Saving Jason (21 page)

T
he Kid stayed up in his room and I let him. A break from schoolwork—and from each other—seemed a good idea. I didn’t check on him until lunchtime. Much later on, we deduced that he had most likely been gone for close to an hour by the time I knocked on his door.

“Hey, Kid. Time for lunch. We’ll go for a ride after. Come on down.”

I waited the prescribed ten seconds and knocked again.

“Hey, son. I’m coming in.”

The room was empty. I checked his closet. The bathroom. The room was hot, despite the air-conditioning—hotter than the rest of the house. The window was open. The “secret passage.”

I looked out onto the balcony. There was no sign of him. I checked my room. The bathroom. There was nowhere to hide. He was gone.

I had thrown together sandwiches for lunch and Hal was halfway across the yard, delivering one of them to Willie, still on duty up the hill. I called to him.

“Hey! Hal. Help me. The Kid’s not here.”

That brought him running. Willie couldn’t hear me, but he saw that something important was happening. He jogged down the hill to the house.

Hal took charge. “Let’s not panic, okay? We’ve been down this road before. First, we search the house. Look in every cabinet, every closet. Check for false walls. We start down here. Keep up the patter. Let him hear us talking to each other. And stay in sight of each other. That way he won’t slip by us like he did last time.”

We worked the downstairs for five minutes. Five wasted minutes,
in my opinion. I had been on the main floor all morning. If the Kid had come back downstairs, I was sure I would have seen him.

Upstairs took no longer and produced no clues. I stopped looking and took an inventory of the Kid’s meager possessions. I could find nothing missing. His books and clothes were all there. His car box held sixty or seventy cars—a new Matchbox car being the only birthday present guaranteed to elicit a positive response—and I would have challenged anyone other than the Kid to know if there were any missing.

I went back out onto the balcony. Nothing moved anywhere on the far side of the valley. Beyond the corral the hill rose up steeply.

Willie came out and joined me.

“Anything?” he said.

“No.”

He examined the railing. “Here’s where he went over.”

I looked and saw nothing unusual.

“He shinnied down the leader. You can see the scrape marks.” Dust clung to every exterior surface—and many internal ones, as well. Once the marks were pointed out to me, they were obvious.

The rain gutters and leaders on the house were made of thin aluminum and were fifty or sixty years old. I would not have trusted them to hold up a squirrel, much less my son.

“Oh my god,” I said. “He really did this, didn’t he? What the hell was he thinking?”

He wasn’t thinking. He was running. His father had yelled at him over some stupid reading lesson.

“We need to call the police,” I said.

“Hey, let’s not jump ahead. There’s a lot at stake. I don’t think the marshals would want you to have that kind of attention right now.”

“Screw that. My son is out there.” I swept my arm to show the desolation around us. It looked like the far side of the moon to me.

“Wait. Let’s see if we can find him first. That’s all I’m saying,” Willie said.

I didn’t so much agree to the delay as I just went along with a calm individual who was willing to make decisions. I was a wreck. I felt like I understood heart attacks for the first time in my life. We grabbed Hal on the way and the three of us went outside to explore.

The bottom of the aluminum leader was pulled away from the wall. Hal pointed out where the Kid landed. It looked like nothing but scattered dust.

“Someone needs to stay here in case he comes back,” Hal said.

“I don’t think I can do that,” I said. “I’ll finish going nuts.”

“Willie?”

He nodded. “Stay in touch. Take water.”

A few minutes later, Hal and I started up the back slope. Somehow I had expected him to be bent over looking for signs, like some Indian tracker from an old Western movie. He didn’t. He stayed upright, as tall as he could. His eyes were constantly sweeping across the terrain. I tried to emulate him. It was hard work. My feet had to find their own way over rough ground. We were both wearing hiking shoes. Mine were suede and ankle-high. Hal’s were thick leather and laced halfway up his shins.

“Watch for snakes,” he said.

“Great.”

“It’s too hot for them to be out and about. Just don’t kick over any rocks without looking first.”

There were thousands of places all around us where a small seven-year-old child could hide. It was hopeless. The trees were short and sparse, not much more than shrubs, but as we moved higher, the trees became taller and our horizon shrank.

“Stop and drink,” Hal said.

“We’ve got to keep going.” We had only been searching for half an hour.

“Drink. Otherwise you’re going to keel over from heatstroke and I’ll have two emergencies to deal with instead of one.”

I had a half liter of water with me. The first sip seemed to evaporate
in my mouth. I was surprised a moment later to realize that I had polished off half the bottle in one long gulp. And I was still thirsty. Was the Kid carrying water?

Hal took off his glasses and wiped his face. Without the mirrors hiding his eyes, he looked much more human. And he looked worried.

“We’re kidding ourselves,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“He could be hiding five feet away and we’d never see him,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“So what do we do? I can’t go back and just hope he gets hungry and comes home.”

He took out his cell phone and looked at it. “Nothing. No bars.”

“Who do you want to call?”

“Willie. It’s time to bring in help. I want him to start making calls.”

“Let’s head back. Call him on the way,” I said.

