Takeoff

by Joseph Reid

  “That’s a whole extra day!” Her eyes were wide, the hair on her arms standing at attention.

  “I know. But as long as we get there safely, what’s the difference?”

  “It’s just—” Max looked down, her eyes darting to different places on the floor. Then she let out a noise, something between a grunt and a growl, and stormed off to the bathroom.

  After the door slammed, I heard the lock click.

  Not in the mood to chase down another of her tantrums, I stayed where I was and slowly ate the rest of my food. Although I tended to avoid red meat, after the events of the day, I was hungry enough that the burger tasted absolutely gourmet. By the final bite, I felt warm and sleepy.

  After cleaning up my own trash, I wrapped up the remnants of Max’s salad. I was on one knee, tucking them into the minifridge, when she reappeared. Visibly calmer, her arms were draped at her sides, her eyes tracking the ground in front of her feet.

  Resisting the urge to ask if she was all right—it felt like that was every other sentence out of my mouth—I tilted the plastic container toward her. “Still hungry?”

  “No. Thanks,” she said slowly. “I’m sorry for freaking out.”

  I shrugged and smiled. “Been a helluva week.”

  As I put the food away, she asked, “What happened to your shirt?”

  I turned, and Max pointed at my right side. I still didn’t see anything.

  She stepped over and pulled the shirt around. There was a small tear in the fabric, surrounded by a brown stain. “Must’ve gotten hit somehow.” I hadn’t noticed. Unbuttoning the shirt and twisting it around the sling to remove it, I stepped to the bathroom mirror, glancing back over my shoulder. A straight line was drawn from my right side toward my spine, a couple of inches above my belt. Thankfully, just a scratch, but it was red and weepy.

  We’d bought clean bandages for my shoulder—at this point, what was one more? “I’m gonna need your help,” I said. “With my bum arm, I can’t reach either one.”

  Although I worried whether Max could handle the blood, she wetted a washcloth and stepped around behind me.

  The cloth stung sharply against the skin, partly from the cold, partly the exposed flesh. Gradually she dabbed at the scratch until it stopped hurting. I handed her some folded-up gauze—she pressed it against the wound and taped it down. It felt good, comfortable.

  “Need to get this one next,” she said softly, putting her hands on my shoulder. The tape didn’t want to lift up at first, and even after that was all removed, the gauze had stuck to the wound. As Max peeled it off, I grunted: it felt like the bandage was taking some awfully big chunks with it.

  “Let it breathe for a second,” I said with my eyes closed. I wanted to help it heal, but the cool air also sucked away some of the burning sensation.

  Max ran a fingernail across the skin of my opposite shoulder, near the sling strap. Lightly, almost tickling. “What’s this tattoo? Is this . . . math?”

  “Yeah. It’s an equation.”

  “Why do you have math tattooed on your back?” She dragged the nail back and forth in a way that made me squirm slightly.

  “It’s called a DCT.”

  “A DC-what?”

  I opened my eyes and smiled at her in the mirror. “DCT. Discrete cosine transform. It’s used to compress audio and video. It’s the reason your songs fit onto a CD.”

  She gave me a look like I’d dodged the question. “So, why’s it on your back?”

  “I told you, I was an engineer.”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  I took a deep breath to give myself time to choose my words carefully. “When I . . . stopped doing that job, getting the tattoo seemed like . . . the right way to remember things.”

  “Did you like being an engineer?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “It was my dream from when I was way younger than you.”

  “So, why did you switch?”

  “I told you, it’s a long story.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

  After a long, slow breath, I said, “Not tonight.” Then I handed her another piece of gauze. “Finish up back there, there’s something else I need to talk to you about.”

  “What am I in trouble for now?”

  I motioned toward the bed. “Sit down for a second.”

  Max sat on the edge, and I moved in beside her. “I need you to tell me who you gave our travel plan to.”

