Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  Alice Menendez said Oscar had lost his ranch and now worked as a miner. I should’ve asked what mineral he was chasing. If it was gold, there might be a connection between Oscar’s work and Rolando’s hand showing up on my doorstep, two miles south of an old gold mine.

  Was there enough color left on Paradise Mountain to justify murder? Tork Mortenson thought so.

  It was late, and my foot was heavy, and when you drive a topless Bronco too fast on a summer night, the hot wind drumming against your ears generates all kinds of mad thoughts.

  Like something bad happened to Opal.

  No, Opal’s fine. She stuck her thumb out and hitchhiked home. She made a bundle on the sidewalk, and in a few minutes, I’d see her waiting for me at the entrance to Double Wide, waving a fistful of bills to pay her rent.

  Talk about mad thoughts.

  After Silverbell, as Speedway begins its ascent into the mountains, the night got blacker with the absence of streetlamps, and the traffic thinned to almost nothing. The key word was “almost.” The headlights in my rearview were abnormally bright oblongs. They’d been there since before the freeway, and I was driving too fast for it to be coincidence.

  I was being followed.

  The rush of sweat came instantly. I goosed the engine and kept it goosed. The two-lane road up to Gates Pass bends around tight curves as it climbs the mountain. At each turn the chasing headlights disappeared for a time and came into view again as the road went back the other way. I drove as fast as I could through switchbacks that got tighter and tighter.

  At the peak, there’s a parking lot and overlook. I killed my headlights and lurched right onto the long driveway that leads into the lot. But I misjudged my speed, and the Bronco skidded sideways. By the time I stopped moving, the wheels on the passenger side had jumped the curb and slipped into a ditch, the Bronco itself tilting heavily in that direction.

  I looked in the back. Charlie O’Shea took the commotion like a pro. Or a corpse. He never budged.

  Headlight Man sped past the lot and over the pass. He moved so fast I don’t think he saw me. But I couldn’t see him either. The car was a white SUV of some unknown make and model, and the driver could’ve been anyone.

  I ran to the cliff at the back of the lot and waited until the SUV cleared the pass and came into view as it descended the other side of the mountain.

  From where he was on the flat, he could see a long way across the desert. If he kept going, maybe he wasn’t following me after all. But if he realized he’d been hoodwinked and wanted to continue the chase, he’d turn around and drive back up the mountain.

  He stopped in the middle of the road and stayed put, not moving, headlights on. I watched and waited for his next move.

  The night was lonely, no traffic in either direction.

  When he didn’t budge, I ran back to the Bronco, slapped it into four-wheel drive, and fought my way out of the ditch. I drove out onto the road, stopped at the top of the mountain facing west, and blinked my beams on and off three times, the way a sailor sends a message by Morse code.

  But I didn’t need to be rescued. I had nothing to say except, “Here I am! Catch me if you can!” Headlight Man took the bait. He swung the SUV into a U-turn and sped back up the mountain.

  The chase was on again.

  SIXTEEN

  I had a good head start and stretched my lead on the downslope back toward Tucson. Headlight Man still had to climb the mountain and negotiate the pass before he could work up any speed at all. I shot through the Silverbell intersection on a green light and under the freeway on two more greens.

  The intersection at Speedway and Stone was brightly lit on its northwest corner by the campus of Pima Community College. My destination was catty corner to the school, a notorious drug-and-homeless park.

  I drove straight through the intersection along the park’s northern boundary and turned right onto Seventh Avenue. I found a curbside parking spot a short way down, beyond the glow of a streetlamp. The Bronco is a pretty distinct ride, and I needed the cover.

  From there I jogged into the park. It was dark under the big trees, and there were groups of homeless men and women gathered on the grass, talking, sleeping, and staring at nothing. I reached a cement picnic table that stood off Speedway, about fifty feet from the pavement.

  In the darkness, I sat on the table and watched the intersection for the approach of the white SUV.

