Don't Lose Her

by Jonathon King

  He was refreshingly different. Yeah, she’d heard of him—the GQ good looks and the quiet, unassuming demeanor of the black lawyer who never took on cases that would put him in open court. The gossips couldn’t quite figure out his pleasant but curt style because they were ignorant of his severe stutter. She’d heard the stories of women who’d approached him and been mildly rebuffed with courteous but blunt thank-yous and curt nods before he’d suddenly turn away.

  But then she’d met him at a fund-raiser for Women in Distress. She was there as a judge and symbol of the so-called vigilante justice system. Billy was there as the biggest benefactor to the program for the past eight years. They were introduced and, belying his reputation, he talked with her.

  Yes, there was the stutter, but his eyes held hers, and he didn’t look away. Her father had instilled the same attribute in her at an early age: look everyone in the eye, prove that you’re listening, really listening to what they say, and that you value them and the time they are spending to talk with you. And when Billy told her she had the “most g-gorgeous gr-green eyes he’d ever s-seen,” she knew it wasn’t a line a stuttering man would ever just use.

  After that first meeting, they’d dated: quiet, personal dinners where she learned of his background in North Philadelphia, the barely present father who’d inflicted so much physical and emotional pain on Billy’s mother. In those most intimate moments, he’d told her the manner in which his mother had ended that abuse: the poisoning, her premeditated killing of his father, her torturer.

  The stories moved Diane, but it wasn’t sympathy or compassion that convinced her that this was a man she could finally commit to. She simply fell for him, despite the social upheaval that would result from her marrying a black man. She just loved him. And this baby, their baby, was the result of that love. Damn it, Billy, where are you?

  Diane kept sucking at the straw until it came up dry at the bottom of the empty bottle or container. At the bubbling sound, the straw was abruptly pulled from her mouth and out through the bottom of the hood, which was again cinched tight. Diane heard, yes, she swore she actually heard, the air move as her captor must have withdrawn from the bedside.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much for caring. And my baby thanks you, also.”

  Work that angle, Diane, she thought. Everyone has a mother. It’s limbic. No one can avoid that reality or that recollection. You’ve got to be inhuman, or a psychotic monster, to look at a baby and not feel something. But had she been taken by monsters? She rolled back onto the mattress, her eyes open against the black cloth. For some reason, she felt she could think better if her eyes were open, even though her view was of nothing. She lay there for a few minutes, formulating.

  “Let me ask you something,” she finally said, keeping her voice as conversational as she could: not antagonistic but not condescending, either. It was her courtroom voice, the neutral one she used when addressing witnesses.

  “It seems you are a compassionate person. Can you at least tell me your name? Or even something I can call you? We’re here alone together in all of this. You can at least talk to me. You don’t have to tell why you’ve done this, or what your plans are. Just talk to me. You’ve let me know you’re here by giving me something to feed my baby. Can’t you just say something?”

  Silence.

  Again, Diane heard the creak of wood. Is he sitting in a chair? A straight-backed wooden chair against the wall? Sitting there with a gun in his hand just waiting for the order to kill her? Or is he just staring at her? Or was that muted clicking sound she’d heard really a cell phone he’s using to text someone? She tried to form a picture in her mind. Were the walls concrete? Was the door metal, like a cell? Were there windows? Were they glass, and thus breakable?

  The silence was causing her imagination to run rampant. She’d never been good at silence. In her work, she was surrounded by people: attorneys asking questions, aides making requests, bailiffs giving reports, other judges discussing changes in rules. Outside of court, she was a sociable woman, attending conferences and fund-raisers and society dinners.

  Billy was the quiet one, always listening, always taking in the conversations and sights and smells, and rarely speaking. Though his stutter put him in that situation, Diane knew there was an upside to it. He liked the fact that she could take over in a social situation. He was glad to be able to ignore a social function he considered a chore. Billy might be able to stand this silence and wait it out.

  She didn’t think she could. She needed to know. She needed to do something. She was blind, pregnant, and at the mercy of physically bigger and stronger captors. If she tried to get up, she’d be shoved back down. If she called out, she’d be slapped quiet. If the only way she could act was by talking quietly, she’d do it.

  “Do you speak English?” she asked. If indeed her kidnappers were somehow aligned with Escalante, maybe they were South American. Or would they be locals who worked in his drug distribution enterprise?

  She’d read the files on Escalante, knew of the ruthlessness of his multiheaded businesses in Colombia and the internecine battles with both the government there and other drug distributors vying for trafficking routes and supplies. The photos of village citizens, children, caught up in the crossfire of the drug wars had made her blanch. Even if Escalante hadn’t done the deeds by his own hand, it was by his order that certain outcomes were achieved. If these were men of the same cloth, a dead American judge would mean nothing to them.

  Stop, Diane, she told herself. No negatives now—don’t go there. Your father always taught you optimism.

  Her father had been a judge for forty years. As a child, she’d learned from watching him come home from court with the wear in his eyes and the tired, slumped shoulders of a man who had carried a burden all day and had not been able to leave it behind in the courthouse. When she was older, he would quietly discuss the day’s deliberations and rulings and the inevitable moral and ethical dilemmas that could not be discussed on the bench or with attorneys.

