Border Crossings

by Michael Lee Weems

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you have your own life, though. You have a successful business to run . . . “

  “It can run itself at this point,” Catherine said. “Believe me. I’ve got a secretary that can run that business blindfolded without me.”

  “They almost killed you,” Jim said, looking at his friend in awe of her. “I’ve got no right to ask this, Catherine, and I know it. But I can’t live with doing nothing.”

  “Neither could I,” she said. “And that’s the point. We’re in this together, all of us.”

  Jim leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to repay you, Catherine. Honest to God, I don’t.”

  She returned to her seat, her heart still racing. She knew he didn’t mean to offend her but the idea that could even think she was here for the wrong reasons had stung. “Don’t thank me just yet.” She watched him with amber eyes. “I have a condition, and you’re not going to like it.”

  Jim looked at her curiously, “What’s that?”

  “You and Amy can’t go back with me.”

  “Like hell,” started Jim, but Catherine cut him off.

  “Hear me out. Besides the fact that she’s heartbroken and in shambles and you need to stay here and take care of her, you won’t be any good to me if you do come. Your face has been plastered all over the news. We couldn’t take two steps down there without everybody recognizing you. Nobody who might know anything would talk to us. Not to mention we’d be shadowed everywhere by the media.” She shook her head, “No, it just can’t happen, Jim. It’d never work, especially with Julio, the boy, with me. You’re presence would put him in danger. We don’t have a right to do that to him. I’ve got to be a ghost down there, never seen until I’m ready. It’s bad enough I’ve been seen as much as I have. It’s gotta be this way, Jim. Nobody is going to talk to someone who is going to bring unwanted attention.”

  Jim wanted to protest, but Catherine’s words were powerful. He knew she was right. “What will you do?”

  “Start shaking the trees and see what falls. I’m going to do everything I can to find whoever did this. I’ll make some calls, put pressure on the authorities, and make them stay on it. We’ll find out what really was behind this and then tell our side of things. Maybe that will help lead to those responsible, but if nothing else, we’ll clear Kelly’s name. We’ll make sure they don’t get away with trying to place any blame on her.”

  “I want these people caught, but don’t want to see you go down there alone. They’ve already tried to hurt you once, Catherine. I can’t ask you to go there without us.”

  “I won’t be alone, remember. I have a friend down there now with Julio.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name’s Matt. We’ve known each other for years as well. Longer than I’ve known you, in fact. It’s kind of a long story. If things get dangerous, though, I’ll be safe with him. Trust me, he’s the kind of guy that’s used to being in bad spots.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Well,” started Catherine, “That’s kind of a long story, Jim. And it’d probably be a little difficult to explain.”

  “I’d really like to know you’re in good hands, Catherine. I would never have asked you to stay and help without me and the authorities down there with you.”

  “Okay,” she told him. “Well, Matt’s basically a soldier for hire.”

  Jim was taken aback. “A what?”

  “He’s a veteran marine who now works on and off for security companies. You know, escorting diplomats, providing security detail for wealthy foreigners, etc.”

  “You mean he’s a mercenary?” Jim asked. “Are you serious?”

  She knew how it sounded. “Yes, I guess you could call him that, although they prefer ‘Private Security Team’ I think.”

  “How in the world do you know someone like that?”

  She almost laughed. If Jim only knew of some of the shady characters Catherine had met over the years. She could only imagine what he’d think about what she was about to tell him. “He was the man I was with before I met David.”

  Jim look dumbfounded. “You mean you used to date this guy?” He was wondering why he’d never heard this side of Catherine’s life. It wasn’t as though they were extremely close friends. Hell, they rarely talked until this happened, but still, it was an unexpected bit of information.

  “Do you really want to know?” she asked him, almost daring him with the first smile of the evening, still working on her Chivas.

  “Yes, if you don’t mind telling me. David never told me anything like this.”

  “That’s because David never knew,” she said with a nostalgic laugh. Wouldn’t he have been surprised. “I surprised myself, to tell the truth. I wouldn’t have thought I’d go for that bad boy type, but I did. I guess we girls tend to have a soft spot for them, what can I say? Several years back some extremists had kidnapped an American in South America. I was handling the risk management aspect and they hired Matt to try and find the guy, which he did I might add. We ended up dating for a while after that.”

  “Really? So what happened?”

