JIMMY ARDMORE’S FIVE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR DRIVE FROM YUMA TO Road Forks had been uneventful, but it seemed to take forever. The headache was a killer and still pounding away. He got to his double-wide in midafternoon. He had planned on walking over to the café and having a bite to eat, but he felt too punk. Instead he went into the house and flopped down on the bed. Rather than simply rest for a while, he fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up, it was dark outside.
With a couple of nosy neighbors around, Jimmy needed the cover of darkness to transfer the dog food and toilet paper from his big truck into the smaller one, a beefy RAM 3500. He was surprised to find that moving even a twenty-five-pound bag was more of a struggle than it should have been. He seemed weaker somehow, as though his body wasn’t quite right.
By the time he finished, it was almost ten o’clock at night—more than twelve hours since his breakfast in Yuma. The twenty-four-hour café at the truck stop was still open. He could have gone there and grabbed a burger, but the waitress who worked the night shift was an uncompromising bitch who reminded him too much of his mother. He raided his fridge for a bottle of beer and a couple pieces of string cheese. Then, with a bottle of Jameson along for the ride, he headed out.
Checking his jacket pocket to make sure he hadn’t misplaced his car keys, his fingers landed on the packet of pills. There was a joint not far from the warehouse in L.A. where, for a price, you could buy pretty much any kind of pharmaceutical on the planet. Some customers were looking for meth or opioids. Not Jimmy. He’d gone there hoping to score some little blue pills.
He’d never expected that he’d be one of those guys who couldn’t get it up. He was still shocked to realize that he hadn’t been able to perform with Amelia, and he was going to do everything in his power to make sure that never happened again. That was the real reason he’d stuffed the girl in the freezer—because he hadn’t been able to get an erection, and she knew it. Nothing he did or she did made it work. Using his leather belt to beat the crap out of a woman was usually enough to bring him to the edge, but not that time.
The unsatisfactory session had ended in total humiliation. When it was time for Jimmy to take Amelia back down to the basement, he was damned if he was going to turn her loose so she and Latisha could sit around talking about him and laughing behind his back. Being laughed at was something James Edward Ardmore did not tolerate.
He had bought the pills in anticipation of his hunting trip, a hunting trip that had also turned into a complete bust. From his point of view, this had been a long dry spell, and he was ready for it to be over. That night, before he ever put the truck in gear to leave Road Forks, he shook three pills out of the clear plastic packet his supplier had given him, washed them down with a mouthful of Jameson, and got under way.
Jimmy headed for Calhoun just as the moon came peeking over the horizon. As he drove, he took the occasional swig of Jameson. On these back roads, the chances of having some cop picking him up on an open-container violation were next to nil. Had this been open range, he might have been more worried. The RAM was tough enough that hitting the occasional deer wasn’t much of an issue, but hitting a stray steer or a cow was another matter entirely. Then you didn’t just have to deal with cops, you had to contend with some pissed-off rancher. So yes, he drove along sipping his Jameson and appreciating that unending line of fence posts on either side of the road.
As a general rule, Jimmy Ardmore wasn’t someone who believed in signs from above, but maybe that failed mission to bring Megan home had been exactly that—a message sent to him directly suggesting that it was time to consider putting his exit strategy into play—time to take the ghost of Arthur Ardmore with him, hang it up, and disappear.
He wasn’t so egotistical as to think he’d never be caught, and he’d been putting pieces in place that would make it possible for him to vanish. Arthur’s passport still had eighteen months to go. Just as with the driver’s license, the spooky resemblance between him and his late half brother made Jimmy’s ability to use the passport to leave the country without detection entirely viable.
During his time on the road, he’d made the acquaintance of some pretty dodgy individuals, ones who had proved to be helpful when it came time to transfer sums of money out of the country and into numbered accounts where he alone would have access to them. That had to be done by dribs and drabs, because transferring large amounts might have raised too many red flags. He bought pieces of property on foreign soil—retirement condos mostly—and sold them again immediately, not caring if he took a loss. After all, the whole purpose of the purchases was to launder money. When the properties sold, whatever proceeds came in from the sale were already outside the country, and that’s where they stayed.
By now he had enough of Arthur’s money stashed away here and there that he would be fine no matter what, but the question was, where should he go? The near miss with Megan in Venice Beach still troubled him. It was possible that she’d reported the incident to the authorities and cops had launched a search for him. With that in mind, he needed to have a suitable destination in mind—a retreat the U.S. Marshals Service couldn’t get to, somewhere that didn’t have an extradition treaty. That way if the cops finally sorted things out and realized Arthur was dead and Jimmy was the one on the lam, there wouldn’t be a damned thing they could do about it.
Time was when Venezuela would have been a good refuge of choice, but the government had pretty much wrecked that one. Jimmy didn’t want to live in a place where people went Dumpster diving just to find food to eat. And it didn’t seem to him as though any of those countries with “-stan” on the end of their names would be a good fit for him, either. Mexico was out, too. These days the U.S. Marshals and the federales were far too chummy. For proof positive of that, just ask Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
At the moment Jimmy’s first choice was Cuba. He wasn’t someone who cared about politics. If the people who lived there were all a bunch of commies, so what? Since planeloads of tourists were flying there from the States these days, getting there wouldn’t be such a big problem. Staying there on a permanent basis might be, but if the people were poor enough, a little bit of money out there greasing palms would probably go a very long way.
Halfway to Calhoun, Jimmy began feeling agitated. The pill was starting to work. He put the pedal to the metal. He wanted to be home and have a go at Latisha before whatever was propping him up ran out of steam.