“You don’t know this, but I gave you a chance once, not so long ago. That was very much out of character for me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was trying to be someone I’m not—that was wrong of me. I realize now that you have to know who you are, Sarah. You have to understand yourself. Do what you know has to be done.”
“If you think I’m going to do anything to help you, you can just forget it.”
She sits up straight and gives a girlish gasp.
“Forget it … hmmm … forget it. Now there’s an idea.”
Suddenly she’s giddily happy, and it’s scaring me more than anything that’s happened tonight.
“So, are you ready to make a statement now?” she says. “We can get you a pen and paper. I assume you have a command of the English language. Unlike your mother.”
The table jumps forward as I leap to my feet. I lean toward her, thinking I might head butt her, but I catch myself. What am I, crazy? I’m already in trouble. I can’t attack this woman at the police station. I glance warily at the observation mirror and sit back down.
“That’s right, Sarah. Sit, sit. If you keep raging like this, they’ll lock you up for who knows how long.”
I take a deep breath and close my eyes, trying to keep calm. I know she’s baiting me.
“That’s it. I’m sure you’re good at keeping a level head. To a point, of course. Everyone has her limit.” The woman lowers her voice to a whisper and adds in the sweetest Southern accent she can muster, “You know what? Just for fun, let’s see if we can find out where yours is.”
She reaches across the table to pat my cheek. I try to jerk my head away, but she grabs me by the chin and digs her nails deep into my skin.
“Let’s see. When was it now? Just two short years ago, I think. Your mother was walking home from work, crossing the street. I’ll bet she was tired, making up beds all day at the hotel. That’s probably why she was walking so slowly. Because she was soooooo exhausted. All I had to do was tap my foot on the gas pedal a little harder than I should and whoops! Up she goes, over my hood and into the air. I stopped and got out and checked her pulse. If anyone saw me, I was prepared to pay him off and tell him to shuffle back to his dreary little apartment, but no one was there. I’ve never seen a New York City street so empty. A stroke of luck for me, really, but then again, fortune favors the bold.
“Anyway, there I was, standing over your mother’s body, and I looked down onto the pavement and there were seeds everywhere. Strangest thing. I thought, How odd! The woman is carrying birdseed. Why? What bird is she feeding?”
“Pepitas,” I say.
“What?”
“They were pepitas.”
She flicks her hand, and that’s when I push the table forward like a sled. It hits her in the chest and she flies backward in her seat, her ball-gown skirt billowing out like a parachute. She shrieks as she hits the floor. I tip the table over onto her, pressing the edge of it into her throat. Then I put all my weight down on it. The next thing I know, I’m pinned against the opposite wall, crying and screaming and thrashing and biting like a wild animal until a Taser drops me to the floor.
“She’s crazy!” Hodges shouts. She’s clutching her neck with one hand, where the tabletop has left a bruise. Her other hand is dangling down oddly. I think I may have broken her collarbone. “She attacked me! Out of the blue! I offered to help her, and she attacked with no warning!”
I’m back. Sitting under the desk, my two hands clutching my bald head.
This is the woman who killed my mother.
Now I’m going to kill her.
CHAPTER 30
I rise to my feet like I’ve been drawn up with strings. Sam is still underneath the desk, not sure what I’m doing. I’m in full view in the lobby. No gun, no grenade, no anything to defend myself, except the strength of my own anger.
Hodges is turned toward the windows, her back to me. She’s talking on a radio. “Speak up! What are you saying? She’s where?”
I hear the static-filled response, the frantic tone, as someone shouts, “She’s there! She’s there! Behind you!”
“Behind who?” she shouts. “Give me your location!”
“Main floor lobby!”
“Don’t be stupid. I’m in the main … floor … lobby.…”
She turns and stares at me.
I take several steps toward her as rage courses through my veins. I am a fountain of fury. I could fill up the whole world with it right now.
She puts her hand to her neck protectively.
