An Absence of Principal (27 page)

CHAPTER 22
 

A
lex heard the truck’s brakes squeal to a halt as it reached the international crossing at Juarez. Two hours later, in the darkness of a serene Big Bend night, Manuel, the driver, finally pulled over. The sound of the truck’s cranky brakes woke her from a fitful stupor in the back of the truck. Alex and the box of Aguileres cocaine were all that remained in the cargo area.

Manuel walked quickly from the cab of the truck to its rear door. Alex could just lie there propped up on her elbow, half dazed, and surrender to the shortness of her life ahead.

He quickly surveyed the area around him. He shone his high-intensity flashlight and saw nothing, heard nothing. It was just him and Alex. Soon it would be only him. The box of coke in the back of the truck was tempting, but Manuel never huffed on the job and he was trying to quit anyway. Manuel wasn’t nearly as careless about life as his bosses in the Juarez underworld. He had a family. Kids. He was a regular at
Iglesia Catolica de Santa Maria,
in one of Juarez’s finer neighborhoods. He was even an usher. Manuel was a high school graduate and was almost halfway through college. But his wife’s cancer and the need for treatment drew him into the big money world of narcotics. He had to keep her alive and the kids in Catholic school. Before he knew it, Manuel was in too deep. There was no turning back now. His dabbling into an occupation that would help him pay his wife’s necessary expenses had become a luxury occupation. Manuel didn’t like to kill people. But when he had to, he didn’t think twice.

Manuel swung open the back door on the truck quickly. When he had a hit to make he liked to do it quick and clean. Get it over with, as if to try to convince himself that maybe it never happened and he had nothing to do with it.

He turned the beam of his flashlight toward Alex, and drew down on her. Manuel fired a single bullet into her. Done. She was dead. He knew it. Another one gone, just like that, and he didn’t feel anything. He’d done this too many times. Tomorrow he would collect his paycheck and it would make any momentary regrets simply go away without a trace. What a great and necessary job he had.

Except that’s not the way it happened.

Manuel threw open the back door of the truck quickly and turned the high beam of his flashlight on Alex. Before he was able to focus the light much less his vision on Alex, he felt a pain in his left hand. The light skittered away, falling to the rough desert surface below the truck. No one could see anything now. Except for Alex, who had been looking at nothing but darkness for hours. Most of her last several days in fact, had been spent in some degree of darkness.

The next pain Manuel felt came in the center of his chest, where Alex barreled the heels of both her feet. The wind flew from him, and like his flashlight he fell limply to the desert floor. A shot went off into the night air; it was all Manuel could manage as he drew what would be his final breaths. Alex grabbed him by the neck, pain shooting from her arm where she had injured it the day before. A second later, she turned Manuel’s head swiftly and violently to the right. It was wasted effort. He was already dead from the brutal and fatal impact caused when his heart exploded, when the heels of Alex’s feet broke through his rib cage. She grabbed Manuel’s flashlight and his .44 magnum and walked into the dark, night air. She knew she was somewhere east of El Paso, down from Juarez. She could see the city lights in the distance, rising from the west, at the foot of the jutting Franklin Mountains. She shoved the gun in the waistband of her blue jeans and made her way through several miles of mesquite thickets before finally finding her way to Interstate 10. She realized she had lost her cell phone in this most recent would-be life-ending altercation with a stranger, and so all she could do was flag down a passing motorist and ask for a ride. Not the safest thing to do in these parts, but after what she had been through the last year, and especially with what she had tucked down inside her Levi’s, she decided to take her chances.

“I don’t know what to believe,” Trask finally answered Nail after the sheriff and chief U.S. prosecutor had left the room. “I think this was a man coming clean of all his wrongs today. I don’t think Ben Doggett killed Junior Walker. But I’m not convinced he doesn’t know something about it or know who did.”

“What happens next?” Nail wondered.

“First thing we have to do, Tony, is move for a mistrial,” Trask said.

Moments after the sheriff escorted Doggett out, Trask made his way to Judge Halfmann’s courtroom with his new evidence that would free his client.

“Judge Halfmann, if I may approach,” Trask said. He was followed to the bench by Midkiff who had heard most if not all of Doggett’s statements in the interrogation room moments earlier. Trask conveyed to the judge what had transpired over the last hour.

“Given this new information and the evidence supplied by Mr. Doggett, the defense moves for a mistrial in the case of the United States versus Anthony Nail,” Trask said.

“Is that so?” Halfmann said. “Mr. Midkiff? Anything?”

“No, your honor,” Midkiff said. “Prosecution is convinced after hearing Mr. Doggett’s confession that Mr. Nail had nothing to do with the murder of Junior Walker.”

Halfmann turned to the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we have received new information this morning that dramatically alters the course of this trial. So dramatically, it would seem, that the United States’ charge of murder against Tony Nail is dropped. Your service to this court of law is appreciated. You are now free to return to your lives. Please accept the court’s apologies for the unproductive use of your time, and my sincere gratitude to you for your service,” Halfmann said.

Trask was renowned in West Texas for getting out of legal jams. He’d made a habit of it throughout a career that featured almost three hundred jury trials and a winning percentage of over eighty percent.

