The Devil's Highway (17 page)

“Cushman’s taking the other chopper!” I shouted, and Andrea’s eyes widened in sudden realization.

“We’ve got to stop him!” She shouted.

We ran together out the back doors, and around the wide side of the warehouse. It was a big building, and there was no choice but to run around its broad metal side, every second listening to the rising rhythm of the helicopter’s rotors. I ran faster, my breath coming in ragged gasps after the long day’s exertions. And then I was out on a wide tarmac, and even at the distance I could see that I was going to be too late, that the skids of the chopper were already off the ground and the nose was tilting forward, and then she was off the ground, headed rapidly away along the ground and then rising, dwindling, vanishing from sight.

We were too late. Colonel Cushman was gone.

Chapter 25

The Texas Highway Patrol had taken over in Delgado. With the Sheriff wounded and Deputy Hughes dead, they were minding the farm until the dust settled. The honor guard at Hughes’s service was a squad of State Troopers. They carried out the service with consummate professionalism, and fired off the salute with military precision. I wondered how many of them had even known him.

A short space away, a military honor guard was performing a very similar service for another of Delgado’s sons. An honor guard had been a long time coming for Ira Greyhawk. A young man and an old man, laid to rest close together. Very different lives, but both brave men. They had both been good men that I was glad to have known. Somewhere out there, the man responsible for their deaths was in hiding, safe for the time being. That was hard to stomach.

Andrea accepted the flag, since we were all pretty sure that’s what Hughes would have wanted. Then it was over. Garrett, his arm in a cast and sling, walked up and shook my left hand.
 

“We did it,” he said. “But damn, at what a cost.”

“Cushman will pay for what he’s done. I promise you that.”

Garrett looked sad, and tired, but his eyes were still hunter’s eyes. “I believe you, Roland. Make sure you let me know when that happens.”

“I will.” I fished around in my pocket and found the deputy’s badge. “I guess it’s time to hand this over.”

Garrett shook his head. “No, you keep it. You earned it. You’ll always be welcome in Delgado, if life ever brings you back this way.
Deputy
Longville.”

“So long, Sheriff.”

“See you around, then.” With that he walked back towards the other mourners, a dour, humble man of few words. I turned to find Brad Caldwell at my elbow.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

“Then don’t say anything. You don’t have to.”

“If it hadn’t been for me, they’d still be alive.”

Andrea stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders, and looked into his eyes. “If it hadn’t been for you, Cushman would still be in operation. He would still be trafficking women and children up the Devil’s Highway. Keep this in mind, Ira and Deputy Hughes knew the risk they were taking. They were good men, and they stood up for what was right. You did, too.”
 

Adrea looked at me. “Let’s get this young man to the airport. His family is waiting.”

* * *

I made the call on the way to El Paso. Fittingly, I thought, Brad’s sister Briana picked up the phone. I told her the good news, which she relayed without so much as one single pop of her chewing gum. Maybe it was just me, but she sounded genuinely happy.

Mrs. Caldwell came on the line: “Mr. Longville, you are a man of your word. I want you to know how grateful we all are.”

I thought about Hughes and Ira Greywolf, and how much the Caldwell family owed them.

“I had a lot of help, Mrs. Caldwell. Selfless people who gave much of themselves.”

“Thank them for me. Thank them for us all.”

I told her I would, though it would not be in the way she supposed.

 
So Brad Caldwell was safely home; his family had been reunited, while his father was still alive to see it. That made me happy, but I only let myself rejoice to a certain degree. I’d gotten involved in a lot of things I never envisioned, since I’d come out to Delgado. And one of those was a very big item that was left unfinished. I couldn’t rest until I saw that complete. I had told Garrett that Cushman would pay, and I would make sure that he did, personally.

Chapter 26

I had rested and tied up loose ends in Delgado for a couple of days, before saying my goodbyes. I had taken in one last meal at May’s Place, and shaken hands with some locals who were glad to have the Redemption Army out of their lives, for good. I was in my room at the Fermosa Hotel, packing up to go, when there was a knock at my door. Thinking it was another well-wishing Delgado resident, I opened the door to find Andrea Herrera standing there.
 

“Andrea,” I greeted her with a hug. “You disappeared after the funeral service.”

“Yes, I did. Because I was texted by a contact of mine. Something very important had happened.” She was dressed for the road, I noticed, boots, jeans and a leather jacket.

“Right back to the job for you, then.”

“The job at hand isn’t over,” she said, her black eyes shining.

“I know that. I plan to hunt Cushman down, just as soon as I can pick up his trail.”

“That’s just what I’d hoped you’d say,” she said, and walked into the room. She set her backpack on the bed, unzipped it and pulled out a portable laptop. Then she produced a DVD from a sleeve and inserted it into the drive.

“Watch this,” she said excitedly, and nodded towards the screen. The media player came up. This was a video, judging from the angle and scene in view, taken from a security camera behind the desk of an airport lobby. I saw the backs of slim women in blue airline uniforms, and large overhead placards in the distance with flight information in Spanish and English. There was the usual press of humanity, faces of people from many lands, the general hubbub that goes on in every major airport around the world. Suddenly, Andrea leaned forward and paused the video.

“There.” I could see him, of course. A face at the desk, a man buying a ticket.

“Cushman,” I said.

“Yes.” Andrea’s eyes were wide, her voice shaking with excitement. “The minute we got back to Delgado after Cushman’s escape, I alerted all of my contacts to be on the lookout for me. The man who obtained this video for me is a worker in the Mexico City airport. He couldn’t get the exact information, but he did hear Cushman’s destination.”

“Which was?”

“Honduras.”

I stood there, rocking on my heels, for just one second.

