by J. A. Jance
Brian laughed, too. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll be glad to pass it along. When I do, Abernathy will go straight up and turn left. A ripple in the force and all that. He’s not going to like it.”
“Good,” Alex Mumford said. “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:45 p.m.
88º Fahrenheit
Ginny Torres’s heart was light as she wheeled her grocery-laden shopping cart through Safeway while her three-year-old son, Pepe, babbled happily if unintelligibly in the child’s seat. It was close to naptime, but so far he hadn’t hit the wall.
Ginny generally hated Sundays. There was always more than she could do in one day—laundry, household chores, grocery shopping. She worked five days a week at the AOL call center and one day a week at a hair-care kiosk at Park Place Mall. Not that she wasn’t glad to have both jobs. She was.
They had been living in Safford and doing all right—up until Felix, her husband, had been laid off from his well-paying job with Phelps Dodge. That had come as a big shock to the system. In the end, they’d had no choice but to come limping back home to Tucson, where they were able to live not quite rent-free in one of Felix’s parents’ rentals.
In the process, Ginny had made the leap from stay-at-home mom to major breadwinner. Her call-center job didn’t pay exceptionally high wages, but it did come with medical benefits. With a toddler to worry about, that was huge. Felix, on the other hand, found occasional construction and yard-work jobs. When he wasn’t working one of those, he took care of Pepe. On those occasions when both he and Ginny had to work, Felix’s mother looked after Pepe. That way, at least Ginny and Felix didn’t have to worry about paying for child care.
In other words, things could have been a lot worse, but Ginny did find herself wishing sometimes that Felix didn’t have such an aversion to doing housework—women’s work, as he liked to call it. He could be home all day without seeing any need to pick up the vacuum cleaner, and he could step over or around the mounds of dirty clothes out in the garage without once taking it on himself to start a load of laundry. Felix never fussed when it was time to go to the store for beer, but going to the store for groceries? Never. Grocery shopping was something else that had to wait for Ginny’s precious “day off.”
Today, though, with the exception of two items, she was picking up staples only—laundry detergent, dog food, and canned goods—things that could sit in an overheated car for several hours without coming to grief, because today, after her shopping excursion, she and Pepe weren’t going straight home.
Pepe’s third birthday was on Monday, but they were celebrating it today with tamales and tacos at Felix’s folks’ place. All the cousins would be there for an afternoon of fun in the pool. All Ginny and Pepe had to do was to show up, bringing along the birthday cake and ice cream—those were the only perishables in the cart. That cake was appropriately decorated with tiny plastic replicas of Wall-E and Eva and the ice cream was Pepe’s favorite, all chocolate all the time.
Ginny was looking forward to the party. Her mother-in-law, Amelia, would be in her element, spoiling her husband, her sons, and her grandkids. The children would be busy splashing around in the pool, the men would be out on the patio drinking beer, and the sisters-in-law would sit around the kitchen table drinking iced tea and griping about their husbands, all of whom were cut from the same cloth. To a man, all five of Amelia Torres’s sons were utterly incapable of lifting a finger around the house.
At the checkout stand, the cashier rang up the cake and then smiled at Pepe. “Whose birthday?” she asked.
“Mine!” he announced proudly, thumping his chest.
“And how old are you?” The cashier’s name tag said “Helen.”
It took some maneuvering on his part, but eventually Pepe managed to hold up three fingers.
“Three, really?” Helen asked.
Ginny and Pepe nodded in unison.
“Enjoy him,” Helen said. “They grow up so quickly. Do you need any help out with these?”
On Sunday afternoons, the store wasn’t normally that crowded, but today the open checkout stands all had lines, and the carryout clerks were totally occupied.
“No, thanks,” Ginny said. “I can manage. Don’t bag the cake, but double-bag the ice cream. Otherwise it might melt before we make it to Grandma’s house.”
A few minutes later, Ginny pushed the heavy cart out through the automatic sliding doors. The early-afternoon June heat was like a physical assault. It burned into her face and skin, and she was glad that the interior of her four-year-old and fully paid for Honda came with cloth seats instead of leather. The cloth might be harder to keep clean, especially when something sweet got spilled on it, but at least it didn’t fry your bare skin when you climbed inside.
Pepe was still blabbing away as Ginny angled the shopping cart through the busy parking lot. She had hoped that she would manage to convince him to take a nap before the party, but it was beginning to look as though that wasn’t in the cards.
As Ginny neared the Accord, she pressed the button on the remote. As close as she had to be before the doors unlocked, Ginny was pretty sure she needed to put in a new battery in her remote.
The parking lot was spacious. Even on this busy Sunday afternoon there were still plenty of open stalls, but a dust-covered minivan had parked close enough to her car that both tires were on her side of the designated parking lines. Creep, she thought.
With Pepe still in the cart, Ginny carefully loaded the groceries into the trunk, making sure the cake was properly wedged into a spot where it couldn’t possibly come to grief. The ice cream she set aside to put in the front seat along with her purse in hopes the AC could maybe help keep it from melting before she made it to her in-laws’ place on the far side of I-10. Pepe unfortunately took exception to her plan. He wanted to keep the cake with him, and he launched himself into a nap-deprived temper tantrum.
