by Steven Gould
“One last chance,” I told him from a pay phone near Balboa Park. “You want my cooperation or not?”
He made a slight concession. “I’ll answer your questions face-to-face. Not over the phone.”
“Where?” I seriously considered it. After all, it wasn’t as if he could hold me.
“Here—in my office.”
“Bugger that!” I bit my lip. “I might consider someplace else. Balboa Park, perhaps? You could be there in ten minutes, right?”
“Maybe.”
“You’d have to come alone.”
“What, alone and unarmed?” You could cut the scorn with a knife.
“Bring as many guns as you want. Just be alone.”
Pause. “I’ve got a call scheduled. How about forty-five minutes?”
He was stalling. “Take it on your cell on the way here.”
“It’s the deputy director. I can’t.”
“I did mention that this is your last chance, right?”
“But I really can’t! Maybe I could cut it down to thirt—”
I cut him off. “I won’t be calling again.” And hung up.
The next morning I jumped to Universal Studios in L.A., a place I’d been with Mum and Dad. Saw the shark. I left immediately, overwhelmed by the memories.
Why should happy memories hurt more than the images in my head from that night?
I caught the brand-new Red Line extension at Hollywood and Vine and rode it all the way to Union Station. My train didn’t leave until the next evening, but I wanted a jump site. I sketched the funky Mission-style clock tower from outside.
Back in San Diego I called the sheriff’s department from an office phone in the county courthouse. The office was empty for lunch and the door was locked but it was glass and I could see through it. The Central Investigations Division at the main office gave me a cell phone number. “Detective Vigil is coordinating with the federal authorities.” She used the Spanish pronunciation, Vee-hill.
I tried the number and after five rings a voice said, “Bob Vigil.”
“My name is Griffin O’Conner, Detective. I sent a sketch to your department.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. “Really. That’s odd. The Feds seem to think you’re in Europe.”
Huh. The U.K. Immigration Service was talking to the FBI? Maybe through New Scotland Yard? “You got caller ID?”
“Yeah. I see you’re local right now.”
“Any luck with the sketch? Was it helpful?”
“Shit, yes! The car rental company ID’d him, the guy whose car they stole in Mexico ID’d him. The Azteca Airlines clerk at Rodriguez ID’d him.”
“Rodriguez? Where’s that?”
“Tijuana,” said Vigil. “General Abelardo L. Rodriguez International Airport.”
“Where’d he fly?”
“They don’t know. She doesn’t remember and the ID he used apparently wasn’t for ‘Kemp.’ That name wasn’t on any of their manifests. Flights left for several cities both in and out of Mexico. The FBI are trying for security video on the departing flights in Tijuana and arriving flights at the possible cities.”
“Does Special Agent Proctor at the San Diego FBI office know this?”
“That’s who told me.”
Bastard.
Vigil continued, “We surmise that Sam didn’t have a phone number for you—that’s why the perp’s camped out there, right?”
“Camped out? At Sam’s place?”
“Yeah—they were there a good week. It ties into the car rental and the amount of trash they generated. I take it that Sam couldn’t just call you.”
I winced. “Uh, no. I called him. I’m semiregular, but—” God. They’d held Sam and Consuelo for an entire week waiting for me to call? I felt like throwing up. I wanted to race to Paris and search until I found Alejandra, to protect her.
You’djust lead them to her.
Vigil interpreted my silence. “You see it, eh?”
My breathing deepened. “Yes!”
He was tactfully quiet for a moment.
After my breathing calmed I said, “Anybody else? Have you figured how many there were?”
“Paolo saw four. He’s the guy who was carjacked on Highway Two. We have some pictures of them, from the camera at the rental place. You could take a look and see if you recognize them.”
“Do you have Kemp in those shots?”
“No. According to the rental agent he stayed outside. One of these other guys took care of the paperwork.”
I suppose he could be one of the guys I’d encountered in the London Tube, or the Big Man in Oaxaca. My train wasn’t going to leave for another twenty-six hours. “I guess I could come look. Where are you?”
