Doubled or Nothing Read online

  Before I started on the trip, I had planned generally where I would be at the end of each day, and I had chosen a place to camp just south of Denver, if I got there as scheduled which I had. It was a placed called Daniels Park that was supposed to be about twenty miles or so south of Denver itself, just off the highway, and it was supposed to have a really good view of the Rocky Mountains that began just west of the city. I hadn’t planned to continue west on I-70 because that route went through Denver and up and over the mountains. I wasn’t sure the little engine on the Corolla was up to it and would actually get me over the mountains that way. And it wasn’t necessary since I could go south along the east slope of the mountains on I-25 and over the Raton Pass to Santa Fe which was a much easier pass and the Corolla probably could make it. I also thought that it would be interesting to visit Santa Fe with its old history as a rugged frontier town and as a Spanish settlement even before the U.S. took it over. I thought that would be more interesting than visiting someplace like Salt Lake City and its history, which mainly consisted of tithing, since it was first founded. I also didn’t have any interest in listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir which I was told was an absolute requirement to see if you went to Salt Lake City. As you may have guessed by this time in my narrative, I am a little bit of a rebel and don’t always do what I’m required to do, and I wasn’t going to let them force me into listening to a choir even if it was for my own good.

  Now the reason I chose Daniels Park was not only because of its convenient location and excellent view of the Rocky Mountains, but because it had a campground and some history associated with it. It was supposed to be the site of Kit Carson’s last campfire, which sounded romantic. I didn’t really know who Kit Carson was exactly but I had heard the name. I had always thought he was some sort of famous cowboy movie star from the past and this may have been his last campfire in a movie that all the old folks knew about but I didn’t. I wasn’t a big fan of old movies. I didn’t know why a famous movie star would actually camp out here, aside from the view, when he could stay at a nice hotel in Denver only a few miles up the road. And maybe he did after they filmed the last campfire scene. I could see where with the view and all it would make a really good scene for a movie. Anyway I never did find out, and I didn’t find out who Daniel was either or why he had a park there, unless Kit Carson was just a stage name and his real name was Daniel something or other or his last name was Daniel.

  I probably would have known the answers to these questions if I had gone to the monument they were supposed to have at the place where the campfire had been. I never did look for the monument because I didn’t know if it would be safe to go to an isolated place in a park to look at a monument and instead run into someone very large who may have been driving a black Buick, someone with a lot of curly black hair or maybe no hair at all. If they followed me in, they might decide to make this my last campfire even though I didn’t intend to light a campfire. They had taken pains to avoid having me recognize them before, but I was afraid they now knew I had spotted them, especially the woman, and it was time to act. I know you think I may have been paranoid about this since the woman had winked at me, but Ivor had been shot dead in the gun range, and since he had a Russian last name and I did too, maybe they liked to kill Russians. As it turned out, they did try and kill me, but that was later on. They apparently hadn’t intended to kill me right then, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what they wanted from me at that time or that I even had anything they wanted. My best guess was that there were two possibilities. That’s two guesses actually. One was they thought I had killed Ivor and they were trying to kill me for revenge. The other was that they thought Ivor and I were working together and they had to kill me too. If either guess was correct, then they would try to kill me and all I had to protect myself was a .25 ACP caliber Beretta piece of shit of a gun. I did find an out of the way part of the park to leave the Corolla, and I hiked to an even more remote place to lay out my sleeping bag. I had bought some bottles of water at the last rest area and took one with me so I wouldn’t have to come back to the Corolla until it was light.

  Chapter 9

  Well nothing untoward happened that night although I slept pretty fitfully and awoke un-refreshed. I kept having this dream about being chased by white rats with little .25 ACP caliber Berettas in their paws. They were all wearing red sneakers. I decided to get going early without looking for the monument to Kit Daniels and make my first stop the next rest area with people in it instead of the coyotes that kept howling all night long. As I was driving out on the two lane road, a black Buick Regal was coming in. It had to pass very close to me and as it did the bald headed driver with a big black mustache didn’t look away from me as I expected him to do. He couldn’t really since he was coming directly towards me. Instead he looked directly at me and scowled as he passed by. I kept looking in my rear view mirror but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to turn around and follow me, and I got on the highway and headed south without seeing him or any other car in my rear view mirror.

  I was still determined to see Santa Fe before I went to San Diego or died, whichever came first. I was not as relaxed and feeling as good as I had been on the previous morning, although I didn’t think I was really marked for death because that could have happened in many places already on this trip. I thought about the job awaiting me at the Salk Institute. I was going to work in a research laboratory there that was similar to the one I worked in for my Ph.D. thesis research. It had a lot of animal models of human diseases that I just knew were no more relevant to any human disease than the last animal model of human disease that I had worked on. I just hoped that the rats were nice, if they used rats. You may think that it sounds boring to go from one similar laboratory research job to another, but isn’t that what most people do with their jobs. And I had marketable skills, injecting and killing animals. And I didn’t know what else to do at the time I accepted the position, and I had spent years being educated to do what I did, so I thought I better get a job using my education, at least until I decided to do something else.

