Snowbound

  “Why don’t you look at the photos in your lap again,” Kalyn said.

  “My family, they’re alive? Unharmed?”

  “For now.”

  Javier nodded. “I would like to speak to them.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Then I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”

  Kalyn moved into the middle seat so she could see Javier’s face. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something, so you understand how serious we are. So you have no doubts of what we’re ready to do to you, Misty, and Raphael. Those photos on the right? That’s Rachael Innis, Will’s wife, and Lucy Dahl, my sister. So please believe me when I tell you that if you continue on this track, you and your family will have a very long, very bad night.”

  “And if I were to provide the desired information?”

  “They live. We aren’t like you, Javier.”

  “And me? Either way, whether I tell you, whether I don’t, you will kill me, no?”

  “You tell us what we want to know, and I leave you here, handcuffed to a picnic table. Maybe someone finds you tomorrow. Doesn’t matter. By then, we’ll be gone.”

  “I don’t know that I believe you. If the tables were turned around the other way, I would get the information I needed, and then I would murder you.”

  “What’d I just say? We aren’t like you.”

  He looked out the window again, said finally, “I am afraid you won’t be pleased with my information, as I am only a small variable in the equation.”

  “Just tell us what you know.”

  As he spoke, he watched the color of the desert move through darkening shades of purple, noticed the mist slithering up the mountains. “It has been the same way every time. A man named Jonathan calls me and says, ‘They want another one.’ And so I begin looking. There are parameters of course. Caucasian. Big dark eyes. Black hair with abundant curls. Beautiful. They like my taste, I suppose. Perhaps I have a counterpart somewhere who specializes in blondes or redheads. When I find her, I follow her for several days. I learn about her. Patterns, habits. Then, when I feel it is time, I call Jonathan, and I tell him. When she’s in my possession, I call Jonathan once more. The time and place are set.”

  “Where?”

  “I think I will wait to tell you that. Suffice it to say that a journey of considerable distance is made. We meet. Jonathan is a large man, a truck driver. The woman is put into a trailer, and that is the last I ever see of her. Anywhere from five to ten days later, a deposit is made into one of my offshore accounts. A larger deposit each time. I require this. I do not speak to Jonathan again until he calls and says, ‘They want another one.’ ”

  Kalyn wiped her eyes. She could barely form the words, and they came as a whisper. “How many women have you taken?”

  “Five. It is not my typical line of work, but the money is good.”

  “How did Jonathan find you?”

  “Various channels. The first time we did business, he mentioned an important name. The right name. I took a chance.”

  “Are there other people like you, people who Jonathan uses?”

  “I have no idea. Ours is not a relationship of questions.”

  Will said, “Look at me, Javier.” The man looked at him. Will reached down, lifted the photograph of his wife. “I want to hear about the night you took her.” He was trembling with fear, rage, sadness.

  Javier looked at the photograph. “That was some time ago.”

  “Five years. My daughter misses her mother.”

  “I first saw her coming out of a clinic in Sonoyta. That’s all I remember. And that it was raining and the sky full of lightning on the night I took her.”

  “How was she?”

  “Afraid,” Javier said. “They all are. I try to calm them. They’re drugged for most of the trip, but not mistreated, if that’s what you’re asking. Not by me at least. You don’t pay what I am paid for damaged product.”

  Will swung. There was a pop. Javier fell back into the door and spit out a tooth.

  “Easy, Will,” Kalyn said.

  Javier licked the blood from a cut on his bottom lip, smiling, his eyes shining, and for a moment Will was convinced the man was mad.

  “Did that feel good?” he asked. “I imagine it did.”

  “Is Jonathan the man who’s buying these women?” Kalyn asked.

  “I would think not. Like me, he’s just a well-paid mule.”

  “Then who? Where are they being taken?”

  “Maybe to Mexico. Maybe they’re shipped on boats to other parts of the world. Thailand. Eastern Europe. I am a blind appendage in the operation, and intentionally so.”

  Will looked at Kalyn, his right hand throbbing.

  “Javier,” she said, “that was the wrong answer.” She opened the door, stepped out of the car, opened Javier’s door. “Get out.”

  Javier didn’t move.

  Will leaned over, pushed him out of the seat. Javier fell onto the pavement. Will got out, walked around the hood, finished dragging him the rest of the way out of the car.

  Kalyn said to Will, “If you want to wait in the car, I’ll understand.”

  “I’m with you now.”

  “Then drag him onto the trail. I don’t want blood on the pavement.”

  Will grabbed Javier under his armpits and lifted him. The man was heavy, solid muscle. Twenty feet took almost a minute. Will finally collapsed in the dirt, sweating, out of breath.

  The sky was now a dark, rich navy, with just a shrinking bar of red in the west, the saguaros silhouetted against it. Will surveyed the parking lot, the road. The only lights, a collection of them, emanated from the park’s campground, a mile away.

  Kalyn said, “Roll onto your back.” Javier rolled, looked up at her, the right side of his face swollen, his jaw broken. “What would you do if you were me?” she asked.

