Season of Waiting

by Jim Christopher

  First came photos of the stolen car. Close-ups of her father’s empty prescription bottle. Wes’s cell phone. Irene recognized those items. There was other trash in the car too: bottles of water, piles of fast-food wrappers, a small bag of hand tools, and a utility belt. None of it was familiar to Irene, and she had to admit that she wasn’t sure what, if any of it, belonged to her brother.

  Then the deluge of data began. Photos came in via email and fax, and to Dietrick’s cell. Stills, dash-cam footage, even grainy CCTV. “Irene, come look, this person fits the description of Wes or your father,” became too much for the sheriff to say each time. So it soon shortened to, “This one?” Over the first hour of the morning, they pared it down to a bare-bones grunt. The rising one-syllable noise from Dietrick told Irene that her eyes were needed. Irene would look, shake her head no, and return her attention to her laptop.

  Deputy Leo had been vigilant too. He’d been on the phone since Irene arrived at the sheriff’s office. He followed up with law enforcement, culling emails, or weeding out leads using the little detail Irene provided on Wes’s appearance.

  For the first time since Dad disappeared, Irene was grateful for those around her. The sheriff and the deputy fell into the same set of people as Dr. Pav. They were helpers. They took action. They did the small things required to get to the big thing. A steady workflow operated now. Leo collected and culled the data. Irene offered analysis. Dietrick governed the flow in and out. This felt familiar to Irene. Productive. A process she respected.

  And Irene had respected it. For almost nine fucking hours. And there was zero progress finding her father or brother. But this was how things worked. She trusted Leo and Dietrick; she trusted the process, and she knew her place in it.

  “The McLennan office is sending in photos,” Leo announced to the room as he cradled his landline. “They’re coming in via email to you, Sherriff.”

  Irene tabbed over to her geoplot of Texas on her laptop. She was unfamiliar with the layout of Texas counties, the locations of cities, how far things were from one another. So she had built up a plot of the state, overlaying counties, cities, and roads. She added McLennan to the list of things she wanted highlighted in the map. A rotated rectangle, just east of the center of the state, started filling in with a red hatch pattern. McLennan was a county. Most populated city in it was Waco. The map updated with new annotations. A note next to Interstate 35 identified the three-hour driving time between Waco and the last place Wes had been—San Antonio.

  Earlier in the day, that might have been useful information to have. At this point, Wes could have driven out of the state. Or out of the country. Irene sighed. Massive areas of her Texas map remained unshaded. The number of unknowns was staggering. The only way to resolve them—to make them known—was to work the process. Get the data. Clean it. Build a picture, atom by atom, until the pattern showed itself. Respect the process. The process worked.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Irene saw the sheriff rotating her laptop toward her. They’d done this so many times today, her response approached a reflex. Irene leaned her chair back toward the officer’s desk before Dietrick made her come-look-at-this grunt. The view in the photo was from high up, the face of the man obscured by the angle. It was a crappy black-and-white still from a video camera. A young man paying for something at a gas station register. Irene could make out the light hair, like Wes’s. The bowl cut didn’t match. Add the T-shirt and jeans hung from a beanpole of a frame. The person was not her brother.

  “Nope,” Irene huffed. “Too skinny. Wes’s shorter as well.”

  The sheriff shrugged, turning her computer away. “Leo?” she called.

  “On it,” he replied, lifting the phone to his ear and dialing.

  The sheriff had asked for recent photos of her father and brother. Irene delivered on her father—she had pictures from just days ago. But she had no photos of her asshole brother. She should have grabbed one from Dad’s house. Hindsight was a crystal-clear bitch. Instead, the sheriff requested mug shots from Las Cruces. There was a single profile and face to work from, and they were three years old. Not ideal.

  Now it was up to the pattern-matching engine between her ears to verify the photos. If she had more pictures of Wes, she would automate the process using her laptop. Facial recognition was a commodity now. You got it for free if you knew where to look. But you needed example data. The more, the better. With only one old photo to work from, Irene relied on her eyes and her memories of her asshole brother. A pattern cannot be gleaned from a single data point.

