“Not a problem. Now, if that’s it, I’d like to get back to my book.”
* * *
The lights came on in the cell block at eight o’clock. James, who’d been in bed, staring at the ceiling, sat up and slipped his Pumas on. The cell doors unlatched and rusting hinges creaked as they fell open. He walked to his barred door and looked out into the corridor. Prisoners stepped from their cells and lined up. He followed their lead and stepped out of his cell. The man behind him muttered an insult in Spanish, but he ignored it. The last thing he wanted to do in his current situation was make enemies. He’d fight if he had to, but he’d neither start one nor be goaded into one. He had no friends here, which meant everybody was a potential enemy, and it was best to make as few as possible.
After all the inmates were lined up in the corridor, two guards led them to the cafeteria, a large room lined with pressed-wood tables and benches. Guards stood in each corner, pepper spray and saps tucked into their belts, eyes scanning.
James followed the line to the back of the cafeteria. Several prisoners stood on the other side of a long stainless steel serving counter. He picked up a damp tray and plastic utensils—a fork and a spoon and a butter knife—and slid his tray along the front of the counter while those on the other side used ice cream scoops to slop thin oatmeal, eggs scrambled with stale corn chips, and burned refried beans onto his tray’s various compartments. As he reached the end of the counter someone tossed two mold-covered tortillas onto his tray.
He picked up a half-pint carton of expired milk and turned to face the room.
Against the far wall he saw a table at which only two people were sitting. He walked to the table and sat with his back to the wall. He wanted to be able to face the room and the men in it. You didn’t turn your back to a roomful of killers and rapists.
He looked down at his food. It smelled sour, just a little bit off. He peeled the mold away from the edge of one of his tortillas, spooned beans into it. He was very hungry. This was his first meal since breakfast the day before, and breakfast had consisted of nothing more than a Snickers, but the smell in here, the smell coming off what he’d been served, made him nauseous. He took a bite, chewed. The tortilla tasted like mold. The beans tasted like the burnt black film at the bottom of a pot left on the stove too long.
But while they tasted bad, they also reminded him of fishing trips he used to go on with his dad. They’d head out on Friday night, after his father was done at the car dealership, and make their way to one of the few good fishing rivers they could reach before dark. Find a nice spot and set up their tents. Dad would start a campfire and they’d cook beans in a thin metal pan and hot dogs skewered on wire coat hangers. Share a six-pack of Pabst and talk in the quiet darkness. He’d once told Dad about a recent breakup he’d gone through.
“Did you love her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you didn’t. You’d know if you did. It wouldn’t be a question. So let her go. You’ll probably end up being with a lot of women in your lifetime, and most of them you’ll have to let go. You want to leave them better off than you found them, if you can, but mostly they don’t matter in the long run. Until you find the one who does. What matters is how you feel when you’re out in the middle of nowhere with nobody but yourself to keep you company. How you feel in the darkness with the crickets chirping around you and not a single other human within earshot. People are never fully themselves when they’re in the company of others. They try to be the person they think others want them to be. But you want to be able to sit alone on the river’s edge and feel peace. That’s how you know, no matter what else happens, that you’ll be okay. Everybody’s life is cluttered with so much white noise—work, car payments and electric bills, obligations to friends and lovers, goddamn idiot television—that they forget themselves. They grind out their existence without stopping to reflect. You don’t want to be like that, James. You don’t want your soul to fill with the static of an un-tuned television. No matter what else is going on in your life, you need to be able to find occasional quiet moments. You need to find—” Dad burped, took a swallow of his beer, and laughed at himself. “You get my point. You need to let her go and move on. Your hot dog is burning.”
In the morning, they got up with the sunrise, put on their wading boots, and walked out into the water. They liked to fly-fish, so they generally stood about twenty or thirty yards from one another, which they did on this morning too, their lines whipping and twirling over their heads in large flowing arcs. Though they both fished for white bass, James used a nine-foot, seven-weight rod with a fast tip while Dad used his soft-tip trout rod.
