Authors: David Cole
33
M
y head fuzzy, eyes filmed over, I tried to see where I was.
“Hello?” I shouted.
My arms duct-taped behind me, ankles duct-taped together.
“Miss Winslow.”
He turned on a flashlight, rose slowly from a plain wooden chair, his body uncoiling fluidly until he stretched, muscles flexing, and I could tell his body was immaculately balanced, a dynamo, ready to take on anything. His sudden, radiant smile seemed that of a politician, but genuine and reflected in his deep green eyes.
Vote for me
, the smile said.
Not because I'll get the job done, but because I'm a good person.
He smiled so energetically I thought his face muscles must hurt. And whether smiling or not, his face shifted with the emotional quality of whatever he said, his face like a small swimming hole that ripples and bobbles with the slightest vibration or summer wind.
The flashlight flickered away from me until I heard a loud thunk and the overhead lights came on. The inside of the warehouse all was in shadows, the bulk of a huge machine rising in the center of the floor. I could see a huge pile of trash bags and bales of cotton stacked here and there in dark corners so you couldn't really make out what was actually
there. On two walls, high above, long, horizontally narrow windows without glass opened to the air for heat evaporation.
“My name is Galeano,” he said, kneeling in front of me. “I'm sorry to see recognition of my name, as groggy as you must still feel. You and your lover have caused a lot of trouble. Tamár Gordon has been arrested. The camp is closed down. All of my boys are in police custody. Even Luis, who you met at your house. Luis rarely misses when he goes to kill somebody. Back in MedellÃn, he's killed twenty, thirty, I don't know how many people. And he's only fourteen years old.”
I looked up at Galeano's face, his cheeks where I'd slapped them still flaming red against his even brown tan, his lips flattened to a horizontal pencil line, his eyes full of shock. He couldn't look at me and I felt very afraid.
In that moment I gave up hope of living. I lay flat on the oaken flooring, arms across my chest, like an animal who's rolled over into the submissive position.
Go ahead, here's my throat, rip it open.
I felt nailed to the floor by my helplessness, all hope crippled, damaged to the point of being completely relinquished. For an instant, I thought of coiling like a snake and striking when Galeano wouldn't expect it, but he saw my body tighten reflexively and just smiled at me.
“Not a chance,” he said. “Don't even bother trying. You're going to need all your energy, where you're going.”
“Where?” I said quietly, hope not yet extinguished.
“I'll tell you exactly where. Well. Not exactly. Let's say, approximately in the middle of the Sonora desert. East of Yuma. Near the border. I figure to drop you out there 'long about noon. 'Long about, say, hundred degrees plus. No water. You'll make it a few miles, I figure. You'll live just long enough to know what's going to happen. Your life is gonna be like the horizon, it's gonna shrink right down to a few yards around you, and then you just won't be able to look
forward even just one more step, you'll realize what's happening and that it just won't go on much longer.”
He slit the duct tape on my ankles with a box cutter, tossed it aside, helped me to my feet.
“But before we go,” he said, “say good-bye.”
He half carried me to the end of the huge machine. I blinked, my eyes smarting, suddenly filled with tears. Trussed up in duct tape, with a strip across her mouth, Spider sat on top of a huge metal lip of the machine. I shook my head hard, I knelt to the floor and banged my head on the concrete, trying to get focused and more conscious of what I was doing. He hauled me to my feet, forced me to look at Spider.
“I don't know yet how you two know each other. But I know you're connected, somehow. I'm going to have to find out from this young woman just what she knows. Back in MedellÃn, I was known as the best cleaner to call. You know, the guy who comes with the bottles of acid and the bags and gets rid of people. You, you're going for a long run into oblivion. Thirty-nine people have already died in the area of the desert where I'm going to drop you. And that includes the cooler months, includes the ones who froze and the ones who got dehydrated.”
“Spider!” I shouted.
“Spider,” he said. “A nickname? Tell me more.”
I clamped my mouth shut.
