A young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
No one was really rattled. Not beyond the basic tension required to carry out their work. It was dark and hot, especially with their helmets and bulletproof vests on, and sometimes the armored truck tripped over occasional bumps that made someone mumble a curse. But no one addressed anyone. They all knew that breaking the ice would also break their concentration prior to them risking their lives. So, if someone dared to break the silence, the reason had to be worth it.
"Gentlemen, we have some news," the driver reported through the internal loudspeakers. "I'm being told smoke is coming out of Landau's. Looks like arson. Firefighters have already been called, so you're on the clock."
The leader of the group took the microphone.
"Then forget about parking two blocks away. The assailant must be gone already. Get to the entrance and wait for us. We'll be done before they're here."
The sudden cutting out of the PA system's signal indicated the driver's consent. In less than a minute, the van was in front of Landau's house, the SWAT team emerging before the furtive glances of neighbors watching in fear from their locked windows. They could only see a corpse bled out halfway along the garden path that connected the entry with the sidewalk. More blood stains highlighted the glazed ceramic tiles under the threshold of the closed entrance door, and a thin dioxide mist slid off the billowing plume that crowned the house. The leader ordered some men to talk to the neighbors and get the details while he and the rest of the team kicked the door down and broke into the place without mercy.
They had a direct view of the dining room and the kitchen a few yards beyond. Also visible were the stairs, where a light emanating from the upper floor dyed the smoke-blackened walls and ceilings gold. The subordinates went to investigate the rooms on the ground floor while the leader rushed to the top. The fire came from just one room, its light crossing the threshold of the half-opened door and mingling with the smoke to seemingly solidify its beams in graceful and unstable lines of gold in the air. As he broke through the fog towards the light, the heat compressed his eyes and chest evermore, and the creaking and crackling beyond the threshold confirmed what he already suspected: that was Landau's office, and whoever did this wanted to destroy evidence. A bloody ball of fire welcomed him upon entering, as Satan does to infidels, and it made him step back instantly. There was hardly anything recognizable left in that room other than a second corpse on the ground being devoured by the flames. He soon acknowledged that it was too late.
"Boss," the radio addressed him from his pocket. "Boss, do you copy?"
"What's going on?"
"We got some witnesses."
"Go on."
"They say they heard a gunshot inside the house, and a neighbor came over with a gun. Then the hooded killer came out with a gun, and there was a shootout."
"And the dead outside is the neighbor."
"Yeah, but it seems the killer has also been injured, and the blood at the door is his."
"OK. I'll take samples. Anything else?"
"I'm being told that, after that, the killer came out with a backpack and Landau's dog, got in a car, and drove off."
"All right."
"And one more thing. The firefighters will be here in about seven minutes."
"Well then, tell the folks to get in the van now. The killer has set fire to the house to erase God knows what kind of evidence. I repeat. Those of you who are outside, get in the van and wait for us. Understood?"
"Yes, boss."
The leader turned around and hurried to the first floor, where the rest of the team was checking room by room.
"Heads up, everyone, change of plans. You, collect some blood samples from the door, and then clean it up. The rest, help me set what's left of the house on fire before the firefighters come. Three minutes tops."
They finished much earlier than expected. Within two minutes, they'd taken samples, cleaned the blood, and surrendered the house to the flames. And then they vanished, as if they had never even been there.
*****
Half her body was inside the bathtub, puddled in blood and sweat that slid down her forehead to the tip of her nose. Diazepam barely took the edge off as she tried to keep the needle in her right hand still so she could stitch her left arm properly. The bullet had ripped through her biceps and come out cleanly from her triceps and, to her surprise, she had felt nothing, as though the injury had been foreign to her. She only had to worry about dizziness from blood loss as she pondered her next move in the random motel where she was hiding.
She held the needle poised to re-enter her skin when the enormous Caucasian Sheperd barked his thunderous rage again, just as his ancestors did to scare wolves away from herds in Eurasian lands. But the cur did not bark to intimidate. The animal cried. He cried in anger, for he had smelled the smoke in the house, and he knew the fire was devouring his and his master's lair. This motel didn't accept animals, though, and especially not ones that looked like a genetic link between a Saint Bernard and a lion, so she hurried to suture the two wounds and disinfect them with a small bottle of vodka she had taken from the minibar. After wiping the blood and alcohol off her arm with toilet paper, she folded two strips to act as dressings before rolling the makeshift bandages around her arm. Only at that point did she allow herself to lie back and calm down, imbued with an almost catatonic state from the bizarre mixture of fatigue after burning off all her adrenaline in the getaway, dizziness caused by blood loss, and stress derived from the burn of the alcohol bleeding through the wounds. She no longer had the strength to cry. Instead, she focused on inhaling and exhaling, restraining the ragged pace of each breath so she didn't hyperventilate.
Perhaps she spent a minute in that state. Maybe an hour. What she knew for certain was that she would have fallen asleep had it not been for the constant barking of the beast behind the door. She finally stood and left the bathroom to try to calm the animal.
"Come on, boy, calm down. Just this time."
She tried to buy his silence with the warmest caresses and sincerest hugs, and in turn, he whined with a sound reminiscent of a knife sharpening. He could have killed her right then and there had he not known who she was, but he looked into her eyes with his human gaze, and then he realized it was useless to shout. So, he fell silent, only that one time and only because it was her, and she thanked him with a kiss on his forehead. She then stood up, took a sip of her water bottle, opened the backpack, and dropped the letters and magazines all over the mattress, scattering them with her hands and questioning whether there were enough. She had been asking that since she got away from the house. But there was no longer time for that, she decided, sorting through the papers one by one. Then she discovered a lump between the bundles. It was a tattered doll with the semblance of a red egg, a worn-out Daruma doll, watching her with his only weathered pupil. She thought it was time to draw the other one in its left eye, as a sign of an objective completed, but then she felt a shudder, as if the figure symbolized a dark parallelism. She decided instead to keep it in her jacket pocket, along with the Zippo Colt had given to her, and then she looked back at the documents with the odd certainty that, sealed in and amongst the data, lay hidden their immediate future. And with it, the chance to see Skyler Landau again.
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