Death Canyon (22 page)

When the torrent of words finally ended, Jake surprised J.P. with his own story about the day.

“No shit! Did you catch the bastard?”

“We have the car, but that's all. The guy escaped on foot. Actually, on foot, then into a canoe, believe it or not.” Jake shook his head. “I would expect the police would want to talk to you. Whether you recognize the guy, stuff like that . . .”

“Stop here! Whoa!” J.P.'s cry startled Jake.

“What's wrong?” Jake asked, alarmed.

Without answering, the wounded ski bum jumped out of the still slowly moving vehicle and jogged gingerly into the small liquor store alongside the road. He emerged after a few minutes with a cheap bottle of tequila, which he opened even before buckling his seat belt. The smell wafted to Jake's nostrils and he shook his head when J.P. held the bottle in his direction.

“Wooo-eeeeee! That feels better, man! Shit!” he said, shaking his head wildly. J.P. reached into his pocket, chose some music from his iPod, and plugged it into Jake's stereo. He turned up the volume, lit a cigarette, and opened the window. Jake cracked a smile and put his foot on the gas.

J.P., crazy as he was, had some big parts of life dialed right in. He was not self-conscious, overly guilt ridden, or judgmental of others. He enjoyed his time on this planet as much as anyone Jake knew—a quality Jake envied.

Gravel murmured under the SUV's tires as Jake came to a gentle stop outside his house. It was colder yet, but J.P. insisted on sitting outside the house and sipping the tequila. He lit another cigarette and offered Jake one. He accepted. It had been a long while since his last smoke, so Jake could outrationalize the guilt. It tasted good and harsh at the same time. Calming.

They passed the bottle back and forth for nearly an hour, barely talking. The porch furniture had not yet been moved back outside for the summer, so they sat on the floor and rested their backs on the wooden beams of the structure, legs outstretched in front of them.

The air was cold, twenty-five degrees now, but there was a distinct feeling of springtime floating about. Smoke from campfires
and wood-burning stoves came and went. Occasionally an owl would hoot or a coyote would yelp and the domestic dogs would bark in response. Jake wondered which one was Chayote. He assumed the loudest, and therefore the closest.

The moment broke when J.P. spoke up.

“Someone's after you, eh?” He handed the bottle to Jake, who took a short pull.

“Looks that way. I just don't know why or what they're after.” He lifted the cigarette pack from the porch floor and opened it before deciding otherwise.

“I'll take 'em.” J.P. grabbed the pack. “You're kidding, though, right? I know why. You're pretty dense for a PhD, man.”

“JD—juris doctor.”

“What? Anyway, I can help.”

J.P. did sometimes have a knack for finding the obvious answer to complicated problems.

“I don't know his or her name obviously.”

Jake rolled his eyes to tease J.P. “Obviously,” he said.

“But I can narrow it down. You, like, pissed off a lot of dangerous people, right?”

Jake nodded. “I guess you could put it that way, sure.” In reality, J.P. had no idea how true his statement was.

Dangerous. Evil. Maniacal. All of the above.

“You came out here and for a while it was like witness protection almost, you know? Nobody knew where you were and they couldn't even find out if they wanted.”

Jake doubted that. Some of the men he had dealt with were savvy enough to find him, if they had the right resources. Some of them did.

“But somehow, someway, man, word got back to these thugs
back East or whatever and one of them thought, ‘Well, maybe it's revenge time.' You are in trouble, my friend. These guys want you to
suffer
.”

“Not bad, Sherlock. One problem: I have a hard time believing that anyone would go to such effort to kill me. Seems like a trivial undertaking. The criminals I dealt with—the ones I pissed off as you so eloquently put it—were smarter and more calculating than you might think. They were thieves and murderers and drug dealers, but smart folks. Plus, anyone with the resources to try to kill me while two thousand miles away would be sophisticated enough to know it was a waste of time. I'm out of their hair, they would know the right move is to move on and forget I ever existed.”

