by M C Rowley
“Finally,” said the voice distorter. “We’re all together again.”
I stayed quiet. The scratchy, tinny voice still made my spine tingle with ice every time I heard it.
“As soon as the drugs wear off enough, you’ll receive instructions.”
“What if we don’t follow them?” I said, trying to sound defiant and failing badly.
“You will,” said Reynolds.
And the phone went dead.
I went back to Jean. “Come on, try to sit up.”
I helped her to rest back on the nearest tombstone.
“What did he say?”
“He said we’d get instructions.”
Jean took a deep breath through her nose. “What else did he say?”
I thought back. “He said we were all together again.”
Jean’s face didn’t change, she just stared into the night.
Behind me, Jairo was getting to his feet, with Eleanor’s help. I turned back to Jean.
“Why do you need Reynolds anyway?”
Jean shook her head. “We don’t need him. We need him dead.”
“But why? Why is Jairo important to this?”
Jean shook her head again. “Reynolds, or whatever his real name is, started the war in Mexico. One man. Started an entire war in our neighboring country. And he’s going to bring it north.”
I stayed quiet.
Jean rubbed her face. “You’ll see,” she said.
I stood up. Jairo looked at me without a hint of apology in his face. His beard had grown and the hair on his head an inch long.
The night was clear and the cemetery was deserted. A light breeze blew through the spindly trees and gravestones and on it I could smell the faint waft of ocean. Why would Reynolds lead us all to a place like this? To Jairo’s plaque?
Nothing made sense.
Jairo and Jean had come around pretty well when the phone rang for a second time. I picked it up and everyone gathered round me.
“Ready, Mr. Dyce?”
I kept quiet.
“Good,” said Reynolds. “There are two freshly dug graves nearby.”
I swallowed. The story was already building in my head, like when someone tells you to sit down before they break the news. Jean grabbed the cell phone from my ear and punched a button and held it flat in her palm in the middle of our huddle, and Reynolds’ altered voice came through the loudspeaker.
“One of the graves contains your son’s girlfriend. The other, your granddaughter.”
Eleanor’s hand flew to her mouth and tears streamed down her face.
“You bastard,” I said. Jean put her hand on my wrist and gripped it tight.
“Watch your language, Dyce. There are two shovels. Both the woman and the girl have been drugged. As you have all experienced, Luciana is quite the expert in poison and controlled doses. Both will die unless you dig them up.”
“Where are they?”
“You’ll find them,” said Reynolds.
We all exchanged a look. I remembered the gravediggers and the pain of regret flooded me. If I’d only known.
“You will only have time to save one of them. I assure you this: If you dig for both, both will die. If you dig for one, you will save that one. You must choose between the girl and the child.”
Jairo’s scowled. I wondered if he was crying. He’d never met his daughter before. And he’d last seen his girlfriend years back.
“It is ten fifty-nine p.m. I would start looking and then digging, if I were you.”
And the phone went dead.
Eleanor let out a cry of pure anguish.
Jean stared at me. The look in her eyes told me she was working something out. At least the drugs had worn off.
“I know where the graves are,” I said.
All three looked at me.
“Come!”
We ran back to the main path. I retraced my steps from six hours earlier, when I’d arrived. I found the stone on which I’d sat, where Eleanor had found me later. I walked then, Eleanor at my side, Jairo and Jean in tow, to where the gravediggers had been.
There in the moonlight, which had become stronger in the last hour, were two black rectangles side by side. At the end of each was a crude piece of wood with a child’s handwriting.
One said, Vanessa.
One said, Estrella.
A shovel lay at the foot of each grave.
“You heard him,” I said. “Start digging.”
I grabbed a shovel and my instinct made the decision for me. Save the young first. The innocent. I was not about to lose another member of my blood family. Not to this madman. Not today.
The first thrust was strong, due to the loose dirt. Jairo jumped alongside me with the second tool.
“Move!”
And we dug and dug with furious velocity.
Eleanor and Jean had gotten to their knees at Vanessa’s grave and were shoveling with their hands. It was a good idea. Worth a try.
I kept on, slamming the shovel deep into the dirt, and lifted a foot of soil up and out onto the grass next to us. Jairo was slamming the dirt on his half harder. The muscles in my forearms and shoulders began to burn much more quickly than I’d hoped, as lactic acid filled the tiny voids in between the tendons. I couldn’t ignore the pain but kept on, agonizingly slowly.
“What’s the time?” I shouted to Jean and Eleanor.
One of them checked and shouted back, “Eleven-oh-seven.”
Damn, I thought, flinging the metal into dirt once more. Eight minutes left to save this little girl. She’d done nothing to deserve being in this situation. I prayed there and then as I worked the hole that Luciana had put her to sleep before they buried her. Although I knew that to be the case. It was how the gravediggers had managed to bury them without any bother earlier on.
I pushed the guilt from my mind and carried on.
We were about five feet down. But the soil was still thick below our feet. Jairo stopped for the first time since we’d started, his side deeper than mine.
“Concentrate on the middle. As soon as we hit a box, we smash it and pull her out.”
