Blue Tears

by Ninie Hammon

  She couldn’t stop looking at her. Or touching her. She reached over in the darkness and gently grasped the little girl’s foot. María’d taken off Bethany’s shoes to make her more comfortable when she’d fastened her into the car seat and now her little socked foot was warm and soft in Bailey’s hand. So she held it. For hours.

  She stared at the child’s face for hours, too, devouring the details, the planes of dark and shadow in the play of approaching headlights and the glow from the instrument panel in the front seat.

  Bethany Nicole Cunningham, age three and a half, was a stunningly beautiful little girl. Yeah, sure, Bailey wasn’t exactly an unbiased observer, but she was certain even a stranger who saw her on the street would come to the same conclusion. Her hair was black like Bailey’s. Curly like Bailey’s, too. María’s hair had waves, and could slide past both waves and curls into fuzzy if the air was damp. Bethany’s shiny black locks hung on her shoulders in gentle curls. Her skin was alabaster, her features as perfect as the face on a porcelain doll.

  Eyebrows that were delicate feathers, eyelashes so long they formed fans on her cheeks.

  Her mouth was heart-shaped. Bailey realized sadly that she had only seen the little girl smile twice, that frozen instant when she stood in the doorway with her arms spread, squealing, “Mommy!” And when she posed with María for the photo.

  Her smile transformed her face, pulled her heart-shaped mouth into a beautiful bow and made her eyes dance. Not hazel eyes like Bailey’s. Blue, a striking shade of pale blue, like a summer sky. Or a robin’s egg.

  Oh, how many times in the past two years had she tried to imagine the face transformed by age. The toddler she’d told Aaron she couldn’t stand to be away from for a whole week had been an adorable infant, but like all babies, her features were not yet defined enough to tell who she resembled, though Bailey had been sure she saw Aaron in them.

  Now, Bethany’s resemblance to Aaron was striking. Bailey could see it in the high, wide forehead and the strong chin.

  This little girl looked like her daddy. A father she would never know. He had been shot down ruthlessly, pitilessly by the monster who … now held María captive.

  The long drive from Boston to Shadow Rock was an enforced time of black silence where Bailey had no choice but to confront her demons.

  In the past months, Bailey had become quite adept at not thinking about the awful things that had happened to her thanks to her gift for painting what hadn’t happened yet. Gratefully, she was able to conjure up only a handful of memories about the time she and T.J. had spent in the monstrous second floor ballroom of The Cedars. Those memories had faded when whatever drug she’d been given had worn off. But she had no trouble remembering what it felt like to be held captive by a monster, the Beast, who had kidnapped teenagers and forced them into prostitution. She had known Jacko would hurt her, torture her to get information she couldn’t give him, just like Mikhailov would hurt María to pry out of her information about Bailey that she didn’t have.

  The bullet named Oscar Bailey’d put in her brain last summer, wallowing in a pit of self-pity and despair on Bethany’s third birthday, would have offered Bailey a get-out-of-jail-free card it she could have figured out how to dislodge it and send it off to bulldoze her brain tissue. María had no Oscar. She had no out. She was at the mercy of Sergei Wassily Mikhailov and he was a man who had no mercy.

  Bailey had painted María burning alive, had lived through the death with her! Her portraits, just like the portraits T.J.’s mother had painted all those years ago, had never been wrong. María’d had tickets to the opening night performance of The Nutcracker at the Boston Opera House — at eight o’clock tomorrow night! — and she’d died before she had a chance to use them.

  Maybe T.J. was right, that Mikhailov had saved María from her fate. Because he’d kidnapped her, she wouldn’t be dressed in a formal gown for the ballet tomorrow night, wouldn’t burn to death in it. It was hard to conceive that he’d “rescued” her, but if he had, it was a reprieve, not a pardon. She might not die in a fire tomorrow night, but Mikhailov would most assuredly kill her. Hadn’t yet, but he would.

