The Last Safe Place

by Ninie Hammon

  She straightened up, turned and motioned for Ty and Theo.

  “You two go on to the gate,” she said, amazed that her voice was level. “I’ll be right there.”

  Theo took a step toward Yesheb, his hands balled into fists at his sides.

  “I need you to look after Ty. Please, get him away from here.”

  Ty’s face was ashen, his eyes huge. He stared at Yesheb with the look of a rabbit caught in the talons of an eagle.

  Theo scowled at Yesheb, but nodded and shoved Ty in front of him out toward the crowded concourse. The old man paused as he passed Yesheb, though, leaned close and said quietly, “Some days you the big dog and some days … you the hydrant.” Then he limped away.

  Alone with Yesheb, Gabriella’s fear returned, rose up in her throat like vomit.

  Yesheb spoke without moving, his eyes fastened on the growling, menacing P.D. “I will kill this dog. Give me time and I will devise an appropriately brutal way to dispatch him.” He remained rigid, but moved his eyes up to Gabriella’s face. “I will stomp the old man, crush his brittle bones, leave him to die slowly. And I will kill the boy, your son, rip his heart out of his chest while it is still beating and offer it as a sacrifice to join us together for all eternity.”

  The ice in Yesheb’s eyes flowed out of them and into Gabriella’s heart. She reached down a trembling hand and took the handle of P.D.’s harness. He was still growling, the hackles standing up on the back of his neck. The dog had never done anything even remotely like this. Had he merely reacted to a threat to his master? Maybe. Or was it more than that? Could it be that his animal senses responded to the presence of evil?

  “Heel, P.D.,” she said, and the dog immediately turned away from Yesheb and moved to a spot beside her right leg. Though no longer growling, P.D. never took his eyes off Yesheb.

  “See you in court on June 26,” Yesheb purred. “I’ll pray for rain. And I wouldn’t plan any more little trips if I were you. I’ve convinced the prosecutor—he and several of the circuit judges were dear friends of my father’s—that you didn’t just assault me. You tried to kill me.”

  She stepped around Yesheb out into the flow of human traffic in the concourse, didn’t turn when he called out to her.

  “When that attempted murder charge is filed against you, my sweet Zara, you’ll be stuck right here until I come for you.”

  YESHEB’S CALM IS only skin deep. Below it is a fury as finely tuned as an ice pick, a single, clear high note of rage that he could focus on her back and stab through sinew and tissue and bone right into her heart. He could kill her with his anger alone. He does not need the kind of weapon they look for here with their X-rays and scanners.

  He can’t do that, of course. She is his bride, his beloved. He cannot kill her. But he can make her pay. He will extract a high price for all that she has done to him, a high price indeed.

  He’d been fantasizing about it in the hospital, lying in bed in agony because he had refused pain killers. He could not allow his senses to be dulled even for a moment. He is accountable. He is being watched.

  As he lay sweating on the crisp, white sheets, gritting his teeth to keep from moaning, he had occupied his mind by considering what would be a fit punishment. Many came to mind—all of them involving tools like bolt cutters and tin snips. Disfigurement arouses him in ways beauty never can. Many more would surface, brought to mind by the heartbeat throbbing of his broken bones held in place by temporary splints. Though the fracture had not been displaced—the bones had not moved—his foot was so badly swollen the orthopedist said it would be a week before the splint applied in the emergency room could be replaced by a cast.

  “I do a good job?”

  Yesheb looks up into the face of the grinning hip-hop process server.

  “Splendid.”

  “When she saw what it was in her hand she ’bout had a cat.” The young man continues to babble, pumped about sneaking into an airport to deliver a summons. “That old man, his eyes was this big.” He pauses. “Say, he wasn’t that boy’s daddy was he? The kid was mixed, but surely …”

  Mixed.

  That’s what his family had thought Yesheb was. Among other things. When he was born—a blonde, blue-eyed child to Iranian parents—it seemed obvious that his mother had shamed his father by bearing a son who could not possibly have been his. A son about whom there were whispers and dark rumors even before he was born, a son who engendered terror—even as a tiny baby.

