Redheads (22 page)

If he lived here and knew the country, he’d be able to think of a better plan. He’d know a cave or an abandoned well. If he went a few more hours west of San Antonio, there might even be an old mineshaft in a ghost town tucked back in the shadow of a mesa. But he couldn’t find these things because they weren’t marked on the highway map. The only good option was to get somewhere isolated, pull the box out of the van, douse it with a couple of gallons of gasoline, throw a match, and take off. The fire might not destroy the body but it would certainly eradicate every trace of Westfield on the box. Someone would probably find the fire in half an hour, but by the time they put it out, Westfield would be over the horizon and the fingerprints would be history.

Westfield opened the door and got out, bringing his crutches with him. He wished he could talk to Chris, Julissa and Mike. He was sure there was something to learn from what happened today. Before he’d shot the man in the forehead, he’d said he worked for the killer, that he paid well.

The man didn’t sound like a contract killer. Maybe he was something more like a fulltime employee. That suggested what all of them had already suspected: whoever or whatever they were looking for was wealthy. Wealthy enough to send the fulltime hired help on a business trip to Galveston to eliminate a potential threat. Wealthy enough to pay to have someone tracked by his credit transactions—maybe by the same person who was hacking into the FBI.

Westfield got to the convenience store and found the aisle with automotive supplies. He took a two-gallon portable gas can, then went to the cashier. There were open coolers full of ice and soft drinks next to the register and he picked up a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of beef jerky. He could eat better later. He prepaid in cash for two gallons of gas, then went outside to the pumps. He was running low on cash but hadn’t used his credit card since Galveston. He supposed the best thing would be to stop at a bank in the morning, take out a few thousand dollars, and then drive like hell in a new direction.

He figured he’d drive another three hours past San Antonio and get off the main road before he dumped the body and burned it. The interstate would be quiet at three a.m. in West Texas; a rural road would be plain dead. Back on the highway, he opened his bottle of Mountain Dew and took a long swallow. He wished he could use his credit card and check into a motel. He’d take a long shower, turn down the air conditioner, and sleep. Whenever he slept in a dark room with the air conditioner blasting, he could fall asleep pretending he was in his bunk aboard
White Plains
—in an hour he’d relieve the watch officer, steering the ship as close as it could go to the Chinese line without crossing. And in those thoughts, just before dreams, the radio telegram would never come. The ship’s XO would not take the folded paper from the radio ensign, would not read it silently and ask Second Lieutenant Westfield to step away from his station and come out on deck for a quick talk. Of course, replaying the moment in his mind wouldn’t change anything. Neither would wishing for a shower and a night in a motel.

“I’m still not sorry I shot you, you son of a bitch,” he said.

After another thirty minutes, he finally broke down and tried to find something besides Jesus or country western on the radio.

San Antonio was asleep when he passed through it just before one in the morning. A police car came down the entrance ramp after the Alamo Dome and stayed on his tail for a mile and a half. Westfield kept the van at exactly fifty-five miles an hour. The cop was just coasting along in his draft, maybe waiting for dispatch to come back with a report on his plates. Then, without signaling, the cop pulled into the far left lane and shot past Westfield’s van. In another ten minutes he was out of the city and back into the darkness of the dry countryside. He stopped at a rest area, walked to the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the mown grass, and relieved himself into a scraggly live oak growing at the fence line. The stars were bright and the air was as dry as the rocks. He could smell some kind of night-blooming flower, a cactus maybe.

He walked back to the van and drove an hour until he turned onto U.S. 277 in Sonora. He went north on this smaller highway, winding between eroded buttes and mesas, and after ten miles veered west onto an unpaved, unmarked county road. After a mile he stopped, turned the van around, and parked on the side of the road, facing the way he’d come. He got out of the van and went around to the back, not using his crutches. There were no lights and no houses in view. Each side of the road was closed off by a barbed-wire fence. Low cedars and scrubby oaks and mesquite trees grew in the pasture land spread between the mesas silhouetted against the stars. The grass along the side of the road was so dry it crunched when he stepped on it. He opened the back doors of the van and took hold of the cardboard box with the body. He slid it along the bed of the van and then let gravity do the rest. The box fell onto the grass, balanced briefly on its end, then tipped onto the gravel road. He closed the doors, got back into the van, and drove three hundred feet towards US 277. As a kid, he’d seen one of the dumber children in his Scout troop pour about a cup of gasoline into a camp fire. The explosion from a cup was bad enough; the kid lived, but did it without eyebrows for a good while. Westfield didn’t want to end up stuck on a back road because he’d accidentally blown up his van.

