by Jim Heskett
On the other side of the false wall was total darkness.
I slipped out my phone and turned on the flashlight app, then saw another, deeper closet inside, this one filled floor to ceiling with guns, hand grenades, land mines, and pack upon pack of what I guessed to be plastic explosive.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I didn’t count how many guns were staring back at me, but it looked like enough for a small army. Or a militia.
I eked out of the gun closet and tried my best to put everything back the way I found it. I had to be quick and silent because I was now sure that at any second, Jed or Carl was going to come screaming up those stairs and stick a gun in my face.
Oh, hey Candle, watcha doing? Snooping through our stuff after we gave you that whole speech about the rules? Thought that was a smart idea, did you?
No, not the wisest move I’d made so far.
Houston, this is Candle, over.
Go ahead, Candle.
I wanted to get a smart-check on rummaging through the meth-heads stuff, over.
Yeah, Candle, we read you. Be advised: Operations is calling that one of your dumbest ideas ever.
Roger that, Houston. Thanks for the confirmation.
While I hadn’t felt safe here before, now I was certain we needed to go. I had to get Omar and form our plan to escape from this place as soon as possible.
I made it out of the bedroom unnoticed. I eased down the stairs and found Carl and Jed in the living room, watching some softcore porn movie on TV while two naked and sweaty bodies gyrated under satin bed sheets and soft saxophone jazz played.
“If he hadn’t hit that retaining wall,” Carl said, “he would’ve won by at least two laps.”
“Two laps? Are you insane?” Then Jed looked up and noticed me. “What the hell do you want?”
I cleared my throat, trying not to sound panicked. “Where is Omar?”
Jed turned back to the TV. “He and Vanessa went out for a while. They ain’t tell me where they were going, but they’ll be back before too long. Don’t get your panties in a bunch about it.”
Carl didn’t say anything, he just sneered at me between gulps of his beer. What the hell were we doing here, with these people?
I retreated upstairs, now feeling like I was crawling out of my skin. I had to leave. Get out, away from these crazy people with the army’s worth of ammunition in a closet. But I couldn’t leave without Omar. For good or bad, my whole purpose here was about keeping him safe.
I sat by the window, praying he would come back soon, watching the sun set over the plains of south Texas. And I stayed in that same position until dark, when I grew so tired I fell asleep with my head against the glass.
***
“Candle,” Omar said, shaking my shoulder.
It took me a second to clear my head of the cobwebs. I’d been dreaming about termites. “What?”
“You fell asleep.”
I remembered the guns. Remembered my panic and the softcore porn movie and Carl’s sneer. “Omar, we have to go, now. I’m not going to spend another minute in this house of crazy rednecks. It’s not safe here.”
“I am afraid we must stay,” he said. “I was not able to get a passport.”
“What, why?”
“We went to see the man that Vanessa knows, but he was arrested last month. We tried a couple other options but came up short, and there is no other way to get one that she knows of.”
“It doesn’t matter. We still have to go. These people… Omar, these are not good people.”
“Vanessa is a good person. She will not let any harm come to us.”
“Well, maybe so, but Jed and Carl sure-as-hell aren’t. Those two are scaring the crap out of me with their dirty looks and all their brawny talk about minding my p’s and q’s.”
“And you do not trust that she can keep them civil?”
I turned up my palms and shrugged. “Maybe. But they wave guns around like it’s nothing. Maybe this is totally normal in rinky-dink small town south Texas, but it’s not cool with me. Somebody is going to get shot, even if it’s just accidental.”
“But what are we to do? We are far away from anything out here and have no transportation. Where are we supposed to go?”
I thought about this for a few seconds. Couldn’t come up with a plan that didn’t involve us being able to leave by car. “I don’t know.”
I checked the time on my phone. Transportation or not, we couldn’t stay here any longer.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to set the alarm on my phone for about five a.m., then we’re just going to pack up and leave quietly while they’re all sleeping. Walk back to Three Rivers. It’ll take us a couple hours, but then we can figure out how to get to a bus station, or something like that.”
“I do not know if that is a good idea.”
“You’re probably right about that, but staying here is a worse idea.”
Omar looked skeptical, but he eventually agreed. Given what he’d told me about his panic attacks, I didn’t want to scare him by telling him about the weapons closet, but that was going to be the next move if he’d refused.
I set the alarm and we went to bed, and I tossed and turned for a few hours. I’m not sure if I slept—maybe a few minutes here and there—but I never got to hear the alarm, because we were woken by the thundering of gunshots in the middle of the night.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I scrambled out of bed and rushed to the window as Omar roused in the creaky twin bed across the room. His eyes darted around.
Only a pair of headlights lit the darkness, the wide open Texas country blanketed under a million stars like grains of salt on black paper.
“What is happening?” Omar said. “Did that come from outside the house?”
Another blast, and I saw the light from the gun flash this time.
“I think so,” I said. “Get your stuff. We’re leaving.”
