An Absence of Principal (15 page)

“I hoped you’d call,” she said softly.

“Can I meet you somewhere to answer your questions about
Eden
?” Doggett asked with an odd mix of shame and anticipation.

“I’ll bring my book. 1511 West Des Plaines Rd. We’ll be able to work there.”

“See you in 15 minutes,” Doggett said.

His carefree attitude about calling an 18-year-old student was soon replaced by a fear that exploded and took hold of him almost immediately. A fear that made him wonder if he was being set up, probably a result of the paranoia that came with a life that had begun to crumble around him.

Doggett hadn’t unpacked many of his belongings since moving into the extended stay motel on the outskirts of Tulsa. He threw everything into his suitcase inside of five minutes, tossed his hanging clothes in the back seat, cleared the hotel room of all of his personal items, and 15 minutes later was on the road. He would not be going to 1511 West Des Plaines Road to make what he suddenly knew would be the biggest mistake of his life (and he had made plenty). He didn’t know where he was headed. Anywhere but here. He simply drove. For eight hours he just drove, back toward Texas.

The uneasy feeling he had from his near illicit meet-up with Elizabeth wore off quickly, and for that he was glad. When his mind cleared he realized he had hit some sort of emotional rock bottom. How far he had fallen was suddenly very disturbing to him. He had lost his family, his job, everything in less than three months, and he didn’t know how to get it back. He noticed how his self-assurance always seemed better in the mornings, but the more each day dragged on, the less certain he became about his life and his ability to make rational decisions.

He drove all night after leaving Catoosa, and pulled off the road at a rest area just as the sun peeked over the horizon. He slept fitfully; sweating, tossing and turning, and wondering if making his life right again would ever be possible.

When he woke from his sleep, the second time he’d slept in his car in recent memory, Ben drove around the area until he found a familiar place. He pulled into a hotel where he remembered he and Angela had stayed 15 years earlier. He was in the Hill Country, a place that for many people served as a place to get away for weekend R&R. The sign at the side of the road flickered on and off, at least the part that said “$29,” and so he walked in to book his room for the ridiculously low price. The woman behind the counter was surprisingly clever, nice and well kept for someone behind the desk of a $29 motel.

“Any rooms?” Ben began.

“I’ve got one,” the woman behind the counter said.

“I’ll take it,” he said. “Can I pay you a week at a time … say, $203 tonight and then come back a week from now with another $203.”

“Where’d you get $203?” the woman asked.

“Your sign says $29 a night. That’s $203 a week, right?”

The woman chuckled slightly and looked up at Ben, who was obviously someone who was not exactly a seasoned Hill Country tourist. If he thought the hotel went for $29 a night, it had obviously been some time since his last trip here, or anywhere for that matter.

“It’s $129 a night, sir. The ‘1’ is burned out.”

Ben turned to leave. A sad caricature of his former self, he reeked of someone who had been through way more than one person ought to have been through.

“I tell you what, I’ll let you have it for $203 for five nights,” the woman behind the counter called out to him as his hand clasped the doorknob on the way out.

Ben thanked the woman for her kindness. He said he was new in town and planned to find some work in time to scrape together a few bucks for maybe another week of rent, and oh by the way, did she know of any work in town?

“What kind of work do you do?” the woman asked.

Ben thought about her question for a moment before giving her an answer. He didn’t want to give out too much information about himself and he certainly didn’t want to tell her he had 25 years in public school administration but because he had lost all sense of his morals he would now take whatever he could find.

“Labor,” he said. “Just odd, blue-collar stuff. And construction. I’m handy with a hammer.”

The woman worked to finish his paperwork. She began tapping her pen on the counter, suddenly in thought.

“There’s a lot of construction around here these days. Aside from that, there’s always someone drilling for natural gas a few miles west of here. I hear they may need some roughnecks.”

It was perfect. Being from Midland he had always felt a kinship with people in oil and gas, though he really didn’t know the first thing about it. He was an educator, an administrator. A professional. He wore suits to work, for crying out loud. Or he had in his past life. It’s doubtful he’d ever see the green of a chalkboard again.

The woman behind the counter slid the registration information at Ben.

“Name, address, make, model and year of your vehicle, please, sir?” she asked.

Doggett bought a few minutes to try to think of a fake name, something that was growing more difficult since he was running out of fake names at this rate. He told the woman his pen had run out of ink and asked her if she could check her office to see if there was another one he might use. He figured that might buy him a couple more seconds to think of a legitimate fake identity.

The woman walked into the manager’s office for a better pen.

“Buddy Gamble. South Atlanta Street. Tulsa. Toyota. White. 1999,” he wrote.

Every blank Ben filled in was a lie. First Name. Last Name. Address. Age. DOB. Occupation. Cell number. Everything. He knew she’d never go out and check the car personally to verify its color or make. As for the name, he tossed her $203 cash so she wouldn’t be asking to check his ID. All he’d have to remember was that his new name was Buddy Gamble. Not Homer Wilson. Or Ben Doggett. Buddy Gamble. The Gamble part would be easy. And the Buddy part should be, too, since that was how he greeted everyone back when he was happy, before his life began to unravel.

CHAPTER 12
 

T
rask knew he didn’t have much time to get as much information as he could about the prosecutor’s statement that Nail was an “expert marksman.”

“I really don’t know how he came across that,” Nail said. “I can shoot a gun, but I don’t own a gun.”

“So just how did you come to be such an expert marksman, then?”

Nail shared the story with Trask. While it didn’t explain why Nail had kept the information from him, it at least explained why he was such a good shot. He simply practiced a lot. Trask was convinced he had good reason to.