  During that black drive through the night, taking her little girl “home,” Bailey came to terms with the horror of her little sister’s kidnapping. She could not allow herself to fall into the black pit of grief and despair that beckoned her every time she thought about it. She couldn’t be so self-absorbed; she had to think of Bethany. She had to keep herself together to care for the little girl she and María both loved so desperately.

  Bailey had to hold on. When Bethany asked for her mommy, Bailey would tell her that her mommy would be back soon. That horror word, soon. She’d been forced to believe in the eventual fulfillment of soon when the marshals in that anonymous house in some anonymous town had told her that’s when she’d get her life back. She would cling to hope in the same soon for María’s return.

  María would survive.

  She would come back.

  She would return to Bailey’s and Bethany’s lives … soon.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sergei Wassily Mikhailov saw the world with absolute clarity. Like after a spring rain when the earth has been washed clean and sits warm and bright in the midday sun.

  It was too crisp, of course, but he was used to that. All sharp edges with shadows behind to show what was flat and two-dimensional and what was not. The van was two-dimensional, lay on the flat surface of the garage floor like a leaf on the ground. The edges were sharp, outlined in shadow like a black Magic Marker. If he touched the edge of that image, it would cut his finger. But he would not do such a thing. He had learned, had been sliced open to the bone over and over until he accepted the reality that some things in the world were real and others just flat images with razor edges. When you understood that, you didn’t get cut.

  Volodya and Dmitri were real, of course. Their deaths would be real, too, and bloody, oh so very bloody. Mikhailov would slice their throats for their incompetence. Or maybe burn them alive. Oh my, yes. The intensity of that pain, their screams, the conjured image actually aroused him. But not now. Now, he needed his associates to implement the plan that had been forming in his mind ever since the sniveling slut revealed that the eyewitness he must silence had celebrated her birthday in the Nautilus Casino.

  That was significant. A woman in the Witness Protection Program was not likely to make a big production out of her birthday. She would not do anything that would draw attention to herself. A birthday celebration would be something small, with a few friends.

  Close to home.

  If she celebrated her birthday at the Nautilus, federal marshals had her stashed away somewhere within, say, an hour’s drive of the casino. That was a huge haystack in which to search for a pin — three states, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the city of Pittsburgh.

  The starting point was the Nautilus, owned by W. Maxwell Crenshaw, who had entertained Mikhailov and his associates and other high rollers who flew in from all over the country to play in his ten-thousand-dollar ante poker game. Only the best of everything — food, wine and women. Mikhailov was a masterful poker player. His face was immovable stone whether he was holding a pair of twos or a royal flush. He had no “tells,” tiny movements or mannerisms that discerning opponents could use against him. He had won big, money that only mattered as an indication of victory.

  Mikhailov considered how to narrow down the needle search, which would be complicated by the fact that he himself was now a wanted man. A fugitive from arrest warrants in Boston — which would mean nothing as soon as Mikhailov eliminated the only witness to the crime he was charged with committing. He thought he had eliminated all the witnesses, but this, this — even Russian expletives fell short of describing her — had hidden like a snake in the grass waiting for an opportunity to strike. His loathing of the pig was boundless. Hers would be a satisfyingly horrific death. He longed to watch her suffer and would squeeze delicious pleasure fro
m her agony.

  Dmitri approached him, the dead-man-walking who had let the Cunningham woman get away. Dmitri knew Mikhailov was displeased. Good. There was fear on his face. Excellent.

  “I think you should see this.” Dmitri held out a cellphone. “It was in her pocket.” He indicated the slut who sat in the doorway of the van cradling her mashed fingers.

  “What is it that I should see?”

  “This morning, when she was on her way to the train station, she got five calls from a single number. She didn’t pick up on any of them, said she didn’t recognize the number so she turned off the ringer after the second call — telemarketers.”

  “Why is it significant that this young woman did not wish to purchase a time share in Florida, or ‘consolidate her student loans’?”