“I see by the look on your face that it’s all starting to come back to you, Angel.” She pushes a long curl away from her face and pouts. “I’ve come a very long way to kill you. I hope you appreciate it.”
I feel a prickle of adrenaline in my fingertips. Just as I’m about to take a step toward her, out of the corner of my eye, I see movement.
Soldiers.
I fling myself over the guard’s desk like I’m hopping a fence. Sam stands up and begins firing.
“Go! Go! Go!” he shouts at me.
I rush into the elevator but know they’ll be on me before the doors can close. Suddenly Sam is there, blocking the door of the car, firing, telling me to close the doors.
“Get in!” I shout.
“Close the door!”
“Get in!”
He pushes a button and then steps back out into the lobby to cover me. He’s firing, and now they’re firing back. He’s hit in the shoulder, then the upper chest. A moment later his face hits the marble tile. He rolls onto his back, twists one of the mines, and hugs it against his chest.
The doors close. A second later a blast rocks the elevator shaft, and for a moment I think I’m in free fall. The car seems to tip a little and makes a horrible scraping sound against the walls before shuddering to a stop. I think it might be wedged in place, but when I take a step, my weight is enough to make the elevator wobble and slide farther down the shaft.
I’m within arm’s reach of the little door that says “For Emergency Use Only.” I try to keep my feet planted and, without adjusting my center of gravity, pull the door open to get the elevator key. I look at it. I had to use a key like this all the time when I was a kid, because the ancient elevator in our apartment building stopped at least once a week. Getting on it was sort of like playing the slots. You could take the stairs or you could take the elevator, but if you did the latter, you risked getting stuck for an hour or more while somebody called the super to get you unstuck.
I try to push this memory out and away like I did before. I can’t give in to it.
“Not now! Not now!”
But I can’t resist it. And I have nowhere to run to get away from the past.
I see the brown, scuffed tiles in the apartment hallways. I remember the sound of the buzzer when you let someone into the building. I remember … I remember …
Being at school. And Mrs. Esteban. Again. Why would these memories be connected?
I see the bright red painted doors of my swanky Upper East Side school, full of skinny girls who get dropped off in fancy cars every morning, their hair pin-straight and shiny, telling stories about what they’d done that weekend—the backstage concert passes, the trips to the Hamptons, the front-row seats at Fashion Week.
I’ve been summoned down to Ms. Janklow’s office. She’s the fairly useless guidance counselor whose only qualification seems to be that she can nod sympathetically.
“It’s Debby. Call me Debby,” she says. “I’m so sorry to have to ask you to come down here, but I’m wondering if there’s been some sort of mistake.”
“With what?” I ask. I honestly don’t know what she’s talking about. My grades are fine. Better than fine. I’ve even managed to keep them up since … since my mother died. That was three months ago. I do it because my mother would have wanted me to.
“Well, your tuition payment has … well … we haven’t received one this quarter.”
I look at her, confused and, I admit, somewhat annoyed. “I’m not sure how the scholarship works. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Scholarship?” Ms. Janklow says. She has very nice skin. It’s creamy and peachy, or whatever that expression is.
“My scholarship. I don’t know how it works. I assumed the school took care of all that.”
“What scholarship?” she asks.
What scholarship? The one that allows me to go to this ritzy school that I hate, but I would never say that to my mother, because she broke her back just to pay for the stinking itchy wool uniform I have to wear.
“You don’t have a scholarship that I’m aware of,” she tells me.
“Then how … I don’t understand. How could my mother afford to send me here?”
“I have no idea, Sarah,” Ms. Janklow—Debby—says to me. “Your tuition has been paid by check just like everyone else’s. Did your … did your mother leave money in a trust fund? For your education?”
I want to burst out in mean, mocking laughter. A trust fund? Me? If I had a trust fund, would I be living in a foster home with a woman who only seems to know how to cook three dishes, all of which feature ketchup as a sauce?