He got out and limped back along the road with the gas can. If they came out here with fire trucks and squad cars, they’d likely drive all over his foot prints. Otherwise, if they had a tracker, they’d be able to study his tracks in the dust and figure out they were looking for a tall guy with a limp. He got to the box, unscrewed the top of the gas can, and emptied it onto the cardboard, covering it from end to end. He was careful to keep the gas from splashing onto his legs and feet. He left the gas can on top of the box. No need to get pulled over in the next couple of hours with an empty gas can in the back.

He walked back to the van and lifted the ancient, ratty carpet covering the spare tire compartment. In there, amongst the jack, the tire iron, and the reflective triangle, was a red flare, probably as old as the van itself. He took it, shut the door, and went back towards the box until he was standing a hundred feet from it. It was as far as he thought he’d be able to throw the flare with any kind of accuracy, but closer than he’d like to be. If he’d had time to plan this, he’d have a remote detonator or some tracer rounds for his pistol.

Then again, if he’d had time to plan this, he wouldn’t be in West Texas in the middle of the night with a man he’d murdered.

He pulled the plastic cap off the flare, pointed it away from his face, and struck the tip of the flare against the sandpaper on the end of the plastic cap. The flare sputtered like an old match, but then caught. Its flame was red and smoky. He put the cap in his pocket so he wouldn’t drop it in the chaos he was about to set off. He considered the distance to the box, looked at the wind in the branches of the trees, and then threw the flare overhand. It spun in an arc through the air, its fire tracing a curving cycloid line as it went. Westfield figured it would do the job if it landed anywhere within twenty feet of the box. It hit the ground five feet from the body. The result was an instant explosion. Flames erupted fifty feet into the air and then mushroomed into an expanding ball. A circle of blue flame shot from the box and expanded along the ground, igniting the grass, trees and fence posts on both sides of the road. Westfield himself was nearly knocked down by the heat and shock of the explosion. Before he even saw how far the flames would spread, he turned and hobbled for the van, ignoring the pain in his right knee. When he reached the van he patted at his back and the back of his head to make sure he wasn’t on fire. His shirt was so hot it may have been smoking. The keys were still in the ignition and the engine was running. He got in, slammed the door, dropped the transmission into gear and floored the accelerator.

The road ahead was bright as midmorning from the fire; the van cast a long shadow ahead of itself. He didn’t need his headlights until he reached U.S. 277. He spun the wheel and skidded onto the pavement, heading south towards Interstate 10. The fire was still visible out his right window. He pushed the van to ninety. It wouldn’t go any faster. No cars came from the other direction and he couldn’t hear any sirens. When he saw the sign for the interstate, he slowed, signaled for the entrance ramp, and merged onto I-10 doing sixty-five miles an hour. He could still see the fire on the horizon, miles away. It took him ten miles to stop shaking and twenty miles after that to stop looking in his rear-view mirror every couple of seconds. His face felt like he’d been out in the desert all day and he realized the initial blast had given him an instant sunburn.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Almost any other day of her life, Julissa would have enjoyed every minute sailing across the channel to Molokai.
Sailfish
was fast and powerful, heeling from the force of the wind in her unfurled mainsail and genoa, her sharp hull easily slicing through the ocean waves. Behind them, Oahu had receded steadily, revealing the curves of its shoreline and the serrated cliffs of its mountain ranges as they drew far enough away to see it in its entirety. Sea birds raced alongside the boat, angling their wings to the wind before diving into the clear water. When they hit the surface, schools of flying fish were scared up into flight, skimming the wave tops for a hundred feet or more. She listened to the sounds of the wind in the rigging and the foaming wake that started on the lee side of the hull, and felt the warm touch of Chris’s hand on her shoulder as he taught her how to steer up into the wind gusts. Mid-channel, when she should have been enjoying it most, Chris left her alone in the cockpit to find the spare anchor.

