by Steven Gould
"Got that, Joe," the radio crackled. "We've got our chopper up and heading your way, eyes wide open. Hopefully they'll spot the missing chopper. Sheriff says secure the crime scene."
I couldn't help myself.
I jumped into the house.
Sam was on the rug before the couch, his hands bound behind him with a plastic cable tie. Consuelo lay in the doorway to the kitchen. The rug had soaked up most of Sam's blood but in the kitchen it spread across the linoleum as far as the refrigerator and the cabinet.
I stuffed my fist in my mouth to keep from screaming.
There were footsteps on the porch outside, perhaps the deputy or one of the INS agents returning after checking the outbuildings.
In the Empty Quarter I took my hand out of my mouth and screamed.
I jumped to La Crucecita, to Alejandra's office at Significado Claro, but she wasn't there. I stared at my watch, juggling time zones with difficulty. Lunch-right.
I jumped to her house. Not there, either. I looked out the window, toward the hotel.
Mateo, the bellman, was striding up the sidewalk, a shoulder bag dangling from his hand, as if he'd snatched it up. He talked to a cell phone in his other hand.
I jumped to the next window and saw him jerk his head around, looking at the house. He was definitely one of the Sensitives.
I started in the living room, two quick steps forward, and jumped into the air.
The sole of my foot smashed into Mateo's chest hard enough to send him flying backward, his feet coming up waist high before he crashed to the sidewalk. I saw his head bounce and his eyes rolled back.
I bent over to check his pulse and he swung at me, weakly. I kicked him in the side, then grabbed him by his shirt and jumped five miles east, to the beach on Isla la Montosa, and spilled him half in sand, half in water. I pulled his wallet out. He'd dropped the phone and the bag, so I went back for them, before I returned to Alejandra's office.
She still wasn't there and I was very afraid that they'd taken her already. I let myself out and started asking questions: "Uisted ha visto Alejandra?"
She wasn't at any of her regular lunch places and no one had seen her. There was a burning at the back of my nose and I was having trouble seeing. They've already got her. Then I saw her, coming across la Plaza Principal from the direction of the church, and my knees nearly buckled with the relief.
She took one look at me and her face went white. "What is it?"
I jumped her to her house, without asking, without warning.
She dropped to the floor. "Now I know it is bad."
"You need to pack," I said. "Whatever you care about."
She blinked. "Tell me! What is it?"
"They killed Consuelo and Sam."
"iMuertos? No!" Both hands went to her face and her breath started coming in short, convulsive gasps, then sobs.
And that broke me, too.
I dropped to my knees and wrapped my arms around her and began sobbing as hard, then harder than her. Her arms pulled me in and I wrenched away. "No! They'll come! You need to pack."
She took one of the kitchen towels and blew her nose hard. "Where?" she managed after a moment.
I opened my mouth to speak and then blinked. "New York City," I said out loud, but then I shook my head vigorously and pointed at my ear and then around the room. She had an erasable whiteboard mounted on one of the cabinet doors. I grabbed the marker and wrote, "France," making sure she saw it, then took the dish towel she'd blown her nose with and wiped the writing off the board.
"What about him?" she said, pointing toward the Hotel Villa Blanca.
"Mateo? I took him on a trip. We've got some time, but I don't know how long." I had no idea if Mateo had local backup or not. How would they have taken me, anyway? I pushed her toward her room. "Pack, please!"
I'd stuffed Mateo's phone in my pocket and I took it out, curious. There were several programmed numbers but most of them were international. Two were local, though. One said "Tio," meaning "uncle," and the other said "Detonar." Deetoner? I was confused, then realized that tio was in Spanish, so I sounded it out. Day-Toe-Nar.
"Alejandro, como se dice 'detonar'en ingles?"
She looked up. "Detonate? Explode?"
Oh, shit.
I grabbed her and jumped. She staggered away from me in the Empty Quarter, dust and underwear swirling around us.
"What?" she yelled. She looked angry and frightened.