W
hat the hell, Willie? What do you mean you didn’t call?”

It took us another half hour to get back to the house. A half hour of nightmarish imaginings of what was happening to the Kid. A full hour wasted. Hal had finally gotten a signal and had told Willie to bring in the local police.

“I spoke to the marshals. They said to wait ’til they got here. They’ll be able to control the situation.”

“This isn’t about turf, you idiot! I’m calling the sheriff’s department.”

“No, no. Reyes has a chopper bringing him in. Just wait another half hour and they’ll be able to search the whole county, if need be.”

Hal looked as astonished as I was at Willie’s failure to act. “We’re a hundred miles from Albuquerque. By the time they get in the air and get here, it’s going to be another hour or more.”

“But they’ll be able to fly over and find him in no time. What’s the sheriff going to do? Besides, if you bring in the locals yourself, you risk having your cover blown.”

Blowing my cover was a different problem. It wasn’t less important, it was less immediate. One thing at a time. First thing was to get the Kid as much help as I possibly could.

I told Siri to dial the county sheriff. Five minutes later, we could hear a siren coming up the road.

T
he deputy contacted the sheriff, who, upon hearing that it was an autistic child who was missing, called the state police. They turned it over to the state SAR—search and rescue—coordinator, who said he would be on-site in two hours. I fumed.

By the time the marshals arrived in a five-seater Bell helicopter, I was fighting recurring waves of panic. The pilot set the bird down in the corral and Hal and I went out to meet them.

Deputy Marshal Geary jumped out, crouching and running, with one hand holding on to his Diamondbacks’ hat. He joined us at the rail fence.

“I really wish you had waited before calling in the locals. This is going to be a circus in a little while.”

The response from the police felt like it was happening on a geologic timeline. I wanted to scream at someone, but couldn’t even find someone high enough up the chain of command to make it worthwhile.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But the more people looking, the better. What do we do now?”

“You come with us. If we see your boy, we look for someplace to set down and you get him. Simple.”

I hated traveling in helicopters.

Hal said, “Do you have room for me?”

Geary shook his head. “You hold the fort. We’ll keep you posted.”

I climbed over the fence and followed him to the helicopter. Marshal Reyes gave me a squint-eyed nod as a greeting. The pilot handed me a helmet with a built-in mic and showed me how to turn it on.

“Keep it turned off unless you’ve got something important to say. No chatter. But if you see something, don’t hesitate or waste time being polite. Jump right in.”

I nodded and strapped myself in.

The pilot took us up, and in minutes we were moving up and over the hill that Hal and I had covered earlier. The two marshals and I watched the ground. The pilot took occasional glances down, but focused mainly on flying the machine. We crossed over another line of hills into the next valley. The trees were taller there and wider—fuller. They cloaked the ground. I realized that there was a lot of terrain that I was missing. A small child, or even a large man, could have hidden from us down there. If the Kid was lost and wanted to be found, we had a chance. If, on the other hand, he was angry or frightened, he could evade us by simply standing still.

We rose again and passed over the dry bed of a small stream, an ancient gray house in a clearing, and a rough dirt road that ran to it.

“We should check the house,” Reyes said. “He’ll be looking for shelter.”

He was applying logic to my son’s behavior. I had my doubts.

“I’ll radio base and have the sheriff send out a four-wheel drive,” Geary said.

I flicked the switch for my mic. “He’s not there,” I said.

Reyes looked at me. “Why not?”

Because the house looked both unsafe and dirty and probably had spiders or scorpions. The Kid would rather roast in the sun than take the shade in a structure like that. “Trust me. He wouldn’t go there.”

Reyes thought about it for all of two seconds. “Have them check it out anyway.”

So much for trusting a father to know his son.

The pilot crisscrossed over the land, keeping the helicopter moving slowly westward. I felt the onset of motion sickness. Whenever I looked up, the horizon seemed to be swooping and spinning. If I looked down, I just felt sick.

We crossed another dried-up riverbed. It was about twenty feet across and looked to have once been two or three feet deep. But it was now covered in young pinyon trees. The river had been dry for years.

On the far side was a large clearing where bare rock broke through the surface. The helicopter rose unsteadily as we passed over. My stomach did some more acrobatics.

“Thermals,” the pilot said as he corrected. “I’m going to have to stay up higher.”

If we stayed up higher, we weren’t going to be able to see anything on the ground at all. The helicopter search was pointless. We were wasting more time.

I flicked the switch again. “I want to go back.”

Reyes snapped at me. “What? We’ve just started looking.”

“We can’t see a damn thing. The Kid could be anywhere down there and we’d never know.”

A herd of javelinas, spooked by the noise of the helicopter, broke from the cover of a copse of taller trees and stampeded along a game trail. The lead animal veered off the trail into another stand of pinyons and the others followed. They disappeared as though they’d never been.

“You see that?” I said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Yeah, but if your son hears us go over, he’s not going to hide, is he? He’s going to come out and wave and be happy we found him. Am I right?”

“No,” I said in reflex. My son was not that simple. “Maybe. But he doesn’t think like that. This is a waste of time. You guys do it, if you want, but take me back to the house.”

