The Legend of Kareem (12 page)

The claim that these people had no internet access was crap. Had to be. While I couldn’t find a WiFi signal in range, that didn’t mean they didn’t have a mobile hotspot device stashed around here somewhere.

If I were careful, they’d never know I looked around a bit.

As I left the room, the TV blared from down below, and I heard bottles clinking together. I figured as long as I stayed upstairs, they had no reason to mess with me. But I also knew this was not the smartest idea I’d ever had.

Besides our bedroom, three other doors lined the upstairs hallway. I tried the first. Bathroom. I tried the second one, and that opened to a closet full of towels, blankets, and a box of Christmas decorations. Just one door left. It creaked a bit as I swung it open, so I paused, holding it still.

I crept back to the stairs, waiting for either Jed or Carl to get up and check out the noise. Nothing but the TV and the sound of those two yokels arguing about some NASCAR driver came back. I waited for thirty seconds to be sure they’d stay put.

I opened the door and entered the room. Saw a closet, a bed with a patchwork quilt like my grandmother used to make, a dresser, and a nightstand. About as spartan as things could get. I checked the nightstand first, and found a bible and a glass pipe, darkened almost black with sticky resin. Maybe I hadn’t smoked pot in a long time, but you never forget that grungy smell of the gunky leftover byproduct in weed paraphernalia.

At first glance, the dresser contained nothing but men’s clothes, but I found a fat money roll underneath a pair of jeans. An odd impulse to slip the cash in my pocket overcame me. But I had no reason to steal from these people. Why was I thinking like this?

I left the money where it was and sighed, thinking that searching for a WiFi hotspot may have been a fruitless idea. But I decided to check the closet, just in case.

When I opened the door, my first thought was that it seemed awfully small. Only about two feet deep, with two slim racks of clothes on either side and nothing against the back wall. Then I realized that back wall was actually a door made to look like a false wall, covered in the same wallpaper as the rest of the closet. A padlock hung unlocked from a latch near the top. I slipped this off and opened the door as my breath caught in my throat.

On the other side of the false wall was total darkness.

I slipped out my phone and turned on the flashlight app, then saw another, deeper closet inside, this one filled floor to ceiling with guns, hand grenades, land mines, and pack upon pack of what I guessed to be plastic explosive.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I didn’t count how many guns were staring back at me, but it looked like enough for a small army. Or a militia.

I eked out of the gun closet and tried my best to put everything back the way I found it. I had to be quick and silent because I was now sure that at any second, Jed or Carl was going to come screaming up those stairs and stick a gun in my face.

Oh, hey Candle, watcha doing? Snooping through our stuff after we gave you that whole speech about the rules? Thought that was a smart idea, did you?

No, not the wisest move I’d made so far.

Houston, this is Candle, over.

Go ahead, Candle.

I wanted to get a smart-check on rummaging through the meth-heads stuff, over.

Yeah, Candle, we read you. Be advised: Operations is calling that one of your dumbest ideas ever.

Roger that, Houston. Thanks for the confirmation.

While I hadn’t felt safe here before, now I was certain we needed to go. I had to get Omar and form our plan to escape from this place as soon as possible.

I made it out of the bedroom unnoticed. I eased down the stairs and found Carl and Jed in the living room, watching some softcore porn movie on TV while two naked and sweaty bodies gyrated under satin bed sheets and soft saxophone jazz played.

“If he hadn’t hit that retaining wall,” Carl said, “he would’ve won by at least two laps.”

“Two laps? Are you insane?” Then Jed looked up and noticed me. “What the hell do you want?”

I cleared my throat, trying not to sound panicked. “Where is Omar?”

Jed turned back to the TV. “He and Vanessa went out for a while. They ain’t tell me where they were going, but they’ll be back before too long. Don’t get your panties in a bunch about it.”

Carl didn’t say anything, he just sneered at me between gulps of his beer. What the hell were we doing here, with these people?

I retreated upstairs, now feeling like I was crawling out of my skin. I had to leave. Get out, away from these crazy people with the army’s worth of ammunition in a closet. But I couldn’t leave without Omar. For good or bad, my whole purpose here was about keeping him safe.

I sat by the window, praying he would come back soon, watching the sun set over the plains of south Texas. And I stayed in that same position until dark, when I grew so tired I fell asleep with my head against the glass.

***

“Candle,” Omar said, shaking my shoulder.

It took me a second to clear my head of the cobwebs. I’d been dreaming about termites. “What?”

“You fell asleep.”

I remembered the guns. Remembered my panic and the softcore porn movie and Carl’s sneer. “Omar, we have to go, now. I’m not going to spend another minute in this house of crazy rednecks. It’s not safe here.”

“I am afraid we must stay,” he said. “I was not able to get a passport.”

“What, why?”

“We went to see the man that Vanessa knows, but he was arrested last month. We tried a couple other options but came up short, and there is no other way to get one that she knows of.”

“It doesn’t matter. We still have to go. These people… Omar, these are not good people.”

“Vanessa is a good person. She will not let any harm come to us.”

“Well, maybe so, but Jed and Carl sure-as-hell aren’t. Those two are scaring the crap out of me with their dirty looks and all their brawny talk about minding my p’s and q’s.”

“And you do not trust that she can keep them civil?”

I turned up my palms and shrugged. “Maybe. But they wave guns around like it’s nothing. Maybe this is totally normal in rinky-dink small town south Texas, but it’s not cool with me. Somebody is going to get shot, even if it’s just accidental.”

