“I went to Phoenix in May to meet with Jordan Dunn, the marketing VP of Taco Delicioso about a new TV ad campaign.”
“Uh-huh,” Adriana said, absently drumming her fingers on the table.
“Please don’t do that, Adriana…that drumming the fingers thing. I’m nervous enough.”
She folded her hands in her lap.
“My Phoenix trip…it was a preliminary meeting to talk about concepts. I won’t bore you with the details,” Diego said. “After the meeting I headed back to my hotel. The GPS on my rental car shot craps and I ended up in a seedy part of town. Street freaks everywhere. I was driving fast because I wanted to get the hell out of there. I was afraid some nut might try a carjacking or something.” Diego had set his story on speed-dial. He took a deep breath and slowed down his delivery. “Anyway, I turned down a very narrow street when this man stepped out from behind an abandoned car and directly in front of me. I hit him.” Diego closed his eyes. “Man, did I ever hit him.”
“Oh, Diego….” Adriana brought a hand up to her mouth.
“His body flew up over the hood and onto the windshield. The windshield shattered.” He shook his head and looked away. “God, I’ll never forget that sound. It was…was the most ghoulish sound I could ever have imagined. I have nightmares about it. I actually hear that terrible sound at night.”
“Was he hurt?”
In a low and shaken voice Diego said, “I didn’t stop.”
“What?” Adriana gasped.
“Dunn had a wet bar in his office. We’d had a couple of drinks. I was frightened. I didn’t stop. I wasn’t thinking straight, Adriana. Drunk driving can get you five years. I panicked. I thought at the time that I was thinking straight. I wasn’t.”
“Please tell me the man survived.”
Diego shook his head. In a soft voice he said, “He didn’t.”
“Dear God,” Adriana whispered.
“I know. It’s bad.”
Someone on the third floor—in the apartment directly above—dropped something on the floor and it made a loud THUMP! Diego jumped in his chair.
“Jesus!” he cried, looking up at the ceiling.
“I’ve never seen you so jumpy.”
“I’ve never been so jumpy.”
“The accident in Phoenix. Is that why that detective left his card in our door?”
“Probably.”
“But the accident was three months ago,” Adriana noted, looking confused. “Why have they have waited so long to interview you?”
“After I hit the man I drove a few blocks and parked the car. I sat in the car for the longest time trying to decide what to do. In the end, I got out and walked across the street and called a cab. The cab took me back to my hotel. I called the car rental agency and told them the car had been stolen. I took a morning flight back to San Francisco the next day.”
“But how do you know the man died?”
“I read the Phoenix Republic online during the flight home. The story was on the front page. The man died instantly of head trauma, and he wasn’t some street freak. He was the twenty-year-old son of a Phoenix judge.”
Eyes wide, the color left Adriana’s face.
“The Republic story said he’d been released from rehab the day before. I’m guessing he was in that part of town buying drugs. Hell, I don’t know.”
Adriana uttered a long, deep sigh. “And you didn’t tell me because…?”
“I was hoping the whole thing would blow over…and it almost did.”
“But you told the rental agency the car was stolen. How can they trace the car—”
“Adriana, my DNA was all over the steering wheel. Mine and mine alone. And fingerprints and hair fibers and all that other forensic crap. If the car had been stolen, the thief’s DNA would have been everywhere.” Diego exhaled a tired breath. “I’m sure the Phoenix cops have deduced by now that the car was not stolen, and they’ve matched up cab fares to the location of the car…etcetera, etcetera.”
“Are you telling me that you might have some sort of manslaughter charge awaiting you at the Department of Criminal Justice?”
“Manslaughter…or worse.”
Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Finally, Adriana said, “Now we’re in this thing together.”
Diego looked across the table and smiled at his wife. “We always were, Adriana.”
6
Diego sat on the edge of the bed in his jockey shorts, drinking his coffee and watching Adriana sleep.
Adriana Elvia Soto, the Santa Maria high school beauty queen who would later become a social activist and editor of the UC-Berkeley school newspaper, The Daily Californian. Despite the terrible scar on her neck, she was just as radiant, just as lovely as she had been sixteen years earlier when Diego first met her. At the time, she was working on her master’s thesis. He even remembered the title: Undocumented Anasazi Petroglyphs of the Southwest. He had helped her proofread the 125-page document. Back then he was a copywriter for a small ad agency in Napa Valley.