Reyes didn’t like it. “When we need to go for fuel, we’ll drop you on the way.” He turned away, dealing with me by ignoring me.

We rode around for another hour. The view didn’t change. The trees got taller and there were fewer patches of sagebrush. There were more rocky escarpments breaking through the crust of the ground, and when I looked back over my shoulder, I could see that we had risen above the foothills by a thousand feet or more.

“He never made it this far,” I said. “He’s not fast enough. And the constant climb would have exhausted him. We need to turn back.”

“We could refuel now,” the pilot said.

Reyes looked like he had just downed a twelve-ounce glass of humility and it wasn’t sitting well.

“Drop him back at the house.” He turned and looked at me. I thought he was about to blast me to assert his control over me, my life, my son, the search, the universe, but he stopped himself. “Jesus Kee-riste. You’re mighty green, you know that?”

I refused to vomit in the confines of a small helicopter cockpit. I took long cleansing breaths and told myself that I would be back on the ground soon.

I
felt better as soon as we started back. The pilot flew in a long curve away from the mountains, no longer searching with the nauseating crisscross pattern, and avoiding the more obvious places where thermals might catch us and toss the helicopter up in the air like a child’s balloon. In a few minutes, we were passing over the edge of Las Vegas and the foot of the road that led up to the house. A deputy sheriff stood beside his car, blocking the road. He watched us soar overhead with a thoroughly dissatisfied look on his face.

The house was surrounded by pickup trucks, some with horse trailers attached. We flew over and the pilot began to set us down in the corral. A man in civilian clothes tried waving us off, but scooted out of the way when he saw that we were coming in anyway.

“Who’s that crazy son of a bitch?” Geary said. No one bothered to answer.

The moment the skids hit the ground, I popped the latch, jumped to the ground, and ran for the fence. Terra firma never felt so good.

“What the hell is going on here?” Reyes was right behind me, yelling over the noise of the engine and the still-moving rotors.

The civilian yelled right back. “You got to get that thing outta here. We’ve got to unload our horses.”

“Who are all these people?” Reyes said. He yelled back at the pilot. “Shut her down.”

“We’re the SAR volunteers. Who are you?”

“I’m the guy in charge.”

“I don’t think so,” the man said.

Another civilian-attired man approached across the yard, flanked
by two state policemen in black uniforms. The man in the center was grinning; the staties were not.

“Hello, gentlemen,” the man said. “Which one of you is the parent?”

“That’s me,” I said. I almost introduced myself as Jason Stafford. “John Sauerman.”

I guessed the man to be in his early fifties. His hair had been brown, now going to gray, cut short in an efficient buzz. Though he held himself far too relaxed to be ex-police or -military, he exuded the air of command. He was wearing a checked short-sleeved shirt, well-worn jeans, and hiking boots. I liked him immediately. He was going to find my son.

“Roy Robertson,” he said, extending a hand. “I head up S and R for the state. Who’s this gentleman?”

Reyes flashed his badge. “U.S. Marshal Reyes. We’ll be running this operation.”

“Did I misunderstand? Is this a hostage situation? I thought we were looking for a missing child.”

“I’m going to want all communication with the press to go through me. You must understand that our presence here reflects the sensitivity of the situation. Mr. Sauerman is under our protection. Therefore, as senior marshal, I will direct the search. You and your people will take orders from me or my associate, Deputy Marshal Geary.”

“Are you in pursuit of a fugitive, Marshal?”

Reyes grimaced. “We’re looking for a seven-year-old boy,” he said, enjoying giving the guy a dose of scorn.

“Then you are invited to participate in my search. If you would like to work with our press liaison, I will arrange that. Is that helicopter yours?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Then please have your pilot take it somewhere else. Anywhere else. My people need a place to keep their spare mounts.”

“This is federal, Mr. Robertson. You’ll take your orders from me. That helicopter may be our most valuable asset in finding the child.”

Robertson looked at me. “I’m sorry about this, Mr. Sauerman. Just give me one more minute to sort this out.” He took out his phone and speed-dialed a number. “Hey, Cindy. It’s me. Is she in?” He waited a few seconds until a second voice came on. “Thanks for taking my call, ma’am. We’ve been called out on a missing child over in San Miguel County and there are U.S. Marshals present. We are having a conversation about jurisdiction. Would you be willing to speak with them?” He listened for a moment and then handed the phone to Reyes. “The governor would like a word, Marshal Reyes.”

Reyes took the phone as though he thought it might bite him on the ear. He listened for a few seconds, then said, “I understand.” He disconnected and handed it back. “You’re still going to need me, and my chopper.”

“Marshal, you ask anyone here, I’m an easy man to work with. But they’ll also tell you that I lack patience. It’s one of my greatest failings. And I do not like to repeat myself. Now, will you please get that machine out of here?”

Reyes wheeled around and stomped back to the helicopter. Robertson took my arm and guided me toward the house. “Mr. Sauerman, please tell me anything and everything you can about your son. I understand that he has ASD. How severe are his limitations? Is he verbal?”

I started talking.