Falling Darkness

“Have you looked out by the pool?” he asked.

“Yes. Nita did too. Where are Jace and Bronco?”

“Out watching the crowd for Heck and/or Gina. Where haven’t you looked? Is there someplace here she’d go to, wanting to feel safe? Lily may do bad things, but not your girl.”

“I—I don’t know. I feel like I’ve lost her in more ways than one, and that terrifies me. Maybe—maybe the store where we bought the bathing suit for her. She liked those stuffed animals in there, and I wouldn’t let her have one to lug around and I knew she’d never leave it when we leave here.”

“Let’s go check that out. Did you tell the lifeguards at the pool in case she goes back there?”

“Yes,” Claire said, her voice breaking, her hands gripped together as if in prayer. “That’s when I really lost it, started to cry—when he said he keeps a watch on the kids, because they found one last month drowned at the bottom of that big pool.”

* * *

Claire spotted Lexi the moment she and Nick walked into the beachwear and gift shop. She was so grateful, so relieved, she burst into tears again. Her knees went so weak she almost fell. Standing in the corner, the child had a bright green stuffed toy whale clutched in her arms. But she looked like she wasn’t embracing it but strangling it.

“Meggie,” Claire cried and knelt beside her. She threw her arms around the child and the whale. Nick squatted beside them and propped Claire up.

“Whales are bigger than sharks,” Lexi whispered. “Big enough to kill those sharks we saw, big enough to ride out of here. I want to go home.”

“We will,” Nick promised. “We will. Sorry,” he said when a saleswoman hurried up to them. “She wanted that, and we told her no, but we’ll take it.”

“I thought she with other people here. You want put it on your room bill?”

“Ah, yes, that would be fine. No, on second thought I’ll just pay cash for it.”

Claire lifted Lexi and the whale and headed out into the hall. She overheard the saleswoman telling Nick the price and saw him take what must be his last small American bill out of his pants pocket.

“Lexi,” Claire told her as she carried her over to a wicker bench and sat down beside her, “don’t you ever do that to Nita or me again! And don’t tell me Lily did it. Everyone’s been looking for you!”

“But, Mommy, I didn’t even know where I was. Where are we? Why can’t we be home?”

“Oh, my sweetheart, I’m so sorry about everything. But we’re together. We love you, all of us. We’re a little family now, but—I guess I’ll have to explain things better.”

When Nick came out of the shop, Claire stood and hiked Lexi up as if she was a much younger child with her legs around Claire’s waist and Claire’s arms under the girl’s bottom. That stupid stuffed animal was still in the way, but nothing else mattered now that Lexi was safe, but—actually, it did. Everything mattered to get them out of here.

Nick looked both relieved and desperate. “I’ll tell them at the desk she’s been found,” he said, “but I’ve got to check my email too.” He took Claire’s elbow and steered her farther away from the shop. “Sit in the lobby. Don’t budge. I want to be able to see both of you.”

Claire sat with Lexi on her lap on a leather sofa and kept an eye on Nick too as he went into the adjacent room where she could see little cubicles sheltering laptops. Jace must be frantic over Lexi too, all of them. She needed to tell Nita and him their daughter had been found. She needed a tissue to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. She needed Nick to hold her. Most of all, maybe more like her daughter than she cared to admit, she needed her sense of safety and sanity back.

* * *

Nick’s stomach was in free fall when he gave his card to the guy in charge, then sat at a different laptop from the one he’d used a little bit ago. He typed in his code, and an email appeared on the screen. Bingo! It was from the fake Chicago firm!

Jack Randal: sorry your investment gamble went in the tank, but we can reinvest. I promise we can “git mo,” to use an old saying around here about getting you more money with interest. Can you handle that ASAP? Let me know if you’re on board with my advice. Investment adviser Robert Patmore.

Gitmo. Guantanamo! That had to be what he meant. Get to Gitmo and the officers there could spirit them out, help them get home—that was, to their WITSEC hideout in Michigan. But the thing was, Guantanamo Bay with its naval detention camp was way on the southeastern end of the island, a long trip away. And Patterson had signed the note with a fake name, but one that echoed his own.

