Just Fall (25 page)

“Listen, bitch, I don’t know what kinda shit you trying to pull…” Crazy B is furious. “First you drag my ass out to this haunted-as-fuck house! Then you parade your skinny white behind all over the place…”

Ellie bites back her indignant retort.

“And now those missing kids!” He takes a step toward her. “You ain’t nothing but trouble!”

Ellie raises her hands in supplication. “Listen to me. I want to rescue that boy. Others, if they’re in there. It’s why I brought you here.”

Crazy B’s bloodshot eyes blink. “And the money? The drugs?”

“There is no money. No drugs. I lied to you. But these people are stealing and selling children. And I needed your help.”

He stares at her. “I still do,” she says, struggling to keep her voice level and her mind clear, to meet his gaze. “I need your help.”

“I’m out of here.” He wheels away from her. “Who needs this crap?”

Ellie can hear the little boy sobbing, an aria of misery. Her eyes rake the house. If she can get up onto the roof of the porch…Maybe she can access the room from which the cries emanate.

“I’ll give you another five hundred. Just to boost me up onto that roof.” This at least stops Crazy B in his tracks. She points. Crazy B’s eyes twitch to the house, then slide back to lock on hers.

“But I’ll give you a grand if you wait for the kid and get him out of here.”

“Let me see the cash.”

Ellie digs into her bag and fans it out. A thousand dollars in American hundreds. “We have a deal?”

Crazy B only gives her a noncommittal shrug.

Ellie edges over to the porch. The weeping above is making her heart ache. Crazy B joins her, his eyes darting. One wrong move, she knows, and he’ll be gone. She can smell his fear.

Ellie hands him the cash. It’s most of the money she has left, but what can she do? The dealer pockets the bills and makes a lattice out of his hands. Ellie slings her bag over one shoulder and steps up into Crazy B’s boost. He hoists her up. She grabs the drainpipe and pulls herself on top of the porch with a thud. She freezes, holding her breath. But all she hears are the child’s soft sobs, the breeze scuttling through the dry tropical scrub.

After a wait that feels interminable, she exhales. She scrambles up the slope of the roof, heading toward the room from which the boy’s cries rise and fall. She glances back down when she reaches the window. Crazy B has disappeared.

Rivulets of sweat snake down Ellie’s body. She peers into the broken window. In a shadowy corner of the empty room is the small boy, his knees tucked up to his chest, thin arms wrapped tight around his bony knees. His disconsolate wails stop abruptly when he sees her. Ellie puts a finger to her lips. “Sshhhh.”

She climbs through the window and crouches next to the little boy so their eyes are level. “My name is Ellie,” she whispers.

The child stares back at her, his amber eyes wild with panic. Her heart starts to trip-hammer. She is terrified he will scream.

“I’m here to help you,” she whispers urgently. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

He gnaws on his knuckle, silent. Then he whispers: “Thomas.”

“Thomas,” she says. “I’m here to help you,” she repeats.

His eyes stay blank with disbelief.

She rises and strides back to the window and gestures for the boy to follow her. “Do you see how the roof of the porch is low over there?” She points and, after a second, he nods. “That’s how I climbed up here to get you. I’m going to help you climb out the window, Thomas. Then I need you to crawl as quickly as you can to that side of the porch. Then all you’ll have to do is drop to the ground. Can you do that, Thomas?”

The little boy looks panicky, unsure. His eyes skitter from her face to the window.

“It’ll be just like the jungle gym at the park. You can climb the jungle gym, right? A big boy like you?” The boy nods. “When you get down, run away from the house. I’ll be right behind you, I promise. Okay?

“But we have to go
now,
sweetheart. I’ll help you out the window. And then, just like the jungle gym. And when you get down, you run. Run as fast as you can down the drive. There will be a man waiting for you with a motorcycle. You can trust him, I promise. He’ll take you home. Do you know your address, honey?”

“Of course I do. I’m
six.
”

“Six? You are a big boy. I know you can do this.”

She lifts the child. She’s surprised at how little he weighs. Tenderly, she sets him on the lip of the window. He hesitates, looking at the drop below, and squirms in her arms. She smiles at him. Unexpectedly, he smiles back. She touches his cheek and nods. Trustingly, he crawls down the slant of the porch roof. Ellie swings one leg out the window to follow him and then she hears a sound that freezes her soul.

The boy has fallen. He slides down the roof, his little hands scrabbling at the tiles. A whimper of fear escapes his lips as he slips over the edge of the roof. His fingers clutch at the drainpipe.

Ellie sees his hands straining as he dangles, his tiny knuckles going white.

“Thomas!” she commands, as loudly as she dares. “Thomas, listen to me. Listen to me, sweetheart. Fall. Can you fall?”

He is mute. Breathing heavily, rigid with fear.

“Thomas,” she croons. “Listen to me. You need to trust me, honey. Just fall!”

Still no movement from him.

She flings herself onto her belly and hurtles down the roof’s steep incline. Reaches a hand for him, but comes up short, in danger of falling herself. She scrabbles backward, desperate for better purchase.

“Don’t let me fall. Please!” The plea is so quiet she almost doesn’t hear it. She looks down into the boy’s terrified face. His small hands strain. He stares at her with desperate, pitiful eyes.

His hands start to slip treacherously down the drainpipe. He whimpers. Ellie lunges for him. She misses, clutching only air. She tries again, her fingers closing miraculously around his red T-shirt. It comes away in her hands as he falls, the boy’s thin body slipping through the oversized garment.

She doesn’t know which is the most terrible. Is it the boy’s howl of pure terror as he drops? Or the sharp cry of pain that erupts as his frail body hits the crushed-shell driveway?