  “Telemarketing calls are computer generated. I don’t think they keep trying the same number over and over if no one answers. The area code on the calls is 304. I looked it up. That’s the area code for West Virginia.”

  “And your point?”

  But Mikhailov knew the point, had already leapt ahead to the point.

  “She was supposed to meet her sister but she didn’t, ran instead. If I was the sister, I’d be calling to find out where she was, why she didn’t show. I’d keep trying to reach her even if she didn’t answer.” He poked a fat finger at the list of five identical phone numbers. “I’m betting that’s the sister’s cell number.”

  Mikhailov did not smile, not on his face anyway. Dmitri did not know it, but he had just earned back his life. In fact, he would give Dmitri the privilege of killing Volodya for his incompetence.

  Dmitri did something with the phone and held it out again.

  “This is the woman you’re looking for, the woman this one calls Bailey. I figured the sister’d have a picture.”

  Mikhailov stared at the photograph on the phone. A pretty black-haired woman holding a baby stared out at him. He memorized the face. He would never forget it. He could pick her out of a crowd of a thousand.

  He dismissed the man with a curt nod, his mind clear, forming plans as fast as a spider spinning a web.

  Perhaps he did not have to find Jessica Cunningham — Bailey — after all. Maybe he could give her a call and invite her to come to him, to a special celebration with her sister as the guest of honor.

  He turned to the dead man Volodya. “Have the plane ready at the airport.”

  “Da ser.”

  “And I want to talk to Abi-Nadir. Find him and bring him to me.”

  Yes, it was good to kill Volodya. It had surprised him that Mikhailov wanted to talk to the Arab gun runner. Mikhailov could see it on his face, and any man who allowed others to see what he was thinking could not be trusted.

  “Tell him I require his services. Have him call me before he comes, so he can bring with him all that is necessary for the task.”

  When they came back to the room with blood spattered on the wall, María was certain they would kill her, had tried to prepare herself for death, but had no idea how to do a thing like that. But they didn’t kill her. Instead, she was shoved into the black car with the tinted windows. Mikhailov sat in the back seat opposite her and she would much rather have ridden on the floor in the van or stayed in the room with the bloody walls.

  But he said nothing. Absolutely nothing. He might as well have been a stuffed animal. She’d never been in such close quarters with another human being where the silence hung so heavy it was like it had substance. She didn’t look at him, not even out of the corner of her eye. She eventually became aware of an odor. She had a pretty sophisticated olfactory system, primed as it had been for years by going from one store to another smelling expensive perfume she and Bailey could never afford.

  What she smelled wasn’t perfume, wasn’t men’s cologne. Wasn’t aftershave or the odor of the shaving cream he used. It was some other smell, something darker and more noxious. It was his smell, the stink of the man himself, the reek of some dark, fetid pool scummed over with a glaze of filth. A pool alive with unidentifiable slimy things born of oozing decay, where small, furry creatures had been sucked down and drowned.

  It was possible to see out the tinted windows. She’d never known that, had always assumed the people in those kinds of cars couldn’t see out any better than the rest of the world could see in. They were driving down Boston streets. None she recognized. Then they passed through a gate and approached a big building she recognized as an airplane hangar.

  There was an airplane on the tarmac and obviously they were all about to get on it. And go where?

  Why were they taking her anywhere? They’d found out everything she had to tell them. What good was she now? Why didn’t they just …

  She watched the men who’d kidnapped her and held her captive load boxes into the hold of the craft, then stood around talking in a language she did not speak. It occurred to her then that she was not tied up and had not been tied up the whole time she had been a prisoner.

  Should she … could she … make a run for it?

  She looked around. There was nowhere to run, and when she turned back, Mikhailov was staring at her with a not-smile on his face and she had the sense that he knew what she’d been considering and was somehow disappointed she hadn’t had the guts to go through with it.

