by Andrew Gross
“My wife is on this plane!”
He forced his way past them deeper into the fuselage. The acrid smell of fuel and burning metal. He ripped off his jacket and put it over his face, choking back the searing smoke, screaming, “Roxanne! Roxanne!”
He didn’t hear an answer.
Though it was only an eight-seater, the smoke that pushed back at him had the force of an ocean undertow, keeping him at bay. He staggered forward. “Roxanne, are you there?”
Why isn’t she answering? He couldn’t bear to think that she was gone. Flames were leaping out of the fuselage onto the wings. Deeper back, he heard the sound of someone murmuring.
His heart soared. “Roxanne!” He pushed farther back, hiding his eyes, his face. “Roxanne, baby, talk to me!”
“Here . . . here . . . ,” he heard. Barely muttered under breath. “It’s Roxanne . . .”
He screamed to the rescuers forward in the cabin. “My wife’s alive!”
He swatted his way through the clouds of smoke and flame, willing himself to the rear, where the voice had come from. “Back here!”
He tripped over something—a leg. He grabbed it and followed it up the body. It was so dark he couldn’t see. “It’s Roxanne,” he heard the voice close, and he pulled it, his heart soaring in hope.
But then he saw the bracelet on her arm. It wasn’t Roxanne. It was Lauritzia. Barely conscious, her blackened lips moving. Her charred eyes rolled up in her head. Harold realized in heartbreak what it was she had been murmuring: “It’s Roxanne. She’s here. Please, someone, someone . . . help. Roxanne!”
She had her hand on his wife’s arm.
His heart sank.
“Get over here, quick!” he screamed to the workers up in front. “One of them is alive!”
Lauritzia had gotten out of her seat belt and gone behind her. It was as if she was trying to save his wife. He lifted her up and pulled her away from the person underneath. A rescuer pushed his way back and wedged her body onto a stretcher. Roxanne was slumped, her hair singed, dark burns and cuts all over her face and neck.
“Roxanne! Roxanne, honey!” he said. “It’s me. Harold. Rox?”
She didn’t say anything back to him.
Her eyes were fixed, empty, and black. Eyes that used to brim with the beauty of life. Her blond hair was charred like burned parchment. He picked her up by the shoulders, and her head fell limply to the side.
“Oh, Roxanne. Honey, it me, it’s me, it’s me . . .”
The EMS team had to pull him away from her, and only then did he come to understand that she was no longer alive.
CHAPTER THIRTY
She blinked open her eyes. She turned and saw the maze of tubes and wires protruding from her. Her throat was blocked like it was filled with sand. She heard beeping, saw lights and monitors lighting up. There was a tube running from her mouth. And a huge compression lung she could see out of the corner of her eye.
Estoy muerte? Lauritzia asked herself. Am I dead?
No, she told herself, she was not dead. Dios maldida. God be cursed. She only wished she were dead. She didn’t remember what happened. Only after, holding Roxanne, whose limp and lifeless body felt like a child’s doll in her hands. She remembered trying to shout, No, no . . . But the ringing in her ears was so loud and the smoke was so thick. She thought maybe she could just go to sleep and she would die. She remembered someone calling out of the haze. A voice, coming closer, merely a distant echo in her drifting mind, the flames lapping all around. A voice, maybe God’s voice, angry at her for what she had done. For all the pain she had caused. So she prayed, the words barely reaching her lips. Jesus Christos, please take the soul of Roxanne.
Lauritzia looked around the hospital room and knew she was alive. It wasn’t over. The fear would only continue. A tear came out of her eye and wound its way down her cheek.
Then she closed her eyes again.
It took a week for her to begin to recover. For the first few days, she drifted in and out of consciousness. There were burns on much of her body, miraculously mostly only first- and second-degree. She had four broken ribs, a concussion, and a crushed spleen from the impact. The doctors said she would live, that she was a very lucky woman. But she didn’t feel lucky. She felt cursed. Her situation had brought only pain to so many people.
