No Man's Land

by G. M. Ford

  By the time he finished, the buzz in the room sounded like an airplane was about to land. First question was from the CNN reporter. “Can you confirm, Mr. Romero, that the film clip aired last night on the ABC program American Manhunt was genuine?”

  He was determined not to outright lie and figured the best he could do was keep it short and sweet. “Yes,” was all he said before calling for another question.

  “The inmate in the clip,” the question began. “Is that inmate accounted for at this time?”

  Romero took a deep breath. The words nearly stuck in his throat. “No. At this time, he is not.” The buzz reached airliner levels. “How many other inmates are unaccounted for?”

  “We have several bodies which . . . ah . . . due to the level of damage, are going to require forensic identification.”

  “But you don’t believe any of them is this . . .” The AP reporter checked his notes. “. . . this Timothy Driver.”

  “No. I didn’t say that. I said, we won’t know until the forensic examinations have been completed.”

  “Is Driver the only inmate believed to be missing?”

  “I didn’t say he was believed to be missing. As I said,” Romero began to show his exasperation. “As of this morning . . .” He hesitated, waiting for the roar to subside and then held up a moderating hand. “I want to emphasize . . .” He raised his voice. “I must again emphasize . . . until the forensics people are finished there is just no way we can give you an accurate accounting.”

  “Can you give us some idea how this Timothy Driver managed to escape his cell and literally take over the prison?”

  “No we cannot,” Romero said.

  “Our sources tell us Mr. Driver was under twenty-four-hour video surveillance. Surely you should be able to—”

  Romero interrupted. “It appears Mr. Driver may have managed to erase the tape loop used to record activity in his cell.”

  “How could a prisoner . . .”

  Romero anticipated the question. He’d been waiting for it.

  “Mr. Driver is not your run-of-the-mill convict, Mr. Blitzer. He has two master’s degrees. One from the Naval Academy in advanced warfare techniques and another from Harvard in electrical engineering. He’s a highly trained professional and thus capable of things . . . outside the realm of other convicts.” Romero squelched a smile. He’d wanted to get the words thus and realm into his answers regarding Driver. Sounded real high tone and articulate. “Is it true he’s been trained as a Navy SEAL?”

  “Yes. San Diego. Nineteen ninety-four.” From the back of the room. “But he was never deployed as a SEAL.”

  “You’d have to ask the navy about that.” Elias Romero nodded at the crowd. “If you’ll excuse me . . . ,” he began, as the roar of shouted questions engulfed the room. Before the assembled multitude had a chance to settle down, Romero ducked to his right, stepped down off the dais and disappeared back through the door from which he’d entered ten minutes earlier. He leaned heavily against the inside of the door, closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. “Iris,” he said. No answer. He opened his eyes. The makeshift office area was empty. He cursed. Seemed like that damned woman was always missing these days. No doubt about it. Things settled down, things got back to normal . . . sure as hell, she was gonna have to go.

  21

  Driver smoothed on one last piece of adhesive tape, then dropped the scissors and the rest of the roll onto the bed. “That’s gonna have to do,” he said. “You just keep eating those ibuprofen. That’s as good as it’s going to get.”

  Corso sat with his bandaged hand in his lap. The slug had gone completely through the back of his hand and exited the center of his palm. He’d nearly passed out when Driver had poured hydrogen peroxide on both sides of the wound and cleansed the interior with a cotton probe. The throbbing pain in his hand had caused his arm to go numb. A handful of Aleve had dulled the pain somewhat but only enough to keep him from crying out. What he needed was a doctor, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. He got to his feet and made his way over to the other bed, where he first sat, then, leaving his feet on the floor, let himself down onto his back in stages. They were holed up in the Palm Garden Hotel and Casino, a crumbling remnant of the days of Bugsy Siegel, about five miles north of present-day Las Vegas. A peek out the back window, out over the Dumpsters and the half dozen junkies who called the area home, revealed the new skyline of the Strip barely visible through the omnipresent desert haze.

  Kehoe had lobbied hard for the brighter lights. The Bellagio or the Luxor or something like that. They’d come out of the gun shop with the better part of eleven thousand dollars and the cash was burning a hole in Kehoe’s pocket. Driver had reasoned that the bigger, fancier hotels were going to have larger and more effective security forces and that their best bet was to find someplace on the skids, someplace where security was perhaps playing second fiddle to the power bill. After much wrangling, they’d settled on the Palm Garden, a four-story pink stucco structure wedged between an Arby’s and the North Vegas Animal Hospital. Bludgeoned by a merciless sun and swirling winds, the paint was peeling so quickly it sounded like rain.

  With Driver behind the wheel, they’d driven the three hundred miles from Phoenix without stopping, hitting the outskirts of Vegas just after three-thirty in the afternoon. The digital sign on the bank announced seventy-four degrees. Then a happy face. Then seventy-four degrees. Corso sat slumped in the middle seat, holding the T-shirt tight around his hand. While Driver went inside and got them a pair of adjoining rooms, Corso and Kehoe sat in the cab of the truck watching the valet parking attendants, listening to their chatter as they scurried to and fro across the parking lot. Before settling in, Driver had visited the strip mall up the street. Half an hour later, he’d returned with a pair of black Nike gym bags, groceries, painkillers and first-aid supplies. After carefully cleaning Corso’s wound, he’d bandaged the damaged area with professional expertise.

