The Girl in the Glass Box: A Jack Swyteck Novel

by James Grippando

  “We have a better plan, Jack.”

  “How is it better?”

  “Asylum in the United States is a lost cause. I heard it in your voice. Shit, Jack. You sounded more optimistic about my chances on death row even after they shaved my head and served me a last meal.”

  He had a point. “Canada is not the answer.”

  “It’s the best shot she’s got. We checked this out. I know about that treaty you mentioned. It only applies if you enter Canada legally.”

  Jack’s response caught in his throat. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I think you get it,” said Theo.

  “Theo, do not get involved in an illegal border crossing. Julia will end up deported to El Salvador, and if you’re not careful, you could be charged with human trafficking.”

  “Don’t worry about that. We found a loophole.”

  Jack groaned. “Oh, my God, Theo. You found a loophole in an immigration treaty? Do you have any idea how complicated immigration law is? This is not the time to be playing jailhouse lawyer.”

  “Fuck you, Jack.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”

  “Yeah, you did. You just shit all over this before you even know what it’s about. I gotta get back in the car. If you want to learn something, ask any immigration lawyer about Roxham Road.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I’ll call you when we get there. If I can figure out how to use my phone. It’s pretty fucking complicated.”

  He hung up. Jack closed the flip phone and laid it on the bar.

  “Did that go as bad as it sounded?” asked Cy.

  “Worse,” said Jack. “I think we’ve both been fired.”

  Chapter 64

  It was Jorge’s first trip to Georgia. He was happy to blow right through it.

  Around midnight he’d checked the MDPD website and noticed the update on the BOLO. The words probable cause to arrest appeared in bold red letters above his photograph. Apparently, the cops weren’t buying his suggestion that Rosa had died of an accidental drug overdose. He’d overstayed his welcome in Miami, and it was time to move on. A check of the GPS tracking app—Thank you, Rosa—had told him that Julia, too, had taken to the highway. Jorge had seen it as no mere coincidence. It was a sign. No, not a sign. A signal—from her to him.

  Julia wanted him to follow her.

  Atlanta was behind him, and Jorge was heading northeast on I-85 toward Charlotte. He checked the app on his phone again. The transmitter in Beatriz’s backpack put them in Virginia on I-77 northbound. They were a good two hours ahead of him, but, like him, Julia was minding the speed limit to avoid getting stopped by a state trooper. She wasn’t pulling away from him, and as long as the battery lasted, he’d know exactly where she was. A dog tracker was something he should have purchased years earlier. A nice accessory to the choke chain.

  Jorge exited the interstate and made a quick stop for gas. A dozen other cars were refueling ahead of him, the black dispensing hoses hanging from the metal canopy like vines in a Salvadoran jungle. Jorge pulled into the last open slot and jumped out. The morning sun had dissolved into overcast skies somewhere north of Atlanta, and he’d been inside the car since Florida, so the late-winter chill of North Carolina was a shock. He would need to buy a coat if Julia kept tracking north.

  The pump display screen told him to pay in advance. He checked his wallet. Paying with Rosa’s credit card would leave a digital footprint for MDPD to follow. A terrible idea. He used another stolen card.

  His thoughts churned to the sound of gasoline flowing into the tank. He wondered if Julia and Beatriz were alone. They’d made the trip from El Salvador to Miami that way, just the two of them, but that wasn’t the Julia he knew. Life with Julia was more like a constant game of whack-a-mole: take out Hugo, the black guy pops up.

  It was easy enough to confirm his suspicions. Jorge got the number from directory assistance and dialed Cy’s Place. The man who answered sounded about ninety.

  “Cy speaking.”

  “Is Theo there?”

  “No,” the old man said. “He ain’t here today.”

  Just as Jorge had suspected. “When will he be back?”

  “Oh, a couple days, I would think. He didn’t say exactly. Try his cell.”

  “What’s that number?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Just a friend.”

  “Yeah? Well, if you was a friend, you’d have his cell.”

