by Quinn, Fiona
“Sir, do you remember last week, when the dogs brought me Lexi’s picture, and I thought I could feel her with me?”
“Is she here? Can you feel her?” Striker jumped to his feet. Hope radiated through him.
“I think she’s with you. Can you feel her?”
Striker stilled. He scanned his body and his emotions, straining to feel me. “No. I can’t,” he muttered.
We looked at the dogs, lolling on the ground. “You said that the dogs had come over and whined at you when you felt her with you. Wouldn’t they do that now if Lexi were here with me?” Striker asked.
“I don’t know, sir. I don’t think it were wishful thinking. I’m pretty sure she’s here right now. I can see a shimmer on you. I know what Lexi was talking about now. You look like you’re standing in a heat mirage – sort of pulsing and blurred.”
Striker’s frustration levels were through the roof. It was hard to be in his body. Too hard. Too painful. I left him and slid into Gater. Gater froze. Beetle and Bella lifted their heads and locked their focus on us. It was an “ah-ha” moment. Striker didn’t feel me. Miriam, with all her expertise, barely felt me. But Gater. . .my mind sprang back to the Brennon case when I couldn’t go into my recuperative trance. The gift that I had been given from helping Anyushka had come when I needed to heal. Gater had held me in place; he had power. We had a psychic connection.
“Sir,” Gater whispered, “she’s with me now. She moved from you to me.”
Beetle and Bella sat at attention. Striker yanked his phone out, calling Miriam. He quickly explained what had happened.
“Lexi, sweetheart.” I heard Miriam’s voice over the speaker phone. “If you’re here, you know how worried everyone is. You know that everything that can be done is being done. Every night we’ve been going to your kitchen in case you tried to make contact – none of us could feel you. I’ve been doing remote searches to get any information possible that might help your team, but you know that I work with the imprints of things that have happened, and all I could get from you was ‘red van,’ a jumble of letters — maybe ‘OIL?’ And ‘airplane.’ My thought is that you probably weren’t conscious during your extraction. Or maybe you were unclear about what was going on. I’m told you had a bag over your head.” Miriam’s voice stumbled. “So there weren’t many imprints for me to find. I’ll keep looking, though. I’m not giving up. I’m sorry I haven’t been much help.” Miriam cleared her throat. “Striker thinks you’ve been taken out of the country. We need to know where you’ve gone. You must find a way to communicate that to us.”
Striker pulled down a huge wall map of the world. And the men waited. I tried everything I could think of to communicate. Miriam had hung up – she was heading over to Iniquus to be there in the office with me. Gater sat there, still as a statue, barely breathing, waiting for some sign. Maybe even my voice booming out, “I’m in Honduras!”
Bella must have felt my frustration. She stuck her nose in the air and, as if reaching back to her ancestral wolf-spirit, she howled a song of lament. The men tried in vain to get her to stop.
The sound raked across Gater’s and my nerves. “Hush” I commanded, and Bella did.
The dogs. Of course.
I commanded Bella to stand up and paw at the office door. Gater and Striker jumped to their feet to follow her. Bella trotted to my Puzzle Room and over to my desk where she stuck her nose against the drawer. Striker used my keychain to open it.
How could I get Bella to retrieve the correct file? I had buried the Sylanos information so it wouldn’t be found. I tutted at myself. Hindsight. What a damned fool.
I asked Bella to tap the desk drawer with her paw. Striker sat on the floor, and Gater followed suit, Striker held up a file for Gater to see; Gater read off the name out loud. They waited. Bella did nothing. Striker moved on to the next one. When he finally got down to the information about Maria Castillo, I asked Bella to bark. Striker flipped the cover open.
“Holy crap,” he yelled.
My energy dwindled. I knew I had to leave…They had the file, it was something. For the first time in a long time I felt the flutter of hope.
Thirty-Nine
Days were followed by weeks. Drunk has escorted me to four showers, so this must be June. Now the sunlight blazed through my window each day, turning my cell into an oven. I soaked my sheet in cold water from my sink and draped it over me. My clothes hung from my jutting bones, gray and threadbare. The mosquitoes that came through my window made me nervous about malaria - even with medicine, I wouldn’t survive an illness. I thought about Spyder. Was he alive? Better? Was he back at Iniquus? Did he know I was gone?
