Nothing Short of Dying (11 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Z
eke?” I asked.

“Maybe. Who the hell is this?”

“It's Barr.”

Silence. Then, “Clyde, man. You out?”

“Yeah. Less than a month ago. You head the way you said you would?”

“Yup. Up in Leadville. Doin' my thing. What the hell you up to?”

“Someone called me, asked for help, and I couldn't say no.”

“You never could, Barr. If you weren't a mean bastard, that little failing of yours might have made you someone's punk. So why the hell you calling me again? Thought we weren't doing that unless it was big.”

“It's big enough. My sister needs help. She's the one who called. Now I need yours.”

He laughed. I could picture him smiling his big, condescending grin. “My help, huh? You still owe me from last time.”

“I know. Double in your debt if you do this. It's for my sister.”

“Which one? They're all fine little pieces, but the nicest—”

“Careful,” I said. “We talked about this.”

“Come on, man. We talked about everything. Three long years in Mexico and those pictures you painted in my mind kept me going. I still think about them. Maybe if I help this sister of yours, she'll be grateful, huh? I mean, like BJ kind of grateful?”

He was testing my patience. “Actually, I was thinking that you'd get another IOU from me. That enough or do I hang up now?”

Silence again. Then the sound of Zeke spitting tobacco juice onto the ground. “Is there any money in this? I mean, if I'm gonna help, I'll need
something
.”

“Plenty of green. The guy who has her, he's rolling in it. We get her, collect some scalps, take home the spoils.” A part of me balked at having to talk like this again.

“Sounds like fun. You coming here, or I gotta go somewhere?”

“I'm on my way there now. My sister's supposedly up in your mountains. We'll meet in town.”

“Okay, brother. Meet me at the opera house, just inside of town, can't miss it. Call me when you're a half hour out.”

I hung up and lit a cigarette. The tar and nicotine reminded me of prison.

Three years in that hot hellhole. The first year I kept my head down, but I hadn't been able to turn down a request for help during the second. I got in a little over my head, and Zeke intervened. We roamed the dusty yard together after that, making some friends, more enemies, and avoided joining any gangs. Most of the men in that Juárez madhouse avoided us; they called us the loco mountain men. We weren't necessarily harder or tougher than the other inmates, but we had a rep of sheer lunacy.

As emotionally opposite as we were, we did share one thing: our love of the lonely places and our passion for the mountains. We agreed after we got out that we'd go back into them—the Yukon for me, Colorado for Zeke.

The last year in that hellhole was especially bad. Zeke lost any interest in the human race and ended up killing two men with his bare hands and a guard with a shoelace garrote. He was never caught, because I was the only witness. I thought not snitching would make us even, but Zeke didn't. He said I'd still owe him after we were out. I thought I'd never see him again, and now I needed help from the scariest man I'd ever met.

Damn it, Jen, you'
re going to owe me.

I went back into the room and discovered that Allie had left. I walked across the street and saw her under the hood of the Jeep. A new set of tools sat on the ground next to a tire. She was swearing, but as I got closer I could see her expertly cranking off bolts and removing parts.

She saw me, asked for a 9/16 socket. I handed it to her, after a long search, and she said, “Almost got it. Give me another thirty and we'll be on the road.”

“Where the hell did you learn all this mechanical stuff?” I asked.

She still wasn't looking directly at me, sending a message that she remained pissed about last night. “Remember I told you that I dated a guy seriously at one point—the relationship that went bad? He liked the fact that I was pretty handy, from fixing tractors on the farm. He put me to work in his garage.”

“How romantic,” I said.

She reached deeper into the engine to push back a wire. “Yeah, well, for a while it paid good money. Then stuff . . . happened.”

I lingered for a while, trying to feel useful, but it was clear Allie didn't need me, so I decided to walk back to our room and gather up our stuff. I needed to think about how I'd handle Zeke, so I sat down and cleaned my pistol and .375 while I waited for Allie to finish. The sharp smell of the Hoppes gun oil acted as aromatherapy; my muscles relaxed, and my breathing became regular.

I finished oiling both weapons, rubbing the cold metal until it shined, then reloaded them and started sharpening my knife. The rhythmic scraping sounds of the blade on the whetstone helped me focus. I jammed the knife into its sheath and stuffed the stone into my bag, then grabbed everything and went to check out.

Back at the Jeep, Allie was slamming the hood shut and putting away tools. “Breakfast?” she asked.