I held up the phone. "I took this from Mateo. Look." I stabbed my finger at the quick-dial entry: Detonar.
She read it and bit her lip. "We don't know what that refers to." She began scooping up her panties and bras. "It could be anything."
"And it could mean one very specific thing."
She shook her head in frustration. "You have the phone, though."
"It's just a phone. Who else has that number?"
"I want my things!"
I jumped us to the Hole and left the bag and her clothes on the table. She opened her mouth to ask but I said, "This is my place. It's an old mine. I detonar the entry so the only way in or out is my way."
"My things?"
I licked my lips. "Let's go see, okay?"
It took me a minute, but I eventually remembered the roof of the hotel well enough to jump. The memory wasn't from the last time I'd been there, sneaking up on Kemp, but from one of the firework-viewing parties.
I crouched at the parapet with Alejandra and looked over the patio and the swimming pool and the tennis courts to her house.
"See," she said. "You are too cautious."
I nearly broke down. "No. Not anywhere near cautious enough or Sam and Consuelo-"
She nearly lost it, too. "Okay!" She chopped down with her hand, cutting me off.
"What's your first priority?" I said, pointing toward the house. "What's the most important thing in there?"
"My mother's jewelry, up on the closet shelf. The rosewood box."
"And then?"
"The photo albums-you know, in the living room."
I took a deep breath and jumped to her room. The closet door was already open from before, and I stood on tiptoe and snagged the box. As it dropped into my hand, I jumped back.
"Here," I said, pushing the box into her hands. I pictured the living room and then we both flinched at the flash of light and the horribly loud, flat crack that shook us, and then the tile roof of her house rose up and scattered like confetti in smoke.
I jumped her and the box away as the first fragments began to fall around us.
Chapter Ten
Turning the Corner I killed them." Alejandra had been crying for about a half hour, lying on my bed. I'd tried patting her back, but I couldn't keep still. I'd tried pacing, then I'd jumped away, to the makiwara in the Empty Quarter, and hit them, hit them, hit them until my knuckles split, bleeding, and the pain was finally enough to cut through the other pain.
I was sitting by the cave pool, soaking my hand in the icy cold water, when I said it.
Alejandra, lying on her side, staring into the dark corner of the cave, lifted her head. "What?"
"I killed Sam and Consuelo."
I'd told her the circumstances already-the INS and the helicopter and the phone calls. The way I'd found them.
A look of understanding came over her face and that was more painful than anything.
"I killed them like I killed my parents. Like I killed that policeman in San Diego." My voice was ragged; my breathing cut through the cave like a coarse-tooth saw. "Okay, I didn't hold the knives, but I might as well have."
I looked at her and away. "And I've probably killed you."
"Callete!" she said. "Stop it."
I took another ragged breath and held it. She got up and came over. "Hay caramba! What did you do to your hand?" She took it out of the water. The bleeding had slowed. "Did you hit someone? Mateo?"
"Mateo? Oh, Christ!"
I jumped.
Mateo wasn't on the island. It was a fairly shor
t swim to the mainland, or he could've flagged down one of the dive boats and gotten a ride. I'd kicked him pretty hard, though, and his head did bang against the sidewalk.
So maybe he drowned in the strait.
I resented it either way, because I really wanted to hit someone.
When I appeared back in the Hole, Alejandra said, "Never do that again!" Her voice was strident and I flinched.
"Do what?"
She gestured sharply around. "You said there's no exit. What do I do when they kill you?"
"I'm sorry," I said, but that phrase was like a can opener. "I'm sorry! Oh, God, I'm so sorry!"
She put me on the bed and held me while the sobs wracked me over and over again. Sometimes she cried, too; eventually we slept.
She stayed with me five days. With me-I never left her in the Hole if I wasn't there, even if it was just fetching food from Phuket or the West End. We'd take turns with the solar shower in the jungle near Bahfa Chacacual, the other waiting down the hill (though I peeked once. Oh. My. I was uncomfortable for hours).