  Then they flew. She had no idea where they were going, wondered irrationally if they were taking her back to Russia for some reason. But she didn’t think a plane this size could fly over the polar icecap and back down into Russia, and besides, what she could see out the windows was green, not white.

  The change in pressure as the plane climbed into the night sky did something to her mashed fingers, that had been growing blessedly numb but now woke up and throbbed again in rhythm with her heartbeat.

  There was food on the plane.

  The fat man with the broad face whose name she thought was Maxim, shoved a sandwich at her and pronounced, “Eat.”

  It didn’t sound like a request, so she choked the sandwich down.

  The men were mostly silent, not a particularly gregarious lot. Four of them gathered and played some card game that was either one she did not know, or an ordinary game that seemed exotic because the men were speaking Russian.

  Then they landed. It was the middle of the night now. She didn’t know the time because she didn’t wear a watch and they’d taken her phone. All she could tell was that it was a small airport, though there were a lot of planes parked outside and a long row of hangars.

  Shoved into yet another car with tinted windows, they drove through hilly countryside toward a huge building lit up like a stadium even at this hour — the lights twinkling like the cut glass of a chandelier.

  A private elevator. An anonymous hotel hallway. A room, a suite, with a living room and kitchenette and at least two, maybe more, bedrooms. She was shoved into one of them and the door was closed behind her. Not locked, though. She didn’t think rooms like this had locks on the door. Not that it mattered.

  This room was no cell where prisoners were tortured — for information or mere pleasure — with blood-spattered walls and a stopped-up toilet. It was a fancy hotel room, more lavishly appointed than anywhere she’d ever been. About an hour later a man returned with a plastic bag that contained basic toiletry items, toothbrush, toothpaste and the like.

  After she saw what was written on the sack, she couldn’t have slept even if her fingers hadn’t ached. There was a logo that featured a periscope and the words The Nautilus Casino.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Bethany woke up as they drove through the mountains — out in the middle of nowhere, of course — and it was only then that Bailey realized the little girl had wet her pants. The car seat cushion was soaked.

  “Where’s my mommy?” she asked fearfully, only removing her thumb from her mouth long enough to form the words.

  The haunted misery on her face broke Bailey’s heart, but she’d been steeling herself for hours to confront the little g
irl’s fear and she pulled it off rather nicely.

  “She couldn’t come with us on our trip, but she’ll be here soon.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Wherever she is, she’s thinking about you, sweetie pie, and she told me to tell you how much she loves you and that she will come home to you just as soon as she can.”

  Bethany took her thumb out of her mouth again. “I want Mommy.” Then she put the thumb back snug between her lips.

  “So do I. I’m your mommy’s sister; did you know that?”

  Bethany shook her head.

  “We used to play Barbie dolls when we were little girls. Did she tell you about that?”

  Again Bethany looked at her with frightened eyes and shook her head.

  “Well, she had one called Superstar Barbie that a little boy threw up into a tree …”

  So Bailey prattled on, keeping the little girl’s mind occupied while they searched for somewhere they could … then they found a general store right off the set of Deliverance, and once Bailey had Bethany cleaned up and dry, the child actually said that she was hungry.

  They bought soft drinks and moon pies — breakfast of champions — and when they got back to the car, Bailey replaced the wet car seat cushion with a ridiculously overpriced handmade quilt she’d purchased in the ‘West Virginia crafts’ section of the store. It was beautiful, with intricate designs created by dozens of different pieces of fabric. Bailey planned to throw it away as soon as she got home; she wanted no reminders of this trip through hell.

  Once in the car, Bailey continued her monologue.

  Gradually, Bethany relaxed. She was nothing anybody could have mistaken for happy, but neither was she so utterly miserable she could do nothing but whimper and suck her thumb.

  Bundy and Sparky saved the day.

  Dobbs had stayed behind house/dog sitting at the Watford House while they were gone. He stepped out onto the porch as they pulled the rental car into the driveway.