Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista (13 page)

“Is that you?  Finally! You know, we’ve only been waiting here for three frikkin’ hours!”

Ranya spun around and dropped to a crouch behind a boulder, as a vise of fear clamped around her chest and throat.  Who was above, waiting for her? This was not in the plan!

Then a shrill female voice demanded, “God Derek, what took you so long? You’ve been gone forever!  My cell phone doesn’t work out here, and we were really, really scared!  You got the gas?”

“Yes, I got the gas, any other stupid questions?”

“Was the gas station open in Mountainview? Do they have any food?” asked the female.

“No Destiny, the gas station was not open!  First, I had to find a hose, and then I had to steal this gas.  I had to!  Then a dog heard me and almost woke up the whole fucking town!  I thought any minute some redneck was going run out and blast me full of buckshot, while I was stealing the gas right out of his pickup truck!  So don’t even tell me about how scary it was, waiting in the van for good old Derek to go get the fucking gas!”

Twenty feet below the unseen quarrelers, Ranya’s heart gradually dropped back below a hundred beats a minute, and the garrote of sudden terror slowly eased its pressure around her neck.  She continued listening, putting the pieces together, and crept in the moon shadow beneath the side of the bridge to the slope at its end, and up the sandy bank to the highway.

“B-b-but Derek, if the gas station is closed, how will we be able to get to Albuquerque tonight?” asked the young female.

“We won’t, obviously!”

Ranya could hear the sounds of a vehicle’s gas cap being unscrewed and removed.

“But I’m hungry, and I want to sleep in a real bed…”

“And your rich Daddy isn’t here to make it all better, is he? What kind of a comrade volunteer are you? They want fighters for the revolution, not crybabies!”

“We’re not crybabies Derek,” said another female voice, lower.  “We just need to take showers and wash our hair!  That’s not too much to ask, not after four straight days in the van! We thought for sure we’d be in the dorms by now.”

The other male voice said, “We would have been, if we hadn’t gotten off the interstate back at Santa Rosa.  That’s why we ran out of gas!”

“Don’t you start that shit again, Kalil! You’ve got NO room to talk! If you hadn’t of talked us into going all the way to Kansas City just to score some weed, we would’ve been in Albuquerque yesterday!  And then you got ripped off and lost almost all of our money, and for what?  Two friggin’ ounces of shitty ditch weed!  So don’t you even talk to me

about…”

“But if we had stayed on the I-40, we…”

“Kalil, you don’t know shit about cars!  The front end is shot on this piece of crap! Above 50, it’s shaking so bad it’s going to…”

“Then let me drive it, if you can’t handle it!  A little shaking isn’t the end of the world!  It can take it…”

“You don’t know shit!  If we…”

“Look guys, it doesn’t matter!” said the first female, the one who had been called Destiny.  “Stop fighting, okay? The blame game, it’s so over, like, it’s so yesterday!  Let’s look at tomorrow, okay? We can handle another night in the van, what’s one more night, right Lisa? We’ll get more gas in the morning, and we’ll be at the university by lunchtime. Like, it’s okay!  Really!”

“If they even have gas in Mountainview,” said Kalil.  “And if they’ll sell it.”

“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” said Derek.

Ranya snaked up the slope between prickly weeds and cactus until she could peer under the steel guardrail at the western end of the bridge.  A dark full-sized van was parked on the dirt shoulder, partly obscured by tall spiked shrubs along the side of the road.  How had she missed seeing it? She must have been too fixated on getting under the bridge—not a good sign.  Literally tunnel vision, she reflected.  

A man was tilting a gas jug above the fuel inlet on the left side of the van.  Another man stood on the other side, looking out to the north, across the dry salt lake.  A smaller person, a female, stepped out of the van and hugged this man from behind, and then pulled him back inside.  The one with the fuel can finished, closed the gas cap, and tossed the empty jug into the back.  Then he went around to the driver’s side, climbed in, and began turning over the engine.

After a few tries the engine caught, the lights went on, and the dark van drove off with a backfire, amidst a cloud of smoke.  Ranya watched its tail lights disappear down State Road 60 toward the west, toward Mountainview.  ‘Comrade volunteers,’ heading toward a ‘revolution?’ Were they for real?  She guessed their accents to be from the upper Midwest. Well, whatever they were, wherever they were from, they were apparently heading for the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque.

