by Max Austin
“Easy for you to say. Not your skin.”
He tried to shift in the bed and was rewarded by a jolt of abdominal pain that made him gasp.
“You need to stay still,” the doctor said. “There are stitches on the inside as well as the outside. Any stress might tear them loose. Then we’ve got internal bleeding and organ damage and it’s back to the operating room. You don’t want that.”
“No,” Doc said. “I don’t want that.”
“Okay then,” she said brightly. “See this button right here? That’s to call the nurse. If you have any problems, they can reach me right away.”
He nodded.
“This other button? That’s the morphine drip. If the pain starts getting too fierce, press that button and you’ll get a dose of medicine.”
He pressed the button.
“O-kay,” she said. “You really want to wait until the pain is intense. It’ll only give you so many doses per day.”
Warmth ran up Doc’s arm and spread across his shoulder and chest. It felt wonderful.
He tried to tell the Navajo surgeon that she had a nice smile, but the words came out garbled. He tried it again and made no sense at all.
“Hmm-mm,” she said. “Good night, Mr. Burnett.”
She turned to leave. Doc glimpsed a big bruiser of a uniformed cop outside in the hall before the door swung shut behind her. That cop meant this nice hospital room was as much a cage as the cell block Doc had left behind. At least he didn’t have to listen to Roger’s yammering. And he didn’t have to watch his back.
“Fuck ’em all,” he said, and that came out loud and clear. He tried to laugh, but darkness swept over him and washed him away.
Chapter 57
Katrina’s combat boots clomped along the sidewalk as she passed the duck pond, the grassy park at the core of UNM’s main campus. Security lamps stood among the evergreens that lined the sidewalk, but she kept to the shadows. Other students out walking in the night veered away when they saw her. Her Goth makeup made her face a spooky skull in the dark, which was partly why she wore it. Look scary enough, and people will leave you the hell alone.
As she crossed the broad concrete plaza in front of the pueblo-style Zimmerman Library, she could hear the clackety-clack of skateboards rolling over sidewalks in the distance. The sound made her think of Dylan and his encounter with the skateboard kids who’d jumped him the night before.
She fished her phone out of her pocket and punched the buttons to call “OSCAR,” as Dylan had typed it into her address book. Katrina thought of Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street, the Muppet who lived in a trash can. Big surprise, he was her favorite when she was a kid.
So she was expecting a raspy voice to answer the phone, or at least a male voice. A woman’s pleasant “Hello” gave her pause.
“Hello?” the woman said again. “Who’s there?”
“Hi, um, is this Oscar’s phone?”
“Yes, who’s calling?”
“I’m trying to reach a friend of mine,” Katrina said. “I think he might be over there.”
“Who would that be?”
Katrina hesitated. Something about the woman’s tone was wrong. She sounded like she was in charge.
“May I speak to Oscar, please?”
“He can’t come to the phone at the moment. Can I tell him who’s calling?”
This was starting to feel like a game of cat and mouse.
“Is Dylan there?”
“I’m not sure,” the woman said. “Are we talking about Dylan James?”
Katrina paused, thinking: She sounds like a cop.
“I’ve got the wrong number.”
“No,” the woman said quickly, “this is Oscar’s house. He’s just in the middle of something right now and can’t come to the phone.”
“Wrong Oscar.”
“Oh, come on, how many ‘Oscars’ can there be?”
Katrina hung up.
Chapter 58
Agent Pam Willis tried to redial the number, but it came back busy. She set Oscar’s phone on the kitchen table and went to the sink to wash her hands. The entire apartment seemed coated in smoke and dust. Already, her suit smelled like marijuana smoke. That ought to get a big laugh at the dry cleaners.
“Who was that?” Hector said from the archway.
“She wouldn’t say. But I think she might be Dylan’s girlfriend.”
“He has a girlfriend? Nobody’s mentioned that.”
“She sounded really young,” Pam said. “But pretty cagey on the phone.”
They went back into the living room, where uniformed APD officers were keeping watch over the handcuffed brawlers. Antony Rocca and Jasper Johnson sat on the floor in one corner, while Rosa Valdez and her posse were kept on the far side of the room.
Oscar Pacheco sat alone on the sofa. Oscar clearly was the victim here and might’ve escaped arrest, but the local cops found three ounces of weed in his bedroom, so he was handcuffed, too.
He squinted myopically as the agents stopped in front of him.
“Hey, Oscar,” Hector said casually. “You didn’t mention that Dylan has a girlfriend.”
“Huh?”
“Young woman just called asking for him,” Pam said. “She wouldn’t say her name over the phone.”
“Dylan didn’t say anything about having a girlfriend,” Oscar said. “All he talked about was his ex-girlfriend, the one who’s responsible for this mess here.”
“Carmen Valdez.”
“Yeah, her. Her current boyfriend is that little fucker over there.”
“Hey, asshole,” Antony snapped. “You better—”
“Shut up,” Hector said. “You’re in enough trouble.”
Pam told the APD officers they could start hauling them away. That set the perps to bitching and caterwauling and protesting their innocence, so the FBI agents returned to the kitchen to confer in peace.
