Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing by Gary Mulgrew

the hire car Reid had pre-booked. Midland/Odessa seemed as dreary as I had imagined, a small town ten hours’ drive from Houston and six from Dallas. Its claim to fame was that George Bush Jnr had lived there and by all accounts intended to return some time after his presidency was over. He was completely welcome to it. After a few minutes we were on the I-20 heading east towards Big Spring, around seventy miles away. If we had gone in the other direction, four hours west, we would hit Juárez on the Mexican border, just across the Rio Grande and by now the murder capital of the world. I thought of suggesting we head west to Reid, but my stock of jokes was wearing thin. We were getting closer.
    We drove along the long, straight endless road in silence, my mood darkening. The landscape was bleak, desolate and unforgiving. Flat as far as the eye could see and hot, damned hot! ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I thought as I surveyed what looked to me like the end of the Earth. I’d lived the dream; now I was living the nightmare, and it kept getting worse. Nothing but tumbleweed and abandoned jack-hammers. I felt I was being taken to a place time had forgotten, a place you take people simply to punish them.
    ‘I can’t believe you’re having to do this,’ Reid said eventually, disturbing the silence.
    ‘I can’t either,’ I murmured back, still looking out at the endless stretch of desert.
    ‘I keep beating myself up that I should have been able to get you out of this, that I should have been a better lawyer,’ Reid said, genuinely emotional as he spoke.
    ‘This was the best I was going to get. We were always going to get extradited no matter what, and we never would have won at trial. I’ve been fucked for a long time, all this was inevitable.’ I waved my hand lamely at the tumbleweed and emptiness as I tried to make him feel better, knowing that what I was saying was ludicrous – how could any of this ever be inevitable?
    I looked out across the empty wasteland again; barren and desolate.
    After a while the long road found a destination and the town of Big Spring shimmered into view. Population of 33,267 – not including the 1,500 inmates of the Federal prison or the 3,000 housed in the nearby immigration facility. The town’s website had boasted that the sun shone uninterrupted on Big Spring for over 320 days a year, and this was certainly one of them. It was named after the ‘big spring’ in Sulphur Draw, a historical watering place for coyotes, wolves, and herds of buffalo, antelope and mustangs, but all I could see was run-down housing and abandoned trucks. The spring had supposedly been a source of conflict between Comanche and Shawnee Indians with hundreds of skirmishes over the years, until the white settlers came along and turned it into the paradise it now was. Looking up into the sky, I wiped my brow and peered towards the sun. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen; always the saddest of sad sights for a Scotsman. It looked like it hadn’t rained in months. We drove through the stretched-out town in silence.
    ‘Jeez, even the prison has to be better than this,’ I said to Reid as we surveyed the abandoned trailers and boarded-up houses at the sides of the road. Reid stayed silent.
    Halfway up the main street, we saw a Rib Shack and parked in there. It was still only eleven o’clock, three hours before I was due to report. I had no intention of turning up early, although the state of the town was giving me second thoughts. Reid ordered some food and I stepped outside to phone home to say some difficult goodbyes. As promised, I spoke to Calum and tried to sound upbeat. I told him the prison looked nice, like a library, and the people looked pretty friendly. I joked that I hoped they wouldn’t feel too intimidated when they saw me.
    Actually Big Spring did look a bit like a library when I had searched for it on the Internet.
    For two months I had been going to my mailbox every morning, waiting