This has been my life since my mother died: pulling myself out of bed every day, even though I don’t want to get up, don’t want to see the sun rise, because every day that passes puts more distance between me and my mother being alive.
“No, seriously,” I say. “My mother didn’t have any money. That can’t be right.”
Ms. Janklow tells me again that my mother has been paying my tuition for years, and they’d hate to lose me as a student, since I offer such a diverse perspective. Yeah, the poor, New York Latina perspective. The girls in my neighborhood would get a kick out of that, right before kicking me to the ground and calling me “white girl.”
“Well, the problem is still the same,” Ms. Janklow says. “The tuition is not being paid. Do you have any idea who might have been funding your education? Perhaps you should talk to him or her about it. You obviously have some patron who’s been helping you.…”
An hour later I’m running up the stairs of my old apartment building. I need to talk to Mrs. Esteban. I know it may be a waste of my time; she’s been failing for a while, but I remember her comment, long ago, about me having green eyes. I think I must have put it out of my head the instant she said it, because I thought she was just being mean and gossipy. But now … now that I know someone has been paying my way through school …
I take the steps to her apartment two, three at a time. Her daughter answers the door. She seems confused about why I’d want to talk to her mother, but ushers me into their neat, shabby living room, where Mrs. Esteban is watching television and picking over a pan of rice looking for rocks and bits of twigs.
“She’ll spend the whole afternoon on it,” her daughter says, motioning to the bowl in her mother’s lap.
Poor Mrs. Esteban. She had such powerful arms, and now she’s little more than a child who must be kept busy. I haven’t seen her in nearly two years, but she knows me. I can tell because she makes a face like, What are you doing here? I guess she’ll never forget that kick in the ankle I gave her.
“Mrs. Esteban. Do you know who my mother worked for? Long ago? I need to know.”
“Your … mother … que bonita,” she sighs. The side of her mouth droops slightly from her recent stroke. I ask her the question again, and she is annoyed with my impatience. She knows the answer. She starts waving her hand at me, her index finger and thumb pinched together.
Her daughter says, “That means she wants to write something.”
I take a pencil and piece of paper from my backpack and give them to her. She makes her hand work very slowly. I’m hoping for a name, even just one. I watch as she writes the letters E C and then circles them clumsily.
She smiles at me, and I try not to show my disappointment.
E.C. This is meaningless to me, but I thank her and stand to leave. Her daughter, drying her hands on a kitchen towel, looks over her mother’s shoulder to see what she’s written. “I’m sorry. She tries. Don’t you, Mamá?”
I’m almost to the door when I hear Mrs. Esteban’s daughter add, “Huh. That looks like the symbol at the top of Claymore Tower, doesn’t it?”
CHAPTER 31
I don’t need to remember any more. I know now as I knew then. That’s what sent me off on my mission. My late-night raids. My desire to bring him down and embarrass him—to do whatever I could to make him look bad. My mother always had a dark grace about her; she seemed to bear the weight of a hundred lives. She was beautiful. He must have taken advantage of her. Pretty maids are like prey. There can be no other explanation.
The man who builds all the tall buildings.
Erskine Claymore.
I’ve somehow managed to keep myself balanced in the elevator all this time. The air in the car is close and warm—so filled with my panic that it feels crowded. My fingers are slippery with sweat as I work the emergency key clockwise. The car slides a few more inches, the metal screeching like a subway car coming to a stop. Finally I can turn the key no farther.
I put my fingertips between the two doors and push as slowly and carefully as I can, a centimeter at a time. The car groans. I keep the pressure steady. I’m stuck three-quarters of the way between floors. The car starts to slip, little by little, so slowly I’m not sure at first that it’s even moving. Then I can see it’s moving faster, and I know I don’t have much time. I throw all my weight forward as I kick my legs out, and am able to just squeeze through the opening and pull my arms out before the car gives a last screech and descends with a horrific crash.
