Blue Tears

by Ninie Hammon

A blast of cold air in her face.

  There was a gray van parked illegally right in front of the door. The side door slid open as they stepped out of the building and the two men shoved her forward. A fat man with a flat broad face inside the van grabbed her arm, the two men with her jumped in behind her, the door slammed shut, and the van sped away down the short alley, turned and pulled slowly out into the street.

  There were no windows in the van, but as they drove past it, María caught a glimpse — out through the windshield — of the rental car parked in the tiny parking lot two doors down from her building.

  The side of Bailey’s face.

  And a sound.

  “Momeeeeee!”

  But she must have imagined that part.

  The man had thrown María on the floor of the van and she didn’t move, just sat there trying to wake up. Because this had to be a nightmare. Had to be. Nothing like this was real.

  Except it was.

  There were four men in the van with her. Two sat in the back on a single bench seat that faced the back doors with her sprawled on the floor in front of them. Another drove, and the bald man with no cap who’d materialized out of nowhere in her apartment rode shotgun.

  When the fat one with the broad, flat face had grabbed her and shoved her down, he had pawed her. She’d squirmed to get away from his rough seeking hands, disgusted and horrified. But when he found her phone in her coat pocket he snatched it out and let her drop to the floor.

  They said nothing, to each other or to María. The silence was adding to the incipient panic that any second would explode. She wanted to cry but couldn’t seem to get her vocal cords to engage. Couldn’t do anything but sit here like a terrified rabbit.

  What were they going to do with her?

  Duh. They were going to kill her.

  Then she did cry. Tears burst out, a sob like a grunt detonated in her throat and suddenly she was bawling so hard she could barely breathe.

  Whap!

  The man closest to her, the one with the pockmarked face who had shot the big man, Brice, hit her in the face. Slapped her so hard she flew backward and her head connected with the back door, making a jaw-jarring thunk sound.

  “Shut up,” he said. “I will put a gag in your mouth if you make another sound.”

  A gag in her mouth.

  No, not that. If he …

  If something covered her mouth and maybe her nose.

  If she couldn’t breathe …

  She found herself whimpering despite her best efforts to keep silent. If they put a gag in her mouth, she would have an asthma attack. Breo inhaler or no Breo inhaler. She could feel the tightness in her chest now, just from the terror. If they gagged her, she would choke to death.

  Her face was on fire, heat making her left eye water.

  Nobody had ever hit her in the face. Nobody had ever … no one had ever hurt her. And so casually.

  “Wipe your face,” said the man who’d hit her, and tossed her a piece of paper, a McDonald’s napkin. She didn’t realize until he said it that there was blood dripping down her chin from a split lip. Maybe her nose was bleeding, too.

  She inched up until she was sitting, her back leaned against the back door. Then she used the paper to wipe off the blood, terror clawing at her chest.

  She’d reach up, open the back door and leap out.

  They were going too fast for that, but she didn’t care.

  They were on a busy street, the car behind them would run over her.

  A traffic light then.

  The instant they stopped at a traffic light, she would leap out.

  Idiot! You think they didn’t lock the back door?

  Of course it was locked.

  Maybe she should just start screaming, wailing. Wouldn’t somebody hear her and call 911?

  If she made another sound, they would gag her. She would have an asthma attack and die.

  She swallowed the scream with the panic.

  She couldn’t panic. She had to think!

  Think what?

  She had no idea.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Bailey didn’t know when Marshal Jordan had shown up. He was just there, talking to the other officers and she hadn’t seen him come in.

  Time had telescoped, like it had that day in the rain when Bailey’d stood looking at the car seat turned upside down in a puddle and Aaron held up the bloody guy from the other car by his lapels.

  Call 911, he had shouted at her.

  Were those the last words Aaron ever said to her?

  No, the last words were Jessie, run. With his last words, Aaron had tried to save Jessie’s life. Then another firecracker pop and the man with the gray beard and the eyepatch stood holding a gun as Aaron collapsed on the street.

