The Legend of Kareem (17 page)

After a break in the trees, we came upon the pond. It wasn’t much of a pond, actually, more like a section of the Rio Grande that widened and slowed before continuing on the other end.

There was no one here. Omar pointed at a fallen log, and we sat.

As the sun left completely, I caught a pair of headlights pointed in our direction. My breath caught in my throat.

“Is that him?” Omar said.

“I think so. Yes. It has to be.”

The headlights shut off and a car door opened. Then the beam of a flashlight lit the trees, and a few seconds later, a short Hispanic man in overalls emerged into the clearing. He wore an unmarked baseball cap, pulled low, but I caught his eyes locked onto mine as he climbed over the stump of a tree.

“Are you waiting for me?” he said.

“I think so.”

“And your friend here, he is with you?”

“Yes, this man needs to cross the border.”

The Hispanic man killed his flashlight and stopped a few feet from us, a big grin lighting up his wrinkled face. “You are already almost across the border, amigo. You need to get him to a city.” He flicked his head at Omar. “You, where would you like to go?”

Omar kept his eyes on the ground and shrugged. “I don’t know, somewhere I can be safe. Somewhere no one will find me.”

“I can think of a few options,” the man said. “We can settle that later.”

“How do we do this?” I said.

The coyote rolled back the sleeve of his shirt and checked his watch. “We’re not ready quite yet. Do you have something for me?”

I took the collection of ATM envelopes and passed them to him. He flicked through each one. The exchange had already taken too long for my liking. My mouth felt dry, and swallowing made my throat sore.

“You’ve got your money. Can we get this started now?”

The man laughed as he shoved the envelopes in a pocket. “Easy. You seem nervous, but I can assure you there is no cause for worry.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

He checked his watch again. “We need to stay just a little longer. You should relax. I am going to take Omar somewhere safe, somewhere he can disappear if he likes. Mexico is a big place.”

Fear gripped me like a cold hand, and I felt woozy for a second. The coyote had just used Omar’s name. I thought back to our phone conversation in Three Rivers, and I’d never mentioned Omar by name. Had I? Maybe Vanessa had told him Omar’s name already, but I hadn’t.

“If you like,” he said, “we can go wait in my car. You will maybe be more comfortable if you can sit down until everything is ready.”

A pair of headlights lit up the trees.

“What the hell is that?” I said.

“That’s nothing,” the man said. “No cause for alarm.”

Something was wrong. The coyote’s chest pumped up and down, and I could hear his heavy breathing. His hand inched toward the back of his overalls.

“Run!” I shouted.

Omar took off just as the man drew a pistol. I threw my shoulder into his chest before he could point it at me, knocking him to the ground. The pistol fell from his hand, and as he scrambled to pick it up, I drew my dad’s gun from my waistband, pointed the barrel at his chest, and pulled the trigger.

Blood sprayed my face as the weapon’s recoil vibrated up my shoulder. I’d just killed another man, and I didn’t even think about what I was doing this time. Pure reaction.

My heart was beating so fast I thought I might pass out.

Get the money
, my brain shouted. But as I leaned over to find the ATM envelopes, a car door shut, and a shotgun blast echoed through the trees.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I scrambled through the tropical brush in the direction I thought Omar had gone as a voice called out behind me. I couldn’t make out the words over the sound of my own labored breathing, but whoever was behind us wasn’t happy.

I spotted Omar on the other side of the pond and ran as fast as I could around it. My feet sunk into the marshy edges, making loud sucking sounds with each step. “Omar, wait up.”

He turned and I could barely make him out. The moon hadn’t risen yet, but a little residual light silhouetted him. He ducked down and I leaped over tree branches and shrubs to catch up with him.

“What do we do?” he said.

“We run. We run until there’s no other choice.” I raised the pistol. “And then we make a stand if we have to.”

I should have expected the coyote’s betrayal, but maybe I thought I could catch a break, just this once.

We dashed back into the trees, but the collection of gnarled roots and hanging vines made movement too slow. A pointless wish for a machete occurred to me.

We kept slogging through the dense brush as another shotgun blast echoed through the trees, and more indistinguishable shouts echoed around us.

We pushed through to the other side of the trees into a vast cornfield. Stalks as high as my waist swayed in the breeze, swishing back and forth like one symbiotic organism. About a thousand yards away, a rooftop poked out above the stalks of corn.

“There,” I said, pointing at the structure. “We have to get inside there.”

As we ran, I turned to catch yet another set of headlights bounce around the trees behind me. Then the shouts resumed, and the now-closer voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t pay attention to that. I focused all of my energy on running and pushing cornstalks aside, with everything I had. Damn this sympathy pregnancy weight for making me so slow, like trying to run with a bag of sand strapped to my belly. Everything in me jiggled, and I had the distinct feeling I was about to barf up the tamales we’d had for lunch.

Through the cornstalks, the house came into view. It was more like a shack, a one-room structure that reminded me of park ranger cabins at Rocky Mountain National Park. Wooden, with a porch and a brick chimney jutting from the angled roof.

We ran up to the house and I tried the door. It was unlocked. I burst inside to total darkness, and only then it occurred to me that I might have just stumbled into someone’s home.

But nobody came at me. In a few seconds, my eyes adjusted. I took stock of a front door, a back door, and a skinny door, which I assumed was the bathroom. It stayed shut as I slammed the front door behind us.

“What do we do?” Omar said, panic stuttering his words.

“Hide.”

Inside, there was a small kitchen in one corner of the room, and a table. No bed or couch to hide behind. A stark one-room home, or way station, or something similar.