“We can try to track her down from her phone number,” Hector said. “We find the girlfriend, she might lead us to Dylan.”
“She sounded like she didn’t know where he was, either.”
He sighed. “We’re no closer to him than we were.”
“He’s got no phone,” Pam said. “He’s got no vehicle. Every police car in town has his photo taped to the dashboard. Why is it so hard to run him down?”
Chapter 59
Dylan stuck close to the looming bulk of Popejoy Hall as he reached the central pedestrian mall that slices through the UNM campus. Two rows of orange streetlamps marched among the evenly spaced trees on the pedestrian mall, but he tried to move from shadow to shadow. A few students walked along the mall, their faces glowing from the illumination of their phones, but none of them gave Dylan so much as a glance. He felt anonymous, invisible.
The Student Union Building was still lit up and populated this time of night, but Dylan angled away, keeping to the darker side of the mall. At the far end, he saw a couple of skateboard punks taking turns grinding their boards down a slanted handrail next to a dozen steps. Up onto the rail, slide down, then jump off. Over and over. The steel handrail was scraped shiny from their efforts.
As he got closer, Dylan recognized them. They were two of the kids who’d jumped him last night, the hooligans from the other side of Central Avenue, with their Mohawk haircuts and their ragged clothes. Neither was the one who’d brained him with a board, but one was the cackling blond who’d demanded money. Chicken Boy.
Here, under the lights of the campus, they seemed smaller and younger than when they were kicking the shit out of him in that dark parking lot. Barely old enough to shave, but old enough to know better. Old enough to get what was coming to them.
He cut around a concrete planter full of evergreens and went down a different set of steps so he could meet the skateboarders at the bottom. Chicken Boy was grinding down the rail, concentrating on his balance. He didn’t see Dylan jump out from hiding until it was too late.
Dylan clotheslined him with a forearm, an
d the kid tumbled off his board and bounced down the last few concrete steps. He rolled around on the sidewalk at the bottom, clutching an injured knee, his elbows bloody. His board shot off into some bushes that grew along the sidewalk.
The other skateboarder grabbed up his board and held it cocked like a baseball bat, ready to defend himself at the top of the stairs.
Dylan didn’t hesitate. He charged up the steps, roaring, fists clenched. The skateboard kid took off running.
Chicken Boy got to his feet, but he could barely walk. Dylan trotted down the steps to him and faked a punch. The kid flinched and stumbled backward. He limped away, dripping blood on the sidewalk.
Dylan looked around, but no one else seemed to have witnessed the brief encounter. He took a moment to dig around in the shrubs and come up with the kid’s red devil skateboard.
Been a few years since Dylan had ridden a board, but he still remembered the feel of it. He set off on the sidewalk toward Katrina’s, going slowly, the board clacking over every joint in the long sidewalk. Much of the route sloped uphill, so he pushed a lot with his blistered foot, but it still beat walking.
Chapter 60
Katrina jumped when Dylan stepped out of the shadows near her apartment door.
“Holy fuck,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“Sorry. I was hiding.”
“Good job of it, too. Where did you get the skateboard?”
“Off one of those kids who jumped me.”
“You ran into them again?”
“Two of ’em. I got even.”
She unlocked the door of her ground-floor apartment and they slipped inside. Katrina flicked on the lights. The apartment was exactly how they’d left it. The air smelled of sex and sweat.
“Funk and spunk,” Katrina muttered as she opened the window.
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re okay? Nobody followed you here?”
“I’m good,” he said, “but wait until I tell you what happened at Oscar’s.”
“That guy Antony was there, like we thought?”
“He was. So was his giant bodyguard. So were four chicks who kicked the shit out of them both.”
“What?”
“And so were a couple of feds.”
Katrina made her eyes go round. “I think I need a beer. You want one?”
“Sure.”
She went to the half-sized fridge in the corner and dug around inside, came up with two Carta Blancas. She was handing him one of the brown bottles when someone knocked on the door.
“Shit,” Dylan hissed.
A key wiggled in the lock. Katrina relaxed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s my idiot roommate.”
Katrina crossed to the door and caught it as it opened. She peeked out through the crack. Christi’s blond hair was pulled up into a perky topknot. She was wearing apple-green workout clothes and bright white sneakers. The big gold cross she always wore dangled between her breasts.
“This is a bad time, Christi.”
“What do you mean? This is my apartment, too. You have to let me inside.”
“Not now.”
“What are you doing in there?”
“None of your business.”
“It is so my business! Do you have a man in there?”
“What if I do? What do you care?”
“I need a shower,” Christi whined. “I need to change clothes.”
“We’ll be out of here in an hour or two.”
Christi huffed and sighed, but couldn’t come up with another argument on such short notice. Katrina closed the door in her face.
When she turned to Dylan, he was grinning.
“You should get a job as a bouncer,” he said. “Stand at the velvet rope and turn people away all night.”
“She’s a moron,” Katrina said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we find her standing right there hours from now. Still trying to think of what to say next.”
They sat together on the black sofa, sipping their Mexican beers.
“How did your test go?”
“Fine, fuck it, who cares. Tell me about Antony and the feds.”
