by Meg Gardiner
“Everything that led you to the flash drives told you her name. Everything that got me the information from Pete Kongsangchai. Come on,” she said. “Bring your A game.”
Everything? The R & B note. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A map of Sherman’s march through the South. Gladys Knight and the Pips lyrics.
I heard myself say, “Oh.” I heard Ray Charles’s voice aching across a crowded club when my father turned around at the jukebox.
“Georgia,” I said.
She took the photo. This time when she looked at me, her eyes were full of want.
“I know what you’re wondering. How could a mother ship her kid halfway around the world? Why do you think? I don’t want her to become me.” She put a hand on my arm. “And unless we keep the Sangers from finding her, that might happen. She could become my flip side. One of the Children of the Corn.”
“We won’t let that happen.”
She smoothed her thumb over the image, as though brushing her daughter’s hair. Deep within myself, deeper than the pit of my stomach, I felt that this was what my father would try to protect: the innocence of a child.
A shot of adrenaline, sick and quick, dumped into me. “Oh, God.”
Jesse knew.
Of course he did. All my strength seemed to evaporate. I grabbed the handle of the luggage cart for balance.
That was what my father must have told him in that desperate phone call the night he was ambushed. And he had sworn him to secrecy, to protect us all.
I peered hard at Jax. She needed medical treatment urgently. But if I went to London alone, I didn’t know how I would get her daughter out. I had no papers, no authority, I was a total stranger.
Outside the terminal, a cop was strolling along the windows, hand on his submachine gun, peering in at us.
“Come on,” I said.
I nudged her into motion and took her by the elbow to the Thai Airways check-in desk. Before I turned to leave she took my wrist and turned it so she could see my watch. I felt a ghostly sense of déjà vu. Tim had done the same thing before I left him. It was ten p.m.
“The Riverbend program will ditch the next chunk of the file to your laptop in three hours. Be sure you log on.” She let go. “I’ll see you in London.”
“Good. Because Kit Larkin’s going to be waiting for you at Heathrow, and if you don’t show up, she’ll kick your skinny ballerina ass.” I let go of her. “Get going. And don’t turn your back.”
24
Jesse checked everything one final time. Ticket printout. Passport. Tire repair kit. Gloves—London could be miserable in April, and wheeling bare-handed was hellacious in the cold. He zipped his suitcase, casting a look at his desk drawer. The Glock had to stay here.
But firepower, truth be told, didn’t matter. Speed did.
Jax Rivera has a little girl. These people want her, Phil had said. That can’t happen, Jesse. They’re human traffickers. Do whatever it takes.
He grabbed his backpack and keys, turned off the lights, gave a last look around, and heard a knock on the front door.
For a second he stared across the entryway. Somebody knocking at eight a.m. could only be bad news. The knock came again. He wheeled over and opened it.
He froze like a plastic toy. “P.J.”
His brother grinned. “I’m ready to rock.”
“What?”
“Want to start off on the right foot. Thought I’d take you out to breakfast, sort of a thank-you.”
P.J. was wearing a new pair of chinos and a button-down shirt, and his hair was freshly cut. He walked in with a bounce in his step. Jesse turned, confused. P.J.’s grin slid a bit.
“My first day. Starting work at the law firm,” he said. “You said yesterday was too soon. So I waited.”
Don’t blink, Jesse thought. Don’t let your face betray you. Don’t slap your forehead.
He hadn’t arranged a job for his brother, hadn’t even found time to speak to Lavonne about the idea. And here was P.J., practically jumping up and down like a kid at a birthday party. P.J. jammed his hands in his pockets and jingled his motorcycle keys. He glanced at the suitcase and the backpack, and at the jeans and parka Jesse was wearing. He tilted his head, perplexed.
“Going somewhere?”
“Yeah.” Damn.
P.J. frowned. “Bro? What’s up?”
He had to say something. He had to do something. P.J. looked so earnest. Neat and eager and humming with nerves beneath the grin.