  She scooted the metal chair closer to the desk. The legs vibrated against the concrete floor, squeaking out a brassy toot with each movement. At first, the noise amused her. The lowbrow sensibility required to appreciate a solid fart joke had been a sledgehammer to her anxiety, shattering it into manageable pieces. Now the sound was glue. Each little squeak marked a dead end, refitting another sharpened sliver of her anxiety back in place.

  A harsh metallic rattle pummeled the room as Irene’s cell phone rang. It vibrated against the metal desktop, creating a percussive onslaught of taps and bumps. The sound had occurred several times throughout the day. Each time everyone jumped like they had the hiccups. Deputy Leo shot her an annoyed glance, covering his open ear with a hand as he murmured into his phone.

  Most of the official channels communicated through Leo. Except fucking Las Cruces. No matter how many times Irene corrected them, they kept calling Irene for updates. She lifted the cell, taking a mental note to disable the vibration after this call.

  She turned it over, and her eyes stuck on caller ID glowing against the black glass.

  First, Irene registered something unexpected. It wasn’t the Las Cruces Sheriff’s Office. Then she read the name on her screen.

  Caleb Allard.

  “It’s Dad?” The words fell out of her mouth, a hoarse whisper at the end of an exhausted breath. She gripped the phone harder, shouting “It’s Dad!” as she stood, her knees knocking the metal desk. Leo’s eyes fixed on her as he eased his phone back into its cradle.

  “Please answer that, Irene,” Dietrick insisted.

  Irene thumbed the connect icon and lifted the phone to her ear. She turned toward the sheriff. Dietrick was standing now, holding a pen against a pad, her jaw set and eyes homed on Irene.

  The line connected with a quiet snap. Irene could hear noise from her dad’s phone. Breathing.

  “Dad?” she gasped. “Dad?” she shouted into the phone, her emotions teetering between anxiety and relief. “Are you okay!” The pressure of the last few days reached her eyes. Tears came, feral ones that poured out of her by their own will. Anxious ones. Angry ones. Hopeful ones. Terrified ones. “Are you safe?”

  She held her breath, listening to the noise coming through the line. Heavy. Ragged. Wet. “Dad?” she repeated.

  Endless seconds passed.

  Then, a gasp. A shuddering heave of a breath. “Irene.”

  Her heart sank. Her body collapsed into the desk chair. The motion pushed the chair back, filling the pregnant room with a flatulent squeal.

  She recognized the voice. From one data point, she knew who this was. But she couldn’t help herself. She had to ask. Verify her assumption. Because one data point cannot make a pattern.

  It was possible she was wrong.

  Dear God, please let her be wrong.

  “Wes?”

  Chapter 56

  Wes

  “Irene,” Wes stammered into the phone.

  There was a pause. Three excruciating heartbeats of silence. Then, his sister’s voice. “Wes?”

  “Irene, I fucked everything up,” he said. His voice was shaking. Tight. He had to remember to keep exhaling.

  “It’s okay. Is Dad there? Is he with you?”

  Wes’s eyes snapped across the gore-filled cab of the truck. Shiny, thick rivulets of blood ran down the windshield. Over the console. Down the front of the glove box. The s
un came in through the open passenger-side door, putting a sheen on the rusty streaks.

  “Wes, is Dad with you?” Irene’s voice was insistent, but far away now.

  No, Pop left.

  “Wes?” she hollered.

  “No, Pop left,” he said into the phone. Wait, where’s the phone? It had fallen from his ear. Wes felt around himself with trembling fingers. The hard case was on his belly. He picked it up. It was slick now too. “Dad’s gone,” he said. “He’s heading back to town.” He panted through a few pulses of pain. “Irene, listen, okay? I’ve been shot. And it really fucking hurts.”

  Irene had been speaking. Wes didn’t realize until she stopped.

  Her voice quickened. “You’re hurt?” she asked.

  He looked down at his leg. The red bloom on the thigh of his jeans was growing. Slower now, though. One hand braced a gnarled branch of mesquite, holding pressure on a makeshift tourniquet his father had made of Wes’s belt. If he held it tight enough, it kept the artery closed.

  “Wes! Did you say you’ve been shot!”

  There was still a lot of blood, though. His vision was fuzzy. Fading. The hand on the branch was bleeding as well. He lost a finger when the gun fired. The index one.

