The Devil's Highway (3 page)

After the Caldwells had finally reported Brad’s disappearance, the Jacksonville Police had put out a BOLO on Brad, which indicated that he might be traveling with an unknown female. I thought Andy Blades was a nice young fellow, but I thought that Ray Polley, despite his party-dude lifestyle, had a deeper insight into his friend Brad’s psyche. I agreed with Ray that there probably was no girl waiting for Brad; I doubted there ever had been. It made sense that he would want his friends to think there was another person involved who would look out for him, but there was another dimension to the story that gave it deeper resonance.

I suspected that the meticulous Brad had planned his disappearance, and that he reasoned that if the police thought that a young man had met a young woman and they had run away together, well, it wouldn’t be the first time. The police had a lot of things to devote their resources to, and looking for two young adults who wanted some time alone together wasn’t going to be pushed to the top of anyone’s to-do list. The authorities had plenty of missing minors and endangered adults cases on their hands.
 

But to what end had he disappeared? What was the reason behind this grand charade?

It stood to reason that if Brad was going to disappear of his own free will, he knew that his parents would hire someone to come looking for him. He’d want to leave a red herring to throw the searchers off. No, I thought that the right-hand turn out of the supermarket door was just as much a ruse as the story about the girl. Brad, by all accounts, was smart and meticulous, a guy who planned ahead, who didn’t miss a trick. That meant there was a connection here, somewhere not too far from where I was standing. Brad wanted everyone to think he’d gone to the right, and had gone to pains to have himself filmed doing just that. So I looked to the left.

To the left, if one walked all the way across the supermarket parking lot, was the highway, and if one followed that, which I did, was a country road, which, after a moment’s hesitation, I decided to walk down. That was very the first road that I’d follow Brad Caldwell down, though many more were to follow.

The road ran down the street past a Domino’s Pizza, a Kinko’s Printing, and a Shoney’s Restaurant. Beyond those establishments the road rose and ran uphill into a four-way intersection that was somewhat busy, and flanked by used car lots.
 

Grasshoppers fluttered away in green-yellow arcs at my approach. The black top bubbled in the sun, spring flowing into summer now. The acrid smell of road tar filled my nose. There was blue sky and fluffy white clouds and bright sunshine, a glorious day back in Birmingham but perhaps just an average day here in northern Florida.
 

Still following whatever strange homing beacon that guided me, I walked up the road and to the intersection. Across from Shoney’s, on one side of the intersection was a Chrysler dealership. On the other, “Big Hearted Al’s” Used Cars, a big painted sign informed me. There was an old man in a rocking chair, sitting under an awning over there.

In front of the dealership, under a large awning, sat an old black man in a folding chair. This wasn’t an area designed for pedestrians. There were no sidewalks, but many feet had worn a path in the high grass on the narrow shoulder of the road. The down slope was filled with beer and soda cans and fast food wrappers, and the tiny cubes of shattered safety glass that were the detritus of a thousand fender-benders from over the years.

I stood there on the shoulder of the highway and looked across. Motorists passed me in thick profusion, seldom more than one in a car, and gave me indifferent or openly hostile glances, as if by being a pedestrian I had committed some infraction. I waited for a pause in the traffic and dashed across to Big-Hearted Al’s Used Cars. I walked straight up to the old man in the chair.

“How are you today?” The old man called to me while I was still fifty feet away.

I smiled and reached into my pocket as I drew up to him, and held up a picture of Brad Caldwell.

“Have you seen this young man, sir?”

He looked at the picture and his eyes widened slightly, perhaps in recognition. “He in some kind of trouble?” the old man said instantly, with no discernible expression on his face.

“He’s not in any trouble that I know of, but he’s missing. His name is Brad Caldwell. His parents hired me to find him and make sure that he’s all right.”

“I don’t want to get involved in no trouble.”

I nodded and looked up into that perfect Florida sky and smiled. No one ever does. “There won’t be any trouble for you. I just need to find out where he is and make sure that he’s safe.”