“Or not,” he said. “I don't care. Once I've dropped you in the desert, I'll come back for this little spider, this tarantula, this black widow that will want to sting me. But I've already arranged an identity kit for her, passport, tickets on a private jet, where she'll be stabilized with tranquilizers.”
“Where are you taking her?”
“South.” He grinned. “To my own place, in the mountains. I'll keep her there until she tells me whatever I want to hear. Then I'll do something with her. I just don't know what yet.”
He pulled a roll of duct tape from his pocket, cut off a strip, and whipped it around my mouth. Punching the button for the electric door, he waited for it to clunk to a stop at the top.
“All right,” he said. “'Bye, my spider. I'll be back.”
He dumped me back in the trunk, held the ether rag to my face again.
34
I
groaned, tried to stretch, but stabs of pain all over.
Stop stretching. Don't move!
A taste of vomit in my mouth, behind that sour taste something chemical, something hospital. I'd been drugged, now I remembered.
Ran a finger over my teeth, trying to clear those tastes, trying to spit, but my mouth too dry. Reached for water, but of course none to drink. I thought of tomatoes and blueberries, of succulent and damp fruits, of raw eggs, of honey molasses, but calling up good-tasting things didn't get rid of the bad taste. Running my hands across the ground, I found a smooth stone, a pebble, and put it in my mouth to suck on. The pebble was flecked with an amber-colored substance, the yellow polished by decades of being rolled along by winds and rain.
I tried to figure the worst-case scenario.
Best-case,
I corrected myself.
Best-case scenario.
Negative. Dehydrated so much that sweat scarcely formed. Positive. Sweat didn't flow continually into my eyes, so they didn't burn anymore. Negative. Bleeding from at least a dozen scrapes. Positive. The smell of the blood so intense that I could focus on it to the point of ignoring some of the pain.
Heat. Negative. Well over one hundred and ten degrees.
Heat. Positive. At some point, temperature doesn't really
matter. The organism dehydrates, blood pressure drops. At some point, you don't think about it.
Negative.
I was going to die.
Positive.
I wasn't dead yet.
Always surprising what the human body can do if the mind is shut off from thinking about things too much.
Think, you die.
Stand up, one foot in front of the other, total body focus, you live.
What to do.
Getting to my feet. My bare feet, I quickly realized when I stepped onto the hot desert floor. Panic of sudden realization where I was, didn't know where I was except it was in the middle of the desert. Slowly swiveling completely in a circle, I saw nothing alive, no birds, no snakes or critters or insects. They were out there, but with the sun directly overhead, nothing wanted to move.
I
had
to move. I had to find water. I had to find somebody.
Nothing I could use to bind my feet, the first hundred yards excruciating on my soles as I limped across the desert. No shifting sands here. Just corniche. Lots of small, sharp rocks, tufted dry grass. Here and there, discarded plastic supermarket bags from undocumented workers crossing up from Mexico. I gathered a few, tried to tie them around my feet, but they quickly tore on the stones and grass.
Stopping at the first saguaro, I used a stone to bash a hole between two saguaro ribs, looking for water. I pulled out clumps of the pulp, trying to suck moisture from them.
A dark plastic bag. I pulled it over my head, tied the loops under my chin, some relief from the sun although after five minutes my scalp felt like it was in a dishwasher. Hot, moist. I couldn't afford the water lost through the sweat and ripped off the bag.
What to do, what to do.
I was in serious trouble.
Gripping large clumps of saguaro pulp in both hands, I guessed which direction was north, hard to guess with the sun directly overhead, but I
had
to pick a direction so I did.
And I jogged off into the desert.
When starting out, without realizing it, I'd taken in the sense of shadows from saguaros and mesquite and creosote bush. I mean the lack of shadows, the sun so precisely overhead that its vertical rays hit directly down on the anvil of the desert. Now, seeing a saguaro shadow about two feet long, I knew that time had passed. Both my feet bled, but not badly. I'd done so much long-distance running that my feet had built blisters on blisters, the soles callused enough for occasional pricking, but on the whole, and I had to focus on the whole, the total foot was okay.