  Sitting in the quiet den with so much sadness and life’s contemplations in the air, she decided to tell Jim what she’d never told anyone before. “What always happens with the bad boys, I guess. He did something bad. Well,” she laughed, “in his case that was kind of an understatement. We had our ups and downs, you know. He was a good guy at the center, really, but there was a reason he did the kind of work he did. He’d been in the original Gulf War when he was still just a kid. Got so wrapped up in the military way of life he didn’t let it go even when he was back in the real world. That’s what led him to the kind of work he was doing when we met. I’d have been okay with that, you know? Except it got the best of him. It’s true what they say about some of the people who go off to war. Some just can’t cope afterward. Matt was one of them.”

  “How so?”

  “Well,” she sipped her glass, now feeling its effects severely. “He went crazy, is probably the easiest and most accurate way to say it. Some rebel nuts attacked and killed some workers on a pipeline, taking two of them for ransom, typical political propaganda bullshit extremists. It was the third such attack. Normally they just shot from the cover of the forest and ran off, but this time they took hostages, so of course the company hired Matt’s company in an attempt to track the guerillas down and recover the workers if he could.” Catherine sipped on her drink some more, “It was all hush, hush, of course. The country’s government announced they were attempting to track the guys down, but the company understandably didn’t want to leave it up to them. Imagine, right?” she said with a smile, “They didn’t trust the government there, either. Figured they were more concerned about the economic ramifications that finding the hostages.”

  “Yeah, sounds familiar.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Anyway, he picked up their trail and followed them through the forest for nearly a week before finding the bodies of the Americans, decapitated.”

  “They were all killed?”

  “Yes,” said Catherine. “See, the oil company had paid the ransom. That was the first thing they had done, but the extremists killed the hostages anyway for a political statement. I remember they issued a statement via a radio station saying they’d released the hostages. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and the missing worker’s families were celebrating, only to find out the radio station hadn’t heard the man correctly. He had said he released the hostages, but without their heads.”

  “Sick,” said Jim, feeling lightheaded from the Chivas and still feeling the burning embers of his own grief inside his belly, swirling with the drink.

  “Well, gets worse.” Her body language became more emphatic. “Matt took it personal. He didn’t like failing. Oh, no, couldn’t have that. And he really didn’t like the way the extremists had decided to kill their hostages despite being paid the ransom, so he decided to make a statement of his
own.”

  “So what’d he do?”

  “He goes A-wol. Well, the civilian equivalent to A-wol, I guess. He continues tracking them down despite being told to come back. Then he finds the guys, sees them all camped out. So he sits and waits for night to fall. They took turns standing a dogwatch, one up while the rest slept in two-hour increments. I think there were seven of them if I remember correctly, a small ambush team.

  Anyway, after killing their lookout, Matt crept into camp and shot each one in the head with a silencer. Nobody woke up. He could have called in where they were. He could have just followed them until the military arrived to arrest them. But he didn’t. He killed them in their sleep, one after the other.”

  Jim said nothing. Catherine’s story sounded like something out of a James Bond movie. He had a hard time believing this was something that someone had actually done.

  “That wasn’t the end of it, though,” said Catherine. “He killed them all but one. Him, he leaves that one after knocking the crap out of him. Then he goes to work. He wanted to send a message to the rest of the guerillas and the one he left alive was to be the messenger boy.” She trailed off in silence still sipping his drink. “He lost it,” she said, much quieter, almost a whisper to herself as she shook her head remembering.

  “What’d he do?” came a voice from the door.

  Jim and Catherine had been so caught up in their conversation they hadn’t heard Amy Woodall’s footsteps. She was standing at the door and had apparently been listening for a little while.

  “Amy,” said Jim. “I thought you were resting.”

  “I heard some crashing sounds,” she said. “I thought I better check on you.” She looked like a husk of a body, her eyes circled in weariness. “Your friend,” she asked Catherine with a distant expression. “What’d he do?”

  Catherine looked at Jim who could only shrug. Amy had as much right as he did to be in this conversation, and if she wanted to hear old war stories, then who were they to tell her no?

  Catherine figured she’d told them this much, she might as well finish the story. She would never have told the story if not for the drink, but now that she was in it, she felt good to share some of the history between her and Matt. It was helping her put things in perspective in an odd way. It made the prospect of seeing him again soon less intimidating. “He wanted to scare any other extremists so bad they’d never think of attacking the pipeline again. He also knew they were very superstitious people, so decided to use that.

