by Ninie Hammon
Brice was studying the arrivals and departures.
“There. Penn Station, boards on Track 7.
Bailey pointed down the rows of numbered tracks and cried, “This way!”
The three of them ran toward the doors that lead from the station out to the trains, dodging through the crowd, around roller bags and strollers and old people with walkers. Brice was faster than either he or Bailey; a thirty-five-year-old man in prime physical condition, he left them in the dust.
He could hear Bailey. She was winded, but still had enough breath to cry.
Her little sister had taken her daughter and run off.
T.J. wanted to be compassionate about that, and he’d get around to compassion. It was on his to-do list. He’d cross that item off soon’s they found the girl and got Bailey’s daughter back. Right now, though, he was madder than dammit.
Brice slowed just past a set of double doors. Trains pulled into the station between platforms so passengers could get on or off on either side of the train. Every car had doors on both sides, so you could step directly into or out of any of the fifteen to twenty cars behind the engine. That was a good thing, ‘cause the first few cars was always First Class. If you could only get on the train through one door behind the engine, you’d have to walk sideways down the aisle between seats the length of three, maybe four cars before you find the seats for regular folks.
Brice had pulled up short and as he and Bailey arrived, panting, it was clear why. The train on Track 7 was closed up and pulling out, already halfway out of the station, gaining speed as it went along.
“No,” was all Bailey could gasp. “Please, God, no …”
“We’ll have to call the marshals,” Brice said. “Jordan can have officers waiting to take them into custody as they step off the train in Penn Station.”
“Arrest María?”
“Protective custody,” Brice said.
“Kidnapping,” T.J. said.
“That’s absurd …”
“Bethany’s your little girl, not hers,” he said. “You can’t let her just run off with the child.”
The train had pulled all the way out of the station by then, out past the passengers who’d gotten off at the far end of the platform.
There were two figures standing there. Like they had gotten off the end of the train. Or had been waiting to get on there.
They stood by themselves, watching the train pull away. A dark-haired woman and a little girl. María and Bethany.
She let out a little squeak of a cry that could have been any emotion in the world.
María had Bethany by the hand and was walking slowly back down the platform toward the station. She was looking down, didn’t see Bailey and the others on the platform on the other side of the empty track. Bailey turned and ran back up the platform, crossed in front of the #7 track, then began to walk slowly down the platform toward her sister and her daughter.
“Mommy, there’s that lady again.”
Bethany tossed the words into the hollow void that had opened up in María’s chest and now stretched out endlessly in every direction inside her. The wind blowing through it was colder than the wind outside, colder that a breath across the polar ice cap. As cold as death.
“Mommy …” The little girl snuggled up close, gripping tight to the hand María wasn’t using to pull the suitcase. María looked down at the child, then followed the little girl’s gaze …
Bailey.
She had to be imagining …
Where did Bailey come from?
How did she know …?
She stopped walking. Stood as still as stone as Bailey approached, and Bethany snuggled tight to her leg and pulled around behind her.
Then María began to run. She dropped the suitcase and dragged a reluctant Bethany along beside her. When she got to Bailey, she threw her arms around her sister and sobbed.
“I’m so sorry, so sorry, but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t. I was so afraid of losing Bethany, I was so scared. I …”
She was babbling and sobbing and making no sense because there was no sense to be made of any of it.
At some point in the darkness last night, as she’d sat up in the chair beside Bethany’s bed and watched her sleep, María had snapped. Terror ambushed her. Not terror of the nameless Russian man with a gun, but terror of losing her precious daughter.
Terror took her captive, propelled her, herded her through the hours as she packed, ordered a ticket, called a cab. The terror was so great in her chest it left room for nothing else. It was as all-consuming as a wildfire through the brush. She had run before it. To the South Boston Station. To Track 7. To the train to New York’s Penn Station, where she would … she had no idea what she would do when she got there. None. She had picked Penn Station because that had been listed on the example ticket on the website.
Don’t leave, María.
She’d heard Bailey’s voice in her head as she hurried across the station toward the track. She’d staggered, stopped, looked around.
Don’t go.
She’d started running then, running from the words, dragging the suitcase and Bethany along the platform, down the length of the train to the last car.
She stood before the open door.
And she couldn’t go through it.
No. She wouldn’t go through it.
She wouldn’t run away from Bailey.
Bailey’s voice in her head wasn’t the reason, though.
María had finally run all the way out to the end of herself. And somehow found herself there. Found María, the little girl with asthma whose big sister had kept the demons away with a Band-Aid.
Bailey was alive. She was alive.
Bethany was Bailey’s little girl.
María would give up Bethany for Bailey.
To Bailey.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Brice and T.J. hung back, let the sisters have their cry. A train station was a good place for a couple of women to have a meltdown. Didn’t nobody notice a thing, figured they was either saying goodbye or saying hello, paid ‘em no mind at all.
