7
THE MAN’S NAME WASJOELBENJAMIN.AVERAGE HEIGHT,average build. 190 pounds, give or take. Dark brown hair and hazel eyes. Forty-seven years old. He was dressed in a rumpled gray suit, his tie loosened around his collar.
Less than ninety seconds earlier, Joel had been on his way to lock himself inside a rest room stall and kill himself. He had been weaving through the throng within the airport, his connecting flight home to St. Louis, Missouri, scheduled to begin boarding at 7:35P .M. He had his luggage—a folded hanging bag and leather briefcase—with him. He’d made up his mind.
He had glanced at his watch then turned his gaze absently only for the fleetest of moments toward the flow of harried travelers rushing out of JFK.
In that instant, he forgot about his flight, forgot about the rest room, and forgot about the contents of the paper bag inside his briefcase. He had seen a face in the crowd. It had only been a glimpse, but he stopped dead in his tracks, the small hairs on the back of his neck suddenly standing on end. In that moment, he knew where he’d seen that person before.
The face belonged to a young woman. Perhaps early to midtwenties. Beautiful, really. Her hair was jet-black and was cut shoulder-length beneath a maroon beret. She wore a long coat and black shoes.
Joel had seen her for only a fraction of a second. But that was enough. He struggled with his luggage, dodging rudely through the mob. He rushed out through the doors into the cold. She was nowhere to be seen.
Then he spotted the maroon beret fifty feet ahead, at the curb, pulling open the door to a cab. There was a wall of human traffic between them. She was out of reach of both arm and voice. In the next breath she was inside the rear of the taxi, and in the next its taillights swerved into a lane of honking motorists.
Frantically, Joel Benjamin raised one hand in the air, his slim briefcase dangling from his thumb, motioning at a taxi that was plowing ahead through deep ruts in the snow and slush. Miraculously, it stopped. The door handle was slick with ice.
“Drive!” he ordered, slamming the door closed.
And they sped away from the curb.
“The taxi up ahead, four car lengths up, in the right lane, in front of the silver Cadillac…don’t let it out of your sight! Stay on its bumper until I tell you otherwise!”
The sun had set in New York City. Darkness had fallen hard on the city that never sleeps. It was brutally cold, made all the worse by harsh, unrelenting winds. Snow had first appeared ten days ago, and now the world was white and growing whiter by the minute.
The driver had both hands on the wheel. Traffic was backed up beyond the limits of human vision. Movement went in fits and starts. They crept along for a half a mile, then picked up speed.
The other cab signaled to change lanes, then made a dangerously hasty veer into the left lane.
“Hey pal, there’s just no way to get over that quick from here,” the driver said matter-of-factly.
Two fifty-dollar bills flew over the seat and landed in the driver’s lap.
“Just do it!”
There was a harsh squeal of tires as the cab skimmed past a Jaguar. The radials spun in the sludge that covered the centerline. The driver crossed himself quickly as he jerked the wheel one way then another, but his words weren’t nearly as Catholic as his gestures.
The headlights from the taxi pointed the way along the expressway. Joel stared out the window at a car in the next lane. He had missed his flight home, though he’d had no real plans to be on it anyway. Above them, in the night sky, a jetliner was blasting its way west. Maybe it was his USAir flight.
The Ford’s suspension was shot. It stunk of gasoline fumes. Joel clawed the cheap upholstery. Passing lights swept over him as they cut in and out of traffic. It occurred to him then that he had no clue where this little jaunt might take him.
The Ford shot through an impossibly narrow gap. Joel could hear the engine begging for a rest. They hugged the right lane.
Joel’s neck and back were as stiff and tight as newly milled lumber. He lowered his head for only a few seconds, propping his elbows on his knees, and worked his fingertips down the back of his neck, drumming out the knots that had collected there over the past few minutes. When he raised back up, her taxi was nowhere in sight.
“Where’d it go?” Joel’s arms were up over the seat.
