The Program

by Stephen White

  I hurdled the woman that I’d knocked to the floor and I vaulted up to the stage. The children had already disappeared stage right, and the blond man’s back was just visible as he was entering the same wing. My mind forced my eyes from his blazer to his trousers.

  He was out of my sight before I could determine whether or not he was wearing chinos.

  I was aware that someone was screaming at me to get off the stage.

  Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.

  Give me two more seconds, I thought, and you can be sure I’ll be off the damn stage.

  A DOORWAY LED from the stage to a dimly lit school corridor. On one side of the corridor the walls were tiled to shoulder height. The other side of the hall was lined with lockers. I listened for the sounds of retreating footsteps, or children’s voices, or—God help me—Landon’s screams. But the bitter clanging of the fire alarm blocked out every sound but the ever-present echo of Ernesto Castro’s threat.

  I sprinted off in the direction of a solitary green EXIT sign. With each step I felt jostled by the reverberations of the relentless bell. The linoleum began to sparkle in the spot that the corridor intersected with another hallway. I turned to my right down that hall and headed toward the distant brilliance of some glass doors.

  Partially silhouetted against those doors at the end of the corridor I saw the man in the blue blazer. He had a child under his arm, the child’s sneakered feet kicking wildly in the air.

  I screamed, “STOP!” I screamed, “BABY!”

  The man didn’t slow. I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life, faster even than I’d run that day in Slaughter, yelling reassurance I didn’t feel to my sweet daughter, screaming at the man to stop.

  I was maybe twenty feet from him when he reached the door. As I opened my mouth to once again yell “STOP!” the fire-alarm bell abruptly ceased, causing my shrill exclamation to fill the end of the corridor. The man’s feet stopped moving, the child’s didn’t. I heard her squeal. He looked back at me over his shoulder.

  He’d heard me.

  “Put her down,” I said.

  “Are you a teacher?” he asked.

  “Put her down,” I repeated, closing the distance between us.

  “She has to get to the orthodontist,” he said. “We’re already late.”

  The orthodontist? Hell!

  I spoke crisply. “Put—her—down. NOW!”

  He put her down between himself and the door. I waited for him to go for the gun that was stashed below his blazer. I wondered what I’d do, how I’d distract him long enough for Landon to get away.

  And then an orca breached and I heard the timbre of spent shells dancing on a New Orleans sidewalk.

  With a distracting tilt to his head, he asked, “Are you a teacher? She’s all done at the spelling bee. She’s out. I’m just taking her to the orthodontist.”

  With a big metal smile on her face, the child peeked around the man’s thick waist and looked at me. She said, “She’s not one of my teachers, Daddy.”

  I stared at her mouth full of braces and her unfamiliar face, and I stammered, “I thought you were … someone else. I’m … so sorry.”

  The man narrowed his eyes and shook his head at me the way I do sometimes at drivers who have cut me off in traffic. He took his daughter by the hand and disappeared into the brash southern sunlight.

  He was wearing tight white jeans. Not chinos.

  I backed against the tile wall and slid to the floor. I started to shake before I started to cry.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER I found the kids from the spelling bee lined up on a basketball court on the north side of the school. Landon was there. She saw something in my appearance as I approached her, maybe the tremor in my hands, or the redness in my eyes. Maybe the desperation in my voice as I said, “Hi, baby.” I’m not sure what she saw exactly, but she stepped out of line and walked over to me.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. Smiled weakly. “Sure. I’m fine.”

  “Did you see the bad man?” she asked.

  Damn. I shook my head. “No,” I managed. “The fire alarm before? It surprised me, that’s all.”

  She exhaled and took one of my hands in both of hers. With gravity in her voice totally inappropriate for her nine years, she said, “The first rule of fire drills, Mother, is ‘Stay calm.’ Remember that the next time, okay?”

  I fought more tears as I said, “Okay. That’s good advice. I’ll try to remember that.”

