Read The Dogs of Mexico Online
Authors: John J. Asher
Tags: #Mystery, #Suspense, #Thriller, #Action, #Adventure, #Psychology, #(v5)
The Dogs of Mexico
The
Dogs of Mexico
by
John J Asher
Brazos River Press
Austin, Texas
Copyright © 2012 John J Asher
All rights reserved. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Places and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
“Poor Mexico! So far from God and so close to the United States.”
—Porfirio Díaz 1830 – 1915
“Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”
—Mark Anthony
1
Home Is Where the Heart Is
R
OBERT BOHNERT
PUSHED
an old chug-popping lawnmower he had stolen from the maintenance shed, mowing his way back and forth toward the entrance to the state hospital. There wasn’t a gate, only two brick columns, one on either side of the narrow blacktop where it intersected Highway 87 on the outskirts of Big Spring, Texas.
The iffy patients were kept under lock and key, but Robert had exhibited model behavior in the week he had been under observation, and Dr. Eisenberg had pretty much given him the run of the place. Eisenberg had lost his grandparents at Auschwitz and perhaps had a built-in resentment against anything resembling a police state. And it
had
been the police who peeled Robert’s hairline back with a marble-based desk lamp, delivering him first to the emergency room in Hardwater and then to Dr. Eisenberg at Big Spring. Robert saw the irony in it—that both Dr. Eisenberg
and
the police may have reacted differently had they known what he did for a living.
If Robert had entertained any hope that the Company might intervene on his behalf, he wasn’t surprised by their silence. After all, the CIA frowned on its operatives making public spectacles of themselves. Just as well. He was done with them anyway.
He took the plastic hospital bracelet he had cut off in the tool shed from his pocket and fed it through the mower with a short
snapety
-
pop
-
snap
sound. He idled the engine down, then knelt and pretended to tinker with the carburetor while scanning the compound. The grounds were empty but for an attendant standing watch over two wheelchair patients in a designated smoking area near the north end of the complex. Beyond, the sun touched down toward a stand of live oaks. Long shadows reached toward the maze of three-story redbrick buildings that comprised the hospital. The air smelled of the day’s heat, engine exhaust and fresh-cut grass.
Robert left the mower idling and slipped behind one of the brick columns where he stripped off the baggy pants and gray shirt with S
TATE
H
OSPITAL
stenciled across the back. Underneath, he wore jeans and a T-shirt. He spotted someone watching him from a second-floor window. But the window was barred.
A hundred yards down the highway, he stepped off the shoulder and hid the rolled-up hospital garb in a clump of bristle grass along the fencerow. A hot dry wind lifted white caliche dust from the shoulder ahead, carried it toward him and let it down in silence. In addition to a natural absence of trees the scattered buildings on the outskirts of Big Spring were low and flat, pale with dust. Even the utility poles were invasive against the thin sky, and Robert felt singularly conspicuous—a lone figure on an endless plain, walking, in a part of the country where no one ever walked anywhere.
A roar like a distant waterfall sounded from a quarter of a mile farther on where Highway 87 intersected I-20 near a truckstop. The complex was already lit though the sun hadn’t quite touched down, dragging stringy red contrails in its wake.
A black-and-white patrol car sat nosed up to the curb in front of the adjoining restaurant. Any law officer seeing him would doubtless check him out—a man with a bandaged head, hitching the Interstate? If so, he was done for, having no identification and no money, his personal belongings confiscated by the Hardwater police, then transferred by a deputy sheriff to the Big Spring facility after his wife had had him committed for observation.
He sauntered past the patrol car, inhaling the smell of grilled hamburger and onions, hot asphalt and diesel exhaust. He crossed the access road and half slid down the embankment alongside the overpass to the I-20 shoulder below. He dusted himself off, then dodged across west- and eastbound lanes, traffic whooping past. A state highway sign on the eastbound side read: F
ORT
W
ORTH
–
258
M
ILES
. He stood under the overpass looking toward the bridge abutment opposite, only the truckstop’s sign on its high pole visible above.
He stepped out from the overpass’s long shadow, thumb out. Traffic whipped by, the
whappety-whappety-whappety
of eighteen-wheelers on asphalt ridges, semis trailing heat-wrinkled exhaust from twin stacks.
Five minutes later a patrol car appeared in the distance behind. Robert considered making a run for it. But run where? The cruiser slowed, turned his overheads on, then eased off the pavement and came to a stop on the apron of dust-powdered grass between Robert and the frontage road atop the slope to his right. A city cop. Watching him steady through the open window. The radio making noise, somebody saying Jeff had just called in a ten-sixty-six over on the interstate.
The officer squinted. “Evening, Where you headed if I might ask?”
Robert took a step toward the car. “Sure. Separation. About twenty miles south of Hardwater.”
The officer eyed him closely. “What happened to your head?”
“Got mugged. I’m trying to get home.”
“Identification?”