“What are you thinking?” Andrea asked me.

“I’m thinking it’s a good thing that I was packing, because it looks like I’m going to Mexico.”

“
We’re
going to Mexico,” she corrected me.
 

I nodded and smiled at her. “So we are,” I said.

And so we were.

Epilogue

The hills were steep and covered with thousands of shanty houses. Millions of people lived here, on the steep wooded hills of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. It was night, warm and windy, as Andrea and I drove slowly through the streets, to an isolated
casa
on the edge of town. The street was quiet. Far away in the night, I heard laughter and music, echoing over the crowded harbor the city ringed around on the sloping hills.

It was three months since I had said my goodbyes in Delgado, and seen young Brad Caldwell off to Atlanta, and home. Three long months since Andrea Herrera had shown up at my hotel room with video from airport surveillance cameras taken in Mexico City. We had traveled there, first, and talked to people in Mexico City who had talked with and seen Colonel Cushman. There we had found out that he had hired bodyguards. With fake papers identifying himself as a Canadian-born Mexican national, he had then taken a plane south, to Honduras.

So we started out on Cushman’s trail. Weeks of searching followed. We learned of his travels, here and there, through a thousand different sources, some dubious, some trustworthy. We learned the story of the Colonel’s travels in bits and pieces. He had been detained briefly in Honduras, we learned, because the authenticity of his papers was suspect, but he was long gone before we arrived; a bribe had secured his freedom.
 

Everywhere, Cushman shed identities, greased palms, and moved on. But we kept searching, through Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Columbia, on through the length of Central America, and on down to the large nations of South America, where Cushman hoped to vanish in the bustle of her vast cities.

At first, it seemed to us that Cushman was wandering aimlessly, but after a while, a pattern developed. It became clear that he was visiting places where he had hidden away money, under the different names that he assumed as he travelled. Cushman was indeed a man who planned ahead, a man with many aliases, and all of those aliases were rich men. Once the money was safely transferred to Colonel Cushman’s account, the alias disappeared forever, one more discarded tool.

Cushman travelled from country to country, collecting his blood money in person, his final destination already planned. However confusing his trail might seem to Andrea and me, one thing was certain; once he was through gathering it up, he planned to vanish into anonymity somewhere in the vastness of South America, and live out his days there, untouched by the hand of justice. That, we couldn’t allow.

It had all started on an old highway in West Texas, long ago, it seemed, the Devil’s Highway, whether you used that term to refer to old Highway 666, or the lonely stretch of road that bisected the tiny town of Delgado, or the hateful stretch of pavement that Cushman and his men used to traffic human beings into the USA and beyond for the most fallen of purposes. But the Devil’s Highway had many tributaries, and it ran into a thousand small towns in hearts of the ancient nations of South America, wherever the innocent were duped or kidnapped, or otherwise enslaved, and started on their long and sorrowful journey north.

Everywhere that Cushman had gone before us, we dogged his tracks, putting the word out on the streets that we were searching for a man named Cushman, or whatever name he was calling himself on a given day. People on the street had heard of us, the big black man and the beautiful Latina, searching for the Gringo who had done something unspeakable in the North.
 

One day Cushman was said to have been seen in Colombia; another, Peru. We always went where the reports led us, but frequently there was either no one, the wrong person, or, worst of all, he had indeed been there, and we were too late. So it had gone, in all those long weeks.

But now it was tonight, and the country was Brazil, and the Colonel was definitely in. A man who had preferred to remain nameless had taken a wad of Brazilian Reals from us and pointed out the place to Andrea and me. I had watched the house from across the bay the day before, through binoculars. Cushman’s hideout was a big, low house with plenty of shade trees. I spotted men on the premises, casually dressed but obviously armed guards. The house was on the shoulder of a hill off the bay, in one of the quieter sections of the city. Such an arrangement must have cost a lot of money, but as we now knew, Cushman had plenty of that.

I took a deep breath and looked at Andrea. It had been a long, exhausting search, hard on us both. But Andrea was a fighter. I ticked off in my head the human cost to her alone: Fernando Mendoza, Deputy Hughes and Ira Greywolf. She had lost three friends to Cushman. That’s why she never gave up, I knew. She had once told me that at night their faces came out of the darkness to her, and she knew their killer was still walking the earth. She also thought about all the Latinas like herself that he had herded like cattle northward, and that enormous crime against women deserved justice, too.

I was the man with the gun in his hand, though. No one had forced me to come there. I was there because I had made promises, and when I made a promise, I did my best to keep it. And the person I had made this particular promise to, I dared not fail. Sure, I had made a vow to Garrett, but I had also made a promise to myself, a promise that I was going to ferret out Cushman and bring him in, and see that he was held accountable for all of his crimes.

“Let’s get this over with,” I said.

I got out of the car. Andrea waited behind the wheel, motor running, with the headlights off. I walked to the corner, and spotted one of Cushman’s men. He was looking in the wrong direction. I knocked him out with a lead-loaded sap, and dragged him into the shadows. I took his gun and radio.

The radio meant he had a friend somewhere nearby. I searched in his pockets and found some keys. At the gate, the third key let me in. I closed the gate quietly, but left it unlocked behind me. I silently crossed the yard toward a lighted pool; no one was about.

There were few lights on in the house, but the front door opened when I turned the knob. The other man was in the kitchen, making himself a sandwich, when I walked in. He looked up just as I chopped him in the neck. Then I wrapped him up in a half Nelson and put him in a sleeper hold, one arm bent around the neck, the other bracing behind. A couple of half-second squeezes to cut off blood flow to the brain, and he sagged in my arms. I left him there, napping on the marble tile. His sandwich would have to wait.