If there was a Pablo, the images I got from him told me that he was growing thinner and weaker too. He didn’t have much more time. Something had to be done for him - for me. I was having a really hard time of it. I questioned everything. My thoughts about craziness were self-fulfilling – they rattled my brain.
From my walks behind the Veil, I believed that Iniquus received a package from Maria - my ransom was a prisoner exchange. Her husband for me. Her husband. That was laughable. The US government thought he was a terrorist. They weren’t going to expose hundreds or thousands of innocent people to this man in exchange for a twenty-one-year-old Iniquus Puzzler. Absurd. Maria was obviously desperate and dim. It wasn’t going to happen. This left me with two options: one, my team finds and rescues me - or two, I escape.
No one would find me. Sure, Grandmother Sibyl had said that all along in my dreams. I had even unsheathed my big knife and walked behind the Veil – but that turned into an enormous leap toward crazy. I had taken a magnificent dive off the cliff of rationality. And the leopard. The damned leopard has been growling and screaming at me day and night for a week now, giving me no rest. My nerves were stripped of their myelin sheathe leaving me painfully exposed and raw.
Last night I dreamt of Grandmother Sybil.
“Run!” She screamed at me. “Run! Run!”
Where the hell am I supposed to run? What am I supposed to do? I paced like a caged animal in my cell, rattling the metal bars that held me in place. My carefully formed plans for sustaining myself went to hell. Hell. Yes, this was fucking hell.
Losing it. I am losing it. My intellectual mind knew all along that people in solitary confinement for long periods of time with no one to speak to and nothing to do predictably go crazy.
“Did you think you could beat the odds, Lexi?” Ha. I stood in front of my Cyclops window staring past the razor-wire out into the trees. “Yeah. I thought I was that special - that strong. I’ve been living in Delusion-land.”
I can do Reiki, and I see the good effects. I slunk over to my sleeping shelf and lay down on my pallet staring up at the ceiling where the moss grew like continents on a gray globe. And there are the dogs. That works, too. But, applying simple animal communication techniques. So what?
I swung my legs off the shelf and returned to pacing. Back and forth. Back and forth. So I thought that I could get Bella to find a file? I told my team East Coast of Honduras? Ha. And what about the other stories I told myself? There was no little Pablo dying and depending on me to sustain him. He was simply the creation of my hallucinations, the mad mirages conjured by my bored mind.
In my fantasy world, I told myself the fairy tale of what was happening up in the States. Striker had read the file exposing Consuela Hervas as Maria Castillo Rodrigues. In that same file Striker found out that Julio was her husband and was in the federal pen down in Florida. It only took a quick phone call to find out that Julio was getting regular visits from his wife. It was only a short plane ride down to Florida to find Maria with the hopes that she would lead the team to me. And of course if that were true, logic would say that Iniquus then put her under surveillance until they received my ransom note, offering a prisoner exchange for Julio. Once Iniquus received the ransom note, and they realized Maria could no longer visit her husband. Surely they arrested her.
I imagin
ed Maria as a prisoner - just like me. Only in an American prison, she’d get food, clothes, showers, health care…
And then Iniquus would interrogate her, make her crack. Soon. Soon they would be coming to set me free.
I knew this wasn’t true. If it were, then Grandma Sybil’s warnings wouldn’t sound so frantic. “RUN.”
I doubled over laughing hysterically. Hysteria - I lived there now. I moved to my window and stared blankly out. Shit.
Going behind the Veil was a lovely piece of fiction I had told myself that never happened, though it made these months tolerable. And now I didn’t even have that.
When I walked behind the Veil back in DC, I always had people confirming my every detail. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ ‘Yes, confirmed’… ‘Confirmed’… ‘Confirmed’… ‘Confirmed.’ Nothing was confirmed. Therefore, I could trust nothing was real. If nothing was real, then I was a crazy loon. If I were basing my survival on my vivid imagination, I was dead. I was dead and gone and Iniquus would never find my body.