“He sure seemed okay to me.”

Bingo. “So you have seen him?”

“Sure as I’m looking at you. He came by here, several weeks ago, now. It was hot as a wet dog, that day, and he walked up here, same as you. Young white boy. Came from the same direction as you, even, walkin’ up that there hill like he was on a mission.”

So, I had second-guessed Brad Caldwell correctly so far. But now it was going to get a little more difficult.

Big-Hearted Al went on with his story. “He seemed like a nice young man, so we got to talking. I let him go inside and get a drink from the water fountain. Like I say, it was pretty hot. I sit out here a lot, under my shade here, and I can tell you, white people don’t come up this road a-walking. You don’t see a whole lot of folks walking on hot days, but never no white folks. I didn’t think nothing to see you come walking up, because black folks walk through here, from time to time. This is a black neighborhood. But I could tell he didn’t come from around here, so I got curious, you know? So I asked him if he needed a drink of water. He said he sure did, so I let him duck inside to the water fountain.” He looked me up and down, and looked vaguely embarrassed.
 

“I’m sorry. You thirsty?”

“I’m fine at the moment. Al, can you tell me which way that Brad went after that?”

The old man smiled. “I sure can.”

Al got out of his chair with surprising dexterity for someone of his years and went inside. He came back after a few minutes, and held out a half-sheet of yellow paper for me to see. It was the dealer’s copy of a sales receipt, to one Bradley Caldwell, for the sale of a used Subaru hatchback, grey in color. Big-Hearted Al had sold Brad a car. I found it odd that someone wanting to vanish would leave this paper trail behind. Brad might be meticulous by nature, but this was an amateur mistake for someone who wanted to disappear.

I looked at Al. “Would you ever sell someone a car without an I.D?”

“Can’t do that no more,” he replied, his face serious. “If they pay cash, I have to see some I.D. I don’t want to handle no drug money and have any trouble come back on me.”

“You didn’t find it odd that someone would walk in here and buy a car with cash?”

“A sale is a sale, if I can see some I.D, mister. Besides, I just hate to see folks a-walking.” Old Al smiled at me. I bet he did, at that. I asked him if he knew anything else.
 

Big-Hearted Al knew just one more thing. Brad had gone west. That’s all that Big-Hearted Al could tell me, aside from the interesting fact that young Brad had paid his $650 dollars in cash from a backpack and had been last seen taking the onramp towards New Orleans on I-20. The old man had sat there in his rocking chair after making his sale, and watched Brad drive down the road to the Chevron, where he presumably filled up his newly acquired automobile, made whatever other purchases he was going to make, and took to Interstate Highway 10 via the westbound entry ramp. Hence, Al concluded, the young man was headed west. How far west was anyone’s guess.

I walked back down the road to the strip mall, and collected my own automobile before Al could convince me that I needed to buy one of his, and I drove, retracing the path I’d just walked, following Brad Caldwell on the start of his mysterious odyssey. I threw Big-Hearted Al a wave as I turned through the intersection and drove down to the same Chevron where he’d seen Brad fill up. I started the nozzle in my own tank, perhaps the same one Brad had used that day, and walked inside.

I walked up to the counter and showed the picture to the woman behind the register. She remembered Brad. He’d bought some gas, a lot of road food, and, oh, yes, a big bag of candy. He said what he needed was fuel, for the car and for himself, because he had a long way to go.

She couldn’t help me any more than that.

Chapter 5

The car that Brad had bought had come with a tag from the previous owner, which I doubted that Brad had bothered to change. A guy buys a cheap car to get out of town with, my guess was, he wasn’t planning on hanging on to the vehicle, once he got to wherever it was he was going. I’m sure he had cursed himself for failing to secure a fake I.D, so as not to leave a paper trail with Big-Hearted Al, but since no one had a clue where he was headed, maybe that hadn’t bothered him too much, after all.

