“Did I?” He blinked, thinking. “Yeah, I did. This doctor. This doctor who I saw on account of my oncologist.”
I exchanged a glance with Andy, who twitched his nose at me. Marc wasn’t the only one getting lost.
“You mean your oncologist referred you to another doctor?”
“Look,” Marc sat up in the chair and wiped some sweat from his neck, “my guy said I could go talk to this other doc, and he’d give me some special treatment that would cure me.”
“Cure your cancer?” No way would any doctor worth his degrees make that promise. Either Marc was being led on by someone looking to wring him dry, or he was more delirious than he seemed in that moment.
Assuming Marc had been seeing an actual oncologist for treatments, pushing scams on the side was a huge risk to a legitimate doctor’s reputation. Unless he was running a side-hustle with whomever he sent Marc to. But then, where did the money come in? Identity theft? Theft of VA benefits?
“Something like that,” he said. “I don’t know. It sounded weird from the start, but with this tumor eating my brain, I’m willing to do weird stuff, you know?”
I nodded.
“He gave me this doc’s address,” Marc said. “So, I figure, why the hell not? What am I gonna lose by going? I went. I’m barely five steps inside this other doc’s house, and he says hello to me, then without taking a breath, he says he wants to give me an injection right there in his living room. I hesitated. He pulled out the needle and tells me to roll up my sleeve. But I’m scared of needles, so I tell him, ‘hell no!’ I’ve seen how this movie ends. And it’s not with me getting up and feeling better.”
Scared of needles and airplanes.
“So, you sent Luc after this guy before he disappeared?”
Marc nodded.
“What’s his name?”
“Markel.”
I scratched the back of my neck while I thought about all the things Marc Herrera had given me to chew on. His story about this mystery doctor didn’t add up. Too many fuzzy details, and since he was, reportedly, the last person to see Luc Baptiste alive, he wasn’t clear of my suspicions.
Maybe, close to death as he was, he didn’t care about stirring up more trouble for himself. It’d all be over soon, right?
Given that Marc was terminally ill, I didn’t think he’d run. His body wouldn’t take it. Then again, he might be happy to kick off if he’d killed Luc. In any case, if he tried to slip away, someone at Armstrong could dig up his home address or a boat registered in his name, and I’d find him.
The next move I needed to make was to check his story. Luc’s bundle of threats and court documents was back on Reel Fun, and it might have something from Marc Herrera or Markel. Or both.
“You remember Dr. Markel’s address?” I asked.
After lunch, Miss Price piled on the work. She was uncharacteristically anxious, calling down to Gabriela’s desk to share every thought she had about the new building. Was she feeling guilty about blocking Flor’s spot in the Anthradone trial? Or did Dr. Markel call to tell her about his conversation with Gabriela?
No, it couldn’t be that. Why would he call Miss Price? She had nothing to do with handling the research labs. He’d call the compliance office, and they’d bring Gabriela in right away.
Miss Price must’ve been worried about the new headquarters. Gabriela couldn’t fault her. Miss Price had a lot on her plate. Gabriela would’ve been zipping around her office too if her nerves weren’t already shot in anticipation of her meeting with Dr. Markel.
But she had to play it cool. She had to check up on contractors, and adjust orders to caterers, and make sure the down payment got into the band’s bank account, and she had to source a sixty-foot projector screen. Miss Price’s eyes had bugged out at the last three quotes Gabriela had given her for the projector screen, but she wasn’t willing to compromise on size, so Gabriela had to continue the search. Amid all of that, Gabriela arranged for Flor’s day nurse to stay into the evening. Hopefully, she’d be back from Markel’s by nine that evening.
One task rolled into another, until she found herself alone in her windowless room when a break in the action finally came. Gabriela checked the time on her phone.
Already 5:45.
She should’ve been gone an hour ago! God have mercy on her if she lost her only chance at meeting Dr. Markel. How would she ever look her little girl in the eye again?
