Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  Lone-R considered Calypso, with her long hair in a wild aura around her haggard face, then looked at his feet and nodded.

  “Okay.”

  He recounted the entire six hours—the questions Cat had asked; her responses; Father Keat’s question, whether she simply might be hallucinating everything; and Cat’s reply that she would not have been able to give an account consistent with her first interrogation if she were.

  “And you cried a lot.”

  “I did?”

  “Buckets.”

  “But I didn’t cry in the cave. At least, not that much. Only in the tube.”

  “You said that, but Cat said it was because the scopolamine touches down into the subconscious, so you get a person’s true responses to a situation.”

  “So I was really just a big baby.”

  “No. So you kept goin’ in spite of overwhelmin’ odds. You gots to remember—these guys have been there and done that. Shit! They’ll probably make you an honorary Ghost!”

  There was a knock at the door and Lone-R called, “Who’s there?”

  “Me.” It was the unmistakable voice of Father Keat.

  “You alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Give the password.”

  “Holy shit!”

  Lone-R lifted the bar on the door. Father Keat bustled in and gestured with his head for Lone-R to close the door fast. He had replaced his cassock with camouflage and he carried an assault rifle with a handgun holstered at his side. “We’ve got to get you out of here,” he began without preamble. “All hell’s breaking loose.” This observation was punctuated by a distance volley of shots. “El Lobo’s crew is holed up on the third floor. They think you killed him and they want revenge.”

  “They didn’t believe my testimony?”

  “Lady, you don’t understand. In the bad guy world, if you even imagine that someone has done you wrong, you do them. Otherwise, you lose respect.”

  “There’s a problem. I still can’t see very well. And I don’t think I can walk down the trail. I’m kind of shaky.”

  “That’s not a problem.” He turned to Lone-R. “Get her out to the back courtyard, pronto.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lone-R lifted the bar on the door and Father Keat was halfway through, when he stopped and turned back to Calypso.

  “Listen,” he said earnestly. “You did a helluva thing these last couple of days. And I don’t just mean El Lobo.”

  “All I’ve done is stir up trouble for you.”

  “No. You’ve flushed out the rats. Every organization’s got ‘em. Now, we do a little rat hunt is all. This place needed a good cleaning up.”

  He hesitated, then shoved the door closed and strode across the room. Taking Calypso’s hand in his, he bent at the waist and laid a courtly kiss on its back. “You’re a helluva broad. I’ve had four wives in all and all of ‘em put together couldn’t make half of you.”

  He dropped her hand, ran to the door, peered out as he drew his weapon, and was gone, leaving Calypso with her mouth agape.

  Lone-R grinned. “What’d I tell you?”

  He came across the room to her. “Madame,” he said, bowing at the waist, and offering her his arm. She hung onto it and he pulled her to her feet. “Can you walk?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Then let’s get you out of here. Pronto.”

  11

  Lone-R led Calypso through a labyrinth of corridors, past what were, by obvious smells, the kitchen and refectory. They hurried by a large room where a small cadre of men was practicing tai chi, and out a tall set of double doors at the back of the building.

  They were in a courtyard paved in river cobble set on edge for drainage. Across the way, a hundred feet distant, stood another stone building with large, sliding wooden doors.

  As Calypso and Lone-R crossed the yard, two men were engaged in wrestling the doors open. Then they ducked inside, and Calypso got a glimpse of some kind of machine, glimmering back in the shadows. In seconds, the men emerged, pushing a small, sleek helicopter with someone already at the controls.

  As Lone-R pulled Calypso toward the chopper, the turbine kicked on with a scream and the rotors began to turn.

  “This is it,” Lone-R yelled. “Where you and me say goodbye.” He yanked open the passenger-side door.

  Stunned by the sudden change of events, Calypso threw her arms around his neck in a brief, fierce hug.

  “You’re a good man, Lone-R. Don’t you ever let anyone tell you otherwise,” she shouted over the increasing whine of the turbine.

  She stepped up into the chopper and reached down to Lobo, who was cowering in the wind of the rotors, his silver and black fur thrashing.