Nick typed a message back: Sounds like good financial advice. ASAP, will do, with all my investments. I realize this could take some time.

He sent the message, then erased Rob’s, wishing he could erase the dangers between here and Gitmo—and without Heck, if he didn’t get back here soon.

* * *

Lexi’s little family reunion in their hotel room wasn’t pretty, Nick thought. Lexi insisted it was all Lily’s fault and that the stuffed whale was named Shark-Killer. Nita kept saying it was her fault, and Bronco kept saying it wasn’t, when a loud knock sounded on the hall door.

Everyone quieted and froze. Nick went over to the door and, pressed to the wall on either side of him, Bronco and Jace waited. “Who’s there?”

“It’s us,” Heck cried. “Open up, boss.”

Still, Nick looked through the spyhole on the door. “He’s with Gina.”

Nick swung the door wide and yanked Heck, then Gina, into the room. He stuck his head out to look up and down the hall, then closed the door and locked it.

Jace began, “Berto, where the hell have you b—”

“I know it took me longer than I planned, but I know where your father’s former friend that cheated him out of some money is here in Havana.” Heck raised his hands as if to ward off an attack. “We got his address, me and Gina, and we walked there, not far from my family’s old hacienda. A guard told us to get away, so we did. It was my idea, but she helped. I had to tell her a few things about him. How he hurt your father—financially, I mean.”

“You found him—how?” Nick demanded. “Are you sure it wasn’t a trap—a setup?”

“It was something Meggie said, how he had those rare fish. Gina and I passed a tropical fish store on the edge of El Vedado. So I said let’s go in, and we made like we wanted to buy some of their pricey stuff. Asked who cleaned tanks in a home visit if we wanted it, all of that. Then I left, and Gina turned it on with the guy, one that cleans the tanks, and he boasted about some American bigwig has an office here in a hacienda. So we walked where he said, looked at the place. It’s offices but Ames must live there. Big. Fancy. Not far from my family’s old place.”

Astounded, taking that all in, Nick said nothing at first. Ames was here. And Heck knew where. He’d used a partial cover story with Gina so she evidently wouldn’t panic at all the gory details. Finally, he asked Heck, “And are you sure no one followed you back?”

Heck and Gina exchanged quick glances. “No one,” he said, “but we spotted a drone. Maybe it was filming the hotel, but maybe not. Couldn’t see who was running it, but someone down on the Malecon, I bet. Funny, but it’s still hovering outside over the front entrance. If we were on the other side of the building, you could see it. We—”

Nick interrupted. “I don’t like the sound of that. Maybe he was looking for us just like we were for him or maybe that guard that ordered you away had you followed. Gina, I see Berto hasn’t clued you in on everything, but we needed to keep secret that we—I—have an enemy here who was my father’s enemy years ago and maybe caused his death. That guy Seth mentioned at the Key West airport who could have tampered with the plane could have been working for that man. Somehow he learned we survived the crash, landed here—I don’t know. Over the years, I’ve learned to put nothing past him. We’ve got to go—now.”

Claire said, “Jack’s right. He’s spied on us with a drone before. But we can’t just run out the front, then.”

“Down the back inside fire-escape stairs and out the back service entry,” Nick ordered. “Grab things fast. We have to go now!”

Nita started to cry again, but Nick was amazed at how solid Claire suddenly seemed. She handed Lexi and the whale to Jace and seized her purse with her meds. They had so little, it didn’t take long to get ready. They streamed out the door, and Nick practically shoved them down the hall toward a sign that read SALIDA/EXIT. Because Jace had Lexi, he pushed him ahead, let them all pass, then locked and closed their hotel door and raced after them. They didn’t get even one night in this place with the inviting beds, he thought.

“And don’t make noise on the stairs! Wait for me at the bottom!” he called after Bronco, and the big man nodded as they headed through the emergency exit.

Nick was barely to the stairs where Heck was holding the heavy door for him. “Sorry, boss. Wanted to help. The drone—I didn’t know he’d be looking for us here too.”

