An Absence of Principal (24 page)

CHAPTER 19
 

T
he deputy’s squad car pulled into Midland just after six Tuesday morning. Ben had spent most of the ride home dozing on and off and didn’t remember lengthy stretches of road near Abilene. He dozed in fits and woke only occasionally all the way back home.

Midland and its surrounding area had a lack of most anything that could be thought of as remotely beautiful. It was flat in all directions, as far as the eye could see, and it was topped by miles and miles of mesquite. Where there were no tumbleweeds there were miles and miles of oil leases with smoothed-over patches of bare caliche. They looked like huge Band-Aids from the air. Drilling sites could be seen every twenty acres for as far as anyone cared to view. Where the land was spared the drilling of oil, there were still more reminders of the energy provided by the wind: giant windmills as high as 10 school buses stacked end to end, with blades on them the length of a football field. To the eye of anyone who knew nothing of the wind energy system in West Texas, the turbines could understandably be mistaken for enormous electronic wish weeds.

The popular story on Midland, told and retold through the ages, would be funny were it not true too often. When oil executives would recruit engineers or geologists or other professionals to come to work at their West Texas headquarters, they would often fly the prospect and his wife in after dark, so neither could see what the countryside surrounding the town looked like. When the out-of-towners would awake the next morning in the Hilton in downtown, they would walk out to find a nice skyline. Never mind that during the Eighties and much of the Nineties, more than half of the offices in those high rises were vacant.

Despite the frequent knocks on Midland and its excessive lack of beauty, it was a town that frequently grew on its unsuspecting newcomers. The people here liked the schools, the churches and the people, and though few and far between, the entertainment.

A veteran like Ben Doggett had Midland ingrained in him. He was a big fan of his adopted hometown, and as such, found much more to like about the place instead of a reason to pick it apart for its topographical eccentricities. Even down on his luck, sitting handcuffed in the back of a deputy’s squad car, seeing the tank farm on the southeast edge of town and the First National Bank building in downtown beyond, was a site that brought back a flood of fond memories. Ten minutes after Midland came into view, Doggett and his armed, uniformed driver pulled into the sally port at the Ed Darnell Law Enforcement Center across the tracks from the central business district. The complex was named after the legendary lawman who served as sheriff in Midland for three decades. Darnell was famous for letting his inmates go free every Christmas Eve on the promise they would all return to the jail December 26. The practice went on for twenty years, ending abruptly in the early 1970s when one daring prisoner defied the order.

Darnell rounded up the man himself and took him for a long car ride back to the jail. It was the last time the sheriff ever let his inmates be with their families on Christmas. He sensed the changing times, and although the average criminal would change constantly through the decades of the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Midland law enforcement always carried with it a reputation for being cordial enough without compromising its toughness. It was respected by most prisoners. Not until the narco-terrorists of the late twentieth century began to gain strength in the region, did the Midland County Sheriff’s Office and its city counterparts at Midland PD have to worry about the kind of lack of respect and contempt for authority that the more brazen drug offenders exhibited. By then Ed Darnell was gone, long after his Home for the Holidays program had itself been retired.

The deputy radioed dispatch to open the sally port door. When the lift was up, Doggett found three more uniformed deputies in the port waiting for his arrival. The sight of so many officers there, just in case there was any trouble, further humbled Doggett and made him finally realize —
really
realize — just how far he had fallen.

When Doggett looked at each of them, it made him feel a bit more comfortable. His eyes fell on Detective Rudy Smithson, a friend since elementary school. He had coaxed the lower-in-rank uniformed deputy to let him handle Doggett’s transfer to the jail.

“Morning, Ben,” Smithson said. The detective took Doggett gently by the arm, careful not to bump his head as he guided him out of the backseat.

“It’s good to see you, Rudy,” Doggett said with a smile. He was embarrassed to be handled in this fashion, but Rudy had always been a calming presence to him throughout his life.

“How are you, Benny?” Smithson said.

“Been better,” Doggett said.

“Let me get you inside, and we’ll go over a few things. I’ll make sure everything goes smoothly for you,” Smithson said.

Doggett thanked him. To see how he was treated by his lawman friend amid all the problems he had caused brought on even more humility. He was ashamed of what his life had become.

Ben looked at Rudy.

“I’ll cooperate however I can,” Ben said.

As the sun rose in the desert that November Friday morning, Alex could still smell the smoke that rose from the canyon far below. The truck that had been driven by her would-be killers was in a smoldering heap, taking with it the bodies of two of the three men whose intent had been to kill her. The third man, she was sure, had escaped. She pieced it together, having heard a separate car drive off after she had landed on the ledge and the truck came flying over her, just feet from her head. It was shortly thereafter that she received the unexpected voice mail from her husband. Her mind flashed back to the darkness when the truck, headed toward her, attempted to push her toward her last step off the cliff. She recalled the split-second when she sidestepped, saved her life and gave back to the earth those who would have killed her. Ashes to ashes, she thought. But who were they? What did they have against her? And why did they have to die on her account? Alex still didn’t know. The first light of the morning overtook the darkness. Alex could only sit on the tiny ledge, her new home, and wonder how her life had taken such a horrific turn in just twenty-four hours.

The ledge she had landed on was barely wide enough for two or three people, and even narrower front to back. If she hoped to make her way back to the top of the cliff, she would have exactly zero room for error. She was only five feet from the top, where she had fallen from the night before, and there at least appeared to be enough rocks and sturdy sticks that protruded from the canyon wall that Alex could maybe grab hold of, and lift herself up. Maybe. She may have only one chance to learn.