On this morning, James tied a white and gray clouser on the end of his line. Stood with the river flowing around his calves, the only sounds in his ears the water rushing around him and the gentle whistle of his fly rod whipping back and forth, and he emptied his mind and moved rhythmically, listening to himself from the inside, and he felt peace, and despite his recent breakup—and how he’d been feeling about it—he knew he’d be okay.
For just a moment, sitting in this jailhouse cafeteria, he felt that peace again—and all because of burnt refried beans with an aftertaste like cigarette ash.
The static in his soul went silent.
Then he looked up, suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling he was being watched. Several of the other inmates were glancing at him between bites of food. But that didn’t concern him. He was new here. They’d want to know what he was about. Whether he was hard enough to survive. Whether he might be of some value in one way or another.
But there was one man, a thin guy in thick black-framed glasses, who was sitting still as stone three tables down, laced-together hands resting on the wood surface in front of him, staring at James with eyes big as Ping-Pong balls, and that man did concern him. His face was expressionless. Nothing about him to indicate he might be dangerous. But there was a malevolence about him. Nothing James could pinpoint, nothing he could put his finger on, but there all the same. Hanging all around him like a dense fog. If humanity could be looked at as a single organism, this man would be a cancer cell.
James would have to be wary, would have to be ready.
He continued to eat, keeping his own face placid.
But while he ate, he dropped both his plastic knife and his fork to the polished concrete floor. Let them lie there while he continued to eat with his spoon. After several minutes, he reached down to scratch his ankle. Shoved the plastic utensils into his shoe. Sat up again. Ate some more, the food settling like hot stones in his gut. He wanted to come across as a man without a care in the world. The men in here were animals. Dangerous. And he was one of them, the same kind of man, so he knew they could sense weakness—a slight limp, a nervous look in the eye, beads of sweat on the forehead—and as soon as they did, they’d attack. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Hungry animals didn’t walk away from easy meat.
But there was one hungry animal, in particular, that concerned him.
He glanced at the bespectacled man. The man stared back, smiled a humorless smile, and raised his hand in a friendly wave.
James took another bite.
* * *
Later, in his cell, he melted the plastic utensils together. Stood on the desk chair, broke the light bulb, and used the heat from the burning filament. It took a while, but finally the black plastic softened and sagged like hot wax. He twisted the two pieces together. It burned his fingertips, but he didn’t care. If an attack came, and he believed one would, he needed to be prepared. After the two pieces had become one, he dipped the malformed hunk of plastic into the toilet to cool it. He sat on his cot and worked to sharpen it into a weapon, filing it against the cinder block wall.
It took about an hour.
* * *
James stood in the yard, back against a chain-link fence, sun beating down on him. Not a cloud in sight, just pure blue—like a stretched bolt of raw denim—and that white sun melting
the world below. Sweat beaded and rolled down his face.
He had his hands clasped behind his back, plastic utensil shiv tucked up into his sleeve.
He watched the other men in the yard, at least a hundred in all, maybe a quarter of the population. Sitting on bleachers doing nothing. Playing soccer, feet kicking up orange dust that swirled and twisted around their calves. Lifting weights. Playing basketball on a dirt court with a rusted hoop nailed to a plywood backboard. He watched them warily, waiting for something to happen, just like he’d done yesterday. Nothing had happened then, and perhaps nothing would happen now, but he needed to be ready. It was the only way he had a chance. If he let himself forget, if his mind drifted, that was the exact moment someone would choose to attack.
He was watching the entire yard but his real focus was on the basketball game. A three-on-three half-court battle full of shoving and shit-talk, violent blocks and panicked scrambles for knocked-away balls.
Several men stood on the sidelines, waiting for their turn to play. One of them was the man he had noticed in the cafeteria yesterday. He had seen him several times since. He stood stiff, and rather than watching the game, he appeared to be watching James. Looking right past the game and the dust swirling through the air.
