Quarantined

by Joe McKinney

  “What's going on, sir?”

  The officer stood next to Treanor. “I need the keys to your car,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “Your keys,” he said, his voice icing over. His expression made it look like he'd just tasted something unexpectedly bitter.

  I looked at Chunk, but his face was unreadable behind his surgical mask. Only his eyes flashed, and those only for the briefest moment.

  “Detective Harris,” said Treanor, his hand open, palm up in front of me.

  I reached into the pockets of my sweatpants and pulled out the car keys and dropped them in his open palm.

  He handed the keys to the SWAT officer, who left without a word.

  “Lieutenant,” said Laurent, only this time her voice was softer, a note of satisfaction in it that made my blood boil.

  Treanor stared at me, then at Chunk, then back at me.

  “I've already been in contact with the District Attorney's Office,” he said. “The two of you are under a gag order as of right now. You are to go back to your office, write your Prosecution Guide and your Charge and Disposition Report, and submit them directly to Assistant DA Carnahan. She'll be standing by.

  “Once you've turned in your report, you are prohibited from discussing the matter with anyone. Is that clear?”

  He kept looking right at me, waiting for me to open my big mouth. Ordinarily, that would have been a sure bet, but this time it didn't pay off. I could read the writing on the wall, as plain as I could see the contempt in Laurent's face. I knew right then that Herrera would never perform an autopsy on Walter Cole's body. I knew that his sacrifice, as insane as it was, had been for nothing. All of it was for nothing. Three people were dead—five if you counted the looters—and not one of their deaths would matter.

  I imagined turning over my report to the DA, who would promptly take it to the deepest well she could find and dump it in. It would be like that scene from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the ark is unceremoniously stuffed in a plain wooden box and filed among thousands and thousands of other unknown secrets. My report would be like that, a secret kept by fools, too proud to realize that's what they were.

  Treanor was still looking at me, waiting to shut me down when I objected.

  “I understand, sir,” was all I said.

  He frowned with his eyes. “Well, okay then. Carry on.”

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 27

  When everything was reduced to paper and turned over to Assistant DA Carnahan, Chunk and I walked across the Scar's parking lot in silence to our cars. We could have said something about what was obviously going on, but we didn't. We could have talked about the injustice of it all, of the thousands, even millions of lives that Laurent's pride was putting under the hatchet's blade, but we didn't.

  As I drove home, my fingers wrapped so tight around the steering wheel you'd have thought I was hanging from it, Chunk's headlights bobbing like corks in a stream in my rearview mirror, I thought about that quote by Edmund Burke, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

  I read it in one of my back issues of Vogue, though in Vogue they'd added and women after good men.

  I left the crowded buildings of the city and entered the rolling, unlit blackness of the foothills north of town, all the while asking myself if I was doing the right thing. I had knowledge, after all, knowledge of evil things in the making, and isn't knowledge supposed to be power? Was I doing the right thing by turning my back on millions of lives, just so my family and I could go free?

  I thought about that hard enough and long enough to give myself a migraine. It worried me that maybe I was on some kind of slippery slope. I used to pride myself on staying away from the black market, and then I bought from it. I had never lied, either expressly or by omission, on any police report I'd ever written, yet I intentionally neglected to mention Isaac Hernandez’ involvement in Dr. Bradley's murder. And now I was planning the ultimate betrayal of my official trust. I was about to turn my back on my oath to maintain the peace and dignity of the City of San Antonio in much the same way as I would snub an ex-boyfriend I'd caught cheating on me. There were good reasons to back me up on all those little sins I'd committed, but I wouldn't be me if I didn't stop to really beat the issue to death.

  I had to ask, was I really doing the right thing?

  When I pulled into the driveway of my house and turned off my car, I was still torturing myself, wondering about right and wrong.

  Chunk pulled in behind me. He got out of his car and popped his trunk. He took out a small black duffle bag and two heavy, stiff blankets that he'd lifted from the SWAT office.

  I was still gripping the steering wheel when he walked by my door.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded, but didn't let go of the wheel.

  A sharp square of buttery light appeared at the front door, and then Chunk and Billy were shaking hands.

  “Lily?” Billy said.

  The car door was open, though I don't remember opening it, or if maybe Billy had opened it.

  He held out his hand to me.

  “Lily?”

  I took it and stepped out of the car.

  “Connie?”

  “She's asleep,” he said. “She doesn't know anything yet.”

  “Good,” I said. That was as we'd planned it. We didn't want her to get any more scared than she needed to be.

  At least I could save her from that.

  Billy and I already had our bags packed. Connie's too. We'd kept them under our bed since the day Billy had found out about the hole under the wall. Now, as I looked at the three small duffle bags and realized that they contained everything with which we were to start a new life, I balked.

  Carmenita's words came back to me. I had made a huge decision with unprecedented ease, and the smallness of the bags, and the scope of the job they were to perform, made me question the sense of what we were about to do.

  And then it hit me. It wasn't the moral quagmire of oaths and betrayals and black markets that was bothering me. It was the prospect of starting all over again that scared me. When I looked deep inside, that was the skeletal fear that stared back up at me.