“No time. There's still jerky.”

“But no chips.”

“We'll get some for lunch.”

“Fine. But you drive for a while, okay? I've got a massive headache, and I banged the hell out of my knuckles getting those rusty nuts off.”

I gave her my best smile. “What happened to that girl in the black dress I met last night?”

“She lost her sense of humor.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
drove.

The temperature dropped as we climbed out of Steamboat, winding east and then south along the western edge of the Rockies. I tried to focus on the road as we followed the paths that water had cut aeons ago through the hard rock and rubble, but instead found myself looking over at Allie.

Banged knuckles aside, she looked pretty damn good.

Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail and had been thoroughly brushed. She wore tight blue jeans, a gray sweater, and a flannel. She put both her feet on the dash and hugged her legs, her worn-out sneakers leaving dusty footprints on the shiny plastic. Her clothes were cotton and her shoes had small holes on the creases. Which only reminded me: we needed to stop and outfit ourselves for the kind of country we were headed into.

I stopped sneaking looks at her after she'd drifted off and was snoring quietly with her head resting on the side window. I alternated between handling the curves in the road and looking out at the scenery. These weren't the same mountains I'd hunted in when I was a kid; they were bigger, lonelier, standing like gods against an azure sky.

I reached for my pack of smokes but hesitated, and then rolled the window down instead. The sharp, crisp smells of pine and wildflowers and creek water flooded the cab and helped ease the growing anxiety that squeezed my chest. If I could just stop here, maybe pull over and make a small fire along a babbling waterway, maybe sleep for a night or two under the bright stars, maybe I could start to forget the things I'd done and the things I'd seen. Maybe I could forget that now all three of my sisters were likely in jeopardy.

I thought about calling Deb and Angie and warning them, but what would I say? “Hi, Sis, a vicious drug lord has your home address and may ring your doorbell one of these days”? Every time I rehearsed the calls in my mind, I pictured my sisters cursing me. And how would they respond once they hurled down the phone? Likely they'd do nothing more than inform the police, who were completely incapable of stopping Alvis if he had a mind to make trouble.

The Jeep dropped down out of one range of mountains and hit the interstate. As we merged into the wide rumbling pavement with its mass of indifferent motorists, I glanced over at Allie again. She was still asleep, her head at an awkward angle against the door panel, her rear at the edge of her seat, a small thin line of drool oozing out of the corner of her mouth. I envied that kind of sleep, the kind children enjoy when they're tucked next to loving parents. It was the kind of sleep I'd rarely had in the last ten years. Most mornings I woke up in the throes of some nightmare.

And the images followed me into the day: bodies piled along roads, beautiful large animals I'd killed for rich clients, tattooed half-naked men shoving knives at me, villagers on two continents being run over and shot and burned and
raped while I shot at the men who did these things, often being forced to run and disappear into the bush when they came after me. Every night was a kaleidoscope of killing and violence.

I fought my way through the thick traffic, slowing, speeding, weaving around cars headed every which way. The diverging lines of cars reminded me of wildebeest herds running, then splitting up in multiple directions to avoid a predator. We stopped in some ski town with too many roundabouts, and I found a sporting goods store.

It had been a long time since I'd shopped in a place that wasn't full of pickpockets and children selling candy and trinkets. Here the only shysters and criminals were the ones licensed by the state.

Inside the giant sporting goods warehouse, I felt like a village kid in a grocery store. The place was stacked to the ceiling with camping gear, ammo, weapons, fishing poles, sturdy clothing and shoes—the kind of stuff that millions of people around the world had never seen and, if they had, would kill to get. Allie seemed unimpressed.

I spent most of my remaining cash buying stuff for Allie: a sleeping bag, pack, coat, hat, boots, and long underwear. On the way to the cashier, I saw something I couldn't resist—a recurve bow that broke down into three parts. Perfect for my pack. I threw it in my cart along with a six-pack of metal arrows and compatible broadhead points.

The total almost bankrupted me. After I paid, I had maybe one hundred dollars in cash left out of what had been my life's savings. I'd packed the cash around with me across three continents, spending and replenishing, until I'd been locked up. Even then I had a cousin of Chopo's watch the cash and
send lumps of it inside to make life in the hellhole a tad more comfortable.

BACK IN THE JEEP, AFTER
Allie and I left the interstate and started winding up the continental divide, I settled into my seat and brooded on what was ahead of us.

