Gps, p.28
Gps, page 28
By the time Cintron put the ball in play with a solid crack, Jeff’s attention had already steered away from the batter’s box again, down to the front row where a curvy blonde woman was trying to concentrate on the game while the two young girls flanking her on each side seemed bent on climbing all over their seats and each other.
Jeff watched the woman instead of the baseball, but even she could not take his mind off the desert. Seeing her raised another of his dozens of questions about the revolucion that he hadn’t gotten around to asking in his time there. Where were the women? Were there women, other than the apparent whores brought there by the Freemen? Did they plan on reproducing at some point? Perhaps the revolucion world frowned upon all of the vices of the traditional world, including the wonderful distraction of women. But more likely, the women and children had fled south with the rest of the nation, Jeff figured, as the FB constantly pushed them. He thought of the little girl in the picture and wondered if he would ever see that part of the war.
The deep burst of Cintron’s bat stopped his stream of thoughts. The sound made everyone in the stadium sit up and emit a simultaneous, “Ooh!” Jeff jerked his head up to see Cintron sprinting out of the box toward first base, watching the trajectory of a long line drive heading somewhere out toward the gap in left-center field.
“Get it daddy!” screamed one of the girls in the front row, now jumping up and down and squealing. Then Jeff stood, scanning the sky above the outfield and trying to find the ball. The Midland center fielder was sprinting almost directly toward the outfield wall, constantly peeking over his shoulder as he went. How strange it was that suddenly everyone Jeff scouted did something important in his presence, as though he was being constantly challenged to notice the same things all the other scouts noticed. It wasn’t going out of the park, Jeff thought to himself, but Cintron might be able to leg this into a triple, maybe even more than that if he was fast enough.
When Jeff caught sight of the descending baseball, his eyes shifted back to the center fielder’s relentless pursuit. He wondered if he was about to watch the guy plow right into the wall and kill himself. When the outfielder reached the warning track, and as the ball appeared destined to bounce at the base of the wall, the center fielder flung himself, glove outstretched, into the air.
He did a brutal belly-flop directly onto the red dirt of the track. He slid to a stop on his stomach, inches from the center field wall, and he did so with his glove raised in the air and the white flash of the baseball visible in its webbing, even from the 10th row behind home plate.
“Holy shit,” Jeff said aloud, thinking at once of the famous Willie Mays basket catch and thinking this one to be of equal standard. The small Midland crowd began shrieking with delight at the sight of the man and his triumphantly raised glove, still prone on the warning track. He stood up slowly and brushed himself off, the ball now in his throwing hand. He heaved it back to the infield and began trotting in from the farthest reach of the park toward the roars of approval coming from the tiny crowd.
Already past second base and aimed toward third on the play, Willy Cintron had stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the roar of the home crowd. He’d spun and looked into the outfield with a stunned expression on his face, joining every other person in the stadium in doing so. When he had seen the ball in the raised glove, Cintron tossed his batting helmet in disgust, sending it spinning across the infield. He peeled off his batting gloves and headed for the visitors dugout.
As the outfielder slowly came into view, trotting toward the apron of the infield, it was clear to Jeff he wasn’t the same center fielder who had started the game. Midland had made defensive changes heading into the top of the seventh, but the daydreaming man in the 10th row behind home plate hadn’t heard a word of them over the public address.
The two girls and the fine-looking blonde were still on their feet, cheering wildly as the RockHounds jogged off the field, many of the players slowing their pace in order to congratulate the center fielder as he made his steady trek toward the home dugout. Jeff was stiff with unexpected excitement, the first baseball-related thrill he had since Ascondo’s triple for the St. Lucie Mets. Before that, it had been years.
He thought of Nifty Carlson’s message from the other day, the one he of course hadn’t answered yet. Was it Simpson he’d said, the stud Midland center fielder, perhaps? Jeff wanted to get a glimpse of this magnificent outfielder, put a name to a face and ponder why he didn’t already know who this was. The outfielder crossed second base on a steady jaunt inward, exchanging baseball glove high-fives with a couple of teammates as he jogged.
Jeff stopped breathing when the man trotted up and over the pitcher’s mound and looked up toward the seats behind home plate, his face coming into full view beneath the brim of his hat. The man smiled and winked toward the woman and the young girls in the front row, who again squealed their approval. When the man’s eyes shifted upward, however, the smile vanished and his lips separated slowly. His mouth fell open and his jog slowed to a walk, sending some of his teammates running clumsily right past him.
The man locked eyes with Jeff long enough to make the woman in the front row, and the two little girls, spin around and look at Jeff too. The man tore his eyes away and hurried into the dugout with his head aimed directly at the ground.
Jeff never sat back down. He walked to the end of his row, scaled the stadium steps and practically sprinted into the parking lot. He got into his car and drove all night back to New Orleans with both the GPS and his cell phone turned off.
It was Josh Simmons.
PART IV
“Some guys are admired for coming to play, as the saying goes. I prefer those who come to kill.” — Leo Durocher
- 45 -
David Hawkins thought about the impending return of Jeff Delaney to the transient army, and it made him even further pissed, even more determined to take his stand the first chance he got.