  “Yeah. Dad … he fucking shot me. Where’s my goddamned finger, Irene?” Where was his goddamned finger? It throbbed, as if the digit still belonged to his hand. But it wasn’t there.

  “Wes,” Irene’s voice came clipped, commanding. She was the authority now. “Wes, I need you to count to five, collect yourself. Can you do that? Will you count with me?”

  “Well, yeah, I can count to five. Just not on my hand. Not anymore.” His finger was missing.

  Irene talked him through it, making him breathe before each number. It helped. Wes found the moment he was in.

  “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I’m shot.” He focused on keeping his breathing steady. “In the leg. Lots of bleeding.” He glanced at his wound again. His pants had turned a sickening purple color, as if a bruise bloomed in the denim. He didn’t need a medical degree to know he was in dire trouble. “I need an ambulance. I’m holding a tourniquet on the leg, but there’s a lot of blood.”

  Irene’s voice fell to a murmur. She spoke, but not to him. Wes took one steady breath through the burn. His mind wobbled, threatening to topple before she returned to the phone. “Where are you, Wes?”

  He had to think. They took a trip. “We took a trip,” he parroted. The pain in his leg oscillated with his heartbeat. Jesus Christ, it hurt.

  “To Texas?” Irene asked. She had always been able to get him talking. Help him figure things out. Yes, Texas.

  “Yes, Texas. Utopia.” She was a good big sister to him.

  Irene’s voice returned to a murmur. Who was she talking to? Was it him? Because he couldn’t hear her very well. “I can’t hear you very well. I’m bleeding, Irene.”

  “Did you say you’re in Utopia?” she asked.

  Yes, that’s right. He and Pop took a trip to Utopia, Texas. To heal their father. See, there’s this boy …

  “Wes?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he remembered to speak this time. His hand ached. From holding the tourniquet tight. From the hole where his finger used to be. His eyes fell to find the source of the slow, thick dibbling sound. Blood saturated his jeans. His blood. It dripped to the vinyl floor mat. It smelled too. Metallic and sulfurous. He tasted pennies in the air. “Dad,” Wes said to himself. He tightened the pressure on his leg.

  Hot pain burned off the mental fog.

  Dad!

  “Dad has a gun, Irene. He wants to kill a kid.”

  A bumping sound passed through the phone. “Wait, say that again?”

  The strobing pain turned into a metronome, ticking away the events taking place right now. Right here. Dad. The gun. The boy. “Oh God, Irene,” Wes cried. “Dad’s got it in his head that he needs to kill this boy in Utopia. He’s heading there now. There’s a restaurant. The Silverleaf. He’s heading there.”

  Irene’s voice was incredulous. “Dad’s gonna kill somebody? What the fuck?”

  A brief shuffling sound carried through the phone, and an unfamiliar voice came over the call. “Mr. Allard, this is Sheriff Dietrick of the Kimble County Sheriff’s Office. Please repeat what you just said to your sister.”

  Wes stammered, the words falling out between flares of agony. “My dad … has a gun. It went off and …” He stopped speaking to breathe through the fire in his thigh. “My dad shot me in the leg. It was an accident, but I’m bleeding bad. Dad’s going on to Utopia. He’s planning to shoot this kid to …” He breathed again, clamping his eyes as the pain crested. “He thinks he needs to kill this kid in Utopia to save the world or some shit.”

  “Where is your father now, Wes?” The woman’s voice was sharp, tense.

  Wes’s eyes opened. Through the blood smears on the windshield, he could see the dusty asphalt ending in another road. The one that cut a beeline north to Utopia. The ground moved in the air. A wiggle. It must be hot outside still. He didn’t know where Pop was.

  “I … I’m not sure. He made a tourniquet on my leg. Then he left.” The throbbing continued to ebb, accompanied by a chilling tingle in his toes. “I think I need an ambulance.”

  “Okay, I can work on that, but I need to know where you are. What road are you on?”

  Wes peered through the splatter on the windshield, to the shoulder of the road. There were no signs here. Everything faded, the edges of his consciousness blunting from the hammering pain. Didn’t he make up a song about the road trip?