“You look like you're worried, Barr,” Allie said, glancing at me briefly, and then returning her gaze to the side window. In the breakdown lane, an old man was pulling a mule. “What are you worried about?”

I stalled for a few moments, then looked at her. “Well,
you
for one thing. I still can't figure why you've signed up for this. Like you said last night, I'm a jackass.”

She flashed a thin smile but then stared straight ahead. A few seconds passed. “Because that's where we're at,” she said finally.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Means that the things that happened the last couple of days have led to this. It's where we are now and what we're doing. Can't change what happened or what will happen next.”

I still didn't understand. “You don't
have
to be here. This is my deal.”

“You helped me, now I'm helping you. That's just the way it is. Look, Barr, ever since I was a kid, I've taken life one day at a time. When you grow up on a farm, you have to. The dullness will eat you alive if you don't. If you look too far into the future all you'll see is plowing and planting every year until you die, and it'll make you go crazy. If you look back and see that all you've done with your life is grow stuff and cut it down, you'll get depressed. So I don't waste time with the past or the future.”

I nodded. Made sense, but it still didn't really explain why she was willing to risk her life to help me. I said as much.

“I want to be here. That's all that matters. Whatever happens, happens. Now shut up and drive, and let me get a little more sleep.”

I shook my head. No use arguing with her.

We climbed up the narrow two-lane, whipped around hairpin turns, and then flattened out in a small, level valley. There was a historical monument sign and a parking area. I stopped the Jeep in the gravel on the wrong side of the road, got out, and read the sign. Years ago, it said, this spot had been the training ground for the 10th Mountain Division, whose ski troops had prepared to kill Hitler by slicing down the mountains on sticks. An elderly couple was standing off to the side, taking pictures. I heard the man, who looked old enough to have fought in World War II, say that this spot had also been an internment camp and then a CIA training ground. Proof that mountains everywhere hid secrets.

Allie was awake when I walked back to the Jeep after taking a piss on the scrub brush. I got in and turned the key. Our previous conversation was still bothering me.

“So there's nothing in your past that you can't let go of?” I asked.

“I never said that, Barr. I said I didn't waste time with it.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Well, if you're going to be a dick about it,” she said, “there
is
one big thing. My daughter.”

I didn't say anything, but the look of surprise must have been obvious.

“I haven't seen her since she was born. That guy I dated, the one who owned the garage—he dumped me when he found out I was pregnant. Mom had her stroke when I was in
my third trimester.” She stopped, looked through her window at the waving trees, wiped her cheek.

I put a hand on her shoulder. She didn't shake it off.

“I was alone,” she continued. “There wasn't any way I could take care of myself and my mom
and
a baby. So . . .” She coughed. “Shit, I'm getting all wimpy here. Nice job, Barr. But it does feel good to talk about it. I've never told anyone about my baby before.”

I wished I could tell someone about
my
past. A few strands of hair escaped Allie's ponytail and fell in her eyes. I gently gathered them and brushed them behind her ear.

“So I gave her up. I was going to go to the agency, but I kept stalling and couldn't make myself go. I stayed on our farm. Didn't have the money to go anywhere else. Anyway, I was crying on the porch one morning and the Ottermans, who raised goats two places down, they stopped by. The wife, she held me and made me come over for dinner. At dinner she told me about her history, that she couldn't have kids, and made a proposal. I took it. They're raising my daughter.”

“You've never visited?”

“No. I tried to forget. Never really could, but I was doing okay until you had to be an asshole and bring it up.”

I apologized.

“But I'm
going
to visit,” she said. “When things are better for me, I'm going to visit. I don't want her back, it's been too long, and the Ottermans are good people. But I want to look her in the eyes, see a little piece of me in someone else.”

I nodded again. Rubbed her shoulder. She sniffed and changed the subject. “That's why we're going to get Jen. You need to see her again.”

I tried to meet her eyes. “It'll be rough.”

Allie grabbed my thigh, hard, and said, “That's why we
do this together. Two is always better than one, right?” She looked at me hard, her eyes searching, hoping, waiting for me to answer correctly.

“You stay with me, neither one of us might make it out,” I said.

“In the long run, Barr, no one ever does.”

I put the Jeep in gear. “One day at a time, right?”

“Exactly.” We pulled back onto the highway, into the warm rays of the sun, pretending to be prepared.