Once the groceries were loaded, Ginny lifted her son out of the car and then wrestled him, screeching at the top of his lungs, into his booster seat. With him screaming and kicking, Ginny was grateful that this car seat was a lot easier to operate than the backward-facing ones they had used when Pepe was younger. Then, with him properly belted but still howling, Ginny hurried to return the grocery cart to the cart collection point three cars away.
Even at the end of the aisle Ginny could still hear Pepe’s full-fledged screeching. Returning to her vehicle, she edged between the poorly parked minivan and her Honda. She opened the door and prepared to put her purse and the ice cream on the front passenger seat. When she tried to do so, however, she was astonished to see a man, a stranger, sitting there in the passenger seat. Not only was he there, he was holding a gun.
“Don’t make a sound,” he growled at her. “If you do, your baby dies.”
Ginny’s breath caught in her throat. A charge that seemed like electricity shot through her body. Her fingertips tingled. The car keys dropped from her suddenly clumsy hands. The key fob fell to the floorboard inside the car. Her purse and the bagged ice cream landed with a splat on the pavement next to the car.
“Who are you?” she demanded when she was able to speak. “What do you want? What are you doing in my car?”
“Open the door of the car next to you,” he said, pointing at the minivan. “There’s a roll-aboard suitcase on the front seat. Put that in the backseat of this car. Then close that one and get in this one. Don’t call to anyone. Don’t make any fuss or your baby dies.”
Ginny looked back over her shoulder at the grubby silver minivan. It looked innocuous enough—like a perfectly normal car. Surely this wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.
“Did you hear me?” the man barked. “Do it now. Move.”
Ginny looked at Pepe, who, still screaming in full meltdown mode, had yet to notice the stranger’s presence. With her whole body quaking, Ginny backed away from the Honda and pulled open the passenge
r-side door of the minivan.
The car was filthy inside and out. The passenger-side floorboard was full of trash—empty fast food and drink containers. But the roll-aboard bag was there on the seat, just as the man had said it would be. It was heavier than Ginny expected, but she hefted it out and lugged it over to the back door of her Honda. As she shoved it inside, she looked around desperately, hoping someone was aware of what was happening, but she saw no one—no one at all. The minivan was tall enough that it obscured her movements from the view of anyone coming and going through the store’s front entrance.
She started to reach down to retrieve her fallen purse and the ice cream. Then she stopped. If she left those items there, maybe whoever found them would be smart enough to figure out that something bad had happened. Then again, maybe whoever saw her purse sitting there on the ground might just steal it for themselves.
Trying to control her trembling body, Ginny got back into the car. The man sitting beside her was middle-aged, pudgy, and balding. There was a long scabby cut that ran from his eyebrow to his cheek, as though he had been in a fight of some kind. That was also when she noticed, for the first time, that the hand that held the gun was actually in a sling. One of his arms, the right one, was hurt and bandaged. Maybe that was why he had wanted help in moving that suitcase. Or maybe he thought that dragging luggage around a grocery-store parking lot might attract too much unwanted attention.
Ginny groped around on the floorboard and finally managed to find the keys she had dropped earlier. With her hand still trembling, she picked them up. It took several tries before she was able to insert the key in the ignition. When the Accord’s engine turned over, the AC fans came on full-blast, spewing hot air into the vehicle. Without putting the car in gear, she looked back at Pepe.
“It’s okay,” she said to her hysterical son as soothingly as she could manage, but her voice felt brittle, as if it might shatter into a million pieces. “We’ll be okay. Hush now.”
But Pepe didn’t listen and he didn’t hush. He kept right on howling. He had no idea that they were in danger. All he wanted was his cake.
Ginny turned to the man. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“Don’t talk, drive,” he ordered. “Get us out of here.”
Ginny was an ordinary young woman—a young mother. This seemed impossible. Surely she and Pepe couldn’t be kidnapped by an armed assailant in broad daylight right in the middle of Tucson! But clearly the unthinkable—the impossible—had happened, was happening. Ginny also knew that if called upon to do so, she would fight for Pepe’s life with her last dying breath. That very real possibility forced her to try to calm herself. She held the burning steering wheel with both hands and used the pain on her palms to help bring her mind into focus. Her life depended on it; so did Pepe’s.
She strapped her own seat belt in place. As she did so she remembered that weeks earlier someone had sent her an e-mail about this very thing. Usually, she discarded those Internet chain letters without even looking at them. For some reason, she had read that one all the way through, and the advice had stayed with her.
The message had said that if you were ever carjacked, you should smash your vehicle into something stationary and then get out and run like hell. The idea was that the deploying air bags would probably knock the weapon out of the assailant’s hands, temporarily disarming him. Even if he ended up firing at you as you ran away, not that many people could shoot weapons well enough to hit a moving target.
But if I jump out and run away, she thought, what about Pepe in the backseat? He was strapped into his booster. That was something Ginny insisted on. In her vehicle, not wearing seat belts wasn’t an option. And what if Pepe’s belt didn’t hold when she deliberately wrecked the car? What if it malfunctioned? What if he came loose and went smashing through the windshield? Or what if he was left alone in the car with an armed and dangerous criminal? All those ideas raced through her mind at once like waves of heat rising off the pavement.