One of the players threw a brick and it bounced off the side of the rim toward James. Came flying at him, this brown leather ball, covered in dust, underinflated. Hit the dirt, bounced left, hit again, bounced right, and rolled.
He put out his foot and stopped the ball.
When he looked up again, he saw the man in the black-framed glasses walking toward him. Brisk, efficient movements, friendly face.
James didn’t believe the benevolent expression, the man had been staring him down for two days now, so he readied himself.
When the guy arrived, he bent down, sat on his haunches, and grabbed the ball from under the Puma that’d brought it to a stop.
“Thank you,” the man said. “My game’s next and I’m hoping I get a chance to play before we all have to—”
He came up while he talked and suddenly he was swinging his arm. James saw the blur of movement. Something in the motherfucker’s hand. He brought his left arm up to block the blow while letting the shiv slip from his right sleeve. It dropped into his palm and he swung it around toward the soft meat of the lower back.
The man spun himself toward James, rolling inside the strike, and elbowed James in the stomach. It was such a quick, efficient, and unexpected move that James didn’t have time to prepare for it. The air rushed out of him. He started to double over, stepping backward, pressed against the fence. But as he bent at the waist, he saw the other man preparing another swing, ready to bring it down on his back like a hammer blow, so he lunged forward like a bull, pushing off the fence, slamming his head into the gut, and the two men fell to the dirt, his attacker on his back.
Dust flew up around them, twisting and swirling on the motion-disturbed air.
Other men in the yard began to shout.
James swung again, putting his shiv into the motherfucker’s left side, just under the ribs. It slid in with almost no resistance, but James grunted from the force of his swing. He thought that was why he grunted. But then he felt a deep pain in his left arm and warm, sticky liquid running down his chest. He looked down and saw a shiv jutting from his jumpsuit like a coat hook. Blood spreading out around it.
He tried to stand, succeeded, and looked down at the bespectacled man in the dirt below him. James was breathing hard, and in pain, but he said, “I bet that didn’t go the way you planned.”
There was shouting to his right.
He turned to see guards rushing at him, their saps drawn.
He held up his empty hands. “It’s over,” he said.
One of the guards whacked him in the leg with a stick and he dropped to his knees. Another whacked him in the back of the head.
6
Gael Morales stepped out of Alejandro Rocha’s house and into the desert heat. He walked past the suited guards standing on either side of the front door, made his way down the stairs, and along the cobblestone driveway to the garage. Leaning on its kickstand behind one of Rocha’s cars—a red Tesla he almost never touched—was the 1969 Honda CL350 Gael had spent a month converting into a café racer, though, he had to admit, it wasn’t much for speed. If he was on a good downslope, he might be able to do the ton, but horizontal he couldn’t hit anything above ninety-five. He could have spent the same on a used Ninja 636, had fewer mechanical issues and more speed, but there was something to be said for style. Ninjas were ugly bikes. There was also something to be said for getting your hands dirty, and older bikes tended to be easier to work on. When he had the time, he’d put in a new exhaust system and re-jet the carbs, which he believed would get the bike to top a hundred. It still wouldn’t be as fast as a Ninja 636, or handle as well for that matter, but if speed and handling were all that mattered, nobody would drive a classic car.
Gael was wearing sneakers, cuffed 527s, and a gray Original Penguin Buffalo Pete T-shirt. He also had a backpack strapped over his shoulders. Within the backpack, a folder into which he’d slipped several pieces of evidence he intended to leave at the dead drop for George Rankin.
He pulled his matte gray Bell helmet off the handlebars and slipped it over his head. Clipped the chin strap. Footed the stand out of the way. Two kicks later the motor was rumbling and he was off, rolling down the cobblestone driveway toward the wrought-iron gate, toeing the bike into second. The gate swung open and he rode through it, making a left onto Calle la Armonia and heading south until a bend in the street turned him west. He took it to Avenida Hidalgo, where he made another left, heading south again. Finally he came to the main road and made his third left.
