J ack placed the call from his own cell phone. Sergeant Paulo wanted it that way. Paulo refused to be anyone’s puppet, and Jack was more than willing to help cut the strings. If that meant calling from the mobile command center on a wireless phone that wasn’t encrypted, Jack was on board, even if he did not yet fully understand Paulo’s strategy. There was no time to debate every decision, and Jack figured that his show of trust in the sergeant’s instincts would only serve to solidify their alliance.
The phone rang several times, but Jack was certain that Falcon would answer soon enough. Falcon was using Theo’s cell phone, and Jack’s number was programmed into it. The display would identify Jack as the caller.
“Changing phones on me, Swyteck?” said Falcon.
“Yeah. I figured it was time to shake things up a little.”
“I thought that was my job.”
“We’ve got the same job. Let’s end this thing and keep everyone safe.”
“Did you get my money from the Bahamas yet?”
Jack had been hoping to avoid that matter, and the abrupt change of subject caught him somewhat off guard. “Soon,” he said, but the bluff rang hollow even in his own ears.
“You’re stalling,” said Falcon.
“No, I’m working on it.”
“You’re lying.”
“It’s more complicated than you think.”
“You stole it, didn’t you?”
“No. I didn’t steal it.”
“You stole my money, and now you think you can just keep on talking in circles.”
“That’s not true at all.”
“You stole my money, and I want it back now!”
“I just need a little more time.”
“Time? How much time do you think I’ve got here? Time is up, Swyteck. Tell me where my money is, or I swear, I’m going to-”
“It’s gone,” said Jack. He cut off Falcon before he could say the words “shoot a hostage,” which would have unleashed an immediate breach by SWAT.
“What did you just say?” said Falcon.
Jack collected himself. Paulo offered a nod of encouragement, as if to say that the truth was out, there was no taking it back, and perhaps it was even better this way. Jack said, “We went to your safe deposit box, just like you told me to. A manager named Riley met us there. When we opened the box, the money was gone.”
“All of it?”
“Yes. Even Riley was shocked. The only thing inside was a note. It was handwritten in Spanish.”
“Really?” said Falcon. The shrill edge was gone from his voice. He sounded genuinely intrigued. “What did it say?”
“It read: ‘Donde están los Desaparecidos?’ Where are the Disappeared?”
The words were met by stone-cold silence. Jack waited for a reply, and, after several moments of dead air, he wondered if Falcon was still on the line. “Falcon?” he said.
Falcon replied in a soft, calm voice, a tone that Jack had not heard in any of their previous conversations. It was a combination of pleasure and relief, punctuated with a hint of sheer joy. “She came,” he said. “I can’t believe it. She finally came.”
“Who came?” said Jack.
There was no reply.
“Falcon?” said Jack. “Who came? Who are you talking about?”
The silence on the other end of the line was suddenly more profound, and Jack realized that no response was coming. The call was over. Falcon was gone. Jack closed his flip phone and laid it on the table in front of him. He stared at it for a moment, trying to comprehend the exchange that had just ended.
Paulo said, “Not exactly according to plan, was it?”
“No,” said Jack, looking off to the middle distance. “At least not our plan.”
F alcon shoved the cell phone in his pocket and resumed pacing. In his years of homelessness, he often went for long walks along the river, up Miami Avenue, and down Biscayne Boulevard. Confinement to a tiny, closed-in motel room made him feel like a caged animal. Walking helped him to clear his head, settle the confusion, and silence the voices. Swyteck had laid a huge mind-blower on him. On the streets, he could have walked all the way to Fort Lauderdale and back just processing this one.
The money was gone. It disappeared.
The money. The Disappeared. The play on words brought a bemused expression to his face.
“You want to share the good news with the rest of us?” said Theo.
Falcon turned and saw his reflection in the full-length mirror on the closet door. He did look like someone who had just received good news. But it was no one else’s business. “Speak when you’re spoken to,” he said.
“That girl still needs a doctor,” said Theo.
“Shut up! Don’t you think I know that? Of course she needs a doctor.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“What do you want me to do? The doctor isn’t here.”
“Then let her go to one.”
“We can’t.”
“Sure you can,” said Theo. “Just open the door. I’ll carry her out into the parking lot only as far as you say, and then I’ll come back inside.”
“Sure you will.”
“You have my permission to shoot me in the back if I try anything funny.”
