Chapter 32

Table of Contents

Cut und run.  The time had come.

The desert had grown deadly.  The heat had boiled the Gadsden Purchase to the point of spontaneous combustion.  From its lonely outpost between the Perseus and Orion belts of the Milky Way, the sun had looked down upon Michael Gasden scornfully, and meted out punishment, castigating him for his hubris in believing he could tame a place that had never been tamed. 

In the course of its untamable history, the raiding and marauding Indian bands here had been supplanted by outlaws. One form of lawlessness had only been replaced by another form of lawlessness, and this would go on as long as there was a stain on the map called the Gadsden Purchase.  Cut und run. Sure Mike could try, but he could only slice, he could never sever the umbilical that connected him to this steaming cesspool of brigands and outcasts.  You could run, but you could not cut.

Mike had upset the precarious balance of power that the place perched precariously upon, and it was clear that his defiance of the hierarchy would also be precarious, and have dire consequences.  He could see now that the Gadsden Purchase was divided up into fiefdoms, parceled out among different Lords.  You paid one or you paid another for protection, but you always paid somebody.  Mike had refused to hand over his tribute, and the penalty was either death or exile.  He had to pursue the latter before the former got him.

The final impetus for his decision of hasty, headlong flight was a phone call he had received from the Earl, just minutes earlier.  In his typical stiff upper lip, cheerio there's a good fellow style, the Earl had informed him of the roadblock outside Tombstone. He told Mike about those dangerous looking desperados, one wearing an enormous hat of John Wayne proportions who bore have you seen me leaflets with the likeness of the Little Fucker.  The Earl had inadvertently let it slip to the man in the hat that he had seen the boy, and told him where. So now Mike was sandwiched between the wrath of the Freedom Frontiersmen on one side, and the thuggery of Danny Valero on the other.  All of this spelled cut und run, in any language, or combinations thereof.

Mike's first reaction to the Earl's news was to ask himself why the FF would be looking for Little F.  Then it at last occurred to him, that aggravating buzzing fly of a thought he had not been able to snatch from the air. He knew what that human sized rolled taco he had seen in the back of one of the FF trucks was, the tarp that clearly belonged to Tony because of the shape and nature of its peculiar stains, wrapped around some heavy, bulky filler.  Holy crap it made sense!  Tony's fingerprints, as well as his unique genetic signature imprinted by certain bodily fluids, were all over that tarp.  That was why the police had tagged him as the killer of Little F's Mom.  They couldn't know that Eric and the FF had stolen the tarp out of the back of Mike's truck and used it to wrap up the victim, probably with the express idea of framing Tony for the crime.  Now the FF was looking for Little F because they feared the boy might be able to tag them as the killers.

This realization clinched Mike's decision.  If he didn't give a shit about his own safety, if he was willing to stay put and hold back Danny Valero, armed only with his extended middle finger, he couldn't exercise such folly where the safety of the boy was concerned.  The only remedy was the Herr's prescription to cut und run.   But therein lay the rub of where to cut und run to.

Going home was out of the question.  If Danny Valero was to be believed, Agent Smith and his sunglassed cronies were on his ass.  As such, home offered no sanctuary, and he didn't want to get his Dad involved in this shit anyway, more than he already was.

Flight to anywhere in the continental United States was probably also unadvisable.  Mike had the feeling that Agent Smith could see a long way through those shades.  Furthermore, Mike had pissed off the President.  However wrong the accusation may be, assaulting the Chief Executive was not something you could just hide from in Podunk, Iowa. Isolated as it was, most of the children of the corn there were probably Trumpsters who would not hide him.

The only solution was Mexico.  The Mexican government might be sympathetic to someone suspected of running afoul of a person, one Donald J. Trump, who was generally hated by the population.  Maybe they wouldn't officially give him asylum, but maybe they wouldn't go out of their way to track him down, either.  Furthermore, the inept, disorganized bureaucracy of a third world country would probably not be too efficient about investigating his custody of Little F.  If necessary, he could probably bribe a few officials.  Then, when he ran out of cash, his Dad could bring him more. 