  “Come on, boy. Let’s go!”

  The terrified animal slunk on its belly to the door, and Lone-R boosted him in and slammed the door. He stepped back and raised his hand in farewell as the chopper immediately began to rise.

  The craft took a dip to the right and as it did, the windshield suddenly crackled into a spider web pattern.

  “Shit!” the pilot exclaimed.

  They were thirty feet off the ground now and as they banked hard right, she saw Lone-R rolling for cover into the stone outbuilding. As they spun up and away, she caught a brief glimpse of faces at the third floor windows of the monastery, saw the muzzle flash of their guns, and heard the ping of bullets hitting the fuselage.

  Then they were screaming over the terra cotta-tiled roof and the abyss of the canyon fell away underneath them. Red cliffs embraced the small craft parenthetically, the river uncoiled its aqua length, and the entirety looked as peaceful as if none of the foregoing mayhem had happened at all.

  §

  “You okay?” It was the pilot, and Calypso, who was still straining to see the last of the monastery, turned to him and was amazed to see Cat at the controls.

  “Yes. I think so. Are you?”

  “Oh, hell yeah. Takes more than that to even get my blood pressure up.”

  “I didn’t know you had a helicopter. It’s a nice one—or was.”

  “It’s a Sikorsky S-434 turbine. State-of-the-art. But it needed a few bullet holes to add character. We were kind of embarrassed by how pristine it was.”

  “Why do you need one?”

  “You can ask that, when it just saved your skin? Besides, when we’re not rescuing fair maidens, we’ve got business to transact. And we fly into El Paso now and again to shop, too. Where do you think that bologna in your sandwich came from? This is our glorified shopping cart.”

  Calypso busied herself, arranging her feet so that Lobo could curl more comfortably on the floor. In doing so, she spotted a machine gun, mounted on the firewall.

  “Shopping. I see,” she said drily. “Are you taking me to El Paso then?”

  “Oh, hell no. Jimmy the Butcher’s got friends there.”

  Calypso waited for him to say more, but he flew calmly on in silence.

  “Where then?” she asked finally.

  “Someplace no one’s going to look for you. To a friend of mine, who’ll take you to another friend.”

  “And then what?”

  Calypso’s heart was sinking with the sudden realization she had no place to go, no one to return to. She had no money, no credit card, no ID, and deeply regretted leaving her pack behind in the cave. All she had was the clothing on her back and a guardian wolf with the generic name of Lobo. How far could she get with that?

  As if reading her mind, Cat said, “My friend will fix you up. That’s his specialty—getting people established across the border.”

  He threw a stern glance at Calypso. “You do realize your time on this side of the border is over, right?”

  Calypso’s eyes filled with tears. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “Well, start thinking.”

  Calypso bent to bury her fingers into Lobo’s ruff, her head turned to the window. She didn’t want Cat to see the tears that insisted themselves on her
, despite her effort to suppress them.

  “Go ahead and cry,” he said gruffly. “You’ve got a right.”

  Tears brimmed over and streamed down her cheeks.

  “Where’s my friend, Hill?” she asked suddenly. “Did you kill him?”

  “Oh, hell no. Why would we do that?”

  “Then where is he?”

  “I put him on Toé and gave him some strong suggestions about just having had a nice parting from you and Javier at your ranch. Then we took him to Chihuahua and put him on a plane. He’s probably just getting over jet lag in Paris, about now.”

  Calypso’s shoulders sagged with relief. “Thank God,” she breathed.

  Cat snorted and said sardonically, “No, actually you can thank me.”

  §

  The chopper flew low through twisting canyons, always northwestward. They crossed the summit of the Sierra and skimmed along its steep western slope. At last, Calypso felt the craft beginning to descend. Looking down, she saw a little shack nestled in a fold of hills amid scrawny oaks, black rocks, and brush.

  “End of the line,” Cat said as he brought the bird down in a dirt yard.

  Vortices of dust rose around them as the rotors slowed and finally came to a stop. When the dust had cleared a bit, Calypso could see a grizzled man standing in the door of the cabin. Cat shoved his chin toward him.