Or most horrible of all, the hollow, vacant silence that follows?

The boy is a broken bird, splayed motionless on the ground. “Thomas! Sweetheart!”

He doesn’t stir. She crumples the red T-shirt in her fist, fighting back a sob.

Rob was late. Ellie glanced at her watch and smiled apologetically at her parents and the hotel’s event coordinator. “I’m sure he’ll be here any minute…”

Ellie decided she would give it another ten minutes before she began to worry. In the meantime, they could get started, as Rob had graciously (and laughingly) ceded control to Ellie’s mother weeks ago. Ellie smiled, remembering how he had thrown up his hands in surrender and conceded that, yes, Ellie had been right, her mother was an unstoppable and scary force.

She turned to her mother. “I was thinking I liked the silver and white tablecloths, what do you think?”

Her mother’s lips pursed. “I was thinking the lavender.”

Ellie coughed to hide her giggle. Of course she was thinking the lavender, if Ellie was thinking silver. Once again she wished Rob were here, in on the joke.

Across town, Rob checked the time and silently cursed Ethan Clark. Normally the guy ran like clockwork and if he had maintained that admirable quality, Rob could be safely uptown debating linens and flowers with Ellie and his future in-laws. Instead, he was on the crowded platform of the uptown 6 train at Union Square, hiding behind a copy of the
New York Post.

Finally. Ethan came down the subway stairs in a hurry. His tie was loosened, his cheeks flushed. He bumped into a squat black woman with an Afro and mumbled an apology. Clearly he had had a couple of drinks. Ethan had been feeling the pressure lately and had not been shy about opening up to Rob. Three nights ago, at the bar while waiting for their table, Ellie and Marcy had talked wedding plans, and Ethan had pulled Rob aside and spilled his guts. Marcy’s thunderous ticking clock regardless, they had not managed to get her pregnant. They had recently begun the seemingly endless series of tests designed to determine whose biology was at fault, and Ethan was scared to get the results as well as a bit over the entire thing. Sex was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it? Babies were supposed to come easily, right? Ethan had friends who had struggled with fertility. He had watched how it had sucked the joy out of not only sex but also entire relationships.

Ethan didn’t know, of course, that Rob knew all too well the source of the other pressure Ethan was feeling. Rob reflected that having “mislaid” a million dollars of Quinn’s money might be an even bigger source of anxiety than infertility issues.

Rob thought about the people he had “handled” for Quinn over the years. A cavalcade of lowlifes and gangsters, idiots and fools. The scum of the earth. Their baseness made Rob’s work easier to reconcile, at least in the light of day. Rob went where he was told, did what he had to, and moved on to the next assignment. He availed himself of the sensory pleasures of life: superb food and wine, excellent accommodations, fine clothes, expensive watches and cars. Vacations in exotic locales, blissfully alone and achingly lonely at the same time.

It was deep in the night that his nightmares flared.

As Ethan lurched over to the edge of the platform to peer down the tunnel for the train, Rob mused that it really was too bad about Ethan. Rob liked him. And his wife, Marcy, had been the one to insist he meet Ellie. But it was going to be difficult enough to be a young widow, let alone a young widow with a baby. Their infertility was surely a blessing in disguise.

And if Rob had any hope of getting out, this last job must go forward. He would figure out something to do for Marcy, he promised himself, and quashed the knowledge that after killing her husband, her college sweetheart, nothing he could do would possibly compensate. He had thought he could never love anyone, and yet, there like a miracle was Ellie. Surely Marcy could love again. Even as he thought this, he knew he was bullshitting himself. He rocked back and forth indecisively on his heels, torn. Fuck. How could he do this? Could he kill a friend? Even with all he had learned about Ethan, it didn’t make it easier.

Rob glanced at his watch once more. Fuck again. Ellie was going to be mad.

Finally, the roar of the approaching train. Ethan swayed unsteadily. Two tattooed, too-cool-for-school Puerto Rican girls rolled their eyes. One gave Ethan the finger. Leaning over the yellow warning line, Ethan peered into the tunnel. The train rumbled and screeched its way into the station. Like Quinn had taught him, it was a matter of preparation and timing. Rob switched into autopilot, moved alongside Ethan. Spoke his name, “Ethan,” loudly enough for the drunken man to hear, softly enough that no one else on the platform heard him. As Ethan pivoted, a question in his eyes, Rob pushed, hard and fast.

Ethan tumbled onto the tracks in front of the onrushing 6 train as Rob walked swiftly across the platform and jogged up the stairs. He heard the screams of watching passengers, the high-pitched screech of the train, the thump and tear of Ethan’s mangled body.

Rob emerged into Union Square, flicking his lighter and gratefully inhaling on a cigarette. If he got lucky with a cab, he wouldn’t even be too late.

Lucien leads the American out of the station and into the humid glare of the noisy street outside.

“Where are we going?” the man wants to know.

“Someplace quiet. Where we can talk.”

They stride along the crowded streets of Castries in urgent silence. The scents of spices clog the air: cinnamon, turmeric, sea moss, pepper. They pass candy-colored shops catering to tourists. Tables set outside the shops feature beaded necklaces and handbags, shells painted colors not found in nature, intricately woven baskets, crafts and paintings by local artists, shot glasses and bottles of rum. Flyers stapled to telephone poles scream: MISSING CHILDREN, with blurry photographs beneath the blaring headline. HELP US FIND THEM! Lucien will not avert his eyes from the children’s images. One of those boys was Olivier Cassiel, indeed found, indeed dead. And now one was little Thomas, his nephew. Guilt and frustration gnaw at him.