I started to gather my possessions, and the door opened. Vanessa poked her head in. “You two stay put and don’t do anything stupid like make noise or turn on the light. We’ve got to deal with this, but you’ll be fine here if you just keep y’all’s mouths shut.”
“What the hell is going on?” I said.
“It’s nothing. Just some people who ain’t happy with us, and we got to have ourselves a discussion about that.”
She dashed out of the room as Omar looked at me, pleading. I could see the panic on his face, and I’m sure I was showing the same thing. But what could we do? Maybe if there were a gunfight, we could sneak out the back.
“I guess we stay here for now,” I said, and we both camped on opposite sides of the window, floodlights lighting up the front yard. “If this goes bad, we’re going to make a run for it, okay?”
“Yes,” Omar said, nodding vigorously.
A truck with three people in front slowed near the house. A man stood up in the back, raising a rifle above his head. In the moonlight, I couldn’t make out his features.
Jed, Carl, and Vanessa gathered in the yard. They were all armed. Jed raised a shotgun and leveled it at the truck.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, coming to my house in the middle of the night?” Carl yelled across the yard.
“You goddamn well know why we’re here,” said the man in the back of the truck. “We want what’s ours.”
“That arrangement is no good anymore,” Vanessa said. “We want new terms.”
“Why should we do that?” the man said. “We can just pump you full of holes and take everything you got.”
They were going to start shooting at any second. “Okay, screw this, we’re leaving,” I said. “Pack up, we’re going out the back door. I don’t care if we have to walk.”
Below us, the two groups were shouting at each other, and I caught only a random word here and there as Omar and I finished packing up our belongings. At least no guns had been fired yet.
We slung our packs and suitca
ses over our shoulders and tramped down the hallway, but as soon as I headed down the stairs, Carl was there in the doorway, pistol in hand. I faintly heard the sound of wheels spinning outside. Maybe they’d come to new terms, after all.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
“We’re going to go now,” I said. “Although I’m quite appreciative of all the hospitality you’ve shown us, we don’t need all this drama you’ve got here. We just wanted some help, but we came to the wrong people.”
Jed entered, then Vanessa, both of them still armed. Jed also raised his shotgun, over Carl’s shoulder and pointed straight at me. They clustered in the entryway of the house as Omar and I were stuck halfway down the staircase.
I wondered if I swung my bag, if I’d be able to knock Carl out and then get to Jed before he could shoot me.
“Knock it off,” Vanessa said. “Y’all put your guns away.”
“No, Van,” Carl said. “I want to know what these two are doing here, for real. Why did you bring them?”
“I told you, Omar is a friend of mine.”
Carl pushed air in and out of his nose, staring at me. “Seems like an odd friend to have.”
“You don’t get to pick my friends for me, asshole,” she said.
“What was that out front?” I said, trying to move the conversation away from Omar.
“Just a business disagreement,” Carl said. “Not that it’s any of your business.” He crossed the living room to me. “What did you say your name was, again?”
“Candle.”
“You ever been to El Paso, Candle?”
Vanessa grunted. “Oh, Jesus, he don’t know shit about it. Don’t be asking him that.”
Carl raised his pistol. “Keep your mouth shut, Van. He can answer the damn question.”
“I, uh, no, I don’t think so,” I said.
Carl spat on the floor. “Bullshit. He knows about the package.”
Vanessa drew a revolver from her waistband. “You’re acting batshit. How in the hell would he know about that? I just met this preppy yesterday.”
A weird urge to laugh struck me. I hadn’t been called a preppy since grade school.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Carl said. “You don’t know this guy. I don’t know this guy.” He walked up the first two stairs, placing the nose of the gun against my forehead. My bowels loosened and my knees went weak. You’d think I’d have grown accustomed to having guns in my face, but it’s never a pleasant feeling.
“What aren’t you telling us?” Carl said. “What you got squared away in that little head of yours?”
I started shaking. I tried to think of how I kept my nerves straight when Darren and Shelton had pointed guns at me in my house, but this wasn’t quite the same scenario. I had no idea how I was supposed to reason with this armed country bumpkin. El Paso? What the hell was that?
I closed my eyes. “I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t kept anything from you and I’ve never been to El Paso. I don’t know what El Paso has to do with anything, and I don’t care. It’s none of my business.”
A blast thundered in my ears. For a second, I was sure I’d been shot, and I waited for the pain to follow the shock. But I opened my eyes to see Carl slumping onto the steps in front of me, blood spurting from a hole in the back of his head. He blinked a couple times, a look of confusion on his face. His jaw moved up and down, trying to talk, but only rasps escaped his lips.
“What the fuck,” said Jed, pivoting toward Vanessa and raising his shotgun at her, who was holding her smoking pistol at arm’s length.
She seemed as cool as could be. With a scowl, she reached out and smacked the barrel of Jed’s shotgun down.
“Cut it out,” she said.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Jed said.
“I’ve had enough of his shit,” she said. “He been on me for weeks about this and that, always testing me. It was gonna happen sooner or later.”
