by Jim Heskett
I latched onto his fingers, but his grip was too strong. He bared his teeth and squeezed harder, and he pushed up, trying to lift me off my feet.
Since I couldn’t pry his fingers away, and I had about twenty seconds of air left before Skivvies knocked me unconscious, I threaded my arm in between his two arms, then used my other hand to push my forearm up, like a lever. The motion took less than a second, and his grip broke against the sudden force of my push.
He reared back and swung, but I had plenty of time to lean out of range of his meaty right-hook. While he was twisted and off-balance, I jumped to the side, put my hands under his armpits, and pushed him off the porch. I jumped after him, wrapped an arm around his belly, then swept his leg to knock him on the ground, facing down.
I drove my knee into his back, then secured both of his wrists.
With his face in the dirt, he yelled, “what the hell are you, some kind of ninja?”
I kept the pressure on his back and pulled his arms toward me, not letting him up. “Not quite, you dumbass. All I want to know is where I can find Omar Qureshi. Whatever beef you have with him isn’t any of my business, and I don’t really care.”
“Go fuck yourself,” the man said, and I responded by digging my knee further into his back and yanking his arms higher. If I pressed any harder, I’d dislocate both his shoulders.
He wailed, and I held him there until he calmed down. “Fine,” he said. “Palm Grove. It’s in the phone book.”
I rolled off and took a couple quick steps back in case he was tempted to throw another punch. But he only grunted into a sit, massaging his shoulders. “Get the hell off my property,” he said. “Don’t ever come back.”
I nodded and retreated, keeping an eye on him as I backed up to the waiting cab. The taxi driver’s mouth was hanging open, his eyebrows gathered together in the middle of his forehead.
As I got in the cab and told the driver our destination, I couldn’t help but wonder who I was going to meet. What had he done to make this redneck so furious at the mention of his name?
***
On the cab ride to Palm Grove, I conducted a little internet research on it. A group home in south Austin, in the same neighborhood as St. Edward’s University, a college I’d once considered attending.
Group home.
So, this Omar was either mentally challenged or had some kind of disability so severe that he couldn’t live on his own. Neither was good news if the goal was to explain to him that he needed to get out of town.
I hadn’t thought much about what I was going to say to Omar, but I started to put my plan into action. Visualized the scenarios of how the conversation would go. I would explain that he was in danger from the same people that had killed his brother. I would get him out of that house, we’d find a way to get a car, and I’d take him somewhere safe so he could explain this whole mess to me.
Then I’d worry about my supposed-sister Susan. But Omar first.
The driver pulled up in front of a large three-story house on a tree-clogged street. “Do I need to wait for you this time?” he said.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be, so I don’t think so.” I paid him and he left me standing on the street corner.
Worries about all the things that could go wrong occurred to me as I walked up the pathway to the house. I checked every possible angle of the street for anyone sitting in cars, or looking out from window shades, but didn’t see a single suspicious thing.
Rang the doorbell. The front door buzzed, and I opened it into a walled-off entryway that ended with a glass booth like you see in concert halls. A woman with wire-rimmed glasses sat behind the booth, smiling at me.
“Can I help you, sir?” her voice came through the intercom.
I approached the glass and tried to pretend I wasn’t nervous. “I’m here to see Omar, please.”
“Is he expecting you?” she said as she lifted a clipboard and scanned a finger across it.
“I’m not on a guest list or anything like that. It’s kinda last-minute, but I don’t have an appointment, no.”
She adjusted her glasses, her expression flat. “Then I can’t let you in, sir.”
I gripped the edge of the counter below the glass booth. “Please, it’s critical that I get in to see him today.”
“Omar is resting right now. I’d rather not disturb him unless he’s expecting you.”
“Tell him it’s about Kareem, and it’s urgent. It’s about his brother.”
The lady’s eyebrows raised a fraction above the rims of her glasses at the mention of Kareem’s name, and she considered my question for a few seconds. “Okay, I’ll ask him. But if he isn’t interested in talking to you, you will have to leave. Understand?”
“I got it. Thank you.”
She disappeared, and I spend some time reading printouts stapled to a cork board on the door next to the glass booth. Flu shot warnings, the benefits of hand-washing, that sort of thing.
A minute later, the door buzzed, and the lock mechanism clicked. I opened the door and stepped inside the house, which was a clean, open-air kind of place, with brilliant white carpet and soothing blue walls.
In a living room, two guys were playing ping pong, paying no attention to me. I think maybe I’d expected the residents to be wearing straight jackets and carting around IV bags, but these guys were in jeans and hoodies. They didn’t look at me as I walked by them.
The TV was on in the next, smaller living room, some daytime talk show. I watched for a few seconds as the host was about to reveal whether or not one guest was the real father of the other guest’s child.
In a recliner, wrapped in a blanket, I spotted the man who had to be Kareem Haddadi’s brother. Same high cheekbones. Same dark skin. Omar Qureshi.
“Omar?” I said as I knelt beside the recliner.
He didn’t look at me, instead kept his eyes glued to the television, stroking his beard. “I knew he was the father. It is obvious. The baby looks like him.”