  “Blow me, old man,” he said, and ended the call.

  The pump clicked off and the gas stopped flowing. Jorge didn’t wait for the receipt to print. He finished up quickly, climbed behind the wheel, and checked the tracking app. Julia was making better time, passing Roanoke already. Theo must have been driving. No way would Julia risk a stop for speeding.

  Jorge started the engine and steered back onto the interstate. He had some serious catching up to do.

  Jack submitted his closing argument in written form to Judge Kelly’s chambers and joined Andie and Righley for dinner at the pancake house near the airport. Righley was on a breakfast-for-dinner kick, which suited Jack just fine. His flight to Albany didn’t leave until 7:09 p.m., which would put him at his motel in Plattsburgh sometime after midnight.

  “What the heck is in Plattsburgh?” asked Andie.

  Jack had taken Theo’s advice, called a friend who was a “real” immigration lawyer, and learned all about Roxham Road. It made him only more worried for his client and her daughter. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about Theo, but he knew that wasn’t true. Jack was on a mission to save Theo from himself.

  “It’s kind of a cool place,” said Jack. “Before the Civil War, it was the last stop on the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves. There was a pathway straight into Canada. The very end of that path is now called Roxham Road.”

  Andie smeared a pad of butter on Righley’s pancake. “That’s an interesting history lesson, but I don’t see why you have to go there.”

  Jack and Andie had been in this situation before, where the FBI agent couldn’t tell the criminal defense lawyer what she was working on, or the lawyer couldn’t tell the law enforcement officer what he was up to. It required a high level of trust, even more than most marriages, but it was “the deal” that made their relationship work.

  “You’re not going to tell me why, are you?” she asked.

  Jack smiled flatly and shook his head.

  Andie cut her daughter’s pancakes into bite-size squares. “Righley?”

  “What, Mommy?”

  “Never marry a lawyer.” She cut her eyes at Jack and added, “Or an FBI agent.”

  Chapter 65

  Jack preferred March in Miami, but the beauty of an old red barn on a snow-covered pasture at sunrise could not be denied.

  A barn with a tin roof and double silos was all there was at the south end of Roxham Road, which jutted out of North Star Road to form an inverted T. The pavement stretched north for about a half mile and then just stopped for no readily apparent reason. One step beyond was Canada.

  Jack parked his rental car at the end of the road. He counted five taxis and a shuttle van that had arrived before him. According to his immigration lawyer friend in Miami, a cluster of cabs was part of a typical morning on Roxham Road. Migrants from Central America, the Caribbean, Nigeria, Syria, and elsewhere found their way to Clinton County by overnight bus. They came from Philadelphia, New Jersey, Chicago, and other American cities. Taxis waited for them at the gas station in Plattsburgh, which also served as the town’s bus station. The journey for some spanned oceans and continents, and the final leg was a thirty-minute cab ride to Roxham Road, for which they might get tagged with a three-hundred-dollar fare—one final rip-off before they set foot on Canadian soil.

  Jack got out of the car and zipped his jacket. The morning wasn’t as cold as he’d expected, but it was too cold and damp to be wheeling an overpacked suitcase
across icy pavement, which was what a Haitian mother and her three children were doing right in front of him. They joined about a dozen other migrants who were gathering at the end of Roxham Road, less than ten yards from the imaginary line that separated one country from another. Up the small hill, just beyond a little knee-high sign that read united states on one side and canada on the other, was a cluster of white tents.

  The border between Canada and the lower forty-eight states stretches 3,987 miles, most of it unpatrolled. The official border crossing nearest to Roxham Road was a few miles east at Champlain. The white tents staffed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were the Canadian government’s response to a dramatic rise in illegal crossings at Roxham Road, from a handful each month to thousands. When Jack first heard about the tents and the RCMP response to the illegal crossings, the seeming absurdity of it reminded him of the scene in the classic Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles, in which a tollbooth springs up out of nowhere in the Old West, and cowboys on horseback must stop in the middle of a chase, wait in line, and search their bags for correct change.