  While Driver was gone, Kehoe, who’d taken over the room, had gotten busy on the phone. The hooker had arrived about five minutes after Driver returned. About the time Corso had stopped moaning and groaning over Driver’s ministrations, the damp sounds of carnal commerce began to seep into the room from next door.

  “Kehoe ever wears himself out . . . you can be next, if you want.”

  Corso shook his head. “Not my cup of tea.”

  “If you’re afraid of catching something . . .”

  “There’s that for sure . . . but that’s not it.”

  “Yeah . . . ,” Driver said. “Me neither.”

  “I availed myself a couple of times when I was a kid,” Corso said. “It just didn’t feel right to me. Like I was stealing money from the poor box or something really shitty like that. Different strokes, I guess.”

  “I never have,” Driver said. “All those navy towns and shore leaves and somehow I could never bring myself to . . . you know.”

  “Probably for the best.”

  “I always imagined what my mother would think.”

  Corso checked Driver from the corner of his eye, looking for signs of irony in a guy who’d just been party to innumerable deaths yet was concerned about what his mother might think about him getting his knob polished. If he was kidding, he wasn’t letting on.

  On the TV a graphic announcing an imminent police bulletin rolled across the bottom of the screen. Thinking it was about them, Corso picked up the remote and adjusted the volume. Not so, though. Cut to a press conference in Shep, Texas. Multiple murder suspects Harry Delano Gibbs and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Heidi Anne Spearbeck, had been apprehended in northern Nevada and now awaited the results of an extradition hearing, scheduled for the following morning. Seems Gibbs, having had his marriage proposal rebuffed at gunpoint by Heidi Anne’s father, Sheldon, had returned several hours later to dispatch the old man with a single bullet in the head, before running off with his daughter.

  It was a week before Sheldon’s decomposed b
ody was discovered by a fertilizer salesman who’d stopped by for a visit. By that time, Gibbs and Spearbeck had already cut a wide swath of crime and killings across the Southwest, leaving a grocer and his wife dead over what authorities figured to be no more than sixty-five dollars, killing Texas Ranger Wade Ott Rufin as he attempted to arrest them at a motel in Vici, Oklahoma, and holding more than seventy customers at bay as they robbed the Pig and Pancake Truck Stop way out in the panhandle by Guymon, Oklahoma. In addition to these confirmed atrocities, the pair were now suspected in another half dozen equally grievous felonies. Sheriff Mace Walker of Harris County, Texas, wanted everyone to know it was safe to go outdoors again as the pair had been brought to bay, that justice had prevailed and that peace reigned once again in the land.

  “Heartwarming,” Corso said.

  Driver pointed at the television. The graphic on the screen read Musket, Arizona. Meza Azul Correctional Institute. Driver grabbed the remote from the end table and turned it up louder. The new graphic said the guy in the brown suit was one Dallin Asuega, an executive of the Randall Corporation. While Driver fumbled with the volume control, the screen split in two, Asuega on the left, Kehoe’s mug shot on the right. Then Corso and Driver. They laid it out. The whole nine yards. Life stories. Criminal records. Armed and dangerous. Do not attempt to apprehend. Back with more after . . .

  22

  Melanie Harris surveyed Main Street, Musket, Arizona, and shuddered. “Anybody ever finds me living here,” she thought, “they should put a bullet in my head.” Everything in that single-story fake adobe look. Built around a little town square, flagpole and all. Except that’s probably not what they called it in Arizona. Probably had some tongue-rolling Spanish name. The oversized American flag popped and snapped in the stiff, swirling breeze.

  Marty was up the street somewhere meeting their contact. Getting more info. Stuff they presumably could use on this week’s show. She hoped it was good. Not as gory as last night’s tape but something hot and exclusive. The number of calls she’d fielded from the network told her they were more popular than they’d been in a long while. In Hollywood, you could always judge your status by the number and quality of people who belatedly returned your calls. In the far distance, out beyond the greenery of the park, out beyond the cookie cutter housing development, out where the desert sought every day to reclaim its sovereignty, a dust devil whirled madly about the sky, brown and menacing, full of loose G.M. Ford dirt and desert debris. It twirled and snaked over the ground, taking this, leaving that, as it made its way west across what she was told was once a vast inland ocean.

  She pulled her phone from her pocket, thumbed it on and waited to see what service was going to be like. Three lines. Way better than back at the prison, where she’d tried several times but had been unable to establish a connection. She pushed nine, then autodial. The phone rang six times before the voice said. “Hello.”

  “Helen, it’s Melanie.”

  “Oh.” The phone company was telling the truth. You could hear a pin drop. Melanie grimaced at the phone. The reception told her Brian’s mother had wasted no time taking sides. Not that she’d ever been on Melanie’s side. No . . . they’d never gotten along. Freud would have had a field day. Classic case of Mommy competing with the wife for the son’s affections. Add to that the fact that people of Helen Martyn’s social standing don’t welcome incursions from army brats like Melanie Harris and you had what could be charitably described as fourteen years of mutual forbearance. Melanie kept her voice cheery. “Brian there?” she inquired. Helen hesitated. “Oh . . . I don’t know . . . uh . . .”