  She bolted to her feet. “What? You think I—”

  I nodded. “I know you did. Only three people knew where we were going and what we were traveling in.”

  “They could have found out some other way!”

  “No. I kept an eye out the whole day. To line up those choppers, they had to know exactly what to look for and exactly where we’d be, well in advance.”

  Max’s hands balled into fists. “So, you don’t trust me now? You think I’m trying to have myself killed?”

  “I don’t think that at all. But the gang has to be getting their information from somewhere. I didn’t tell anybody. I don’t think Jerry Norgard called them. Which just leaves you.”

  Max’s lower lip and chin started trembling.

  “Was it your dad? Did you call him to say you were okay?”

  “Fuck no.”

  “So who was it?”

  Her eyes dropped to the bed, and her shoulders slumped. “Marta.”

  “Who’s Marta?”

  “She’s my nanny.”

  All I could picture was Mary Poppins, but that didn’t seem to square with Max’s life.

  “Since we moved to Texas, my dad’s always busy. With my mom gone, it’s just kinda been me and Marta.” Then she paused. “But Marta loves me. She’d never—”

  I raised my hands. “This doesn’t mean she wanted to help them—just that she did. But now that we know they have access to her, you can’t talk to her again, okay?”

  Max nodded slightly. “Do you think she’s in trouble?”

  “I don’t know. How did you call her—what did you use?” I’d intentionally avoided returning Max’s phone after she’d turned it over to me in Shen’s Lexus, and before we’d left LA, I’d hidden both our handsets inside a drawer at Shen and Brian’s, turned completely off so they couldn’t be tracked. As smart as that seemed at the time, not searching her for other devices now seemed equally stupid.

  “I called this morning, when I got freaked out about the plane. I just needed to talk to someone. I have a flip phone Marta gave me for emergencies.”

  I stuck out my hand. “Let me have it.”

  Max produced a small silver phone from her purse and dropped it into my open palm. “Other than that one call, I kept it turned off, just like you said. I usually leave it off, anyway; no one has the number, and that way I don’t have to charge it much.”

  I checked, and sure enough, the phone was completely powered down. “You sure the only time it was on was this morning? If you used it at the guys’ house, I need to know. They could be in danger.”

  “I swear.” She stared at me unblinking, no signs of wavering.

  “Well, that’s something,” I managed to say. I tucked the phone into my pocket. “This stays with me. No other communications from now on. No calls, no texts, no tweets. Nothing, understand? You saw what happened today when anyone knows where we are.”

  Max’s chin dropped to her chest, and she nodded.

  “Is Marta the reason you’re so desperate to get home?”

  She nodded again.

  “How’d she sound when you talked to her?”

  Max shrugged. “Normal, I guess.”

  “Did she say anything unusual? Did you get the sense she wasn’t alone?”

  “No. She sounded relieved, sort of, that I was coming.” Max remained quiet for several moments, as if she were replaying the conversation in her head. Then she glanced up at me. “Do you think they’ll—”

  “Hurt her? I have no idea,” I
said, trying to wear the most honest face I could. “But since we foiled their little ambush today, the gang should want to keep all their sources of information open. That means Marta’s still valuable to them. Let’s get some sleep now. Tomorrow, we’ll make for Dallas and try to get the jump on them for a change. Then we’ll hit Austin and hope Charlie Garcia is our man.”

  I gave Max the best smile I could, but the worry and confusion in her eyes said she wasn’t buying it.

  Fifteen minutes later, the lights off, Max was in her bed, and I was in mine. Over the earpiece, I listened, trying to hear if she’d fallen asleep.

  The pitch-black room was silent, and I hoped that had done its trick. I closed my eyes and started to let myself drift.

  And that’s when I heard it. The slightest, softest noise, like what I imagined a mouse’s whimper might sound like.

  Was Max crying?

  What a fucking day for her: almost die several different ways, then find out your surrogate mom either sold you out or might be in danger.

