Blue Tears

by Ninie Hammon

  “Bailey?”

  “Jessie … Jessica. We, I always called her Bailey.”

  “She came to visit you yesterday — as I am told it was the first time in a long time.”

  Panic was so close to the surface it burst out her throat.

  “I can’t tell you anything about her because I don’t know anything. I—” The man standing behind her let go of her hair and kicked her in the back and she flew forward, landing with a grunt only inches from Mikhailov’s shoes.

  “You speak when you’re spoken to,” he said. He sounded American, had no Russian accent María could discern.

  She looked up, terrified, at Mikhailov.

  “So you are going to tell me what I want to know about your sister and then I will not have to hurt you — not badly, anyway. I will give you a little demonstration that will make our conversation shorter and more profitable.”

  He nodded to the bald man who’d been sitting in the front seat of the van. He came forward, pulled María up off the floor and slammed her up against the back door of the big black car. The suit-and-tie driver of the car opened the front door and the bald man held María up against the car with his body, grabbed her right wrist and pulled her hand up to rest on the car door jamb. Then just held her there with her hand …

  When the driver of the car began to move, she realized what he was going to do.

  Nooooo!

  She only had time and strength to yank backwards a little bit. But even so, when he slammed the car door shut on her hand, it did not catch all her fingers as he’d intended. Instead, it smashed down on two inches of her index and middle fingers.

  She shrieked! The man holding her against the car stepped away and she tried … her fingers were smashed … to free them. She clawed at the door handle with her left hand, screaming her voice raw. Yanking, pulling. She tugged up on the handle, pushed the handle in, wrenched it out and shoved it down — frantic, desperate. She couldn’t open the door to free her fingers! Didn’t know how to operate the handle. She yanked and strained and shrieked and …

  The men watched her struggle to free her mashed fingers, listened to her screams and did nothing.

  Finally she did something that engaged the handle, the door came open, she grabbed her right hand with her left and crumpled to her knees, cradling her crushed fingers. It hurt so bad she felt instantly nauseous, couldn’t stop herself, leaned forward and began to vomit violently on the ground, splattering the shoes of the car’s driver.

  He spit words at her, Russian profanity probably, as he leapt back. Then one of the men had her by the left arm, dragging her to her feet, shoving her away from the pile of vomit toward the van, where he allowed her to collapse beside it, crying and coughing, holding her smashed fingers.

  Both fingers were flat! Had dents on them where the metal had crushed …

  She didn’t notice that Mikhailov had followed them to the van until she heard his voice above her.

  “That was a little demonstration. Maximum pain, minimum damage. Probably didn’t even break the fingers.”

  She was staring at her fingers, not trying to move them, trying to keep from vomiting again from the pain.

  “Look at me when I speak to you.”

  She looked up.

  He nodded and two of the men took her by the arms and sat her inside the open van door, on the floor with her feet on the concrete outside. She kept her eyes on his face as they moved her. Didn’t want to watch her fingers turn purple and black.

  “I can hurt you in ways you do not know, hurt you so bad you will beg me to smash your fingers in a car door instead because it would hurt less. Do we understand each other?”

  She started to nod, then remembered.

  “Yes.” Her voice was hoarse from screaming and vomiting.

  “Excellent.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Bailey wasn’t sure, but she didn’t think the marshal could force her to go with him. Maybe he could, and if he could, he would have to. He would have to drag her kicking and screaming out of here and off to Nowhere Land. She would not go gently into that good night.

  She thought to explain it to him. But why bother.

  Yeah, she needed to bother.

  “I know where you plan to take us. Oh, not the specific place. I didn’t know where the specific place was when I was actually there. But I know what kind of place, and I’m not doing that. Not ever again.”

  “Mrs. Cunningham, surely you realize the danger. Especially … now.”

  Yeah, now. When Mikhailov had María.

  “If you think María is going to tell him—”

  “She might try not to, but there are ways to force—”

  The hammer blow of the word force did what nothing else that day had been able to do. It dislodged the knot in her throat and she leapt up, raced to the bathroom, and was violently sick. Nothing but burning acid, coffee vomit.

  Why was it she never threw up when she actually had something in her stomach to eject? Surely, that wouldn’t be as unpleasant as acid burning the back of her throat and nose.

  She kept her head hung over the toilet, dry-heaved a time or two, then flushed the noxious mess before the smell made her keep gagging.

  She stood, shaky, turned to the sink, which was right next to the toilet. Tiny bathroom. It smelled like Chanel Grand Extrait. A knockoff, of course, all María could afford.

  María.

  Dear holy God in heaven, the monster who had killed Aaron now had María. He would force … the word hurt so bad, razor blades through her soul … force what?

  He couldn’t force her to tell him what she didn’t know.

  María didn’t know anything that would be valuable to him.

  In a horrible, soul-death way, Bailey realized that was the good news for Bailey and the bad news for María.

  Bailey splashed some cold water on her face, wiped it with a towel that smelled like it had dried on a clothesline. That’s when she saw the picture on the wall. It was one of who knew how many pieces of little-kid art all over the house. But this one was framed, though. Clearly, Bethany had drawn it. It had a little more shape than most of her artwork — you could almost tell that it was a tree. There was a small white splotch of paint in the green smear of tree limbs and leaves.

