River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (10 page)

In the end he had decided to let them go. The guy who drove, the baby-faced man with the big blue peepers, didn’t seem to know anything about anything. And the other one, the one who was clued in, was clearly working for him. He was a psychic, apparently, but maybe not a very good one, since he had drawn a blank here, not even sensing an onlooker.

Brewer followed them to the airport and parked at the curb with a Homeland Security placard on his dashboard when baby-face let the tall, bald psychic out.

The guy had just gone into the men’s room, which meant Brewer had to make a final decision now. Restrooms were an ideal killing ground—almost no business or institution had put surveillance cameras in them yet, although cameras were commonplace everywhere else. And you could lock the body up in a stall, so by the time anyone found it (even janitors weren’t inclined to disturb a man in a locked stall) you could be long gone. He had gone inside the terminal after the psychic on the off chance that the guy been lying to baby-face—that he really had learned something he hadn’t shared with his boss.

Brewer watched the men’s room door for thirty seconds, forty. Finally, he went inside. The tall man stood before a sink washing his hands. Brewer stopped in front of the mirror, ran water into his own hands and dashed some onto his face, wiping it off the bridge of his flat, prominent nose, smoothing down the short, once-black hair (
more gray in it every week,
he mused) that he combed back off his forehead. He pretended to examine the bags that had formed under his eyes these last few years, the lines at the corners of those eyes, the creases around his mouth, while he watched the psychic wash up. At fifty-two, Brewer had a physique that men in their early thirties envied—a few pounds not precisely where he’d like them, maybe, but solid and muscular, flat-stomached, with broad, sloping shoulders and a thick neck and ripped, powerful arms that ended in hands that looked big enough to choke a lion.

“Getting old sucks,” he said after a few moments.

“Tell me about it,” the psychic replied. He gave Brewer a long, curious look in the mirror, then turned away, shook water from his hands, turned to the automated paper towel machine, waved in front of it. A towel dispensed and the psychic tore it off, wiped his hands dry. It wasn’t until he was tossing the wadded-up towel into the trash that Brewer decided to let him live.

Your lucky day, pal. Good thing for you I don’t think you know shit.

By the time Brewer was out of the restroom, the psychic was passing through the security checkpoint. Brewer watched his back until he was out of sight, then went back to his car. He had a long drive ahead of him, through the night. He hated to be away from the old man for too long.

Who knew what the geezer might draw next?

EIGHT

From the air, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez looked like a single city bisected by the Rio Grande. Like Paris and the Seine, or London and the Thames, Wade thought. From the low point of the river’s concrete channel, buildings spread across the hills, reaching farther every time he flew in or out, it seemed, a quickly metastasizing cancer of urban sprawl.

Which, given that his main reason for coming was to see Byrd before leukemia finished him, might not have been the best analogy. Fortunately, he hadn’t spoken it out loud, and he could chastise himself mentally for it without embarrassing himself.

CNN had kicked in for a first-class seat home, and as much downtime as he needed. Wade understood the unspoken warning that he’d better not need more than a month or six weeks, including the holidays, since twenty-four-hour cable news waited for no man or woman, however damaged.

He could always find another job, though. He’d never find another Byrd McCall. Which meant he would stay right here as long as it took. It would be just fine with him if the war ended while he sat beside Byrd’s hospital bed. The days of captivity had been a bitch, no denying that, but over the long haul he thought the days of reporting on mass deaths—forty in a marketplace on one day, seventy at a police station the next, then thirty-four job seekers killed by a car bomb, American troops slaughtered by IEDs, and more, and more—wore on him even harder.

It was all part of the job. Adding to the stress, stateside politicians blamed the media for not reporting the good things that were happening: schools being opened, electricity being restored. That wasn’t the case, though. Wade longed for positive stories, if only to clear his palate of the shitstorm that was his daily life, and the daily life of virtually everyone else in Iraq. And yes, schools were being opened. Not as many as had closed, but that was partly because the population of school-age children had shrunk, what with refugees fleeing the country and more kids dying every week. As for electricity, it had been restored, which was better than no electricity at all. But even in Baghdad’s wealthiest districts, it was an on-again, off-again thing—a few hours a day at best.