Delaney’s presence would just push him further down the totem pole, further into obscurity. And what did it matter? There was no status worth fighting for here, no honor in this God forsaken place. He’d tried that route already and failed, failed big time. Riding alone on the bed of a pickup truck in the middle of the nighttime chill, the blackness drove into Hawkins. He couldn’t sleep and couldn’t see two feet in front of him, so he instinctively began to stew in hopeless anger about his potential end result in life.
The journey had barely begun. Something had to change, but now he had something. It was still so new he had to keep reminding himself. He just had to wait. Before now, he’d always reached the same conclusion — if he could just end things on his own, he would be free from this place. But for some reason, despite all the bloodshed he’d witnessed on a daily basis in the fighting, Hawkins could not force himself to take his own life. He knew that now, and normally that would have just added to the hopelessness of it all, but now he’d seen a flash of hope, the first and only one he’d seen in better than a year.
Countless nights he had sat up alone, volunteering for watch duty, hoping the will to end it would finally consume him. He would use the pistol he always kept strapped to his side, or maybe even the mostly unused rifle he’d been issued somehow, and get it over with before he gave himself the choice not to. But night after night he couldn’t do it, and in fact had never even brought himself to hold a loaded gun anywhere near his face.
He couldn’t have explained it, and had no one to explain it to, but somewhere between a brain that wanted to do it — told him to do it — and the finger on the trigger, the message got interrupted. Suicide had seemed the only means of ending the cursed life he’d otherwise spend here. He’d refused in the first month to even believe any of it was real. And until a little over a week ago, he hadn’t spent a single second here doing anything but hoping to find some way back out, or hoping to die. It had been mostly the latter because on the same night he arrived he’d lost almost all hope of ever leaving.
There was no honor or courage or fun about anything going on here, and he was as certain of that now as he was that first night. Even when he’d had what he thought was a moment of purpose, a moment when he believed in destiny and that being stuck here was, in fact, his destiny, it was a fleeting one.
The part-time car thief, full-time video game, cocaine and pill junkie had momentarily believed that his uncanny memory, sense of direction and untapped marksman skill would create a new life for him here. But he was informed quickly, about as quickly as he’d been informed he was stuck over here forever, that he wasn’t going to serve any purpose here beyond dying as a foot soldier in a war no one would win. When it came to the big hit on Destinoso, Hawkins was a hose man — one of the expendable goons charged with siphoning the gas out of all the FB trucks. In other words, he would either be one of the first ones engulfed in flames or one of the first ones downed in a hail of FB bullets. In Hawkins’ mind, neither of those would have been bad at all if he didn’t know what he now thought he knew.
He hated every minute of the war, hated the non-stop cat-and-mouse fighting and didn’t accept Paulo or any of the others as people with even a shred of sanity. They didn’t understand him and they didn’t trust him. They also didn’t like him. Funny, Fonseca didn’t trust Delaney one bit either, yet he fawned over him constantly.
The desert had done nothing for Hawkins except kick his addictions, and that was little more than what he would have gotten out of a prison sentence, he figured. People like Delaney got this crazed look in their eyes when they came to this place, like they were high on the idea of killing without consequence, and that only confirmed they were well on their way to crazy before they ever left home. Hawkins wanted no part of fighting for his life every day, so much so he spent all these months praying for death instead.
Though he’d ultimately accepted that he wasn’t ever going to develop the courage to do himself in, he had constantly hoped to get killed some other way — gunned down in an ambush or even run over at random by some new arrival in a full-size pickup. But it just didn’t happen. Hawkins had outlived all but the highest ranking guys in the entire transient division.
Until now, the night of the ambush on the ranch was the night he had expected he would finally die. But now he had a plan to live instead. It was a desperate one, cowardly even, but he believed it would take just that kind of a crazy act to counterpunch the bullshit testosterone which fueled this world.
For the last week or so, Hawkins had been contemplating. Out of nowhere, something had come to him while he was driving to the old stadium for training, a possible answer to it all. The only possible answer to it all. It was a guaranteed ending, a way to get out or get killed once and for all, and it would be done on his own terms, which was more than could be said for dying as one of Paulo’s unwilling pawns.
So now, when the others figured Hawkins was pouting, he was actually plotting, biding his time. He rode farther and farther into the nothingness toward Old Victoria, knowing a chance to take his life back was looming out there somewhere in the distance.
- 46 -
Hawkins’ path here had been quick and, he was told, permanent. He’d never gotten the chance the others out here did to just stroll on home after a couple of days, let it all sink in and then just start coming back on weekends like it was a beach house.
If this was the final chapter in his pathetic life, he wanted it to be just as quick as his extraction from reality into hell. Even if the plan amounted to nothing more than “running off and eating a bullet” like Paulo always said Hawkins would, that was better than the day-to-day struggle of packing, moving, shooting, ducking, running, climbing mountains, trudging across deserts and generally starving to death.
