An Absence of Principal (23 page)

Still, the sound of a knock at such an hour was unsettling. Velma jumped at the sound of it. She opened the door to find Ben. He looked different than when she had seen him the last time, when he had stashed the gun in his bureau drawer two months earlier. Something had changed. There seemed to be a dim ray of optimism emanating from somewhere within him.

“Ben?”

“It’s me, Mama,” he said.

“What on earth?” she said, opening the door to let him in.

“I’m OK, Ma. I’m all right now,” he said, embracing his mother as a sea of emotions overcame him.

CHAPTER 18
 

A
lex found herself in as dark and hot a place as she had ever been. There was no light. She could not see her hand in front of her. Everywhere she turned there was darkness. There didn’t even appear to be a crack of light at the bottom of a door. It could have been night but something told her it was the middle of the day. There were muffled voices all speaking Spanish.

How did I get here?
Wherever here is,
she thought to herself.

Every inch of her body ached. She could barely move and her arms felt broken. The pain coming from her forearms was intense. She didn’t know what her captors had done to her while she was unconscious. She hoped she never knew. Gradually, the longer time she spent regaining the feeling in her body, the more apparent it became to her that wherever she was, she was in motion. She heard the sound of a car or a truck. The muffled voices she suddenly realized were coming from the cab of the vehicle in which she was apparently a passenger. She then realized her arms were bound behind her back. No bones were broken, but she had been atop them for as long as she had been wherever she was, and her body weight had cut off her circulation. She felt the truck come to a stop and heard the sound of an air brake as they came to rest. She had gained enough sense in waking to know that whatever vehicle she was in had just traveled down a dirt road — maybe it was a road — filled with holes.

The voices that seemed to be coming from the cab of the truck moved. They came close, then grew more distant again. Her captors had moved to the back of the vehicle. She panicked. She heard keys being pulled out and rattled, a lock being moved, and laughter. She didn’t know how they left her when they threw her in the back of the truck, and she was sure that whatever position she chose now would lead them to know that she was awake, or even alive.

The door slid open and the voices grew louder. She could still see nothing. It was as pitch black on the outside as it was inside. She fell to the ground below, probably a good three feet, and grimaced as she hit the desert floor, her body writhing in pain.

One of the men grabbed her arm, which brought more pain the more he pulled at her. Another man grabbed her feet, a third pulled her by the hair.

“Open your eyes,” one of the men demanded. “Now!” They felt open to her but she couldn’t see. She did not speak and could barely make out the figures of the three men in front of her.

The man had a voice that she thought was vaguely familiar but she was still too confused over everything to know for sure. She saw the three of them, their backs bathed by the bright truck lights behind them. She glimpsed at the license plate and caught the letters OXZ15. She couldn’t make out the rest of it, but the plate also contained the word Chihuahua. She knew when she saw the name that she was probably somewhere in Northern Mexico. It was impossible to say what with the darkness encompassing everything except the 15 feet directly in front of her.

“Stand up! Get up, now!”

Alex stumbled to her feet, barely making the transition to her knees and finally to a standing position.

“What do you want with me?” she asked.

“Shut up. We talk. You no talk!”

Her emotions bubbled to the top. She didn’t know what the next few minutes held. But she didn’t like her odds. Not at all. The voice of the man demanding her silence was another that was familiar to her. She had heard it in the garage several days earlier when she had witnessed the horrific murders of the men who had apparently made a tactical error the cartel lieutenants had deemed serious enough to kill for.

It was the same man she had seen in the garage carrying out the murders. When she realized who it was, her knees went weak.

“Turn around,” the man barked.

Alex turned and faced the darkness. Beyond the beam of the headlights she could see nothing. She stood, waiting for her end.

She heard the sound of a slamming door from behind. She glanced back and saw that the three men had gotten into the truck. She heard the motor drop into gear, the sluggishness of the truck pulling away. But it wasn’t pulling away. Not exactly. The driver lurched the truck forward. And it was coming straight toward her.

Alex took a few steps to her left, unable to see anything but blackness bathed in the 18-wheeler’s headlights. For the first time she could see that twenty or thirty feet ahead of her there was nothing; a steep drop off that reached downward, who knew how far. The sound of the truck motor grew louder. She looked behind her: it was maybe twenty feet behind her and coming fast. She cut suddenly to her right, something the men had not prepared for.
What would she do other than run straight ahead and plummet to her death?
they must have thought. But her hard right turn caused the truck to turn sharply and violently and head her direction. It closed to within 10 feet of her.

Her foot slipped and caught on a mesquite bush. She tumbled forward. Thoughts of whether these were her last few seconds of life streamed through her mind, and her adrenaline kicked in like never before. She began to fall, but almost as soon as she did, she hit ground again, thudding against what had to be a ledge that her would-be murderers did not foresee when they drove her toward what they figured to be her certain doom. She landed with such a force that her breath was taken from her. She was not dead but neither could she breathe. She looked up and saw the eerie sight of the undercarriage of a massive 18-wheeler airborne and not 10 feet above her head. She hunkered down on the ledge, covering her face, trying to shake the sound of a flying, falling six-ton truck that was so close she could almost reach out and touch it.

When it finally became apparent to her that the threat of imminent danger was over, her body became less rigid. She lay still for several seconds wondering what had happened to the truck and the murderers inside.