  I went to the kitchen and met up with Billy and Chunk. The three of us spoke in hushed tones, like burglars in the night.

  “We need to go soon,” Billy said. “We need to use as much of the night as we can.”

  “We're ready, aren't we?” I said. I looked from Billy to Chunk and back to Billy, my eyes questioning theirs.

  “Everything's set,” Billy said.

  “But?”

  “But I was telling Billy I need to do something first,” Chunk said.

  “What?”

  I looked back and forth between them again. Billy looked at his feet. Chunk stammered.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Gram,” Chunk said, suddenly looking much smaller than his six-four, two hundred and sixty pounds. “I want to see her again.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hmmm. Okay. Okay. We've got time for that.”

  “Thanks,” Chunk said, unnecessarily, and then went out the backdoor and out across the lower end of the property where his grandmother was buried. It was a clear night with a thick sliver of yellow moon high in the sky, and I could see his large form in silhouette clearly until he entered the shadows of the trees.

  When he disappeared into the shadows, Billy took my hand and squeezed it gently. His hand felt so warm, so comfortable.

  “What are you thinking?” he said.

  “I'm scared,” I said. “Really terrified.”

  He nodded.

  “You know, it's not even the getting out of the city part that scares me. Not the helicopters or the troops on the ground. It's the starting over part that scares me. We're going to have to make a whole new life.”

  He was quiet for a while, quiet enough I could hear him breathing.

  “No,
” he said finally. “It's not a whole new life.”

  I turned to look him in the eye, a question hanging there between us.

  He reached up with one hand and pulled my mask down. I started to protest, to hold it in place, but then stopped and let him do it.

  He pulled the mask down under my chin and stared at my face.

  I reached up and pulled down his mask. The two of us stood there, lost in each other's faces, seen whole for the first time in a long time. A very long time.

  “It's not a whole new life,” he said. “It's new circumstances, a new place. But you and I are still here together, and we still have Connie. We're whole. Only the place names change.”

  He touched his fingertips to my cheek and brushed away a tear.

  “I love you,” he said. “I'm with you every step of the way, and that won't ever change.”

  Billy and I stood on the back porch, watching Chunk trudge back to us, head bent down, heart heavy. I knew something was wrong even before he stopped on the bottom step and looked up at us.

  “What is it?” I said.

  He had been crying, his face still wet. It was something I hadn't seen since his grandmother died.

  “I'm not going,” he said.

  I felt Billy's body stiffen against my arm.

  “No,” I said.

  But he wouldn't let me finish. He held up his hands and stared at us with eyes so full of sorrow that everything I would have said just evaporated away.

  “Please don't,” he said. “You need to go. You have a reason. I don't. Everything I've ever had is here. Everything I'm ever going to have is here. Let's not talk it to death. You guys need to go. Just you guys.”

  I swallowed hard, then nodded.

  Billy squeezed me close. He said, “Go wake up Connie. It's time.”

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Chapter 28

  I held Connie in my arms. Billy carried our bags. Together we ran down to the creek and cleared the brush away from the raft Billy had made of coffin pine. It looked like a surfboard to me. I sucked in a breath, realizing how slim our chances really were. Billy pushed it into the water and waded in so that he was waist deep in the inky, muddy water of the creek. He stood next to the raft, steadying it, so that Connie and I could climb on board. Once we were in place, Billy pushed himself onto the raft and we all settled into our places. I spooned Connie and Billy spooned me. Chunk, on the shore, spread the SWAT sniper blankets over us and covered the blankets with brush. The idea was that we were a piece of scrub brush that had broken off a nearby tree during the last storm and was now floating harmlessly down the water. That was what we hoped the helicopter patrols would see, anyway.

  I lifted a flap of the blanket so that a little sliver of the shore showed. Chunk was there, our house behind him in the distance. He raised his right hand and showed his palm. Not a wave, just an open hand, a forever goodbye. We floated down the creek, the world around us graveyard quiet, and I watched Chunk. His hand was raised the whole time, and he was going, going, and finally gone. We were alone, the three of us, lulled into the quiet by the gentle lapping of the water against the raft. I felt Connie breathing in my arms, and I reached over the back of her head and kissed her cheek. In the dark, I imagined her smiling bravely.

  “Mommy?” she said.

  “Yes, honey.”

  “What's going to happen?”

  “We're going to leave here, honey. We're going someplace safe.”

  “Why?”

  Not where, why. The hard question.

  “Something bad is coming, Connie. We can't be here when it gets here.”

  “What about Uncle Reggie?”

  I cupped her hands in mine. She was holding the blue jay Billy had made her tightly in her fist. I thought about how a single blue jay will attack a pack of wild dogs to protect its nest before I answered her.

  “Uncle Reggie will be okay,” I said, and prayed that wasn't a lie. “Quiet now. Shhh.”

  We'd planned it out without really getting too specifics. There hadn't been time, and we hadn't really known how. Neither of us had ever escaped from hell before. Billy had gone down to the creek the morning before with Connie's binoculars and a can of orange paint. He'd poured some of the paint into the water and watched the cloud as it drifted down stream with the intention of timing it—to see how long it would take us to drift the third of a mile from our house to the wall.