  María had printed a title beneath it. The Barbie Tree.

  Jessie finds María on the front porch of the house, sitting in the porch swing that protests with a waaaa-ng sound so loud you almost don’t want to swing in it. Mr. Anderson’s always going to “put some WD-40 on it,” but he never gets around to it.

  As soon as she sees María’s face, she knows something is wrong.

  “I’d say you look like you just lost your best friend, but since that’s me, something else must be wrong.”

  María says nothing, just points wordlessly up into the leaves of the big tree in the front yard. It is a huge oak tree, a perfect tree for climbing with that limb that sticks out at right angles to the trunk only a few feet off the ground. The boys clamber up and down it like monkeys.

  Jessie looks where María is pointing but sees nothing.

  “What?”

  “There,” María says. Her wheezing isn’t as bad today as it is sometimes. She can get most of a sentence out. “The white at the end of that branch.”

  Jessie sees it then, something white and fluffy is up in the tree at least thirty feet off the ground, tangled in the smaller limbs.

  “What is—?”

  “It’s Superstar Barbie. Kyle took it and he and Jake were playing keep-away with it.”

  Jessie seethes. She hates it when the boys tease María, and in truth they don’t do it very often. Their own boy-on-boy aggression keeps them pretty busy and they know Jessie will leap to María’s aid and they don’t want to cross Bailey. She has a clear streak of foster-care toughness they don’t want to mess with.

  “Then Kyle threw it real high and it got stuck in the tree.”

  “I’ll go get Kyl
e and make him climb up and get it.”

  “Can’t. He and Jake went with Mrs. Anderson to karate class.”

  “Mr. Anderson can get it down when he gets home.”

  María looks at her disdainfully. “He’s going to climb that tree?

  Yeah, that was a stupid idea.

  “Then we’ll just have to wait until—”

  “It’ll be ruined by then.”

  As if to give substance to what María says there is a low rumble of thunder in the distance. The sky is full of boiling gray clouds.

  “If it gets rained on … she’s wearing that white gown.”

  Jessie remembers that particular garment, one of María’s favorites, all ruffles and laces and tiny little snaps that Jessie always has to fasten for her.

  A cool breeze rustles the leaves of the tree and carries with it the smell of approaching rain.

  María looks miserably up into the branches at the splash of white fabric fluttering in the wind.

  “I’ll get it down,” Jessie blurts out and is instantly sorry. She has never climbed a tree and there’s a reason for that. Acrophobia. Fear of heights. Which, technically, she doesn’t have. What she does suffer from is fear of acrophobia — she’s afraid that she would be afraid of heights if she ever looked down from something tall. She’s relatively certain if that happened, she’d be terrified, but she has never actually put it to the test.

  “You could get it down?” María might as well have said, “You can leap tall buildings in a single bound?” She made it sound like it was a feat of derring-do unparalleled in human experience.

  Which, of course, meant Jessie had to climb the tree.

  “Sure. Piece of cake.”

  Thunder rumbled again. The sound was closer.

  “Then … hurry, before the rain hits.”

  Rain. Yeah. The only bigger challenge Jessie can think of than climbing a tree for the first time is climbing it in the rain.

  She rushes to the trunk of the tree and stands beneath the solitary limb sticking out at the bottom. From the side, it looks like it would, indeed, be a piece of cake to jump up and grab that limb. From below, it looks like it is at least fifteen feet off the ground.

  “Use the chair,” María says, and Jessie drags one of the wooden Adirondack lawn chairs to the trunk where she can use it as a ladder.

  She climbs up the slats of the chair, holds onto the trunk and stretches out her hand as high as she can reach. Which is about six inches below the limb.

  How did the boys get onto that limb?

  They jumped for it.

  She jumps, uses both hands, grabs the limb, then scoots her way up the trunk until she is straddling the limb. She looks at María, sitting on the porch.

  Bad move.

  Don’t look down.

  Above all other things, she knew she must not look down. So she turns and looks up. The doll is about fifteen or twenty feet above her, and she carefully begins to make her way toward it. Grabbing a limb, stepping from one limb to the next highest one. Moving carefully.

  Finally she is positioned on the limb directly below the limb where the doll is caught.

  Wind wiggles the branches, creating a sense that the whole tree is swaying.

  “… almost there …”

  The words are carried away by the accelerating wind and Jessie manages not to look toward the porch where María is shouting them.

  She takes hold of the limb above, which she can barely reach, and begins to inch out on the limb she’s standing on.

  Which bends down slightly under her weight. The limb above bends too, though, and she doesn’t have to go all the way out to the doll. She can pull the limb down to her and grab …

  A gust of wind hits the tree, shaking the boughs. Jessie lurches, clutches the limb above, dragging it downward and the doll slips free and plummets to the ground.

  María is probably moving slowly down the porch steps to get the doll out of the grass.

  Probably, because Jessie refuses to look to make sure.