  Those burdens belonged to the judge. He’d told Diane the truth when she first donned a robe: “You stay optimistic, Diane, because you will see and hear so much of the evil in this world that if you don’t, it is too easy to lose faith in all mankind.”

  It had been her parents who guided her, through school, through college, and into law as she followed the family tradition. But she’d thought that she’d given up that inevitable link during her adulthood and had become her own person—which she’d achieved on her own. But now she questioned that independence. She wanted their help. She wanted Billy. She wanted someone to sweep in and rescue her, and the weakness was pissing her off. She had to gain back her strength and do something.

  The silence continued from the other side of the room. Her captor was there; she could feel the air from his breath. Use what you have, she thought.

  “Can I have some more?” she said. “I’m still very hungry.”

  She heard the creak of wood and felt the shift in the density of the space around her. She sniffed, trying to discern from the odor of cologne or sweat or breath something that would help her gain an image, an internal picture, an advantage. But all she gained was the feeling of fingers tipping her chin up and the straw beginning to probe again up under the hood.

  Chapter 16

  If I slept again, I wasn’t aware of it. After picking apart the case by her poolside, Sherry and I had lapsed into a silence that under other circumstances both of us would have enjoyed. Instead, she gave up on the neck massage, sat, and shared a second beer with me, and then excused herself to go to bed. I stared into the blue-green light and found myself waiting for one of the three cell phones next to me to ring, to call me to arms, to give me a direction or an enemy or a hope.

  At some point in the night, I caught myself massaging a dime-size disc of scar tissue at my neck, letting my fingertips glide over the unnaturally sm
ooth skin, probing it, measuring it, remembering it and the day that bullet had ripped through skin and muscle and barely, just barely, missed my carotid artery.

  Being an officer of the law had seemed like a destiny for me, an odd sort of birthright, though emulating my father would never be a motivation. My career had been checkered. I was not smart. I was not ambitious. I was relatively big and athletic, not afraid of long shifts, and could always defeat boredom by studying people—their movements, routines, facial expressions, body language, and interactions with one another—which made me a good street cop, but not an internal climber.

  When I’d given up my short stint as a detective, I’d gone back to the streets, on a third shift walking a beat in Center City. When the shooting that ended my career occurred, I never even felt the first shooter’s round pierce my neck. They told me later that I continued to the storefront and on one knee actually turned over the body of the boy, pressing my hand to the hole in his skinny chest created by my exiting bullet.

  Later, in the hospital, commanders offered me a disability payout to leave the force, and after killing a child in the street, I agreed. I took the money, invested, and then moved to South Florida. I left the place and the profession that had formed me with the hopes that I could leave the past behind. But like every human with a modicum of self-actualization, I learned no one can bury the past deep enough. It is always there, scar tissue stirring the present.

  Before sunrise, the birds began to flit in the canopy above Sherry’s pool: wrens with their tea-kettle calls, mockingbirds with their loud clack, and the annoying green parrots, a colony of which had somehow taken up residence in the neighborhood and was known to go screeching through the trees like a bunch of squeeze toys.

  I got up, gathered my three phones, and went inside to take a shower. I grabbed something to eat out of the refrigerator and, as was my habit, I leaned across the bed where Sherry lay sleeping and silently kissed her good-bye on the side of the forehead. I was once told it was a cop’s kiss, knowing every time you went out on a shift, there was a chance you might not be back. Whether it gave your loved one any peace was debatable; maybe it only made you feel better. Maybe it was selfish. But if such an act is a display of selfishness, then maybe selfishness is overly maligned.

  I took the F-150 instead of the Fury. I was thinking about the incognito nature of my morning trip. Billy’s plan was for me to arrive at 6:30 a.m. at the federal courthouse’s underground parking lot, where I’d be cleared to enter by security. Then I’d meet Billy at Diane’s office, where he had been living for the past two days. From there, he had arranged for a limousine to leave the garage ahead of us. We’d soon follow in my pickup, staying in cell phone contact with the limo driver. When he got to Billy’s condo, we would slip in behind the building, where Billy would have on-site security personnel allow us up on the basement freight elevator. Maybe the whole plan was unnecessarily elaborate, but both of us had seen the media at its worst, and if the limo distracted the hounds, then Billy—the anxious and aggrieved husband of the kidnapped federal judge—wouldn’t have his ducking head and profile flashed on CNN all day.

  When I arrived at the courthouse, I took Tamarind Avenue around to the back and stopped in front of the lowered parking garage gate to give the uniformed officer my name, my private investigator’s and driver’s licenses, and the business card of the FBI agent in charge whom I’d met in Diane’s office the last time I’d been here.

  It still took ten minutes for the guard to clear me. Inside, I parked as close to the elevator as possible and noted how sparsely populated the garage and the hallways inside the building were. It was an eight-to-five kind of place; the day-to-day workers—clerks, bailiffs, secretaries, lawyers—wouldn’t start flowing in for another hour or so.