If he rode straight for another thirty or so miles he’d be in Juarez, but he had no intention of doing that. Instead, he cruised through the desert at fifty miles per hour for less than five miles, passing the brown and green and yellow streaks of desert shrubbery.
When he reached the dead drop, he brought the bike to a stop on the sandy shoulder of the road. He squinted back over his shoulder and saw nothing but desert and the ribbon of asphalt twisting through it, wavering behind heat vapors. He didn’t believe anybody suspected anything but it was best to be careful. If Alejandro Rocha found out he was DEA, he’d be dead within the hour. Every day he lived with that knowledge. Went to bed with it and woke up with it. Part of the job you didn’t like to think about. But you had to, or you might forget to be cautious, which would lead to the very thing you feared.
He got off the bike, walked to what appeared to be a desert stone, and picked it up. It wasn’t actually a stone but a cast plastic container made to resemble one. He flipped it over and opened a hatch in its bottom. Pulled out a cell phone zip-locked inside a sandwich bag, removed the phone from the bag, turned it on, and waited for it to boot up. Once it had, he called Special Agent George Rankin, his stateside man on this undercover operation.
While the phone rang in his ear, he lit a Camel, took a deep drag, and spat a fleck of tobacco off the end of his tongue.
“George Rankin.”
“Gael.”
“What’s the news?”
“Got some paperwork for you at the dead drop.”
“What kind?”
“Bank transfers, phone records, that kind of thing.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good news. Anything else?”
“I’m hoping the bank information might get us somewhere.”
“Laundering money, sure, which we can nail him on if it all lines up, but we really need a solid international drug trafficking case.”
“I’m working on it.”
“I know you are.”
“Think I might be getting somewhere too.”
“In what way?”
“Hard to put my finger on it. More a feeling than anything.”
“A feeling’s better than noth
ing.”
“Rocha’s starting to trust me, for one thing. Also, there’s a couple girls I’m pretty sure want out of the life. Might be able to work one of them, get her to flip.”
“Be careful with that.”
“You don’t need to tell me; it’s my ass on the line.”
“Is it worth the risk?”
“These girls have a broader view of Rocha’s organization than anybody else. They know drug routes, stateside dealers. Might not be the safest way to pin this motherfucker down, but it’s gotta be the most efficient.”
“Hard evidence is better than a talker, though; evidence won’t get scared and back out. Or get itself murdered.”
“I’m going at it from all angles. I want Rocha pinned in. Besides, a talker might lead us to hard evidence. You know that.”
“I understand.” Rankin was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “You hanging in there?”
“I’m fine.”
“Gael—are you really?”
George Rankin was a good guy but Gael hated when he got that tone. He wanted the conversation to stay on business. Someone asked you how you were doing, it made you think about it, and that was something he didn’t want to do. He’d left his wife back home in El Paso and he missed her. They’d only been married eight months now and hadn’t seen each other or talked for six of them. He might leave a widow behind, might never smell her hair or hear her laugh again. He wanted to be shut off from those kinds of thoughts, wanted to be the person he was pretending to be until he could be himself again. It made it easier. You couldn’t keep one foot in each life and function. You had to dedicate yourself fully to what you were doing. Otherwise you hesitated. You made mistakes.
“I’m fine,” he said again.
“Good.”
“Listen,” Gael said, “I gotta go. I’ll call if I get anything else. Meantime, pick up the shit at the dead drop, see if you can pull anything out of it.”
“Talk to you later.”
Gael hung up the phone, powered it down, slipped it back into the sandwich bag, and shoved it into the dead-drop rock. Next in was the paperwork, which he removed from his backpack and folded in half. He shut the rock’s hatch, clipped it shut, and set it back down on the desert sand. Walked to his bike, kicking his footprints away as he went, and looked back at the rock over his shoulder.
The Breakout Page 7