Falcon was pacing again, furiously this time. The last telephone conversation with Swyteck had brought a long-awaited clarity to his thoughts, and then Mr. Big Mouth had to mention the girl again and scramble everything. It wasn’t his fault that she needed a doctor. It wasn’t his fault that the doctor wasn’t around. There was only so much he could do, only so much abuse he could stand, only so much self-loathing he could inflict.
“What do you want from me?” he shouted, but he didn’t wait for Theo or anyone else to reply. Demons that he’d kept locked deep inside were taking control and forcing their way to the surface like a volcanic eruption. He went to the wall and started kicking it with the force of a soccer star. “Why…the hell…did you…have…to be…pregnant?” he said, a swift kick to the wall marking each break in his sentence. He didn’t even notice the horror on the hostages’ faces, didn’t hear the girl shouting that he had it all wrong, that neither she nor her injured friend was pregnant. It was as if the hostages were no longer in the motel room, as if Falcon himself were in another place, another time. In his mind’s eye, he was seeing other faces, ones that had haunted him for over a quarter-century.
“FASTER!” SHOUTED EL OSO. He was in the backseat of the car with the expectant mother, prisoner 309. She was flat on her back, belly protruding, knees bent, her feet squirming in El Oso’s lap. She was wearing a loose-fitting cotton dress, but it was hiked up to her hips, all sense of modesty abandoned.
“You must drive faster!” she cried.
“Two more minutes,” said the driver.
She let out a shriek that belonged in the torture chamber. That kind of noise coming from a man on the grill was something that El Oso heard every day, all just a part of the job. The same sound coming from a woman in labor affected him in ways that he had never anticipated.
“I have to push,” she said.
“No, you can’t!”
She started breathing loudly through her mouth, in and out, trying to build a rhythm and control the pain. Her face was flushed red and glistening with sweat. Her legs quivered, and her eyes bulged as if ready to pop from her head. Every pothole in the bumpy road elicited another grimace of pain. “I really have to push.”
“Not yet!” said El Oso.
She rolled from her back onto her left side and drew her knees up, assuming more of a fetal position. It seemed to help slightly.
“This is the turn,” said the driver.
“Just hold on a few more minutes,” El Oso told the woman.
The car squealed around the corner. Gravel flew as they turned off a paved highway and continued down a long, narrow alley. It was almost midnight, and with no streetlights in the alley, they sped like a freight train through a long, dark tunnel. The car suddenly screeched to a halt. The driver jumped out and opened the rear door. He grabbed the woman by the armpits, and El Oso took her by the legs. Together, they carried her to a metal fire escape at the rear of a rundown apartment building. In their haste, they knocked over a trash can, which sent a pack of rats scurrying toward the gutters. Up the rickety metal stairs they climbed, all the way to the third floor.
“Where are you taking me?” the woman said in a voice tight with pain.
Neither man replied as they reached the top of the fire escape. They were standing at the rear entrance to an apartment. A light shone through the kitchen window, but the door was closed and made of solid wood. El Oso was still holding the woman’s legs with both hands, so he knocked on the door by kicking it so hard and with such urgency that the steel toe of his military boot splintered the lower panel. “We’re here, let us in!” he shouted.
The deadbolt turned, and the door opened a few inches. El Oso immediately pushed against it, practically pulling the pregnant woman and the driver across the threshold. The old woman who had unlocked the door was suddenly pinned behind it, her back to the wall. Before she could speak, El Oso shouted, “Look the other way, woman!”
She complied without protest, averting her eyes from the pregnant woman as the men carried her inside. “Take her to the back bedroom,” she told the men.
El Oso and the other man carried her through the kitchen and down the dimly lit hall to the bedroom. She seemed to be getting heavier with each step, and the men were so exhausted that they dropped her onto the mattress.
“Please, get this baby out of me!” she cried.
The older woman was still waiting in the kitchen. “Are you ready for me?” she asked.
“Wait!” said El Oso. He took a black cloth from his pocket and put it over the prisoner’s head. She resisted and tried to pull it off, but El Oso grabbed her by the wrists. “The hood stays on, or you and your baby die.”
“Okay, whatever you say,” she said, her voice trembling. “Please, let’s just do this!”
El Oso called into the next room. “We’re ready!”