  By this time you must realize that just because someone may have a Ph.D. from a good school, they may not be that knowledgeable in areas outside of their field of expertise. Yes, I’m good at math and science, at least good enough in some areas of math and some areas of science, but I don’t know that much about other things outside my areas of interest. I think a lot of scientists who know a lot about what they are doing, even Nobel Prize winners, don’t really know shit about anything else. I’ve met a lot of them, even the Nobel Prize winning types. They are like idiot savants with the emphasis on idiot if you are talking to them about anything other than what they are studying even though they seem to think they are savant about everything else. Occasionally you meet scientists who do have knowledge and skill outside their field, like, for example, my skill for killing people dispassionately and without remorse.

  Now, you may ask why I was choosing to go to work at the Salk Institute for my next gig. That is, aside from the fact that it’s a pretty prestigious place, just like MIT was. Well, these prestigious places usually have the best access to federal grant money and therefore have many scholarships and fellowships available, and they were willing to give me one at the Salk Institute since I had been at another prestigious institution and had skills they needed. These fellowships are called National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowships and the government seems to have a lot of them. In order to get one, you have to have the doctoral part of the fellowship. If you don’t have the doctoral part, you can still get one, but it has to have the pre in front of the doctoral, in other words you get a predoctoral fellowship like I had at MIT. Now the postdoctoral fellowship pays much better because they presume you know more and have more skills since you received a Ph.D. with the help of the predoctoral fellowship’s support. In fact, unlike the predoctoral fellowships, the postdoctoral fellowships pay well enough to give you a decent standard of living, and t
here are some people who spend their entire career as postdoctoral researchers and never get an actual job. The Federal Government seems to have an endless supply of money to give out for postdoctoral fellowships, and I understand that if they think they are going to run out of money for the program they can just print some more. So I knew that there was no reason for me to worry about getting a real job since I could just continue getting money now that I had a Ph.D. and wait to see if some other career appealed to me more. As it turned out, my next career also was a government position, in another field to be sure, but still one that all the government needed to do to support me was to print money, and in the case of the CIA, they needed to print a lot more money.

  I don’t really know how the Federal Government works really, and I never bother to vote because I never know anything about any of the candidates who run, only what they say about each other. Since I know that all politicians lie and will say anything to get elected, then I presume that whatever they are telling me about the other candidate is a lie which means I don’t know enough to vote and I don’t. It’s obvious to me that the reason politicians want to get elected so badly is because they know that once they get elected they are working for the government and can go ahead and spend all the money they want because the government can just print more. They never run out. I guess in that way they are just like me, although I don’t think most of them have any marketable skills other than the ability to lie about other people without feeling guilty. At least I can kill animals, and people if necessary.

  So here I was on the way to San Diego, which is a very nice place to live I had been told, with much better weather than Boston. It also had a job that I could handle that paid a decent salary, at least for someone who wasn’t used to having much and had few material needs, except for a better gun maybe. All I had to do was get there in one piece and maybe figure out what all these people in black Buick Regals wanted and whether it had anything to do with Ivor ‘fucking’ Federov, which I thought it must have since I was sure that old Ms. Halloran couldn’t afford a fleet of Buick Regals.

  It actually turned into a fairly nice trip traveling down the front range of the Rocky Mountains with the sun shining and no parade of black Buicks that I could see. I arrived in Santa Fe in mid-afternoon. I saw a sign that said public parking and pulled into a big parking lot that was almost full. It had one of those machines at the entrance where you put in your money, punch in how much time you think you’ll need and a paper ticket pops out with the amount of time you’ve purchased, and then you put that on your dashboard for all the world to see how much time they have to vandalize your car before you return. I had to park at the far end of the lot and I began to walk towards the machine at the front. Half way there I noticed a young woman walking towards the machine from a different section of the lot. She had black hair, was fairly slender and was about 5’7”. She had on a black T shirt, black shorts and black flats. The shorts were tight enough so that I could see she had a very well-shaped butt and nice legs that were in need of a tan. You’ll find out as the story goes on that I’m a sucker for a nice butt. That had been Julie’s best feature. Anyway, this girl was not wearing red sneakers, but as she swung her left arm behind her as she walked, I noticed she had a wide red watch band on her left arm. She was just finishing taking her ticket from the machine and had turned around when I walked up and realized I had come face to face with the black picture-framed, pale faced girl from the rest stop on I-70. She actually was quite attractive and had a pleasant, although mildly surprised look on her face.

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained I always say, so I simply said to her,

  “Hi. I’m Alex. What’s your name?”

  She looked at me with a twinkle in her big blue eyes and said, “I know who you are, Alexei.” She hesitated a few seconds and then said, “I’m Olga” and smiled.

  “Do you have some time to talk?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t. I’m on an assignment so I can’t stop to talk now.”

  “When, then?”

