When She Flew (18 page)

17

“
A
w, shit!” Jess yelled, then said into the phone, “Damn it, she ran off. I’ll call you back.” She threw the cell phone into the empty passenger seat and fought out of the seat belt, pulled keys from the ignition, and jumped from the car to chase after the girl.

“Lindy!” she yelled, dodging between parked cars to the sidewalk. “Get back here! What are you doing?”

The girl sprinted easily away, even lugging the huge pack. Jess’s thigh muscles were in spasm; she ran stiff-legged like a toddler, legs burning, cheap sandals flapping uselessly on her feet. She’d left her purse behind.
Shit,
she thought. Had she locked the car?

Leaving the circle of streetlight, she stubbed her toe on uneven pavement and cried out, then continued limping forward as quickly as she could. How had she let this get so out of control, so quickly?

“Lindy, come on!” she yelled after the girl, feeling naked and vulnerable without her weapon in such a rough neighborhood, so late at night.

Over a block away now, Lindy paused, then turned left between buildings.
Toward what?
Jess wondered, then heard a scream. She ran harder, her legs responding to extra adrenaline, the sharp pain subsiding to leave a dull one she could tolerate. The slap-slapping of her sandals echoed in the dark canyon of concrete and brick. Fear propelled her now, her vision sharpening in the dark. Lindy had turned between an old stone two-story and a squat, flat-topped dry cleaner. Jess’s feet found a rhythm, her arms pulling long swim strokes until she came to the space between buildings.

“Lindy, where are you?” she yelled, breathing heavily, wishing she had her flashlight. The gravel alley was dark and smelled of fetid Dumpsters. The sound of scuffling in the gravel was followed by voices, one angry and male, the other frightened and small. Lindy.

“Columbia Police! Freeze!” Jess shouted, running straight into the dark toward human figures against the wall of the stone building. “Freeze right there, motherfucker!”

“Let me go,” Lindy’s voice cried out. “Let me go!”

“Let her go, goddamn it, or I swear I’ll shoot,” Jess bluffed, and what appeared to be a lanky juvenile male spun around. For one heart-thudding moment, Jess wondered if he had a weapon, if he’d now fire at her, but he turned and sprinted farther into the dark and disappeared.

Lindy ran toward Jess, who could barely breathe. She caught the girl in her arms and leaned against the wall to catch her breath.

“Are you okay?” Jess wheezed between breaths. “Did he hurt you?”

“No, he just scared me,” Lindy said into Jess’s shoulder, arms clinging to her. “He said he would help me get away, but then he tried to steal my backpack. Oh, thank you, Officer Villareal. Thank you. I’m so sorry.”

“Lindy, listen.”
Puff, puff.
“Nothing bad”—
puff
—“is going to happen if you stay with me, I swear. I’m trying”—
cough, cough—
“to help.” White dots danced before Jess’s eyes in the dark.

“Are you all right?” Lindy asked, stepping back.

“No, yes. I’ll be fine, but it would be much easier to find your dad if you didn’t run off, if you just let me help you.” Her breath was coming back to normal. Jess reached for the girl’s hand and said, “Okay?”

Lindy squeezed Jess’s hand with both of her small, rough ones. She had palms like a lumberjack, Jess thought, or a stone-mason. Of course she did; she lived out-of-doors, performed daily physical labor. Jess thought of Nina’s small, soft hands and shivered.

“Officer Villareal, could you please just take me to my church, please, please?”

Jess sighed.“How do you even know someone will be there? We haven’t heard from your dad yet.” Of course, the phone was now in the car. The unlocked car, probably, several blocks away, along with her purse, weapon, and badge.

Lindy’s voice quavered. “He will be,” she said. “He promised.”

The church would be closed and locked up for the night, but if Jess took her there first, the girl might be more willing to go back to the safe house to sleep. They could call the church in the morning, and maybe they wouldn’t turn Lindy over to the authorities.
Sanctuary,
Jess thought. Wasn’t that what churches did? Provide sanctuary?

“Okay,” Jess said. “We’ll go check it out, but if it’s not open, I’m taking you back to the safe house.”

“Oh, thank you, Officer Villareal. Thank you. Thank you.”

“Jess. Come on, call me Jess,” she said. She looked at her watch. It was closing in on two a.m.

Cops couldn’t make decisions like this on their own. They had to play by the rules, remain impartial.
Right,
she thought. The rules were long gone. Maybe she had gone round the maternal bend, or maybe Lindy was truly that one outstanding case that made the rules impossible to follow, but Jess was relying on dead reckoning now. She was bushwhacking, traversing territory as unfamiliar as the forest had been, and all she could do was keep moving forward, one foot in front of the other, heading in the direction she believed to be right.

Like Ray had been doing for five years. He would never give up on his daughter.

Jess felt her chest close in. Lindy was right; her dad would find his way to the church somehow.
I’ll do everything I can to help,
she’d told him.
Just trust me.

He had.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s hurry up and get back to the car before someone else tries to mug us. We’ll go to the church to see if your dad’s there.”

“Oh, thank you, Officer Villareal,” Lindy said again. She skipped like a second grader all the way to the car and Jess had to smile. That would probably keep the bad guys away. If her own legs hadn’t been in such agony, she might have tried it herself.

At the car, Jess unlocked the passenger door, pleased that she had indeed locked it, and helped Lindy take off her pack. She considered stowing it in the trunk so Lindy couldn’t run off again, but shook her head and let the girl keep it at her feet. Then Jess slid into the driver’s seat, locked the doors, and turned the key, the car shuddering to life.

“So, what’s the name of this church? Where is it?”

Lindy folded her hands in her lap and looked straight ahead. “It’s called City of Refuge United Church of Christ, and it’s on Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard, a block past the little grocery store with the big green sign.”

