Three Marys

by Glenn Cooper

  ‘Do you think they are? Do you think they’re miracle babies?’

  There was a box of tissues in the center console, left there by the last person who rented the RV. He pulled a few out and handed them over.

  ‘I really don’t know. But hey, some people say that all babies are miracles.’

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Do you say that too?’

  He deflected the question with a joke. ‘Hell, Sue, I just think it’s a miracle I’ve been able to avoid having any of my own.’

  They were flying directly into a setting sun that was slowly sinking into the horizon, turning the desert sky shades of pastel.

  ‘Mr Anning,’ Carling said, ‘they’re telling me they’re still on State Road 62 heading west, about ten miles from the New Mexico border.’

  ‘She’s from Santa Fe,’ Anning grumbled. ‘Maybe she’s got people there she thinks are going to help her. How long till we’re over them?’

  ‘Less than five minutes,’ the pilot said. ‘Clay, if you could get the pursuit vehicle to tap its brakes every so often, we can make them out by their brake lights.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ Carling said.

  Anning grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned the road. In a minute, he declared that he thought he could see flashing red brake lights. In another minute, he was more certain, and a minute later, Carling confirmed the sighting with his naked eyes.

  ‘That’s them for sure,’ he said.

  ‘I see the RV,’ Anning said. ‘I see the son-of-a-bitch.’

  ‘We’ll be over it in sixty seconds,’ the pilot said. ‘What altitude do you want?’

  ‘Low,’ Anning said. ‘I want you to get their attention.’

  ‘Then what?’ the pilot asked.

  ‘Get ahead of them and get them to stop.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Land the damn chopper on the road if you need to.’

  ‘Mr Anning, if I do that without declaring an emergency then I could lose my pilot’s license.’

  ‘Then declare a goddamn emergency if you get caught. You work for me. Remember that. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I copy. Descending to a hundred feet. There they are, right in front of us.’

  The roar of the helicopter engines was so loud that Cal nearly froze at the wheel. He instinctively let up on the gas as the chopper passed overhead and it filled the big windshield as it passed over, heading west.

  Sue recognized the distinctive red and white markings. It was going to be her medevac vehicle at the ranch in case any of the girls needed it during labor.

  ‘That’s Anning’s,’ she said.

  ‘I guess we know why those guys were following us,’ Cal said.

  The sudden roar had scared the girls and babies something fierce.

  ‘Why won’t he leave us alone?’ Sue said.

  ‘Guys like him don’t let go easily,’ Cal said, checking his position on the GPS map. He looked down for only a couple of seconds. When he looked up again he saw the helicopter setting down about half a mile ahead.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ he said. ‘Girls, do you have your seat belts on?’

  Mary fastened hers and the Marias followed her example. All of them held their sons tightly to their chests. Cal heard Maria Mollo praying in Spanish. Mary Riordan, always so tough, began to cry.

  Anning turned to Carling and said, ‘Get out there and wave at them to halt. Use your rifle to make them stop.’

  ‘You’re not asking me to fire on them, are you?’

  ‘I am not. We can’t risk hurting the babies. Just scare them to a stop.’

  Cal and Sue saw a man on the road standing in front of the chopper. He had a rifle.

  ‘Oh God, Cal.’

  ‘I’m not going to stop,’ he said.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘This. Hang on. Girls, duck down!’

  Mary Riordan reached over to the opposite bench seat and pushed her friends’ heads down.

  The median strip was level with the road and flat as everything else around them. At the last, safe moment Cal slowed a little to keep control of the bus then steered left onto the median, bypassing the helicopter and rejoining the highway to the west. The detectives’ car slowed and stopped.

  ‘Shit, Carling’s standing there with a fucking gun,’ the driver said. ‘This job is ridiculous, man. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.’

  With that, he did a slow U-turn on the median strip and took the highway back east.

  Carling just shook his head and re-boarded the helicopter.

  ‘Get back after them,’ Anning said to the pilot.

  Cal heard the engines roar over them again.

