Depth of Winter

by Craig Johnson

  I also didn’t really know if I could trust her—she could have been kidnapped along with Cady or it was possible she was in league with Bidarte even with Culpepper’s opinion that she was not. Given that Culpepper had killed her nephew, I decided to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  I glanced at the windows and figured I could cut the line free and then return to the base of the building and climb my way up—it was also possible that I could sprout wings and just fly up there.

  One thing at a time.

  Making sure my .45 was tucked in tight and the binoculars were around my neck, I scrambled over the rocks toward the base of the tree, careful to keep my footing and not fall into the crevasse, which led who knew where.

  I stepped behind the trunk and stood there for a moment before glancing around and then looking back at the monastery windows. About half of them were shuttered closed, and there was no glass in the three that were open, off-white curtains drifting in the slight breeze. The one where the laundry line was hooked was toward the middle and the highest up, of course, about sixty feet if it was an inch.

  I pulled myself onto one of the lower limbs and climbed up the back side so as to not be seen, settling into a notch and finally reaching the sand-cast metal pulley, threaded into the end of a piece of hand-forged iron, a heavy hook that was hanging around one of the branches.

  The line was a weathered hemp rope, and I was amazed it even held the dozen or so pieces of laundry—so much for that idea. Frustrated, I pulled on the rope and watched the clothes sway and tried to think of a way to let Alexia and Cady know that I was there. I had nothing with me that I could use to write a note.

  I had a thought, and I began pulling the line toward me, immediately recognizing the blue blouse my daughter had been wearing when I saw her last in Cheyenne. I reached out and took hold of it and could smell her on it, even through the laundry soap. Tears filled my eyes as I reached into my shirt pocket and slipped out my wallet, pulling my badge and pinning it to the light blue fabric, the six-point star shining like a vow of vengeance.

  Running the line through my hands, I began working it back the other way when I froze, seeing someone in one of the other windows, a dark-haired man in sunglasses, who luckily only seemed to be interested in the sky.

  Edging behind the trunk of the tree, I stayed there, waiting until he yawned and disappeared. I waited a minute more and then began moving the line at a slower pace, pulling the first piece of clothing up against the stone wall, something I hoped Alexia might find strange.

  I looked through the lenses of the M19s and searched the windows, starting with the one where I’d seen her, but all I could make out were the gauze curtains. I must’ve kept the lenses on the window for ten minutes, but nothing showed, so I began working over the others, finally settling on the one in the lower right where a shadow played off an opposing wall.

  I had just pushed my hat back to wipe the sweat away from my eyes when I noticed movement on the clothesline and turned to look up in time to see the blue blouse disappear.

  I waited until Alexia appeared in the window again after about ten minutes. She re-pinned the blouse to the line and began threading it back toward me. The badge was gone, and in its place was a folded envelope, attached to the line with a clothespin.

  DADDY!

  Oh, my God what are you doing? Alexia says that you’re outside. Where’s Lola? Is she safe? Who do you have with you? Henry, Vic, the FBI, CIA, the Marines? I can’t believe you found me. I’m okay, but this place is a madhouse. Please be careful, these people are insane. I’m locked up in one of the second floor rooms, but Alexia got this envelope and a pencil to me. Thank goodness she’s here or I think I would’ve lost my mind. What do you need us to do?

  I LOVE YOU!

  Cady

  Reveling in the fact that it had been in her hands only moments ago, I watched my hands shaking as I reread the note. A stubby pencil that she must have used to write the note was in the envelope, so I pulled it out and began composing a response. There was no plan, so I stuck to the things I wanted to tell her.

  Punk,

  Lola is safe back home with Henry. I’ve got people with me and more on the way, so sit tight and just be ready because no matter what, we are coming.

  I love you, too.

  Dad

  I reattached the envelope to the blouse with the clothespin and waited until it slowly began bobbing back toward the window. I waited a few more minutes and gave the sky a look, the sun now angling over the precipice behind the monastery. There was a sudden coolness and before long it would be dark. I looked west but couldn’t see any hoped-for clouds, just the clear but faded blue over the Chihuahuan desert.

  * * *

  —

  I had carefully climbed down the tree and made my way back up the scrabble and rocks to the base of the wall. I sat there, thinking about what I wanted to do with this new information, the location of the room not collating with what I’d gotten from Culpepper or Iván. Anyway, it appeared we were going to have to make a more frontal assault.

  People were cheering and chanting along with the cacophony of the music, and I was losing my patience and about ready to just climb over the wall to see what was going on for myself when something bobbed against the brim of my hat. Tilting my head back, I could see that it was a pony bottle of Pacifico beer hanging from a piece of twine. Looking further, I could see Adan holding the other end.

  He glanced around as if admiring the countryside as I untied the bottle and then slowly wrapped the twine around a few fingers, palming a beat on the top of the wall mimicking the drums that were now thrumming in the square with trumpets sounding in counterpoint.

