I turned to Max and quietly said, “They know. It’s been too long and they reported it. We’re fucked.”
“Hang in there. I’m positive it’s unrelated.”
Sure enough, two of the guards grabbed a man from the front of the line and escorted him into a near-by office. The third guard slowly walked down the length of the queue, as if inspecting the passengers for more trouble. As he approached us, a moment of panic set in. I grabbed Max and kissed him frantically to make us look like the newly weds we were impersonating. As soon as the guard marched beyond us, I let go.
Max pulled away from me quickly and rubbed his face. “Jesus Christ, Ellie! That hurt!”
“Sorry. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just chill out,” he said, as if he were cool as a cucumber, but his hand automatically shot up to his hairline, searching for hair to nervously twist around his fingers. Finding a bald scalp instead, he rubbed his hand over his head and blew out his breath.
“We could go to jail!” I whispered.
“Look at it this way. If we end up in jail tonight, at least we’ll have a warm meal and a bed to sleep in.”
“Your optimism is just . . .” I shrugged. “Fucked up.”
He chuckled. “Well, jail’s better than dead.”
I took a deep breath and calmed my frazzled nerves. A crewmember walked by and glanced at us. He stopped short and my panic started all over again.
“You two can come with me,” he said and waved us over.
I swallowed hard and was about to innocently ask what we had done wrong when he picked up my bag and said, “No need to make you wait in line. You look pretty uncomfortable. Do you need wheelchair service?”
I sighed with relief and said, “No, I’m okay with the crutches.”
“What happened to you guys?” he asked, curiosity taking over.
“We were in a car accident. Just before our wedding, too! Can you imagine? We almost canceled but thought, oh well, for better or worse, right?” I was back in the groove and found myself lying with ease.
We followed him up the gangplank and he took our tickets, barely glancing at the passports. He showed us to our room and set my suitcase on the bed.
“By the way, my name is Tim. If you need anything, let me know. Have a great trip!” He waved and departed, walking at a brisk, professional pace down the corridor.
We looked at each other and both smiled. We had breezed through. Now, it was time to gorge ourselves on the all-you-can-eat buffet.
31.
The steamy air slicked my skin with sweat. It wasn’t even 9:00 am yet, and it was already too hot to do anything. I sat in the hammock, rocking back and forth, looking out at the azure waves as they lapped against the white sand. This was paradise.
When the cruise ship docked in Roatán, the largest of the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras, we decided to take the opportunity to slip off the boat with a shopping expedition. The lush, tropical paradise wasn’t as well known as other islands of the Caribbean and cheaper by far. We decided to stay and rented a small bungalow on the beach where I had spent the last six months snorkeling, napping on the porch, and reading in the ocean breeze. It was the perfect place to hide and find peace.
Our ordeal with Hashimoto had left us with little. We considered ourselves lucky to still be alive. The crime boss had a weakness -- his pride. He could have killed us efficiently and quickly that afternoon in our hotel room in Montreal. Instead, he called us first. At our house, he had to lecture us before doing the deed then only hurt us before walking away, confident that he had succeeded. For his last mistake, he sent us the eye, a warning that gave us time to get ourselves out of the country. He wanted his victims to fear him, to know what was happening, that he was the one holding power over them. He wasn’t a stupid man, but his hubris once again had allowed us to escape.
I decided to go for a swim and walked down the front steps off our porch, pulling the knot that tied my sarong loose to let it drop to the ground. I adjusted my red bikini and dove into the warm tropical water, swimming out to the reef and back. My leg had healed well and felt strong now. The daily exercise I got swimming helped. I was toned and tanned, my body thriving on a diet of fresh fruit and fish. I looked better than I ever had.
I emerged from the water and wrung my hair out. The sand stuck to my bare feet as I walked across the strip of beach to our front steps. Our neighbor was sweeping the palm fronds that had fallen on her porch. Her ample bottom swayed with the movement of the broom, making her skirt swish about in swirling colors.
“Buenos días, señora!” I called out to her.
Her round face split in a grand smile as she answered in a long fluttering of Spanish. Over the past few months, I had picked up a few words and phrases in Spanish, but not nearly enough to understand what she was saying. I smiled and nodded, hoping I wasn’t agreeing to something unpleasant, then walked up the steps to my own front porch.
Max was lying in the hammock, sunglasses perched on his nose, a Barena beer already in his hand at this early hour.
“Hey,” I said and eased into the hammock next to him. He didn’t answer. The experience with Hashimoto haunted him. Guilt and the desire for revenge ate him from the inside. He had become quiet and sullen, not the smiling, good-natured Max whom I loved. His hair had grown back from being shaved and was now well past needing a cut. He wore a full, thick beard and looked puffy and out of shape. He drank too much, and he rarely touched me.
I reached out and pushed his sunglasses up. He yanked his head away and let them fall back into place, hiding his eyes from me.
“What are you doing?” he snapped.
“I just wanted to look at you.”
“Don’t.” He got up fast, sending the hammock into a swing that almost dumped me ass over teakettle onto the floor, and went into the house. I wildly flailed my feet to catch my balance, then sat for a minute, trying to decide if I should let him be or if I should follow him in. I decided to follow.