  “We would be in a warehouse in Tempe. Acid would be involved. There is also this thing I do with a soldering iron and a powerful magnet.”

  “I only have this gun.” She aimed it at his crotch.

  “One moment,” he said, though his voice completely lacked fear. “If you do that, I will be in no shape to make the phone call.”

  “What call?”

  “As it so happens, I received word from Jonathan a month ago. I am still in the searching phase.”

  “You haven’t found anyone?”

  He shook his head.

  “Sit him up, Will.” Will propped Javier against the toppled trunk of a dead saguaro. Kalyn took out Javier’s BlackBerry, turned it on, found the address book. “This him?” she asked. “Jonathan?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you text him?”

  “I wouldn’t. He lives behind a steering wheel. We speak.”

  She squatted down beside him. “When he’s on the line, you tell him you already have a woman, and that you’re ready to meet.”

  “In return?”

  “You keep your penis a little while longer. Do this right, I leave you here. Maybe you see your family again.”

  The Superstitions were now just a black wall in the backdrop.

  “Here, hold it to his ear, hit ‘Talk’ when I say.” Kalyn handed the Black-Berry to Will and aimed the Glock between Javier’s legs. “Transparence is key, Javier. If you launch into Spanish, if you say things to Jonathan that don’t make sense, that sound suspect, I will pull the trigger. Clear?”

  “Yes. You are handling this all very well.”

  “Do it, Will.” Will pressed the button, held the BlackBerry to Javier’s ear. They waited; then came the static sound of the ring. On the third, someone answered—the voice husky and low over the speakerphone. Will could hear the voice on the other end, but he couldn’t make out the words.

  “It’s Jav. I have someone. . . . No, I have them already. . . . They’re with me right now. . . . Yes, I can do that. . . . Okay. . . . No, that’s plenty of time. . . . All right, I’ll see you then.”
br />   Javier nodded. Will broke the connection.

  “That was it?” Kalyn asked.

  “That was it. So. I tell you the information and you both walk away?”

  “That was the deal,” Kalyn said.

  “And my family stays unharmed?”

  “In twelve hours, I call the police, tell them where they are.”

  “The exchange is in two days,” Javier said.

  “Where?”

  “Interstate Eighty-four, exit fifty-six, twelve miles outside of Boise, Idaho.”

  “What’s there?”

  “An abandoned drive-in movie theater.”

  “And you’re supposed to meet Jonathan there?”

  “Monday night. Eleven o’clock.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Long red hair, bushy beard, weighs over three hundred pounds. Smells terrible.”

  Something rustled a ways off in the underbrush.

  “Look at me,” Kalyn said. “You’ve been responsible for the deaths of more than a few people. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ever looked one of their loved ones in the eye? Accounted for what you’d done?”

  “I don’t believe so. This situation has been unique in many ways.”

  “I want to know if you feel remorse.”

  “It is not personal what I do. I did not take your sister because I desired to do her harm.”

  “No, you took her for money. But you did cause—”

  “Let’s not pretend I am in any way like you. You ask about remorse. You would like me to say that I deeply regret harming your sister, his wife. I can say these things, but they would be untrue. I would know it. You would know it. My line of work does not allow for remorse. Tell me what you were. I’m guessing DEA.”

  The whites of his eyes stood out in the growing darkness.

  “FBI.”

  “You’re very good, Kalyn. I would have enjoyed killing you.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “How many what?”

  “Alphas.”

  He chuckled. “Not as many as people think. Some who believe they are Alphas are not.”

  “How many?”

  “Fifty-seven at the moment.”

  “Any gringos in the bunch?”

  “Just two.”

  “Come with me, Will.”

  He followed Kalyn back to the car, stars now visible.

  “You believe him?” Will asked, leaning against the hood. It was the first time since arriving in Phoenix five hours ago that he wasn’t overwhelmed by heat.

  “Yeah, actually. I’m going after Jonathan.”

  “The trucker?”

  “You be up for that?”

  “I don’t know. What about Javier? You comfortable just leaving him here?”

  “No.”

  “Well, what’s the alternative? Take him with . . .” Will felt something tighten in the small of his back. “No. No way.”

  “I dug a hole three days ago. About fifty yards out.”

  “Kalyn—”

  “Alphas aren’t the kind of people you walk away from. You understand what I’m saying? They’d use every resource tracking us down. Kill friends, family to get to us.”

  Will shook his head. “Not in cold blood, Kalyn.”

  “You can wait here, Will, for all I care. I’ll take—”

  “No. Not like—”

  “Oh fuck.”

  Will didn’t even see the draw, just a blur of movement, then Kalyn standing with her feet shoulder width apart, a two-handed grip and the Glock out in front of her, sweeping back and forth, aimed into all that darkness.

  “You see him?” she whispered.

  Will kept staring at the trunk of the dead saguaro, as if the man might rematerialize, but he wasn’t there.

  “No.”

  “Get in the car, passenger seat. Right now.”

  Will turned and opened the door, got in and shut it as Kalyn climbed behind the steering wheel.

  She flicked the locks.

  For a moment, with the interior lights on, they were blinded to the nightscape beyond.