“You did help if we can tell our friends where Ames is. We needed to run anyway. I’ve been given a plan. Go, go!”

Nick saw he had been right. As the heavy door started to close slowly behind him, he saw two men dressed in suits and ties down the hall burst from the elevator and draw guns. They must have inquired at the desk. What else did they know? Nick watched them for one split second through the hazy glass window in the door. Heck tugged at his arm and hissed, “Boss, come on!”

And then Nick saw what scared him as much as Ames’s men. One man produced something from his pocket that opened the door just as the other elevator door slid open to reveal four men who looked like Cuban police.

8

Heck and Nick rushed down the stairs as quietly as they could. The others were below them, whispering, but it echoed in the stairwell.

“I’d like to fire you for being followed back here, but you’ve just made a promotion,” Nick told Heck. “Keep going. We’ve got to get out a back door somehow. Heck, I have to know. You sure you trust Gina?”

“With my life.”

“Well, maybe,” Nick whispered as they heard a door above them in the stairwell slam open with a bang, “you’ve risked exactly that. Run.”

* * *

Claire heard a bang, then heavy, fast footsteps above as Heck and Nick joined the rest of them in the ground-floor stairwell.

“Out. Out!” Nick told them. “Not the lobby. We need to get out back.”

Here! Jace mouthed. Despite the fact he held Lexi in an iron grip, he shoved one of two doors inward. It opened on a plain back hall with a concrete floor. Claire glimpsed mops leaning against the wall, a barrel, a ladder. Jace thrust Lexi into Claire’s arms and pointed. He whispered, “Go!” and, clutching her daughter to her, she ran.

She saw Jace drop behind the others to jam a ladder against the door, but it wouldn’t last long. Would any of them?

They emerged through a back entrance with a delivery bay but no trucks in it now. Looking up for the drone, they darted under a line of trees and ran the only way they could. Nick took Lexi from her, thank heavens. Claire felt dizzy, nauseous. She needed a pill, but not now...

“Palm trees—not much cover,” Gina said, panting as hard as the rest of them.

Nick said, “Stick close to the building. Nothing overhead so far, but we have to get out of this alley before those goons with guns find us.”

“Gina,” Heck said, “I didn’t mean to get you in all this. You want to go, go, in case they catch us.”

“I’m with you. No going back.”

As they sprinted around the corner and then slowed so they wouldn’t draw attention, those last words echoed in Claire’s mind. No going back. “We need to mingle with the crowds on the Malecon, get lost,” Jace said. “Split up into small groups but keep in sight of each other. Stroll, not run. Maybe we can get a couple taxis.”

“How about we go back to my parents?” Gina asked. “I would want to say goodbye if I can escape with you. Please, let me go too. My father could help with his boat, but we cannot put them in danger.”

“We have another contact that may help us,” Nick said. “Someone on our side.”

Claire thought he still didn’t trust Gina. But could they trust anyone on this island, except Gina’s parents? Well, surely the marines at distant Guantanamo miles and hours away. And Gina’s home was in the opposite direction.

* * *

Jace tried not to keep looking back. Anyway, once they blended in with the strolling crowd, he felt calmer. As they slowed their pace, he tried to catch his breath. But his heartbeat kicked up again when three police cars screamed past, heading for the hotel. At least the guys dressed in business suits with guns Nick said he’d spotted were nowhere to be seen.

They stopped under a thick fica tree with the seawall and crashing water on the rocks behind them.

Jace said, “Don’t we need to cross the street to get taxis heading east?”

“East?” Gina said. “Costa Blanca is west.”

“We’re going to trust Gina to keep our secret and her father to help us,” Nick announced. He was holding Lexi and her green whale again. Claire had seen Jace reach for the girl, but Nick had hung on to her.

Jace asked, “You mean hire him to get us where we want to go?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. But, Gina, will he balk taking us to a rendezvous spot, if it means maybe losing you?”

“Rendezvous with who? Another boat? I can ask him, beg him, tell him it’s my chance, but my mother... After losing Alfredito... I will not tell my mother and will only tell him at the last minute. We could take the bus again.”

