by M C Rowley
“Let’s find a cheap hotel to crash at,” said Robert, “and then maybe get a drink?”
I nodded. I needed it.
We found a motel that charged us thirty dollars for each room, which Robert once again stumped up. We checked in and headed out to the street. There weren’t many places open, but we found a dive bar called The Rack down a back alley. It had ten billiard tables and five other patrons, all sitting at the bar, heads sunk, beers nestled in palms.
We took a table and a young, fed-up-looking waitress dressed in a baggy black tee and jeans came over and took our order. I ordered a beer, and Robert ordered a scotch, straight.
Clergymen and doctors, I thought. Always closet alcoholics.
The drinks came and we sipped and started to relax a little. The first went down smoothly as we discussed the drive. We ordered another round and Robert went quiet for a bit.
Then he asked, “Andrew, were you involved in that plane crash the night before I found you?”
He had caught me as the bottle of beer reached my mouth and I followed through with the swig, just to buy time. I had a choice. Lie and have to invent and maintain a story that would hold till the next morning, or tell the truth. Or a half-truth. Either way, I wanted to talk about it. I did. And Robert was the kind of guy who got people talking, I could tell that much. So I evaluated the risk. Who would he tell? The cops? Maybe. Not like I had much choice. And we were traveling. We were out of New Mexico’s jurisdiction, and if Robert reported me, a story with zero evidence would take days to get to the ears of the feds. And in all probability they knew anyway that one of their agents was flying the plane.
So I decided to come clean. And it felt good.
“Yes,” I said.
Robert leaned back, a big smile on his face. “I knew it,” he said. “When I found you, I knew something was up. And all the people were chattering about some rogue military plane from Mexico crashing out in the sand. I knew it. With everything going to hell down there, people are nervous.”
I nodded.
“It’s like civil war,” he said.
“It is,” I said.
“How did you survive the crash?”
“We parachuted.”
“We?”
“I was with three others.”
“And where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
Robert nodded. “Are you a fugitive?”
I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
“I knew it,” he said.
“Will you tell the cops?”
Robert shook his head. “No, I can tell you’re a good man. I’m good at that, judging people. Comes with the territory. But I’m worried for you. New York is far away. That’s a hell of a diversion to your journey. And you mentioned your wife. Is she in danger?”
I sipped my beer again. “She might be.”
Robert nodded. We stayed quiet for a while, pondering another round and drinking in silence.
I asked Robert, “Did you really lose your arm the way you said?”
Robert looked up at me, and I sensed a little undercurrent of irritation.
“Yes,” he said. “Why would anyone lie about something like that?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We kept drinking, and after five or six whiskeys Robert became quite inebriated, slurring his words and throwing his one working arm around as he told me about his brother Brian. He recounted how Brian had not been a man of faith and had cheated on his wife, and how Robert disapproved vehemently. I listened to him speak, and despite the dramatizing and the histrionics, I detected something false about him. I couldn’t put my finger on what, though. Perhaps his faith. Perhaps his version of his brother’s story. But it was something. Something wasn’t quite right.
As the clock struck one a.m., the booze began flowing through Robert, making him spew out thoughts and unfinished sentences without control. He started mumbling, and then he got started on the subject of revenge.
“You know,” he said, “my teachings, my vocation, everything I do tells me that to wish for vengeance against the people who took my arm is wrong, and will only send me into an endless, dark spiral of retribution. But I’d be lying to you if I said the idea of revenge didn’t comfort me.”
I sat up a little. His speech had become more refined again. I could tell the topic meant a lot to him. I could see it in his eyes, like it was something he wanted to talk about all the time, but could not.
“The things I’ve imagined doing,” he said. “But we must leave all wrath to God and only Him.”
“There are many who take justice into their own hands,” I said, watching him closely now. His face had changed somehow, gnarled, his smile gone, an indifferent slant left in its place.
“It says it, in Deuteronomy 32:35. ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.’”
I nodded and kept quiet. I could see Robert was not stable in that moment. Something deep inside him was burning. The verse he had used was from the Old Testament, I was pretty certain, and that wasn’t something you generally heard modern protestant pastors spouting.
Then his stare rested on a distant point, past me and past the walls of the bar. I looked at the clock. It was quarter past one.
“It’s late,” I said.
Robert nodded and grunted.
I had to take his cash to pay. He didn’t have a wallet, but instead one of those money clips. I paid and slid his arm over my shoulder and walked him out of the bar and back to the motel. He stopped halfway through and vomited on the side of the road. We made it and I put him on his bed. Then I walked to my room and crashed on the bed, and thought about Eleanor and how much I missed her.
I woke up the next morning before sunrise, my head hurting from the beers but fully awake. I waited for Robert outside in the reception area at the entrance, where you paid and checked out. I couldn’t lie down anymore, not with the last part of the drive ahead of us, and whatever else awaited.
After an hour, Robert came along in the Jetta, window down, and said, “Good morning. Breakfast?”
