Applewood (Book 3): The Space of Life Between

by Myers, Brendan P.

  The third vehicle, the only one that had moved since Proctor and his nephew’s departure, was a beat up and rusted pickup truck that belonged to the caretaker and his wife. If the two followed their usual routine, it being Wednesday, they would leave the house together sometime after sundown, with the wife going to visit with their daughter and new granddaughter, and the husband stopping in to say only a momentary hello before heading off to the tavern, where Torres had shared many a drink with the man on Wednesdays. He was counting on them to follow their usual routine. This was the window Torres planned to use to take the girl. Everything was arranged, including what he planned to say afterward.

  What happened to the girl? Where did she run off to?

  Who can say. It could be any of a thousand reasons. How much did we really know about her? In all probability, she decided to go home, or went to visit family. Perhaps she was growing tired of living with the gringo. Likelier still, she was starting to think he abandoned her, which time would prove he had, Torres knew, certain they had already seen the last of Senor Proctor.

  On Friday evening, he was scheduled deliver the girl to Rocio and receive his payment, which left him plenty of time between then and now for a little fun. As anticipated, Rocio was less than enthusiastic to take a girl far older than the ones he normally provided, but relented once Torres explained what a precious flower she was. Still, he would not be paid his usual rate.

  Though he squawked a little, because that was to be expected, it was actually okay with Torres. He was not taking this one purely for the money. She had been on his mind since he first laid eyes on her, and he planned to enjoy what precious time he had.

  5

  On his recent outings into the city, Dan had taken to stopping in at the lobby bar of the Regis Hotel, as opposed to communing with the Rivera mural at nearby Hotel Prado. He supposed the odd visitations he had received there from both the DEA man and the reporter’s assistant had something to do with putting him off the place. So far at least, he had been left to his own solitary pursuits at the swankier Regis.

  However, while sitting at the polished wooden bar and reflecting on it, amid the well tended plants and freshly shampooed carpet, he confessed to himself that the seediness factor probably had something to do with it. His overly fastidious observation of the rundown interior of the Prado, taking note of the water stains and lack of fresh paint and unwatered plants, had just made him sad. He promised himself he would revisit it one last time before leaving the city, but that would be that.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time he finished his drink. From the chair beside him, he grabbed the brown bag containing his newly purchased lined notebook and Wouk novel. Exiting the hotel, he stepped out onto the crowded sidewalk and took a right toward the busy plaza to hail a cab. Along the way, he passed sidewalk cantinas and street corner food vendors and young kids pestering him for money. They typically followed for half a block before giving up.

  He happened to glance up while passing one of the ubiquitous news stalls, mindlessly scanning the headlines and catching a quick glimpse of front page photos. The Vice President of the United States had arrived in town. A voluptuous Mexican pop star was involved in a contentious divorce. Something exciting evidently happened in the world of soccer.

  He had already passed it by when his brain caught up with something he thought he saw. Turning, he stepped back the few paces and looked more closely. On the front page of the newspaper the murdered journalist worked for, below the fold, beneath the two word headline: “Mas Tragedia!” was an inset photo of a young girl.

  Dan’s vision narrowed. Blinking, he looked again, but there was no denying it. The studious looking girl staring back at him was Rosa Lopez, the reporter’s assistant he had met just the other day.

  As if underwater, his hand reached out for the paper and he started to read:

  It is our sad duty to report that tragedy has again visited this newspaper, with the death yesterday of twenty-year-old research assistant Rosa Lopez, who was struck and killed in the early morning hours while crossing a street in the Tepito district. The driver fled the scene. There were no witnesses.

  “It happens every day in this neighborhood,” said shopkeeper Jesus Vargas. “No one walks where they should walk, and people drive the way they drive. We complain and complain and nothing is ever done.”

  With respect, not nothing, Senor Vargas. This newspaper has long railed against such avoidable tragedies, recently reporting that in nine out of ten accidents involving pedestrians, the driver flees the scene. More than sixty percent of all traffic fatalities in the city involve pedestrians.

  We can never allow our society to view such incidents as normal, and we renew our call for city officials to take the steps necessary to minimize the grave danger we all face on our blood soaked streets.

  The body of Lopez, a journalism student at UANM, was found by a passerby. Funeral arrangements have not yet been made.

  Letting out a ragged breath, Dan let his eyes slip closed and set the paper back on the pile. When on shaky and trembling legs he reached the next block, he looked three times before crossing the street.

  6

  After descending into a deep, bowl-shaped valley, the helicopter swept low across an extensive body of water. The drab, sallow lights of San Salvador were off to their left. In stark contrast to the glowing radiance that was Mexico City, El Salvador’s capital seemed a darker and more subdued place, even from the air. Dugan supposed that a years long and bloody civil war might have something to do with that.

  The helicopter set down at an airport in the eastern part of the city. When the doors opened, waiting for Richards were a pair of suited, civilian men who looked relieved, if not happy to see him.

  “Thought we’d lost you,” one of them said, smiling as he gripped Richards hand.