  ‘Open the door and fire a warning shot,’ Anning said. ‘Make him stop.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Carling said. ‘Once a round goes downrange, there’s no accounting for it.’

  ‘Do it, goddamn it!’

  Carling sighed hard and slid the side door open. ‘Hover and keep it steady,’ he told the pilot.

  By the glow of the cabin lights, Cal saw the profile of a shooter aiming down at them. He braked hard. There were no cars coming from either direction. They were alone on a deserted stretch of Texas highway. The rifle shot sounded like a clap of thunder. Cal saw the round spark about fifty yards ahead as the lead met asphalt.

  Sue screamed and so did the girls.

  Cal said as calmly as he could, ‘Sue, take my phone and find Andy Bogosian in my contacts. Call him on his mobile number and give me the phone.’

  Cal sped up again and the helicopter flew ahead westbound to once again double back.

  Sue handed him the ringing phone.

  ‘Andy, this is Cal Donovan. I’m with the girls. We’re on State Road 62 in Texas about five miles from the New Mexico border. We’re in trouble. That’s right. Big trouble. I need you to pull every string you’ve got.’

  ‘Again,’ Anning said. ‘Closer this time. That bastard’s going to stop for me.’

  The chopper got into position again and Carling leaned out, sighting through the rifle scope. This time his round slashed the pavement about twenty yards ahead of the RV. A piece of asphalt pelted the windshield.

  There were more screams and Cal drove on.

  ‘I’m not fucking going to stop,’ he muttered, clamping his hands around the steering wheel.

  ‘Again!’ Anning shouted. ‘Get in for another shot.’

  ‘He’s not stopping,’ Carling said. ‘We can’t stop him without crashing them.’

  ‘I said, again. Closer. He’ll lose his nerve.’

  The pilot headed west for another swing.

  The pilot pointed. ‘Mr Anning, look at that, about three miles away on the other side of the state line.’

  A conga line of blue flashing lights was heading east. Then suddenly, the lights became stationary. Blue flashes lit up the darkening sky.

  Anning wasn’t sure what to make of it but Carling knew.

  ‘Those are New Mexico State Police! They’re holding at the border.’

  ‘Why?’ the pilot asked.

  ‘They don’t have jurisdiction in Texas, that’s why,’ Carling said.

  ‘Shoot a tire out!’ Anning shouted. ‘It’s now or never.’

  ‘He could lose control,’ Carling said. ‘We might flip it.’

  ‘We’ve got to take the chance. Do it, for Christ’s sake.’

  The chopper hovered no more than twenty feet above the road and Carling did as he was told. They were so close that when he took the shot Cal could see into the cockpit and the look of hate on Anning’s face.

  The heavy slug ripped into the front passenger-side tire, shredding it. Cal felt the bus violently lurch toward the right. He struggled to keep it on the road but it drifted too far and began traveling on the scrub. He braked as it bumped over the vegetation until it dipped hard and came to a jarring stop when the right rear tire slid into a shallow drainage ditch.

  The girls shrieked and the babies wailed.
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br />   ‘Everyone OK?’ Cal shouted. He’d been holding his breath for so long that now he was panting for air.

  ‘Yes, we’re all OK,’ Mary cried, ‘but they’re fixing to kill us!’

  ‘Are the babies all right?’ Sue said, about to unclick her belt and go back.

  Cal saw the blue lights flashing ahead of them no more than a mile away.

  ‘It’s Andy. He came through.’

  He gave the rig some gas and it rocked hard. Sue kept her belt on.

  ‘They’ve stopped,’ Carling said, relieved as hell.

  The helicopter was hovering a few feet off the ground, yards away from the stalled RV.

  Anning looked out one window. The bus was bucking as Cal tried to free the rear tire from the ditch. Out the pilot’s side window he saw the flashing police lights close by.

  ‘He’s going to free himself,’ Anning said. ‘We can’t let him get loose. Shoot the engine block. Disable it.’

  ‘I’m not putting a round into that RV,’ Carling said. ‘Someone’s going to get shot if I do it.’