  “There’s your next connection.”

  He opened his door, slid out and went to talk to the man, while Calypso got herself and Lobo out on the other side. The two men approached her.

  “This is Rat,” Cat said. “As in Desert.”

  Calypso reached to shake a grimed, leathery hand. Rat stood about four foot ten, by her reckoning. He was wearing rough white cotton pants of a Mexican peasant, although he was clearly Anglo, a grungy singlet stained coffee brown, and scuffed and sloping huaraches. She could just see eyes of piercing blue above a bulbous nose, within a cloud of wildly curling, desert tan hair and beard. He could be, she thought, anywhere from twenty-five to seventy.

  “He’ll take you on the next leg,” Cat said. “I gotta get back. I’m missing all the fun.”

  “I can pay you all for your trouble,” Calypso stammered. “Once I get my bank account straightened out…”

  Cat held up a restraining hand.

  “It’s on the house,” he said. “We haven’t had this much excitement since the last time. We were getting stale. We owe you.”

  He reached a large and powerful hand to her shoulder, pulled Calypso to him and kissed her soundly on the lips. Then he turned and trotted back to the chopper.

  Just as he was pulling the door shut, Calypso called, “Cat!” With his eyes trained on her, she smiled broadly, threw him a kiss, and mouthed “Thank you!”

  His head jerked with a chuckle, he flashed a salute, the turbine whined and in a suffocating cloud of dust, he was airborne. In seconds, he and the helicopter were gone, with only the hammering echo of its rotors rebounding from the dry hillsides.

  §

  “So” Rat said when the dust had settled enough to speak. He looked her up and down. “You ready to roll?”

  Calypso looked around her. Besides the decrepit shack, there was a lean-to filled with firewood and hanging strings of drying chilies, another sway-backed shed, and endless miles of scrub.

  “Where?” she asked, bewildered. “How?”

  “Aha!” Rat exclaimed.

  He held up his forefinger, cautioning her to wait. Like an unwashed leprechaun, he bounded to the shed and dragged the door open. Back in the shadows, Calypso could just make out a large grill grinning at her, with chrome teeth secured by a fat lower lip of chrome bumper.

  Rat disappeared into the shed. There was a moment’s silence, then the thunk of a heavy car door closing and the deep, throaty roar of a big engine kicking over and revving.

  Suddenly, out the door of the shed flew a huge powder blue boat—a 1960 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz, almost twenty feet long. The ragtop was back, revealing plump white leather tuck-and-roll seats. The two-door convertible throbbed and shimmied from the power of its engine and from the blasting of its tape deck, already scorching the air with the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black.”

  “Hop in,” said Rat, deadpan. “Three hundred forty-five horses at your service,” and he tipped a nonexistent hat. His head barely showed above the dash.

  Calypso’s eyes swept the car from its massive hood, over six feet in width, along its bullet-shaped sides to its pointed tail fins. The only anomaly was that its sleek body was jacked up on a massive undercarriage and oversized, knobby tires that still sported elegant, crest-embossed Cadillac wheel covers.

  She opened the passenger side door, pulled the white leather seat forward, got Lobo safely installed on the back seat, and then slipped into the front. She groped for seat belts but Rat just shook his head.

  “Not in this model,” he said.

  Gripping the wheel and ramming the four-speed transmission into gear, Rat slammed his foot to the accelerator. The car dug in like a racehorse in the starting gate and then with a tremendous lurch, fountains of dirt from the rear wheels and a graceful S-shaped fishtail, it leapt forward, and charged out of the yard.

  Calypso shrieked as they appeared about to crash straight into an outcropping of black rocks, but Rat hauled on the steering wheel and wrenched them onto a narrow track that was more rock and rut than drivable surface. Down this he tore, apparently with no sense that modulation of the accelerator was possible.

  Rat reached a small, grimy hand to the knob and cranked the tape deck to maximum volume. “I see a line of cars and they’re all painted black…” wailed two built-in speakers on the back deck.