It was love at first sight for both of them—he had taken her to a Giants baseball game on their first date—and two months later they were married in Henderson, Nevada.
Diego sipped his coffee and continued to study his wife’s angelic face. He enjoyed looking at her. It wasn’t just sexual, the feelings he had when he gazed at her. Sexual, yes, erotic, yes, but it was more than that. It made him ache inside.
It didn’t seem possible that Adriana’s cancer had returned. It didn’t seem possible that she would soon be leaving him. La vida pasa. Her favorite saying. Life goes on. Diego knew that once Adriana was gone, however, life would not, could not, go on for him.
Numbed by the hopeless thought of Adriana’s approaching death, Diego reached over and quietly opened the top drawer of the nightstand beside their bed. Inside, pushed to the back and tucked beneath a stack of envelopes, was the Smith & Wesson .38 revolver he had purchased two weeks earlier, without Adriana’s knowledge, a few days after she had complained that eating had again become difficult and they suspected the cancer had returned for one final encore.
Diego removed the loaded revolver and stared at it, his mind racing, cold beads of sweat dimpling his forehead. The gun felt heavy in his hand.
He paused for several long seconds, trying to sort through it all. Adriana wouldn’t feel a thing. It would be over in an instant. Some blood, yes, but her suffering would be at an end. Then he would put the gun to his own temple and make the ritual complete. They would ride that next bus to heaven together.
All aboard!
Tickets please!
Diego pulled back the hammer and pointed the barrel of the gun at Adriana’s temple, the weapon trembling in his hand, a chorus of unfamiliar voices screaming inside his head.
Pull the trigger! Do it, you cowardly bastard!
Don’t! There’s a better way!
Do it!
Don’t!
Diego lowered the revolver—Don’t had spoken the loudest, the clearest—and a sliver of fear tore through his body at the thought of what had almost happened. The idea of sending a bullet crashing through Adriana’s skull was simply too crippling. He could not kill the only thing in life he loved.
Adriana still had life in her. Dr. Chiapas said she had three months. She would still have good days for at least another month. Maybe more. He would celebrate her life during those few precious days and weeks. He would treasure each minute, each hour, each day with her. Besides, she had a supply of Z patches. It would help her through the days ahead. The glass was half full.
The voice screaming You cowardly bastard! tried to squirm back into his head, but Diego showed it to the door. He uttered an anxious sigh, released the hammer, then replaced the revolver in the drawer and quietly closed it.
It was a stupid idea, he told himself. He had never come close to taking another person’s life—his accidental killing of a judge’s son aside—and it was ludicrous to think he could start with his wife.
Diego wondered how in God’s name they would make a successful border crossing. From what Cutbirth had said, the border now separating the two sovereign republics posed more of a physical obstacle than the one presented by the infamous barrier between East and West Berlin during the Cold War of the 20th century. Or even of the one that still divided North and South Korea. Not many people had made it across those borders either.
Diego went into the kitchen and prepared a couple of ham and cheese bagels. He flipped on the TV and sat at the kitchen table drinking his second cup of coffee and watching California A.M. while the bagels warmed in the oven. Weatherwoman Margo Flores was standing in front of a País Nuevo map and talking about the God-awful heat that continued to stretch from Florida to California, and then said they were going to the videotape from the night before. The routine was always the same. National weather. Execution. National news. The ghastly event was now a part of the daily news cycle.
A generic black and white test pattern appeared on the television screen. In the upper right hand corner was a clock: 11:59 p.m. In a few moments it changed to 12:00, and a chilling message appeared:
The Following Is Presented
By The País Nuevo
Department of Criminal Justice
Execution Division
___________________________
Support Your Local Police
A head-on view of a shadowy indoor gallows appeared on the screen. A hangman’s rope dangled from a wooden crossbeam above a trap door. Stairs to the gallows could be seen off to one side. The undercarriage of the gallows was hidden behind a dark curtain. A masked figure in black stood on the gallows in one murky corner opposite the stairs. His hand (or her hand, as some had speculated) rested on a long-handled lever that protruded from the floor. It was a fixed camera system and the view was always the same.