  Yet when I locked my truck and looked down past the pillars to the east end of the garage where a corridor leading to the holding cells was fenced off, a man clad in the black paramilitary uniform of a SWAT officer was standing with an MP5 automatic rifle slung over his chest. When I took the elevator to the first floor, I met a uniformed Palm Beach County officer on duty at the security and screening checkpoint.

  While I emptied my pockets of keys and change and three cell phones, I looked out through the glass-front doors and could see two news vans already parked, or perhaps still parked, out in the public lot. No one was doing any early stand-up reports for The Today Show or the many local morning newscasts, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they would.

  Even though I hadn’t tripped any signals when passing through the metal detectors, the officer on the other side still wanded me. Once cleared, I headed upstairs to Diane’s chambers. Outside her doors, I was met again by men I assumed were federal agents, who radioed my presence inside and then passed me through after obtaining clearance. Things were tight. They’re always tight after the fact, after the hijacking, the bombing, the homicide, the riot, or the abduction.

  Law enforcement is a reactive entity—often closing the gate after the horse is out. It is that way out of necessity. A free society can’t function any other way. But tell that to a father who signed a petition against those stoplight cameras and whose daughter was later run down by someone blowing the light in his neighborhood. Tell it to the guy who derides the TSA for slowing his business travel and then finds out his family was on the plane blown out of the sky by a terrorist wearing a shoe bomb. Tell it to the folks who lobbied for less regulation and then found four feet of toxic sludge in their backyards when the nearby coal plant’s retention wall collapsed.

  People never want government telling them what to do until something hits them between the eyes. Then their reaction is to blame someone for not keeping them safe. You don’t want rules and regulations? Welcome to chaos.

  The reception area of Diane’s office was empty, her assistant nowhere in sight. If schedules and attorney inquiries and requisite daily handlings of bureaucratic housekeeping were being done, they weren’t being done here. When I walked through the door to her chambers, the silence was telling. There was one agent sitting close by the electronics that had been set up to monitor and record all incoming calls. There were empty coffee cups and several editions of the local newspapers stacked around him. The lone agent nodded at me, stood to shake my hand with one perfunctory pump, and then looked into my eyes awaiting any question or utterance I might offer. I said nothing.

  Billy was still behind Diane’s desk, staring into the computer monitor there, his fingers dancing on the keyboard. He did not look up as I stepped to his side. With nothing to report himself, he waited on me in vain. He looked as bad as someone whose loved one was missing and had spent days without sleep, banging out emails and making phone calls to anyone who might be helpful or could be bribed or cajoled with favors or pressured with economic ruin to hand over any information that might lead to the whereabouts of his wife.

  I put my hands in my pockets and after a full minute I finally said: “You ready to go?”

  Billy looked up at me with eyes I didn’t recognize: the flesh around them was pouched and swollen, the whites striated with red veins, the pupils focused and burning with a deep anger and volition that would have caused me to reach for my handgun had I seen them in the head of some street criminal in my patrol days.

  To my question, he only nodded and then stood with a wobble in one knee and a hand that had to go out on the nearby bookcase to steady himself. I instantly wondered how long it’d been since he’d been out of Diane’s chair, but I knew better than to reach out. I let Billy gain his own balance, but I hooked his forgotten suit coat off the back of the chair as he led us out of the office.

  “I’ve g-got to g-get home, M-max,” Billy said as we headed down the corridor towards the elevators. “I’ve got m-more c-computer­ p-power in m-my own office than they d-do here and m-my c-contacts­ aren’t always g-going to b-be f-forthcoming unless w-we’re on a s-secure l-line.
”

  If he was pulling in his national and international players, the big economic guns that he’d cultivated and with whom he’d shared his financial expertise, I could see why they would be reluctant to talk openly to him while he was sitting in a federal courthouse. Billy wasn’t a scammer. As far as I knew, and admittedly I knew little about big-time finance, he played it legally and above-board. With his background at the Wharton School and the myriad friends he’d met there and throughout the law community, his clientele was varied and far-reaching.

  He’d made them money over the years, and I knew he’d tapped them for some of his philanthropic endeavors. He knew they would help in any way they could, but they weren’t comfortable flaunting it. The real players don’t put their business out on the street. They keep it confidential. Just like in the underworld, if you’re a player you don’t talk about it out in the barrooms or at open lunches or on unsecured phone lines. Wannabes brag; the real ones just quietly and effectively go about their business.

  As we walked to the elevators, a few early birds began to appear. A black janitor with his wheeled refuse can and a broom slid his way into our path, and Billy stopped and took the elderly man’s hand, which was offered in a muted gesture of consolation and hope. Further down, a middle-aged woman stopped to wish Billy well and “knew, just knew” Diane would soon be home. Before we reached the elevator, a knot of suited men turned their faces to us. All nodded their heads in greeting and uttered sentences of support. Among them was a silver-haired man of medium height whose eyes were focused on Billy, but not intently.

  “Mr. Manchester. I was just on my way to your wife’s office, sir,” said one, who stepped forward as though the spokesman for all.