  Then, of course, it hits her. Even at the time she realizes that this particular one of the great truths of the universe is one you can only learn by painful experience.

  It is a simple task to climb up a tree without looking down. It is not a simple task to reverse that motion.

  She froze in place.

  Somehow María knew she was scared.

  “Just look at your feet.” Wheeze. “Your feet.”

  Jessie looks at her feet securely on the limb. Can see just beyond them the limb she’d stepped on before this one, and she watches her foot move slowly toward it.

  By the time she makes it to the ground, it has begun to sprinkle and her arms and legs are trembling from effort, strain and terror.

  María rushes to her, as fast as María ever moves anywhere. Hugs her. Tells her she saved Superstar Barbie’s life.

  Since the doll hadn’t been alive to begin with, that negates some of the effort. But Jessie is okay with that.

  Bailey left the bathroom and walked into a heated conversation going on between Marshal Jordan, Brice and T.J. Jordan was raking the two of them over the coals for bringing Bailey to Boston and they were hotly defending—

  “María can’t tell Mikhailov anything about me that’ll help him find me because she doesn’t know anything,” she said.

  “She can identify where—”

  “No, she can’t.”

  “Can’t what?”

  “Can’t identify where or who or when. You don’t understand what happened here. I showed up out of nowhere, did my back-from-the-grave routine and it totally hammered her. We didn’t talk about anything except why I had pretended to be dead. I told her about Mikhailov and Aaron and …” Pain momentarily stole the air from her lungs. “I told her she was in danger because he was back in the country and would come looking for me.”

  “That’s what I mean, she will tell him where—”

  “You’re not listening!”

  Her shout momentarily silenced all the other officers in the room, who turned to look at her. Good. She had Jordan’s undivided attention.

  “I did not tell her where we were going. Wasn’t keeping it from her, we just never had time. I told her I had been taken by WITSEC to Albuquerque. And that’s it. I never even mentioned Peoria or Omaha. I never said a word about Shadow Rock, West Virginia. Nothing.”

  “You didn’t accidentally drop—”

  “No, I didn’t accidentally drop anything. I told her I lived in a big house with a big yard, a lake nearby and a puppy. That doesn’t narrow down the geography a whole lot.”

  “Your name—”

  “She’s always called me Bailey. It’s one reason I wanted the name. But I never gave her my WITSEC last name to go with it.”

  “You can’t count on—”

  “The Marshal’s Service, to keep secret the location of one of their star witnesses? Because if I can’t count on that, I’m already dead.”

  “No, the WITSEC program has a record of …”

  “Save the brochure material, I’ll read it on the website.”

  Jordan clearly did not know what to do with the new and improved version of Jessie Cunningham. He’d been expecting a mouse, not a mountain lion.

  Then she turned down the heat, dialed back the belligerence she felt rising in the back of her throat like bile.

  “In every one of the anonymous places you parked me, I died inside.” The almost whispered words were more powerful than a shout. “I won’t go back there. I absolutely will not take a traumatized little girl into a lighthouse-on-the-wall hellhole in Des Moines.”

  She could tell he didn’t get the reference but she didn’t care.

  “I am going to take my little girl home.”

  Tearing up then, she didn’t dare look at Brice and T.J., who had come to stand with her, one on either side. “I have a house with a yard. Bethany has her own room, with a pink bedspread and some kind of frozen-icy creatures from some movie I
haven’t seen on the sheets. There are toys. And soon there will be paints.”

  She took a big gulp of air.

  “That little girl in there has just lost her mother!” The pain of those words came from so many wounds her whole soul was bleeding. “I’m going to take her somewhere she can … heal.”

  Then Brice and T.J. took the ball and ran with it. They pointed out that if Shadow Rock, West Virginia had been good enough to hide their star witness last week it was still good enough this week. If the leak to Mikhailov hadn’t come from the Marshal’s Service, nothing had changed.

  “Besides, the Watford House will be guarded like a fortress,” Brice said. Jordan didn’t get it, but she understood the grim tone. One of his deputies had been killed the last time he’d been protecting Bailey there. Brice would be ready for trouble this time.

  “One of us will be with her and Bethany twenty-four-seven,” T.J. said. “We won’t even let her … take the puppy out in the back yard to pee without an armed escort.”

  “Find my sister!” She spoke the words to Bernard Jordan softly but they conveyed a wallop that was staggering. “Don’t let him … hurt her. I’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll do our best.”

  He didn’t sound hopeful.

  “If, like you say, he can’t find out from her where you are, then he will try to come up with some other way to use her to get at you.”

  “He’s going to have to find Bailey to do that,” T.J. said, “and that ain’t gonna happen.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The man in the gray suit did not stand still in front of María. As he spoke, he paced. At first, she thought he had a limp. It seemed he favored his right leg. But the next few steps his gait was effortless, then he began to limp again.

  “I will tell you what I know. You will fill in the parts I do not know.”

  He began to tick items off with his fingers.

  “Your ‘sister’ was there the day Ivan ran the red light and … had a little accident. She was a witness, but somehow I did not see her and she got away.”

  He stopped talking and María realized he expected her to say something.