As the plane dropped toward El Paso International, he felt the weight of war lift off his shoulders, as surely as if he were leaving it behind at thirty thousand feet. Another weight—the anxiety of facing a dying friend—was replacing it, but that he was willing to bear.

These last few days had been strange, almost as bizarre as the captivity itself. After being checked out at Ibn Sina hospital in Baghdad (some cracked ribs, two teeth gone, various bruises and lacerations), he had spent a day being debriefed by military intelligence officers. Based on his description, they had backtracked and found the bombed-out mosque, but the tunnels beneath it were empty, a colonel had told him unhappily, with no indication that they had been occupied anytime in the recent past. Wade wasn’t trying to keep any secrets, although he had glossed over the more unbelievable aspects of his escape, wanting more time to think over what had happened—and to convince himself that it wasn’t all in his head—before discussing those. Colonel Cox said that the neighborhood had been populated when the troops went in, which didn’t square with Wade’s experience. He suffered the colonel’s thinly veiled implications that he was hiding something, but he was glad to get on a plane.

His next stop was the American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where his injuries were looked at once more, and a new batch of intelligence officers took a shot at his story. He told it the same way, glossing over the weirdness. He spent a night there, then got on yet another airplane, bound for Atlanta and CNN headquarters.

At CNN, he received a hero’s welcome, with cameras rolling the whole time. The footage must have aired fifty times in the next twenty-four hours; every time he caught the channel, on a hotel set or in an airport, it seemed to come up again, like coleslaw that had sat in the sun too long at a Fourth of July picnic.

After dinner with some of the network’s top brass and a night in Atlanta, he finally got onto a flight for El Paso. He had taken several long, hot showers in the interim, but he hadn’t shaved; he wouldn’t be on camera for a good while, and it seemed like the right time for him to grow back the beard he’d had to hack off for his first television gig, all those years ago.

Because it promised decent gas mileage, Wade drove a rented Ford Focus straight from the airport to Providence Memorial Hospital, on Oregon Street. The hospital was a collection of yellowish tan buildings, several stories tall, just up the hill from UTEP. The neighborhood was full of medical facilities, so many that it seemed everyone on the streets must be either a sickie or a student.

Unlike the hospital in Germany, which had stank of disinfectant, or Baghdad’s, which reeked of blood and decay, Providence’s scent was clean and fresh. Even here, he was recognized and fussed over. While he hoped it wouldn’t be a regular occurrence, it did help him cut through the red tape and find out where Byrd’s private room was, in the Young Tower.

Byrd looked awful.

He smiled when Wade entered the room, but his gums were pink and raw, his face gaunt, as if it had begun to collapse in on itself. The skin was bruised and covered with sores. His formerly thick brown hair was gone, stolen away by chemotherapy. The scar across his left eyebrow stood out more than it used to, the damaged tissue there slick and white. He sat up in the bed, bracing himself on his right arm, which had lost its muscle tone, along with most of the fat, leaving behind loose, ruined flesh.

“I look swell, huh?” Byrd said as Wade regarded him. “You look good, though, under those bruises.” He stroked his chin. “Beard, too. I like.”

“Thanks, dude. You’ve looked better,” Wade admitted.

“I know. You want to see my peri-rectal abscess? I can’t get a good view of it myself, but I’m told it’s a beaut.”

“I’ll pass on that particular pleasure.” Wade crossed the room and leaned over the bed to embrace his friend. Byrd seemed almost weightless in his arms, as if he held a bundle of dry sticks instead of a man. “How’re you feeling?”

“You see how I look?”

“Yeah?” Wade released him and backed away a couple of steps. Byrd waved him toward a guest chair.