  Two people lay in the grass at my feet, a man and a woman. The man was enormous, probably three hundred pounds and six foot four. He had a black beard and black hair. He wore tattersall pants and a long tan raincoat against the tremendous heat. He lay on his back, the raincoat open, his button-up shirt untucked and showing a triangle of belly flesh. He wasn’t wearing shoes, and the skin on his feet was grotesque, cracked, filthy, caked with blood.

  His hands were thrown out at his sides, palms down. The slight up-and-down movement of the raincoat told me he was breathing. But it was noiseless and not too convincing.

  A black woman sat beside him. She had a long forehead and dreaded, spiked hair and silver posts jammed through the tops of her ears. With the wide spread of her nose, the high, sloping skull, and high cheekbones, she looked native African.

  She was sickly thin. She wore a torn black T-shirt, and her arms hanging out of it looked scabbed from needle tracks. She rocked and mumbled words in a language unknown to me. But they had the rhythm of a plea or a prayer, only the nearly dead giant wasn’t listening.

  I said, “Is he okay?”

  “No man ever loved me the way he did.” She had a buttery voice with a British accent. The elegant sound of it was jarring coming from someone so far gone.

  “He still loves you.”

  The woman settled her lost eyes on me, and her mouth fell open. She dragged her right hand slowly down her cheek, the fingertips barely touching flesh. She was especially black to begin with, but her skin had been made blacker by time in the sun and the accumulation of dirt from living on the street.

  Her trembling hand stopped at her jaw. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, with all his heart,” I said.

  She let out a small choking sound, pressed both palms against her face, and cried. She picked up the giant’s hand and cupped it tenderly in her lap. He remained corpse-like, seemingly unaware of her ministrations. She went back to rocking.

  I watched them a moment longer and didn’t want to watch anymore. If I kept at it, I’d invite them out to Double Wide, just for a day or two until they got back on their feet. Before you knew it, they’d be nailing up blanket drapes in my empty trailer and planning other decorative touches, like a door.

  Headlight Man pulled up to the red light at Speedway and Stone. From my tabletop seat, the streetlights and the school lights were bright enough for me to see a shape behind the wheel and the color of the driver’s hair.

  Turned out I had it wrong. Headlight Man was a woman, a blonde with shoulder-length hair. That worked. If I was a detective, she had to be a blonde.

  When the light changed, she lurched off the stop line and sped along the park boundary heading east on Speedway. Her passing gave me a side view from forty feet, and it was the same as before. The SUV was traveling too fast to see much detail.

  But I saw the blond hair again. Long and snowy white, probably bleached.

  I felt triumphant. I’d ditched my first tail.

  Something told me not to take the usual route over Gates Pass back to Double Wide. Instead, I drove south, thinking of Mortenson’s map, which showed me an alternate route home.

  If the map told the truth, it was little more than a fading two-track that would take me past an abandoned gold camp defended by gunmen who may or may not be involved in the assassination-style murder of one man and the brutal dismemberment of my friend.

  The way the last twenty-four hours had gone, driving the wagon road made perfect sense. I looked over my shoulder. “How about we take a ride, Charlie?”

  No answer.
He lay amid the popcorn, snoring like a hog in the garden.

  “That’s what I like about you, Charlie. You’re up for anything.”

  Nearing midnight, we started the long drive to Paradise.

  SEVENTEEN

  The trip is a straight shot west of the city on Ajo Way, a two-lane blacktop across open desert, few signs of life anywhere. At that time of night, the traffic is light and at least every other vehicle is Border Patrol.

  That part of southern Arizona, from the edge of town out to Three Points and into the vastness of Tohono O’odham Reservation, is among the most smuggled territory in America.

  In Mortenson’s office, I counted twenty-five miles to the wagon road, and when I reached that point I stopped and scouted around.

  A light appeared in the sky to the south. I watched it get bigger and bigger. A Border Patrol rescue helicopter. They regularly flew back and forth from the Mexican line, bringing injured crossers to the hospital. The sound was small and distant, and then all consuming as it roared overhead, heading north.