Two National Police officers in full gear escorted an obese woman up the gallows stairs. There was no sound. The woman’s head had been shaved and her hands were tied behind her back. She wore a gray jumpsuit. Tears flooded down the woman’s cheeks as she spoke. Diego tried to read her lips, but it was impossible. Seeing the hangman’s noose, the woman’s stride shortened and the officers had to physically exhort her to take the last few steps and onto the trap door. One of the officers placed a black hood over the woman’s head and face, and then bound her legs at the ankles. The other officer dropped the hangman’s noose into position, and drew the rope tight around the woman’s fleshy neck. When her knees buckled, the officers steadied her, and then stepped back. The following message appeared on screen:
Judith Meyer of Baton Rouge, Louisiana was convicted of murdering her husband on April 2 of this year. Although she claimed he had physically abused her for years, her appeal was denied on May 24, and the following day she was sentenced to be hanged on August 6 this year. May God and his Son Jesus Christ have mercy on her wretched soul.
Diego was no longer shocked by the televised executions. In the beginning he was. Three years ago he had been unable to watch. It was easier now, but not much. The state often executed as many as four or five criminals a day. They were always televised. Today it was only one: Judith Meyer.
Diego watched uneasily, his heart racing.
There was a brief pause—Judith Meyer’s full-bosomed body shook visibly as she stood waiting to die—then the masked figure pulled the lever, the trap door opened, and Judith Meyer plunged to her death. The rope quivered under the enormous weight.
Cut to Anchorman Rob Winslow. Seated at the País Nuevo Network news desk in Dallas, he appeared on camera with a wide, handsome smile. “Good news today from the Department of Labor and Wages,” Rob announced. “Unemployment fell below eighteen percent for the first time in two years.”
***
Diego was still in the kitchen a few minutes later when he heard Adriana stirring in the bedroom. He poured her a cup of coffee, added a tablespoon of sugar, and made his way to her.She was sitting up in bed.
“Morning, Adriana,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed and handing her the mug. “Today’s the big day.” His voice was filled with cautious optimism.
“Morning, sweetie,” she said, her voice scratchy. “Yum! That smells good!” She sipped the coffee with a wince—even swallowing liquid had become difficult. “Yes, our big day.” She looked at him with an odd little smile.
He had seen the smile before.“Ah, I see someone has been dreaming again.”
“Yes.”
“The baby girl?”
“Yes, the baby girl. I always expect to see her lying beside me when I wake.” She looked at the empty bed with sad eyes. “This morning I even thought I heard her crying.”
It was always the same: Diego couldn’t think of anything to say.
“You want to know something, Mr. Sanchez?”
“Tell me,” he said.
“Our life together has been good.”
“I have no complaints. Zero.” He reached over and touched her face. “You have made me absurdly happy.”
“I’d only change one thing.” Her voice was disheartened.
“I know.”
“Everything else was good. Is good.”
“You did your best, Adriana,” Diego said, his eyes soft and caring.
She paused to sip her coffee. “Diego, something’s been bugging me,” she said, suddenly looking uncertain. “Why in the world would Arnold Cutbirth want us to bring warm clothes? We’re in the middle of a seven-year heat wave. And not just in California.”
“It’s my guess we’ll make our way across the border following some high-altitude mountain pass. Warm clothes would certainly come in handy, even in the summer. It can get damned cold at altitude.”
“I like that,” she said. “We’re going for a mountain hike.”
“Or...” he tempted.
“Yes?”
“We’re crossing in a hot-air balloon.” He quickly added, “I know that sounds bizarre.”
Adriana shook her head. “One problem, sweetie. The air space above the border is restricted. They scramble jets and shoot down people, according to PNN.”
Diego nodded. “Yeah, that fact did occur to me.”
“One more question. What in the world is the connection between Dr. Chiapas and Arnold Cutbirth?” Adriana looked confused. “Talk about strange bedfellows.”
Diego shrugged. “I have no idea.” The two men were, indeed, as different as day and night. What was the common denominator? He couldn’t even begin to imagine. Diego sipped his coffee, and then in a soft voice said, “Have I told you today how much I love you?”
Locking eyes with Diego, she put on a wounded face. “No, and I missed hearing it.”
“I do, you know. Wildly, crazily, madly in love.”
“You wouldn’t kid a girl, would you?”
“Not a chance.”
Normally, Adriana would say, “Then you’ll have to prove it, Mr. Sanchez.”
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