I nodded and smiled. We checked out and found a diner and ate huge portions of bacon and eggs and drank lots of coffee. Within an hour, we were on the I-70 toward Pittsburgh, around nine hours out of New York State.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
The day’s drive was smooth and we spoke little. I supposed Robert was a little penitent after his ramblings the night before. It didn’t bother me; I was happy to not have a conversation. I was concentrating on the place where our son’s grave plaque had been placed. It was a small community on the tip of Long Island called Southold. A leafy, green, rich suburb. That was all I remembered. Eleanor’s parents had been from there, which was why they selected it as the location for the plaque. In fact, Eleanor had spurned it, for what it represented to her—the admission of defeat in searching for our lost child. And yet now it was pulling us back together, serving a purpose after all.
Robert and I switched driving responsibilities every three hours, and we made it to the Pittsburgh area at around one p.m. From there, the drive was smooth. I felt anything but calm, though. As we got closer to the coast, I felt anxiety building up inside.
Would Eleanor be there?
What was the plan?
The truth was, I didn’t have a clue.
I was at the mercy of a future I no longer recognized.
It was five p.m. when we arrived in Fort Lee, where the bridge crossed the Hudson River.
“This is as close as I can get you,” said Robert. “Here, take this.”
He gave me a wad of tens.
“Robert, I can’t,” I said, knowing I had to and would.
“Make a donation to the church. It’s easy.”
“Okay,” I said, taking the thin stack of money. “I will. Thank you again for everything. I hope it goes well with your brother.”
Robert smiled and said nothing. He wound
the window up and pulled away, leaving me on the side of the street, just off the bridge’s exit and past the river on the right side. I hailed the first cab that came along and told the driver to head to Southold on the peninsula. He nodded and we pulled away.
I rested my head on the window and wondered what I would find, feeling terrified.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
It was slow-going in the cab, due to heavy traffic. It was rush hour, around six p.m., and half of Manhattan was pouring out at that exact time. But I was happy to be moving and planning what I would say to Eleanor. Since this whole thing began, when Esteban told me our long-lost son was still alive, I had seen her once. Everything had changed that could have changed.
And I’d lost our son again.
But something besides Eleanor’s inevitable disappointment was nagging at me. An impending doom, coming our way.
The cab rolled into Southold after about an hour. It was a fairly well-to-do suburb of New York State. It was where Eleanor’s parents had last been registered. The place meant nothing to us, which only made the whole thing worse for Eleanor.
There are places I would never go here.
For Eleanor, the plaque represented treachery, nothing less and nothing more. She had not accepted it. And she had been right.
Jairo was twenty-two years old and a man. He meant everything to Eleanor now. That was why I was sure she would be here.
Out of the window, I saw a small restaurant opening for business and asked the driver to stop. I needed directions to the cemetery and I was hungry. I paid the driver, giving him a decent tip, and got out and walked to the restaurant. It wasn’t clear what type of cuisine they served, but it was open and the lady manning the small bar smiled nicely.
I ordered a beef sub and fries and asked the lady where I might find the church. She gave me directions that seemed simple enough, a short, five-minute stroll. I finished the meal, paid up, and went out into the darkening evening.
The sun was flooding the shallow sky with streams of yellow and orange and purple. And it was enough light for me to find my way to the cemetery with ease. It had been more than ten years since the plaque had been laid, but I recognized the site in an instant.
The church was named Saint Patrick’s. A short, stubby white wall enclosed a big plot, with a small entrance cut into the middle. I left the quiet road I had walked along and entered. Sporadic trees lined a stone path that cut through the gravestones at either side. It seemed to run on for a great distance, and I began to realize the enormity of my task: finding Jairo’s plaque amongst all of this.
Within five minutes of walking, the road behind me was out of sight and I was in the middle of stones and trees and nothing else. For the life of me, I could not recall the location of the plaque. They had probably moved things around since then, or expanded. I guessed the latter would be true, given that cemeteries fulfilled an ever-expanding demand.
After half an hour of looking at the stones closest to the path, I started to feel panic rising in my chest. What if I’d got it wrong? What if the plaque had been removed?
Where would Eleanor have gone then?
I breathed and tried to calm myself, but it was getting so dark that I was struggling to make out the words carved into the stones. I moved deeper into the plots and scoured among the headstones for the small plaques in between them. I remembered it as being pink marble, but I couldn’t be sure. I remembered the words, I thought, but I wasn’t completely sure about that anymore either.
I sat down on a large tomb honoring some man from the twentieth century with a double-barreled name. I scanned the place. At the far side, I could make out two figures moving up and down under a tree. I screwed up my eyes and peered further. Two men. Digging. I supposed the holes were done that way, the night before. No wonder gravediggers enjoyed such a morose reputation. Working at night, making holes for corpses.
I thought of X03 again and shuddered.