  “Not that easily,” Richards replied.

  The men barely acknowledged Dugan’s presence with a glance and raised eyebrows before they started ushering them both toward one of the airport buildings. A large structure to the right looked like it had suffered some recent rocket fire. Its facade had a tired looking sign that referred to the place as Ilopango International Airport.

  Dugan noted that even at this late hour, the airport was humming with activity. Soldiers packing long rifles stood sentry every few yards along the perimeter fence. On an adjacent runway, a military cargo plane bore the Star of David, revealing that Israel too was involved in supplying the region with weapons. Nearer them were a trio of military helicopters without insignia, from which men unloaded bales of cargo and toted them toward an enormous hanger whose massive bay doors were open. Inside the hanger, an unmarked cargo plane that may have been the one that carted Dugan and Richards to Panama City on the first leg of their expedition had its ramp down and was awaiting shipment.

  Weary looking troops not involved in the unloading milled about smoking cigarettes and talking quietly among themselves. Overhearing their accents, Dugan instantly took them for rural Nicaraguans, no doubt from one of the Contra contingents that were waging civil war against their leftist Sandinista government. It was on a mission to resupply those insurgents, Dugan was convinced, that resulted in the downing of their plane.

  One of the two men escorting them clapped Richards on the shoulder and veered off toward the empty left hanger bay. Dugan trailed Richards and the second man into an adjoining building, where they walked down a long hallway, with Richards in a hushed voice providing their escort a brief narrative of their circuitous trek. At the end of the hall was a door that opened into a dormitory of some stripe. A dozen neatly made cots were lined up on opposite walls. An opaque glassed in office was at the far end. Their escort pointed out nearby beds on which clean clothes and toiletries had been laid out for them both before taking his leave.

  Richards took a long, hot shower, while Dugan scrubbed himself clean in the sink, ridding his flesh and hair of the fish box stench. Discarding his rancid, once white turtleneck and
filthy beige khakis, he put on a long sleeved black shirt, multi-pocketed, dark green, military style pants, black socks, and the black boots the rescue helicopter crew had been kind enough to provide.

  Though the night was warm and he was comfortable, Dugan helped himself to a black leather flight jacket hanging on a rack, lifting the collar out of long habit to conceal the remnants of the grievous neck wound that had been the beginning of his own long journey as a creature of the night.

  With a freshly clothed and squeaky clean Richards now hefting a pair of briefcases he had retrieved from the office safe, the two exited the barracks and again strolled down the hall. Once outside, they walked across the tarmac in the direction of the hanger, where Dugan saw confirmed that the bales of bulky and misshapen cargo being offloaded from the Nicaraguan helicopters were indeed being loaded into the cargo hold of the plane. Moving closer, he heard muted laughter and good-natured banter from the Nicaraguan soldiers, sharing a laugh with the American crew responsible for loading it onto the plane.

  Closer still, a long sniff divulged that beneath the heavy body odor and grime emanating from the soldiers, somewhere amidst the pungent reek of jet fuel and fumes that naturally permeated the place, the cargo itself emitted a stimulating, vaguely medicinal scent. Dugan had smelled it most recently beneath the metallic acridness of the armaments on the planes. The same smell had wafted off Richards their first night together in Esquinaldo’s office, oozing from his every pore. It wasn’t something he was proud of, but he himself had tried it once with his friend Jimmy, scored from some disreputable corner of his hometown by their older friend Mark McCaffrey.

  By the time it got to them, it had been cut down eight ways to Sunday and was probably mostly baby aspirin and God knows what else. But it was the kind of smell you never forgot, and he understood then that what was being loaded onto the jet currently occupying hanger number 4 was Grade A, 99% pure cocaine. And though it was only a hunch, he further suspected this particular cargo was bound for America.

  7

  It was well after nightfall. Dan was in the back room of the guest house, having already polished off six of the beers that had been thoughtfully restocked while he had been out for the day. In addition, the cold cuts and milk, the cereal, bread, and other staples they had provided for him had also been refreshed.

  After coming home, he went upstairs and learned that his meager supply of laundry had been done. It was all nicely pressed and folded on his bed. In the open closet, his hangared sport jacket was wrapped in plastic as if professionally dry cleaned. Dan suspected that it was.

  While on the second floor, though all seemed in its rightful place, he got the cold feeling that someone other than Fritz the butler had been there. It felt somehow as if the place had been searched thoroughly and things put back too carefully. Thinking that, he suffered a moment of raw panic. Rushing downstairs, he raced to the front room and blew out a long sigh of relief that only by chance, because Esquinaldo’s office had remained dark the previous night and he was bored, he had moved the telescope from the front room to its proper place in the rear. He had spent last evening again traveling to the stars.

  After grabbing the first of his beers, he plopped himself down with his new paperback and ruled notebook and reflected on his day. Yet again, he rued the fact he had left the cottage at all.

  Nothing good comes from that, my friend, he reminded himself.