  TRUE TO HER promise, Landon placed in the top three in the spelling bee, securing second place. The word that finally tripped her up was funicular. She was in a good mood as we drove home.

  I remained unsteady from my experience with the fire drill. I answered warily when the phone rang in my bedroom as I was changing into shorts and sneakers to fulfill my promise to go to the park to play soccer.

  Carl Luppo said, “It’s me.”

  “Hi,” I said. I surprised myself by how happy I was to hear from him. Given what I’d just been through, my tone was friendlier than I would have imagined possible.

  “Hey, listen, remember that thing we were talking about yesterday? That thing with the big white … Hey, I don’t have to spell it out for you, do I? You know what I’m talking about here, right?”

  “Yes.” His evasiveness warned me that something was up. My knuckles were turning to chalk on the hand that gripped the phone.

  “Well, it appears there’s another one, now. A different one, but the same kind of thing. This one is more confusing to me. I’m not so, I don’t know, cavalier about it as I was yesterday. You and me, we should talk somewhere I think. Soon.”

  Cavalier? Did Carl Luppo say “cavalier”? I bet Landon could spell it.

  “How soon?”

  “Like now. Now soon.”

  I fought panic. “Okay.”

  “I was thinking that place I mentioned that serves those things that give me a little touch of indigestion. You remember that place?”

  He was talking about the empanada place that was on Thirteenth, just off the Pearl Street Mall. “Yes, I think I do. You said you thought you were developing a taste for them.”

  His voice took on the timbre of a smile. “Exactly. Say, twenty minutes? We’ll meet right there.”

  I remembered my commitment about soccer and sushi. I said, “I have someplace to go first. With my daughter. Let’s say seven o’clock. Will that work?”

  He exhaled before he said, “Not a good idea. Being out of your house somewhere with your daughter right now.”

  My heart stopped. I felt a whale being calved.

  I lowered my voice, but my next words came out in a swirl. “What do you mean? What—?”

  Carl’s voice stayed level. “Not here. Not now. Not on your home phone. Outside phone lines or face-to-face. Trust me on this.”

  “Twenty minutes you said?”

  “That’ll work.”

  I hung up the phone and counted to ten. I said a silent prayer before I called out to Landon. “The bus leaves for dinner in two minutes. Little change in plans, we’re having empanadas. Are you ready?”

  She said, “Have you seen my shin guards? Mom? What are empanadas?”

  “Your shin guards are down here by your shoes. But we’re not going to play soccer right away. Bring some clean socks instead. Empanadas are South-American food. They’re like little baked sandwiches.”

  “Mom.”

  “I think you’ll like them.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “Different things. You can choose. Let’s go, honey. Please. It’s really, really important.”

  “Do they have any with sushi in them?”

  I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how to respond. How many nine-year-olds would ask that question?

  My mind was spinning. Carl had discovered something that had convinced him that Landon and I were in danger. He must be thinking that someone else was following me. Someone besides Ron Kriciak.r />
  Before Landon came downstairs, I went to the bookshelf and transferred all ten thousand eight hundred dollars from John Irving’s mutilated book to a spot in the bottom of my purse.

  I checked for my keys.

  Good.

  I heard my daughter’s footfalls on the stairs. But my heart was the loudest thing in the room.

  What was I forgetting?

  Ernesto Castro? Have you really found me so fast?

  3

  The wide lawn that stretched between the courthouse and the fourteen hundred block of the Mall was almost deserted when Landon and I arrived to meet Carl. The street people I was accustomed to seeing there had retreated from their grassy domain earlier than usual that evening, and the adolescent kids who were usually hanging out waiting for their friends to show up had apparently found something better to do with the rest of their day.

  After we finished our empanadas and lemonade, Carl offered to kick the soccer ball with Landon for a few minutes on the courthouse lawn. He wasn’t what I would call agile but was quite enthusiastic and showed a flair for the dramatic that I hadn’t seen in him before. When he finally joined me in the long shadows near a big tree across from Antica Roma, Landon elected to stay on the open part of the lawn and continued to work on her dribbling. I kept my attention divided between her and Carl.