  Had he shot María, too?

  Bailey could imagine it, could even picture it — as clear as if she had seen it. He is standing in the apartment. María comes in the door and looks confused. Yeah, she’d be confused that there was somebody in her apartment.

  Then the one-eyed man points a gun and there’s the sound of a firecracker pop and María falls to the floor. Then he shoots her again. Just to make sure she’s dead. After all, he had to shoot Aaron twice. Aaron had refused to die with only one bullet in him. He was stubborn like that.

  Bailey shook her head to clear the webs of imagination.

  The one-eyed crazy man — yes, crazy now, that’s what the private investigator had reported to Dobbs. He’d been sane when he murdered Aaron. He’d been crazy when he kidnapped María.

  Kidnapped.

  He didn’t shoot her down like he did Brice. Could have, but didn’t.

  Only it hadn’t been the one-eyed man, but one of his goons. The boy down the hall — Jason — had talked to him, to both of them. They’d seemed nice enough, he’d said, just wanted to know about María. Only they called her Dawn, and he’d told them she wasn’t home right now, he didn’t think, and they’d asked where she went, and he’d said he didn’t know, that this woman had shown up in her apartment yesterday and María/Dawn had started screaming and the woman said it was because María/Dawn had thought she was dead.

  He’d heard the sounds in the hallway — Brice crashing into the wall — and peeked out, saw the men shoving María toward the back stairs.

  “She looked so scared,” he’d said.

  Terrified.

  More scared than squirming around in the mud under a dumpster.

  Jessie’d been afraid the one-eyed man would find her.

  The one-eyed man had found María.

  And took her away.

  Bailey swallowed hard. There was a lump in her throat and she didn’t know what would happen if she didn’t swallow it back. Maybe she would scream, or burst out crying. Maybe she’d throw up. But swallowing the knot in her throat was making it hard to breathe.

  María was gone.

  Mikhailov took her.

  “Mrs. Cunningham …” it was Marshal Jordan, the U.S. marshal with the Witness Protection Program. It had been so long since anybody’d called her Mrs. Cunningham. Not since that day in the safe house somewhere when she first met Marshal Jordan. He’d called her Mrs. Cunningham then, too. He’d spoken in that same tone of voice he was using now, the one she had come to loathe, the one that treated you like you were so fragile you might shatter into a thousand pieces.

  Like you were weak and not possessed of all your marbles.

  She wasn’t weak now, and had every marble she’d ever had.

  “I’d like the answers to some questions if you feel—”

  “No, I’m the one who wants answers. You knew he’d come looking for me. Why didn’t you get María and Bethany and take them somewhere safe before you served—”

  “They didn’t serve the subpoenas.” Brice’s voice sounded bitter as well as pained. He was sitting in the recliner opposite the couch with his sweatshirt, t-shirt and vest off and a paramedic was poking around two humongous purple bruises, one on his abdomen, a
nother on his chest.

  The one on his chest could have stopped his heart, she’d heard the paramedic say. The force of a bullet from a Glock hitting a Kevlar vest at such close range had the explosive force of a sledgehammer blow.

  Brice had been cold this morning, so he’d put on the vest under his shirt. He was alive now because he’d been cold. Big doors swung on such little hinges sometimes.

  “Which means somebody leaked information to Mikhailov soon’s you guys got arrest warrants.” That was T.J. He was sitting beside her on the couch, holding her hand.

  “Wait a minute …” Bailey’s mind was not tracking, and she hadn’t been able to get it to focus on much of anything after they heard the wailing of sirens and the Boston Police units came roaring down the street, skidding to a stop with officers piling out, guns in hand.

  At that moment, the horror of it, hot and stinking, had overwhelmed her and she’d been carried along as relentlessly as the cold water in that coal mine had carried her and the other girls toward their deaths.