“She’s in a coffin?”
Jairo looked at me, panting. I could hardly breathe and used the tiny rest to try to get my stamina back.
“Of course,” he said, between breaths. “She’d be dead otherwise. Go for the middle. As close to my digging as you can. Go!”
I followed my son’s orders. I could hear Eleanor and Jean grunting from the other grave. We were in the ground now, up to our shoulders if we’d been standing. Reynolds was right. If time was up at 11:15, we had no chance of saving Vanessa too. I dismissed the thought and carried on smashing into the ground.
Our digs became rhythmical, one in, one out, one in, one out. I used my arms like tools and used my back muscles, utilizing more strength and tiring my arms less. Jairo was a machine. I could smell his sweat. His arms were huge masses of tangled muscle and he was not holding back.
We carried on.
Then, bang.
The sound of metal hitting wood.
“Here!” Jairo shouted loudly.
Eleanor and Jean appeared over the edge and looked in.
I worked quickly on the wooden circle that had appeared in the middle of the dirt. It was white in the moonlight. I scraped the dirt off it until the circle was two feet wide.
Jairo pushed me back, lifted his arm into the night sky, and slammed it hard into the center. The wood splintered instantly and his fist disappeared into the hole. He scooped his arm into the coffin to grab his girl. He didn’t come up.
“What is it?”
Eleanor was mumbling incessantly above us.
I shouted again, “Jairo! What?”
Jairo stopped moving and looked upward.
“It’s empty.”
Chapter Forty-Two
We jumped to the second grave.
We dug at the same rate, perhaps faster. We ignored the pain and the blisters and the blood run
ning from our knuckles.
We reached Vanessa’s coffin in ten minutes or less, opened it, and found her limp body.
Too late.
Jairo pulled her petite frame from the hole he had made in the coffin and up onto the grass. Vanessa was in her early twenties, I guessed. She was dressed in what looked like hospital scrubs. Jean checked her pulse, but there was no need. You could tell from the lack of response in her muscles that she was dead already.
Jairo sat with Vanessa’s body across his lap, his head bent down to hers. He was crying.
Eleanor came over to me and I put my arm around her and looked down at the hole. The coffin was made of cheap plywood. On top was a brand: Reynolds Shipping Co.
I tapped Jean on the shoulder and pointed at it. She nodded and closed her eyes.
There would be time for that.
Jairo’s lifted his face to look at us. He looked terrifying, melting into pure rage. Like on the plane.
Then Jean said suddenly, “Wait!” She put her finger to her lips. “Shush.”
We shut up.
“A car,” she said. “On the road.”
Jairo didn’t need any more information, he got up and began sprinting away. “He’s here. Reynolds is here.”
Jean was following him. I went too. Eleanor stayed with Vanessa’s body.
“Sick asshole wanted to watch,” said Jean as we ran, hard, to the road.
We cleared the trees and saw the headlights of a vehicle pulling away slowly from the sidewalk. Jairo surged into a faster sprint. Faster than I could ever run, faster than anything I’d ever seen in the flesh. He leapt over gravestones, Jean and I behind him. He had one target and it was moving.
It was hard to gauge the distance in the darkness, but I could tell Jairo was close to the car—a newish black Mercedes, the interior dark.
Then he leapt over the low white border wall, into the road, and slammed into the front of the car.
The driver braked hard and attempted to get into reverse, grinding the transmission.
Jairo got off the ground and blocked the car, hands laid out on the hood.
The brake lights came on. The two back passenger doors opened and two massive men climbed out. They were wearing black raincoats and had short-cut military haircuts.
Jairo squared up to them.
The men stood at the same height as Jairo and me, but were three times as wide. Jairo began stepping back, allowing the two behemoths to walk around the car to the front. Now they faced Jairo straight on, illuminated by the Mercedes’ headlights.
We reached them and stopped. Jean didn’t move. I couldn’t move. My muscles seared with pain, from the dig and now the run.
Jairo was moving from side to side. The two mammoth guys were taking their coats off. They were both white guys and looked like first-pick college quarterbacks. They shifted their weight from foot to foot, staring Jairo down.
In a blur, Jairo lunged forward, shoving his elbow into the face of the guy to his right, then spun and landed it again in the face of the second guy. Both dropped like sacks of potatoes. Jairo raised his boot to the first and crushed his face. Then he repeated the process on the second. The crack was so loud, I thought he’d busted the skull. They were out cold.
Jairo stood up again, a vicious wolf, eyes burning.
Jean was starting toward the car to join Jairo in checking the front seats when the Mercedes flew backwards, like the driver had flung the stick into gear and stomped on the accelerator at just the right moment. Jairo was thrown back and Jean stumbled.
Then she stood, “give me your phone,” she said.
I gave it to her.
At that same exact moment lights flooded the scene. Headlights.
Five pairs of them.
Five cars began to move away from the sidewalk from the shadows on the other side of the street. Eleanor came up from behind me and I stood with her, holding her in my arms.
Jean’s call, meanwhile, had connected and she was shouting the digits of the first Mercedes’ plates.
