A young girl, a fragile china doll stripped of her clothes and innocence, stumbles along, desperate to escape the savagery suffocating her, pushed forward by big hands connected to big arms. Terror seizes her face because she’s heard stories about what these men do to pretty young girls like her. She searches for sympathy in the hard faces, and she finds it in his. She turns to him, silently pleading for help. He knows he must save her to save himself: her life and his soul hang in the balance as she falls face down in the dirt. A big hand grabs at her, but he shoves it away and gently lifts her delicate arm. He hears her sobbing voice in her native tongue: “Save me. Please save me.” The china doll turns her face up to him, in slow-motion she turns into the light, and he sees her face, the face of Gracie.
Ben Brice screamed himself awake and sprang to a sitting position in bed, gasping for air. His heart was beating rapidly, his chest and face and hair were matted with sweat, and his ears were ringing. The phone was ringing. He reached for the phone and knocked over the empty whiskey bottle. He put the phone to his ear and spoke.
“What happened to Gracie?”
DAY TWO
Dawn was breaking when Ben parked the old Jeep, grabbed the duffel bag from the passenger’s seat, and double-timed into the Albuquerque airport terminal. His head throbbed with each jarring step. Skiers heading home after the season’s last runs already crowded the gates early on a Saturday morning. He located an arrival/departure monitor. The first flight to Dallas departed at 0600 from gate eight.
“I understand it’s an emergency, sir,” the female gate attendant said, “but the flight is overbooked, and we have twenty stand-bys. In fact, all our flights to Dallas today are overbooked.” She glanced at her computer. “Earliest available flight out is Monday.”
She gave him a sympathetic expression and a shrug and held her hand out to the next person in line. Ben picked up his duffel bag, stepped away from the counter, and studied the waiting passengers, bleary-eyed college kids returning to school from spring break; none seemed likely to surrender a seat to a stranger.
But he had to get to Dallas.
He spotted three men in uniforms marching down the main corridor toward the gate: the flight crew. The man in the middle appeared about his age and wore captain’s wings.
He stepped over and intercepted them.
Karen, the nineteen-year-old gate attendant, shook her head when the man stopped Captain Porter. Six months on the gate and the story was always the same: It’s an emergency! A crisis! She always wanted to say, Well, so is my social life! But it was against company policy to act rude to customers, so she just smiled and shrugged. The man seemed sincere, though, not the type to lie his way onto an overbooked flight. He had nice eyes. Still, she picked up the phone just in case she needed to call security.
Karen handed a boarding pass to the next customer in line and then glanced back at the man pleading with Captain Porter. She liked Captain Porter; all the girls did. The airline hired only military pilots; the younger ones thought they were such studs, always bragging on themselves and expecting every female employee to drop her skirt on command. The older ones, like Captain Porter, were different. They were respectful of the girls, probably because they had daughters the same age, and they never bragged on themselves or what they had done in the military. The younger pilots thought Captain Porter was some kind of god; they said he had been a real top gun in some war she barely remembered from history class in high school and had been held prisoner for like, three years. Karen shuddered at the thought: no MTV for three whole years!
The man was now pointing up at the CNN monitor. Karen leaned around the counter to see the monitor. On the screen was the face of a little blonde girl under CHILD ABDUCTED and above RANSOM SUSPECTED. She was cute. Karen looked back at Captain Porter, fully expecting him to send the man packing with a sympathetic expression and a routine shrug- What can I do, I just work here? — the universal response to any passenger complaint quickly mastered by all airline employees. But Karen stood slack-jawed and oblivious to the passengers waiting in line when Captain Porter dropped his flight bags and hugged the man like he was his long lost brother then released him, picked up his duffel bag, and carried it over to Karen.
“Karen, stow the colonel’s gear,” Captain Porter said. “And bump someone in first class.”
Karen could swear Captain Porter had tears in his eyes.
Over her mother’s objections, Gracie had come to visit him every few months and for a month each summer, for five years now. But for her visits, the morning Ben would not answer Buddy might have already arrived. He needed her and he knew why; she needed him but he did not know why. All he knew was that God had bonded them together in a way he neither understood nor questioned: his life was inextricably tied to hers, and somehow, hers to his.
Ben now sat in the back seat of a yellow cab doing seventy on the Dallas North Tollway, a turbaned driver behind the wheel, the city noises beyond the windows, a ferocious pounding behind his eyes. Outside, a concrete world raced past; inside, his stomach stewed over the thought of never seeing Gracie again. He felt as if he might puke the peanuts-and-coffee breakfast he had on the plane; and if he continued to focus on the four little Dallas Cowboy dolls standing on the cab’s dashboard, their oversized helmet heads bobbling around, he surely would. So he leaned his head back and closed his eyes; his thoughts returned to Gracie’s last visit. They had sat in their rocking chairs on the porch and watched the sunset; after a period of silence, she had said, “Mom says you’re a drunk.”
He had said, “She’s right.”
“But you don’t drink from those whiskey bottles when I’m here.”
“I don’t need to drink when you’re here.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I guess I only think good thoughts when you’re here.”
“Then that settles it: I need to be here all the time.”
He had smiled. “That’s real nice of you to offer-”
“No, Ben. I mean it. I want to live here with you.”
“Honey, this is no place for a girl.”
“Then you come live with us. It’s a really big house.”
“That’s no place for me. Once you’ve lived in a jungle, you can’t live in a subdivision.”
Gracie was quiet, then she said, “She still loves you.”
When Ben opened his wet eyes, the cab was pulling up to the entrance guardhouse at BRIARWYCK FARMS, AN EXCLUSIVE GATED COMMUNITY, or so read the sign embedded in the tall brick wall. Black iron gates with TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED across the bars blocked their way. Ben recalled the front doormat at his childhood home in West Texas that read Welcome, Y’all.
After Ben’s ID checked out, the guard gave the cabby directions and activated the automatic gates. They passed through the gates and entered an oasis in the concrete desert: tall oak trees shading the wide road, expansive stretches of green grass, sparkling blue man-made ponds encircled by walking paths, and magnificent mansions set deep into large lots, homes that would cause most visitors’ jaws to drop; but Ben barely noticed. His thoughts were of Gracie.