  ‘Then give me the fucking rifle,’ Anning said, turning back and almost ripping it out of Carling’s hands.

  Anning slid the passenger door open and pointed the rifle at the grill.

  Cal saw the rifle barrel, threw the transmission into low gear, and buried the gas pedal into the floor. The RV rose up like a whale breaking the waves.

  Anning pulled the trigger as the RV came down, free of the ditch.

  The RV regained the roadway and Cal fought to keep it on a straight line as the front rim sent showers of sparks on to the road.

  The pilot had to lift up precipitously to prevent a collision with the throttling RV. He hovered a hundred feet above the highway. Anning watching helplessly as the bus fought its way to the west.

  The state line was looming. The police lights were getting brighter.

  A sign said: Leaving Texas. Another sign said: Entering New Mexico.

  Cal pulled over on to the verge and the police cars converged.

  ‘Sue, we made it. We’re safe.’

  She was staring straight ahead. One hand was still on the pistol. The other hand was over her diaphragm. Her shirt was soaked in blood.

  He whipped off his seatbelt and got close.

  She said to him in a soft, breathy voice, ‘Don’t let them see me.’

  ‘Girls, stay in your seats,’ Cal shouted.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ Mary said.

  ‘Just stay put!’

  State troopers opened the doors.

  ‘We need an ambulance,’ Cal shouted. ‘Please take the girls out.’

  Cal put pressure on her wound. He felt pulses of hot blood against his palm.

  ‘You’re going to be OK, Sue,’ he said. ‘The ambulance is coming.’

  ‘I’m not OK,’ she said weakly. ‘Not OK.’

  ‘Come on, stay with me. I want to get to know you.’

  ‘I would have liked that. Cal?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are the babies safe?’

  ‘They’re safe.’

  ‘Don’t you think they have the loveliest eyes?’

  ‘Sure I do.’

  She shut her own eyes and whispered ever so faintly. ‘I think they’re my eyes, Cal.’

  ‘Sue.’

  Then she uttered her last words. ‘She knows. Mrs Torres.’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Looking back on it, Anning and Gottlieb would agree that the hardest night on the mountain wasn’t the one when they were the hungriest or the one when they had lost the last thin reeds of hope. It was the one when Phil Alexander died.

  The third night.

  They had left him strapped to his seat. His back was broken and something very bad was happening inside his belly. It had slowly ballooned to three times its normal girth and the skin had become drum-tight and turned the color of an eggplant. The man had been one of the sharpest corporate lawyers in America and also wickedly funny. The sense of humor departed on the first night, his lucidity left on the second, and his life force faded to black on the third. What persisted up to the point of death was the pain. Intermittent moaning turned into a roaring groan. Near the end he was howling like an animal caught in a steel trap.

  That night, Gottlieb used his good arm to try and give him some snow to eat but he kept turning his face away like a child refusing a spoonful of spinach.

  ‘Don’t waste your time,’ Anning said from under the pile of parkas he’d stripped off the dead. ‘He’s done.’

  ‘Maybe dehydration is making him more uncomfortable,’ Gottlieb said.

  ‘Dehydration’s the least of his problems.’

  The two men were only a few feet away from one another but it was so impossibly dark inside the fuselage they couldn’t see each other.

  ‘He needs to be quiet,’ Gottlieb said. ‘I can’t stand listening to him anymore.’

  ‘Stick some wadding into your ears.’

  ‘I tried it. It didn’t work.’

  ‘Then sleep outside.’

  ‘I’ll freeze to death.’

  Anning was getting testy. ‘Then maybe we should help him with his pain!’

  Gottlieb understood the meaning. ‘We could be rescued tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s already dead.’

  Gottlieb felt his way back to one of the blood-encrusted seats.

  The lawyer howled long into the dark night. Anning was able to nap intermittently but Gottlieb couldn’t sleep a moment. Then, as the first blue-gray mountain light was washing the blackness away, the howling abruptly stopped. The sudden quiet had the effect of waking Anning up. What he saw was Gottlieb kneeling beside Alexander, his good arm bearing down on the lawyer’s face.