At some point Harold came into the ICU and sat by her bed. He took hold of her hand. She couldn’t even look at him. All she could do was whisper, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry . . . ,” and turn away in tears.
“It’s okay. Just get yourself better,” he said, and through her tears she saw the hurt that covered his face. Hurt that would never go away. She wanted to tell him, “I told you. I told you to stay out! To let me go.” She looked away, too ashamed to even look him in the face.
“Just get yourself better,” he said. “The kids miss you. Maybe they’ll come next time.”
“No, no,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
She was too ashamed to ever see them again.
For days she just lay there, wishing she had died instead of Roxanne.
After a week they reduced her pain medication. They moved her out of the ICU. The police came and spoke with her. As well as the FBI. She was the only survivor. She tried to describe the man in the orange suit but she couldn’t bring him to mind. Nothing from that horrible moment came back to her. She knew that when she was released she’d have nowhere to go. She would be deported and it would all end. More blood and tears.
She should have just gotten on that train.
The day before she was to leave, one of the nurses said she had a visitor.
“Who?” Lauritzia inquired, nervous that she was still very much a target, even in the hospital. That Cano would come and finish the job.
“A man. He’s come several times.”
“From the police?” Lauritzia asked, confused. “An investigator?”
“I don’t think so,” the nurse replied.
The only man she knew was Harold.
“Bring him in,” she told the nurse. She shut her eyes and prayed. If this was it, then let it come. She would welcome it. She would not cause any more pain. She looked away, not even wanting to look in the face of the person sent to kill her. Tears fell down her cheeks and onto the bedsheet.
“Ms. Velez?”
Slowly Lauritzia turned.
The face she encountered was not one she expected. Not threatening at all. It was Anglo, with longish dark hair, and dark, friendly eyes. He was in jeans and a black leather jacket with a satchel slung over his shoulder. He stepped up to the bed.
“Are you with the police?”
“No,” he said. “I’m a journalist. But I know what was behind the bombing, Ms. Velez. I know why Eduardo Cano wants you dead.”
“Eduardo Cano wants my whole family dead,” she muttered, surprised to hear his name. “For what my father did to him.”
“No, not for what he did.” The Anglo placed a hand on the bed railing. “For what he knows. For what I think you know as well. That this was never about revenge, Lauritzia, but about keeping your father from talking. About what really happened in Culiacán. That’s why your brothers and sisters are dead. And why Cano was never brought to trial.”
“Go away.” Lauritzia turned away from him. Blood and tears, that was all this had ever brought. She just wanted it to end.
“Who the real targets were that day. That’s what they’re trying to protect. You know, don’t you? I think you do.”
“Who are you?” She wanted him to leave. How did he know these things? But at the same time there was something in his handsome eyes that made her trust him.
“I’m a journalist. My name is Curtis Kitchner.”
CANO
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The sounds of a soccer ball being batted and of children laughing echoed in the courtyard of the large, white-stucco hacienda high on a hill in the Sinaloa province of Mexico.
The heavyset man with the mustache
and three-day growth, his white shirt worn open against the heat, kept the ball aloft with his feet, counting, “Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . .” Keeping it at bay from his two sons, who scampered around him trying to steal it. Showing the surprising skill and agility of someone who once played at a high level.
“Nineteen!” the man said, pivoting away from Manuel, who was nine, then finally losing control. “No, no!” he shouted as the ball fell onto the pavement, as Tomás, who was six, ran it down near the black Mercedes Maybach and the three Land Cruiser SUVs that were parked in the courtyard. The young boy dribbled toward the soccer goal that was painted on the fortresslike white wall.
“Pass it, Toto!” Eduardo Cano shouted to his son, who scrambled around Ernesto, one of Cano’s bodyguards, whose Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol sat on the hood of the Maybach and who ran after the boy with an indifferent energy, clearly trying just to please his boss. “Pass it to Manuel. He’s open!”