  It took Carl a few minutes to catch his breath after running around with Landon. He said, “I like your kid. She’s sweet. Kind of spunky, too. I like girls who like sports, you know what I mean?”

  I was hoping he wasn’t thinking I might be one of those girls. I said a silent prayer that he wasn’t going to ask me something about football or baseball. “Thanks,” I said. “She is both those things. The spunkiness hides the sweetness sometimes—if you know what I mean.”

  He chuckled. “My granddaughter, Amanda, I hear she’s like that, too.” He pointed to Antica Roma. “That place over there,” he said. “The trattorias don’t really look like that in Italy. Not in the south, anyway. I’ve been a few times to visit family. This one here’s a bit too Disney World. Like a tourist version of the real thing, you know what I’m saying?” He smiled. “But from here the food smells all right. You think? You ever eaten over there?”

  I said, “No,” and to focus his attention I grazed the top of his hand with my fingers. He seemed startled by my touch, immediately caressing the same spot I had just touched. I asked, “Carl, how do you know it’s safe for Landon and me to be here? I mean out in the open like this. You seemed pressured earlier on the phone—now you’re nonchalant.”

  “Like I told you when you got here, the woman followed you home from work, and she waited for a while outside your place with her camera. Your daughter came out the front door to say good-bye to that woman, the one you said was watching her.”

  “That’s Viv.”

  “Whatever. Your daughter was out for just a minute or so. The woman snapped a couple, three pictures, then she took off again. I stayed with her and tailed her back to the motel where she’s staying. It’s up Arapahoe, near the mouth of the canyon, by the mountains.”

  “And you don’t know who she is?”

  Carl shook his head. “Sorry.”

  “Is she a marshal?”

  Carl made a soft fist and covered it with his open hand. “Doesn’t make sense for the program to put a marshal up in a motel like that. WITSEC could use somebody local if they wanted to tail you. Hell, they’d just tell Kriciak to do it—he’s been doing it enough anyway. Or they could put a transmitter in your car and make it easy on themselves, right?” I nodded. He went on. “The office here has plenty of people in it. I’ve been babysat by at least half a dozen different marshals on my witness trips. And the camera? I can’t make any sense of the camera at all. WITSEC has plenty of pictures of you and your daughter. Both before and after your entry into the program. I don’t see any way it adds up that the lady is a marshal.”

  I thought about his words and the underlying argument. On the drive downtown with Landon, I’d covered some of the same ground myself. “Then there’s no escaping the fact that Landon and I are in some danger, Carl.”

  He looked down before he spoke, picked at some long blades of grass and twirled them between his fingers, braiding them into a single thick strand. When he looked back up at me, his eyes said, “No shit,” but the words he spoke were, “I’m afraid I have to agree with that appraisal, Peyton.”

  “Do I tell Ron about the woman?”

  He shrugged. “I think you have to. The important information, I think, is how he reacts.”

  “What if the woman is a marshal? Someone still angry about my criticism of WITSEC. Someone trying to set me up, get some retribution. You know, catch me in a security breach. Get me … the paper.”

  “If Ron’s not part of a setup like that, then it’s a problem for him. Puts him between the proverbial rock and the proverbial hard place.”

  I considered Ron’s conundrum, thought it paled in comparison to my own. “Do I lose anything by telling Ron about the woman with the camera?”

  Carl laughed ironically. He said, “If your point is right—that that lady’s a marshal with her own agenda and that Ron’s in on this—then he already knows where to find you.”

  “Will he believe me?”

  “You mean if he’s not in on it? That somebody from WITSEC might be tailing you without his knowledge? Probably not. That there might be forces within WITSEC that want you out? If he’s not in on it, I don’t think that will go down too easily for Ron, but it won’t surprise him.”

  “What about the woman with the camera? How do I tell him about her? How do I tell him I know about her? I can’t tell him about you and me.”