Score one for Caylen Barlow.  Evidently, he knew what he was talking about.

6
 

Monday June 23

Ranya slept in the backseat
of an abandoned Cadillac, on the outskirts of the crossroads village of Mountainview.  Even in June the high plains were chilly at night at 6,000 feet of elevation.  Mountainview was in fact entirely flat, but it did enjoy a spectacular view of the Monzano and Sandia mountains erupting to above 10,000 feet just behind it.  On the other side of these mountains, forty miles northwest as a crow might fly, lay her destination: Albuquerque.

She washed her face with a baby wipe from her pack, and applied light makeup in the Caddy’s rear view mirror.  Ranya hated the length of her hair: too short to tie back in a ponytail, but too thick to stay put behind her ears.  She wasn’t used to loose hair rubbing her face this way, it irritated her.  But at least the chopped and dyed-black hair had gotten her out of D-Camp, so she really couldn’t complain.  She brushed it back, and pulled on her newest ball cap: tan, with a leaping blue marlin on the front. It was one of her untraceable Barlow ranch acquisitions, along with her cheap Timex digital watch, her folding knife, and other items.  She wore the same clothes she had hiked and slept in: blue jeans and the dead assistant warden’s black hooded sweatshirt.

At six AM she was standing outside the front door of the Ancient Pueblos Restaurant on State Road 60, when it was unlocked from the inside by a plump middle-aged woman.  The gray-haired lady smiled and said, “Good morning, honey, c’mon in,” and flipped the “Closed” sign inside the glass door over to read “Open.”  Evidently, the
Español Solamente
laws had yet to take root in Mountainview.  

Ranya followed her inside and picked a table near the kitchen.  The restaurant was humble, but homey, with just eight tables in the main dining room.  The place was neat and clean, the tables were covered with fresh white tablecloths, and mouth-watering aromas were emanating from the kitchen.  

The waitress returned to her table with a steaming pot of coffee, and Ranya turned over a porcelain cup already on the table to be filled. “I’ll be right back with the cream, all right?” she said.  “Will you be having breakfast? We only take cash, hon.” She gestured to a hand-painted sign above the kitchen, which read, “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash.”

Ranya understood that the woman had noted her brown backpack, her lack of a car outside, and the dust on her slept-in clothes. “Cash is fine. Can I see a menu?”  Ranya guessed that the regulars at this small town diner probably knew the selections by heart.

“Sure thing—just a sec.”

While the server was gone, the front door opened again with the jingle of a bell.  Four young people, college age, entered the dining room. Two guys and two girls.  Ranya pretended to examine the mural of an ancient Indian mesa dwelling painted on the wall behind them, while observing them in her peripheral vision.

It was ‘the comrades’ from the bridge.  Ranya glanced over at them. They were wearing jeans and khaki shorts, and sweaters and sweatshirts. One very tall guy, at least six foot four, had dirty blond shoulder length hair and wore wire-rimmed eyeglasses.  The other was a young black of medium height and build, with a bushy Afro hairstyle. Both had several days’ growth of whiskers on their oily faces.  One girl was a blond with a long ponytail, attractive except for the rings through her eyebrow and lip. The other was a dumpy brunette with her hair in tight braids, and too many silver earrings to count.  Derek, Kalil, Destiny and Lisa...up close, and in the light of day.  Derek had large blue oriental character tattoos visible on the back of his neck above his gray University of Michigan sweatshirt, and silver rivets punched through his ear lobes big enough to serve as pencil holders.  Ranya turned away, disgusted.

The waitress returned with Ranya’s menu and cream, and four more menus for the other table. Derek asked the woman, “What time does the gas station open up around here?  We need to get back on the road.”  The town’s independent service station and mini-mart were visible through the front windows across State Road 60.

“Don’t worry, by the time you finish breakfast, they’ll be open. You’re having breakfast, right?”

“Um, sure.  Yeah, we’re having breakfast,” said the tall one.

“We only take cash.  Cash or metal.  No checks, no credit cards, no e-bucks.”

Ranya watched their obvious discomfort out of the corner of her eye.

“Uhh…yeah, no problem.  Let’s see the menus.”

