Send Down the Rain(3)
Closed-circuit television cameras positioned on the flashing light poles a mile before the curve recorded Jake at the wheel. Facial recognition software, as well as Allie’s own viewing of the recording, proved that faithful Jake Gibson with his characteristic oiled ball cap was driving the truck and shifting gears as it ventured north on 30E.
No part of Jake Gibson was ever found.
Not a belt buckle. Not a heel of his boot. Not his titanium watch. Not his platinum wedding ring. Not his teeth. Not the bronzed head of his walking cane. Like much of the truck, Jake had been vaporized. The horrific nature of his death led to a lot of speculating. Theories abounded. The most commonly believed was that Jake fell asleep long before the turn, slumping forward, thereby pressing his bad leg and portly weight forward. This is their only justification for the unjustifiable speed. Second is the suggestion that four days of caffeine overdosing exploded Jake’s heart and he was dead long before the turn—also causing him to slump forward. The least whispered but still quite possible was the notion that Jake had an aneurysm, thereby producing the same result. No one really knows. All they knew with certainty was that he went out with a bang so violent that it registered on military satellites, bringing in the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, who both raised eyebrows at the enormity of the blast area. “Shame.”
With the site surrounded in yellow tape and flashing lights, it was still too hot to approach. Firemen said it’d take a week to cool off the core and allow anyone near the blast site. Onlookers shook their heads, thought of Allie, and muttered in their best backstabbing whisper, “That woman is cursed. Everything she touches dies.”
Rescue and coast guard crews searched the ocean and the shoreline throughout the night. They thought maybe if Jake had been thrown through the windshield at that speed, his body would have shot out across the rocks and into the ocean on the other side, where there’s a known rip tide. If so, he’d have been sucked out to sea.
Like everything else, the search turned up nothing. And like everything else, each failed search reinforced the excruciating notion that Jake died a horrible, painful death.
The weight of this on Allie was crushing. Jake, the affable husband who simply worked hard enough to put food on the table and laughter in his wife’s heart, was not coming back. Ever. The last year or two or even three had not been easy. He had worked more than he’d been at home, staying gone weeks at a time, months even. Allie knew what people thought . . . that she was just tough to live with.
She was left to plan the funeral and decide what to put in the box. But every time she tried to tell his memory that she was sorry, she was met with the haunting and deafening echo that the final three words she spoke to Jake were not “I love you.” Instead, her last words to him had been spoken in a spit-filled tirade of anger.
And for those words, there was no remedy.
2
Five hundred sixty-five miles northeast of Cape San Blas on the shoulders of Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, Juan Pedro Perez lit a cigarette. His knuckles were scarred, as was his forehead, and beneath his shirt were twenty more. He had long prized his ability with a knife, but his education came at a cost. Born in Juarez, he’d first walked across the border when he was six, and most of that distance he’d carried his sister. Now thirty, he’d lost count of his crossings. Raised in the fields, and tired of endless hours in the sun and countless unmet expectations, he’d robbed a border farmer, taken his gun, and learned to use it. Soon, he was hiring it out. A drug runner with a guerrilla fighter’s pedigree. Such talent and disregard got him noticed. Those atop the food chain took him under their wing, making him well connected. While hunted, he was also protected. Pretty soon he brokered his own power.
He sat in the front seat of an old flatbed Ford, left hand loosely cupped over his mouth, cheeks drawn, eyes dark and cold. Cigarette smoke exited his nose and trailed up and out the car window. He spun the brass Zippo lighter on his right thigh. With every spin he’d flip it open, flick it lit, then slam it shut. Spin it again, repeat. The woman next to him in the front seat didn’t watch the lighter so much as the hand that held it.
Catalina was twenty-eight—or so she thought. The two had met, oddly enough, at church. She was attending her husband’s funeral while Juan Pedro was running a load and using the church as both a cover and a safe haven. She had no idea. Diego, her husband of five years, had been a good man and she had loved him. They married when she was eighteen and he twenty-eight. He was a dentist, and given his honesty, underinflated prices, and twenty-four-hour house calls, he had a lot of patients but little money.
Juan Pedro stared at her long dress and beautiful black eyes, then at the simple wooden box that held her husband. He pointed north, toward the border. “America?”
She looked at her two children, who were looking blankly at the box. Then she looked at the hell spread around her and figured it couldn’t get any worse.
She had been way bad wrong.
Five years later, she had America, an oil-leaking, mufflerless truck for a home, and Juan Pedro’s pistol for a pillow. His process was consistent—he would drive her and the kids to a community ripe for harvest, drop them at a shack, and disappear for weeks or months while a couple of his lieutenants kept an eye on them until he reappeared without warning, flush with cash and half a bottle of tequila. Thus far she’d lived in Texas, New Mexico, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, South and North Carolina. She’d seen him in two dozen angry and bloody knife fights. He liked to stand over the other men as they quivered and bled out. A sly smile. His blade dripping. His weapon of choice was a Dexter-Russell six-inch skinning knife. A butcher’s knife. He’d first learned to use it at the meat-packing houses. Curved blade. Wooden handle. Carbon steel. Razor sharp. If his pistol was close, that blade was closer.