“Really?” Jess wished she’d kept the surprise from her voice. It actually made more sense than any other church she could think of—the City of Refuge had a longstanding tradition of assisting Columbia’s downtrodden.

She blew a long breath. She was really going to do this. They had a bed for Lindy at the safe house, but the thought of leaving her there felt less palatable now. She was a fresh little flower who’d been tended to and protected by her dad for so long Jess was afraid what would happen to her if she let her out of her sight before she got her back to him.

18

T
hree years previously, Jess had responded to a call to assist other officers during an INS raid at Pacific Produce Wholesalers. Undocumented workers streamed from the building when they got wind of the raid, still wearing latex gloves and hairnets, a good many of them escaping into north Columbia’s industrial warehouse catacombs. Like most of the other officers, Jess didn’t try too hard to find them. The city—the entire state of Oregon—had a policy of looking the other way when it came to these workers. It was only the feds who wanted them rounded up and deported, and Oregonians didn’t much care for feds.

Jess knew that if not for a little good luck, her mother’s grandfather might not have made it here from Chihuahua, might not have found work at the lumber mill in Columbia and met her great-grandmother and started a family.

A small group of fleeing produce workers found their way that day to the City of Refuge Church, a nondenominational house of worship in Columbia’s oldest African-American community. The church welcomed all, delivered meals to AIDS patients, assisted the homeless and the poor. They granted the workers sanctuary and, over time, helped them immigrate legally. The feds backed off in disgust. The citizens of Columbia rejoiced, most of them anyway. Those who didn’t wrote their editorials and huffed and puffed for a while, then moved on to taxation issues the next election year.

That Ray and Lindy attended the City of Refuge Church made a strange kind of sense to Jess. They were refugees, more so now than they had been before the Columbia Police had found them. She stared resolutely into the dark as she drove.

At MLK, Jess turned north. After a few blocks, Lindy’s excitement became palpable in the car; she fairly glowed with it, wriggling and chattering in her seat.

A block away, Lindy exclaimed, “There it is, there it is!” She pointed out the tall spire, dark and stately against the city-light glow of sky. “Wait till you meet Reverend Rosetta!”

“Honey, it’s two something in the morning,” Jess said. “It’s probably all locked up for the night, and even if we can get in, the reverend will surely be home in bed.” She didn’t mention Ray. Even if he planned on meeting her eventually, Jess doubted he could have made it there yet. What would she do with the girl? “Just don’t—”

Get your hopes up,
she was going to say, but clearly Lindy’s hopes were well beyond up. Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a good idea. If the doors were locked, what then?

At the church, Jess eased the car into the parking lot and came to a stop beneath a light pole, the safety of illumination not all that comforting in a neighborhood known for drug activity and drive-by shootings.

Before she’d even switched off the ignition, Lindy was out of the car with her backpack, sprinting across the lot.

Jess pushed her reluctant body out of the driver’s seat, clutching her sore shoulder. “Lindy,” she called, “wait!”

The big purple door appeared to be opening before Lindy even reached it, and Jess wondered if it was fatigue or shadows causing her eyes to play tricks on her, but out stepped two adult figures. They were too far away and it was too dark outside of the circle of streetlight for Jess to be sure who they were.

“Great,” Jess muttered, breaking into an agonizing trot across the parking lot. This time she had her purse, her badge, and her weapon. One of the figures grabbed Lindy and Jess ran faster. As she drew nearer, she realized it was, of course, Ray. The other person she recognized from news photos. She slowed to a stiff-legged walk, even though her heart kept pumping at full throttle.

Ray either hadn’t gone to the Y or had left immediately after being dropped off.

The woman was undoubtedly the notable Rosetta Norton Albert, pastor and community activist.

And Lindy had been right to trust they would be there.

Jess stopped at the edge of the church lawn. What was she supposed to do now? She had crossed some indefinable boundary, crawled to the underside of the rock, where day was night and night was day, where children were wise and adults could be clueless, and where those who were supposed to do good did more harm than she had ever let herself believe.

She could turn around, get back into her car, and drive away. She could report that Lindy had escaped and Jess had given chase but failed to catch her. She would be disciplined. She would probably be suspended, but it would be with pay, for a while at least. She doubted she would be fired, but it was possible, in which case it would be next to impossible to work in law enforcement again. Even if she wasn’t terminated, Sergeant Everett would never trust her now, nor would any other commanding officer, any other fellow patrol officer. She’d never be promoted. She’d always figured she’d at least make sergeant before retiring. But if she’d done what she was supposed to do, she’d never have forgiven herself.

Lindy moved from hugging her father to hugging Pastor Albert, then back to hugging Ray.

Jess wiped her eyes as she walked back to her car, then got in and drove away.

 

 

 

The DARK QUIET JESS DROVE through occurred only at this hour in the city. After a night spent in some otherworldly enchantment she would never be able to explain to anyone, it felt as if she were now reentering the normal world. This was the time of morning she usually drove home from work; her shift ended at two and it usually took until two thirty to get out of the station house. The bars had emptied, their patrons mostly home, and the early-morning commute was still a couple hours off. Jess was glad for the emptiness of it. She had turned her phone to vibrate; she wasn’t ready to talk to the sergeant. Yet. It wouldn’t be lying to say Lindy ran away. The girl had escaped, after all, and might have found her way to the church somehow, if she’d survived the night on the streets.

It was Jess the mom who had taken her—safely—to the City of Refuge Church. Jess the cop had failed as soon as Lindy jumped out of the car and sprinted easily from her grasp. No, she realized. The transformation had come in the locker room, when she traded her uniform for her street clothes and stowed her duty belt. Her fate had been sealed when Lindy emerged from the restroom, looking at her with those eyes, the eyes of a child who still believes in you.