The leopard screamed, and I jumped. Holy shit that was close.
I grabbed the bars on my Cyclops and tried to shake them. Then slid down to squat against the damp wall.
***
Yesterday, I let myself wallow in mental instability. This morning, I was determined to get myself back together. To pull myself off the ledge.
Elicia was here before Grandma Oatmeal had made her breakfast rounds. She stood at my door and sobbed. Just stood there and let grief pour out of her. She was moaning, “Pablo.”
I had continued to send Reiki to Pablo, even though I doubted his existence. I thought that I was probably sending Reiki to some child named Pablo, somewhere, that had no connection to Elicia and Franco — if those were even their names, and if their connection wasn’t created in my imagination. Emotions flooded me as I heard her. She said Pablo. Hope glimmered — maybe I hadn’t lost my mind entirely.
But what was wrong? Was Pablo worse? Did he die? I couldn’t talk to Elicia. I needed another solution; I needed to think. While she sobbed, I sang “Ave Maria” to her and hoped she felt some solace.
Every day I had watched for the rhythm of the compound. Things worked on a dependable schedule. From my window, around one each afternoon, I saw Franco drive his truck over to the buildings and park near the showers. At two o’clock, when I was in the exercise yard, I couldn’t see the back of the truck, but I could hear the men unloading. Franco would stroll to the front of the truck, which was in my line of vision. He smoked a cigarette while he waited for the church bells to sound three, and then he drove away. I decided to talk to Franco today.
I stood staring out my window at the woods beyond, preparing myself for my coming interaction with Franco, feeling disjointed.
Run. I still felt the force from Grandmother Sybil’s command, yet again. “Run. Run.” Her plea cycled through my brain.
Today, Grandmother? Now?
A pouf of dust rose into the air at the far reaches of my visual field. A car must be charging up the road fast.
Danger is moving in.
My “knowing” blazed mottled-red behind my eyes. My breath caught. Maria! Oh, holy hell.
The keys rattled in my door making me jump. The church bells rang two. Drunk had come to take me out to the yard. Thank God. I trotted beside him down the stairs, glad for the first time that he had such a fast gate. Get me out of here.
As usual, he used my exercise hour to go sit in the shade and smoke a cigarette with his eyes closed. This time, he sat down without his keys on his belt loop. I shadow walked back to the building. The guard dogs’ ears perked; they stared unwaveringly at me. I could hide from human eyes, but not a canine’s. I commanded them to “leave it” when they looked at me and asked them to turn their attention to a uniformed guard walking toward the front gate and bark. They did, giving me enough cover to unlock the door and slip back into the prison.
I worked as quickly and quietly as I could, moving through the building to the main entrance. I watched as Maria, dressed in a baggy, green sweat suit, hugged Gray Mustache.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, his voice filled with tension. He searched up and down the hallway to see if anyone was listening. I froze in the shadows.
“Well, I…”
“In here.” Gray Mustache interrupted. He grabbed Maria by the arm and jerked her through the door to an office. I slunk up the corridor and rolled under the bench that sat to the side of the door. It wasn’t the best of covers – it was all I could do.
“Is she still alive?” Maria’s voice drifted under the crack at the bottom of the door.
“Barely.” Came Gray Mustaches grim answer. Me? I was barely alive?
“She does us no good dead, Tío,” Maria scolded.
“Believe me, I am very aware of this. You knew before you sent her here what a dangerous little game this was for both of us. I have to treat the girl the same as any other prisoner, or it would attract even more attention.”
“Bad then?”
“I don’t know that she can survive the summer. Are you making any progress with Julio and the money?”
“No. I came to get some incentive.”
“You don’t mean…” Gray Mustache stopped mid-sentence. My skin prickled with fear.
“Why not?” Maria asked.
Why not what? What the hell are they talking about?
“Because she won’t survive it, and without her, you’ve got Iniquus, the US government, and maybe even Sylanos’s people coming after you. It was a brash plan at best. Did you hear Sylanos is dead?”