“Omar, I’ve come a long way to see you. You don’t know me, but I want to help you.”
He eyed me without moving his head. I saw his chest rise and fall, a little faster. He swung his head to make the recliner rock back and forth.
“Your brother Kareem sent me.”
Now he finally turned his head to look at me. His eyes were dark and full of fear. Breath smelled of mushrooms. His lips parted, and he wheezed as the recliner came to a stop. “Kareem?”
“Yes, he wanted me to come find you because there’s been some trouble.”
“What trouble do you mean?”
I hesitated, with no idea how to come out and say this. “Maybe you don’t know. Your brother, he… he passed away last week.”
Omar turned back to the television, blinking several times in succession. “The man does not seem happy that he is revealed as the father of the child. I would think he should be happy.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes, I heard you. So, that snake Heath Candle finally got his wish and killed my brother, did he?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Omar’s deep black eyes bored into me as the television droned on in the living room. “It was him, was it not?”
My mouth didn’t want to work. Omar had just accused my father of murdering this man’s brother. “I, uh, no, it wasn’t him. I was there when it happened, in Colorado.”
“Colorado? My brother has a house there. One of his smaller ones. He tells me he spends little time there.”
I knew that, and I’d been to that house. “The two men who murdered your brother were named Darren and Shelton. On the orders of a man named Wyatt Green. They shot him, and tried to get me to finish him, but they’re all dead now. All the people directly involved are dead.” Except for Glenning, of course, who was in Texas. And, all the people who were directly or indirectly involved that I didn’t know about.
Omar turned his head back to the television, nodding solemnly as a commercial for the U
S Navy showed men and women in camouflage gear operating high-tech equipment on a submarine.
I couldn’t tell if he was absorbing the info, or if he’d already forgotten, or what. I couldn’t read this man.
“Green,” he said. “One of the other snakes.”
“You knew Wyatt Green?”
Omar scoffed. “Of course I did. He is from IntelliCraft, the source of all evil in this world. But how do I know who you are?”
I unfolded Kareem’s letter from my pocket and showed it to him. He mouthed the words to himself as he read. I thought I detected a little bit of wetness in the corners of Omar’s eyes, but he shed no tears.
“If all this is true, then we must move before they put more people in danger. We must finish what my brother started and expose them.”
He bounced up from his seat and raced up the stairs to the second floor. With no time to question, I followed him up the carpeted stairs, past the ping pong players, who still acted as if I didn’t exist. My head buzzed. So much didn’t make sense.
I caught a flash of him entering a bedroom at the end of the hall and chased after him. When I entered the room, he was dragging a metal suitcase from the closet. He threw open his dresser drawers and piled clothes into the suitcase.
“Omar, wait. What do you think is going to happen here?”
He stopped packing, his chest heaving. “We are going to go to Dallas and confront them for what they have done. We must seek out justice while there is still yet time.”
“What have they done?”
Omar paused, gripping a pair of slacks in his hands. “Kareem did not tell you?”
“Kareem didn’t tell me much of anything. He just said to stay away, but then I got mixed up in the whole thing anyway, and now I’m here to get you. Because he wanted me to.”
“What he did not tell you was for your own safety.”
He went back to packing, his hands clumsily transferring everything out of each drawer and into the suitcase.
“Why now?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve known whatever it is that IntelliCraft is doing, right? You’ve been hiding out here in Austin, so why haven’t you done anything before?”
“He did not want me to get involved. He said they would not hurt me as long as they thought I would stay quiet. And he said he had a plan. But now that he is gone, there is no one left. There is only me. I am the only one who knows how to stop them, and I will hide no longer. You must take me to Dallas.”
I shook my head. “I can’t do that. Your brother’s last request was that I take you somewhere safe. We go rushing into the IntelliCraft office flinging accusations, they’ll just have us arrested.”
“Then what are we to do?” he said as he emptied the last drawer and moved on to a desk.
I had to make a snap judgment. I’d only intended to warn him and then leave, but somehow I found myself saying, “I think we need to get you to Mexico.”
“I don’t have a passport anymore,” Omar said.
“Right. We’ll worry about that when we get there. The first step is to get out of Austin.”
Omar sat in the desk chair and lifted a framed picture of two young Middle Eastern boys. He smiled. “Kareem was never not in trouble. My mother, she was always so furious. She said she had one gray hair for each time he made her angry. I was too scared of her to disobey, but Kareem could make an art form of it.” He held out the picture to me. “The same day we took this photograph, Kareem later stole the neighbor’s motorcycle, and he crashed it into a building in town. I could not believe he even dared. Mother screamed for days.”
Omar didn’t seem too broken up over the news of his brother’s death. “Are you okay, Omar?”
His smile flattened. “I knew they would come for him. He also knew they would come for him, and he told so me often. Now that he is gone, they will come for me. Does not matter how little or how much I know. I cannot hide any longer.”
“That’s why we need to get you out of the country, and away from all this. Maybe there are things you can do to stop them once you’re safely at a distance.”