  That, and he just couldn’t shake the feeling that the death of the young girl had been no random accident, even if Mexico City did happen to be the hit and run capital of the world. He worked hard to suppress the even more ridiculous notion that her meeting with him had anything to do with hastening her demise. Hell, maybe it was just a fluke thing, he said to himself. The world doesn’t revolve around you, Dan. Sometimes, bad things just happen. And yet, no matter how hard he tried, he didn’t believe a word of it.

  It was after cracking his second beer, with the sun going down behind the mountains to the west, that he flipped open his newly purchased notebook to somewhere in the middle and started making random notations of disjointed, half-formed thoughts, and stream of consciousness lists of unconnected things, as if by the mere act of writing them down, connections could be made.

  Mired in thought, he didn’t know how long it was after the sun went down that he got up for a stretch and wandered to the front room. Peering through the curtain, he saw up in the big house that lights were on in Esquinaldo’s office. More than that, there appeared to be a great deal of activity. On the patio outside the office stood two dark suited men with earpieces and solemn expressions. One appeared to be speaking into a walkie-talkie. After thinking about it, Dan dropped the curtain and went to the back room to retrieve the telescope.

  He had only just put his eye to the viewfinder when a knock on the door almost caused his heart to leap from his chest. Sliding the telescope from the window, he shoved it down to its resting position and then walked to the front door. Opening it, he saw waiting outside was one of the dark suited men.

  “Mr. Proctor?” he asked cordially, in that flat, broadcast quality accent that was all Upper Midwest.

  Dan nodded.

  “I apologize for the inconvenience, however, if you wouldn’t mind stepping out here for a moment?”

  His heart pounding, Dan stepped outside onto the small porch.

  “Now, sir, if you could just raise your arms?”

  Dan did as he was told, and the man began to professionally frisk him, running his hands up and down his legs, feeling beneath his crotch and along his backside, then up his back and upper torso. The man would have found a stray bobby pin, Dan thought, even one protruding from his ass.

  When satisfied, the man stepped back. “Thank you sir, and once again, I do apologize for the familiarity and the inconvenience. Also, I would ask that you remain in your cottage for the rest of the evening. Is that all right?”

  Dan paused for what seemed too long a time before nodding his head. The man acknowledged the nod and turned around, lifting his radio and muttering something into it.

  Assuming they were done, Dan stepped backward into the house and closed the door. After letting his heart rate return to something close to normal, he weighed it for a moment and returned to the front room.

  Once again positioning the telescope behind the curtain, beyond what he now knew could only be a security detail, through the eyepiece he saw two people sitting at the round conference table in Esquinaldo’s office. Both were dressed casually. The one on the right was smooth faced and gap toothed, sitting ramrod straight in the manner of a military man. His short-cropped black hair was parted razor sharp, with enough sprinkling of gray to take the edge off his otherwise youthful appearance.

  The man beside him was older. Open faced, bald and jowly, he puffed on a pipe while listening to the younger man. Though not seated nearly as straight as his colleague, there was enough of an imperious air about him to make Dan think he too might be military. Dan didn’t recognize either one.

  The younger man was addressing his comments to a third man who was seated on the couch. Dan could only glimpse the back of his head. He would occasionally lift a tea cup or something like it and take a sip, nodding now and again toward the earnest younger man who thus far had done all the talking.

  In between sips, the man on the couch appeared to ask a question or two, and the young man would answer, sometimes lifting one of his paper exhibits to underline a point and then wait for the next. When the cross-examination seemed at an end, Dan watched the man on the couch tilt his head as if deep in thought, taking another dainty sip before standing and heading toward the conference table.

  When he turned face forward, the first thing Dan noticed was he was dressed in formal wear, black tie and tails. Before he sat down, Dan observed the man was tall and lean and wore glasses. It took him a longer stunned moment to process the rest, but it eventually registered that the man holding court in Esquinaldo’s office was the vice president
of the United States.

  Dan’s pulse quickened as he watched him pick up the younger man’s documents. He pursed his lips while seeming to carefully peruse them, asking another question or two. When apparently satisfied, he blew out his cheeks and thought a while before finally, nodding his head and mouthing something Dan couldn’t read.

  A broad smile broke out on the younger man’s face. Even the man with the pipe seemed pleased, smiling wanly through his thick cloud of smoke.

  When the vice president stood from the table in signal the meeting was over, the other men sprang to their feet, with the younger man aggressively offering his hand to the vice president. To Dan’s untrained eye, he seemed somewhat taken aback by the gesture, but took the man’s hand anyway and offered what looked like a limp handshake.

  The vice president then apparently left the office, leaving the other men alone. The younger man still smiled broadly as he shook the older man’s hand. Then, he scooped up his documents, shoved them into a valise, and the two left the office in what looked to Dan like a big hurry, almost like they had a plane to catch.

  8

  It was about an hour before sunrise when Dugan saw the small, private plane approach the airport. He had been sitting on the tarmac outside the hangar for hours now, just so much forgotten luggage. If he were still human, he would have yawned out of sheer boredom.