“But what are we to do? We are far away from anything out here and have no transportation. Where are we supposed to go?”

I thought about this for a few seconds. Couldn’t come up with a plan that didn’t involve us being able to leave by car. “I don’t know.”

I checked the time on my phone. Transportation or not, we couldn’t stay here any longer.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m going to set the alarm on my phone for about five a.m., then we’re just going to pack up and leave quietly while they’re all sleeping. Walk back to Three Rivers. It’ll take us a couple hours, but then we can figure out how to get to a bus station, or something like that.”

“I do not know if that is a good idea.”

“You’re probably right about that, but staying here is a worse idea.”

Omar looked skeptical, but he eventually agreed. Given what he’d told me about his panic attacks, I didn’t want to scare him by telling him about the weapons closet, but that was going to be the next move if he’d refused.

I set the alarm and we went to bed, and I tossed and turned for a few hours. I’m not sure if I slept—maybe a few minutes here and there—but I never got to hear the alarm, because we were woken by the thundering of gunshots in the middle of the night.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I scrambled out of bed and rushed to the window as Omar roused in the creaky twin bed across the room. His eyes darted around.

Only a pair of headlights lit the darkness, the wide open Texas country blanketed under a million stars like grains of salt on black paper.

“What is happening?” Omar said. “Did that come from outside the house?”

Another blast, and I saw the light from the gun flash this time.

“I think so,” I said. “Get your stuff. We’re leaving.”

I started to gather my possessions, and the door opened. Vanessa poked her head in. “You two stay put and don’t do anything stupid like make noise or turn on the light. We’ve got to deal with this, but you’ll be fine here if you just keep y’all’s mouths shut.”

“What the hell is going on?” I said.

“It’s nothing. Just some people who ain’t happy with us, and we got to have ourselves a discussion about that.”

She dashed out of the room as Omar looked at me, pleading. I could see the panic on his face, and I’m sure I was showing the same thing. But what could we do? Maybe if there were a gunfight, we could sneak out the back.

“I guess we stay here for now,” I said, and we both camped on opposite sides of the window, floodlights lighting up the front yard. “If this goes bad, we’re going to make a run for it, okay?”

“Yes,” Omar said, nodding vigorously.

A truck with three people in front slowed near the house. A man stood up in the back, raising a rifle above his head. In the moonlight, I couldn’t make out his features.

Jed, Carl, and Vanessa gathered in the yard. They were all armed. Jed raised a shotgun and leveled it at the truck.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, coming to my house in the middle of the night?” Carl yelled across the yard.

“You goddamn well know why we’re here,” said the man in the back of the truck. “We want what’s ours.”

“That arrangement is no good anymore,” Vanessa said. “We want new terms.”

“Why should we do that?” the man said. “We can just pump you full of holes and take everything you got.”

They were going to start shooting at any second. “Okay, screw this, we’re leaving,” I said. “Pack up, we’re going out the back door. I don’t care if we have to walk.”

Below us, the two groups were shouting at each other, and I caught only a random word here and there as Omar and I finished packing up our belongings. At least no guns had been fired yet.

We slung our packs and suitcases over our shoulders and tramped down the hallway, but as soon as I headed down the stairs, Carl was there in the doorway, pistol in hand. I faintly heard the sound of wheels spinning outside. Maybe they’d come to new terms, after all.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

“We’re going to go now,” I said. “Although I’m quite appreciative of all the hospitality you’ve shown us, we don’t need all this drama you’ve got here. We just wanted some help, but we came to the wrong people.”

Jed entered, then Vanessa, both of them still armed. Jed also raised his shotgun, over Carl’s shoulder and pointed straight at me. They clustered in the entryway of the house as Omar and I were stuck halfway down the staircase.

I wondered if I swung my bag, if I’d be able to knock Carl out and then get to Jed before he could shoot me.

“Knock it off,” Vanessa said. “Y’all put your guns away.”

“No, Van,” Carl said. “I want to know what these two are doing here, for real. Why did you bring them?”

“I told you, Omar is a friend of mine.”

Carl pushed air in and out of his nose, staring at me. “Seems like an odd friend to have.”

“You don’t get to pick my friends for me, asshole,” she said.

“What was that out front?” I said, trying to move the conversation away from Omar.

“Just a business disagreement,” Carl said. “Not that it’s any of your business.” He crossed the living room to me. “What did you say your name was, again?”

“Candle.”

“You ever been to El Paso, Candle?”

Vanessa grunted. “Oh, Jesus, he don’t know shit about it. Don’t be asking him that.”

Carl raised his pistol. “Keep your mouth shut, Van. He can answer the damn question.”

“I, uh, no, I don’t think so,” I said.

Carl spat on the floor. “Bullshit. He knows about the package.”

Vanessa drew a revolver from her waistband. “You’re acting batshit. How in the hell would he know about that? I just met this preppy yesterday.”

A weird urge to laugh struck me. I hadn’t been called a
preppy
since grade school.

“That’s what I’m saying,” Carl said. “You don’t know this guy. I don’t know this guy.” He walked up the first two stairs, placing the nose of the gun against my forehead. My bowels loosened and my knees went weak. You’d think I’d have grown accustomed to having guns in my face, but it’s never a pleasant feeling.

“What aren’t you telling us?” Carl said. “What you got squared away in that little head of yours?”

I started shaking. I tried to think of how I kept my nerves straight when Darren and Shelton had pointed guns at me in my house, but this wasn’t quite the same scenario. I had no idea how I was supposed to reason with this armed country bumpkin. El Paso? What the hell was that?