“I don’t know, I don’t know—sit back! It was right up there just a second ago. A bus changed lanes and cut me off. And by the time it got out of my face, it was gone!” The driver’s photo ID had the nameJimmy beneath a face only a mother could love.
“Listen, Jimmy,” Joel said, digging out his wallet. He held up a wad of cash pinched between his index and middle fingers and said, “You find that cab, and this’ll be your tip. Understand?”
Jimmy mashed his ancient Reebok to the pedal.
They exited Grand Central Parkway and Jimmy’s eyes went wide and his neck craned, his head turning this way and that, hoping for even the faintest glimpse. He knew he was looking for cab number 1881. He’d seen the ID number printed in bold black lettering. But as they crossed the Triborough Bridge, 1881 was nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t know what to tell you, pal,” Jimmy offered with a shrug. “I’m not a miracle worker.”
“Just drive!”
Everywhere he looked were dozens of yellow cabs that were carbon copies of the one they were hunting. And they multiplied by the second. His field of view was a chaotic mess. Joel pressed the side of his face against the cool glass, and scolded himself.Stupid…stupid…stupid! The cab was gone. She was gone.Gone. She’d been nearly within his grasp. Yet as suddenly as she had appeared to him from among the passing throng outside JFK, she had now disappeared back into the cityscape.
Hers was a face he hadn’t seen in ten years, and one that he’d become certain he would never see again. But he had—here in this city, tonight.
Joel clutched his hands to his face in disbelief, uncertain whether to weep tears of anguish or those of intense relief. A moment he’d longed for had arrived with the abruptness of a brick to the head, then passed, and was now gone. Ten years of hope and loss rushed back at him in a torrent.
He had seen the face of an angel,his angel—his daughter.
8
IT WAS FULLY DARK OUT NOW, AND WITH THE ARRIVAL OFnight came a new wave of sleet and snow. The cab had dropped Joel across the street from a coffee shop. He stood in the cold and the elements, his toes and fingers growing increasingly numb. He waited for a break in traffic, clutched his luggage and darted across the street to the warm sanctum of the coffee shop.
Once inside, Joel found a table. A waiter took his order. His thoughts were a jumble. It was early evening, but he’d already put in a long day of business, and suddenly he found himself stranded in an unfamiliar city, without a room, without a way home, without a plan. It was just days before Christmas, making the prospect of finding an open seat on any flight in or out of the city anytime in the near future so remote it seemed ludicrous to even consider the odds.
This was not like him. Not at all. He was a man of strict habit, of routine. He’d had a schedule to keep. But recent developments had altered circumstances dramatically. Seeing Megan brought all other thoughts, all other plans, all other considerations, to a bone-jarring halt. Seeing Megan changed everything.
Last month had seen an infamous milestone for forty-seven-year-old Joel Benjamin. It had marked the tenth anniversary of the disappearance of his family.
In an earlier lifetime, as a freshman at USC, Joel Benjamin had fallen in love with a high school cheerleader named Ariel Matthews. They married a week prior to his graduation. Ariel dropped out of school, well shy of completing her degree. Her parents frowned upon this, but she and Joel had to follow wherever his career path led.
He took a sales rep job in San Diego, which allowed them to take out a mortgage. They found a decent neighborhood, a three-bedroom house, with a tree in front and two in back, dishwasher, disposal, stone fireplac
e, chain-link fence, and a mailbox with a dent in one side the shape of an aluminum bat. The mortgage was for thirty years.
The company manufactured adhesives. Tape. Glue. Caulking. Paste. Industrial-strength gunk designed to adhere and harden and fasten one thing to another for nearly eternity.
Joel’s territory included Southern California and much of Nevada and Arizona.
Rental cars, flights in coach, fast food. Gray suits, blue suits, red ties, striped ties. Wing tips, deck shoes. A firm shake. Fake smile. Forms in triplicate. Sign here. Initial there. How about those Dodgers?
Days at a time slipped away on each of his trips. A week or more on the road was commonplace. The life of a salesman.