The last decade had been particularly rough as Trask had dealt with personal issues including a lengthy illness that had plagued his mother and a car accident that had left him with a broken leg. He worked through both concerns, but judges, prosecutors and his defense attorney peers in local legal circles couldn’t help but notice he had seemed distracted. It was no secret, either, that he had been devastated by the news that a jury in the early 1990s had intended to declare a hung verdict in the case of the drifter Lionel Sturgis. Trask had come close to getting the man off before Sturgis’ escape, and later suicide-by-cop. The Florida man had broken free from his cuffs and jumped out a second floor window at the Brewster County Courthouse in Far West Texas. It was a court appointment; Trask accepted appointments as often as he could and took them seriously, looking on them as his ethical duty, something an old college professor had driven home to him years ago. Sturgis survived for days in the wilds of the Big Bend desert before taking a priest hostage. Father Tom told Trask he felt he’d seen a change in Lionel Sturgis that night during the hours Sturgis had held him hostage. But by then apparently, Sturgis had figured he had made too many bad decisions: felony flight, possession of and discharging a stolen firearm he wrestled away from a bailiff. They’d get him for attempted murder, too, because one of the bullets had caught the leg of the bailiff during the escape. Then there was the little matter of kidnapping when he broke into Fr. Tom’s rectory and held him at gunpoint for several hours.

Lionel Sturgis was probably right for one of the few times in his criminal career. The odds were stacked too high against him. And so when he decided to reach for the phantom gun that was not in his waist band, with a stable of law enforcement officers drawing down on him on Fr. Tom’s porch that evening, Sturgis knew death was his only way out.

Only problem was the jury was going to cut him loose, or at least give him a far lesser charge of possessing a stolen firearm prior to his escape, because it couldn’t come to a verdict in the case against him. The way events transpired at the end of Sturgis’ life deeply disturbed Garrison Trask, a staunch opponent of the death penalty, who had taken a liking to his brash client. Trask, too, could sense a change in Sturgis, and he felt for the first time since he had known him that he just might be able to be rehabbed. Somehow. Although the state didn’t push the poison cocktail into his veins, Trask considered Sturgis’ death a by-product of capital punishment. He was angry about it. He didn’t blame the law enforcement officers who did what they had to do. Trask just opposed any form of violent death.

Some in the West Texas legal arena noticed a shift in Trask’s mood after everything went down against Sturgis. News of a hung jury in a trial of that size and importance had been the biggest legal occurrence in West Texas in years.

CHAPTER 23
 

“T
he name’s Gimp. Step right on up here, little lady,” the trucker said as he reached for Alex in the darkness. She had been walking for two hours, maybe three, across the darkness of West Texas. She was obviously out of place, despite the tears in her clothes, her now uncharacteristically unkempt hair, and the bruises on her forearms, both old and new.

“Lord awmighty, little lady, what on earth are you doin’ out here at this time of night? Good golly, it looks like you been beat up.”

“Car broke down by the road a few miles back. Just need a lift if you don’t mind,” Alex lied, ignoring the trucker’s observations.

“Broke down? Whereabouts?” the trucker asked.

“Don’t know really. Out in the dark somewhere. Not on the highway. Couldn’t even tell you how to get back to it now. It just quit on me,” Alex lied some more.

“Where you headed?”

“Like to go to Midland if you’re headed that far.”

“It’s where I’m bound, so you’re in luck,” the trucker said.

Alex was as tired as she could possibly be, having walked several miles in the dark and before that, snapped a man’s neck and killed him. She had run out of adrenaline sometime in the darkness and it was simply a matter of God looking after her that He sent a friendly, albeit a bit talkative, trucker.

Gimp was trying to carry on a conversation with Alex over the din of a stereo that was cranking out Bob Seger’s “Fire Down Below” at some impressive but annoying decibels.

Sometime after three or four songs, Gimp had apparently had his fill of Seger and finally turned down the volume.

“What brings you out to these desolate parts?” he asked.

“Was on my way back from a job and a visit with my parents in El Paso,” she said.

“Oh yeah? What kinda work you do that you’d be comin’ all the way out here?”

She thought for a split second and all she could think of she blurted out.

“Oil. Drilling engineer,” she said.

Gimp said nothing. He knew she was lying. She wouldn’t be this far west had she been in oil like she’d said. And she wouldn’t have ditched her car in the middle of nowhere had she come from El Paso. The interstate ran all the way from Midland to El Paso. No need to get off the beaten track. He wondered what she was really all about, what she was hiding. He noticed what looked like a little blood on her forearm, but he let it be.

“Think I might try to get me a little rest if it’s OK with you?” Alex asked Gimp.

“Please, you look like you might’ve had a long day. Be my guest. Pillow there in the back seat if you wanna reach for it.”

“No, no, I’m fine,” she said. Alex wasn’t comfortable with using a stranger’s sleeping gear, especially a trucker she hadn’t even known thirty minutes earlier.

Right before she dozed off, she looked at the clock on the dash. 5:00 a.m. The city limit sign Gimp was approaching said “Van Horn 20.” She couldn’t do the math at this early hour, but she thought that would put her and her road companion in Midland right at 8:30 a.m.

An hour or so after the sun rose over the Midland skyline, Gimp and his load of Wal-Mart electronics pulled within sight of the West Texas town. Alex pointed him to her apartment, and when he dropped her off thanked him for the lift and the conversation.

“You be careful, little lady. Anything west of here can be pretty dangerous. I’d maybe not go for any more late night strolls on the Interstate, especially near the border. Those people involved in dope, they’ve got no value for human life. They’d just as soon kill you as look at you.”