“That's your problem, man. You're too smart! You think just because you're logical or whatever, that other people are too. You're overestimating people, Jake. People are maniacs.”

“Didn't know I had a problem. Want to tell me more about it?” Jake smiled, still kidding around. “Maybe you're right, but it just doesn't add up to me. There's too much risk in chasing me around for revenge. There's gotta be something else.”

“Well, I hope you're around so I can say ‘told ya so.' ” J.P. coughed a bit as he took another big swig of the tequila, then pushed the bottle toward Jake.

“No thanks. If I'm gonna survive the night, let alone the next couple days, I need to go to bed.
No más
.” J.P. held out an open hand as Jake stepped past him to get to the door. Jake took it and shook heartily. “Glad to have you back, buddy. Sleep in the house tonight, would you? In case you need anything.”

“Thanks, man. Good night.” J.P. was coughing and lighting another cigarette.

Once inside, Jake took off his jeans and watch but got into bed
with his T-shirt and socks on. He didn't brush his teeth. His mouth still tasted peppery from the tequila. His mind wandered, perching momentarily on images, scents, and sounds of Noelle, rivers, Elspet, crime scenes, and courtrooms. He was drunk.

As sleep approached, his thoughts settled on Noelle. The way she looked and talked. The way she smelled. Her smile. A drunken mutter left his lips.
Don't get involved.
It wasn't Elspet's memory that caused it. He was
meant
to be alone. He could fast-forward a few months in his mind and see the aftermath. Two hurt, estranged individuals wondering what went wrong, hoping never to run into each other again. He wouldn't make that mistake twice. It was so much easier this way.

Sleep was near, but his mind posed some final questions:
What if J.P. is right? What if I am overthinking it? What if I am too far removed from the game to sense my own demise?

The man looked out over the Yellowstone Plateau from a large house on a hill. The home was a modern-looking cedar structure and it was built in a hurry. He had bought up the land and contracted the build from start to finish in only six weeks. Cost was no concern. It sat up high in a swath of trees that was surrounded by wildfire damage, facing south so that the sun warmed it during the day.

The room resembled a control center. A few computers, a fax machine, two flat-panel TVs, and other various, albeit less common, electronic devices. Like the rest of the house it was cold, unlived in.

The man stood up and rolled his neck. He had been sitting at the computer for too many hours. Checking numbers and worrying.

Walking to the window that looked out on the national park's
northern tract, he inhaled deeply and rubbed his face with his hands. He was anxious.

His name was Jan Lewis Rammel, pronounced “John” for simplicity's sake. Born in Germany, he had a huge, muscular body that stood six feet three inches tall. His cropped blond hair was just now starting to gray as he approached middle age.

A former college athlete and successful businessman, he was used to pressure, but the type of pressure he was under now was enough to make anyone crack. The unlikely possibilities were slowly turning into probabilities, and they were sickening. If the worst happened, the consequences were mind-boggling.

Horrific, really.

But the others involved in the project seemingly couldn't be bothered with that reality. They were trying to remain optimistic. “Stay positive. Do your job,” they told him. But they were unrealistic and greedy. The truth of the matter was that the situation was getting out of control, and there was no stopping it.

At first he had spent what seemed like eighteen hours a day, seven days a week with them. Working to end the crisis. Save the world. He wasn't so sure they weren't destroying it.

Now everyone had left. Now, with the wheels in motion. They'd all gone back to their cities: D.C., Houston, Abu Dhabi, and New York.

They were oilmen and politicians mainly, all criminals in one way or another, but that identity was hidden behind a thick wall of respectability. A few, he didn't know what the hell they did. They operated in the shadows. Google searches revealed nothing. They treated Jan like shit.

He was the low man on the totem pole, except for Makter.

Jan's wealth was significant, but not compared to theirs. Anyway,
his money had been made by endeavors more conventionally criminal: drugs, arms, and bribes. A few times, someone's life. This made Jan a less-legitimate businessperson in the eyes of the others. It also made them fear him.