He couldn’t tell him that he’d forgotten. Couldn’t tell him that he didn’t have a job. And, Christ, he couldn’t possibly let him go home unemployed. Disappointment, failure, empty time—that was the portal back to dope and drink and a locked cell.
“We need to change your schedule. I have an emergency,” he said.
“What kind of emergency?”
“Work-related. That’s all I can say.”
P.J. flushed. Jesse put up his hands.
“Nothing to do with you. It’s confidential. I can’t even tell Evan, and believe me, that has landed me in deep shit.”
“Whoa. This is for a case?” P.J. looked around and saw the passport and ticket on the kitchen counter. “Dude. You’re leaving the country?”
He picked up the ticket before Jesse could stop him. “London? Are you serious?”
Jesse took the ticket. “This is privileged information. You can’t tell anybody.”
For a moment P.J. looked suspicious. Then his smile returned. “What’s this about? Like, a high-stakes case?”
“Yeah.” He grabbed his backpack and had an idea. “And I need you to drive with me to LAX.”
“Really?”
“We’ll take the truck. Then if you don’t mind, you can drive it back here. That way I don’t have to leave it in long-term parking.”
And if anybody got suspicious about his whereabouts—anybody such as the U.S. Attorney or the FBI—they’d see his pickup at home in the driveway instead of parked at a major international airport.
“Why aren’t you flying out of Santa Barbara?” P.J. said.
Jesse pulled his suitcase along the floor to the door. “LAX is simpler.”
He shoved the suitcase out onto the front porch. It was a sunny morning, crisp and bright. His flight was leaving in four hours and it was a two-hour drive.
P.J. was quiet. Jesse glanced over his shoulder and was surprised to see him looking pensive. Without another word, P.J. grabbed the suitcase, carried it to the truck, and tossed it into the cargo bed. Jesse felt a flush of relief: His brother understood. Flying had lost the appeal it held back in his days of traveling with the U.S. swim team. And the Santa Barbara airport had no jetways—you had to board your flight via stairs. Or, in his case, by mucking around with a skinny aisle chair and getting bumped up the steps by a ground crewman like a crate of dinner trays, while the pilots and other passengers and baggage handlers all stared, silently thinking, Poor bastard.
“Thanks.”
He locked the front door. P.J. took the backpack from him and tossed it in the backseat of the truck. When he turned around, he looked dead serious.
“Take me with you,” he said.
“To London?”
“I’m serious. Let me come.”
“Are you . . . ?” Don’t tell him he’s nuts. “No.”
“I can be your assistant. Like a paralegal.”
He touched his forehead, thinking, Stay calm. “No. Even if I needed an assistant, you don’t have a ticket; you’re not packed. Do you even have a passport?”
“Yeah, I found it a few weeks ago. I’d totally forgotten. So this is, like, karma.” P.J. spread his hands. “Dude, come on; it would be awesome.”
Awesome like European Vacation. He opened the driver’s door. “Hop in the truck. I need to roll.”
“Then how about letting me stay here and house-sit for you?”
Halfway into the truck, he nearly fell to the ground. “No.”
“Don’t you t
rust me?”
He boosted himself into the driver’s seat. “Don’t ask loaded questions. Come on; get in. Please.” He checked his watch. “I need to haul.”
“You think I want a free trip to London, that it?” P.J.’s expression was barbed. “Well, yeah, duh.”
He had to laugh. “Good try.”
P.J. crossed his arms. “You forgot, didn’t you? About the job.”
Jesse’s shoulders dropped. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“That’s why you want me to drive with you, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry. Things have been crazy, and it slipped my mind. I’ll call Lavonne today and get it set up.”
“Okay.” P.J. walked toward him. “But in the meantime, look at you. You can’t even get on an airplane by yourself.”
“Traveling isn’t a problem. It’s a gigantic pain in the ass, that’s all, which is why I need to get moving.”