The midwife rushed through the open doorway and went straight to the prisoner. Everything she needed for the delivery was arranged neatly on a table beside the bed. “Let’s get those underpants off,” she said.
The men lifted her hips, and the midwife slid the underpants down the woman’s legs. They were soaking wet with fluid from her broken membrane. “She’s ready to push,” said the midwife.
“No kidding!” the woman cried, her voice only slightly muffled beneath the black hood.
“How far apart are your contractions?”
“I don’t know. Not very long. Hurry, please. I can hardly breathe with this stupid hood over my head!”
The midwife asked each of the men to take one of the woman’s feet and raise her legs into the air. Then she probed with her whole hand into the vagina, stopping just before she was in up to her wrist. “The head is right there. Clearly you’ve been pushing already.”
“I tried not to.”
“One more good one and I’ll be able to grab a shoulder.”
The woman’s body tightened. Another contraction was coming. “It hurts so much!”
“Push through it,” said the midwife. “Just ignore what your brain is telling you and push right through it!”
El Oso could not see the woman’s face, but he knew that beneath that black hood was the contorted face of a woman in utter agony. She screamed again, and the midwife assured her that she was doing great. El Oso was starting to feel dizzy.
“Keep pushing!” said the midwife.
The woman rose up on her elbows so that her shoulders were elevated above the mattress. She was half sitting and half lying on the bed, trying to find the best angle to push out the baby and end this ordeal. The next scream was loud enough to be heard throughout the neighborhood. The crown of a newborn’s head emerged between her legs.
The next few moments were a blur to El Oso. He heard the woman screaming, fighting to rid herself of something far too large to possibly come out of another human being. He heard the midwife praising her, yelling at her, encouraging her, ordering her to keep pushing. It took El Oso completely by surprise-after all the torture he had witnessed, all the pain he had inflicted-but he felt his own knees weakening, and he had to look away to get through the final stage of delivery.
Then the baby let out its first cry, and El Oso turned to see the midwife cutting the umbilical cord. The mother collapsed on the mattress, her torso swelling with each breath. The midwife washed the baby in a basin of warm water, which did nothing to stop the crying. She cleared the baby’s eyes and nostrils, wiped the baby’s entire body clean. When she was through, she wrapped the healthy newborn in a soft blanket and started toward the mother, who was still wearing her black hood.
“I’ll take that,” said El Oso.
The midwife halted. “Surely you are going to let her hold her own baby.”
“I said, I’ll take it,” El Oso repeated sternly.
The prisoner sat bolt upright and screamed again, which caused her to push out the placenta. The midwife hurried into position to collect the blood and tissue, but the mother couldn’t have cared less about her own body. “What are you doing with my baby?” she cried.
The other guard grabbed her by the wrists and tied her hands behind her back so that she could not remove the hood.
“I want my baby!”
“We do not punish the innocent,” said El Oso. “Your baby will be well cared for.”
“No. Don’t take my baby!”
El Oso turned to the midwife and said, “Your job is done here.”
“No, it’s not. She’s torn. I have to sew her up. And she needs to be cleaned up to prevent infection.”
“That won’t be necessary,” said El Oso.
“It will only take a few minutes.”
“None of that matters. I need you to come with me.”
The mother tried to rise up from the bed, but the other guard held her down. “Where are you taking my baby?” she shouted.
El Oso did not respond. He simply looked at the other guard and told him to wait at the prisoner’s side until he returned. Then he took the midwife by the arm and said, “Come.”
“No!” screamed the prisoner.
“Gag her,” El Oso told the guard. The prisoner was beyond exhaustion, but she resisted with all her remaining strength. El Oso handed the baby back to the midwife and directed her toward the door. The prisoner continued to scream and resist as the guard tried to place a gag on her mouth. El Oso and the midwife left the bedroom and walked down the hallway together, the crying baby in the midwife’s arms. She unlocked the back door to the fire escape, and they were almost clear of the apartment when they heard one last cry from the back bedroom, a desperate plea that was audible even though the woman was wearing a hood over her head, even though the guard was struggling to gag her. It was a voice that El Oso would never forget.
“My name is Marianna Cruz Pedrosa!” shouted prisoner 309.
El Oso hesitated for a split second, exchanged glances with the midwife, and then closed the door.
The baby cried all the way to the car. El Oso climbed behind the wheel, and the shiny new Ford Falcon disappeared into the night.