54. ICE

T ito woke as the Cessna’s wheels touched down. Sunlight through the windows. Grabbing the back of the couch. They sped along on the ground, the pitch of the engines changing. The plane slowed. Eventually, its propellers stopped. He sat up in the sudden silence, blinking out at flat fields, rows of low green.

“Here long enough for a stretch and a pee,” said the pilot, getting out of his seat. He passed Tito on his way back through the cabin. He unfastened the door, and leaned out, swinging it open. “Hey, Carl,” he called, grinning, to someone Tito couldn’t see, “thanks for coming out.” Someone propped the top of an ordinary aluminum ladder against the bottom of the door, and the pilot climbed down it, moving slowly, deliberately.

“Stretch your legs,” Garreth said to Tito, getting out of his chair. Tito sat up, watching as Garreth started down the ladder. Tito rubbed his eyes and stood.

He climbed down to the packed earth of a straight road running in either direction through the flat green fields. The pilot and a man in blue coveralls and a straw cowboy hat were unrolling a black rubber hose from a reel on the back of a small tanker truck. He looked back and saw the old man descending the ladder.

Garreth produced a bottle of mineral water, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste. He began to brush his teeth, pausing to spit white foam on the ground. He rinsed his mouth from the bottle of water. “Got a toothbrush?”

“No,” said Tito.

Garreth brought out an unopened toothbrush and passed it to him, along with the bottle of water. While Tito brushed his teeth, he watched the old man walk a distance down the road, then stand, his back to them, urinating. Finishing with the toothbrush, Tito poured what was left of the water over its bristles, shook it dry, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his jacket. He wanted to ask where they were, but the protocol of dealing with clients prevented him.

“Western Illinois,” Garreth said, as if reading his mind. “Belongs to a friend.”

“Of yours?”

“The pilot’s. The friend flies, keeps avgas here.” The man with the cowboy hat yanked a cord on the back of the truck, starting up the engine of a pump. They moved away from a sudden billowing reek of fuel.

“How far can it fly?” Tito asked, looking at the plane.

“A little under twelve hundred miles on a full tank. Depending on weather and number of passengers.”

“That seems not so far.”

“Piston-engine prop. We have to keep hopping, this way, but it keeps us under all kinds of radar. We won’t see any airport. All private runways.”

Tito didn’t think he meant actual radar.

“Gentlemen,” said the old man, joining them, “good morning. You seemed to sleep quite well, finally,” he said to Tito.

“Yes,” Tito agreed.

“Why did you lift that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement badge, Tito?” the old man asked.

ICE. Tito remembered Garreth saying “ice,” when he’d handed him the thing. Now he had no idea why he’d done that. And Eleggua, not he, had taken the badge-case from the man’s belt. He couldn’t tell them that. “I felt it on his belt as he tried to hold me,” he said. “I thought it might be a weapon.”

“Then you thought to use the Bulgarian salt?”

“Yes,” Tito said.

“I’m curious to learn what happened to him. I imagine, though, that he was taken briefly into custody, causing a jurisdictional pissing match. Until some entity, sufficiently high up in the DHS, ordered his release. You probably did your man a favor, Tito, taking that badge. It’s unlikely it was really his. You saved him having to refuse to explain it, until his fix came through.”

Tito nodded, hoping the subject was now closed.

They stood, then, watching the fueling of the plane.

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