Hawkins believed that no one like him had ever run off before, and Paulo thought he was exactly like everyone else who had. Even with the damage Hawkins had done to his brain in the last 10 years, he thought no line of cocaine could rob him of his capacity to think under pressure, or at least he wanted to think that. In truth, he’d never faced any pressure in his entire life before coming here. Nothing, that is, beyond getting hopped up and stealing a car or two out of a parking garage and maybe a few from the malls and a couple more from the college.
He could survive out there in the cliffs and on the desert plain, he truly believed that and always had. From the minute he arrived here, he’d been pondering escape possibilities, despite the assurance from others that for him, there could be no escape.
It had begun with the most obvious plan of just running off so he could at least be alone. He couldn’t stand the transients and would rather have lived or died alone than with them. For a while, he thought that maybe he’d be able to make his way north and east, skirt the FB somehow and get back across the border to see what the world looked like up there in this time and version of it. He thought maybe he’d get back to Pennsylvania and see if anything was still the same, see who was alive and who wasn’t. But the longer he’d been here, the more he understood that would be impossible.
He’d even tried to get back over as a stowaway. About three weeks into his misery in the revolucion, Hawkins had hidden himself behind the seats of Rico’s pickup truck while he was supposed to be standing watch. Earlier in the day, he’d overheard Rico telling Paulo he was heading back home that night to get some pain pills for his back. Hawkins thought it was as simple as just not being seen and going along for the ride.
But for some reason, the GPS wouldn’t take Rico or Hawkins across that night, causing Rico to totally flip out. He yelled and screamed and opened and slammed the truck doors until he spied the unusually large mass beneath his blanket behind the seats. Rico was so pissed when he discovered it was Hawkins, he’d pulled his knife on the kid and chased him with it. For whatever reason, traveling back and forth with the GPS was a one-man show. There wouldn’t be any families or brothers or best friends or father-and-son tandems coming across together, so hitching back across was out.
But now, Hawkins had a much more daring, much more sinister plan for escape. It was a way to get back to the real world and to never have to see this place again. And it was absolutely perfect. It was a plan that would not only get him out of here, but also prove that he had figured out something the other idiots had not. It was a very simple concept, and all it required was for him to murder someone, then take command of their vehicle and the GPS inside it. Take out whoever needs taking out and wave bye-bye. If anyone deserved a pass out, it was him.
Through the entire ordeal, the thing he never got to tell anyone, the part that never got tried in any district court, was this: Hawkins would have begged for jail time if he’d known this was the alternative. He wasn’t cut out for jail either, perhaps, but he most certainly wasn’t fit for this life.
The transient convoy crawled along into the night, and as it went, the familiar, painful home movies again began playing in the mind of Hawkins.
- 47 -
For the 12th time, at least in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, that was, David Hawkins had promised himself that night, now much more than a year ago, that this would be the last car he’d ever steal. He’d made himself that same promise as he sat behind the wheel of each and every car he’d ever stolen before that.
He’d crept up to the black Cadillac Escalade in a poorly lit liquor store parking lot in Newcastle. He was not even certain it was a car he wanted to steal or even if it was empty of all of its passengers. But it was left running and looked vacant. And when he spied the giant GPS glowing on the windshield, looked through the liquor store window and saw the scene starting to unfold within, he just couldn’t resist.
He flung the truck’s door open, climbed inside and then promised himself he would only go far enough around the corner to yank the GPS off the windshield, fish around for some loose change, CDs, pot, coke, whatever he could grab, and abandon the thing right there and run the 10 or so blocks back home. He didn’t need to go down for grand theft auto after all he’d gotten away with already.
But he did need money. Man, did he need money. And he was already inside. So maybe just this one last one. Petey would pay some serious loot for an Escalade with rims and a sound system and a GPS. The Escalade’s owner and passenger were robbing the liquor store at the moment and were a little preoccupied, making his path out a little more certain.
What Hawkins didn’t know was that the little red button behind the liquor store’s counter had been pressed two minutes before, as he arrived on foot walking home from Bennie’s Tavern and spotted the SUV. The first-time robbers inside the store had spent a good deal of time trying to establish to the store clerk that they were serious, that the guns were real, and apparently the clerk had brandished his own, seriously-real gun.
The shots which rang out the second Hawkins slammed the truck into drive and hit the gas made him grit his teeth, duck his head and put the pedal to the floor. There was no time to consider whether or not the shots were coming at him, but as he stole a terrified glance across the parking lot and steered the Escalade toward the alley, he caught a glimpse of one of the two robbers on the floor inside the store, apparently shot by the clerk.
No one seemed to be looking at him from inside, so he kept the pedal slammed and squealed into the narrow alley in what suddenly seemed a Godzilla-sized SUV. As he did, he noticed the GPS on the windshield blinking on and off, malfunctioning in some way.
The big, colorful screen now was displaying the word REPROGRAMMING, with a little percentage bar running along the bottom. It was only at 12 percent, then 13, then 14. Hawkins wondered if he’d set off some sort of security device when he jumped in the car. But then the line zipped right across to 100 percent, the screen went blank for a second and then flashed back on in blinding blue light.
