Take No Names, page 1
Dedication
For my sisters:
Susie, Ari, and Camellia
Note on Language
In this text, Mandarin that the narrator hears is rendered in pinyin transliteration: “Zhège yàngzi!”
Chinese characters that the narrator sees are rendered as written: 就像这些
All translations of Chinese and Spanish appear in italics, like the narrator’s internal monologue. Quotation marks indicate what Victor hears; italics represent the experience of language in his mind.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Note on Language
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
A habit established without discussion: Mark Knox and I sit in silence for several seconds before we exit the van. For me, a moment to steel my nerves. Fear takes up its proper position inside my rib cage, and my senses awaken to the night: the spit of the rain in the yellow headlights, the steady pit-pat as it drums on the roof, the sour odor of the van’s mildewed upholstery.
As for my employer, I don’t know what goes through his head. Maybe Mark is like me, saying a prayer for a good haul and muttering his gratitude for some work to do on a Friday night. Or maybe he’s just waiting for Ty, the guy we bribe for parking, to emerge from his single-wide.
The door of the trailer cracks open, and Ty sticks his head out.
“I’m Matt,” Mark whispers. “You’re Dave.”
I make my eyes big like, Duh. I screwed up the fake names once, and now he never fails to remind me. We hop out of the van, sling our backpacks over our shoulders. Mark ascends the three steps to the door of Ty’s trailer. I hang back.
“My man Matt.” Ty proffers his fist.
Mark leans against the side of the trailer, taps Ty’s fist with his own, and palms him a ten-dollar bill.
Ty tucks the ten into the breast pocket of his blazer. Still in uniform—he must’ve had to work late. The three of us tip our heads back in unison as a passenger jet roars overhead, rending the air with twin six-ton engines. The world feels changed once it’s gone, the unseen throngs of crickets and chorus frogs chastened into silence. Ty glances at his watch. “Delta red-eye to Newark, that’s a Dreamliner. Y’all want rolls?”
Mark grins as he produces five more dollars from his rain pants. Ty works as a concierge at the Visa Crown Elite Lounge, where Obsidian cardholders are served the same defrosted croissants every day until they’re gone. But at the Cinnabon in Terminal Three, where his girlfriend cashiers, day-olds go home with the staff.
Ty pockets the five, disappears for a moment, and then reappears holding a plastic bag.
“There’s extra icing in there.” He hands the bag to Mark.
“My man,” Mark says.
“You good, Dave?”
“Hi, Ty,” I say.
“Lotta new tents out there.” Mark jerks his head back toward the entrance.
Ty’s lips press into a tight line, and he shakes his head ruefully. “Land of the free. Well, good luck, my dudes. Bag mucho amphibians.”
He salutes us with two fingers and pulls his door shut.
Mark puts the cinnamon rolls in the van, and then we set out through the rain, navigating the puddles in the potholed pathway between the netless tennis court and the empty pool. Making our way toward the reservoir behind the mobile home park.
“Six rolls for five bucks,” Mark says, scanning the cloud layer for upwind gaps. “That’s like fifteen calories a cent.”
“Diabetes can add up,” I say.
Mark chuckles and says, “We need happy Ty.”
We skirt the muddy banks of the reservoir, trace the chain-link fence to where it vanishes into a thicket of blackberry bushes. Then the work gloves and headlamps come out of our backpacks. Peering into the darkness that surrounds us, I seek signs of others out roaming the night, but we’re alone.
So I click on my headlamp in red-light mode and pull aside the thorny vines that hide our tunnel through the thicket.
Mark crawls in first. I follow behind. The bushes have grown since we last cut them back, and for the final several feet of the tunnel, on the other side of the hole in the chain-link fence, we’re wriggling forward on our elbows and bellies.
“Think maybe we should trim again?” I clamber to my feet on the other side.
“We’ve only got a couple trips left,” Mark reminds me.
We’re standing in the corner of a large field, its soggy expanse arrayed with a grid of shipping containers listing in the mud.
Hull Secure Facilities. Or as we call it, the Lost and Found.
Mark shucks his backpack to the ground in front of the nearest shipping container. Kneeling next to him, I knit my fingers together and boost him onto the top. After I’ve passed up both backpacks, I grasp his hands and launch myself upward, and he heaves me onto the container beside him.
The first thing I do is check for our two-by-fours: right here where we left them. Then I follow Mark’s gaze to the cottage on the hill at the far end of the Lost and Found.
A light glows in one window.
“Jerry’s up late,” I say, glancing at my watch, a black rubber Casio I found among Dad’s things after his murder.
Ten minutes to midnight.
Mark narrows his eyes at the cottage. The window flickers. Dimmer. Brighter. Yellow. Blue.
“Watching TV,” Mark concludes. “Rain might clear up by four. I say we move.”
June on the forty-seventh parallel north: the sun lingering in the sky until nine, rising again at five. Seattle averages eight nights of rain in June. July only gets six. The window for our visits to the Lost and Found is closing.