I'd sleep on my side, away from her, aware of her every motion.
On the sixth day, we shopped-Harrods in Knightsbridge- clothes and luggage. Back in the Hole we took the store tags off everything and packed them away in the two bags. I put fifty thousand dollars in the bottom of her main case without telling her. In London I'd already changed a thousand dollars to francs at Barclays.
"Don't flash it," I said.
"No, I'm not too stupid."
The corners of my mouth turned down and she laughed. " jSolo estaba bromeando!" She pulled me to her and kissed my forehead, without bending. "Ai."
We jumped to Rennes and waited for them but apparently it wasn't the sort of place they were monitoring. I started to buy the ticket for her but she stopped me. "Sweet, but I must do for myself now, eh?"
The clerk delighted in helping her with the transaction and came out of his booth to direct her to the right platform for the Paris express. I bought a southbound ticket for Saint-Nazaire on the Bay of Biscay.
I had this picture of me standing on the platform, watching her train pull away, but I wasn't paying enough attention when I purchased my ticket-mine left first. She walked me to my platform, held me for a moment, hard, as if to take an impression with her flesh, an indented memory. Then she kissed me, on the mouth, a grown-up kiss that brought the blood rushing.
"Be careful-sois prudent!" And then she was walking away, her shoulder bag slung, her large suitcase trailing behind on its wheels.
I rode the train as far south as Redon and jumped away, from the space between the cars.
The papers said the helicopter was abandoned in Mexico, just over the border near Highway 2, the route to Tijuana.
There were no cars reported hijacked but there was also no sign of the fugitives.
Apparently the police theory was drugs. Drug smugglers killed the INS agents and Sam Coulton and Consuelo Mon-Jarraz y Romera. And they fled back into Mexico.
Sam's funeral was in El Centra, Consuelo's in La Crucecita. I didn't go to either. What could result but more death?
And not the right victims.
I tried to jump to Phuket, not my usual place out on Ko Bon island, but an alley near the market in Chalong, but I couldn't recall it well enough.
I jumped my dinghy to the island instead and sailed over, and, when I got there, I spent fifteen minutes sketching the spot.
My plywood wall of sketches began having another purpose. If I wanted to return regularly to a place, I'd record it. Maybe photographs would've worked but when you sketch a place, you really look at it.
And I tried to sketch Mum. Then Dad.
Couldn't.
It wasn't memory-their faces were as clear as the day they-well, they were clear. But I couldn't see through the tears and my hands shook. It's hard to draw when your hands want to make fists.
It was the same with Sam and Consuelo, though I managed a head and shoulders portrait of Alejandra.
I tried another drawing of Mateo, as I'd last seen him, half in the water, half out, on the beach at Isla la Montosa. That I managed with some degree of accuracy.
I knew it was accurate-I had his driver's license. I also had his bag, which had held a gun-an odd gun.
I'd fired it in the desert, at a limestone outcropping, and it put two spikes into the stone with a cable taut between them. When I touched the cable it shocked the shit out of me, numbing my entire arm.
There were five more cartridges in the bag, all identical. The gun folded open at the breech, like an old-fashioned shotgun. I fired one more and it, too, shot out cable and two spikes. I didn't touch it this time. I put the bag back in my Hole.
I tried to relax, to do nothing, but when I did, I found myself wandering down to the end of the cave and turning on the flood that lit my villains' gallery. There were only four sketches. I thought there should be more.
I knew they were in London -they'd tried for me twice there, so I figured that was the place for the experiment. I bought two cheap video cameras and placed them on tree limbs in the corner of Hyde Park near the Tube station. I started them recording, walked out in the middle of the green, and jumped home to the Hole.
I returned in five minutes and left again. At ten minutes I returned, and stayed.
There were two of them, you could tell, their car came to a screeching halt in the bus lane on Kensington Road. They spread out, one coming up the main path from Queen Elizabeth's Gate and the other one cut around west, past the Boy and Dophin Fountain. They hadn't spotted me yet-I was standing next to the Rose Garden-and so it wasn't that obvious when I jumped.