Ranya studied her own plastic laminated folding menu.  The prices were marked in black grease pencil over the old printed figures.  Pancakes, bacon and two eggs were $64!  Suddenly her bankroll of nearly $9,000, mostly in crisp new hundred dollar “blue bucks,” didn’t make her feel quite as rich as it had yesterday. 

The waitress came back to take her order.  The glass-plated front door opened again, and a genuine cowboy, about fifty, held it open for his wife. He was wearing a black cowboy hat, cowboy boots, jeans and a jean jacket. Ranya could see at a glance that he was the real thing, not a poser. The man nodded to the waitress, and they both raised eyebrows at the table of unsavory young people.

“Have you decided yet, hon?” she asked Ranya, her pencil poised over her blank pad.

“I’ll have the Western omelet, with the home fries, and a side of bacon. And a glass of orange juice.”

“Okay, coming up.”

“And, ahh…” She lowered her voice.  “Is…Don here?”

The waitress looked directly at Ranya, skeptically, sizing her up. “Don? You want to see Don? You know him? You related, or something?”

“Ah, no, not exactly, but somebody told me…”  Ranya was flustered and floundering slightly, afraid of being overheard.  The meticulously planned linkup was suddenly not going according to the plan. 

The waitress just stared blankly at her.  “Don’s not in yet.  He’ll be in later, most likely.  You want to leave a message?”

“Ahh, no.  Wait—actually, well…maybe.  After breakfast.  If he’s not here by then.”

“Sure thing.”  The waitress turned for the kitchen.  

Damn, thought Ranya.  Now what?  Hang around and wait for Don? Leave a note for him, and kill time in this remote village, where a stranger without a car will stick out like an Eskimo in the Sahara? While pondering her options, she overheard the college-aged group talking quietly among themselves.

“I’ve got four hundred left, but it’s got to go for the gas,” said the longhaired Derek.  His hair was parted in the middle, and hung in dirty strands under his whiskery dimpled chin.  “We can eat when we get to the university; they’ll have something there.”

The pony-tailed blond grumbled, “I can’t get my cell phone to work in this crappy little town!  Daddy…um, my f-father…well, he could zap me a thousand e-bucks, if I could only get this stupid cell phone to work!”

“Des, didn’t you hear her?” whined the chubby brunette Lisa.  “They don’t even take e-bucks here!  Cash only, she said.”

“Shit!” exclaimed Destiny, getting a look from the cowboy’s wife two tables over.  “How much is toast and coffee?”

Ranya looked across at them again, sizing up the situation. She got up and sidled over to their table, drawing their hushed attention, and leaned among them and said softly, “Hey, you guys go to Michigan? I go to Virginia—UVA.”  She addressed herself primarily to their apparent leader, Derek with the neck tattoos and the rivet-punched ears, smiling while suppressing her revulsion.

The longhaired young man had a greasy face and terrible body odor…or perhaps his entire group did.  He replied, “Yeah, I do…I mean, we do…or at least we did.”

“You wouldn’t be heading to Albuquerque by any chance, would you? If you are, I could chip in for gas, if that would help.  I could even pay for a full tank, if you can give me a lift up there.”

The four of them broke into smiles, sudden relief flooding their faces at the prospect of both a hearty country breakfast, and an easy non-stop drive to the University of New Mexico, their neo-Marxist Mecca. 

***

It had taken Special Agent Garabanda
only five minutes to walk up 5th Street from the Federal Building to the Bernalillo County Courthouse. This was where the latest skirmish in the ongoing custody battle with his former wife Karin was going to be fought.  They were the first case on the docket this Monday at nine AM, and the judge was only fifteen minutes late when she appeared from her chambers.

The chubby family court judge had a long brown ponytail, and a pierced nose.  Alex Garabanda knew he was in deep trouble going before Judge Galatea Balfour-Obregon. Prior to becoming a judge, she had been a New Mexico left-wing radical activist and public defender for decades. It was not his first time going before her, and so far, it had never turned out well.

His ex-wife Karin was seated at the other table on the far side of her female attorney, and would not even make eye contact with him. Instead, she had stared straight ahead while they all waited for the judge to appear. He had to admit Karin looked terrific, with her long blond hair teased out. She was wearing her beige pants suit, with the ruffled blouse showing at her throat and cuffs.