Ginny took a deep breath and turned toward the man with the gun. “Where do you want to go?” she asked, straining to be heard over the noise of Pepe’s overwrought protestations.
“Mexico,” he said.
“Where in Mexico?” she asked. “Nogales? Agua Prieta?”
“I don’t care. Just get me across the border.”
The car parked directly in front of Ginny’s Honda, an SUV, pulled out of its spot. Relieved, Ginny followed it out. That way she didn’t have to back up and show the killer that she had left her bag of ice cream and her purse sitting there on the ground in plain sight.
If the guy wanted to go to Mexico, Ginny knew she had another problem. Her driver’s license was in the purse along with her cell phone. So was her passport, and Pepe’s, too. She and Felix had gotten Pepe a passport when Grandpa and Grandma Torres had taken everyone—kids and grandkids included—with them on a Mexican cruise in honor of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Since then, Ginny had discovered that racial profiling did happen. In southern Arizona, if you looked Hispanic, it was always a good idea to have plenty of government-issue ID available, especially if you happened to get stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint.
But this time, when she reached the checkpoints, she wouldn’t have ID of any kind. What would this man do then?
Suddenly she made the connection. It had been all over the news when she turned on her TV earlier that morning. Someone had killed four people out on the reservation last night. Was this the same man? If it was, this guy wasn’t just desperate. He was a stone-cold killer who probably wouldn’t think twice about taking another life—or two.
Ginny took a deep breath and glanced in the rearview mirror.
Behind her she saw a woman hustle up to one of the carryout boys. She was waving her arms and gesturing, pointing first in the direction of Ginny’s Accord and then back to the place where Ginny’s purse and her bag of melting ice cream sat abandoned on the burning pavement.
For one giddy moment, Ginny allowed herself to hope that help was on the way, but that moment of respite was short-lived. She knew it would take time for help to get there. She needed to stall long enough for that to happen.
“I need gas,” she said.
That was true. She had less than half a tank, and there was a gas station right there in the corner of the parking lot. She also had no money and no credit card, but maybe she could get inside long enough to ask for help.
“We’ll get gas later,” the man said, waggling the gun in her direction. “Get us out of here now. Go that way.” He pointed southbound on Campbell.
Ginny drove as far as the exit onto Campbell and signaled to turn left. Within a couple of blocks, Pepe finally finished crying himself out and fell quiet. It was his usual nap time. Tired from shopping and from crying, and still blissfully unaware of the danger they were in, he seemed to be falling asleep. Mentally Ginny uttered a prayer of thanksgiving. The sudden silence gave her a chance to concentrate on what she was doing and to get herself under control.
She tried desperately to remember everything she had ever heard or seen about hostage situations on television and in the movies. Wasn’t she supposed to get the guy talking? Isn’t that what hostage negotiators always did—try to establish a line of communication?
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
The gunman shrugged and didn’t answer.
“If you’ll let Pepe and me out somewhere, you can have the car,” she said. “We won’t tell anybody. Just let us go. Please.”
She knew even as she said the words that this was a futile hope. He would never let them go. She understood full well there was only one way this nightmare would end, and it would be with Ginny and Pepe dead. She would never see Felix again. Never have a chance to tell him good-bye. And she wouldn’t live long enough to see Pepe go off to kindergarten, or graduate from high school, either. Her eyes filled with hot tears, but she blinked them back.
“Don’t talk,
” he said. “Just drive.”
Since there was nothing else to do, Ginny drove. She forced herself not to look in the rearview mirror. If that woman in the parking lot had noticed something amiss and had summoned help—if by some miracle someone was following them—she didn’t want to risk doing anything that might warn the guy that help was on the way. And if there wasn’t anybody back there coming to help? Then it didn’t matter anyway.
“What happened to your arm?” she asked.
He glanced down at his injured hand. Ginny looked, too.
“Dog bit me,” he said.
That was all he said. He didn’t explain which dog had bitten him or why, and Ginny decided not to ask for any further clarification on that score.
“Why did you choose me?” she asked finally.
“I drove around until I found a car with a car seat in it,” he said. “I figured while you were dealing with the baby it would be easy for me to get in your car. And it was.”
Crap, Ginny Torres thought. They told you that you should always put your baby in a car seat. That was supposed to make it safer. Not this time.
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:48 p.m.
88º Fahrenheit
Now that Annie and Amy were six, they were old enough that Kath Fellows was willing to risk leaving them alone for an hour or so at a time. On this particular Sunday afternoon she knew she’d be in and out of the neighborhood grocery store in far less time than that. So after giving the girls a pep talk and promising to bring them both Twinkies if they were very good, she left them in the living room with orders to stay there watching a video until she came back.
Kath was at the checkout line and just signing the credit-card authorization screen when one of the carryout boys came charging into the store yelling, “Call nine-one-one.”
“Why?” the manager called back. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s an old lady outside who said she thinks a woman and her baby were just abducted at gunpoint, from right here in the parking lot.”