Gabriela grabbed her purse and bounded out of her chair. She slapped the light switch off as she went out, then zipped down the hall, her heart thrumming in her throat while the stale office air rushed past her ears. Running through the door to the staircase, she took the steps down two at a time, getting to the main floor faster than she’d believed possible.
There, she pushed through the staircase door, then briskly strode through a lobby decked in marble, steel, and glass.
Once outside, she pulled out her phone and copied Dr. Markel’s address into her GPS app. The tropical air outside rested heavily on her shoulders, sticking to the back of her neck, and putting a chill in the light breeze blowing across her skin.
Her car was one of a dozen still in the employee lot, about two hundred feet away.
She ran past Miss Price’s Lexus, and past four more empty rows of parking spaces before she reached it.
Gabriela’s used Kia stuttered to life as soon as she turned the key. She slapped the car into gear, started the directions in her GPS app, then rocketed from the parking lot.
First, she headed east, then south toward the highway, which cut through the more densely populated part of the city. There, the side streets just off the highway’s shoulders were quilted with mismatched asphalt patches, and the historic hotels, shops, and colorful murals in Santurce yielded to apartments, convenience stores, and cubic houses still bearing the scars of Maria’s fury three years on.
South of there, she crossed the Martín Peña Channel. Then the road followed alongside the Rio Piedras for a few miles before the highway crossed over the river and bent westward.
Her phone said Manati was half an hour away. Most of the drive would be through San Juan’s suburban sprawl—more squat, blocky houses and strip malls filled with mom and pop operations tucked against jungle and rocky hills. More murals and tarps on roofs and patchwork asphalt.
Seeing the areas west of San Juan came as a welcome change of pace—she and Flor hadn’t left the city in almost a year. But the real treat was being out from all the tall apartment buildings. Out on Highway 22, where the road overran the trees, she had a perfect view of the westward Puerto Rican sky. Ahead, the setting sun had all but disappeared over the horizon. In its wake came bursts of pink, orange, and deep purple as vibrant as her little girl’s smile once was. The hand of the Lord painted this air, leaving His radiance upon it, His glory for her eyes to see and for her heart to follow into the arms of mercy and healing, to remind her that life had once been kind to her, and it would be again. Not only for herself, but for the fruit that she’d borne in the back room of her family home when she was still a child, too.
Even after years of heartache and despair—after hurricanes and watching her little girl wilt before her eyes, Gabriela Ramos couldn’t stop herself from being awed by the majesty of God and His message that no matter how hard things became, how murky they seemed, nothing could ever close that wide-open sky.
She continued westward, alternating her attention between the road and the sunset. Eventually, she turned off the highway, taking the only exit—heading south toward Manati. A half mile down, Gabriela’s phone told her to head west onto Highway 2, which took her along the northern edge of Manati, proper.
This town was unknown to her. She didn’t know anyone who’d come from Manati, or even anyone who’d spent time there. The houses and buildings were compressed to one story for the most part, and the structures weren’t as densely packed as in San Juan. Before she could get a good feel for the place, her phone told her to turn northward, up a two-l
ane highway. Outside her car, buildings and pavement gave way to forest so dense and dark, she couldn’t see anything but walls of green leaves and dying branches lit by her car’s headlights and dripping with shadows.
She passed through a barriada, where only a few streetlamps still worked, leaving nearly every intersecting road she looked down cocooned with darkness. These few working-class neighborhoods to the north of Manati likely had irregular power—which, on a given day, was probably off more than it was on.
Moving north, the houses spread farther apart and became bigger. Compared to the houses she’d passed a few blocks before, most were lit up like Christmas trees. She saw no blue tarps glistening with moisture under fading twilight, or loosely piled lumber in vacant lots, or balls and bikes thrown down by children wherever they stood when their mothers called them in. Three miles down the road, she was guided into another thick stand of jungle, where her phone instructed her that she would turn eastward in a quarter mile. Gabriela strained her eyes into the darkness ahead, looking for a lamp post, street sign or mailbox, or some hint of a way forward.