  I went back to business, looking for something resembling a road. I pulled onto the sandy strip beside the asphalt and crawled along until I reached a cut in the four-strand barbwire fence at my passenger door.

  Opposite it, on the south side of the pavement, stood two old gas pumps and the shell of an abandoned building with a sign hanging by its last screw over the door. The paint on the sign was chipped and faded and barely readable, except for one word, Glory.

  That was all I had to go on. I drove through the fence break into the dark desert.

  Mortenson’s map said the drive to Paradise was three miles. The road was loose sand in the first portion and hard-packed dirt as the ground rose to meet the mountain. I flipped on the high beams and saw tire tracks—fresh, meaning they were made some time between last night’s rain and five minutes ago.

  It looked like I might have company on the mountain.

  I turned off my cell and headlights and kept going, past clumps of sage and bunchgrass bordering the road. The shrub gave some guidance on a cloudy night, but not much. I alternated between looking at the ground and the way ahead, making sure I didn’t drive into a cactus.

  As the road climbed, the Bronco had to work harder, and that made it louder. Worried the noise might give me away, I veered into the desert and parked under a cluster of mesquite trees. Charlie was still unconscious in the back. I left him there and jogged up the steep incline.

  Good legs are a pitcher’s best friend, and I still had mine.

  About a mile remained to the peak. I made it easily.

  At the top, the road flattened out through the mountain pass that held the remnants of the town. I found cover behind a debris pile on the west side of the road. Four buildings stood on the opposite side, faint halos of light above them, their backs bumping against the mountain.

  Crouching and listening, I heard male voices and the rumble of truck engines, which likely explained the light. The men were using headlights to do their business.

  I wanted to know what that business was. Honest players don’t work in the middle of the night twenty-four hours after police find a murdered man a mile away on the north-facing slope of the same mountain—to say nothing of me finding my friend’s severed hand at about the same time. There had to be a connection.

  Of the four buildings, three were near ruin. The fourth was a saloon, crumbling but holding on. It had a long porch and windows without glass on either side of batwing doors. A board sidewalk ran the length of the building, and in the street outside, there were hitching rails and horse troughs.

  Keeping low, I ran across the street, hopped onto the porch, and stepped inside. Ceiling beams angled down against the floor amid the powerful smell of dust and disuse. The bar and back bar were in a thousand pieces, and broken glass covered much of the floor.

  I tip-toed around the shards to the rear window and got on my knees for a better look. Two trucks were parked side by side, their back ends facing me, headlights shining into a drift under the mountain. A third truck faced me, headlights off.

  Men were carrying items out of the drift and throwing them into the back of the trucks. The objects were white and bowling ball sized, the exteriors in a checkerboard pattern, like pine-apples. They were heavy. The men held them with two hands between their knees, struggling to keep their backs straight.

  Others carried something lighter, capable of being handled with one hand.

  Over and over, a man growled, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” He appeared to be the leader. I couldn’t see much of him, only his shadow on the wall of the drift.

  The building snapped and settled. I wanted to get out of there before it fell on me. I stepped through the saloon onto the porch, and that was as far as I got.

  From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed someone at my shoulder and felt cold steel pressing against my cheek. My uncanny powers of deduction said “pistol.”

  I threw my hands up. “Where can a guy get a glass of milk around here?”

  EIGHTEEN

  The gunman shoved me around to the back of the saloon and against one of the trucks. With his arm straight out and gripping my shirt at the chest, he yelled into the drift. “Jefe! Out here! Found this one sneaking around!”

  The leader walked out and faced me. He wore a tactical holster strapped low on his right leg, between thigh and knee. “You’re looking for something at my gold mine, friend?”

  He was a squat Mexican not long out of his twenties and probably 220 pounds. He had short, wide-hanging arms, a barrel belly, round, pitted cheeks, and a bulb nose. His skin was copper colored and his black hair ran low across his forehead in a straight line, interrupted only by a V in the middle.