  I’d always thought Max and I came from different worlds, but this? This put her out in some other universe. Scared, tired, afraid—it didn’t seem like anything I could say would make a difference. But, staring upward in the dark, I started with, “I have to tell you, the original ‘Baby, I Love You’ is probably my favorite song of all time.”

  Max shifted on her bed, sniffling loudly. “Great. Let me guess, I fucked that up, too.”

  “No. Not at all.” I glanced over but couldn’t see her face. “I thought you had your own take on it, you know, which was really good. You didn’t just re-sing it. It meant something different than the original, but it still meant something. You—you put a lot of emotion into it.”

  There was a long silence before Max spoke again.

  “Thanks,” was all she said.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sunday, July 19

  A nightmare caused me to bolt upright in bed the next morning. A grotesque hand—wrapped in bandages like a mummy’s, the skin purple, black, and blue from bruising—had been reaching out of the darkness toward me.

  Sarah’s hand.

  My eyes popped open at the last moment.

  Although the room still stood dark, enough daylight pushed its way around the curtains to expose the edges of everything. Glancing over at Max’s bed, I found the sheets and covers flat and empty.

  I rolled to my feet and drew the Sig off the nightstand in one motion. As I did, a click sounded, and the bathroom door opened. Max inched out, her profile illuminated by a shaft of yellow light streaming into the room.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said softly. “Sorry I woke you.”

  “You didn’t.” My pulse gradually returning back to normal, I placed the Sig back on the table. “I wake you?”

  She nodded. “You were talking in your sleep. Thrashing around, kind of.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Was it . . . this?”

  I shook my head. “Something else.” After a glance at the clock, I said, “It’s late enough—we should get rolling.”

  A quick shuttle-bus ride delivered us back to the Albuquerque FBO. Although not as large or luxurious as the one in Phoenix, it featured a little Southwestern-themed seating area with wooden beams across the ceiling and a rounded, adobe-looking fireplace in the middle. The couches were serviceable, and I set Max up in one before I approached the reception desk.

  Overnight, Norgard had texted me a list of names and numbers of pilots he knew who made runs between Albuquerque and Texas. The receptionist confirmed one was in town and another would be passing through later today, so I texted them to see if we could stow away to Dallas.

  Next, I considered where we might stay once we got there. Although Shirley and my godkids live in Fort Worth, just a short drive away, I didn’t want to risk exposing them to Max’s pursuers. They’d been through enough misery. I had some other ideas of low-profile places, though, so I called and left a few voice mails for people.

  Finally, I dialed a 214 number from memory. After four rings, I was just about to give up when a man’s thick Texas drawl answered, “Jim Grayson.”

  “You got nothing better to do on a Sunday morning than answer your phone?” I asked.

  “What can I tell you,” he said. “Mindy’s off tapin’ a story on life in the border towns, so I’m all by my lonesome.”

  “Then you ought to be out taking target practice at least.”

  Grayson chuckled. “You know, if I could just get shooting lessons from you, Seth Walker, I wouldn’t do anything else but play with my gun. How the hell are you, amigo?”

  “Never a dull moment. But I should be asking you that. How’s the leg?” Before shooting at me, the crazy woman had poured four shots into Grayson. Thankfully, even the worst one had only hit his leg, although for a runner like him, being out of commission must have been torture.

  “Doin’ all right. Rehab’s coming along. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m on this new case—”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Nothing like before.”

  “Good thing. I still got six weeks’ leave comin’ from what Berkeley did to me—I don’t think I could take another one like that.”

  “You know somebody I could ask questions about a gang I’m running up against?” I explained briefly about the men I’d seen, and how little the FBI seemed to know.

  “No hay problema. There’s a guy over in our gang unit, Sal the Pal. If he can’t answer your questions, nobody can.”

  “Great. I’m hoping to pull into Dallas sometime tonight.”

  “Let me see what I can do—it may be the mornin’ before we can get ahold of him. If you need a place to crash . . .”