“Here, Toto!” the older brother shouted as the ball found its way to him and he approached the unmanned goal, his father hustling back into the goal mouth, announcing, “Guttierrez of Juárez coming in on goal for the win . . . Julio there to stop him . . . Shoot!”
Manuel swung his leg hard, but the ball weakly glanced off his ankle, the shot hugging the ground and hitting off the wall a couple of feet wide of the goal.
“Aaargh.” The boy put his hands to his head in dismay.
“So close . . .” Cano tried to console his son, going up and messing his mop of black hair. “Next time, set yourself and strike it here,” he said, pointing, “on the instep. But no whining now. Even the great Ronaldo went wide at point-blank range against Argentina in the America Cup. You remember ?”
The boy shrugged. “Yes. But he won it with a penalty kick . . .”
“So there is still hope! But not for you, old lady,” he said to the bodyguard with a shake of his head. “You play like my ninety-year-old grandmother. And she had gout. Thank God you pull the trigger with better skill than you can kick.”
“I didn’t want to hurt the boy,” the bodyguard said in his defense.
Cano heard his cell phone inside his trouser pocket. It was a number only a handful of people in the world knew, all of them important on some level. Or equally dangerous.
The call was encrypted. The screen read, KVC Consulting, which Cano knew was merely a fake address, routing through an empty office simply meant to conceal the caller.
“Who wants lemonade?” he asked.
“I do!” Tomás said.
“And me!” added Manuel.
“Then go upstairs. Your mama has it ready for you. I’ll be up in a few minutes.”
“Papa . . . ,” Manuel groaned with disappointment. He’d seen this happen many times before. These few minutes often grew into hours. Sometimes even days.
“Go ahead now,” Cano barked, a bit sternly. “I’ll be along. Shooo . . . it’s business. Go on.”
He said “Hold on” into the phone as the kids ran upstairs, and with a wave to Ernesto indicating that he should remain close by, he went up the staircase that led to one of the house’s many terraces. He took a seat on a chaise underneath a large white umbrella and stared out at the palm trees surrounding his house that he had brought in from the coast and the hills that reached to the sky-blue sea.
“It’s a Sunday,” he said in English. “Is a poor man not allowed a day of well-earned rest with his family?”
“It’s because of another Sunday in Culiacán that we are even in this mess,” replied the caller, who was known to him as “Grasshopper,” one of Cano’s highest-level contacts across the border in the U.S.
“Yes, I heard the little bitch is still alive,” Cano said. “She is a hard one to kill, no? Like a centipede, you have to stamp it out with your heel or else it will follow you home. But no worry, due to the openness and accessibility of your own judicial system, it appears she has nowhere to go.”
“Yes, your threats have their merit,” Grasshopper said. “But Lauritzia Velez is not why I’m calling. Someone else has been asking around. He’s been to the ranch. He’s even been to see the girl. He seems to know about things.”
“What things?” Cano lit up a cigarette.
“Gillian,” the contact said.
“What does he know?” Cano asked.
“Enough,” his contact said. “Why else would he be out west? Why else would he visit her in the hospital?”
“Who is this person?” Cano grunted, swatting away a mosquito that had landed on his arm. “Governmentale?” A zealous government investigator who had stumbled onto something indeed could prove to be a pain in the ass.
“No,” Grasshopper said. “A journalist.”
“Periodista!” Cano exclaimed. “Here, a nosy journalist is like a lousy goalie in football. Or a judge. We don’t like them—we just get rid of them. No trace. And I mean in a real box, my friend, not a ballot box.”
“Well, here it is different,” the caller replied. “Which is why you’re not currently in a federal prison awaiting execution, I might add.”
“Eh, well, not so different at all.” Cano shrugged. He lowered his sunglasses and stared out at the blue sea. “I’m a great believer in the freedom of the press. You know that, right? Just give me the maggot’s name, and we will be free of him for good.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I slept in the Explorer that night, after making it away from Grand Central. I took the Metro-North back to Rye, my heart bouncing as bumpily as the train over the tracks, and found my way back to my car.