“Right.” P.J. put his hands on the door to keep him from closing it. “Dude, I don’t know what’s going on with this emergency, but if it’s got Evan pissed off at you, then you need serious backup.”
“From you?”
“You know what London’s like? They ride the tube. They take double-decker buses. Didn’t you watch Lock, Stock? The sidewalks are bumpy, and there’s narrow stairs in these creaky buildings—I mean everywhere. Plus it’s always raining, and patience ain’t your virtue, especially when you’ve got a bug up your ass. And if you punch some cabbie’s lights out ’cause he won’t let you into his taxi, you’ll spend your trip banging your head against the wall in a police station instead of fixing this emergency.”
Jesse felt his face heating.
“Man, you’re in such a rush you can’t stop looking at your watch, and I’ll bet good money your hurry will only get worse once you’re there. You have a total urge to move quick, and that’s what you can’t do by yourself.” He held tight to the door. “You need help, and I’m it.”
Jesse had almost forgotten that, clean and sober, P.J. was a pretty smart guy. For a long moment he stared at his brother, aware of the gulls shrieking and the surf foaming white in the distance.
“Can you pack in ten minutes?” he said.
One swallow, one drop of water, one touch of moisture on his tongue—that was everything. Phil lowered his lips to the minuscule puddle in the corner of the shipping container. The water soaked his cracked skin and jumped against the roof of his mouth, full of rust, thick and earthy. Like the water in the red pond where the creek had flowed into his grandfather’s pasture on the Oklahoma prairie. Sharp and muddy, the heat of the day lying on his back when he and his brothers went swimming, wind ticking through the tall grass, cicadas droning from the trees with the intensity of an electrical transformer.
He rolled over and slumped against the corrugated wall of the container. His life flashing before his eyes, that was a dangerous sign.
Resting for a moment, he took stock. There was no more food. He had eaten the apple core and licked every bit of chocolate from the candy wrappers, despite the taste of mold. He had found some orange peels in an old crate and eaten them too, and scoured the salt from an empty bag of potato chips. But that was it. The water was only what dripped into the container from the hole rusted in the top. And from what he could tell, it hadn’t rained in the last twenty-four hours. The insignificant puddle, now only a wet spot on the floor, was not going to be replenished.
The crack of light coming through the doors of the container was angled off to his left. Early morning, he made it. Grabbing the broomstick he had fashioned into a cane, he hitched himself over there again and pressed his ear to the metal. He’d pounded and kicked on it for hours. Yelled, too, until his voice was hoarse. Nobody came. He knew what that meant. This container was stacked among hundreds, maybe thousands of others on a massive dock, too deep in the stack for anybody to notice. It had to be Los Angeles, Long Beach or maybe Oakland.
At one point during the night, a security patrol had passed through this section. He’d heard a dog bark. But even then, kicking his foot against the door, yelling with all his strength, they hadn’t come. The port worked through the night, cranes busy loading, ships’ horns blaring, and they hadn’t heard him.
He checked his watch, counting down. He had to stop that. He had to reset his thought process. Counting down—counting down to rescue. To the cops busting open the doors, because they’d figured out where he was. Because Rio and Christian had been arrested, broken, had talked.
He laid his head against the door. One more hour, he could hold out. And one more after that.
His family must be desperate. That was almost the worst thing. Brian and Evan, they were strong, but this would be knocking them for a loop. Angie as well. He could just hear her—Phil, that son of a bitch. I’m going to kill him for this. He almost laughed. Having his ex-wife kill him . . . he could hang on for that.
But it was the not knowing that bled the heat out of him.
His message—he didn’t know if Jesse had gotten it in time. Or if he’d carried through. Jesse was tough and resourceful, but that might not be enough. He had to be willing to go all the way. He had lived through enough bad times to know that only the big things mattered—family, loyalty, honor. But he was hotheaded and he loved Evan, which was the problem. Love could tangle your parachute lines.