Ariel was twenty-one when their daughter was born. She took to motherhood with ease. Joel stayed home for the first two weeks after Megan’s birth. He could see the fresh spark in his wife’s eyes. Two made a couple; three made a family. They were in debt up to their armpits, but they somehow managed to keep their heads above water, and though this new arrival added extra weight to an already teetering load, they bore it the only way an up-and-coming couple can—with love and determination.
He approached life on the road with renewed vigor. His accounts blossomed, and the little annoyances of the day-to-day business world bothered him much less than they had previous to his baby Megan entering the world. The proud papa stood tall, his chest puffed out. Joel vowed to give her the world on a string.
Megan was her mother incarnate. Her nose. Her mouth. Those ears. Those eyes. And that hair, as dark as the deepest night. She was a gorgeous child, sublimely blessed with her mother’s flawless genes. Her tiny smile produced enough raw wattage to power entire cities.
But in time, the child brought discord. Joel’s extended absences left Ariel feeling terribly lonely, and often alienated. Megan was a handful, and Ariel resented being stuck at home 95 percent of the time, cut off from real, adult company and conversation. She threatened to leave him, to take their daughter and go. They sought counseling, and for a short time the tension eased up. But his accounts multiplied, thus expanding his route. Exasperated, Ariel moved in with her parents. She was tired and frustrated and sick of being a married single parent.
During this period, Megan blossomed into a radiant little girl. By her tenth birthday, Joel had taken a desk job, mercifully granting him the luxury of being home every night. But the damage was done. The days of possible reconciliation were over. The divorce was final a week before her eleventh birthday. Ariel was awarded full custody.
Joel stood by helplessly for months and watched as Ariel repeatedly denied him his visitation rights. He pleaded with his attorney, who in turn pleaded with the judge, who in turn scolded Ariel, ordering her to cooperate or risk losing custody.
And for six months the cogs of their dysfunctional arrangement turned without incident. Joel again had a relationship with his daughter. For her twelfth birthday, he took Megan and a cluster of her giggly little friends out for pizza and a movie. It was his best and last memory of her.
Two Fridays later, Joel pulled up to Ariel’s house and found her car was gone. The closets were emptied. Ariel and Megan were gone. The neighbors didn’t know a thing. Her parents pled ignorance. Joel nearly went mad.
When they first disappeared, he later learned, they hid in Oregon. For a week, Ariel laid low in a rented cabin a half mile outside a national forest. She sold her Volvo for twelve thousand dollars cash, and flew with her daughter to Miami. And it was there that Ariel and Megan Benjamin, mother and daughter, disappeared. Once and for all.
Miami was where the trail went cold. Joel paid a California PI to track them down. The man returned from Florida with nothing more to offer than a shrug and a bill for expenses. And that was it.
Joel was thirty-seven.
His depression hit like a tsunami. It consumed him without warning and hammered his psyche for ten years. He battled the pain with prescription antidepressants and booze, using one to control the other.How do you forget the past? How can you simply walk away from one life to begin another? Megan’s sweet face haunted his dreams. Sometimes the all-consuming void opened up great and wide, hungrily tugging at him.
He dodged suicide twice: the first attempt was thwarted by an observant secretary who phoned 911 when he locked himself in his office and stuffed into his mouth an entire bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills. The second occasion had come to pass barely an hour ago; Joel had purchased a small-caliber handgun from a pawnshop, fully intending to lock himself in a rest room stall in JFK and shove the muzzle down his throat. Then he had glanced up for a fraction of a second and seen the one face that could make him hold on for just a little longer.
9
AS THE BOAT CONTINUED TOWARDNANTUCKET, HIS OLDnemesis, paranoia, began to tap on his shoulder. It was a nuisance, but such things kept you alive. Especially in his business.
St. John slept fitfully. He tossed and turned, battling the wool blanket. The bed was six inches shorter than his body, so he spent much of the night fantasizing about stretching his toes. The mattress was abused and lifeless, and air wheezed from it every time he moved or adjusted. It beat sleeping on the floor, just not by much.