  “I would, but I’ve got someone with me.”

  “Oh, ho, ho! That’s gettin’ back up on the horse, my friend.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s not like that.”

  “What’s his name then?”

  “She’s a girl.”

  “What’d I tell ya?”

  I rolled my eyes and growled a little bit, which I knew would only encourage him.

  “If you need the name of a place with Jacuzzis in the rooms—”

  “This is bodyguard duty, Grayson. She’s sixteen.”

  Grayson chuckled. “Don’t worry, amigo, your secret’s safe with me.”

  “I’ll call you when I get in.”

  “Sounds good. I should know somethin’ by then.”

  When I returned to the couches, I found Max sprawled over one arm sideways, looking sick. Sweaty and droopy-eyed, her skin had paled to the point it looked almost gray.

  I asked what was wrong, and she complained about a headache and cramps. While I wondered again if she’d been lying to me this whole time about drugs, she was so visibly miserable, I held back from posing too many questions. Truth was, whether she’d gotten food poisoning from last night’s salad or was just jonesing for a fix, at this point it didn’t make much of a practical difference: I was still going to need to drag her to Austin.

  Mumbling that she might need to throw up, Max slouched off to the bathroom adjacent to the reception desk. I kept an eye on the door while buying her a bottle of Gatorade from the vending machine. If nothing else, I could keep her hydrated.

  Over the next two hours, a visibly embarrassed Max continued making runs to the bathroom while I kept working the phone and thinking about the new variable she’d identified last night: Marta.

  I’d obviously never met the woman, so I had nothing to judge beyond the facts themselves. She’d been with Max a long time—far longer, it seemed, than the gang might have been targeting her. That seemed to weigh against her being some kind of plant. But it left wide open the question of why she’d be helping them. Max worried Marta was in danger, and based on the gang’s handiwork so far, I imagined they had plenty of experience making people do things. Torture, extortion—I wouldn’t have put anything past them. If that was the case w
ith Marta, we’d need to determine how to rescue her.

  But what if she wasn’t in danger?

  Max loved Marta—I could see that in the way her eyes softened when she talked about her. Was that feeling mutual? Given what little I knew of Max’s dad, I wondered whether he’d done something to turn Marta against the family. Maybe Garcia had gotten to her?

  Or maybe it wasn’t even that complicated. Maybe the gang had just offered her money, or something else she needed.

  Ultimately, there was no way to figure it out on this end. All answers lay in Austin.

  A few minutes after 1:00 p.m., a woman strode into the seating area. Max and I were the only ones present, so she approached us directly, her boots clacking slightly against the dark composite flooring.

  “Seth Walker?”

  I rose and nodded. With a slight boost from the heels on the boots, we stood eye to eye.

  “I’m Zonnie Begay,” she said. “You still need a ride to Dallas?”

  One of the names Norgard had given me, although for some reason I’d assumed it belonged to a man. “We sure do, if you’ve got room.”

  “Just to warn you, I’m going to Love, not DFW.”

  “Love is great,” I said, realizing she meant Love Field, Dallas’s smaller, lesser-known airport.

  Her full cheeks pulled up into a smile. “Then it’s your lucky day.”

  I introduced Max as my niece.

  Begay’s high, arching eyebrows furrowed. “She doesn’t look too good.”

  “I think she might have eaten a bad salad for dinner last night.”

  Squatting down next to Max, Begay asked, “You okay to fly, honey? We’re looking at about two hours in the air.”

  Max nodded weakly.

  “Okay, then.” Begay rose back to her full height and faced me. “We’re fueled up—let’s get going, assuming you’re ready.”

  I grabbed the duffel and swung it over my shoulder.

  “Need help?” As she extended a hand, I had no doubt Begay could manage the oversize bag: although her fingers were tipped with precisely manicured crimson nails, her matching sleeveless blouse revealed taut, muscular arms.