  “No, you can’t tell him you know me. I suspect that Ron won’t deal with that in a mature manner. Just tell Ron you saw the woman with the camera out your window. You were keeping an eye on Landon when she went outside, and you saw the woman sitting in her car taking pictures of your daughter.”

  I thought about his suggestion for a moment, didn’t see any obvious flaws. “Yeah, that should work. But I want Ron to know where she’s staying, don’t I? I mean which motel.”

  “I’ll call that in anonymously, somehow. I can think of a way to do it. I’ll give them the license plate number of her car while I’m at it, too.” He shifted his weight and his leg ended up only inches from my thigh. I felt some heat radiate my way. “There’s something else you need to be thinking about, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  He rested his weight on his elbow and craned his neck to look at Landon before returning his gaze to me. His eyes narrowed. “What if the woman with the camera is not a marshal?”

  My lungs seemed to stall. I forced an exhale and said, “Then it must be somebody sent by Ernesto Castro.”

  “Every precious thing I lose, you will lose two”

  Instinctively, my eyes scanned the courthouse lawn until they found Landon. She had begun playing one-on-one with a boy a little younger than her. She was smoking him. It made me smile.

  Carl said, “Castro’s the guy who ordered the hit on your husband?”

  I shivered at the ease with which the words exited his mouth. Ordering a hit was like ordering a pizza margherita for Carl Luppo. I said, “Yes.”

  Carl nodded, scratched his ear. “See, I don’t think so. Señor Castro doesn’t seem like the type to send a woman for this job.”

  I tried not to be offended by Carl’s contention but wasn’t about to mount a spirited argument that murder was one of the jobs women could do just as well as men. I said, “Maybe Castro is trying to be clever. By using someone I don’t expect him to use. Like her.”

  “Your Ernesto Castro doesn’t sound clever to me. Look at his life, you want to call it that. He’s not sharp. He’s not a scalpel, not even a knife—he’s a hammer, a blunt instrument. He sells people drugs. And what use does he have of women? He beats up prostitutes, is that right? And then, what, he goes and rapes a secr
etary in a wheelchair? And he goes and rapes some other women, too. I got that correct, don’t I? No, this Castro’s not going to hire some woman to do his dirty work. He’s not the type. Women clean up his blood; they don’t spill it.”

  “It was a woman who tried to grab Landon when we were living in Slaughter.”

  “Grabbing ain’t shooting. He wouldn’t send a woman to clip you.”

  The irony didn’t escape me. I was sitting in the light of dusk on a tranquil lawn just steps from the Rocky Mountains chatting with a retired mob enforcer—a self-described gorilla—and he was pontificating about the character flaws of the lowlife scum who’d ordered my husband killed. I blinked rapidly a few times and had to make a conscious decision to close my mouth so that my jaw didn’t hang open.

  Carl Luppo seemed confident of his assessment about Ernesto Castro. And a sharp twang below my rib cage told me he was probably right about it. I didn’t like the conclusions I was left to draw.

  “So who then?”

  He held up one thick finger, said, “You got your Ernesto Castro.” He flicked up a second, making a peace sign. “You got your pissed-off federal marshals.” He grabbed the ring finger with his free hand. “Who’s number three? Anybody else who isn’t particularly fond of you, Peyton?”

  I shrugged. “Isn’t two enough?”

  “In my experience, enemies always seemed to come in packs. You’re strong—there’re no buzzards in the sky. You bleed a little, and the black birds come out of the clouds waiting to peck on you.”

  The dusk was still shimmering, but I felt the darkness like a pillow over my face. It was threatening to suffocate me. I tried to lighten things up. I joked, “Just how many mortal enemies can one girl have, Carl?”

  “Usually, in my experience, the answer is one too many.”

  “What about the press? Maybe it’s a reporter who’s following me,” I said.

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. A tabloid like the Star or the Enquirer. Maybe they’ve decided to track me down.”

  He looked puzzled. “Why?”

  “Why do they do any of the things they do?”