoline on the man after the rally. She stared at the empty five-gallon pail, so white that it appeared to be glowing in the darkness. She remembered the bucket being raised above the man chained to the tree; she saw the gasoline poured over him and the match arcing through the air. Ranya shuddered at the memory of him bursting into flames, and again she heard his screams. She had stared at his burning face, it seemed that he had looked into her eyes, but there was no way to know what the man had seen through his veil of flames.
What a day of excruciating memories it had been, beginning with the jolting shock of Deleon’s assassination twenty feet from her, followed by the man being burned against the tree, and then the radio man’s dragging death, flayed alive while tied to the back of a Suburban. In the quiet and dark of the night, the misery brought by these painful memories filled her with deep regret at having left Basilio Ramos alive.
After the loss of her mother to cancer, the loss of her father to the federal assassins, the loss of Brad Fallon in the river, the loss of her son only minutes after his birth, and the loss of five years of her life in the camps, Ranya had thought that she had lost the ability to experience normal human feelings. Nevertheless, today had been too much even for her armor-plated soul. Today’s new store of pain penetrated to the remaining core of her humanity, and found a tender spot to stab with a burning poker, and she wept with her face in her hands for a long time.
Eventually she returned to the present, staring at glowing red and amber LED lights. The soft dashboard display lights told her that the Solaris now had only 12% battery power remaining. The car was a two-seater, configured like a micro station wagon. She guessed that all of the space in the back beneath the small cargo area was given over to batteries. The car was not going to recharge from sunlight any time soon, that was a given. At best, even a small urban commuter like this one was going to get only a supplemental boost from the black solar panels contoured into the hood and the roof. She assumed the car had a cable for recharging from household power, and she found an orange cord rolled up on a spool, inside of where a gas cap might have been. When she put the plug into the garage’s outlet, she only confirmed that the house power was off.
After failing to find an outlet with power, she examined the garage by penlight, especially where it joined the rest of the house. There was an interior door leading from the garage into the house, and it had only a doorknob lock. The houses in Glenwood all appeared to be variations on the same layout, so she guessed the Garabanda’s house would also have a similar interior garage door.
The house where her son was living lay at an angle to her left across the street. After traveling hundreds of miles to find him, Brian was now sleeping only a hundred feet away. The thought crossed Ranya’s mind to just walk across the street and ring the doorbell, gun in hand. There was no car in front of the Garabanda residence, but their garage door was rolled down, so their car might have been inside.
After watching for an hour from the empty garage, she slipped out to do a walking recon around the Garabanda’s house. The .45 went under her belt, hidden beneath her black sweatshirt. Instead of a grass lawn, their small front yard was covered in pebbles, interspersed with small desert plants and bushes. After gingerly stepping from the sidewalk into the dark space between the Garabanda house and that of his neighbor on the right, a floodlight on the roof snapped on, and she had to hop back and quickly walk up the street and out of sight. She knew that these motion-activated lights often gave false alarms, but still she wondered if it had alerted Special Agent Garabanda.
A gunfight on his front sidewalk was not what she had in mind. After returning to her hiding place in the garage, she decided to wait for dawn and signs of activity. If the Garabanda family went to church, she thought she might boldly cross the street and ambush them at gunpoint when they backed their car out of their garage. She could take them unaware, carjack them and climb into the backseat with the barrel of her .45 leveled at their heads. If they didn’t go to church…well, she would have to think of another ruse to gain entrance to their house.
Once she managed to overcome and subdue them, she would escape in the Garabanda’s own gasoline-powered vehicle. She tried to guess what type of a car an FBI agent might have in his garage. Perhaps a big sedan, or an SUV? She wondered why no second car was parked on their driveway, or on the street in front of their house. The homes on this street had only single-car garages, but surely, the Garabanda’s had two cars? Or had the difficult economy forced them to economize?
In the abstract, her mission had seemed so uncomplicated. Find this address, grab her child and leave. Now, back in the Solaris and looking across the street at his house, it seemed anything but simple. She wondered if Brian would scream and struggle, and how she would deal with him if he did. It wouldn’t be easy to subdue the two adults, while gaining control of her five-year-old son.