She turned and the five cars passed her by, heading away on the small road.
Jean stooped, barking numbers into the phone as each car zoomed past.
When all went back to dark, she walked to us and Jairo, out of breath.
“I called in the plates to my boss,” she said. “All six.”
I looked at Eleanor. She was in shock.
Jean went to the bodyguards and pulled two handguns from their belts.
Jairo was walking away. We followed him.
We walked back to the graves. Eleanor was scared and worried as I told her what had happened.
“That was it? What about Estrella now?”
Jean was on the phone again. Jairo was holding Vanessa’s body.
In the distance, we heard the sirens of police cars. Many of them.
We waited. I held Eleanor and felt her hold me back.
“When the cops get here,” said Jean, “let me do the talking.”
Chapter Forty-Three
We let Jean do the talking.
And it took a while.
At first, the cops suspected us, probably of being in some sort of weird sect, and cuffed us all. A corpse in a graveyard in the middle of the night. And two knocked-out henchmen.
In the end, Jean asked to make a call. She was on the phone for what felt like forever, but then she hung up and spoke to the sheriff and he agreed to release us into Jean’s custody.
We sat down on the grass as we waited for the coroner to pick up Vanessa’s body. Eleanor was beside herself about the little girl, our granddaughter, Estrella. Jairo paced back and forth.
I asked Jean, “Are you arresting us?”
“Yes,” she said. “No other choice. It’s the only way to protect you two. Jairo made a deal with us already.”
I said, “I’m not sure I can take prison. I can’t leave Eleanor again.”
Eleanor squeezed my hand; it gave me strength.
“Not prison,” said Jean. “But detained in a CIA facility. For your protection as much as anything else.”
We couldn’t argue with that.
“First,” Jean added, “we need to see those photos of the cars. My boss, David Rose, says his team may have got decent shots of them escaping back through the city.”
“Okay,” I said. “That might lead us to Estrella.”
Jean nodded. “It’s possible.”
Jean talked with Jairo quietly after that, leaving me to talk with Eleanor. She told me how Reynolds’ people, led by Luciana, had let her go without questions or anything. She’d had to go to her family’s old bank and get authorized access to some savings she’d always kept in the States. And then she’d come here and been contacted by Jairo. I realized the CIA had helped with that too.
I looked at our son, talking to Jean, his rugged face covered with grime, his thick beard, his muscles and lean frame.
I didn’t recognize him at all.
After half an hour, the coroner and Jean’s ride showed up. The local cops helped the coroner put Vanessa’s body on a gurney. Eleanor asked that we be allowed to organize a proper funeral, but Jean dodged the question.
We got into a large black SUV, a Tahoe, and took off. We rested during the journey while Jean talked to her boss and fellow agents in preparation for our arrival. I gathered that her job had been to bring Jairo in and she had succeeded and thus was allowed to come in from the cold, so to speak. But I also guessed she had a fair bit of explaining to do as regards the mess down in Mexico and the crashed plane and the dead girl.
The trip lasted five and a half hours, even in the middle of the night, but at last we saw the Washington Monument from a distance as the driver circled the capital. When we arrived at Langley, it looked like a university campus, peacefully set in a large, green park. We drove through checkpoints where Jean registered and we stayed put. Eventually, we made it to an entrance and stopped.
Jean got down from the Tahoe first and ushered us to fol
low.
“No time for freshening up, I’m afraid,” she said. “My boss got the photos of the cars back and we have some clear faces.”
I gripped Eleanor’s hand. There was hope.
We passed through tougher and more stringent security, and then through a maze of corridors, before a large man, slightly overweight and with an unkempt mop of black hair and a pasty-white face, came out to meet us.
Jean shook his hand and stood beside him. “This is my direct boss, David Rose.”
Rose nodded and said, “Come. We got photos of the six cars. CCTV, but a couple of faces are visible. They split after they hit the city, and the plates were fake and seemingly untraceable. Local cops couldn’t find the cars.”
My heart sank. “They’re gone?”
Rose turned to me like an angry uncle staring down his nephew who interrupted.
He continued: “So we need to see if your boy here is any use and can ID any of them.”
We entered a small, austere room with a well-worn gray carpet, white plasterboard walls, and a ceiling that hummed under the weight of its A/C and heating systems. A camera was perched in the corner. Laid out on the table were twelve dark six-by-nine photographs.
Rose ushered Jairo over to the table and Jean stood next to him as they began looking through the photos.
“You know any of these faces, Mr. Morales?”
Jairo said nothing but looked at each one. Eleanor pulled my hand and we shuffled over to stand next to Jean and stared down at the shots.
Rose said, “You told us you had information, Morales, and now it’s time to collect. We did everything we promised at our end. We need to find this guy Reynolds faster than you can believe. Check the photos again.”
Jairo peered closely but shook his head.
I looked at the first photo. It was one of the cars passing through a crossroads, a single face illuminated at the wheel, staring forward. I’d never seen the man before in my life.
The next photo was taken from the side. This time, the passenger’s side profile was visible. A thin white face, unknown to me too.