  He used his Machete and decapitated the ones he’d killed, just as they had done the hostages. Then he cut their eyes from them and placed them in a folded handkerchief he took off one of the bodies.” Jim looked a little ill at the thought, but Amy stood impassive. “He was setting a stage, you see,” Catherine tried to explain to them. “Acting in a play just for the benefit of the one survivor that he might tell his tale to the rest.”

  “How do you know all this?” Jim Asked her.

  “He told me,” she said. “After I was given a report on what the government had found in the jungle. They wanted to know just who we had hired to find the hostages. It was all a real nice mess. Matt took things way too far. What he did down there is the kind of thing psychopaths do. When the sole survivor his own little massacre woke up, he probably thought he was in some nightmare. I’m sure he wondered why he couldn’t see right and what the pain was coming from his head. Then he saw all his companions’ heads all lined up on pikes around him. And there in front of him was Matt, who opens up his handkerchief and shows the man thirteen eyes. Then he tells the man that he’s going to use the eyes to watch them with, and that if they didn’t stay away from the pipeline, he’d take all their heads. Then he holds out a pocket mirror for the man. Matt had thirteen eyes, twelve from the dead, and one from the man he left alive.”

  “Shit,” said Jim. “Guy sounds nuts.”

  “I certainly thought so,” said Catherine. “That’s why I ended it. I’d asked him what happened out there . . . I wish I hadn’t because he told me the whole story beginning to end. It was more than I was ready to deal with. I did what I could to help, but I couldn’t stay with him after that. The country’s government wanted to file charges on Matt for murder and the company he was with was going to hand him over. They weren’t going to lose future contracts because Matt lost it. I threatened to expose the whole thing if they did. The government had known who those extremists were and did nothing before the attacks to stop them. They forced that company to hire someone like Matt by their inaction. And the company knew the kind of people it was hiring. These were war-worn vets that were sent out, sometimes alone like Matt, which they should never have done, to handle the kind of job that would terrify most normal human being. He’d definitely gone too far, but would never have been there if the government had done their job and protected those workers or if his company had given him more support instead of sending him out there alone in the jungle with no link to sanity. It was a perfect recipe for disaster.”

  “What happened to the rest of the extremists?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Catherine. “But no more Americans were kidnapped from that pipeline. Matt had accomplished that much.”

  Amy just stood at the door, staring ambivalently. “Then I don’t think what he did was so crazy. He did what had to be done.” She stood a moment longer in ponder, an eerie silence about the room, then turned and walked away.

  “She doesn’t look well,” Catherine said, watching Amy shuffle quietly back upstairs.

  “I know. I’m worried about her, but her folks are here helping me keep an eye on her.” They finished their drinks during a quiet moment of thought. “So this guy, Matt. You really want him with you down there? Contrary to what Amy said I do think the guy sounds off. What if he loses it again with you in tow?”

  She had asked herself that same question and thought long and hard before calling Matt. She knew it would be difficult for anyone who didn’t know Matt like she did to reconcile what he’d done with the other side of Matt she’d fallen for so many years ago. It was something she’d never quite been able to do herself. But despite that, the answer she’d realized then had remained true and definitive. “I trust him.”

  “And he’s the one watching the boy for you?” asked Jim worriedly.

  “He’ll be fine,” assured Catherine. “Matt’s a bit of a kid himself, sometimes.”

  Jim found that hard to believe. “If you say so.” He wondered what their old friend David would have thought about Catherine’s ex-flame.

  “Where is she!?” cried Miss Lydia.

  The girls were all lined up in the yard as usual, except this time there was no customer waiting. There was Miss Lydia, flanked by Jose and Hector. Arnulfo stood off to the side shaking his head. She’s really done it now, he thought.

  “I’m not going to keep asking!” warned Miss Lydia. “I want to know where that little bitch went!”

  “She obviously ran away,” said Imelda, always the feisty one.

  Miss Lydia scurried up to her like an angry crab and knocked her on her head, something that Imelda was entirely used to by now. “I can see she’s run away! I want to know where!” None of the girls spoke. “You!” she cried, scurrying over to Silvia, “What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing, ma’am,” said Silvia.

  Miss Lydia knocked her on the head. “Don’t you lie to me! You tell me what she said.”

  “I swear, she didn’t tell me anything!”

  “Liar!” she scorned. “You’re all a bunch of liars! Every last one of you!” She turned to Jose and told him, “Put them in the hot box!”

  “All of them?” asked Arnulfo.

  She wheeled around on him. “Yes, all of them! They’re all in this together. Ungrateful little whores, the lot!”