I had no idea where to go. All I wanted was to get away from there as fast as possible. Away from anywhere I could possibly be traced back to. I didn’t know if the police had a read on my car. I didn’t know if Joe was alive or dead. The news reports only said an injured bystander was rushed to Bellevue Hospital.
I drove north from Rye and pulled off I-95 in Bridgeport and drove around the city until I found a large, multistory garage downtown. I took a ticket and drove through the gate, then found an open space up on the third floor, which I assumed would be far less trafficked.
At first I just sat there. For an hour. Realizing I was finally safe. For my heart to finally calm.
I knew I had to change how I looked. And maybe switch out the license plates on the car, if I was going to continue to use it. I also knew I needed another phone. They now had Joe’s in their possession, and it might well lead them to mine.
As soon as it was dark, I got out and found a Honda with Connecticut license plates in the same row as mine. I took off the front plate, using a wrench I’d found in the spare tire tool set in the back of the Explorer. It would probably take a while for the Honda owner to even notice it was gone. Then I took off the rear plate on the Explorer and replaced it with the Honda’s.
I ventured out, my face hidden behind sunglasses and in an old Mount Snow baseball cap I found in the back of the Explorer. Downtown Bridgeport wasn’t exactly the best neighborhood at night.
I found an open bodega on Congress Street and picked out another disposable phone, as well as a slice of pizza and a beef empanada, the first food I’d have all day. I also grabbed a box of blond hair color and a pair of scissors.
As I stood in line to pay I found myself behind a woman who was counting out change. A cop came in and got in line right behind me. My heart almost jumped through my chest. I stood there, blood rushing, totally freaked out of my mind, sure that I was giving off this aura, like, You know that woman who’s wanted for the murder of her husband and that Homeland Security agent . . . well, hey, I’m here, buddy. Take a look. Right in front of you!
“Next, please.” The cashier looked at me. I tried to block what it was I was buying on the counter, certain it would give me away.
I paid with cash, muttering, “Thanks,” and averting my face, hurried out of the store. Exhaling, I headed back to the garage. I asked the attendant there—a Middle Easterner who was more absorbed in a soccer matc
h on the tiny TV than in me—if there was a bathroom. He pointed to the rear of the first floor.
The door was open. I didn’t even need a key. I locked it immediately behind me and looked at myself in the greasy, cracked mirror: the harried uncertainty in my eyes; my face pale from nerves. I ripped the scissors out of their package and held them up to my hair—my beautiful hair that I had worn thick and below my shoulders ever since I could remember, that people always looked at with envy, and began to chop away. Fistfuls of it, sheared off. I stuffed them into the plastic bag from the bodega. I kept cutting and shearing, until I looked and my hair fell to my shoulders.
It all meant nothing to me anymore.
I opened the box of color. I had always been some kind of dark brown with occasional streaks of henna. But I bent over the sink and poured the goopy, amber-colored liquid all over my hair and massaged it in, averting my eyes from the mirror. I waited a few minutes, then rinsed it out, washing the viscous liquid down the drain. When I looked up, I saw a completely different face. One I barely even recognized. But filled with nerves and shame.
I went back to my car, unable to free my mind of what had happened to Joe. He had been so brave for me. I needed to find out how he was. I had to take the chance.
I called Bellevue Hospital and nervously asked the operator for an update on his condition. She asked if I was family, and I answered yes. I was transferred to another line; it took forever to connect, which began to get me a little edgy.
“May I help you?” a man’s voice finally answered. “You’re inquiring about Joseph Esterhaus?”
Suddenly it ran through me that they might be thinking I would call in and were tracing me as I spoke.
“Hello? Private Patient Information. May I help you? Hello?”
I hung up. My hands were shaking. I didn’t know how to do any of this! I was ashamed to be so cowardly. Joe had put everything on the line for me. Joe, please, just make it through. I closed my eyes. I’m praying for you, Joe. Please . . .