She saw nothing until the moment her phone told her to turn, when a small notch cut through the trees caught her eyes, holding the way open for a one-lane dirt road. She hit the brakes and swung the wheel, making the turn.
The road ahead was frighteningly dark; leafy branches hung out over the narrow road, blotting out the stars. On either side, thick vines and heavy foliage crept closer. If she had to stop and get out for some reason, she doubted she would have enough room. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Half a mile down, the dirt road turned to blacktop so smooth, she could feel it caressing the dirt off the tires of her Kia. The forest peeled back as well, held off by a large stone arch over the road with massive flowerpots at its base.
When she passed under the arch, it was as if the whole world opened up to Gabriela once more. Stars twinkled overhead, the driveway looped around a large flower garden bursting with color, and in the middle of that, she saw a two-tiered fountain spitting into the air. The lowest tier was a circular bath, its edge hovering a few inches above clumps of red tropical flowers. The top tier supported a caduceus staff—an emblem Gabriela saw at every hospital, on the sides of ambulances, stitched into lab coats, printed on the labels for Flor’s medication; two snakes twisted around the staff, with wings spreading from the staff’s head. It looked angelic, until a heavy feeling settled over Gabriela, burning hot as pitch, and the faint smell of bleach over a dusty hospital floor came to her.
How much did that thing cost? Had to be the same as one or two chemo treatments for Flor. Or ten, for all Gabriela knew.
Judge not. She took a deep breath.
Still, she couldn’t help but feel slighted. Was this the kind of crap this doctor spent his money on, while Gabriela scrimped and saved and struggled?
She was close to stomping on the pedal and ramming that stupid fountain into the porch and through the front door. Then she’d jump out of the car, scramble through the hole in his house and grab whatever medication he was, undoubtedly, going to rake her over the coals for.
Imagine that, she thought. This beautiful house with its front teeth knocked in—this house that Dr. Markel probably treasured as much as anything in his life. The mound of broken glass and concrete Gabriela would leave behind her, the shards and dust of another man’s dreams.
She snapped herself out of her terrible imagery. God help me, she thought, when did she turn into this person?
She followed the drive around the fountain and into a turnaround, parking between a gleaming black Mercedes Benz and a huge SUV.
Of course, her brain started to crawl into thoughts about how expensive both those cars must be to drive, and insure, and what it meant for one person to have all this wealth while so many other people had barely enough to live. People dying to keep their families from the kinds of debt that denied opportunities across generations—the kind of debt that kept a child’s mind as empty as her belly.
If the cash put into either of those cars were put toward…
Gabriela closed her eyes tightly, ran her tongue along the bottoms of her teeth, and willed herself to stop imagining scenarios and do what had to be done to save her daughter.
Before she got out of her car, Gabriela prayed, then pulled the visor down and checked her makeup in the mirror. Her lipstick had gone dull, so she reapplied, then noticed that her mascara could use some touching up. She started to reach for her makeup bag in the pouch behind the passenger’s seat, then stopped herself.
Through the back window, she saw the house’s big front porch, elevated about four feet off the ground, the steps leading to a front door with opaque cast-glass that looked like ripples on churning seas.
It was open.
Gabriela shook her head. If she left her front door open, she would’ve been tied up and tossed in the bathtub while somebody cleaned her place out in thirty seconds flat. And the police wouldn’t be able to find a suspect if he’d left behind a note signed, dated, and stamped by a notary.
Out of her car, she started toward the front door. The fountain bubbled to the right of her and bugs dove at the lights hidden behind the flowers, looking for the darkness behind them, while coqui chirped and laughed from the security of the undergrowth off the driveway.
At the first step, Gabriela became acutely aware of the rising and falling of her chest, the sticky air in her throat, and the movement of her ribs and her diaphragm. Her tiny, mortal body both pushed against and gulped something primordial, something that would be around long after she was dead and buried.
