Danny thought of Alejandro standing outside the coffee shop that morning. He’d seen Danny meeting with the DEA guy, Slocum. Obviously, Danny couldn’t say anything to Galvin about it, but he couldn’t help but wonder: Did Alejandro’s murder have something to do with his seeing Danny that morning?
His BlackBerry played “Sweet Home Alabama.”
“Sweetie,” he answered. “Querida.” He launched into a hurried conversation in Spanish. Danny could make out only a few words. Inmediatamente. And protección. And peligro, which he knew meant “danger.” Words like that. He was telling her what had just happened, maybe. Telling her they had to leave.
The high-pressure nozzles assaulted the Suburban’s windows and its flanks. It was like driving through the worst rainstorm ever.
He hung up and for a long while he said nothing, just watched the hot air blast from the nozzles on either side, blowing the droplets away, the wind from a dozen hair dryers.
“My time is up,” he said finally. “I have to vanish.”
“Vanish?”
“And only you and my wife can know about it.”
55
Graciela Arriaga had worked at the Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, for almost eighteen years.
She was a file clerk in the Records Management Unit. She knew her colleagues mocked her behind her back, considered her humorless, uptight, rigid, rules-bound. A stiff. They called her Debbie Downer.
The truth was, she was none of those things. She was a woman who just wanted to do her job and do it right, keep her head down, earn a living, be left alone.
Somehow she had to support a daughter and a granddaughter on a GS-6 salary and the negligible survivors’ pension the VA paid for her husband, Luis, a Vietnam vet who’d died more than a decade ago.
Her daughter, María Elena, worked in customer service at Marshalls in the Snowden Square Shopping Center. Her take-home pay barely covered day care for her two-year-old boy, Jayden, with just enough left over for food and clothing.
So María Elena and Jayden lived in the second bedroom of Graciela’s apartment, on the fourth floor of the ugly dun brick building on Columbia Road, in Columbia Heights, Maryland. Graciela’s son, Raúl, was in prison in Hagerstown for boosting a Zipcar.
Graciela was not the type of person ever to do anything that might put her job at risk. Yet there were all the money problems. And there was Tía Yolanda, back home in Mazatlán, and her nine children and twenty-four grandchildren. They needed whatever money Graciela could spare to send them.
Life did not always give you choices.
Wearing a long puffy charcoal-colored down coat with gray pants and simple black shoes, she climbed to the fourth floor and keyed open the top and bottom locks and then the police lock. Graciela had high cheekbones and wore prim black glasses and had once been considered reasonably pretty. Now she was generally regarded as matronly.
Her tabby cat, Señor Don Gato, meowed loudly when she entered, and brushed up against her leg. That was unlike him. Most days he scarcely bothered to rouse himself from the sofa.
Graciela sniffed. The kitty litter needed changing. She hung up her down coat on the wall hook next to little Jaden’s snow pants. She noted with disapproval the dishes still in the sink. She was always asking María Elena not to leave the breakfast dishes unwashed.
Then she lit the flame under the kettle to make herself a cup of tea and selected her favorite mug from the cupboard: WORLD’S BEST MOM.
“Make two cups, if you don’t mind.”
The voice-a soft baritone-startled her. She turned, saw the silhouette in the shadowed recesses of the living room.
“You know who I am, don’t you?”
She nodded mutely. The mug slipped from her hand and thudded to the linoleum floor of the kitchenette, where it bounced but didn’t break.
“I hope you have something for me,” the man said.
56
“Anything you need,” Danny said. “I’m here.”
“I’m going to need you to vouch for me.”
Danny looked at Galvin curiously. “Vouch for you? How do you mean?”
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, brother: I’ll need you to lie to law enforcement after I disappear. Back up an alibi for me. When the FBI question you-and they will, believe me-just say I told you I was flying down to meet some business contacts in Mexico.”
“Where will you really be?”
“Probably best you not know. Belize, at first. Then somewhere else. Cuba, Venezuela. Maybe Kazakhstan or Croatia or Dubai.” He was driving less erratically now, though just as fast. “There’s this remote fishing village in New Zealand Celina and I discovered on our honeymoon. It… it’s the town that time forgot. On the west coast of the South Island, in the middle of nowhere. The landscape’s out of Lord of the Rings. Maybe a dozen ancient stone houses, green rolling hills dotted with sheep. You sit there eating the greatest fish and chips from a little shack on the water’s edge. Watching the dolphins playing and the fishing boats bobbing in the bluest water you’ve ever seen.”
Danny nodded. “You’re taking your plane?”
“Right. But as I told you, it’s chartered. I don’t own it. Means I have to file a flight plan. Which I will, but it’ll be a bogus one. I’ll be requesting one particular pilot, and I know he’ll cooperate. He’ll fly me wherever I ask. For a briefcase full of cash.”
“So you want US law enforcement to think you were meeting with cartel officials and were abducted. Something like that?”
Galvin nodded.
“So what’s-what’s your plan? Just fly away one day?”
“Pretty much.”
“Do you have a fake passport or something?”
“No. A real one.”
“I don’t get it.”
“If you know the right people and you have the right kind of money, you can buy an absolutely one hundred percent genuine US passport under a different name.”
“Jesus, Tom. You sure it’s real? It’s not counterfeit-not something that might be flagged and get you arrested?”
“It’s absolutely authentic. And it was extremely expensive.”
Danny went quiet for a moment. Neither man spoke. Then Danny said, “You’re talking about leaving your family behind?”
He nodded. “It’s for their own protection.”
“Would you… will you… tell them?”
“Just Celina. She knows this may happen someday. As for the boys and Jenna-I couldn’t burden them with the knowledge. When the time is right, I’ll say good-bye to them as if I was just going away for a week or so on business.”
“And then just disappear.”
“Right.”
Another long silence. “I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“How you can actually do this. The way you love your kids… the way you love Celina… how you could bring yourself to decide one day you’ll never see them again.”
Galvin exhaled slowly. Then he replied, hesitantly, stumblingly. “I can’t-I mean-I mean, consider the alternatives! Having their father in prison for the rest of his life? Having their father killed by the cartel? And them in jeopardy, too?”
“So why is this any better, Tom? Leaving your kids to think you just ran off one day? Or that you were abducted and killed. But never knowing?”
Galvin sounded weary, even defeated. “They’ll figure out in time that I had to leave, that I had no choice. Maybe they’ll hate me for it. But they’ll know this was the only way to protect them. Anyway, they all have money in trusts. They’ll be taken care of.”
Taken care of, Danny thought: What a phrase. When the one thing his kids wouldn’t be was taken care of. They’d have money, like they’d always had. But to have their father just be gone one day without a word of explanation? It was difficult to think of anything harder or more painful than losing a mother to cancer, as Abby had. But losing a parent without closure, without ever knowing how and why? That would be painful beyond words.