I found him sitting in a wooden chair in the living room flicking the large knife with which he had started obsessively playing recently. He twirled it between his fingers, dexterously flipping it back and forth. The TV was tuned to CBC News Montreal. He watched TV too much, and I felt bad I had disturbed him in one of the rare moments that he actually went outside.
The announcer, a pretty blonde in a boring beige suit, smiled at the camera. “In the political spectrum, Kendo Hashimoto has announced his intentions to run for Mayor of Montreal,” she said. “Having made his fortune importing and exporting goods between Japan and Canada, the business man is well known for his philanthropic philosophy.”
“Philanthropic businessman, my ass,” Max muttered under his breath and plunged the sharp dagger into the arm of the chair hard enough that the blade poked out the other side, going through the inch-thick wooden plank and cracking the entire length. His whole body tensed, his hand gripping the handle of the knife so tight I thought he’d break it. He leaned forward, interested in this new development.
“Hashimoto will be making a series of speeches throughout the city, even going as far as getting his hands dirty to help out building that new playground downtown.” She turned to the anchor on her right. “What a great guy!”
If she only knew what kind of “goods” he dealt in, she might not be quite so eager to praise him.
“Max.” I stood in front of him and put my fingers lightly on the hand with the knife. He looked up at me, the right eye boring into me with anger. The left eye, a perfect match in color, but not function, kept its glassy stare straight ahead.
“Let it go,” I said calmly, gently, hoping he would release the anger and accept our situation.
He narrowed his eyes, that gaze piercing me like the dagger through the arm of the chair, and pushed me aside as he got to his feet. “I can’t.”
We may have run far enough that Hashimoto didn’t pursue in person, but I could see that he would haunt us forever.
>
Max walked out the door. This time, I didn’t follow.
Two hours passed, and Max still hadn’t returned. I figured he had gone down to Eagle Ray’s, a bar in West End that sat at the end of a long pier perched on pillars out over the sea. He often went there and hung out with Carlos, a fat Honduraño taxi driver. They both had shady pasts that were better left on the mainland and often found themselves drinking beer and talking until late.
I started to fix myself lunch, figuring he wasn’t coming back anytime soon, when he barged through the door, a huge smile on his face. He had cut his hair and shaved his beard. Something in him had changed, and it was more than just a physical transformation. There was a light in his eye I hadn’t seen in a long time, not since that night in bed when he told me his plan to steal the painting from Hashimoto.
He leaned against the doorjamb, crossed his arms, and asked, “Can you make a detonator?”
“A detonator?” I thought about it for a second. “Yeah, probably. Why? Are you about to play a new Game?”
“No.” He shook his head and grinned. “More like a Beer Run.”
35.
Max explained what had happened to him, why he finally pulled himself out of his funk. When I told him to let it go, a white-hot anger had welled inside him. He was so mad, he confessed, that he wanted to hit me.
“I’m so sorry. I swore to you that I would never hit you, and I meant it. I’d rather die than treat you like that.“ As he recounted his tale, he apologized over and over.
“It’s okay. You didn’t.”
“But I almost did.” Instead, he left, heading down the beach in the direction of Eagle Ray’s, just like I suspected. However, halfway there, something made him stop. He sat on the beach, throwing pebbles into the water, and thought about the depths to which he had sunk. He realized how close he had come to turning into his father, a thought that scared him more than anything. At that moment, he felt a huge shift and vowed to turn himself around. He didn’t want to hide anymore. A plan started formulating in his head. He decided that if he could do this one thing, everything could go back to normal, life could go on again, and he could be himself once more.
He got up off the beach and, instead of going to the bar, went to the barbershop. He said that cutting his hair and shaving gave him a new feeling, helping him carry it over into his new outlook.
When Max came back to our bungalow, he placed a lump of gray substance on the table in front of me. It looked like modeling clay, and when I touched it, it had a similar feel.
“What is this?” I asked.
“C4”
I looked at it skeptically. “What the hell are you planning on doing with C4?”
“What do you think I’m going to do with it?”
“Obviously blow something up,” I said. “What I really meant to ask is what are you going to blow up?”
“Hashimoto.”
“Where did you get this, anyway?”
“From Carlos.”
I should have known it was from Carlos.
“How are you going to get a homemade bomb all the way to Montreal? Unless he’s coming to Roatán, which I highly doubt.”
“No, we’re going to Montreal.” He slapped two passports on the table. “I got these for us, too. Carlos can get anything.”
“Who am I this time?” I picked up my new passport and read the inside. I’m not sure when Max had gotten a suitable photo of me, but there I was, staring back from the page. “Velma Gronski. Nice.”
I thumbed through the other passport. “Arlo Dickens. Where did he get these names?”
Max shrugged. “He didn’t make them up. Those are real passports, just with our photos swapped out. At least I don’t have to shave my head this time.”
I laughed. “Well, Arlo, what are you planning, anyway?”
“I need you to make a detonator. Something really small.”
“How much C4 are you using?”
He held his hand up with his thumb and forefinger together. “About this size.”