“I’m at Lemon Grove substation. Your number looks like its downtown, yes?”
“I’m at the county courthouse.”
“I’m going to the main office. I could meet you someplace closer to downtown.”
Well, he had answered my questions, unlike Proctor, and I wanted to see the pictures—the other faces.
“Okay. The main library on E Street.”
“Right. Take me twenty-five minutes, okay? Just inside?”
“Sure. Are you in uniform?”
“No. I’ll have a red folder with the pictures—I’ll wave it. I’m Hispanic, about two hundred pounds, and I’ve got on a brown suit, no tie. Clean-shaven. Well, I was this morning.”
“Right.”
I jumped to the little staff parking lot behind the central branch library and walked around to the front. For a moment I stood under the covered entranceway on the sidewalk, looking around, but it was just a busy San Diego weekday. I went inside and found a place where I could watch the door from behind a circular book display rack and lean against a wall.
Lots of people moved in and out through the doors in the next thirty minutes. Finally, as advertised, a man in a brown suit came in, a thick red file folder in his hand. He was holding it in front of him chest high.
I pushed off the wall and went to meet him. As I passed the reference books I heard a step and twisted to my left to see a man lunge out from between the shelves. Something flashed in his hand and I felt a pressure on my back ribs, then excruciating pain. His hand, and the flashing metal, came back for another stroke, toward my stomach, and I was gone.
I staggered across the uneven floor of the Hole and fell to one knee. When I tried to lift my left hand to feel back there, I screamed, and dropped it again. Where my arm rested against my leg, I could feel the cloth was soaked. I couldn’t even twist to look down but I tilted my hand and saw blood on the fingers.
I needed a doctor, urgently, before I bled to death, but I also needed to avoid the places I frequented. Going to hospital in London could be quickly fatal. Definitely in San Diego, too, or the clinic I knew in La Crucecita. I managed to stand though the effort caused my sight to darken and the room to spin. I found myself staring at my sketches, pinned to the sheets of plywood.
There.
It was early evening in Hondarribia, but the old quarter was well lit, and when I sprawled facedown on the pavement, the red mess on the back of my pale shirt apparently stood out very well, for the last thing I heard was a woman screaming and a man’s voice saying, “¡Por la sangre de Cristo!”
Indeed.
I woke up lying on my stomach, my head tilted to one side. My back didn’t hurt as much but someone was tugging on it. I started to shift and a hand pressed down on my shoulder. A man’s voice said, “i No te muevas! ¿Entiendes?”
I settled back down. “Entiendo.” After a minute I asked where I was. “¿Dónde estoy?”
“Mi clínica. Soy el doctor Uriarte. El policia te trajo.”
The police brought me, eh? I thought about what was in my pockets. Just money. English pounds, some francs, some U.S. dollars. Maybe an art eraser. No ID—not since my passport had been confiscated by UK Immigration.
“Treinta-nueve puntadas,” Dr. Uriarte announced. “Por to
do.”
Thirty-nine stitches. He’d obviously numbed it but my imagination made it itch and ache and tingle all at once. He dressed it.
He helped me to sit. I was naked. My shirt, pants, underwear, my shoes, my socks, were all in a corner, in a bloody pile—even my shoes had blood on them. I had an IV in my left arm, some clear fluid running down the tube. The room spun and he kept his hands on my shoulders until I said, “Bien.”
He put a dressing on and fastened it by taping all the way around my ribs, watching me carefully to make sure I didn’t fall over. “¿Usted recuerda ser atacado?”
Well, yes, I did remember being attacked but I shook my head. “No. Sucedió muy rápido.” It happened too fast.
He took a plastic bag from the far counter and started to hand it to me. “Tenga su dinero—are you American?” He’d noticed the dollars. His English was thickly accented but colloquial.
“British,” I said.
“Oh. Your Spanish sounds like Mexico.”
I nodded. “Yeah—that’s where I learned it.”
“I went to school in Texas,” he said. “Baylor Medical School.”