I sit in the hallway and look around, trying to figure out where I am. I need to rest. I think I’ll have time. Hopefully, they’ll assume that I didn’t make it out, that I fell to the bottom of the shaft.
Like a lot of my hopes, though, it doesn’t work out that way.
The other elevator car is coming down. I watch the numbers above the doorway until I see the LL light up.
I stand up and take out the last mine.
Wait.
Wait.
I twist it. Pull my arm back.
Wait.
Wait.
I hear the bell ring. The doors are about to open.
Wait.
Wait.
I throw the mine and then run down the corridor, toward the tunnel that may be an escape or a trap—or maybe it doesn’t exist at all. The first few doors I try turn out to be closets, but then I fling one open and face a black, musty void. I walk in and pull the door shut behind me. I have no idea how long the tunnel is, so I keep walking blindly. About twenty yards later, my hands touch cool, smooth metal. I find the knob, turn it, and pull. It doesn’t budge.
Panic explodes in my chest like fireworks, but I remember the burn charges. I use one to melt through the lock and, a moment later, burst out of the tunnel like I’m emerging from a tomb.
It takes me a few minutes, but I find my way back to the swank waiting area where I’d found the laptop computer. The passcard gets me in, but I use it with a sense of fatality. What difference does it make if I give myself away now or ten minutes from now? They’ll find me eventually.
I untie the battery from around my waist and drag it behind me like a child’s pull toy, running down the hallway, trying to match the route I took earlier. I think I’m going the right way.
As I round the corner a shot rings out. The bullet just misses my head. I slip and fall, then scramble sideways like a crab, trying to find cover. The shot has come from near the rec lounge.
I peek around the corner and see Oscar. He’s standing at the end of the hallway, blood streaming down his head. It looks like he’s clawed the metal inserts out of his skull. He’s got a gun in his hand.
I call out, trying to sound amused. “What’s goin’ on, dude? You almost shot me.”
“It don’t matter, mija. I shoot you,
they shoot me. We all get shot eventually.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll get shot another time. I’ve got things to do right now.”
His laugh is a funny, strained heh heh heh. I take another look at him. He’s walking toward me, shaking the gun like a maraca. I see that street swagger I’ve seen from so many boys, so many times in my neighborhood, especially when they first get home from jail. So much energy wasted on trying not to look afraid.
“No matter what you do, they kill you, you know what I’m sayin’? You can’t get away from it, so why try?”
“Are you supposed to be up and walking around? You were injured.”
“Doctor Man, he told me to stay still, but I can’t, you know? I can’t. Rich Kid, he tried to stop me, but he can’t. I need to get up and move around, you know?”
Doctor Man. Rich Kid. I assume he’s talking about Elmer and Thomas. I watch as he does a little dance step.
“Where are they, Oscar? Doctor Man and Rich Kid?”
“Aren’t you listening?” he shouts at me. He sounds far away, but then suddenly he’s there, next to me. I feel the warm, hard gun muzzle touching my temple. “He tried to stop me, and I shot him.” He lowers the gun and pushes the barrel into my chest. “Right. In. The. Heart.”
I put my hand in my pocket and grab hold of the syringe Jenner gave me. I face Oscar, like this is all a big joke between the two of us. I make myself relax and push the gun away from my head, smiling and shaking my head back and forth.
“We don’t have time for messing around, Oscar. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
He slaps my cheek lightly and pulls me close to him, pressing his forehead to mine. I feel the gun against the back of my head as he hugs me roughly.
“Chica, you all right.”
I stare at him at close range. The whites of his eyes are dotted with small, reddish hemorrhages. I puff my chest out like a bird trying to look bigger.
“Thanks, Oscar. Come on. We need to get out of here.”
I try to peel his arm away and take a step back, but he tightens his grip on me. Then he spins me around and puts me in a headlock. He flexes his bicep into my throat.
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