  “Maybe later. Who knows? Maybe we’ll meet again later. You never can tell.” She said it very lightly and then she said, “Ta Ta” and walked back to the section of the parking lot where she had come from.

  I watched her walk away, not knowing what to do. She didn’t seem very threatening but she did know who I was obviously. If I had known then that the assignment she was on was to help follow me and kill me if and when she was told to do so, I would have felt differently. She was a very cool customer. As I got my ticket from the machine, I noticed the black Buick Regal she was driving leaving the parking lot. I didn’t feel guilty that she hadn’t used her ticket. As I walked into the main part of Santa Fe where the parking lot was situated, I thought about the whole encounter. She had a perfect American accent and seemed as ordinary as any girl I had known except she was much more attractive than most and would have been even better looking if she hadn’t had that silly hairdo and terrible dye job.

  Well, Santa Fe was not what I had expected. I thought when I planned to stop there that I would be visiting my first real western town, a true remnant of the old Wild West. If Santa Fe was truly a remnant of the old Wild West, then I learned that it was because the old Wild West had been filled with art shops and expensive chi chi restaurants that I couldn’t afford based on the menus posted in the windows. Everyone there looked expensively dressed, except for the ones who were dressed like Indians or Mexican cowboys selling silver jewelry or brightly colored blankets respectively. I walked around for about an hour but never could see anything that looked historical. I was getting hungry, so I finally went back to my car which hadn’t been vandalized, got in and headed out of town hoping to see a fast food restaurant before I got back on I-25 headed for Albuquerque. I did get a bite to eat, went down I-25 and caught I-40 heading west. Just as the sun was setting, I got off the interstate again at an exit in a sparsely populated area and went down the road looking for a place to camp out. I passed over a railroad crossing and went a little further to make sure I was away from the train tracks. By this time it was dark. I found a dirt road and went up it a short distance and it seemed to end in a small cul-de-sac with nothing around it. I laid out my sleeping bag, got in and went to sleep. I wasn’t worried since I didn’t think that I was in danger because Olga seemed so unthreatening, even if she and her cohorts were following me. I didn’t know then that Olga was just one of those upbeat personalities that always seemed cheerful and could even shoot and kill with a smile on her face. I went to sleep and didn’t dream about white rats with guns and red sneakers, or red watch bands either, for that matter. In fact I didn’t dream about anything I could remember when I did wake up, suddenly, only a few hours later.

  Chapter 10

  At first I thought I was dreaming. The world was getting very bright, much brighter than just having the sun coming up, and the ground was shaking. I looked up and I saw a very bright light rumbling and roaring as it came bearing down on me. I realized it was the bright light of a locomotive and the rumbling and roaring was the train moving at a very high rate of speed. I stood transfixed. It seemed to be coming directly at me, but I knew I had crossed the rail road tracks a quarter of a mile back. Maybe it was off the tracks because I couldn’t see any tracks. But they were there, just over a little rise of ground. And then the train shifted to my right as it came to a turn and roared by about a hundred feet away, not that close actually. I decided this maybe was not the best place to camp since I didn’t know the train schedule, but I also didn’t know where else I could go since it was dark and there were no discernible land features to tell me where it was safe to camp. I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock. I decided to just get up and drive and make do with the four hours of sleep I had. It wasn’t so bad. So I got in the little Corolla, kissed the steering wheel which I had not remembered to do recently, and got back onto I-40 heading west.

  I drove until I was about thirty five miles outside of Flagstaff, an
d it was still dark out. But the road was getting harder and harder to see. I looked at the dashboard and the check engine light was on. I figured it must be the alternator because the headlights were pretty dim. I pulled over and realized I had better stop before my battery was completely dead and I didn’t have enough juice to even drive. I wanted what remained of the headlights to be on so someone could see me. I got out of the car in case someone crashed into it from behind and stood in the headlights and waved at cars that came by. There weren’t too many. Finally someone stopped. He had an even more beat up car than the Corolla, but all the people in good cars had come and gone. I was thankful. He was a Mexican with a straw hat and a heavy Spanish accent, but he did ask if I needed a lift. I told him I needed to get to a service station with a tow truck that could tow my car into town since I knew that charging the battery would not do it. He said he knew of a service station that was open all night and had a tow truck and was located just before Flagstaff, and he would give me a lift since it was on his way and only a short distance off of the interstate. I said thanks and got my laptop out of the car since it was the only item of value I had, shut off the lights and locked the little Corolla up. I then went over to his car which was parked in front of mine on the side of the road, opened the door and stepped inside, and ended up standing back on the road way. The passenger side of his car had no floor board left. It had all rusted out. Most of the driver’s side floor had rusted out as well. The Mexican didn’t say anything or apologize. I sat down with my laptop in my lap of all places. I couldn’t very well put it on the floor. I placed my left foot on the transmission hump and my right foot on the door sill and reached for the seat belt. There wasn’t any. About this time he took off and I braced myself as we sped down the highway. I had my option of watching either the road ahead or the road below. Then I realized I had a third option and I closed my eyes.