I waited until they'd passed my cameras, then jumped away, west up the park toward Knightsbridge Station. They should've felt it, I hoped.
I walked across the street and into the station. After five minutes, a westbound train came through and I stepped aboard but got off, next stop, back at Hyde Park.
I strolled back casually, my eyes open for the two guys in green overcoats, but I didn't see them. I picked up the cameras and then jumped away, from the same spot I'd used before, by the Rose Garden.
One of them was blond with a receding hairline and a bald spot in back. He had almost no eyebrows and he looked familiar, but only vaguely, and I thought that perhaps he was the one who had attacked me on the stairs at the Elephant and Castle Tube stop.
I froze them on the little television screen at various points and sketched them.
His companion shaved his head, but he had dark stubble and bushy dark eyebrows and ran to fat-kind of jowly. Either of them could've been the one who'd tried at Embankment Station, when they'd snagged the two women instead-didn't see them that time. They both were Sensitives. They'd snapped their heads around the minute I'd jumped. You could see it on the tape clearly.
Must be a thankless job when your quarry can just jump away in an instant.
Then I remembered the circumstances of my first encounter. Maybe it's not so hard, when your quarry is an inexperienced child. Maybe they didn't have to hunt adult jumpers. Maybe the spent their time killing nine-year-olds instead. Or younger.
Now that would make it easier.
I had no sympathy.
I was irritated with the London police and with myself a bit, too. I should've stayed longer-as it was, the tape showed that when I jumped, the two guys had dashed back to their car to speed up Kensington after me. Not only did they not get towed or clamped, they didn't even get a ticket.
Their sketches went up on the board as London Blond and London Baldy, along with Post-its for the city and notes about where I'd seen them.
It was weird, but after I'd done this, I was able to draw a brief sketch of 5 a.m., leaning forward, like he did on the edge of his living room couch.
Huh.
I wanted to see Alejandra, very much, but I'd insisted she just disappear, on her own, so I wouldn't know. So I couldn't betray her accidentally. Hopefully she'd discovered that she had enou
gh money to buy a new identity-that was my hope.
I'd warned her about using her own passport-told her what happened to me in Portsmouth. She said she understood. She said not to worry. I pulled out the big gun. I told her, "Consuelo would be very angry with you if you were to come to harm."
I took a train south from Rennes, first to Bayonne, then on to Hendaye, across the Rio Bidasoa from Spanish Hondarribia. I skipped the border, using my binoculars to see across the river, then jumping to a walkway on the far bank.
Bienvenido a Espana.
The locals wouldn't mind my travel-they considered both sides Basque-but they probably would disagree with the "Welcome to Spain." I sat in the old quarter and sketched the wall and the castle. When the place had seeped into my bones, I walked to the train station and purchased a ticket for Madrid for the next day.
I jumped to the Hole from one of the narrow alleys.
I was exhausted but I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about Alejandra. After tossing and turning, I got up and took a fresh sketchbook over to the table, turned the lights on, and drew her.
I drew her nude, as I'd seen her under the shower in the jungle above Bahia Chacacual. I sketched for two hours. The memory was better than the sketch, but it was still the best drawing I'd ever done.
Then I was able to sleep.
The next day I talked a lot, on the train, finding interesting variations in the accent and once getting in trouble when using taco, which apparently means "swear word" in Spain. So much for lunch.
Because of a service problem on a train in front of us, it took six hours to get to Madrid. When I looked at the map, it surprised me that it took only that long, but going back to the scale, I realized Spain was smaller than the state of Texas.
I was still exhausted, though, from the travel and the talking and the pretending to smile-that was the most tiring. I jumped away as soon as I'd made a quick sketch of the platform itself, with the city skyline prominent.
To whom it may concern:
My name is Griffin O'Conner. I am the child of Robert and Hannah O'Conner, murdered on October 3rd,19____________________ , in San Diego, Ca.