  Yesheb’s whole family had been long dead before he understood it all. He learned the truth from an old servant who confessed to eavesdropping on a conversation between Anwar Al Tobbanoft and his wife’s doctor while Yesheb was still in his mother’s womb.

  Serena Al Tobbanoft had been carrying twins—two distinct heartbeats. And then there was only one heartbeat. The doctor told his father that one of the twins was dead.

  “How did my son die?” his father demanded—certain that his firstborn would be a son and heir.

  “One of the twins … absorbed the other.”

  “Absorbed the other? What does that mean?”

  “It means,” the doctor told him quietly, “that one of your unborn sons has eaten his brother.”

  Though the old servant feared retribution for eavesdropping, and even worse punishment for the awful news he had delivered to Yesheb, he’d been surprised when his master responded with uproarious laughter.

  Yesheb’s cell phone rings and he dismisses the hip-hop moron with a wave of his hand.

  “Mr. Al Tobbanoft, the surveillance team is in position to pick up the subjects at the baggage claim in JFK.”

  “You understand the importance of continuous contact?”

  “It’s a crack, four-man team, sir. The subjects will never even know they’re being watched. We’re also tracking them electronically, of course. They couldn’t possibly shake my men.”

  “Are you willing to bet your life on that?”

  There is a heartbeat pause.

  “Yes sir.”

  Yesheb hangs up and acid-tasting bile rises in this throat. He has let her slip out of his grasp! He had been injured, hadn’t been thinking clearly. After he’d summoned help and a team to do cleanup at her residence, it had taken a few hours to find her again. She had left the monitoring chips planted in her wallet, the heel of her shoe and her cell phone case behind when she ran. He hadn’t moved fast enough with the summons and the criminal charges and she had slipped through his net. Oh, how he wished he could simply kidnap her and hold her hostage until it was time. But he couldn’t do that. It must take place precisely as it was foretold. He must go to her alone, unaided, crush her resistance and take her.

  Yesheb feels a shiver of doubt run down his spine.

  After a millennia of looking for her, he has finally found her. Now the clock that allows him three opportunities to become one with her is ticking. Their joining will grant him unfathomable power; it will usher in the reign of The Beast of Babylon as the sovereign ruler of the abyss. But ancient decrees require precise timing. The first full moon after Good Friday, the day of death, was for preparation. He’d fasted and precisely performed the prescribed rituals and self-flagellation—beat himself with a whip tipped with broken glass and pieces of metal until he was barely conscious. After that, there remained three lunar cycles. He must mate with her during one of them and she had gotten away from him this month! She must not escape again!

  He rises slowly, in some ways relishing the agony in his foot because it keeps him hyper alert, on a razor’s edge. He picks up his crutches and hobbles on them out into the concourse. He briefly considers going to their gate and waiting there with them until their flight takes off. But there would be plenty of time for intimidation—and payback—later. Revenge is, indeed, a dish best served cold.

  CHAPTER 4

  THEO HAD TO HAND IT TO GABRIELLA. SHE HAD ORCHESTRATED their disappearing act in New York City like they was characters in a television spy show—not that Theo watc
hed such things, of course. The only time his television was on was so he could watch the news or sports. And that didn’t count as watching television.

  Course he didn’t have no television now. Didn’t have nothing. They’d left everything they owned behind. Well, except that rock, Gabriella’s crystal rock. Wasn’t no way she was gonna go anywhere without that!

  Gabriella had launched what she called the Great Escape as soon as they got to New York. They checked into the Warwick Hotel, then went directly to the Bank of New York on East 45th Street where Gabriella had a private conversation in the manager’s office and cleaned out all her accounts, walked out with all the cash she could lay her hands on, a little over $75,000. From there they went to Macy’s, where they purchased a whole new set of clothes each—from the underwear out. Socks, shoes, trousers—the works. Gabriella was certain Yesheb had somebody watching them every minute. But she suspected he might also be keeping tabs on them with some kind of electronic tracking device. In their clothes, their shoes, their luggage, somewhere. So they’d bought new everything, all the way down to their birthday suits. Theo picked himself out a bright red button-up sweater. Gabriella picked him out a fedora to go with it. He hadn’t never worn a hat, told her it made him look like one of the Blues Brothers in blackface, but he knew it was part of the plan.