I pick up one of the two-by-fours and lay it across the gap to the next container over, and Mark places the second board parallel to the first. We cross this makeshift bridge one at a time, moving our feet in short, wide steps like inept roller skaters. Then we move the boards and cross the next gap, working our way toward the only four containers that we haven’t searched yet: the ones closest to Jerry Hull’s cottage.
A single footstep on the paths among the containers could result in a felony burglary charge or a spray of buckshot in the back. It would trip the network of seismic sensors buried beneath the ground, and that would trigger an alarm on Jerry’s phone that would send him scuttling to his gun cabinet.
But the vibrations caused by our steps on top of the containers, dampened by the seismic static of the rainfall, aren’t strong enough to trip the sensors. And there are dead spots in the network, including the far corner by the blackberry thicket.
All this from Mark. He knows all about the ground sensors. He installed them.
It takes us about half an hour to reach the first untouched container, the one labeled Bin Four on Mark’s hand-drawn map back at the office. Now we’re within a hundred feet of Jerry’s. The light has migrated from the front of the cottage to the rear.
“That his bedroom?” I ask.
Mark shakes his head. “Bathroom. Brushing his teeth, I suppose.”
“Impressive hygiene for a parasite.”
“Well. He doesn’t floss.”
I smirk at Mark. “You searched his cabinets?”
“I don’t know about ‘searched.’” His tone is defensive. “I wasn’t fiending for Vicodin. You don’t peek behind the mirror when you use someone’s john?”
The question gives me pause. Do I? Would I? Nobody’s invited me into their house since I arrived in Seattle sixteen months ago. And before that, well. I was a different person before that. I had a home and a future back then. I had a name.
Mark’s gaze shifts from my face to the darkness behind me. He puts his hands on his hips, sticks out his chin, and says, “Huhhh.”
I turn around and see what he’s staring at: a rectangular pool in the mud, twenty feet long and eight feet wide, where Bin One used to be.
I say, “Oh.”
We peer at the absence of Bin One for a long moment. Conjectures float through my head with all the dependability of helium balloons. Meanwhile, the rain thickens.
“Maybe we should get the hell out of here,” I say.
“We’ll make tonight our last.” Mark glances back at the cottage. All dark now. He opens his backpack, pulls out his climbing harness and the rope.
“You sure about that, boss?” I say.
Mark nods. “A few more hours, Lao. One last hurrah at our dear Lost and Found.”
I pull out my own harness and tighten the straps around my waist. We tie the ends of the short rope to our carabiners with figure-eight knots. Then I sit down on the roof of the container and brace my heels against the steel lip of its front edge.
Mark drops off the front of the container, hangs for a moment with his hands on the lip, then sets the soles of his boots against the container door. As his weight falls into his harness, the rope between us stretches taut.
I hear a beep from his watch. Mark’s gotten pretty handy with his pick and tension wrench. He opened the padlock on Bin Twelve in ninety-two seconds. He hasn’t come close to that record since, but he hasn’t given up.
I follow along on Dad’s Casio. A hundred and fifteen seconds later, I hear him pop the shackle on the lock and slide open the bolt.
He climbs back to the top of the container with a grin on his face. I get to my feet, unclip the carabiner from my harness, and make a show of stretching my legs.
“A few more cinnamon rolls and we’re gonna need a thicker rope,” I say.
“Hit the squat rack,” Mark scoffs. “I’m trimmer than a sprinter.”
The chummy banter feels forced, undermined by the conspicuous absence of Bin One and the increasingly stormy skies. The wind is really ripping now, the rain blooming into a downpour. And when we’re shifting the two-by-fours to the next gap, rushing a little so that we can get out of the weather, I trip over the rope, lose my footing, and drop the board all the way to the ground.
We freeze, lock eyes, and then turn as one to look at the cottage. Long seconds pass in which the only sounds are the splatter of the rain on the steel containers, the whistle of the wind through the gaps.
I check my watch. One minute. Then two. No lights snap on. No door flies open. No sign of Jerry.
I look down at the errant timber, one end still resting on the lid of Bin Three, the other sunk into the mud beneath us.
“Is this a dead zone?”
Mark shrugs, still watching the cottage. “I guess so.” He turns to frown at me. “Think you can keep your shit together, Lao?”
“Line management is your job, Matt.”
He looks down at my feet, where the rope lies in a heap.
“All right, all right. Just watch where you’re going, you big baby,” he says. “Can you cross a single plank?”
I don’t answer, just step out onto the remaining two-by-four. I fix my eyes on the far bin and move quickly. Then I turn around and extend both middle fingers toward Mark.
He gives me a golf clap. I reach down and retrieve the second board for his use. We repeat our routine on Bin Three, and Mark picks the padlock in ninety-eight seconds. Then we look at the skies. Plenty of rain left.
“Three hours?” he says.
“Oughta do it.” I set a timer on Dad’s Casio.
“You need some puréed pumpkin to tide you over?” he asks.
“I’d kinda like to purée your face right now.”
He flashes his snaggletoothed grin, then crosses back to Bin Four. He dangles himself over the front edge, pulls the door open with one hand, and drops into the shipping container with the grace of a jungle cat.