  Now, all that remained of her fragmented memories were some snapshots. And those weren’t even in color.

  Black and white.

  Snap.

  T.J.’s face, contorted with emotion, gesturing at the officer on the street who absolutely would not let him go into the building.

  Snap.

  Bethany’s face, contorted with emotion, screaming for her “mommy.” Who’d told her she’d be right back. But who didn’t come right back.

  Snap.

  Her own face, glimpsed in the mirror on the wall in María’s apartment hours — maybe hours, who knew? — after she’d stepped inside and found a paramedic working on Brice and a Boston Police officer asking her if she was related to the woman who was renting this apartment and if she knew what …

  Bailey had just stared at him, then past him at the mirror. She’d looked dead. The way her face had looked in the portrait T.J.’s mother’d painted of her thirty years before she was born. Dead, with a bullet hole in her temple.

  “… just hold on here.” Her voice was scared and anger-fueled and was every bit as strong as she didn’t feel. She turned it full force on Marshal Jordan. “It’s your fault? Somebody in your office or …?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

  “Fine,” T.J. said. “We’ll all shut up now.” He squeezed her hand. “And let you tell us what you are saying. ‘Xplain how this Mikhailov fellow knew he was about to be arrested before it happened. So long before, in fact, that he had time to figure out that the wife of the man he was ‘bout to be charged with murdering wasn’t dead like he figured, so maybe he’d ought to go have a little talk with the family that’d been pretending for two years she was dead.”

  “There was a leak, yes,” Jordan said, but held up his hands, placating. “But it wasn’t in the Marshal’s Service.”

  “What, you’re playing CYA now? You think I care who—”

  “We’ve been looking for Mikhailov ever since we got the call from Mrs. Cunningham.”

  Bailey doubted that, doubted he’d dropped his Thanksgiving drumstick and raced out his front door with his tie flapping in mad pursuit.

  “He was seen on Saturday at a restaurant called Little Moscow. We were locked and loaded to take him down, but he was gone before we got there. I think that’s when he found out about the indictments — on Saturday — because nobody’s seen him since.”

  He turned and spoke directly to Bailey.

  “Someone at the federal courthouse, a clerk, a bailiff — we’ll ferret out who was responsible — was paid off. I’m not playing the blame game. I just want you to know it wasn’t us so you understand that you’re still safe while you’re in our custody, that the Marshal’s Service wasn’t responsible for—”

  She didn’t let him finish. “I want to go back to that other part. The ‘in your custody’ part. What do you mean—?”

  “Protective custody. You and your little girl. We need to get you out of here and to a safe—”

  “Safe?” T.J. and Brice said the word together with the perfect unison of a chorus line.

  Bailey knew the drill, knew what would happen next. She’d be hauled out of here to some anonymous place — with Bethany!

  The little girl was in her room now with a woman from the Marshal’s Service, maybe the same one who had held Bailey up so she wouldn’t fall down in the shower and sat up all night watching her sleep that first night after …

  But maybe it wasn’t the same woman. Bailey wouldn’t recognize her now if she found her under the bed. The woman reading a story to Bethany was an anonymous police officer who clearly had a way with children.

  At some point during the police-officers-everywhere nightmare, Bethany had stopped crying, had fallen asleep in the car seat in the back of the rental car which was supposed to be bearing them all — including María — away to safety in West Virginia.

  She’d awakened crying for her mommy, and Bailey had somehow managed to stay away from her while T.J. and the female marshal had taken her to her bedroom and tried to get her to play with her toys.

  T.J. got down on the floor with her and some paints and a sketch pad.

  Until then, Bailey hadn’t even noticed all the little-kid art that decorated the apartment. Pictures of lopsided boxes that were either houses or wheel-less cars were stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. Free-form splashes of color — in watercolors and pastels and crayons. They all had neatly printed titles: A Bird in the Park. Jasmine’s House. Flowers by the Stoop. Obviously, Bethany had inherited her mother’s artistic flair.