Omar set down the picture. “I will come with you and go to Mexico.”
A wave of relief blanketed me. “Okay, great, do you need help packing?”
“No, but I do need help leaving.”
“Sorry, what?”
“I’m not supposed to leave the home. You will have to help me escape.”
***
Omar took me into his bathroom and used a red crayon to draw the layout of the house across the mirror. Three stories, seven bedrooms. All the doors on the first floor locked from the outside. The windows on the first and second floors were also restricted. The third-floor windows were unlocked, but the house had no trellises or vines or anything convenient like that to descend.
The tricky part, he said, was that the on-site nurse lived in a bedroom on the first floor, so trying to escape from that level would be nearly impossible.
Omar did not explain to me why we had to flee, or even why he was a resident here. I’d save that conversation for another time.
He ran the faucet and splashed water over his crayon schematics, then smeared them into a circular mess.
The plan, as he described it, seemed a little unusual, but he spoke with confidence and passion about each step, and I had to believe he knew what he was doing. The step where he would jump out the window seemed ill-conceived, but he assured me he’d done it before and everything would be okay.
“Once we go down this road, there is no turning back,” he said.
After he’d explained what we should do, we walked down the hall to the first bedroom on the floor. He leaned against the door for a moment, then turned to me. “I do not want to give you the impression, based on the motorcycle story, that my brother was some kind of teenage miscreant. He was rebellious, but also terribly smart. Always first in class at school. We all knew he would be successful in business someday, no matter which avenue. He seemed destined for great wealth.”
“Okay.”
Omar nodded, then entered the room. A man with wild hair and deep wrinkles on his face sat in a chair, staring out the window. A White Widow poster hung on the wall. This band had fans everywhere, it seemed.
“Bernard,” Omar said.
This man, Bernard, did not turn to look. He grunted, then leaned in his chair to fart. Omar pursed his lips and glanced at me, and I shrugged. This was his plan, so I didn’t know what I was supposed to say.
Omar knelt next to him and whispered into Bernard’s ear for a few seconds. Bernard nodded, reached out, and patted Omar on top of the head. Seemed to be a done deal.
“Okay,” Omar said to me. “We are ready to execute the plan.”
I followed Omar and Bernard down the stairs to the living room. The two ping pong players were now eating soup at a table, and three others were reading in chairs. A man wearing blue scrubs was scribbling on a clipboard, standing next to the front door. Elevator music drifted through the air from some other room.
Omar put a hand on my arm. “It’s time.” Then he disappeared back up the stairs. The two soup-eaters stared at me.
Bernard walked to the center of the room and stood there for a few seconds, looking a little confused. He coughed, then immediately crumpled into a heap on the floor and started writhing and foaming at the mouth. When no one paid attention to him, he screamed and kicked his legs out, knocking over a lamp.
The man in scrubs dropped the clipboard and rushed to Bernard’s side. Bernard twisted, gasping, gurgling, and generally over-acting the part. But it seemed to work.
The other inhabitants of the room started jumping around, yelling for help, and in the chaos of the scene, I did my part: I walked calmly to the front door and waited.
The door opened in front of me as two men in scrubs rushed past, walkie-talkies on their hips squawking. With the door open, I walked through, not turning to glance back at the station with the glass booth.
Everything was happening a little too easily, but I kept playing along anyway.
I exited the house, and Omar was standing on the street corner, grin on his face and his bags under his arms.
“Wait a second,” I said, “are you okay? Did you literally jump from the third story?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
The door opened behind us, and the woman with the wire-rimmed glasses rushed out, headed straight for us. She held a clipboard out in front of her as she hurried down the steps.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
But Omar did not run. He kept his head high and stared flat-faced at the woman in the glasses.
“Omar,” she said, “if you’re leaving, you need to sign yourself out.”
Omar accepted a pen and scribbled his name on the clipboard. Then he placed the pen in her waiting palm.
She glanced at me, then jogged back to the house without a word.
“What the hell was that?” I said. “I’m totally lost.”
“That was the perfect execution of a masterful plan,” Omar said.
“You didn’t really jump out of the window, did you? Those doors weren’t locked at all. You just walked out a back door.”
Omar wore no expression on his face. “The plan worked. There is no need to discuss it any further. What is our next step?”
I wanted to back up a bit but didn’t think Omar would oblige. “I don’t think public transportation or flying is a good idea, so we need a car. The sooner we can get on the road, the better.”
“I have a car,” Omar said. “I am not allowed to drive it, but I definitely have a car.”
CHAPTER NINE
Omar wouldn’t tell me where the car was, but he said we could walk there. I followed this curious little man down the street while he hummed to himself, occasionally tossing a glance left or right. After that scene back at the group home, I didn’t know how much to trust him. Or how much of what I was seeing and hearing to believe, either.
I watched a group of kids on the lawn at the edge of the St. Edwards campus toss a football. Made me wish I’d played sports in college, more than just Judo. Throwing other guys around on a foam mat hadn’t ever instilled the same kind of camaraderie the regular jocks seemed to enjoy.