“Ah. I’ve lived in California. I’m a little cold, Doctor.”
“Oh, forgive me.” He pulled a cabinet open and took out an examination robe. “I’m a pediatrician. My clinic is near where you were mugged and I live next to it. I’m afraid I stitch up a lot of the local bar fighters.” He took out the IV and helped me put on the robe. “What hotel are you staying at?”
“None. Only just arrived.”
“Oh, so they stole your passport. I was hoping it was at your hotel.”
I shook my head.
“The nearest British consul is in Bilbao. I think they can issue emergency passports.”
I nodded.
“You need to be very careful—I stitched together three different layers of muscle. No exercise for four weeks, and then some physiotherapy.” He pursed his lips. “It could’ve been much worse. I think they were going for your kidney. You would’ve died within minutes.”
I remembered twisting around at his movement. Yeah, he missed. But if he hadn’t, it wouldn’t matter how fast I’d jumped? “I would’ve bled to death?”
“Oh, yes. The renal artery is very big. Only immediate attention in a trauma center could have saved you. Your attacker must’ve been a very desperate man.”
I blinked. “I’m not feeling much.”
“Oh, you will. You’ll need something for the pain. I’ll write you a script.”
“And the stitches?”
“Ten days. The internal ones will dissolve—don’t worry about them.”
“Okay.”
“If there is redness or discharge or swelling, get to a hospital.”
“Okay. How much do I owe you?”
“You don’t have insurance?”
“No.”
He told me how much he would’ve been charged against an insurance company and I gave him that and half again in the U.S. dollars.
“The police are waiting to talk to you.”
“Of course,” I said.
I asked to use his bathroom and didn’t come out.
At first, I slept well, but the lidocaine faded and pain brought me awake, a shout of pain echoing off the walls of the Hole. It was agony to put a T-shirt on. Merely painful to pull on some shorts.
I jumped to a farmacia in La Crucecita. I didn’t care if the bastards detected the jump—you don’t need prescriptions to get pain medication in Mexico. I explained my problem to the pharmacist, even started to lift my shirt to show the dressing, but raising my left arm was not in the cards.
The pharmacist looked alarmed at my expression and gestured for me to put the shirt back down. “¿Treinte-nueve puntadas?” The number of stitches really impressed him.
“Verdad.”
He sold me a bottle of Tylenol with codeine. I jumped back to the Hole before I was through the door.
I wasn’t able to get back to sleep but the ache died to a dull throbbing. I dressed carefully and shopped for new shoes, first in San Diego, then in Rennes. Had to let the clerk tie them for me. At six that evening I carefully boarded the Southwest Chief at Los Angeles’ Union Station, let the conductor show me to my expensively exclusive room, and, with the aid of the pills, slept fitfully on my right side.
My plan had been to sketch at every stop along the way, but the drugs knocked me (and that plan) on its ass. I did manage a few drawings out the stateroom window at the stations in Kingman, Flagstaff, and Winslow. In New Mexico I got Albuquerque, Lamy, and Raton, but I doubled up on the pills after that and slept all the way through Colorado and most of Kansas, waking up in time to sketch Lawrence and Kansas City. There was only one other stop in Missouri, La Plata, and only one in the corner of Iowa before we began crossing Illinois. I gave up drawing. Everything hurt too much and the pills were making me constipated.
The last five hours into Chicago were misery encased in a fuzzy drug fog. I stank—I hadn’t trusted my ability to keep the stitches dry and just washing my armpits was surprisingly difficult. I’d been bumped by other passengers several times as I tottered along the passageway to the dining car.
And I’d been thinking.
He’d told them. Investigator Vigil had told them I’d be at the library. They’d been waiting. They’d either gotten there ahead of me or come in a different entrance, possibly circumventing the emergency exit alarms.
But Vigil had told them.
Bastard.
I checked into a hotel near the station, paying in advance. I explained that I’d been mugged and that was why I didn’t have any ID. Looking at my face in the mirror later, I looked older than I remembered. I was older, but the real change stemmed from the pain. Maybe they thought I was over eighteen or maybe they just felt sorry for me.