They needed something to weigh down the body before they dumped it.

She told herself it was a beautiful day to start a new life. Chris came heavily up the steep stairs from below, carrying an anchor that must have weighed eighty pounds. He set it on the cockpit floor and then disappeared again, emerging a moment later with a long length of thick, welded chain in a canvas bag.

“How deep is the water here?” Julissa asked.

“Thousand feet or so. Any boats around?”

“Just us.”

“Okay.”

Chris carried the bag of chain to the stern and stepped to the swim platform, just above the water. When he knelt, she couldn’t see him anymore. If he fell overboard, she might not even realize. She angled herself on the helm seat to watch their wake. She tried to steer a straight course by keeping the line of froth and bubbles behind them on an even track. Two minutes passed and she wondered if Chris really had gone overboard. Then his head came up and he climbed over the stern rail and came back to the cockpit.

“I unzipped the bag, tied the chain around his ankles, then wrapped him with it. I’ll shackle the anchor to the chain, zip it up, and shove it overboard.”

“You think he’ll ever come up?”

“No.”

Chris took the anchor, stepped carefully out of the cockpit onto the stern deck, and started towards the transom. Julissa watched him disappear onto the swim platform. Less than a minute after he ducked beyond view, she saw his hands come up and untie the rope that secured the fish bag to the deck. Then, seconds later, she saw the bag in the water. It floated momentarily like a buoy, its un-weighted end up in the air. But it lost is buoyancy as it filled with water, and it sank before it even disappeared behind the first wave. Chris came back to the cockpit and joined her on the bench behind the steering pedestal.

“This heading okay?” she asked.

She was aiming for southwest tip of Molokai. According to the chart on the screen behind the wheel, the end of Molokai was ten nautical miles from
Sailfish
’s current position. They were hitting fifteen knots in the strongest wind gusts, and averaging over thirteen.

“This is a good course. Keep up like this, we’ll be in Haleolono in an hour.”

Julissa looked at the chart. Haleolono was an abandoned barge harbor three miles down the coast from the tip of Molokai. Chris had said it would be safe to anchor the boat there and leave it. He said there were bluffs above the harbor with a dirt road that came down in switchbacks. If the killer’s men found the boat, they’d likely watch her from the bluffs until they were sure no one was aboard. Then they’d swim out and either set her afire or sink her, just from spite. Julissa hoped they wouldn’t find the boat at all.

Chris went to the companionway, then into the salon. He emerged a moment later wiping his wet hands with a paper towel. Julissa thought he’d been washing away blood. It would have been impossible to wrap the chains around the corpse without getting blood on him somewhere. He looked tired and angry; shooting the man might have bothered him until they saw the scene inside Mike’s house. Since then, he hadn’t said much.

Chris sat next to her and she brushed her fingertips over the back of his hand. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe just to show she didn’t mind if his hands had been bloody. Maybe to say she could go six years, or ten, or twenty, without letting the fire die out.

“I’ll take the helm if you need a break,” he said.

“Okay.” She’d been steering for two hours.

“Galley’s got cold drinks, and there’s a head—bathroom—right under us.”

Julissa let him take the wheel and she went below. The inside of Chris’s boat was finished in brightly polished teak. She’d seen pictures of expensive sailboats before, but she’d never been aboard anything like this.
Sailfish
was probably bigger than the studio apartment she’d rented in Boston as a graduate student. The boat had the unmistakable imprint of Chris’s touch—spotless, organized, carefully set up for any kind of occurrence, the safety systems seamlessly built into the beautiful woodwork. She found some sunscreen in the medicine cabinet and put it on. Then she went to the galley and found two bottles of ginger ale in the refrigerator. She held them by their necks and climbed back up, feeling a little queasy from being below. It was better once she stepped onto the deck, with the fresh wind and the steady horizon. She handed Chris a bottle of ginger ale. He twisted the cap off and pocketed it, then weakly clinked the base of his bottle against hers.