  “Keys.”

  Will handed them over and she fumbled with them for a moment before jamming one into the ignition.

  The engine cranked. She flicked the headlights to high beam, shifted into drive.

  The brights shone out into the desert, and the first thing Will noticed was the glimmer of metal near that dead saguaro where they’d questioned Javier.

  “You see that?” he said.

  “What?”

  “By the cactus. He got out of the handcuffs.”

  Kalyn eased her foot onto the accelerator.

  “What are you doing?”

  The car lurched forward, crossed twenty feet of pavement, then rattled into the desert.

  “He can’t have gone far,” Kalyn said, dodging jumping chollas and shrubs of Mormon tea. “He had what? Thirty seconds? At a dead run, might have covered—”

  “Two hundred meters.”

  “Really?”

  “I ran track in college. He’s in great shape.”

  Something darted out from behind an ocotillo—just a cottontail, two bunnies in tow.

  “See the arroyo up ahead?” Will said.

  “Yeah.”

  Kalyn braked, the Buick sliding through the dirt. She reversed, then drove on again in a slow, wide circle, the headlights scanning the desert.

  Thirty seconds later, they were stopped again at the arroyo’s edge.

  “Think he went down in there?” Will asked.

  Kalyn pulled her Glock out of the shoulder rig.

  “No,” Will said.

  “He’s out here. We either get him now or spend the foreseeable future looking over our—”

  “Don’t go out there.”

  “I’ll be fine.” She shook the Glock. “He doesn’t have one of these.”

  She threw open the door, got out.

  “Kalyn.”

  “He’s not supernatural, Will. Bleeds like you and me. Stay here.”

  She slammed the door. With the interior lights on, he couldn’t see Kalyn moving away from the car, only heard her footsteps crunching through the dirt.

  Just the headlights now, blazing into the desert, and the last thing he saw before they went dark was a roadrunner streaking between chollas on the far side of the arroyo, a snake twitching in its beak.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Kalyn was at least a hundred yards out from the car before she realized she’d forgotten the flashlight in the glove compartment. She stopped beside an ancient saguaro, gnarled and rotting to death. With no wind, the silence screamed, though after a moment, she began to discern the subtlest inklings of noise—low bass from a radio blaring out of the campground a mile away, the scraping hiss of dry brush set in motion by a wood rat or a wren.

  She scrambled down the twenty-foot embankment and stood on the sandy bottom of the arroyo. It was absolutely quiet, the cooler air having settled here.

  She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the meager starlight. Shapes appeared—boulders, scrubs, ten feet away, the carcass of a coyote—sharp whiff of decay.

  There was movement in the sand behind her—crunch of fast footsteps.

  A cottontail bounded past.

  “You little shit,” she called after it.

  She climbed back out of the arroyo. The moon had edged above the Superstitions. The car was up ahead, a black hulk standing in the desert, the chrome glowing as the moonbeams struck it.

  She walked around to the driver’s side. As she touched the door handle, a bush shook behind her and she turned, saw Will.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said. “I told you to stay put.”

  “I was afraid if he killed you, I’d be a sitting duck for him inside the car.”

  She lowered the gun. “Well, you don’t have to worry about it now.”

  “You got him?”

  “No, he’s gon
e. Come on, we should go.”

  “Just let him walk off—”

  “What would you suggest, Will? You wanna stay out here all night, walking around in the dark. ‘Javier? Javier? Where are you?’ ”

  “You said he’d warn Jonathan off if we let him go.”

  “I know.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, he’s gonna be concerned with finding his family, first and foremost. That’s our only card, but it’s a good one.”

  As Kalyn turned out of Lost Dutchman State Park, Will watched her face—pensive and hard in the glow of the dashboard lights.

  “You know, you’ve been lying to me since I met you. ‘Come on down to Phoenix, Will. I’m an FBI agent. We just need you to make an ID. We’re just gonna talk to him, Will.’ You had this thing planned all along. Hole already dug.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

  “Anything else I don’t know? Wanna drop any other bombs while we’re on the subject?”

  She glanced over at him, said nothing.

  “From here on out, you start treating me like a partner,” Will said. “I wanna know what you’re thinking, what you’re planning. I don’t wanna be surprised again. One more lie, Kalyn, and I’m done with you. Devlin and I will take our chances on the run.”

  They rode on in silence, speeding west toward Phoenix now, a massive, distant glow on the horizon, like a city on fire.

  Space 151

  TWENTY-TWO

  They walked into Kalyn’s apartment at 8:30 P.M., and before he touched his daughter, Will scrubbed his hands with soap and hot water at the kitchen sink.

  Kalyn went back into her bedroom and closed the door.

  Will knelt by Devlin. She was snoring quietly on the couch, and he curled up on the floor beside her, the heat working on him like a sedative.

  His eyes closed. Through the thin walls, he heard children playing a video game in the adjacent apartment. A jet roared overhead, shook the floor.

  Someone whispered into Will’s ear. He opened his eyes, saw Rachael standing by the couch.

  “So this is our little Devi?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t believe how perfect she is. Does she ask about me?”