  But Bethany hadn’t wanted to draw with T.J., so the marshal had picked out the most dog-eared of her story books — Green Eggs and Ham — and sat down with her in the rocker. Bethany had her thumb in her mouth and was clinging ferociously to a tattered minion blanket that was the wear-and-tear version of the one Bailey’d clung to just as ferociously as she’d cried herself to sleep for months.

  Marshal Jordan was right now making plans to take Bailey and the traumatized child to some anonymous place with anonymous pictures of lighthouses or sailing ships — why was it that every place they’d taken her had been decorated in tacky ocean decor? Someplace empty. Profoundly empty and impersonal. Housing for an automated attendant and her on-the-run robot child.

  No.

  “Bethany and I aren’t going anywhere with you. We’re going … home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The van finally pulled off the street and into a driveway. María heard the sound of a garage door opening and once they were parked in the dark interior of a building she finally had the courage to speak — for the first time since the man with the pockmarked face had hit her.

  “I have to … I need to go to the bathroom.”

  The bald man who was sitting in the front seat turned around and glared at her.

  “Piss yourself,” he said.

  The driver, a dark, swarthy man with a single thick black eyebrow and a heavy mustache, barked words in what María assumed was Russian at the man who had hit her. He pulled her to her feet and shoved her in front of him out the door of a van. They were in a large building, a warehouse, maybe, definitely bigger than a garage. It felt vast and vacant, not much warmer than it was outside and her breath frosted when she panted explosively out her nose. There were no windows to admit light and flickering fluorescents high overhead provided the only illumination, which left puddles of shadows around piles of something, boxes, machinery covered with tarps … something.

  The driver spoke again and the man who had her arm continued walking with her, hauling her along beside him into a shadowed area, then shoved her between stacks of boxes about ten feet high.

  “Go!”

  “Here?”

  “Go or piss yourself.”

  If she had not needed to go so desperately, she would have refused, but the pain of holding it overcame her shyness and she moved as far away from him as she could, turned her b
ack and began unbuttoning her jeans. She kept her back to him, didn’t know and didn’t want to know if he, too, had turned his back or was standing there watching her. The stink of warm urine wafted up to her, making her briefly nauseous.

  Nothing to wipe with. Duh.

  She stood, buttoned and zipped her jeans, then turned back toward the man. He was facing her, surely had been the whole time. He took a step toward her, grabbed her upper arm and yanked but she managed not to step in the puddle she’d just made. As he dragged her back to where the other men were standing around the van, the garage door opened again and a big black car rolled in and parked on the other side of the van. She caught a glimpse of outside — gravel, concrete, a parking lot — before the door slid back down into place.

  The driver of the car was a man in a tailored business suit and he hopped out as soon as he stopped and opened the back door of the vehicle.

  The man who stepped out of the back seat was Mikhail-whatever. Unmistakable. Slender, immaculately dressed, a short white beard that came to a point on his chin. And a black eyepatch. She was looking at the man who had shot Aaron while Bailey looked on in terror. The man who’d believed he’d also killed Aaron’s wife and now was looking to finish the job he’d started. They’d taken María to get at Bailey and it was a dark irony that they’d driven within a few feet of the victim they’d been seeking when they drove off with María in the van.

  He gestured with a black-gloved hand and the man dragging María hauled her toward him and threw her down at his feet.

  “You are the sister of Jessica Cunningham, yes? The legal guardian of her daughter.”

  His voice had an oily feel, unpleasant for some reason María couldn’t identify.

  She nodded.

  The man who had thrown her grabbed her hair and yanked her head back.

  “Answer the question.”

  “Yes … I mean, no, not really.” The man still had her hair and he shook her head with it. She cried out and stammered. “I’m Bethany’s guardian, but Bailey and I, we’re not blood relatives. We just grew up in the same foster home and have always called ourselves sisters.”