  After that, they went directly to Mama Rosina’s in Little Italy for dinner before the show, dressed in their new duds with their old clothes in Macy’s sacks. Mama’s was a family-run Italian restaurant with lots of atmosphere, which meant it was dark as an old maid’s underwear drawer, lit only by candles on the tables that had dripped mountains of wax down the sides of their wine-bottle holders. The place instantly made Theo uncomfortable because it looked just like the restaurant in the first Godfather movie where Mikey Corleone shot the crooked cop and the drug dealer Sollozzo. Which maybe was what had given Gabriella the idea.

  Halfway through the salad, Theo got up and excused himself and went to the restroom—just like in the movie, only not to pick up a gun hidden behind the toilet tank. The restrooms were in a small hallway off the kitchen with a back door at the end leading to the alley. A red sign on the door warned: “Emergency exit. Do not open. Alarm will sound.”

  He came back to the table a short time later, his gimpy limp a little more pronounced than usual, as the pasta was being served. They all ate, talked, didn’t laugh though. They couldn’t pull that off. Right after the main course, Ty started to get sick. Within minutes Gabriella had to rush him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t puke on the table, with P.D. only a step behind, of course. They stayed there a long time, didn’t return for the rest of dinner or the tiramisu dessert.

  Theo figured if you’d been hired to keep track of the folks who’d gone to the bathroom, you’d have to be a special kind of stupid not to notice they never came back out. There was likely a lot of yelling going on somewhere on the subject. But by that time, Gabriella, Theo, Ty and P.D. were driving through the Holland tunnel into New Jersey in a bunged-up, five-year-old Honda Accord with so much mud on the license plate you couldn’t read the number.

  After the meal, the old black man seated at their table used his napkin to discretely wipe off his silverware, glass and the two, crisp $100-bills he used to pay for the meal—told the waiter to keep the change. He gathered up all the Macy’s bags, pulled his red sweater close around him against the chill in the air and took a cab to the Warwick Hotel. He got in the elevator, punched every button so it stopped on every floor all the way up. When the doors finally opened on the 38th floor, the only thing inside the elevator was a pile of Macy’s bags.

  Three hours later, the afternoon shift maintenance crew supervisor, an old fellow who’d been called Drumstick back in the day, punched out on the time clock in the hotel basement like he’d done just about every day for the past thirty-seven years. Dressed in his blue jumpsuit uniform, the old, bald black man with coke-bottle-thick glasses made his way down the hall past the garbage chute that was the final resting place for the tiny, snipped-up pieces of a fedora and a red sweater and went out through the Sixth Avenue staff entrance. He walked the two blocks to the subway entrance on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street and took the D train home to Harlem—with $5,000 in crisp, hundred-dollar bills tucked snug in his hip pocket.

  Least that’s the way he and Theo had planned it and Theo assumed that’s the way it’d worked, prayed that it had.

  The man who’d played drums in Theo’s band forty years ago had exchanged the keys to the Honda for Theo’s red sweater, his hat and a 30-second demonstration of Theo’s limp in the bathroom of Mama Rosina’s. Folks had joked back in the day that they was twins separated at birth and even after all these years they were still the spittin’ image of each other. Except Drumstick didn’t have a hair on his head anymore. And he could barely see. Hated contact lenses, though, only wore them to Mass on Sundays, weddings, funerals … and other special occasions. Drumstick arranged for the car to be parked outside the restaurant’s back door—between two dumpsters that blocked the view from both ends of the alley.

  The alarm on the back door in Mama Rosina’s hadn’t worked since the Eisenhower administration.

  Soon as Gabriella, Ty and P.D. hopped into the car, they laid over in the seats and Theo covered them up with blankets. He had already gotten that crazy wig situated on his head with the dreadlocks hanging halfway down his back and put on the mirror sunglasses that made him look like a pimp.