The real problem with this plan was evading any cartel connections Danny might have in Mexico. But if that danger emerged, he could skip to another Latin American country, buying false passports for he and Little F if need be.  The part of this plan that made him happy was that he and Little F would be together.  There was no longer the specter of a New Jersey aunt to threaten their bond.

He loved the Little Fucker now.  He didn't have a problem admitting that to himself anymore.  It had been a long road from hating children and never wanting any in his life, to not wanting to live his life without this little waif who had crawled in from the desert.  The kid was family.  Biology had not forged their ties, but the desert heat had seared the weld that held them together. Such a connection could not be ripped asunder without an irresistible force acting upon it.

So the plan now was to flee that irresistible force.  With Little F holding Mike's hand, and lovingly clutching his Osama action figure to his chest with the other, the unlikely pair went into the office of the soon to be abandoned Gasden Motel.  What would become of the place? - Mike considered sadly.  He had spent a lot of time, energy and money fixing it up, turning a shithole into a beacon of comfort in the dreary desert.  Now he was abandoning the property to the forces of erosion.  Wind, sun, and human malice would soon wipe it from the face of the planet.  He looked up apologetically at his cherub-faced forebear, the haughty James Gadsden, hanging on the lobby wall.   "I tried," Mike told him.  It was not to be.

Black duffel bag in hand, Mike opened the safe and began emptying his squirreled-away cash from it.  When he was finished, all that remained there was the sealed envelope from the Herr to Tony.

Shit.  How important could that be, Mike wondered.

Mike didn't know if he would ever see Tony Vargas, or anybody else in Cornudo ever again.  If he left this letter here and it turned out to be a matter of life and death, he would be the one responsible.  A dark cloud of that good old Gasden guilt came over him.  The Gasden guilt could be deadly, he knew, but he couldn't help it.

After a spell of figurative hand wringing, Mike figured out how to appease his nagging conscience.  He would leave the letter with Linda at the cafe, with instructions to give it to Tony when he came back, which he was bound to do sooner or later.  As such, Mike would wash his hands of it.  Then he could wash the Cornudo dust off his body just as soon as he and Little F got to a safe spot. 

He had been played for a fool by everyone in this town.  First Tony had duped him into free rent by claiming he was the caretaker.  Then the Freedom Frontiersmen had duped him into free lodging by playing on the heartstrings of his patriotism.  Then Danny Valero had played him into hacking creeps on the dark web by playing on his sense of righteous indignation.  Finally, and most painfully, he had been tricked into falling in love with a tainted but beautiful women who played on his sense of loneliness and abandonment.  He didn't trust anybody here, anymore.  He couldn't wait to get out, now that he thought about it.  But first, he had this one last quick job to do.  Who would play him in the meantime, he wondered with a laugh.

Mike threw the duffel bag back into the safe, and shut the door.  "Fucker, hide!" he ordered.

"Fucker, hide!" the tyke responded with a crisp salute. Mike then smuggled him in the cleaning cart to the shelter of the critter room. Then he took the Herr's letter and crossed the asphalt to the Cornudo Café for the last time.

The Cornudo Café was in its usual state of post lunch torpor.  Like everything else in the desert, it estivated after gorging, conserving energy for prolonged periods of unfavorable environmental conditions.  Linda was literally snoozing, flat on her back on the front counter, but when she heard Mike she flopped to life, wriggling upward like a lungfish after years immersed in sand.

"I'm glad to see you, my little Zagnut" she said.  "And it has nothing to do with my cougar fantasies this time."

Zagnut? What the hell was Zagnut? Mike tried to crack a courtesy smile.  He couldn't help but feel sad that he may never see Linda again.  Most of the time she had been really sweet to him, but like with everyone else in the Gadsden Purchase, Mike just assumed she was playing him too.  Mike intended to keep this short, so as not to be hypnotized.  "I came to ask you a favor," he said.