  I continued to watch him, but after a moment he turned and greeted someone. I listened to him and another man, talking and laughing as their voices faded off into the fiesta, or whatever it was called.

  Looking at the condensate rolling off the small bottle of beer, I thought about whether a negligible amount of alcohol was allowable. I decided that it was preferable to dying of thirst and took a swig, and it was the best beer I’d ever tasted. When I lowered the bottle, I noticed that I’d drunk half the thing with one swallow.

  I took off my hat and sat there thinking about what I had planned; I wasn’t really sure if it was going to work. If we were able to overpower the first team, we might have a chance of working up the ladder, but that was going to take a lot of skill and a lot of luck—neither of which we had in abundance.

  I looked back up at the wall and gauged the distance from there to any of the windows. The first set, which included the open one, was about twenty feet up, but then I studied the shuttered windows and thought that maybe if they led to uninhabited rooms, they might provide a better route inside, making up for that lack of skill and luck.

  I needed rope and a grappling hook.

  I looked at the tree from which I had just recently climbed down, where the makeshift clothesline was attached to the pulley on the hook. The hemp rope might not hold me, but the hook would.

  Rope, where in the hell was I going to find twenty or so feet of rope that would hold my weight?

  The bodies.

  The bodies back where we’d left the mules—some of them had been tied.

  I hoisted myself up with the weight of a man returning to hell and started off from whence I’d come.

  None of the pieces of rope were long enough in themselves, but I was able to collect enough pieces so that I could fashion a line almost twenty feet long, and I figured the knots were going to be handy in the ascent.

  Adan would be a lot better at climbing than I would, but he wasn’t around, and I didn’t want him losing his position. The other trick was letting him know what the heck I was doing so that we could coordinate our actions.

  Waiting there with the rope and hook, I kept looking up and down the wall, but he didn’t
show, and neither did anybody else as the noise from the crowd, the drums, and the horns continued to escalate.

  I walked back to the monastery, looked up at the laundry line hanging limp, and wished Alexia would reappear.

  I chose one of the assault rifles from the pack bags, loaded the magazine, and yanked the action before setting the safety. I also grabbed a brick of ammo, placed it in the Dallas Cowboys bag, and slipped the straps of both over my shoulder.

  The one partially open window on the first floor on the far right was inviting as a target and really my only choice as I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to hook on to a shutter of one of the closed windows without a great deal of noise, and I was also pretty sure that the rotten wood would pull right off the wall.

  Hoping I wasn’t throwing the grappling hook into a poker game of armed men, I relied on my calf-roping skills and began twirling the heavy hook; with every turn I thought about what a harebrained idea this was.

  I glanced back at the wall where Adan had been, but there was still nobody there. I twirled the thing a few more times and then let it fly, which it did, entering the opening and making what would have been a loud thump if there hadn’t been all the racket from the town’s party. Pulling the rope, I felt a little resistance, then a touch more before it clanged off the rocks and landed at my feet.

  This kind of thing never happened to Errol Flynn or Will Rogers.

  Picking up the hook, I tried to calculate the angle of the point in hopes that it might catch on something if I got enough English on it, twirled, and threw again. The same sound was covered by the same noise, but I was a little more careful when I pulled the contraption back and it caught on something. I breathed a sigh. Tugging with one hand, I felt the hook set and just hoped it was in something that would carry my weight.

  I checked it with both hands and felt it sink deeper.

  I jumped for the nearest knot and pulled, immediately regretting every part of this plan. Struggling to get a hand up to the next knot and then the next, I climbed the best I could and figured I had reached about halfway.

  I hung there for a moment and then reached up without the benefit of another knot, slipping a bit as I brought my boots up against the wall. I grabbed for the next knot and one fist over the other made good progress, ending up only about three feet from the ledge of the window.

  Grabbing the last hitch, I lifted myself again and finally throwing a hand over the sill, I clambered up, chucking a leg over and tumbling inside, making a terrible racket when I hit the floor. I scrambled back toward the window, pulled the AK around in front of me, and switched off the safety.

  Breathing heavily, I sat there letting my eyes acclimate to the darkness, the only light coming from the moon, which had risen large and orange in the eastern sky. There was no movement, and as my breathing slowed, I stood, pulled the rope up and out of the way, and moved next to the wall so as not to be any more of a target. With rows of boxes piled up to the ceiling, I was pretty sure the room was being used as storage.

  I nudged one of the top boxes with the barrel of the AK, caught it before it hit the floor and flipped the stapled flap back, revealing stacks of taped packets about the size of a ten-pound bag of ice. It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what the stuff was. There were smaller boxes by the door, so I quietly stepped across the room and kneeled down to pull one open, finding plastic-wrapped bundles of US currency hundred-dollar bills. Judging from the ample amount of small boxes, I estimated there were millions.

  I studied the door, heavy and wooden with hand-forged hinges, handle, and lock. Moving to one side, I brought the AK up again and tried the handle, which did not move.