Once the tears had ratcheted down, they talked. T.J. couldn’t imagine what the conversation was like, them two women who’d been beat up by life and by events they didn’t cause, by the evil of others, like they’d washed up together with that little girl on some island after they’d been shipwrecked at sea by a hurricane.
Finally, Bailey turned and beckoned to them.
The little girl was hidden so far back behind María it was hard to get a look at her. The young woman who was literally clinging to Bailey had a sweet, open face — which right now wasn’t her best look, her eyes all swelled up from crying and her nose red. She wasn’t much of a looker right now, but fixed up she’d be attractive. Not beautiful like Bailey, but pretty.
Then he reminded himself that they wasn’t blood sisters anyway.
Bailey introduced them. He shook her hand. Didn’t bother with his Thomas-Jefferson-Alexander-Hamilton shtick. Hers wasn’t no dead-fish-on-a-stick handshake. It was strong and firm. He liked that. She looked him in the eye, too. He liked that, too. The little girl would barely peek out at him from behind her mama. No, not her mama. Bailey was her mama.
From her perspective, she’d just met a skinny piece of gnarled licorice and a redheaded, freckle-faced behemoth in a Boston sweatshirt.
Brice dropped down to one knee in front of the little girl.
“I’m Brice,” he told her. “They won’t let me wear green. Know why?”
She looked at him with the one peeking eye and shook her head.
“Then people would think I was the Jolly Green Giant.”
“And you think that little girl got any idea who that is?” T.J. shook his head in disbelief. “That dude ain’t been advertising frozen peas in a decade. You don’t get out much, do ya?”
T.J. focused on Bailey and María then.
“Since appears you’s all packed up, I s’pect we’d better get on down the
road a piece. We got a long way to drive …” He cut a look at Brice. “‘Sides, we might not have no car to drive in.”
“No car?” Bailey said.
“Brice was determined to park in that loading zone," T.J. said piously, cutting his eyes toward Brice. "I warned him, tried to get him to listen to reason, said they was gonna tow the car, but nooooo …”
He kept up the banter as he gently herded the women and little girl out of the station. The GPS had said it was a twelve-hour drive. Best they could hope to do was get close enough so they could make it home with an easy drive tomorrow.
He watched the interplay between the two women as they walked along. Bailey and María was holding hands. Holding hands! They was talkin’ about when they was little girls, silly memories. Safe memories. No landmines there, wasn’t no dead bodies gonna surface, and right now that was definitely a prerequisite for any conversation.
Bethany was staying as far away from Bailey as she could get. He seen that Bailey was studiously ignoring the little girl, and he could tell with just a glance how it was cutting that girl all the way to the bone to do it. But she’d learned from her mistake, wouldn’t go tacklin’ the kid again.
The car was still sitting where Brice had parked it. Didn’t even have a ticket.
“I’d call that the luck of the Irish if your last name wasn’t McGreggor.”
“There’s no car seat,” María said.
Car seat. Duh. They couldn’t take Bethany anywhere without one.
“There’s one in my car,” María said. “We can stop by and pick it up.”
T.J. didn’t want to stop, would rather pull over at the first Walmart they seen and get a new car seat. But the women wasn’t paying him no mind. He looked over their heads at Brice, who shrugged. T.J. had checked them out of the hotel when he went down at dawn to get coffee. Just one stop, wouldn’t take long, and they could be on their way.
They pulled up beside María’s car parked in a tiny lot next to a wall of dumpsters at the end of the block. There hadn’t been a whole lot of talk about logistics, he guessed because María was so totally fried by the circumstances her mind wasn’t on a page where she was able to plan out what she’d ought to do about her car, or was the pipes gonna freeze and who was gonna water the plants while she was gone.
That wasn’t no bad thing. If they got to talking about the needful things, they wouldn’t never get on the road. Yeah, they was lots of loose ends. From the size of the suitcase María was packing, she hadn’t brought much by way of belongings. They’d sort that out, too.
It didn’t take María two minutes to unhook the car seat from her car and fasten it in place in the middle of the back seat of the rental. If it’d been left to T.J. to figure out how to get that contraption hooked up and that little girl in it, they’d all have to begin life anew right beside these here dumpsters.
“Wait,” María said, and she turned to Bailey. “Pictures. I have albums full …”
You could see the yearning in Bailey’s eyes. She needed to watch her little girl grow up.
“It won’t take but a minute to get them.” María turned down the sidewalk toward her building.
“I’m going with you,” Brice said and strode up beside her.
The oh-don’t-bother, I-can-manage froze on her face when she realized why he didn’t want her to go alone.
“Mommy!” Bethany cried from the backseat, holding out her arms to María. “I go wif you!”
“Wait here for me, sugar plum. I’ll be right back.”
“Nooooo!” squalled the little girl and she began to wail, not in a kick-your-feet tantrum, just pure misery.