  Only thing Gabriella said was: “Did your friend get what I asked for?”

  Theo wordlessly nodded to the glove box and she opened it. Inside was a .38 revolver. Serial number filed off. Untraceable. The whole transaction had cost $20,000.

  Once they got away from the restaurant, Gabriella took the wheel and the others remained covered up with blankets for the next two hours. Theo had spent most of that time praying—that the “watchers” hadn’t spotted them and that Gabriella’d stop soon so he could go to the bathroom before he wet himself. She drove through the night, getting off the expressway every thirty or forty miles, watching the exit ramps to see if any suspicious vehicles got off, too. Nothing. Maybe that didn’t prove they weren’t being followed, but it was all she could do.

  They was eating McDonald’s big breakfasts in the car in Salisbury, North Carolina, when Gabriella asked Theo where he wanted her to drop him off now that his part in this wild ride was over. She apologized for dragging him into her nightmare, thanked him for his help and said she’d give him plenty of money to get by on—because they both knew he was in Yesheb’s gunsights now, too, and he’d have to vanish his own self for the next couple of months.

  Theo shoved a syrup-slathered hunk of pancake into his mouth and said, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere ’cept with you.”

  Her look of shock would have been comical if her face wasn’t all puckered up on one side—Smokey’s handiwork.

  “You’re going with us, Grandpa Slappy?” The instant of pure joy on that boy’s face made Theo’s throat draw up so tight he couldn’t swallow his own spit.

  “Oh no, he’s not!” Gabriella said.

  “How you figure to do this if I don’t? Face like yours ain’t ’xactly gone blend into a crowd. Every time you check into a motel, or go in some convenience store to pay for gasoline, or buy a box of fried chicken at a drivein window—somebody gone see you. Anybody ask ’em later, they gone remember.”

  Gabriella couldn’t argue that.

  “But a old black man ... don’t matter what they say, most white folks still think all black people look alike. And ain’t nobody looking for a old bald black man. Under all this nappy cotton, I bet I look just like Denzel Washington.”

  “Theo, this is … dangerous.”

  “Ya think?”

  “You won’t like where we’re going.”

  “I don’t like where we been! You ever notice how many fat women they is in the South?”

  “Theo, I’m serious.”

  “So
am I. That woman over there, she got so much flab on her arms she look like a flying squirrel.”

  Ty tried unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle.

  “And them spandex pants. They’s stretched so tight over them thunder thighs, she try to run, her legs gone rub together and start a fire.”

  Ty lost it then, laughed so hard he spilled his syrup and Gabriella used cleaning up his mess as an excuse to drop the subject. She didn’t bring it up again.

  They stopped at a Walmart in Charlotte and bought suitcases, toiletries and bare-essential clothing—they had to travel light. Made it as far as the suburbs of Atlanta before Gabriella crashed. Next day, they went into the city and got Gabriella a laptop and Ty a Nintendo 3DS and just about every video game ever invented. They drove to Nashville then and spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the next day going from one music store to another until Theo found what he was looking for—a vintage Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone. Wasn’t no way he planned to spend eight weeks in exile without a sax to keep him company.

  That’s what it was supposed to be. Two months. Gabriella said if she could hide from him through two more full moons, the Beast would be screwed and Yesheb wouldn’t be after them no more.

  Theo figured that Yesheb giving up the chase was about as likely as successfully milking a chicken. He hadn’t known a whole lot of madmen in his life, but the ones he had known didn’t take losing real well. Yesheb might not be able to marry her two months from now, but that wouldn’t keep him from killing her. Would make it even more likely, from where Theo sat. He didn’t say that out loud, of course. He didn’t have to; Gabriella wasn’t no fool.

  * * * *

  All the color drains out of Yesheb’s face.

  “Say that again, slowly,” he says into his cell phone. His modulated, television-announcer voice quakes, his hand grips the small device so tight it might shatter.

  “Sir … I have teams out, more than a dozen men sniffing for her trail—we’ll find it. Our techies have hacked into her credit cards, we’ll know as soon as she uses one. We—”