  A sentry wearing the RCMP uniform and a black Kevlar vest emerged from one of the tents and, from the Canadian side of a temporary crowd-control fence, addressed the forlorn group of migrants across the border.

  “This is not a legal point of entry,” she said in a loud voice. “This is an illegal point. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, we know,” they answered in a mix of accents—Nigerian, Mexican, and everything in between.

  The sentry’s morning announcement continued. “Does anyone have a valid visa from the United States?”

  Most nodded and said they did; others were silent, perhaps because they didn’t understand English.

  The sentry continued, “Are you aware that as soon as you cross this border, your status in the United States is nullified and there is no guarantee that you will receive asylum in Canada?”

  “Yes, yes,” they answered in desperate voices. “We want to come in.”

  The immigration drama played out as Jack had been told it would. The sentry warned all of the migrants, as she warned hundreds of others every week, that they would be immediately arrested upon crossing at this illegal point. Therein was the loophole that Theo had discovered by surfing the Internet, the same way these people had found it. If they crossed at a legal point of entry, a treaty between the United States and Canada required the RCMP to return them to the States, where they would be immediately deported to their home country. But if they crossed at an illegal point of entry, like Roxham Road, the treaty didn’t apply. They could apply for asylum in Canada.

  These migrants wanted to be arrested at the illegal point of entry.

  For Jack, it made about as much sense as the other immigration hoops his client had jumped through. Or the tollbooth in the Mel Brooks movie.

  “What are you doing here, pal?” a man asked him.

  Jack turned. He was still on U.S. soil, and he was looking into the eyes of a U.S. immigration officer.

  “Is this not the line for Maple Leaf tickets?” asked Jack.

  “Funny,” the officer said without humor.

  One of the Syrian migrants was fed up with waiting. He wheeled his suitcase across the thirty feet of frozen no-man’s-land between the end of Roxham Road and the white immigration tents, stepped past the sentry at the temporary gate, and surrendered himself to the RCMP. As he disappeared into the tent for processing, others followed.

  “You with the media?” the U.S. border patrol officer asked Jack.

  He seemed friendly enough. Jack decided to pick his brain. “No, I’m not media. But do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “You’re border patrol, but you just stand here and watch. I don’t get it.”

  “I can’t stop anybody from leaving the U.S. if they want to leave. Unless they’re here unlawfully.”

  Unless they’re here unlawfully. “So that’s why the sentry warns them that their U.S. visa will be nullified? These people are in the U.S. lawfully?”

  “Most of them.”

  “What if they’re illegal?” asked Jack. “You can arrest them?”

  “We can, and we do. Clinton County jail is full of undocumented migrants we picked up on their way to Roxham Road.”

  Undocumented—like Julia and Beatriz. “Got it,” said Jack. “Have a good day.”

  Jack went back to his rental car, started the engine, and blasted the heat while speed-dialing Theo’s cell. His friend answered, and Jack told him where he was.

  “Cool. We spent the night in Plattsburgh and were just going down to the breakfast buffet. Free and all you can eat. My kind of place. We’ll be right where you are in about an hour.”

  “Just stay where you are until I get there.”

  “Why?”

  “I looked into that loophole you found in the immigration treaty.”

  “It works, right?”

  “Sort of,” said Jack. “But there’s a really nasty footnote.”

  Chapter 66

  Jorge didn’t reach Plattsburgh until dawn.

  He’d been losing ground since Pennsylvania, where he just couldn’t drive any farther without sleep and had to pull over for a nap. Julia had the advantage of being able to split the driving time with Theo, coupled with Theo’s lack of concern for the speed limit when he was behind the wheel. By the time Jorge woke from his roadside slumber, he’d fallen at least six hours behind them. And he could see where they were headed: Canada. If he didn’t catch them before they crossed the border, Julia would be out of his grasp forever. Jorge was a Salvadoran first and a Miamian second. If for climate reasons only, “Canadian” landed somewhere in the bottom third of his personal comfort zone.