“Does that change anything?” Maria asked. “Julio’s still alive, and he’s still locked up – so, that tells me there is still someone pulling the strings. Someone who cares about being exposed when the computer dumps those files into every in-box in America.”
What were they talking about? I wasn’t following this conversation at all; it made no sense to me. I was still stuck on the incentive.
“… that means gangrene. And probably death. You won’t have anything to bring to the trade.” Gray Mustache said.
“I’ll have to take my chances – right now I’m about out of options. I made a bad mistake, Tío. I thought Spyder McGraw cared for Lexi like his own child. That’s what Beth Sylanos told me. But if McGraw loved her, she would be home by now. Either he would have pulled out one of his many chits, or he would have broken Julio out of the prison.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know she’s in danger.” Grey Mustache said.
“Lexi worked for Iniquus for Heaven’s sake. Surely, they contacted McGraw. Of course, he knows. He must have decided she’s not worth the trouble. I should never have trusted Beth.” I heard things slamming around the office as Maria threw a tirade. “I can’t think of anything else to do. I need Julio out of prison, so we can access the money he hid away. Something has to make Spyder McGraw act. I need to send Iniquus her fingers. Maybe then we can stop playing games.”
WHAT?
Silence followed. I wondered if they stopped talking because they could hear my heart pounding like a kettle drum — my raspy breath hitching and sucking air erratically.
“Nobody from Sylanos’s cartel knows she’s here?” Maria finally asked.
“So far we’ve been extremely lucky. They haven’t sent us any new packages since Sylanos’s death, so no one has been here sniffing around. Once you do this? Well, I’ll end up dumping her body in the ditch with the others. After a week in the sun, no one will be able to identify her. Sylanos’s cartel would only care if they figured out how you worked to outsmart them.”
Maria murmured something I couldn’t catch.
“Yes, well, I figured we’d have to kill her eventually anyway,” Gray Mustache said with a ho-hum voice. “Especially if things turned out well, and Julio was released. Come. It’s been a long trip for you. Take a shower, eat something, maybe a nap? I have a man that I think will greatly enjoy this project.” The door opened and the two of th
em walked out arm-in-arm moving toward the front entrance. He changed from Spanish to English, I guessed so no one could understand. “Tomorrow morning the three of us will go visit your little Lexi. I suggest you video tape the whole thing. Her begging and screaming and all the blood will have a bigger impact on those all-American-heroes at Iniquus than a couple of fingers in a box.” The front door squeaked open. I lay petrified.
As soon as Gray Mustache and Maria left the building, I rolled from my hiding place and ran for the door to the side yard and Franco’s truck. There, I waited for him to smoke his cigarette; my emotions exploding.
Emerging from the shadows — just enough so that he knew I was there — I shrank back again and spoke quietly. “Franco, don’t move. Don’t show any signs that I’m here with you,” I said in fluent Spanish, with a decidedly Puerto Rican accent. Franco froze. I was surprised I was able to get my lips to work properly.
“I am worried about your son Pablo. Tell me what’s happening.”
Franco visibly shook; his cigarette dropped to the ground. “You are speaking Spanish. How do you know our names? How did you get over here? They will shoot you.” His whisper was fierce with alarm.
“Franco, I’m supposed to answer your prayers. You have prayed that a miracle would come to your family, and that Pablo would get the medical attention he needs to survive. Yes?” Confirm me, Franco, oh please, confirm me.
“We have prayed hard. But Pablo grows weaker in this heat. Without surgery, the doctor has no hope for him.”
“Yes, that’s what I feel to be true. So much so, that I need to escape and help him, Franco. I am risking my life to escape. I am your hope — your only hope for your son’s survival. I’m an American and have a great deal of power where I come from. That’s why they have imprisoned me here, to offer me in exchange for a terrorist being held in America. But, Franco, look at me. I’m too weak, and it’s too dangerous, for me to take Pablo with me now. Once I get home, I will send a team to take your family to the United States where Pablo will get the medical help he needs.”