“Christ, woman, you didn’t have to shoot him.”
At my feet, Carl gurgled and writhed. In a few seconds, he stopped and his head slumped to the side.
That weird desire to laugh bubbled up through me again. Laugh, or maybe crap my pants, or something.
Jed picked his shotgun up from the floor, brushed a bit of dust off the barrel, and wandered off into the kitchen. He came back a minute later with it slung over his shoulder and two beers pinched between his fingers. He handed a bottle to Vanessa.
“Hell of a mess,” Jed said. “I still can’t believe you did that. You oughta consult me before you go shooting anybody else.”
“I’ll clean it up later,” she said. As she crossed the room, she nodded at me. “I have an idea for you two. I can make a phone call in the morning and get both of y’all fixed up. Sit tight, and you’ll be good to go in a couple hours.”
Jed glared at her back as she walked away. As she closed the door behind her, Jed sipped his beer, belched, and said, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
Then he went into the kitchen and brought a chair back to the foyer, and placed it next to the front door. He sat, with his shotgun across his lap, and glared at me.
***
Omar and I went back to our room since Jed was now guarding the front door, but we didn’t sleep. I stared at the water-stained ceiling and punished myself over and over again for letting all this happen.
Maybe Vanessa was a good person, as Omar had said, but she was as much a lunatic as Jed and the newly-deceased Carl. Who would shoot their own brother, or husband, or roommate? I didn’t even know how those three were related.
Omar sat up in his bed. “I cannot believe I involved you in this. I am so terribly sorry.”
“You didn’t know. What matters now is that we get out of here safe, with all of our limbs intact.”
Omar gripped the bedsheets so tightly that his hands shook.
“We should leave,” I said. “Stick to the original plan and just go. Every minute we stay here is another minute one of these savages might decide to come up here and skin us alive. We can go out the window if we have to.”
Omar ran his hands through his wiry hair. “I am afraid of Jed. I do not think he will let us leave. If he sees us outside, trying to escape, he will shoot us. Maybe we should wait and find out what the idea Vanessa spoke of was. I still believe she can help.”
I thought about this, and it did seem like the only reasonable solution. For all I knew, Jed had moved from the foyer to the front porch and was now waiting for us to try to flee.
“Okay. But if she can’t come up with something good, then we’re out of here. We’ll just wait until Jed goes to take a crap or something, then run for it.”
An hour later, as the sun was rising, a knock came at the door. Vanessa poked her head in. “Told you I could get y’all fixed up. I got something for you, and I think you’re gonna like it. Follow me.”
We got up and followed her down the hall, Omar and I sharing a look that was some mix of hope and terror. Carl’s body was no longer sprawled on the stairs, but the smears and streaks blood and brain matter remained. Funny how desensitized I’d become to dead body spillage after seeing a few of these over the last month.
Vanessa led us to the kitchen, where a plastic rotary phone sat on a table. The phone was off the hook.
She pointed at it. “Go on, then.”
I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Is this Candle?” said a man with a strong Hispanic accent.
“Yeah, that’s me. Who are you?”
“You don’t need to know my name. Vanessa said you are looking to make a permanent trip down south?”
So he was some kind of coyote. “That’s right. Quickly and quietly.”
“One person, or several?”
“One. Just a friend of mine. I’m staying.”
“Then here is what you are going to do, amigo. You are going to drive to the city of Laredo, and then—”
“Can we do this in Br
ownsville instead?” Laredo was too far west. Brownsville got me closer to Susan Palenti, where I needed to end up. I still didn’t know how to find her, but that was a problem for later.
He paused for a few seconds and I heard some papers shuffling. “That will cost extra.”
“Okay, that’s fine.”
“So instead, you will go to South Point. It is part of Brownsville. You will meet me east of town, where Alaska Road ends. There is a pond there. I will be in a truck. You will bring me five thousand dollars, and I will take your friend across the border.”
My chest constricted. “Five thousand dollars?”
“This is what it costs.”
This sounded crazy. Delivering five grand to some voice on the other end of the phone. What the hell was I buying?
“Are you there?” he said.
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
“Okay. Meet me there tomorrow evening, at sunset. Don’t tell anyone else you are coming, and that money must be in cash and in US dollars, do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Okay then. Tomorrow at sunset.”
He hung up, and Vanessa crossed her arms, grinning, looking pleased with herself.
“All good?” she said.
I shrugged. “Yeah.”
“What’s he charging you?”
“Five grand. I don’t have that kind of money, though.”
Vanessa sighed. “You best figure out how to get it. I’ve worked with this guy before, and he ain’t gonna take you if you show up with less than that.”
“I can get the money,” Omar said. “I can pay the five thousand dollars.”
I heard a creak in the other room, the sound of a recliner shifting. Then the sound of Jed groaning as he stood up. He appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, a grin on his face. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but hear y’all talking about how you can get five thousand dollars. And I started thinking about how interesting that is.”
Omar gaped at me, open-mouthed.