The wind’s supremacy could kill her with the brush of a breeze—and almost had more than once—but she needed it. Every second she was alive, she was a minute from death, until she took her next breath and restarted the timer. She existed at the mercy of something far more powerful, and always would.
Her eyes met the open door ahead. Her brain switched to Flor, then to Dr. Markel.
She climbed the rest of the steps, then stopped on the porch, which extended all the way to the corner of the house. To her left, a splash of light coming from a Tiffany lamp at the center of the house’s big front window spilled onto the porch. It sifted through strands of wicker in a pair of chairs sitting on the porch. Beside the chairs, shadows from a large wood table cloaked the rest of the porch in darkness.
Through the front window, she saw a sitting room with a TV as big as a mainsail, and wall-sized bookshelves speckled with beachie knick-knacks like driftwood and conch shells and a dried seahorse pinned under glass. She pictured herself in that room; Dr. Markel sitting on the antique rocker in the corner, his legs crossed at the knees as he studied her over a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose. She could see him shaking his head and dismissing her when Gabriela explained that she wasn’t a journalist, but a desperate mother with her hands out.
She would be shooed away without a second thought.
Gabriela paused and prayed. God would get her through. He always did.
Standing less than a pace from the door, she peered into the open crack. The entryway waited on the other side. Past it, she saw a shard of a room, well-lit with pebble-glass cabinets high on the walls, and the faint shape of a stack of white plates behind the glass.
A kitchen.
That thought tapped the threads of Gabriela’s soul, reverberating deep inside her.
Dr. Markel was a person. He ate. He kept a tidy home. He sat in his chair and read books by the light of his Tiffany lamp in the front room, where he could see his gaudy fountain.
A nugget of humanity existed within him. She could work with that. Gabriela’s hand moved to the vertical wooden handle of the front door, made to look like a weathered ship’s mast. It was warm.
Bang.
Her hand recoiled from the door handle. A sharp sound reverberated inside her skull. What was that? A firecracker? A power transformer blowing? But the lights were still—
A woman’s scream c
ame next. Gabriela’s blood went cold.
Bang. Bang.
The scream stopped.
A gunshot. In a haze of panic, she stepped back, blood scurrying from her brain, every instinct in her body begging her to press herself low and get as far away from the gunshots as possible—and God in Heaven! That bone-chilling scream.
Footsteps pounded inside the house.
A shadow fell across the cabinet doors, coming closer. Her conscious mind was no longer in control—it was being devoured by fear, her instincts alone driving her to act. Gabriela darted to her left. The thick shadows near the table drew her eye. She balled herself up, pulling the darkness over, then turned around, her back against the house.
Stay here. Stay quiet. Don’t move, don’t think, don’t breathe.
The porch rattled under her. Footsteps came nearer, like a stormfront crashing over the water. Suddenly, the back of a man’s figure came into view; then he turned right at the bottom of the steps and trotted past her.
She saw him in profile. The man wasn’t tall, but he was upright, with good posture; a muscled, broad-shouldered man. His long, dark hair was swept back from his face, and the light from the lamp in the window behind Gabriela revealed a lean, hollow cheek, a deep-set eye and angular nostrils that bestowed him with a murderous intensity.
She flattened herself against the wall. Why did she look? Why would she risk bringing herself out of hiding?
Had he seen her? Did he hear her? Was he coming back?
She was as good as dead. He was going to shoot her. Wait. If he was going to shoot her, why hadn’t he done it earlier? He needed more ammunition—maybe he’d only had enough for the doctor and his wife. Three bullets? Why would he only bring three bullets? Would he know the exact amount he’d need to plug up a shrieking woman after she saw her husband killed in front of her?
Stop. Just stop.
A hellish orange glow appeared across the fountain. The snake-and-staff at the top turned fearful, and the walls around Gabriela reflected the same quivering, orange light. Her deep, dark shadows began shrinking. She couldn’t see where the light came from—only that it appeared, eating the only thing keeping her safe.
Wayward Sons Page 14