  Wind whipped Calypso’s hair and she hauled it in, twisted it into a rough rope and coiled it into a knot at the nape of her neck. The locket hammered against her chest in response to the jolts of the road, like a metronome metering the rhythm of fate.

  “I could not foresee this thing happening to you…” the Stones sang, and Lobo threw his head back and howled in agreement.

  Rat drove by looking through the spokes of the steering wheel but this did not diminish his exuberance. Wind flattened his bushy tan hair against his skull and streamed it behind him like a snarl of fishing line. His beard pressed against grinning teeth and his short fingers, sun-creased and lined black with dirt, drummed time on the perforated leather of the wheel.

  On and on, down the endless desert track they roared, trailing a tall rooster tail of dust. The autumn sun spread flat, white light over rough tracts of blue-gray shrub and jagged, misshapen stone. The Stones sang, Lobo howled, and Calypso hung on, fearing for both body and sanity.

  Bushes growing on the verge of the almost impassable track scraped along the sides of the car, shrieking. A blast of fall wind sent a cloud of dead oak leaves into the air as they whizzed through a small copse. Leaves pelted them and so did “Gimme Shelter.”

  “Oh, a storm is threat’ning/My very life today/If I don’t get some shelter/Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away,” Mick Jagger wailed.

  “War, children, it’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away.” The relentless, driving rhythm underpinned the contrapuntal madness of the car’s lurching frame, its pounding shock absorbers and hammering leaf springs.

  They raced across a desert slope, the Cadillac tipping almost forty-five degrees. Calypso, on the downhill side, looked into a nest of black, jagged boulders, like a mouthful of rotten teeth waiting to crush and mangle.

  “Ooh, see the fire is sweepin’/Our very street today/Burns like a red coal carpet/Mad bull lost your way…”

  Her mind was a blur of images, backing wildly through recent chronology, as if to create a drag that would slow forward momentum—the chopper’s windshield suddenly bursting into a shattered web; the smoking timbers of Rancho Cielo; the face of El Lobo as he was sucked down…

  “The flood is threat’ning/My very life today/Gimme, gimme shelter/Or I’m gonna fade away…”
/>
  They plunged from the slope down into a dry arroyo of sand and boulders. With a tremendous jolt, the convertible high-centered on a rock but Rat pressed even harder on the accelerator. The vehicle kicked up a fountain of sand, dragged its scraping undercarriage off the rock, and shot up the other side like a charging bull. Calypso saw one of its elegant wire- and crest-decked hubcaps roll off down the wash.

  “War, children, it’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away…”

  §

  Rat drove until the Cadillac ran out of gas. It was late afternoon and they had descended from the hills into flat desert flecked with low, widely spaced bushes of dusty gray-green, and small cacti with very long black thorns. The track, while still rutted and rough and only one car wide, now had two distinct wheel tracks, signs of increased usage.

  Rat coasted to a stop and immediately hopped out to open the trunk. Calypso unfolded her legs, which felt drunkenly unsteady on the sandy soil. Lobo hopped over the side of the car and trotted off into the desert.

  The capacious trunk, Calypso saw at a glance, was filled with sloshing red plastic gas cans, several large caliber carbines using high velocity magnum cartridges, a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, and a case of dynamite. An open metal pail of blasting caps listed beside it, along with two detached huevos del toro, drum magazines for the AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles she glimpsed, shoved into the rear of the trunk. She closed her eyes and looked away.

  She walked out into the desert to get away from Rat’s endless, off-key humming, as he slurped gas into the tank. “It’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away/It’s just a shot away…”

  After the racket, the near silence of the desert was almost hallucinogenic. A cold wind rattled the dry limbs of the scrub. A small bird cheeped repeatedly somewhere close at hand. A hawk cried, up near the sun. The thrumming of branches in the wind seemed to repeat the urgent rhythm of the song’s chorus.

  She searched the horizon with dry, reddened eyes looking for any sign of civilization and saw none. She scanned the ground, hoping to find something—an interesting stone, a shard of glass, a bit of rusted metal—to act as talisman, but there was only yellow sand.