His dreams were the spaces where the paranoia liked to creep in first. Such ugly visions. This was another reason to sleep in narrow shifts. An hour here, a half hour there. Fifteen-minute naps when he could afford it. The visions were never as bad between jobs, when he’d pulled it off and managed to merge back into the anonymity of the masses. It was the act of fleeing, that awful slinking into the shadows, that wrecked his sleep.
This morning he brewed thick, black coffee. St. John set an opened package of graham crackers on the corner of the table behind the navigation equipment and munched in the darkness. The moon was faint. Green and red lights from the navigational instruments blinked and formed patterns.
The boat rocked with the sea. The old diesel sounded strong. He was making good time. There was another two hours before sunup.
Midmorning, the radar chimed. St. John was below deck, tending to the oil and motor fluids. He shot up the ladder and approached the console with a shop rag in his hands. The sweep of the green readout clearly identified an oncoming vessel 5.63 kilometers due south, and closing in at close to eleven knots.
St. John snatched the Leupold field glasses from a hook above his bunk and went up on deck. The sky looked gray and threatening but the weather was not altogether unpleasant. His middle finger toggled the viewfinder into focus. He leaned his midsection against the railing at the very nose of the boat. Nothing but open sea.
Whatever it was, it was coming straight at him.
With nothing yet on the horizon, he slipped below to the cabin to ready himself. The mattress lifted up and out, revealing a stowage compartment. He pressed one clip into the grip of the 9mm, and slipped a second into the back of his waistband. The loaded Glock waited patiently on the wooden lip of the instrument console. He popped the protective caps from his scope, and opened the bolt action to arm the rifle with six shells.
St. John eased the rifle onto the nylon bench-seat at the table and took up the Glock to have another look-see.
On the far horizon, a mast appeared. In no time, he could see the fishing nets, and the crew aboard her moving about, working the hooks and baiting lines. She was a fishing vessel. St. John took in a deep breath and stuffed the 9mm down his waistband. He watched with suspicious curiosity as the oncoming vessel grew larger and more defined. He wheeled his own vessel off course just slightly, and the two boats passed within five hundred yards of each other. The crew was busy at work, and if they noticed him they ignored him. This set well with his frazzled nerves.
A quick retooling of the instruments, and he was back on course. He stowed the rifle back inside the hold beneath his bunk, but left the Glock atop the navigation console. If there were more visitors, anytime soon, he’d be prepared.
He washed his face at the sink and fixed something of
substance for his shifting stomach. St. John took his lunch and his field glasses on deck.
The paranoia twisted its talons into his back and shoulders as he sat cross-legged and watched the horizon.
It wasn’t an enormous charge of plastic explosives, just enough to do the trick. St. John had rigged them himself, and now he knelt on deck, making a final inspection of the timer and the detonator.
He wasn’t a novice at these games, but handling enough plastic explosives to instantly incinerate his upper body never failed to elevate his anxiety level by a marked degree. It was a simple rigging—nothing fancy—designed for a straightforward task. He fingered the device gently, examining all the connections, making sure this wire went here, that wire went there. The soldering was clean and holding firm. The battery pack had plenty of juice.
It was early evening on his last full day at sea. The bow of the boat rose and fell at the prompting of the sea. The sun hung low in the sky, brilliant and massive, gradually nearing the unbroken line of the horizon.
Here, the sea was a deep blue. The water was choppy and rolling. He glanced at his watch, anxious to get his chores under way, yet still holding to the peace of this moment at sea. These next few hours represented the end of a way of life, which had been the only one he’d known for more than half of his lifetime. And like this boat, he hoped that the burden of his past would settle to the ocean floor to be forgotten by time.
When the light of the moon replaced the light of the sun, St. John struck the tip of a wooden match and lit the lantern hanging above the table in the cabin. The gear he’d need was stowed in a pack on the bench-seat. He put on his wet suit.
He headed on deck with his diver’s mask and snorkel, finding his way by flashlight. He played the light across the explosive held in his hand just to make certain he’d not forgotten anything, then adjusted the mask over his face, took in a long breath and held it, and dropped over the side rail with a mild splash.
The Greater Good Page 4