  And then Melanie heard his voice in the background.

  “Your wife,” she heard Helen say.

  A minute passed before Brian came on the line. “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  “How’s the weather in Arizona?”

  “Windy. What about Michigan?”

  “Dad says you’re all over the tube.”

  “How is he?”

  His timing told her something was amiss. “He’s getting on. His memory’s not what it used to be. He forgets things these days.”

  A moment passed, neither of them willing to use the “A”

  word. Brian changed the subject. “He says the show’s getting a lot of press.”

  “We’re on a bit of a roll. What about you?”

  “I’ve been so busy I haven’t even got my bags unpacked yet.”

  “Busy with what?”

  “You know; settling in. Catching up on old times. That kind of thing.” Another voice could be heard in the background. A woman’s voice. Not Helen.

  “Who’s that?” Melanie asked. She heard his intake of breath.

  “Patricia,” he said. “Patricia Lee . . . you remember Patricia don’t you?” Melanie used her voice training to keep her tone neutral. “I remember,” she said. How could she forget? Patricia had been Brian’s high school sweetheart. The girl he’d been expected to marry. Her father was a state appellate court judge. All very incestuous you know. At least until Melanie appeared and gummed up the plan.

  “What’s she doing there?” Melanie asked with a bit more of an edge in her voice than she would have preferred.

  “She’s helping me find an apartment.”

  “Oh really?”

  “She’s in real estate.”

  “Still married to Larry?”

  “Harry, and no. They got a divorce four years ago.”

  “Somehow I could have guessed.”

  A strained silence settled over the connection. “So anyway,”

  Brian said after a long moment. “You kinda caught me on the way out.”

  “I can be home in a few days.” The words were out of her lips before her brain had a chance to censor them. “We could maybe—”

  “I’m not coming back to California, Mel. Not now. Not ever. Not gonna happen. Place never felt like home to me anyway. I always felt like I was on a bad vacation.”

  “Brian please . . . we could—”

  “Please,” he said. “Listen, Mel, I understand. You’re a big TV star and all. No way you can give it all up for a life as a lawyer’s wife in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I don’t blame you.” When she didn’t respond, he went on. “We’re just too different from each other. We want different things.”

  “We didn’t used to.”

  “That was a long time ago. Before Samantha. Before every thing.”

  “Yeah,” she said softly.

  “I ran into Stan Rummer yesterday,” he said, naming another old high school chum. Another lawyer. She remembered then, and her heart froze in her chest. “Mr. D . . . I . . . V . . . O . . . R . . . C . . . E, Detroit.” she spelled it out like his obnoxious TV commercial used to. “Stan still trading in human misery is he?”

  “We need to talk, Mel.”

  She felt him squirm. “So talk.”

  “Not now.”

  Patricia’s voice rose in the background.

  “Tell her to shut the fuck up.”

  He paused and gathered himself like he always did when she swore. “Listen . . . I gotta go.”

  “With her?”

  “I told you. I’m looking for an apartment.”

  “Brian,” she said. “Maybe . . .”

  A dial tone told her the conversation was over. Melanie Harris pulled the phone from her ear, used her thumb to turn it off, then dropped it into her jacket pocket. The dust devil had disappeared from view. She wondered whether it had gained speed and whisked off to parts unknown or whether it had simply run out of steam, uncoiling to an ignominious stop, dropping its collected contents back to the desert floor to await the next thrilling ride in the sky, maybe a million years hence.

  The wind rose, flapping her collar, plastering the coat to her chest. She reached up, as if to hold a hat in place, and squinted her eyes so hard she was blind. On the inside of her eyelids she could see the interior of Brian’s parents’ house, straight out of Ethan Allen. All very trad
itional. Full of oriental carpets and warm wood. In her mind’s eye it was always decorated for the holidays, with Christmas music playing, with bows and red ribbons everywhere and the biggest Christmas tree they could fit through the double doors holding court in the living room. When she opened her eyes, Marty Wells was a hundred yards away, walking briskly in her direction. The wind had again lifted his careful comb-over from his head. She could tell from his stride. He thought he had something special.

  “Good?” she asked.

  “Better,” he said, grabbing the handle and pulling open the motor home’s door. He used a thick red folder to shepherd her inside. The air inside was still and old. Marty used his free hand to pat the shingle of hair back into place. “Get this,” he said with a wink. “This all started with what they said was a medical checkup for this Driver guy. Right? That’s how he got out of his cell and how this whole thing started.”

  “So?”

  “So . . . it wasn’t medical at all. It was a psych appointment.”

  “Really.”

  “He’d been exhibiting disassociative behavior.”

  “Like?”

  “Losing it. Not knowing who he was or where he was. Going into loud diatribes with himself.” He tapped the folder with his forefinger. “He was losing his mind. That’s why they were taking him to see the shrink. They were afraid he was going nuts.”