In his own eyes, he wasn't hopelessly evil. Quite the contrary. He was motivated by success just like anyone else. And like most, especially those who had hired him, he was indiscriminate about the means to the end.

His career had started with legitimate businesses. It was manufacturing plants, the low cost of labor, that first drew his interest to South America and Asia. There his companies found relaxed regulations and higher profits. After a few years, the opium industry's outlandish profits convinced him to pawn off his companies and invest in poppy fields, refineries, and trafficking vessels. He expanded his operations into the Colombian cocaine industry the next year. In the 1980s, when civil unrest was tearing apart El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, Jan made a killing, both literally and figuratively, in the weapons trade.

By 1999, he was completely detached from the day-to-day operations of all these endeavors. He held estates in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Florida and had a four-thousand-square-foot flat on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he resided with his wife and their child. It appeared as if he'd escaped from the risky game unscathed. He had finally made it. It was country clubs, private schools, and five-star dining from here on out.

Then, one early morning in New Jersey, things changed.

Unbeknownst to Jan, his son, Argus, had begun operating an outfit between Miami and New York City with Makter. A drug outfit.

Makter. Uncle Mak.

Argus had become attached to Makter over the years. It wasn't really a bad thing, their relationship. Mak took care of Argus. Helped him become a man. It was just that Makter had always had something off about him. Dark. Ghoulish, even for a criminal. This frightened Jan, which was quite an accomplishment.

South of the city, in the gritty Jersey suburbs, Argus and Makter would sell their product to middleman dealers.

Jan got the call at 5:18 in the morning, and he would never forget that time. His bright, young baby boy had been shot four times and was in intensive care in Brooklyn.

When he arrived at the hospital Argus was stable, but the prognosis wasn't good. The boy had been shot three times in the chest and once in the neck. Luckily, the bullets had pierced the right side of his body and left his heart undamaged, although his right lung had collapsed. The neck wound was more significant. When the swelling came down, the doctors confirmed that the round had severely damaged his spinal cord. If Argus survived, he would never walk again.

It was the cops that did it.
Those rats.
They'd raided the transaction, guns drawn. When Argus reached for his pistol, two officers had fired on him without mercy.

The boy lived, but what kind of life? He'd lost the ability to speak and spent his days wheeling around the flat, silently. A permanent look of shock was plastered on his face—one of the many surgeries he underwent during his recovery left him with facial paresis.

Jan was distraught. He also secretly despised the hideous sight of his own progeny. A strong, cunning, and proud heir brought to his knees. Jan refused to accept his son's condition as permanent.

No cost was too high. He installed elevators and ramps in his
villas. He rigged his son's favorite boat so that it could accommodate him. He bought cars and leased a private jet so that Argus would not have to endure the public humiliation and inconvenience of the airport. It all started to add up.

Then there were the medical expenses. Jan sent Argus all over the world for experimental treatments: India, California, Switzerland. Jan paid out of pocket. But none of it worked. Still, his son wheeled around silently, looking as if he had just seen a ghost.

Communication was limited to notepads and Argus's small repertoire of sign language signals. As Jan became more engaged in his son's crisis, his wife wandered: she traveled, gambled, cheated, and developed an expensive drug habit. Before long, his family's expenses had caught up with them. It was a lucky coincidence that he was called about this project before his assets were completely drained. The job had sounded so good at the time.

Jan poured himself two fingers of scotch and spent a moment smelling the golden liquor before he took his first sip. He remembered the pitch. The payoff could be in the hundreds of millions, they said. The risk was low, they said. The federal government was aware of the situation and they were turning a blind eye because they were interested in the results. The only risk was state authorities and the media. Jan hired Makter to take care of those things.

The idea was genius in many ways, and it appealed to Jan especially. He had made his first fortune by knowing what people needed, never bothering with what they wanted. Wants could be ignored. So he'd sold drugs for their addictions and guns for their survival. Rehab from heroin was extremely rare, especially outside of the developed world. Civil unrest rarely resolved itself without guns in undeveloped nations.