  The only trouble was, the cloud of paint either sank, or became so diluted it became invisible. He tried the same thing with a Coke can, but it kept getting caught up in the brush along the banks of the creek. In the end, he had to give up the experiment and settle for a big unknown. And so we drifted for the better part of an hour, coming closer all the while to the horror of freedom.

  It was a warm, clear night, not unusual for late August in San Antonio, and we had been in short sleeves before we got in the water. But afterward, after we'd spent all that time curled up together, feeling scared and claustrophobic and blind and wet from the water that constantly lapped over the sides of the raft, we began to shiver. Connie especially was feeling the cold, and she shook in my arms like an epileptic.

  I spoke to her in hushed, easy tones, telling her it was going to be okay, that it was almost over, but still she shivered.

  She said she wanted to go home.

  When we heard the first helicopter pass overhead, she began to mew like a kitten and my quiet reassurances changed to harsher “Shhhs” and “Stop that.”

  I was scared too, and I tend to bark when I'm scared.

  It didn't help.

  The helicopter passed overhead then backtracked. Their routine patrols were never the same, or, if they followed a pattern, it wasn't one that I could ever figure out. The pilot's whim seemed to be the only deciding factor, and the pilot of the helicopter above us seemed happy to spend his night flying over the same patch of ground time and time again. Just our luck.

  The blankets over us made us invisible to the helicopter's night vision equipment, just as it kept us from seeing the world beyond the banks of the creek. But I could see enough to know what the crew of the gunship was doing. They were in random patrol mode, not actively searching for anything, their spotlights groping the ground like a blind man's fingers. Several times they flew low over us, so low that the wash from the rotors beat on the blanket as if it were a cleaning woman beating the dust out of an old rug on a wash line.

  Connie began to scream and writhe in my arms. Billy and I both pleaded with her to be quiet, but she couldn't, the poor thing. She was way too scared. The sound of the helicopter drowned out her screams. The ground on either side of the creek flickered in the spotlight.

  I grabbed Connie and pulled her tight. “Stop it,” I said. “Look at me.”

  She screamed again, her eyes closed tightly.

  “Look at me,” I said. “Look at me.”

  She opened her eyes, her face still twisted by the scream.

  “Connie,” I said, my voice quiet. “It's Mommy, honey. Look at me. We are going to make it. We are going to get out of here. Stop moving.”

  Suddenly she went limp in my arms. Her legs stopped kicking mine.

  “I'm scared, Mommy.”

  “Me too, honey.”

  I squeezed her tightly.

  Everybody reacts to extreme fear and stress in different ways, and most of those ways are bad, counterproductive. But children Connie's age seem to have the gift of being able to shut down. That's what Connie did. After fighting in my arms like a feral tomcat about to get its first bath, she went to sleep. She just went limp, groaned, and fell asleep. I envied her. We drifted the rest of the way to the wall in relative quiet. Connie slept, and the gunship meandered off farther down the length of the wall.

  The front of our raft bounced off the heavy, weed-choked grating that allowed Vespers Creek to pass through the containment wall. Billy slid into the water and held the boat steady while I woke Connie. This par
t of our escape was going to be tricky. The storm had washed out enough of the bank just to the left of the grate that we could slip through, but we would have to get out of the water and push the boat through the hole. It wasn't as easy as floating to safety.

  Once I had Connie safely on the bank, on her belly and covered by a sniper blanket, I examined the hole. It looked like it was going to be a tight fit to get the raft through it. Billy hadn't been able to get close enough to measure it, after all, and he had been forced to guess how wide the hole was.

  I put my hand on the wall and was shocked at how cold it was against my palm. Only then did it occur to me that I was actually touching the walls that for so many months had dominated my life. I was touching the outer limits of my prison.

  “Help me push it up there,” Billy said.

  I grabbed the front and pulled. Together we got it right up to the hole and pushed.

  It was too big. By less than an inch. We tried it every which way, but it wouldn't go through. We tried to dig the hole wider, but the soft dirt was just a thin skin over solid rock. We tried to bend the grate and gave that up almost immediately. Under the sniper blanket, Billy and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do.

  “Should we leave it here?” I said.

  “Somebody may spot it.”

  “What about putting some brush over it?”

  He looked at the hole again, at the baggage and the food and the supplies we'd stowed on the raft and said, “Damn it.”

  “We'll carry it,” I said.

  “Yeah, we're gonna have to.”

  We off-loaded our stuff, then stashed the boat in the weeds next to the bank. As Billy was covering the raft and I was helping Connie stash our bags into the hole, I heard the sound of the helicopter again. Our pilot friend was coming by for another pass.

  “Billy,” I said. “The helicopter.”

  “Shit,” he said, and frantically piled twigs and grass and anything else he could find on top of the raft.

  “Hurry,” I said. I know from experience that the equipment on those helicopters can pick you up long before they're close enough for you to see or even hear them, and Billy was standing in the open, without the protection of the sniper blanket.