  “Well, hell.” I’d scaled the wall of the place just to be locked in a twelve-by-twelve room.

  I kneeled and spotted the hole where the key would have been inserted. I went back to the box of drugs that I had opened and noticed that there were a couple of large staples that had held the top closed. I crept over and pulled one out of the cardboard.

  I’d monkeyed around with these kinds of locks before on the basement door of our office back in Durant and had found them not so difficult to pick. I straightened one side of the staple and left an angle on the other for a little leverage as I inserted the straight end and began threading it around. Finally feeling a little tension, I jammed it to the right.

  The door jumped just a touch and then pulled loose from the jamb about an inch.

  Frozen, I stayed there without moving, pretty sure that if anybody was in the hallway outside they would’ve had to have heard the noise or seen the movement. I placed my ear to the opening but didn’t hear any footsteps coming toward me.

  Easing to a standing position, I leaned against the wall and nudged the muzzle of the automatic weapon through the opening and peered out with one eye. As near as I could tell, I was at the end of an empty hallway. Figuring that if there was anybody in the corridor I’d at least have the thickness of the door between me and them, I pushed it open a bit farther.

  The arched hallway shot off to my right, narrow, with just a few small alcoves where lit candles dripped onto the stone floor. There was a blue light coming from a partially opened doorway at the far end of the hall, like one from a TV, but the only sound I could hear was the noise coming from out front.

  Easing through, I led with the AK and followed with the Dallas Cowboy bag.

  I closed the door behind me, careful not to close it completely in case I needed to beat a hasty retreat, and then took a few steps forward, studying each door as I passed it, each one closed like the others with no light from inside.

  I got within sight of the last door. The bluish light that spilled out changed and fluctuated, and I was pretty sure that it was indeed a television, but there was no music or dialogue, just a strange, reoccurring plastic sound that was almost like Ruby typing back at the office.

  Edging a bit farther along, I could see metal shelves, racks of electronic equipment like computer servers, and other communication devices with lights going on and off in sequence. Leaning in, I could see the edge of a large, flatscreen television and the back of somebody’s head with a ball cap on backward and a set of headphones covering his ears.

  There was a stunning amount of muffled noise coming from the headphones, and as I stepped sideways again I could see that it was some kind of video game with a person aiming a sighted rifle and a squad of individuals fighting their war across a dystopian, urban landscape, all the while impressively blowing things up and shooting everything in sight.

  I stood there in the doorway looking at the individual in the room, his back to me, humming as he operated the game with the keyboard in his lap, completely unaware that I was there.

  He had long, blond dreadlocks and was wearing a white San Diego Padres T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of leather sandals with flowers between the toes.

  I thought about shooting the TV for effect but figured that would just bring the whole monastery down on me, so I waited a moment and then reached out and tapped his shoulder.

  He didn’t respond, so I nudged him again.

  “Go away, I’m Arma-Battlefield four—”

  I poked at him this time.

  “I told you, man, beat it.”

  Bumping him one last time, I placed the barrel of the AK plainly in his line of sight, mimicking the weapon on the screen, and leaning around to look at the other side of his face. “Howdy, Peter.”

  * * *

  —

  “All I do is run the computers, man, honest.”

  I sat on the table in front of him, the AK resting easily in my hands and uneasily against his skinny chest. “You did surveillance on my family.”

  “No, I—”

  I tapped him with the muzzle, thirty 7.62x39mm rounds ready to fly through the space where his heart was at 2,350 feet per second.

  His ha
nds strained against the zip-ties that I had used to attach them to the arms of the gaming chair. “Okay, yeah, I did. Your family, they’re sweet . . . I mean your daughter is a knockout. Hell, I’d date her.”

  “Chances of that are slim.” I leaned in. “Look, Peter, or whatever your name really is, I’m here to get my daughter and then get the hell out by killing the smallest number of people possible, and right now you are ruining my plan.”

  He looked at me. “You’re here by yourself?”

  I ignored his question. “Where is Cady?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I poked him again.

  “She’s on one of the upper floors, but I don’t know where. Nobody is allowed up there. I mean, you go up there and they kill you in strange and sickening ways.”

  “Bidarte?”

  “Who else?” He paused for a moment and then volunteered, “They have a camera in her room.”

  “You can see her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Show me.” He did as I asked, his fingers tapping the keyboard as the image switched to a bird’s-eye view of a room with a stone floor and a few carpets. The screen was huge, and I watched as Cady came into view. She walked past the camera with something in her hand.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “No, it’s just a camera, man.”

  Reaching out, I touched the screen as she stopped and looked up at us, unmoving. “How do I get there?”

  “There are steps, but there are dudes, armed dudes, man.”

  I nudged him with the Kalashnikov again, reminding him I was an armed dude, too. “Nobody ever goes up there bringing food, laundry, nothing?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean the housekeeper they brought, she goes back and forth, but nobody else.”

  “My daughter’s housekeeper, Alexia?”