At four in the morning she switched on the car radio, figuring the extra electrical output would be minimal. The AM band was preset to a Spanish language station, which dramatically announced itself as ¡Radio Regeneración, La Voz de la Revolución! Two men were discussing the assassination of the governor, and the Anglo fugitive who was the main suspect. The alleged sniper’s name meant nothing to her, but she sat straight up when they mentioned the rifle that had been found in the Regent Hotel behind an ice machine: a Remington, in 7mm magnum caliber!
On Wednesday at the rifle range west of the city, she had sighted-in three scoped bolt-action hunting rifles, and she could recall each of them in detail. One of them was a Remington 700, in 7mm magnum. Ramos had insisted the rifles be zeroed in at only 200 yards, and she mentally estimated the distance from the stage, across the Civic Plaza, to the Regent Hotel. She would never forget the sight of the blood and tissue jetting out of Governor Deleon’s back. Now she had little doubt that she had personally fired the killing rifle, that she had zeroed it in and readied it for that single fatal shot.
It was time to get out of New Mexico, way past time.
***
The porch light illuminating the number 4875 gradually faded, as the dawn spread over Albuquerque. Morning twilight was a long and gradual process, with the rising sun still hidden behind the Sandia Mountains. The Garabanda’s house had an angled roof topped with red Spanish tiles. Like all of the homes in the neighborhood, its stucco surfaces were painted in shades of tan and beige. About half of the homes on the street had grass front lawns, and half seemed to be using pebbles instead, like 4875. She’d never seen pebble “lawns” before, and guessed that the cost of watering real grass might be exorbitant, given the dry local climate. Some of the homes on Camino Del Cielo were two story or split-levels, but most, including the Garabanda’s, were one story high. If she had to go in and take over the house at gunpoint, its single-story layout would make the task much easier.
There was a one-car garage on the left side of the Garabanda’s house, and Ranya presumed that one of their cars was inside it. Again she wondered where their other car was, assuming that they had a second car. Perhaps it was in the shop, or perhaps, she thought hopefully, Garabanda was away on FBI business. It would greatly simplify grabbing Brian, if she had to deal with only his phony mother. If their primary vehicle was now parked inside of their garage, as she assumed, then she could get Brian into the car and under control before taking off with him. The most difficult part of the snatch could be done out of sight, avoiding any ugly scenes on the street in view of the neighbors. She could leave Brian’s bogus mom tied up inside the house,
or take her along and dump her off in some remote place on the way out of New Mexico.
Ranya went over her primary immediate action plan. If the garage door opened and their car backed outside, and it looked like they were heading to church, she would wait until they returned. When they did, she would quickly walk across the street and follow the car inside the garage while the door was still rolled open, and jump them at gunpoint. If they didn’t go to church but she saw them inside, she considered various ruses for getting into the house. She could ring their doorbell with a clipboard, like a polltaker or petition signature gatherer. Did people still do things like that in Albuquerque, she wondered? Would they be too suspicious to open their door to a stranger, even a woman on Sunday morning?
She imagined that they would open their door for a young woman on their doorstep on a Sunday morning. Why wouldn’t they? Once the door was opened, she could use her .45 to force her way inside and subdue them. She ran through various scenarios and permutations of scenarios.
What if the wife opened the door, but the husband was in another room? What if she screamed and alerted him? She went over possible variations until she couldn’t think anymore. Finally, she decided that she would just have to rely on her instincts when the opportunity came.
***
“Mommy, I gotta go to the bathroom.” The five-year-old boy was buckled into a child’s car seat, diagonally behind the driver on the passenger side. Boxes, bins and bundles were packed into almost every other cubic foot of the vehicle.
“Brian, we just left, and I asked you if you had to go.” His mother was driving her mid-sized SUV. She was wearing faded jeans, a gray jersey and running shoes, ready for a long road trip.
“But I didn’t have to go then!”
“That was only five minutes ago.”
Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista Page 38