I watch the dark cottage for another minute, a scowl on my face, resentment nesting in my intestines.
Think you can keep your shit together, Lao?
Typical Mark. Mister Teflon. Not a mistake-owner. Leaves a rope coiled around my ankles in a rainstorm and snaps at me when it trips me up. I’m still fuming in his general direction as I slip into Bin Three, shut the door behind me, and switch my headlamp to white light.
But when I look around the humid interior of the shipping container, anticipation floods my veins, warming me from scalp to fingertips. Gratitude returns to me, gratitude to my boss and only friend, the man who introduced me to the one thing I ever feel like doing anymore: searching through stories sealed in plastic, each one a life to glimpse into, a lottery ticket to scratch. Purses, wallets, backpacks, suitcases.
The confiscated belongings of people ejected from the country.
2
We first visited the Lost and Found on a drizzly night in April. We searched Bins Twenty-One and Twenty. Our cumulative haul was a pearl necklace, an e-reader, two film cameras, and 386 dollars in small bills.
We’d burgled federal property for a little more than what we could’ve made bouncing the door at a Cap Hill nightclub. On the giddy drive back to the office, I tried to figure out why it felt so good. In the weeks that followed, I developed a few theories.
Theory One: the dance with danger. Mark and I were weaned on adrenaline. Cable sports, console gaming, online poker, laser tag. Here was a game with real stakes: sneaking around in the dark, evading shitbag Jerry and his shotgun collection. After a night at the Lost and Found, air hockey felt like quilting.
Theory Two: the lure of fortune. Each plastic bag was a facedown hand of cards, radiant with possibility. “There’s a big score in here somewhere, I know it,” Mark said on that first night, rubbing his palms together. “A score that will change everything.”
We’d hit several times, no royal flushes but plenty of straights: the Rolex in Bin Sixteen, the sock full of engagement rings in Eleven, the vintage dreadnought guitar in Eight that Mark fondled for a week before consenting to sell.
I inferred Theories One and Two from Mark, that hop in his step each time we came here, that daredevil desire to linger until dawn. Theory Three came later. As I lost myself in the excavation of other people’s tragedies, an unfamiliar feeling washed over me. I had trouble naming it at first. Too warm for pity. Too far removed for compassion. Eventually I made up a word for it: “intonymity.” The combination of intimacy and anonymity. Like watching a sad movie. You see someone up close: their eyes, their teeth, their tears.
But they never see you.
I shed my rain gear to the floor of Bin Three, swap out my work gloves for disposable latex, and make a pile of bags from the nearest shelf. The first one I open contains a trifold wallet, all nylon and Velcro. Eight bucks in ones. A few neatly creased receipts, an expired condom, and a punch card for a movie theater: BUY SEVEN LARGE POPCORNS, GET THE EIGHTH FREE! One punch short of redemption.
And an Idaho driver’s license. Chambi Musa Jabril: 5’9”, 155 pounds, eyes brown, hair black, date of birth May 28, 1994. The photo shows a man with bushy eyebrows and pointy ears. Address: 6213 Overlook Street, Boise. Once upon a time.
“Chambi Musa Jabril. So close to free popcorn,” I mutter, tucking the cash into one of the dry bags in my backpack. “Happy belated, Chambi. I hope you got cake.”
Next up, a tiny denim backpack. Butterfly barrette, three sticks of fossilized chewing gum, and a high school ID card. Aracely Garcia. Rosacea, shy smile, eyebrows very plucked. The inner zip pocket contains a worn wooden rosary, a Korean smartphone in a bedazzled case, and a family photo from one of those green screen booths at tourist attractions. Aracely stands with her parents and her brother, superimposed on a stock image of the Space Needle, all four of them smiling that same shy smile.
I stare at the photo, studying their faces. Did this family fall to pieces, like mine, when they were shaken awake from their American dream? Or are they still together somewhere south of the Rio Grande, taking new photos and assembling a new life?
I put the photo, the rosary, and the phone into a different bag—the one Mark doesn’t know about. This is the bag I’ll send to Leon Few, the director of a nonprofit in Nogales that helps deportees get back on their feet. I close my eyes for a moment, imagine the surprised smile that would light up Aracely Garcia’s face if she ever gets these items back.
The third bag of the night is a carry-on suitcase. The Border Patrol label says SEATAC. I dig through folded clothes. Suit pants, dark stockings, sheath dress in scarlet red. High heels, strappy sandals, and a pair of black training shoes made by Li-Ning, China’s biggest sportswear brand, its logo laughably similar to the Nike swoosh.
Quality stuff. Not worth enough to bag, but promising.
Near the bottom of the suitcase, I find a small notebook clamped shut with a plastic hair clip. The clip catches my attention. It feels a millimeter too bulky, a gram overweight. I examine it in front of my headlamp, spy within its recesses a micro-USB port.
What’s this, a cleverly disguised flash drive? My pulse quickens as the intonymity surges through my veins. This suitcase belonged to someone with a secret.