“Is that enough to blow someone up?”
“Carlos said it would be about the same amount as in a hand grenade. We could add some shrapnel in it for impact.”
“I guess I could put something together like the detonator for a grenade.”
“It has to be small. Really small. If it’s too big, I won’t be able to hide it.”
“I don’t know if I can make it really small.” Now I had images of him stuffing a bomb in his bum. I wasn’t sure I liked that idea. I knew C4 was very stable on its own, but with a homemade detonator, it could blow us both to bits, as well as possibly causing fatal damage around us. “You’re not going to, um, you know, stick it where the sun don’t shine?”
He burst out laughing. “No. My ass is exit only. Could you make the detonator once we got to Montreal?”
“I could but what if it doesn’t work?”
“There’s enough C4 here if you want to try one out first.”
“Good. I’ll feel a lot better about this if I know how it will behave.”
Max’s plan was suicidal, but it beat moping around and avoiding each other. If it could bring him back, I was willing to try anything.
I spent the next two days working on the project. I won’t give away my bomb making secrets, but I came up with several different ideas from the few supplies I could scrounge up on such short notice, finally settling on one. It worked better than I could imagine.
The detonator was about the size of my fist. I pushed the C4 onto the two prongs at the top of the blasting cap and depressed the button. The fuse hissed, and I threw it as hard as I could out over the ocean. There was a five second delay, then a good-sized explosion. Although it could still do a fair amount of damage, it may not have been lethal out in the open. In an enclosed space like a car, it would do the trick.
We left our Bungalow around 10:00 in the morning and headed to the airport, a twenty-minute drive. Carlos drove us in his taxi, speeding along the curves as the tropical vegetation whipped by. He dropped us off at the entrance, and we gave a cheerful wave as he left us on the curb. We turned and entered the terminal.
I was a bundle of nerves, not sure how this was going to play out. I was afraid we’d be caught before we even had the chance to execute our plan.
The tiny airport had only two gates, and we quickly found ourselves through the checkpoint. The Honduran customs officials didn’t pay too much attention to us, and, after waiting in the steamy gate area for almost two hours, we boarded the plane without incident.
The layover in Houston, however, was a different story. Max was pulled out of line almost immediately. They took him to a small room off the main entry and questioned him for 45 minutes. They also did a full body search. They took his luggage and emptied it, pawing through everything he had. They could tell there was something suspicious about him, they could see the criminal mind behind his easy-going smile, but none of them could put a finger on it. Max just grinned as they searched. He found the whole thing amusing. Finally, not finding anything of consequence, they let him go, just in time to make the plane.
It was nearly midnight when we arrived in Montreal. Raphael was waiting for us at the disembarkation gate, wearing a pair of green plaid pants and a long sleeved, white thermal shirt with a black John Lennon tee-shirt over it. He had shaved his goatee and grown his hair out long, wearing it pulled back in a ponytail. A fashionable pair of glasses sat perched on his nose. I almost didn’t recognize him. We hugged, the three of us happy to be reunited.
Raphael was the only person we could trust. I didn't know how much our gang had been compromised, but I did know we could completely bank on him. He had missed the entire incident and was out of any suspicious circles. Even if he had been there in the heat of it all, we could still place our confidence in him no matter what. When we decided to come back, Max called him and asked if he could help us out. He agreed without hesitation.
“Shit, after I heard what happene
d to you guys, I thought I’d never see you again,” he said. We hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to him before we left. He was still in California, and we didn’t have time to hang around. Max had called him shortly after we settled into our new place in Roatán, but he didn’t dare talk long, paranoid that we could be traced. He explained the situation, and Raphael was relieved to hear from us, having heard rumors that left him worried sick.
“Thanks for picking us up. It’s good to see you,” Max said. He put his arm around Raphael’s shoulders, and we walked out to the parking lot together, filling each other in on the past six months.
“When did you start wearing glasses?” I asked.
“Oh, about two months ago.” He touched the frames self-consciously. “Do you like them?”
“Yeah, they fit your face really well.” I wasn’t saying it to be nice; I meant it. He looked good in them.
“Thanks. My girlfriend picked them out,” he said, pleased at my compliment and happy he could slide that news into the conversation.
“Girlfriend? You mean a real one?” I was surprised.
“Yeah. She’s a lawyer.”
“How did you meet a lawyer?”
“How do you think I met a lawyer? I got in a little trouble just after you guys left. I hired a defense attorney. She got me off and, well, I felt like I needed to return the favor.” He smirked, that naughty smile appearing on his lips, then said, “Do you want to see a picture?”
He took a photo from his wallet and handed it to me. She was classically beautiful, elegant in a gray suit with blonde hair pulled up in a French twist; completely different from the bimbos he usually brought home.
“What’s her name?”
“Anaïs.” He smiled in a way that I could tell he actually liked her, not just lusted after her.
When we arrived at Raphael’s apartment, he grabbed a plastic shopping bag from the black granite countertop and handed it to me. His apartment was elegant with modern décor and bold colors. It was comfortable, too, not just fashionable.
Hashimoto Blues Page 22