T.J. was proud of Bailey. She didn’t leap into the back seat of the car and start trying to console the child. Sat still in the front seat holding onto her emotions with her fingernails. Smart move. Which, of course, left him to deal with the situation.
“You ever seen anybody could take they thumb off and then put it back on again?”
He proceeded to demonstrate his one and only kid trick, but Bethany wasn’t buying what he was selling. As María and Brice hurried up the steps and disappeared into the building, the little girl proceeded to engage in a full-bore emotional meltdown.
Goody.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The big man in the bulky Boston sweatshirt and no coat was nice — what was his name? Brice? María was horrible with names. The man’s size was intimidating, but it was comforting, too, if María let herself consider why he was accompanying her up the stairs to her apartment.
But her mind still couldn’t/wouldn’t go there. That there was somebody out there who wanted to kill …
No, that was a bridge too far. In a day or two, when it finally sank in that she had dropped her whole life and gone running madly away into the night … okay, mid-morning. Point being, she needed time for it all to become real to her before she’d be able to believe …
“I’ve got the albums stuck in a couple of different places,” she told him as the elevator door closed in front of them. “One big picture album on the top shelf in the hall closet and there’s a smaller one under my bed. There’s also a box of loose pictures I haven’t had time to … the ones of Bethany in her Halloween costume this year. She was a minion, you won’t believe how—”
She realized she was babbling, but had a sense that Brice was okay with that, might even be used to it. He was, after all, a friend of Bailey’s.
How did somebody in the Witness Protection Program make friends when you couldn’t tell anybody who you really were? But maybe they weren’t friends. The two men — the old one was T.J, she remembered that much — acted like police officers. Both carried guns. That must be their connection to Bailey. They were part of the Witness Protection Program or something. But they called her Bailey — the name María had given her when they were kids. Did she drop Cunningham and go by Jessie Bailey now? You’d address somebody you were guarding by their last name.
But as soon as the thought entered her mind, she rejected it. These men were her friends. You could see it in every syllable of body language and in the easy way they had with each other.
So maybe they’d started out guarding her or whatever it was they did and then after a while they all became friends. She’d have to ask about that. She’d have to ask about all of it, so many things.
Where were they going? She didn’t even know where they were going! How ridiculous was that? She hadn’t even asked. Didn’t know how long it would take to get there. If they’d chartered a plane or whatever to come to Boston, it must be more than a couple of hours away.
“—cute she was. I made the costume, got a diver’s mask to put on her face, painted an eyeball on it so she could be the minion that only has the one eye in the middle, I can’t remember his name.”
The elevator dinged and María realized she hadn’t given the man a chance to say a word since they left the car.
Where Bethany was probably hysterical by now.
“We need to hurry,” she said as the elevator door opened.
The man continued her thought. “That little girl is not happy strapped in that car seat.”
“Bailey scared her is all. She didn’t mean to but—”
“She told us what happened.”
“Bethy will … get used to her.”
Will more than get used to her. Will become her …
No, best not go there, either. There were landmines barely under the surface all over her life right now and she needed to be careful not to step on one. Not until she was prepared.
They had gotten to the door of her apartment. She fished around in her coat pocket and pulled out her key ring. He took them from her before she could insert the key into the deadbolt lock at the top.
He moved her out of the way, put the key in the hole and turned it.
He looked at her quizzically. “The door’s not locked.”
María burped out a laugh.
“I blew out of here so fast this mor
ning I’m surprised I remembered to close it.”
She started to open the door but he gently shoved her to the wall beside the door. Then he turned the knob and pushed the door slowly inward with his left hand as he put his right hand on the grip of the pistol in the holster at his side.
The door was only halfway open when she saw something … movement inside … and Brice coughed. Somebody coughed.
After that, nothing in the world fit right.
The big man let go of the doorknob and staggered back as he began pulling his gun out of the holster. Another cough and he twisted around the other way. His pistol tumbled to the floor and he fell backward, slamming into the wall on the other side of the hallway.
Even before he went down, before he hit the floor, the movement she’d seen became a man inside her apartment. He must have been standing behind the door and when it began to open …
He wasn’t as big as the red-haired man who now lay on his back at her feet.
But the gun in his hand made him look ten feet tall.
Gun.
He had shot Brice.
Killed Bailey’s friend.
The man pointed the pistol with the long barrel at her, and María knew she had only moments to live.
“You are María McKessen, yes?” the man demanded.
She nodded. Bethany!
Squeezed her eyes shut. Bailey would take care of her.
Tensed for the pain of a bullet ripping into her chest.
But the man didn’t shoot her. He grabbed her arm and propelled her ahead of him down the hallway. A second man had materialized out of her apartment and was following them toward the back stairs.
She glanced to the right at the door to Jason’s apartment in time to see that it was open about an inch and Jason was peering out. Then he shoved it shut and they hurried past to the door marked “Stairs.” The men were huge, but they moved so fast María had trouble keeping up. And quietly, their footsteps barely sounding on the steps.
The back door.