Dylan told her about Antony’s gun and Jasper’s oily menace and the way they’d tortured Oscar. Katrina smiled when he told her about running face-first into the clothesline covered in wind chimes. She laughed out loud when he described the four cholas barging in and whacking those two with their high heels.
“That’s great,” she said. “I’m going to have to rethink the kind of shoes I wear.”
He rubbed his shoulder against hers. “I wouldn’t mind seeing you in some stiletto heels.”
“Yeah? That would turn you on?”
“Sure.”
“Okay,” she said. “You wear ’em first, then I’ll try ’em.”
“Never mind.”
He told her about escaping through the kitchen window just as FBI agents burst into the apartment, guns drawn.
“After that, I just ran,” he said. “Pretty much all the way to the campus.”
“Until you scored a skateboard.”
“Still a long way.”
“You hungry?” she said. “I could make a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.”
“With beer?”
“Take it or leave it. This ain’t Hooters.”
He smiled. “Give me a kiss instead.”
“Now you’re talking.”
She let him pull her close, and their lips met. Katrina usually wasn’t much for making out, but she liked kissing Dylan. A lot. When he started peeling off her clothes, she liked it even better.
Chapter 61
A friend in need will fuck up your life.
That’s what Oscar Pacheco was thinking as he sat in a holding cell at police headquarters in downtown Albuquerque. All he’d done was offer a needy friend a place to sleep for the night. Given him his last ten dollars, like a good Christian, and what did he get in return? Beat up, broke, busted and blind, sitting in a cage like a chimp.
At least he was alone in the cell. Other cells down the hall were occupied by raging drunks who alternated between singing, cussing and puking. Oscar was awfully tired of the noise.
He still hurt all over from the beating. The jail nurse, a white-haired dyke with wrinkly hands, had looked over his bruised face and ribs earlier and pronounced that he would live. She’d given him some Tylenol, as if that would help, and the guards had deposited him here in this cell to ache and regret and sniff blood out of his nose.
If only he hadn’t opened his door to Dylan James last night. It had been nearly midnight. He could’ve pretended to be asleep. Could’ve let Dylan find somewhere else to crash, let him bring the wrath of Antony and Jasper and the federal government to someone else’s home.
Oscar sighed. He was tired and his head hurt, but he didn’t want to lie down on the bunk, too afraid of whatever lice or cooties might be hiding in the mattress. So he sat on the edge of the hard bed, waiting for his lawyer.
He’d used his one phone call to reach his cousin, Jackie, who was married to a criminal defense attorney named Barney Chavez. By all accounts, Barney was only a middling lawyer, but he worked cheap and he couldn’t turn away family.
Jackie had said her husband would be at the cop shop within the hour. That had been three hours ago, Oscar estimated, but he supposed Barney was dealing with paperwork and police elsewhere in the building.
Oscar figured Barney could get him out on bail. The cops had told him that he’d be charged with possession with intent to sell, though the three ounces of weed had been strictly for his personal use. They’d said he might also be charged with harboring a fugitive, even though he hadn’t really known Dylan was a fugitive when he harbored him.
Oscar figured even a middling attorney could get him off the charges, so he wasn’t too worried about the long-term effects of the arrest. But he sure wanted to get out of this cage.
Once Barney got him sprung, Oscar planned to go home and lo
ck the door and not answer it again, ever. His friends could take their needs elsewhere. He didn’t need the hassle.
Chapter 62
When Carmen rolled up to police headquarters in her little Nissan Sentra, her sister Rosa was standing under a streetlight, flirting with a beefy uniformed policeman at the curb.
Rosa’s pink blouse had been torn and she’d tucked the ripped part under the strap of her black bra. Otherwise, she seemed unharmed. Saying good-bye, Rosa gave the cop a girly handshake. He winked in return and flashed a smile that must’ve cost him a bundle in dental work.
Rosa opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. She waggled her scarlet fingernails at the cop as Carmen pulled away.
“Who was that?”
“One of the investigating officers,” Rosa said. “He said he goes for women like me. He likes a woman with big, strong hands.”
“You sure he didn’t mean your big, strong tits?”
Rosa laughed. “Whichever. I gave him my number.”
“Good God,” Carmen said. “And I was so worried about you. I couldn’t believe it when you called and told me you’d been arrested.”
“You knew where I was going. You knew what we were going to do.”
“I didn’t know there would be a gun,” Carmen said. “When you said on the phone—”
“Yeah, I didn’t expect a gun, either. That little shit Antony was beating that hippie guy with it.”
“Oscar?”
“His face was full of blood. When Antony tried that shit on me, I took the gun away from him and gave him a dose of his own medication.”
“Rosa!”
“I got in two good whacks before the door was busted in by the FBI. They made me drop the gun.”
Carmen could barely focus on her driving. The FBI?
“They wanted Dylan,” Rosa said. “But he went out a window.”
Carmen was grateful for a red light. She took a deep breath and said, “He got away?”
“The cops were not happy about that. They hauled the rest of us in.”
“So how come you’re out now?”
“The gun was registered to Antony. He was the one who fired the shot.”