  “I made up a song about it,” he slurred. Damn, he was losing it. “Highway 83 to something-with-a-nine, then 187 to the end of the line.” His singing voice sucked right now. That’s okay, this shit hurt something fierce.

  “You’re on road 187?” she asked. “Near Utopia?”

  His mind wandered. Vision blurred. “I can see there from here,” Wes mumbled. “I’m the guy in the truck with the blood all over it.” The throb in his leg wasn’t helping him stay focused anymore. The moment faded further from him with each thrush of his pulse. “You can’t miss me.”

  He looked at his leg. Blood gushed. When did he let go of the branch? Shit, he couldn’t do that. Wes twisted the branch around, tightening it again. It hurt. More than before. It was hard to hold. Slippery. His finger was missing. That fucking hurt too. Where did it go?

  “You know what? I think I’m dying.” The words dribbled from his lips. He could hear them dripping on the floor.

  The sheriff talked, but Wes couldn’t hear very well. He had dropped the damned phone again. Where was it? He looked around the cab.

  On the dashboard, pointing back at him from a pool of thickened blood, Wes found his severed finger instead.

  Chapter 57

  Caleb

  His sneakers crunched on the road. The sound was a pendulum, and Caleb used its momentum to keep moving. The sun was falling, the collected heat of the day rising from the asphalt. It was sweltering under the field coat, but he didn’t dare take it off. The moldy duster made Caleb look like a hobo. But it was a hell of a better choice than walking around in his blood-covered shirt and pants.

  Jesus. Wes had been wresting the gun from him. Caleb hadn’t even been holding it tight. The truth, if Caleb was honest with himself, was that he had been about to let go of it. Succumb to Wes’s bigger will and younger strength. He had seen it in his head, one fluid motion. Caleb letting go, Wes moving the pistol out of reach. Calling Irene to set the world back on the right path before his body gave out on him.

  That hadn’t happened, though. The sound, the impact of that moment, had been immense, like the voice itself. It filled his head, pushed on his body, froze his thoughts. The first change was a chemical bitterness in his mouth. The next change was incomprehensible.

  It arrived as a heavy whine in his good ear. Neither Caleb nor his son moved. Still as stone, they gape
d at each other. Wes’s eyes were wide, searching over Caleb for an injury, while Caleb scoured his son.

  The tentative thought had formed in Caleb’s head: we’re both okay. It was irrational. A false hope that despite the blood on everything, the warm wetness on his own face, they could put it back where it came from.

  That’s when Wes started screaming. A spray of blood—his son’s blood—was hitting the windshield. Caleb followed the spray to the spreading stain on Wes’s thigh. It saturated the denim and worked its way into the bench seat beneath him.

  Caleb had to stop the bleeding, or his son would die in front of him. He pulled the belt from his son’s pants, snaked it under the injured leg a few inches above the wound. He tightened it as hard as his failing body allowed. His strength wasn’t enough—the spray slowed, but it was still steady. He needed leverage, something to compound the pressure. He jumped out of the cab, found a solid length of dry hardwood, and worked it between the belt and his son’s leg. He rotated the stick like a winch, got three revolutions in before his arms threatened to shake off. He put Wes’s hand on the branch, telling him to hold it firm. That’s when he saw the stub on his son’s hand. The flash from the revolver had severed his finger.

  The recollection quickened his step. His son’s blood, a timer counting down Wes’s life one drop at a time. He walked through the growing stitch in his belly. Caleb needed to find someone to help his son, get medical attention to him before Wes bled out. They had holed up in a remote area on purpose. There was nothing between the apiary and Utopia except a few miles of road, scrub, and sky.

  Caleb needed a phone. Call an ambulance.

  You don’t need to do that.

  “You shut the hell up!” Caleb spit, taking another heaving step north, toward town.

  No, it’ll be all right.

  “I said be quiet!” he screamed. The sound disappeared into the wide space around him. Caleb could see Utopia from here. It was miles down the road, yet there it was. Across the flat, unremarkable landscape, he made out the individual boards in the siding on the buildings in town. The structure and the road swayed in the haze of heat and breeze. The mirage of movement stoked Caleb’s hope that someone was on the way to him. Coming to help.