Her left arm still hurt terribly and she realized she would have to push through the pain if she hoped to live through the next several hours.

She grabbed onto a large white piece of shale that could easily be used as her first step to freedom. The trick was pulling her body up to the rock far enough to be able to stand on it with one foot. Getting to that point would be tricky enough, but above the rock there appeared to be a large branch that may have at one time belonged to a tree. She couldn’t tell if it was dead or alive, but she really had no time to analyze it. She just wanted up and out of wherever she was.

Alex was poised on the rock with her right foot, her left arm dangling by her side, virtually useless, and her right hand grabbing hold of the branch above. In a second, the timber snapped. Her foot slipped and she landed awkwardly on her backside, her left arm taking the brunt of the fall, bringing even more pain than she had experienced moments before.

Her eyes were closed tightly as she grimaced her way through the extreme pain she felt.

When she opened her eyes, the morning had evolved just enough to where she was able to determine how fortunate she was to be alive. As she propped herself on her elbow, both her feet and lower legs dangled off the ledge.

She propped herself up on her good elbow and could see that far in the distance, a mile away, maybe two, was a mountain range; peaks whose tops jutted up higher than where she was herself.

And then she looked down.

Far below she looked at her kidnappers. They had met with a fate that had instead been intended for her. She saw the smoldering 18-wheeler on its side. She could not see the men. They were either thrown from the truck or were still in it, she didn’t know which. It was much too far down to make out anything as small as a body. Alex realized it was not a good time to suddenly develop a fear of heights.

She felt her feet and lower legs dangling from the ledge and so she pulled them to her chest quickly. Her life, until today, had been free of any fear of falling or dread of heights, but it turned quickly to a terror, and the realization of just how close she had come to dying.

Alex wondered again if this would be her end. Would she just die here, succumbing to exposure from what no doubt would be unrelenting elements? She was chilled to the bone, entirely unaware of where she was.

Hours passed. The sun rose to its highest point in the sky. In those hours there was nothingness. No noise. No movement. Nothing but the occasional large black birds that flew overhead, birds that made no noise. As night gave way to the morning, a slight wind picked up, and with it she seemed to hear a sound she couldn’t quite place.

The sound was vaguely familiar; a kind of hissing noise, she thought. Her eyes focused on something she saw far below, about halfway up the mountain on the other side of the canyon from her.

It was a car. Two cars. They were both headed in the same direction. There was another one. And a fourth passed by, towing a camper trailer.

She struggled to her feet, putting her weight and balance on her one ankle that was still strong enough to hold her.

She began waving her arms wildly.

“HELP! UP HERE!! I NEED HELP!! HELP!”

She would scream until her voice began to hurt and until she finally realized she had no water to soothe the sudden dryness of her throat. They couldn’t hear her cries anyway. She was much too far away, as much of a speck to any passerby on the road across the canyon as her would-be murderers were to her below.

She had been dumped in the dead of night and until now did not know where she was or how far away from both life and death she had been cast. She surveyed the road below, across the canyon. On the other side of the river. The river. The mountains. The rocky desert and absence of vegetation. She was finally able to determine that she was perched on a tiny ledge thousands of feet above her potential death in Mexico. Far Northern Chihuahua, as closely as she could figure. Just across the Rio Grande from Texas. She was in one of the most sparsely populated areas of North America. And even the people she could see were too far away to be seen, and her voice too far to be heard. She could scream all day or until her voice went out completely. No one would ever hear her.

CHAPTER 20
 

B
en couldn’t pinpoint for sure when it was, but he figured it must have happened sometime in the last two to three days. Sometime between being fired at his job in Fredericksburg and arriving back at his mother’s home in Tulsa, he wasn’t sure, but at some point along the way it finally began to dawn on him: he was sick and he had to get help. He was finally able to call it what it was, a huge turning point.

Nine months earlier he’d been on top of the world. Respected and admired by his peers, he was a man that people looked up to, from 7-year-old students to elderly family members and random strangers in the community. In a flash, everything was gone, destroyed by not one addiction, but two, maybe three. Ben had shut out his family and became focused only on his personal desires; things that he had never before expressed an interest in going after: riches, women, mind-altering substances.

No man is safe from the bondage he creates for himself.

He remembered reading the quotation from an old Franciscan monk when he was taking a college philosophy course. It never made sense to him back then but he understood now.

Rudy Smithson led Ben down the long hallway through the sheriff’s office to processing, where he sat for what seemed like an interminable length of time. He found himself next to a smelly collection of drunks and dopers. He took a seat next to a woman who was provocatively dressed. She had been beaten and bruised. Ben could see behind her burned-out eyes that at one time there had been a beautiful young woman. But a ghost lived inside her now.

“Morning,” Ben nodded slightly and tipped his head, trying to strike up an innocent conversation.

The woman looked at him with no emotion, disinterested in him, in what he had to say, and in his attempt at friendliness.

A short and stocky woman of about thirty pulled up a chair across the processing counter from Ben. She was ready to begin booking Ben Doggett.

“ID, please,” she said curtly.

Doggett fetched his wallet out of a plastic tray where it had been with all of his other effects. He pulled his driver’s license out of his wallet and the woman behind the counter looked at it, then at him, and then back at the license again.