I leaned back on the altar and closed my eyes. Not for the first time in recent months, I asked myself how the hell things had gotten so bad.
I heard the footsteps first, before the voice. I didn’t know if I’d been asleep for long but I’d definitely been out. It was pitch black and the two gravediggers had gone.
Footsteps behind me. Then her voice. Soft and kind and loving, like it always was.
“Scotty? Is it really you?”
I got up and turned and a torch was shone into my face. Then it was dropped again and my eyes adjusted to see my wife. Her hair was down, and she was wearing a thick black jacket. Her eyebrows were raised, her lips parted. Beautiful.
“Eleanor,” I said, and the tears defeated me and I walked to her and held her tighter than I had ever held anybody in my entire life.
Chapter Forty
We stayed like that for what felt like hours. My real family. I don’t know why, but in that moment I felt scorn for Jairo and his coldness and his detached way of being. Despite being with him for most of the escape, I had felt alone. I had missed Eleanor, the person I had known for twenty-five years. That scorn was washed away with acute guilt for feeling like that.
Finally, Eleanor pulled back to look at me. Her eyes were black holes in the moonlight.
“How did you find me?”
I smiled. “I worked out your clue from the Skype call. There are places I would never go here. That’s what you said. It took me a while.”
Eleanor smiled and kissed me on the lips again. “Where is he?”
I looked down. “I don’t know.”
Then I told her an abridged version of what had gone down. The jungle. The military base, the flight, and the parachutes. And X03. And then the kindness of the pastor, Robert.
She listened to all of it without interrupting, despite a thousand questions waiting on her lips.
“And that’s how I ended up here,” I finished. “But I couldn’t find the damned plaque.”
“Come,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
We walked through the trees and the stones, and the wind began to pick up. Eventually, we stopped at a small pink-white square embedded in the ground.
Inscribed on it were Tennyson’s painful lines:
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps and the nerves prick,
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
— In Memoriam, February 2002
We held each other and looked at it and cried together. Holding her head to my chest, I felt her sobs run through me. I felt nurtured and loved. Having Eleanor with me brought the energy back into my body. And I swore that this would end soon.
After a time, Eleanor pulled away gently and wiped her eyes.
“You said Jairo and the CIA lady had a prisoner. One of Mr. Reynolds’ people?”
I nodded.
“Who was she?”
I looked at Eleanor. Her expression had turned worried.
“Why? They were going to take her into custody. To help find Reynolds.”
“What was her name?”
“Reynolds’ employee? Luciana.”
“Oh, shit, Scott.”
I stepped back. “What do you mean?”
Eleanor’s worry turned to panic. “I met her when Reynolds had me. She’s dangerous, Scott. Very dangerous.”
I smiled. “Calm down, El. I know, but Jairo is worse—trust me. Jean too. They had her handled.”
“No,” said Eleanor. “No, they didn’t.”
And then, out of the dead of night, we heard an engine coming close, along the road where I had walked, coming out of Southold.
“This is a trap,” said Eleanor. “We have to get out of here.”
“What the—?”
But it was too late to argue as Eleanor pivoted on the spot and began walking at a fast pace away from me, toward the road. I followed.
“What is it, El?”
“Don’t underestimate the power of this man, Scott.”
I caught up with her.
“He’s lethal.”
“You met Reynolds?”
“No,” she said. “But that Luciana lady ran the show. She’s dangerous.”
The engine we heard was louder and then came to an idle. We could make out headlights ahead. The vehicle was parked at the side of the cemetery gates. I could just make out the shape. A dark van, like a Transit.
“Come on,” said Eleanor, and she began to run towards it. “This is bad.”
I ran behind her. We were fifty meters away when the van pulled out and took off, leaving two figures lying in the dirt.
“No,” said Eleanor. “No.” And she sprinted the last part.
I followed and we made it to the forms in the dark and realized who they were.
At our feet, still breathing and apparently very dazed, were two people.
One was Jean Santos.
The other was our son, Jairo.
Chapter Forty-One
Eleanor collapsed over Jairo, stroking his face, kissing him, and crying.
I went to Jean. She was in a bad way, rolling around, her eyes half-open. I couldn’t see any injuries or blood or anything, though.
“What happened?”
Jean opened her eyelids and seemed to focus on me for a few seconds before closing them again.
“Reynolds,” she muttered. “He wants us here.”
Her voice was gravelly and groggy, like a party-goer waking up with a massive hangover.
“But you had Luciana. In the motel.”
Jean kept her eyes closed but nodded.
“It was a setup,” was all she said.
I looked over at Eleanor. She nodded and seemed to confirm that Jairo was in the same state.
They had been drugged. But a very controlled dose.
Luciana.
Reynolds.
How had they known we were here?
“This is a trap,” I said.
And as if Reynolds himself were listening in, the small, cheap mobile phone in my pocket began to vibrate. I fumbled for it and picked it up, opened the clam and pressed the green button, knowing already who would be on the line.