  “I lost my dog couple days ago,” I said. The dog was the first thing that popped into my head. “We were hiking and he got onto a scent, and wouldn’t you know it, I couldn’t find him again.”

  “You come here at night to find a dog?” He turned his head as he stared. He asked my name, and I told him. The work went on behind us, the men dropping those bowling balls into the truck bed and hurrying back for more.

  Something in the leader’s left hand gleamed off the light from the drift. It was a machete held tight against his leg. I thought, “Rolando.” I might be standing in front of Rolando’s killer.

  “You hiked up this mountain, Stark? I don’t think so. Where’s your truck?”

  “I drove and then hiked.” I pointed vaguely south. “It’s parked down here a ways.”

  The gunman piped up: “He was spying on us, jefe.” He pointed to the back of the saloon. “At the window.”

  “Spying?” Machete’s mouth tightened. Muscle packs bulged along his jaw. The smear of tattoos covering his neck and arms spoke of long hours in the prison yard. “No one likes a spy. Is that what you are?”

  The gunman nudged closer. “Jefe, we have to go—the helicopter.”

  Machete paid no attention, and said to me, “At night you look for your dog? In the dark? I’m giving you one chance to live. Tell me your business at my gold mine.”

  “I told you, the dog.”

  Machete’s face wrenched into an ugly knot. His breath hissed, and he drew the machete up and placed the blade on my left shoulder, the cutting edge against my neck. A single downward slash of his arm would do it, and I’d bleed out in a mountain ghost town.

  He held the blade steady. Red flecks glowed at the corners of his eyes. “You lie, Stark.”

  I felt the first surge of panic and fought to hold it back. I tried to stand perfectly still, tried to breathe. But there was no air on that dark mountain. I saw myself falling. I saw a guard walking down the block to Sam’s cell and delivering the news through the bars in a cold, flat tone.

  “It’s your kid,” he’d say. Sam would wonder about a town called Paradise. Where is it? On a mountain, you say? What was Prospero doing there? Sam would see the irony of practicing a faith all his life that promised paradise, and this is the p
aradise he gets.

  No, no, don’t die this way, Stark. Do something. Fight. Swing at him, go for the machete.

  The gunman spoke. “The helicopter will come back, jefe. Take the spy with us. We’ll find out what he knows.”

  The blade stayed tight against my neck. Seconds ticked away. I died again and again.

  Machete said, “Put him in the truck.”

  The gunman roped my hands behind my back and shoved me into one of the pickups. Machete sat in the front passenger seat of the lead truck, the gunman beside me in the back. The three trucks rumbled down the road, bumper to bumper, no headlights, a slow, bouncing ride on a moonless night.

  The rope squeezed my wrists. The pulsing blood made them feel huge. I worked my hands back and forth to create some give. No one in the truck spoke. The cab smelled like sweat and junk food. The gunman stuck his head between the front seats, watching the road ahead.

  I inched closer to the door on my right and stretched my hands close to the handle, fumbling for it. The awkward position cramped the muscles in my shoulders. I relaxed to let the tension ease and tried again.

  I found it, slid a finger under the latch, and yanked, but the latch didn’t engage. The door was locked.

  The unlock button would be slightly forward of the latch. I twisted some more, trying to reach it. If I could get out that door to open ground, I could run. The odds weren’t great, but my legs would give me a chance at least.

  The truck went along, diving into craters in the road and out again, the four of us bouncing along with it. I worked my hands back and forth, back and forth.

  The driver’s cell phone trilled. He fetched it from his breast pocket and held it to his ear without speaking. The voice on the other end burped out a string of muffled words. The driver responded by straining to check the rear and side mirrors.

  “Behind us, jefe! La migra! La migra!”

  The driver opened his door and looked back toward Paradise just as the chopper appeared. Its spotlight arrived first, sweeping the desert at an angle. Then the light beamed down in a blinding circle as the craft drew up and hovered overhead, the whooping blades churning at the ground, whipping dirt, stones, and twigs against the truck.