But that saguaro shadow was ominous. I estimated it was at least an hour since I'd started running. At least a quart of sweat, of moisture evaporation that I couldn't replace. Weighing the odds, I picked up my pace to something like a twelve-minute mile. The extra speed meant I had to watch my step. A trip, a fall, anything like that could be painful at minimum, potentially dangerous to the point of fatal if I broke bones. I shifted my path several times, the ground increasingly rocky, and I sensed I was on an incline, running uphill, and I didn't like that extra effort, but I had little choice. A covey of quail scattered in front of me, their song like Indian flutes, but the beauty of those flutes scarcely registered. My head was buzzing, inside, almost a rattle, like the sun was drying out my brain and leaving it to twitch about like the tail of a huge timber rattler. I went up and over a small escarpment, down the other side with a thud onto solid rock, impatient with my progress slowing down as I fought against tripping and stumbling, my eyes so intent on the two and a half feet of my next stride that I
misjudged the next rocky outcrop and fell on my rear, sliding down the rocks for several yards until I stopped, my panties shredding, bright lines of blood on my rump. I clawed at the rocky desert, got to hands and knees, not bothering to look at the scrapes, willing myself erect and running again to the top of the small outcrop, where I stopped with a deep sob.
As far as I could see, nothing but desert, as flat and hot as the bottom of an iron. In the winter, I'd been in the desert at night, with temperatures down around freezing, the slightest breeze chafing any bare skin, piercing your sinuses and eardrums. But that was the other side of the calendar.
Until falling, I'd not been thinking about anything but the immediacy of being in the desert, of needing to get
out
of the desert. But now my head was full of the future, of eternity in the desert. In extreme sports, you do
not
think of the miles left, the time to completion, the summary of mental and physical exhaustion which will be stretched out beyond comprehension. In extreme sports, this is unthinkable. You just put one foot in front of the other, swim another stroke, pedal the bike one more revolution.
This totally freaked me.
I stopped again. I wanted to just lie down, cry myself into wellness, into healing, into begging for somebody to find me.
Two years ago, I'd have done just that.
Given up.
Not this woman,
I thought.
Not this time.
I carefully gauged the shadows, figured I'd been running at least two hours, figured my mind wasn't rational anymore so it could be three or four hours, the shadows having that midafternoon, indeterminate length about them.
Raising both hands, I cupped the palms around my eyes, shading out the sun, looking at the horizon. At first, I thought the tower was just another saguaro, maybe half a mile off. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them to slits, looked again
carefully. It really was a tower. Maybe two, three miles away. I saw no other towers, so it couldn't be a power line, maybe a telecommunications satellite tower. That was bad news, since anything like that would be so tall that I was underestimating the distance to it. It's a survival tower, I said to myself. One of those emergency signals to those on the desert illegally because of the hundreds of illegal travelers who died every summer.
Water! Here!
the tower signifies.
My entire map of existence shrank to those few miles. Even the horizon was blurred, indistinct. I kept that tower etched in my head, even when I couldn't see it, which was most of the time, both feet bleeding heavily now, and my pulse so faint I could barely pick it up except at the base of my neck.
I headed toward the tower. Trying to run, really just a loping pace, slowing now and then to a fast walk, gradually slowing even more to shorter steps, my mind hallucinating, my strength really going now, felt like my blood was boiling directly out of my skin, reducing my circulation, reducing blood pressure to the point where I knew I was light-headed and getting dangerously near that point of low blood pressure where the body just collapses into a coma. And out here, a coma meant death.
Double vision. I shook my head violently, huge globules of sweat flung left and right, but no luck. Every bush had a double image, both of them sharp, overlaid, like two serrated leaves, one laid almost on top of the other.
A black lightning bolt hit the ground, no, hit the prairie dog, the strike a blur, talons ripping into the prairie dog, ripping a long string of entrails as the hawk swooped upward, suddenly skittering a full ninety-degree turn as I waved my arms at it, furious. I'd watched the prairie dog, licking his paws, satisfied, no longer hungry,
alive
and then dead. The hawk wheeling in a disdainful arc. I was no threat. It flapped
its wings slowly, rising on a thermal, disappearing into the sun.