Free Man Down by Roger Smith Page B

top and faded blue jeans, listlessly puffing on a cigarette as she watched a little black dog squirt piss at the wall of the motel.
    “What’s wrong?” Turner asked.
    “Nothing’s wrong.”
    “Then what do you want with me?”
    “Just to let you know you’ve got a guardian angel watching over you.”
    “How did you find me?”
    Bekker laughed.
    “You left footprints, Englishman. Listen, I can’t talk for long—places to go, people to see, wah, wah, wah. Keep the phone charged. Anything happens that’s of, shall we say, mutual interest, you dial the number that’s in the memory. Yeah?”
    “Wait.”
    But Bekker was gone and Turner was left watching the woman walking away with her dog down the sun-seared road that seemed to him way more sad than miraculous.
    Maybe you’d had to be there in the fifties.
    He drove home, eyes on his rearview, even though he knew that if Bekker followed him he’d never allow himself to be spotted.
    Turner had dumped the phone in the shoe box in the back of his closet and, over time, he’d thought less frequently of it and of Chris Bekker.
    Until last night.
    Now he was heading toward the Mexican border, as Bekker had instructed during their brief conversation, telling Turner to leave Tucson at 10 a.m. and drive south and wait for his call .
    As he drove Turner checked his mirrors, seeing a scatter of pick-up trucks, semis and SUVs.
    He clicked on the radio and found himself plunged headlong into a talk show. The strident, hectoring voices of the callers, gabbling about cartels and coyotes and illegals had Turner changing channels.
    After a blast of static the cabin of the car was filled with thumping reggaetón—Latinos chanting hoarsely about gasolina. He guessed the song was an anthem to sex but it prompted an unwelcome image: the Lexus, with Turner still strapped behind the wheel, ablaze on a vast creosote pan, oily black smoke staining the bleached sky where vultures circled like twists of burned paper.
    As Turner killed the radio the phone rang.
    Despite the blasting air-conditioner he was sweating and the phone skidded away from his damp fingers, falling to the floor beneath the dashboard. Leaning forward to grab it Turner drifted into the next lane, earning a blaring horn and a raised middle finger from a chunky woman crammed into a Japanese hatchback.
    Over-correcting the drift too vigorously, Turner brought the cell to his ear and it smacked against the arm of his Aviators, leaving the sunglasses askew on his nose.
    “Yes?”
    “Take the next exit,” Bekker said, “then turn left. After a few clicks the blacktop gives way to dirt. Keep going until I call again. Got that?”
    “Yes.”
    Turner followed Bekker’s directions and when the asphalt ran out a dust cloud pursued the Lexus into a ragged landscape where only the occasional tuft of brush and the ever-present looming saguaro broke the endless expanse of sand and stone, small rocks pelleting the underside of the car.
    Even though the windows were closed Turner tasted dust in his mouth, like the dry vestiges of the communion wafer—his mother a sometime Catholic—that he’d been forced to eat when he’d been bribed with comic books to attend Sunday mass on rare visits to the city.
    When 110 degrees Fahrenheit clicked up on the Lexus’s dash display, Turner realized that he was powerfully thirsty and he’d forgotten to bring water.
    “How could you be so fucking dumb?” he said out loud.
    And he heard Tanya’s determinedly South African voice correcting Lucy: “You mean stupid . We say stupid. They say dumb.”
    Constantly hectoring the child, berating her, in a futile attempt to quarantine her from any taint of Americanization.
    The sun glinted off something in the distance and Turner, squinting, realized it was the tail of jet plane, rising from the sand.
    When he spotted a tube of mangled fuselage with one sheared wing sprawled in the dust like a broken bird he thought he’d stumbled across some