On the off chance Brad had gotten a speeding ticket or run into some other misadventure with law enforcement, I called an old friend in the Birmingham Police Department and got him to run the tag for me. Whatever Brad had been up to, he hadn’t gotten into any trouble on the road. The search came up negative.
 

* * *

When I got to my office, the day was dying, and the stairwell of the Brooks Building was lit by the soft light of the waning sun. The Brooks Building is an old Brownstone that lords over Brooks Plaza, just off Third Avenue North and 20th Street. Both the building and the plaza were mostly deserted for years, until recently, when the North Side started undergoing a kind of renaissance. A lot of upscale businesses started moving in, turning around a part of town known, up until then, for street crime and lurid scenes of destitution and violence. Affluent businesses were buying up and renovating all the old relics. Think of it as Urban Renewal from the private sector. These days, you could walk down the street after nightfall without getting panhandled, mugged or even propositioned.
 

There was a young woman waiting in the lobby as I stepped in. She was sitting in a lobby chair, holding a backpack in her lap. She was pale, and her hair was dyed jet black, though her light brown roots had started to show, and there was a silver ring in her bottom lip. She was wearing torn black fishnet stockings and a short black dress under a transparent plastic raincoat. Over her shoulder was a backpack. She looked like she might have just come from a high school classroom, where she had sat, texting her way through a lecture on The Middle Ages or Applied Calculus. She fixed me with intensely bright blue eyes as I walked in. She got to her feet and headed towards me.

“Roland Longville?” she called out, popping chewing gum loudly in the process.

“Yes?”
 

“I’m Briana Caldwell, Brad Caldwell’s sister.” That stopped me. The Caldwells hadn’t even mentioned that they had a daughter, though maybe in their minds, there was no reason that they should have.

“How can I help you, Briana?”

“I want to help
you
. Find my brother, I mean.”

“Well, I’m sure that I can—“

She popped her gum loudly to interrupt me, which I thought was novel.
 

“No you can’t, because you don’t know where to look. Brad made sure of that. Well, he
thought
he did. But he forgot something.” She unzipped the backpack and pulled out a laptop PC. “This is Brad’s.”

“And this laptop will lead me to Brad?”

“If you’re smart enough, it can.” She rolled her eyes and started talking at an extremely fast pace. “Listen, Mr. Longville. Brad had another side to him that my parents and his dorky friends didn’t know about. He didn’t think that I knew, but I dated a guy, Hans, who knew about everything that Brad was into, and he told me everything. I mean, before I dumped Hans because he’s a dork. I just never told Brad I knew about the stuff he was into. But when he pulled this disappearing act, I knew that he’d gone away to try to be a part of this weird scene he’s into.”

She took a breath, and I got a question in. “What weird scene is that?”

Instead of answering, Briana popped her gum, reached into her backpack, and produced a book. It was a hardback, with a battered red dust cover. On the cover was the picture of an older man. His stern expression and buzz-cut hair announced unmistakably that he had some sort of military pedigree.
The Redemption Manifesto,
the title was proclaimed in a thick bold script;
by Col. Elihu Tolbert, United States Army (ret.)

Briana chewed viciously and went on. “Brad’s laptop was being fixed; the computer repair service sent it back a few days after he disappeared. I messed around on it to see if there was something useful. Then I found this dumb book of his in his closet. I guess he had it memorized, or maybe he had more than one copy. He was that into all this stupid stuff.”

I took both the book and the laptop from her. “Thanks, Briana. What do you know about where Brad was headed when he disappeared?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly, but Hans—that’s the dorky guy I dated—he said that there was an online forum, that the dorks who were into all this crap logged on to and discussed what this Tolbert guy wrote and believed, and he told me Brad was on that forum so much they made him a mod—you know, a moderator? You don’t get to become a mod on a forum unless you know everything about the forum and what it’s all about. My guess is if you look at Brad’s web surfing history, you’ll learn something.”