Juan smiled. He had a warm smile. If it had been any warmer, he could have toasted bread with it. “De nada. Anyway, I had a plan. If some ISA types pulled us over, I’d have taken a pistol from under my seat, shot you dead, then claimed you kidnapped me and I took the weapon away from you.”
I did not know what to say to that, so I said, “Huh.”
Juan’s smile became a wide grin. His grin was so wide that it made me think of a jack-o’-lantern. “I’m joking, Quinn. I like you too much to ever shoot you. But I wish you weren’t so clueless.”
Dismayed, I said, “‘Clueless’ is kind of harsh.”
“Not really. I like you too much to sugarcoat it. Get your shit together, amigo. But keep your sense of humor or you’ll go insane, like so many seem to have done these days.”
Opening the door, I said, “I will. I’ll get my shit together.”
“Another thing. You have a smartphone?”
I withdrew it from a jacket pocket. “Apple. You want me to stay in touch?”
“Not really. I want you to stomp hard on that phone and drop it in the nearest storm drain. It’s got GPS. They can track you as long as you carry it.”
“But I’ve got all these apps. I’ve got weather and maps and podcasts.”
“You want to survive, you’ve got to be totally street from here on, Quinn.” He held out his cell phone. “It’s a burner, disposable. Nothing fancy. I didn’t use my name when I activated it.”
“I can’t take your phone,” I said.
He threw it at me, and I caught it. “And one more thing, amigo. You know about three-hundred-sixty-degree license-plate scanners?”
“Should I get one?”
He snorted in a prayerful sort of way and rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, protect this boy. Quinn, every police car and a lot of other government vehicles are equipped with scanners that record license plates all around them and transmit in real time to the National Security Agency’s million-square-foot data center in Utah. You’ll be scanned half a dozen times before you’re out of this city. If they want you as bad as you say they want you, they’ll be alerted every time you’re scanned, and they’ll track you down sooner than later.”
“How do you know that?”
“How could I not? It’s the kind of thing everyone needs to know in the new America.”
“So I should take the plate off my car?”
“That would be a start.”
As traffic whooshed past, sunshine flaring off the windshields, I got out of the van and looked in at him. “What if a cop stops me because I don’t have a plate?”
“Then you’re a burnt burrito. Still sure you don’t want to take a trip to Mexico?”
“No, I’ve got to stay here and clear my name. This is all some terrible mistake.”
After a snort of exasperation, Juan said, “Vaya con Dios.”
“You too,” I said, and closed the door.
As he drove off, I stood there in the searing sun, feeling small and alone. My shadow seemed to be straining to get away, as though it didn’t want to end up in a coffin with the rest of me.
A Ford F-150 crew cab cruised toward me, bulging tarps full of landscape clippings swelling like bulbous mushrooms in its open bed. Rather than draw attention to myself by stomping on my smartphone in a fit of Rumpelstiltskin rage, I tossed it among those tarps so that the ISA might chase it around Phoenix for a while.
|?4?|
The cavernous garage offered an elevator and enclosed stairs, but both felt like traps. The vehicle ramps were two lanes wide, two per floor. I walked up to the long-term parking on the sixth level.
In those days, I never felt safe in a huge public parking structure. I wasn’t concerned about motorists who drove too fast, though some seemed to think they were on a slot-racing track. The massive supporting columns would prevent the ceiling from collapsing on me, so I didn’t worry about being crushed in rubble. Muggers rarely worked these buildings, for there weren’t enough routes by which to make a quick exit. However, such garages always struck me as eerie, especially when I got to the less busy higher floors. Maybe vent fans produced the faint whispery sounds that suggested gremlins conspiring under the vehicles as they watched my feet move past. Maybe the lack of natural light and the granite-gray concrete and the silent cars lined up like rows of coffins inspired thoughts of death. Sometimes I felt that I was on the brink of an encounter with something otherworldly, perhaps a tribe of pale, feral children with smoky eyes and sharp teeth, the big-city twenty-first-century equivalent of the boys from that island in Lord of the Flies.