“That’s about how I feel. Pretty shitty, most of the time. The doctors do what they can, and the nurses. There’s this one nurse, a little Latina, yum. If you can stick around until shift change, I think you can meet her. Single, too.”

Wade lowered himself into the chair by feel, unable to tear his gaze from Byrd. “God, man, this is so…I can’t believe it. I just
can’t
.”

“Believe it, bro. Acute myelocytic leukemia, they call it. Came up out of nowhere, and the docs were amazed at how fast it progressed. Not exactly my definition of progress, but you know what I mean.”

“Right. You always were an odd one.”

“I am this time. A regular showpiece. They’ve had all sorts of visitors, doctors from all over the place, comin’ in to look at me. It’s comforting to be a visual aid for disease studies, let me tell you.”

Wade wasn’t sure how to approach his next question, so he just stepped right up to it. Journalistic instincts kicking in. “Do they know…?”

He couldn’t finish, but Byrd took it from there. “How much longer? No. Could be months or years, under normal conditions. I, of course, haven’t presented them with any normal conditions yet, and they don’t expect me to start anytime soon. In technical terms, my monocytes and granulocytes are fucked. They’re not maturing properly—”

“Well, that’s in character, at least.”

“Thanks. Pick on the sick guy. Anyway, my immature cells—they like to call them blasts, maybe so they’ll sound like they’re watchin’ an action flick instead of a bunch of microscopic gunk—affect my ability to create red blood cells and platelets, and interfere with…well, just about everything else my body has to do to keep goin’. It’s been a real learnin’ experience, bud. And a treat. Blood in my urine, shortness of breath, weight loss. What they call ‘abdominal fullness.’ Bone marrow transplants, now there’s a joyful time. Thank God for Molly…I’m sure bein’ a donor was no picnic either. And then there’s the chemo. And buyin’ clothes in the boy’s department because they don’t come skinny enough in men’s. You’ve really been missin’ out on the good stuff.” Byrd smiled again, a death’s-head grin that chilled Wade to the core. “But you didn’t come here to talk about my illness.”

“Actually, I did.”

“I heard you went missin’ in Iraq, though. That must have been interesting, at least. What happened?”

“I got kidnapped by insurgents, they smacked me around for a while, and then I got away. No big.”

“That’s not what CNN says.” Byrd indicated the TV mounted high on the wall. “You’ve been all over it. I told the nurses I knew you. Thought it might get me a hand job, but you know, no luck yet.”

“Juárez isn’t far away,” Wade said. “Can’t you take field trips?”

“I don’t know how much good it’d do, but I can go anywhere I want. It’s just a matter of stayin’ awake, out of pain—and in Juárez, I guess, of gettin’ it up.”

“You’re not taking my brother to some Mexican whorehouse, Scheiner.” Wade glanced up to see Molly walking in carrying a brown paper bag with the top folded over several times. “You want him to get syphilis or something?”

“Like that’s my biggest worry right now,” Byrd said with a dry chuckle.

Wade hadn’t seen Byrd in a couple of years, but it must have been eight or nine since he’d seen Molly. He had met Byrd for runs on various rivers, and a couple times Byrd had flown out to Atlanta or Washington, when he’d been living there. Escaping west Texas had, for him, been like escaping from the cell beneath the mosque, on a far grander scale. He had been in no hurry to return.

And Molly, who had been a lovely, grown-up college graduate the last time he had been to town, had matured even more in the intervening years. Her face had filled out a little, and a minute tracery of lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth hinted at plenty of laughter, and maybe some worry—living, anyway—in that time. Her hair was almost black, lustrous even this late in the day.

She dropped the sack onto the bed and opened her arms as Wade thrust himself out of the chair toward her. After Byrd, he was glad to hug someone who he wasn’t worried about snapping in two. Plus, she smelled better than her brother. Wade breathed in the aromas of shampoo and soap, lotion and sweat, all helping to dull the bitter, sharp stink of Byrd’s encroaching death. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, her face pressed against his collarbone.