  The two men didn’t say a word about it then, or later.

  They just fell into a deep slumber and slept through the morning and into the afternoon.

  When Alexander was consigned to the row of dead men outside the plane, the fuselage became more livable. They had made an inventory of the crash site, scouring the cockpit and front section, the fuselage and baggage compartment, and the pockets of the dead for anything edible and usable. The small galley contained a drawer of cellophane-wrapped pastries and breakfast bars but they had spilled out when the front of the plane ripped apart on impact. But they found a half-dozen breakfast bars scattered in the cockpit where the pilots must have squirreled them away, and a large bar of chocolate inside McGee the banker’s duffel.

  ‘One-quarter breakfast bar in the morning, one-quarter in the night per person,’ Gottlieb had suggested. ‘That way we’ll have a little something to eat for six days. If we’re still here after that, the chocolate bar should get us another three or four days.’ For a time, Anning kept his mouth shut about another source of protein and fat in their midst but Gottlieb suspected that he hadn’t heard the last of the subject.

  For better or worse – Anning contended for better – among the luggage, they recovered three unbroken bottles of Chilean brandy from their last night at the resort.

  Again, Gottlieb had an opinion. ‘I don’t think drinking alcohol’s such a good idea in freezing thin air.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Anning said, having a swig. ‘What do you think St Bernard dogs carry in their collar flasks? Brandy, for Christ’s sake. It’s got calories. Food of the gods.’

  Gottlieb was more interested in getting warm. All the ski clothing was valuable, of course, and each man had donned as many layers as humanly possible, but fire would have been life-saving. A generation earlier, some of the passengers or crew would have been smokers and carried matches or lighters, but there weren’t any fire-starters to be found. Gottlieb, the engineer, got the idea to find a battery to make a spark and light some goose down from parka linings. In the cockpit was an empty set of clips where a flashlight had been mounted but it must have hurtled down the mountain. There had to be some kind of battery back-ups behind the instrument clusters but they spent an entire two days exhausting themselv
es pulling at the tangled metal and banging away without finding what they were looking for.

  The luggage area was filled with skis and poles, of course, and they even had an absurd little conversation about the feasibility of the uninjured Anning trying to ski down the mountain. It would have been a very fast suicide mission.

  So, they fell into a tedious and highly uncomfortable routine.

  During daylight hours they took shifts, one of them always remaining outside the fuselage, scanning the skies for rescue. They had pried off a reflective piece of cockpit aluminum and while one man tried to keep warm, the other braved the strong winds that swept the mountainside, catching the sun on its surface and bouncing light toward the sky. At night, they tied cargo-hold webbing woven with parka sleeves and ski pants over the jagged fuselage opening to insulate them as best they could from plummeting temperatures.

  And they marked the passage of time, in the age-old way: a line for each day scratched into the burled wood of an interior piece of trim.

  Within a few days it became apparent to both of them that they had remarkably little in common beyond a narrow slice of business interests. However, it was hard to come up with a topic more trivial than buying and selling companies when one was marooned on the slippery slope of a desolate mountain peak. Each of them would have, perhaps, chosen any other man in their party as a survival companion. Anning, a son of Texas ranches and oilfields. Gottlieb, a son of Manhattan private schools and Broadway plays. As long as there were a few morsels of civilized food to eat and any hope that a civilian or military aircraft would find them, they were able to keep their conversation to practical matters of survival.

  But when ten days had passed and they were down to the last square of chocolate and a thimbleful of brandy, when their energy levels redlined and apathy set in, they turned philosophical in search of common strands of humanity.

  It was a heavily overcast afternoon and snow was falling heavily. There was no point in watching the sky on a day such as this so they both huddled inside their aluminum tube. Usually they chose seats as far apart as they could to carve out a bit of privacy but Gottlieb had been so exhausted that he fell into the seat opposite Anning on the way to the rear.