Phil had never been able to reach Jesse, not really. The man was across some wall Phil couldn’t jump. He stuck to his guns, he couldn’t easily be swayed, and he swung for the fences. Throw him a changeup pitch and he’d hit a line drive, straight at your head.
Moreover, even if Jesse was determined to carry through, Phil didn’t know if he could. And he could hear Evan now: Don’t, Dad. She would call his doubts cruel. She could feign blindness, could feign irrelevance, but there was only the hard truth, and a father couldn’t shunt it aside. There were a lot of things Jesse couldn’t do. Much as they all hated it, and Jesse fought to make the best of things, it was an insurmountable fact.
Jesse wanted to be a husband to his daughter. And Phil couldn’t deny the bald truth that it looked like a fatal wish.
Phil rolled his head and looked at the line of sunlight inching its way across the floor. He pulled himself up straight, his swollen knee throbbing. The pain was good. It kept him awake, kept him focused.
There was too much pain in all of this. He remembered the time he went into Rio Sanger’s club. The young people there, young women Rio had torn apart inside. He thought of Christian. Grown now, a good-looking young man but a husk. Cruel, and scoured clean of conscience, as destroyed as those other kids in the brothel. Kids he hadn’t been able to help, because the op went wrong.
Christian on the road, sneering at him, putting that SIG Sauer to his head and leading him into the backseat of the car, where Rio was waiting. Hello, old man. Christian putting his hand on him with such strange softness and need in his touch.
Christian had something of Hank Sanger about him. Maybe it was the death in his eyes.
And Jax, so committed and daring, the girl with such flair and courage, the almost suicidal confidence in her abilities, and a need to exorcise some bottomless anger, who threw herself into a black and unredeemable world and then found herself broken and betrayed, calling him from Hank Sanger’s place in Bangkok twelve years ago, calling in the clear, begging, Get me out of here.
That was the cruelest day of his life. Jax had looked at him afterward, torn by the not knowing, already trying to grow a scab over the emotional wound, thinking she could never heal, and had seen something in his eyes. They’re dark. I never noticed before. Like a winter sky.
He swallowed. It might rain again. He could last. For his family, he could hold out as long as he had to.
For Jax, the girl he had sworn to protect all those years ago. For Georgia, the daughter Jax would protect even to death.
As he sat in the inky darkness, the walls of the container seemed not so much black as gray. And a sound mixed with the
walls. It was sharp and deep, and somebody was trying to shut it off.
He snapped out of it. The dog—outside, the dog was back, and its master was shouting at it to quiet down. He pounded his fist against the side of the container.
“Here,” he yelled. “In here.”
His voice was hoarse. He pounded again, not getting enough power behind it. He turned around and began kicking his good leg against the door, hard as he could.
“Help. In here.”
The dog barked.
Phil kicked with everything he had, knowing his voice might not be carrying. The dog began racketing. Phil put his fingers between his lips and whistled.
The master gave the dog a command, telling it to seek on. Phil kicked, the sound echoing in the container, his blood pounding in his ears. A drone rolled overhead, and he realized it was a stacking crane rolling along the dock among the containers, and then he heard metal clanging as the crane lowered a container into place above his.
The dog had stopped barking. The voices were fading. He kept kicking, kept shouting, even though his voice was nothing but a whisper and he was flat on the floor, his throat more parched than before, his strength gone, his head dropping back against the metal floor, the fog thickening all around him. Like a winter sky just before the sun disappears into the horizon.
In my first-class seat, I stared at the bubbles going flat in my champagne glass, and at the other passengers chatting and settling in for the twelve-hour flight. I checked my watch. I booted up my computer, plugged in my headphones, and stared at the screen, watching the ticker count down. The program loaded.
Again, no preamble. Fade in: Sanger’s place, the fan lazing on the ceiling, Jax flat on the floor in the bedroom with her leg shattered by a gunshot. Her arm was out, gesturing, Stop.
“Don’t, Hank, please. I have to tell you about Christian.”
Sanger swayed above her, gun wavering in his hand. His face was bleary. “Who put you up to this?”