  An orange sliver of the morning sun rose over the snowy hilltop. Swirling blue lights appeared in his rearview mirror.

  “Puchica!” he shouted, pounding the steering wheel with his fist.

  The drive from Miami to Plattsburgh via Atlanta was over eighteen hundred miles. Jorge had gone the entire distance without being stopped by the cops—until he reached Plattsburgh and its twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limits. Welcome to small-town U.S.A.

  Jorge chose not to run for it; where would he go? He pulled off to the side of the road, the snow crunching beneath the tires until he came to a stop. The Clinton County squad car pulled up behind him, beacons flashing. Jorge left the motor running and waited.

  This was not going to end well. Jorge fully understood that. A local cop. A Salvadoran driver. A stolen Florida tag. A BOLO issued in his name.

  Jorge reached inside the console for his pistol and placed it between his thighs. He watched through the rearview mirror and considered his options. His only good one depended on the cop getting out of the car. If the cop waited for backup, Jorge was in trouble.

  “Get out of the car,” he said under his breath in Spanish, willing it to happen, staring into the rearview mirror.

  A car passed heading in the opposite direction, but Jorge’s gaze remained fixed on the squad car in the mirror. The driver’s door opened, and Jorge’s heart raced. The cop stepped out of the car, checked for traffic, and started walking toward Jorge’s vehicle.

  “That’s it, you dumb fuck.”

  Experience had taught Jorge that you didn’t wait for the cop to get all the way to the driver’s-side window. An alert officer was way too on guard at that point. A seventeen-year-old gangbanger in Soyapango had educated Jorge on the proper technique when he was just fourteen. Jorge was riding in the passenger seat. The older boy—a kid named Pablo who’d eventually ended up facedown in a cane field with a machete in the back of his head—had walked Jorge through it, step by step.

  You watch in the side mirror until he reaches the taillight.

  Then what?

  Then you make your move.

  What do you want me to do?

  Lean forward and put your head between your knees like you’re trying to suck your own dick. B
ecause bullets will fly.

  Jorge flung the door open with his left hand, rolled out of his seat to the ground, keeping much lower than the cop’s anticipated line of fire, turning his body as he swung the semiautomatic pistol around and squeezed off round after round after round—pop, pop, pop!

  The cop dropped to the cold pavement like a sack of concrete. He didn’t move.

  Jorge leaped to his feet and checked him out. Eyes open. No pulse. Two slugs to the chest, but the kill shot was probably the messy one to the forehead with the angled exit wound that had blown the hat right off his head. Jorge took the dead officer’s weapon and left him where he lay. Only one car had passed in the five minutes he’d been there, but the next one could come any second. He jumped back in the car, put the car in drive, and hit the gas. The tires spun in the snow, and the car jerked to the right, deeper into the pile of slop left behind by snowplows. He tried backing up and then rocking it forward, but driving in the snow was not something he’d learned in El Salvador, and the tires only sank deeper. At this rate, he’d be lucky to get out by spring. His car was worthless, and walking all the way into town would have been just plain stupid, which left only one alternative.

  He jumped out of the car, grabbed the keys from the dead cop, and climbed into the Clinton County Sheriff’s squad car. The engine started. He had no idea how to turn off the flashing beacons, so he left them on, nearly driving over the cop’s body as he pulled onto the highway and headed toward town.

  Jorge glanced in the mirror and, as the mess he’d left behind got smaller, he knew his problems had just grown exponentially. A dead cop and a stolen squad car were a death sentence anywhere, from San Salvador to Plattsburgh. Law enforcement and immigration would soon be all over him, and there was only one way out of this alive.

  He checked the tracking app on his phone. Beatriz was at the Plattsburgh Inn, just two miles away.

  Jorge needed a hostage. And he knew exactly where to get one.