To be on the safe side, Trask opened his cell phone and called Alex.

“I need you to find us a ballistic report on the Junior Walker murder. I’m specifically looking for information on entry wounds, how far the shooter was away. Stuff like that,” Trask told her. “I have a sneaking suspicion it might just come in handy sooner than we think.”

“Where are you?” Alex asked.

“JoJos. With Tony.”

“I’m around the corner,” Alex said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

JoJo’s was a no-frills, real meat-and-potatoes place where actual cooks prepared the food low on preservatives and high in real meat and potatoes content. JoJo’s was the unofficial diner of the unassuming legal types in town, the ones who preferred simplicity, small talk and visiting with peers, to the often-times pretentious moments one must engage in over a few slices of prime rib at The Derrick. While the conversation at The Derrick was often golf games and society shindigs, the talk at JoJos was more given to high school football and whether West Texas would survive the great drought of the 21st century.

Trask could tell Alex was nervous about something by the sound of her voice.

She walked into the diner looking every bit as frazzled as she had sounded on the phone.

“What’s going on?” Trask asked her.

Alex glanced at Nail, uncertain if she should continue. She had only told Trask about her other life.

“If you’re worried about Tony repeating your story, don’t,” Trask said. “The attorney-client privilege goes both ways. Right, Tony?”

Nail nodded yes.

It had been weeks since Alex Wallace had shared the secret details of her trek through Central and South America. Garrison often wondered when the next part of the story would come. He knew he didn’t want to ask matter-of-factly, ‘So, what happened next?’ Not after the latest chapter, which included her nightmarish train ride through Mexico, imprisoned in a box car with sadistic drug runners; almost sub-human men who had stowed themselves away en route to their next ‘assignment.’ The beatings and violations Alex suffered would have been enough to institutionalize weaker people. That she was able to escape and regroup in time to continue her effort to follow the drugs was nothing short of miraculous.

“What’s up?” Garrison asked, knowing something was amiss.

She was shaking.

“Just got a phone call. I don’t know who it was on the other end. A man about forty, it sounded like. Latino accent. ‘We know where you are,’ he said. And then he hung up.”

“Bluffing, maybe?” Garrison tried to reassure.

“How’d whoever this was get my phone number?”

Garrison didn’t know the answer to that, but obviously someone was involved in Alex’s little fact-finding mission and they were able to get her number and track her down; someone who played for the other side. Someone who didn’t want her to go on without knowing that she had been found out. What would come next, Garrison wondered for a moment. But his time was growing short.

Nail’s trial was upon them. He and Alex had built a strong case for Tony’s freedom, but they were without the one thing they needed: a suddenly gone-missing elementary school principal with an overzealous knack for gambling, women, and as it was beginning to look like, booze. Now all Trask had to do was point an accusatory finger in Doggett’s direction to implicate him in Junior Walker’s murder.

He looked at Alex.

“I don’t want to have to go through what I went through on that train again,” Alex suddenly stammered, her usual self-assuredness replaced by an uncertainty. A fear was there, where it hadn’t been before. “They told me I would be safe here. They told me no one would know me. Or know where I was. Or what I looked like. They promised.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Garrison asked.

“I don’t know. Not yet, at least.”

She was making no sense, but clearly something had happened relative to her journey that had led her to the fright she was now experiencing.

Alex began to calm down the more she talked. Knowing that she was in the presence of Trask and Tony and the other locals seemed to allay her fears, for the time being, at least.

Three-hundred miles east, the Mexican man from an office high atop the First American Bank building in downtown Fort Worth closed his smart phone.

“Good. Very good,” the man on the other side of the Mexican’s desk said. “Now we wait.”

The two men in the room came from vastly different backgrounds and cultures. But they both had one objective in mind: putting a stop to Alex Wallace’s unfinished mission.

“I remember my first morning after the train pulled into the station, after the trip that I thought would never end finally did. I rented a car and a hotel room near the rail yard. I remember how beautiful the morning was. Maybe it was because of what all I had been through, and I realized how lucky I was to be alive then. The sunrise was beautiful and there was a cool feel to the air. I kept an eye on the boxcar that contained the cocaine that I had been following all along. The hotel I had checked into was across the street from the train yard where freight and passenger cars docked all day and all night.

“Just like clockwork, a couple of hours after I checked into the hotel, and right before the sun came up that first morning, a white van drove up next to the box car I had been in. Three men off-loaded the cocaine, including the kilos I had been following since I was in Aguileres. They shoved the coke quickly into the back of the van and the four men, two of whom had been with me and had brutalized me in the boxcar, went, too.”

Alex told Garrison she couldn’t be absolutely certain, but it felt like she was somewhere in northern Mexico. She said the next few minutes had the typical big-city congestion you would expect to find in one of the world’s most populous cities.

“I was able to hop in my rental and stay fairly close to the van with the cocaine. We sat in traffic for almost an hour before making our way from the northeast to the far southwest side of town. Traffic really never lessened the farther west out of town we reached. We drove into the desert and twenty minutes later the white van exited onto a desolate, thin ribbon of a road that led back toward the north toward the U.S. border. I pulled to the side of the road because I really didn’t want to be noticed. Traffic by now had begun to thin out. I watched the van as it took a valley road back to the west, then off to the north. There were hills on either side of the road, and when the van disappeared, I pulled onto a dirt road where the van had disappeared between the two rises. I parked on the shoulder just down the road from what looked like an abandoned used car lot. No one noticed I was there.