I slid against the wall next to the window facing the direction we’d come from and pointed at a spot next to me. Omar sat on the other side of the window.

“We are going to die,” Omar said.

Maybe. Probably.

“We’re not going to die,” I said as I checked the clip in the pistol. Six bullets left. I reached into my back pocket for the spare clip, but it wasn’t there. Probably fell out while I was chasing Omar. Would six be enough?

Shuffling came through the sound of the cornstalks outside. I lifted the dirty windowpane a couple inches and fired a shot out into the field.

“Hey you motherfuckers!” said a familiar voice. In a second, it registered. Jed. “Did you think I wasn’t gonna find y’all? I got a Lo-Jack on my truck, you stupid sons of bitches.”

I tapped the barrel of the pistol against my forehead. Why hadn’t I thought of that? But then, the other question was, if Jed found us by tracking us with the Lo-Jack, who was the coyote waiting for? Who had he sold us out to?

But the answer seemed obvious.

“We are going to die,” Omar said.

“Stop saying that. It’s not helping.”

“How many bullets you got in that gun, Candle? Cuz I got a whole box of shells with me. I can sit out here in these cornstalks all night and poke a million holes in that little shack you’re sitting in. I ain’t using birdshot no more, and one of my slugs is going to get you, eventually. Why don’t you toss that gun outside before I have to come in there and take it?”

He was right. Taking him on directly was not going to work. The best thing to do would be to bolt out the back door and keep running. Maybe we could get lost in the cornstalks if we kept low and didn’t stop. But then what? Where would we go without safe transportation south?

“Take the truck and go,” I shouted. “If you try to come in here, I’ll put a bullet in you.” I didn’t think he’d go for that option, but it was worth a try.

“Because you still got the keys, asshole.”

I felt my pocket, and I did have the keys.

“But I don’t just want the truck,” Jed said. “I want me a little payback. Carl’s dead, Vanessa’s dead, our little guest staying in the garage is dead. I got nothing to go home to because of you assholes. Did you think I’d just take the truck and leave empty-handed?”

Before I could come up with an answer to that question, another voice joined Jed’s outside.

“You listen to me,” the voice said. “Drop your weapon and put your hands above your head.”

Broken-wristed Glenning. As I’d figured, the coyote had sold us out to IntelliCraft. I didn’t even have to spend any time worrying about the mechanics of how that would have happened. They probably already had the coyote on retainer. For all I knew, they had half of Texas on their payroll.

“Go fuck yourself,” Jed said. “You’re not cops or border patrol, so you got no business being out here.”

“How do you know we’re not cops?” Glenning said.

“I’m the sheriff of Live Oak County, and I’m here on official police business.”

Sheriff?

“I don’t really care why you’re here,” Glenning said. “We’re not interested in you. We want the people in the shack. You can leave here alive if you drop the shotgun and walk away.”

“What a goddamned coincidence,” Jed said. “I’m here for those two fucks too. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t do what y’all say.”

I peered through the window. Glenning was standing next to someone, but I couldn’t make him out. They were a couple hundred feet, maybe more, from Jed. The swaying cornstalks and the falling darkness made it difficult to clearly differentiate all the shapes outside.

The person standing next to Glenning started running through the cornstalks, to the other end of the house. There went my plan to leave by the backdoor. I fired a shot out the window, just to let them know I was armed. How many bullets did that leave? Four?

I slipped the cell phone out of my pocket. Flipped it open, checked for service. One bar. One glorious, merciful bar.

“Who are you calling?” Omar said.

“Susan,” I said as I dialed the number.

Omar gripped my arm. “No, Candle, you must not. You have no idea what she is capable of. Please, do not involve her.”

“I don’t know who you think you’re talking to,” Glenning shouted. “But you will put the weapon down and return to your vehicle this second, or I’ll have to kill you. It’s your choice.”

Jed replied with a cackle and a blast of his shotgun.

I shrugged off Omar as Susan answered. “Hello?”

“Susan, it’s me. You have to listen to me. I’m in trouble and I need help.”

“Tucker? What’s going on?”

Pistol fire crackled out in the cornstalks.

“I’m in Brownsville. In the town of South Point. I came out here to meet someone, but IntelliCraft is here. They’ve been following me and they’ve got me trapped in some kind of one-room house.”

“Is Omar with you?”

I glanced at my traveling companion, whose face was streaked with tears. “Yes.”

She paused. “You have to give him up.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You have to. He’s the one they want. If you turn him in, they’ll let you live. Give him up and you can walk away from this. If you don’t, they’ll kill you too. He’s a dead man either way.”

Breath eked out of my lips. Jed and Glenning kept shouting at each other. Their voices were broken by the occasional crack of the shotgun or a pistol.

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “There’s another man here. He’s someone I pissed off yesterday. I don’t have time to tell you about it. Can you just come here? And bring help, please?”

“Where are you?”

“East of South Point on Alaska Road. Past the pond… a few thousand feet in a corn field. We’re trapped in a shack.”

“Sit tight. I’m on my way.”

She hung up, and I slipped the clip out of the gun. Four rounds left. That wasn’t going to be enough.

“The fortune cookie?” Omar said, stuttering. “The message was
Luck will speed you to your destination
. A bit ironic now, yes?”

Sweat dribbled down his cheeks as he tried to smile at me.

“We’re going to get out of this. I’m not going to let anyone hurt you.” But I didn’t know if I believed it anymore.

I peered out the window again as another shotgun blast lit up the night. Jed creeped west through the corn as Glenning disappeared into the north.