"Good, because I need a favor too.  Since you don't want to swap bodily fluids, we can swap favors."

They stood there staring at each other for a moment, Mike hypnotized despite himself by her lovely, ageless eyes.  "You go first," Linda said.

It look Mike a minute to remember why he was here.  Linda had that effect on people, without trying.  Her magnetism was much stronger when she was 30, at the height of her powers, but even at 50 she could still snare men with her spell.  Mike had to command himself to focus.

"I'm going out of town for a few days," he said, handing her the letter.  "Tony might drop by and this is an important letter for him, from Herr Müeller."

Linda raised her lovely eyebrows.  "Josef?  What a sweetheart.  I miss him.  How is he?"

"He's doing good," Mike said.  "He's writing a book."

"He's finally writing that old book of his?  Good for him.  I sure will give this to Tony, butter cookie, but why didn't you just leave it in the critter room?"

"It's kind of cluttered," said Mike.  "He might not see it.  The kid has his little papers all over the place and he is very protective of them."

"I hear that.  Is it my turn for a favor?"

A bittersweet part of Mike's life was ending.  He would never again be called a Zagnut, a butter cookie, or any kind of empty calorie, sugary confection. Normally Mike was not a nostalgic guy.  He had done many a complete cut und run before and never looked back.  But butter cookie?  That was painful.  "Yeah, go ahead."

"Max's computer is busted again.  I know that doesn't sound like an emergency, but it's an emergency.  I wouldn't ask you to help if it wasn't an emergency.  If he can't take the edge off with his porn he gets really cranky.  When he gets cranky he can't concentrate on his work.  When he can't concentrate on his work customers get burned bacon and lumpy grits.  His bad attitude is going to put us out of business if somebody don't do something quick."

Mike looked back longingly toward his motel.  He tried to mentally calculate the driving time between here and Tombstone, but for a computer science guy who had been forced to take calculus and beyond, he sucked at math.  He really should beg out of this.  Little F was in danger and shouldn't be left alone.  But Linda looked so desperate, and Mike was thinking about the time she had hooked them up with a doctor in Yuma.  Did Max's inability to satisfy his porn addiction constitute a similar medical emergency?  Mike supposed this was a matter of perspective, and he was no doctor to be judging the medical merits of people's warped fetishes.  Besides, how hard could it be?  There was probably just a tiny corrupted file that had to be flushed out.  He could fix it in 15 minutes and be on his way.

Max's computer turned out to be a veritable cesspool of buffer overflow, registry errors, and deleted processes.  Mike immediately ascertained that the source of Max's woes were the hundreds, possibly thousands of files that progressively got worse in degree of sleaziness.  There were videos of women doing things with eels and other aquatic animals.  There were odd acts with livestock and family pets.  There were bodily fluids being used in ways that Mike had not thought possible.  Mike was no Puritan by any stretch, but there were things here that no human eyeball, or even the eyeballs of the goldfish swimming in the bowl next to the computer, should be subjected to.

A tormented Max had known that Mike was going to find weird stuff, and in shame he had locked himself in the bathroom, from where Linda was trying to coax him out.  "It's okay honey," she said softly through the door.  "He's a computer guy.  He's seen everything."

Mike nodded in solidarity from behind the corrupted computer - no, defiled would be a better word,  but in truth there were abominations here he had never seen, or even thought possible.

"Can you fix it?" Linda asked with the gravity of someone asking the odds of her 90 year old mother surviving heart surgery.

"Oh yeah," Mike said confidently, "it's just a little more complicated than I thought."

Meanwhile, as Mike Gasden furrowed his brow, then dug and uprooted and sterilized, falling into that zone from which the only return is a hard drive made spotless by a hacker's sweat, the shadows lengthened over the forgotten Gasden Motel.

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Photo by Vegas Scorpion via Wikimedia Commons