A deafening boom followed by a flash of light and finally a cloud of smoke wafted past her, and she knew that at least for now, she was out of danger. Even if she didn’t know where she was or how far she had fallen. In the distance, Alex thought she saw a glimmer of dim light cut through the darkness. But even so, she was still an hour from being able to tell if she would be forced to stay where she was until the elements killed her, or if she would somehow be able to scramble back to safety.

She sat quietly in the pre-dawn still, perched on the edge of what might have been the rest of her life. The only noise came from the uncontrollable shaking of her hands and legs. For the first time in years Alex was thankful she had a “rest of her life” to ponder, and found herself thankful to be alive.

There was a vibration first, and then her George Strait ringtone sounded. It sounded unexpectedly, muffled inside her pocket. It scared her like few things had before. She didn’t recognize the number and so she let it go to voice mail.

“To the curious law enforcement officer who retrieves Miss Wallace’s voice mail
,” the message began.
“By now you are no doubt wondering why we would choose to kill her. Why she is at the bottom of Panther Canyon.”
There was a slight pause on the voice mail.
“Good luck with your investigation. I wish you well.”

Another pause, and then,
“Unless you want to meet with the same fate, cease all of your attempts to discover Junior Walker’s murderer. Be happy you have someone like Tony Nail to pin it on. He will make a fine inmate in your prison system. He will ask few questions, be of help to others and he will accept the fate his good Lord has dealt him.”

The voice mail brought a flood of emotions to Alex. Clearly there had been a larger attempt to murder her. Where it started was anybody’s guess, but two things were for certain: Tony Nail was an innocent man. And the voice on the message left on her cell phone could only belong to one person. It was unmistakable. It was Pierce Wallace, her husband.

Doggett slept on his mother’s living room couch. It had been a long day. A long week. And an especially long last three months. As he laid his head on a pillow that his mother had taken from his bedroom, he sank into it, recalling a simpler time. He felt his troubles would soon be over. Twenty minutes later, Ben was asleep. He was sober for the first time in two weeks, and he felt a comfort in his boyhood home that he was unable to feel in any other place he had been since his troubles had begun. He drifted off and slept soundly for fifteen hours. Velma Doggett awoke again at her normal five a.m. She paced the house not knowing what to do about her son, who looked helpless and almost childlike. She was concerned how he would be when he woke up, whenever that would be.

Mrs. Doggett decided the only way to deal with her uncertainty about her son was to go to Mass and say a few prayers. Few things comforted her as much. When Mass was over she slipped into the confessional to try to further free her conscience.

“Forgive me, father, for I have sinned,” Velma told Father Dan, the pastor at her parish for almost thirty years. Father Dan had been a young priest at the parish when Ben was a high school boy.

“Velma, tell me about it,” Father Dan said, using his opening line in the confessionals, and to many people he sounded more like a friend and a therapist than he did a priest.

“I have betrayed my son,” she said.

And that would be all she would say before she opened the curtain and headed for her car; Father Dan followed after her but decided to allow her some space for now. He would finish the conversation with her later.

When she returned to her home, she found three police cars, one parked in her driveway, one in the street and one in her front yard. They had evidently arrived in a hurry. The cars’ lights remained on, the engines were running, and the flashing blue and red spinning bulbs on top of the squad cars turned quickly and unevenly.

Velma walked into her home as quickly as she could and found her son shackled at the wrists and ankles. When he saw his mother, he cried and told her he was sorry for what he had done to himself.

“I don’t know what’s happened to me,” Ben said.

“Everything’s gonna be OK, Ben. We’re gonna get this fixed. We’re gonna get
you
fixed. The police need you back home. Ben, you gotta go there and tell them everything you know. Everything you did and didn’t do. And then they’re gonna let you go and you’ll be free to start mending your life again.”

Ben nodded.

“Did you call the police, mama?” Ben suddenly asked as it began to become clear to him.

She turned and walked away.

“Mama? Did you call the police? Mama, did you?”

Velma walked into the den at the back of her house and sat down, facing a soft light and dim glow of the TV in the corner of the room. Father Dan had walked into the home as Velma comforted Ben. He sat in the chair where Ben’s father had sat for many years before his death.

“I betrayed my boy, father,” she said, picking up where she left off. “How can God ever forgive me for betraying my own boy?”

Father Dan sat for a few moments searching for the right words.

“You had to help Ben get out from where he is. He has to die to this darkness, walk away from it, before he ever hopes to be bathed in the light of God’s goodness again. You’re helping bring on that light a little sooner, Velma.

Ben’s sister arrived shortly after the officers responded. She handed over the stolen handgun Ben had brought with him, to the lead detective in the case.

“Ran a quick match,” Venita said, “but this is not the gun that was used to kill Junior Walker in Odessa. You’ll still need to bring him back to Texas, though. Plenty of unanswered questions and an assortment of charges are possible as I understand it.”

“We’ll take good care of him, sergeant,” the officer who had driven up from Midland told Venita.

Ben went quietly into the back seat of the squad car. He would be processed at central station, booked and held until a sheriff’s deputy from Midland County arrived later in the day to transport Doggett the 500 miles back to West Texas. For now, he would be held on a charge of possession of an unregistered firearm, as well as transporting the gun across state lines. He would ride peacefully back to Midland, giving the transporting deputy no trouble, and he would arrive at the Midland County courthouse, a former decorated education professional, who had been reduced to a material witness and possible suspect in a federal murder investigation. He would spend the next few weeks repairing his reputation and trying to mend his life, just like his mama said.