Robert’s pulse had picked up, but there wasn’t a lot more anyone could do to him. “That’s the thing,” he said. “They took my wallet, money, credit cards, everything.”
“Yeah? Where’d this happen at?”
“El Paso,” he said, not thinking it through.
That got the officer’s attention—El Paso, Texas’s own backyard to the land of drug cartels and murder by the truckload.
“Okay. Stand back. Put your hands on your head.”
Robert did as told. “Took my damn pickup too.”
“Spread your legs,” the officer said, stepping out, right hand cupped over his holstered pistol. “Put your hands on the car. Now!”
He put his hands on the car. “Why? What’d I do?”
“Okay, spread your legs. Hands behind your back. Easy.”
“You’re taking me in? For what? Getting mugged?”
The radio was going again, a note of urgency in the dispatcher: “Jeff? Anson? We got a two-one-one, guy with a sawed-off shotgun at the 7-Eleven on Birdwell. Repeat, this is a two-one-one, a thirty-three priority. Use caution. Repeat.”
“God damn,” said the officer, looking at Robert. A moment of indecision as the dispatcher continued to issue orders for all units to converge on the 7-Eleven—a thirty-three, urgent.
The officer already had his handcuffs out, but replaced them in the cuff holster on his belt. He snapped the flap shut, opened the cruiser door and slid in behind the wheel—calling the dispatcher: “Dispatch? Jeff here. I’m on my way. ETA five minutes”—yelling back at Robert—“God damn son, this is your lucky day.” He threw the cruiser in gear and peeled out onto the Interstate east, lights flashing, siren winding out, traffic getting out of the way. A few hundred yards down, he braked hard, throwing up a cloud of dust as he skidded across the median back onto the Interstate west before shooting off onto the frontage road. Lights, siren, engine—wide open. The cruiser disappeared behind the embankment with only the truckstop’s sign visible above. Robert could hear the siren. Then another one in the distance.
Whoa. Thank you, thank you, Robert breathed, either to himself or to whoever was in charge of the fortuitous timing of human events.
He put his thumb out and within minutes a Silverado Crew Cab pulling a horse trailer braked and slowed to a stop. Robert trotted up alongside and hopped in.
The driver, a middle-aged Mexican in jeans and a shirt with snaps and piping, eyed him closely, wishing perhaps he hadn’t been so quick to stop.
“Where to?” The driver’s gaze lingered briefly on Robert’s bandaged head.
“Hardwater. About sixty miles straight on down the road here, if you’re going that far.”
Robert explained that he had wrecked his pickup and bunged himself up a bit. They talked ranching, the lack of rain, the pros and cons of miles and miles of wind turbines standing out across the country—ugly as hell, said the driver, unless you owned a dozen or so.
Robert spotted one Highway Patrol just off a side road,
radaring traffic, and another coming out of Colorado City. But that was it. Darkness had closed over the long country when the driver pulled off near an overpass skirting Hardwater and let him out.
“Thanks again,” Robert said.
He walked steadfast in the lingering heat past shotgun houses of stucco and native rock interspersed with prefabricated metal buildings—pawnshops, insurance offices, auto repair. Crickets made gritty music from the shadows. June bugs banged over and over into the outside lighting, popped under the tires of traffic and smelled like burnt plastic. Staying to the shadows, Robert strolled past the darkened courthouse and skirted the Texas State Bank. In semidarkness he crossed the railroad tracks, the ground flagged with pinches of cotton from the cottonseed oil mill. He made his way through a neighborhood of rundown houses and barking dogs to where his pickup waited under a high porch fronting the old boarded-up Igloo Ice House.
He took a key from under the frame and unlocked the drivers door, smiling now, seeing the cab full of cardboard boxes. He hadn’t realized he was hungry until the smell of fried chicken and homemade rolls caused his saliva glands to act up. In addition to chicken and rolls Ziploc’d beneath two towels, there were Tupperware containers of garden-fresh tomatoes, sliced cantaloupe, a big serving of peach cobbler and a quart Mason jar of tea, the ice melted. Three more boxes contained clothes and a Dopp kit with a safety razor, toothbrush, floss, aftershave.
An envelope taped beneath a box flap held ten hundred-dollar bills, ten twenties and a note:
Dear Robbie, I pray we are
all doing the right thing.
Let us know where you are.
We love you, Mom and Dad.
Robert sat for a moment, already missing the life he was never to have again—his parents, Tricia, little Nick. Robert visualized his four-year-old son in his room surrounded by his toys.
His son. Nick. Dead.
If only to stand once more in Nick’s little world, his personal space, to breathe some residual essence. And, since Trish and Stanford were out of the country…
He folded the note into his pocket, then drove south out of Hardwater, chicken wing in hand. The loamy odor of fresh-plowed earth and the perfumed smell of wildflowers seeped through the air vents, stirring his memory—tractors and combines and long fields of red sorghum
….
In another twenty minutes he drove into Separation.