I used the bathtub, gratefully, leaving my left arm down, the water shallow. I managed to get rid of the stink and even wash my hair a bit. The bed was softer than mine back in the Hole, but even with the drugs, every noise brought me awake with an adrenaline rush. Finally, I turned on the lights, got a good look at the room, and jumped back to the Hole, where, harder bed or not, I actually slept for six hours.
That was when I turned the corner, I think.
It hurt the next morning but not so bad. It was manageable. I didn’t take a pill, and by the time I’d finished breakfast back in the Chicago hotel, the drug-induced haze was lifting.
The Lakeshore Limited left at 7:55 P.M. and arrived at Penn Station midafternoon the next day. I’d slept better than I had since the attack and as soon as I was off the train I bought a New Jersey Transit ticket for Trenton. While I waited for the 5:01 train, I drew a nook under the Seventh Avenue steps. The train was ridiculously crowded, but then it was rush hour. It hurt to sit, anyway, so I found a corner where I could prop myself without leaning against the stitches.
The trip was just over an hour.
Trenton was wet, light rain.
The concessionaire had a Trenton map. Trenton Central High School, where E.V. went, was about a half mile from the station and her address, on Euclid Avenue, was even closer.
But it was raining and an hour standing on the train had wiped me like a blackboard. I sketched a spot on Platform 1D, complete with scurrying commuters, and jumped back to the Hole.
Ten days after the attack, I went back to Dr. Uriarte, waiting with mothers and their sick kids in his pediatric waiting room.
He blinked when he saw me, puzzled, and then he remembered. “iEs usted! Where did you go?” He looked around at the interested audience and waved me back to his examining rooms. Several women who’d been there before me looked murderous.
When he’d closed the door to the examining room he said, “The police were very upset with me. They said I was lying when I told them you’d left, naked.”
“Lamento mucho. I didn’t mean for them to bother you. I need my stitches out, but if it would cause trouble, I could find someplace
else. I’ll pay cash.”
He considered it. “Of course we’ll take out your stitches. They didn’t say to call if you came back.”
“Ah. Muchas gracias.”
He had one of his nurses pull them while he dealt with some of the other patients and their angry mothers, but he came back and examined the cut when she was done. “Excellent. There will always be a scar. A line, but I think you won’t have any functional damage.”
I paid him twice what he said the amount was.
I called on a Friday night, from Penn Station. She wasn’t at home but her mother told me she’d be back by ten and she was, snatching up the phone when it rang at 10:05 P.M.
“Hello?”
“Hello, E.V, it’s—”
She interrupted. “It is you. I’ve been waiting almost an hour! My mother could’ve called me—I was just down the block at Rhonda’s! She didn’t realize it had to be an overseas call!”
“Well, no. Actually not. I’m in New York City.”
She was quiet for a second then said, “Really?”
“Really. I was wondering if I could drop off that sketch, tomorrow, perhaps, if your schedule is clear.”
She laughed. “Clear. Mother? Is my ‘schedule’ clear tomorrow?” She said it British, like I had, “shed-youl.” “Of course my schedule is clear.” This time she said it with the hard c. “Where? When? Should I take a train into the city?”
I liked that idea a lot but I said, “No. Don’t think your parents would give that a go, would they? Better I should come to you. All right if I come around about ten? Euclid Avenue, right? Looks like it’s walking distance from the station.”
“How’d you know that?”
“Maps, m’dear. Maps.”
“Oh. Well, that would be fine. What are you doing in New York?”
“Talking to you.”
I jumped to the Trenton station the next morning and joined the crowd getting off a Philadelphia train. I walked, stretching my legs more and more. The cut was still incredibly sore but I was regaining my stamina. I no longer got dizzy standing up, and I was able to manage the boxed sketch under my right arm. For the first time in two weeks, I felt clean, having had an excellent shower—no worries about getting the stitches wet.