“No,” Nick said, “we could be trapped in a net that way, if they set up a roadblock or come on board. Let’s move on down farther into the crowd, line up for two taxis. Change I got for Meggie’s whale, even if it’s in pesetas, should get us a good ride. Let’s go before they search the crowd.”

Jace got them one taxi—a two-tone Ford Fairlane Skyliner, it was called. How he wished it was a flying skyliner and he was at the controls, getting them all out of here. The one Heck hailed was an old Cadillac Fleetwood.

Nick, Claire, Jace and Lexi piled in the Ford with Nita to translate while Bronco, Heck and Gina took the Cadillac. Heck had the money for their taxi. “He say he can go only far as Costa Blanca, so he gets back near dark,” Nita translated what the cabbie said to her.

“Tell him that will do,” Nick said.

But as they pulled away, and the engine seemed to cough, Jace wasn’t so sure. And he really got shook when he saw two Cuban policemen emerge from the crowd they’d just left and point after them.

“We’d better change taxis,” he told Nick. “The boys back there may have spotted us.”

“Let’s get a ways out, off the main drag. Lorena, ask him if he can pull off in a block or two and signal so the taxi behind us does too.”

She asked, then translated back. “He have to charge you more, half of what you promise him.”

“Tell him to do it. And I’m giving him a tip with a tip. If he’s stopped, not to say where he heard we were going.”

“Tell him,” Lexi spoke up, though Jace had been grateful she’d kept quiet so far, “this is a whale, but sharks are after us, ever since the water.”

“Meggie, not now,” Claire said to their girl and hugged her, but it wasn’t enough to shut the child up.

“If he doesn’t listen to me, Lily will do something really scary.”

Claire put two fingers over Lexi’s lips as their cab blinked its lights and pulled off into a side street with the other right behind it.

* * *

Nick knew this plan changing taxis he’d hatched so suddenly was a big gamble, but he was afraid to flee straight for Guantanamo. Basically, there was just one main road along the coast that went both east and west. It was possible that the Cuban government had intercepted and decoded the emails and knew they’d be headed toward Gitmo. Or had Ames’s people followed Heck and Gina because they looked suspicious outside Ames’s Havana hacienda—and they’d called the police? Those guys in business suits with guns loose in a huge hotel—pure amoral Ames.

But could they make it to Gina’s house in these two different taxis? His neck was about to break from craning around to watch behind them all the time, and he saw Heck doing the same in the taxi following. If the police located their original taxis, what would the drivers tell them?

But they had no choice, he agonized silently, trying to keep calm. Hitchhiking like they’d seen people do here was ridiculous. Risking the bus? Walking forty miles to Costa Blanca—impossible. The thing was, even if they got back to Nando and Carlita’s house, would that old fishing boat get them clear to the other end of the island? Was it his imagination or were those dark clouds ahead and not just the sharp shadows of sunset?

* * *

By the time they reached Costa Blanca and got out of their taxis to walk the rest of the way to Gina’s house, Claire saw the sun had disappeared in a blinding burst of crimson and gold that was soon devoured by storm clouds on the horizon. Since Gina had decided not to tell her mother she was leaving and to only tell her father just before he got them as far east as he could, she’d been scribbling them a note to explain, to promise she’d be back, that she’d send them money and love them always.

The distraught woman had used her backpack for a makeshift desk on her knees. Jace sat in front beside the driver, and Gina was wedged in next to Claire in the backseat with Lexi in the middle asleep and Nick on the far side. More than once, in tears, though she was writing in Spanish, Gina had whispered to Claire what she was telling her parents.

Strange, but Claire was coming to trust her now like Heck did and Nick still didn’t. So far, Gina didn’t know their destination was the place her country hated, American-held Guantanamo. And Gina wasn’t the only one in tears. Claire was too, and her well-honed forensic psychologist instincts—and her woman’s intuition—told her they could trust Gina.

Since they apparently had not been followed, they thought they were momentarily safe in Costa Blanca. Yet rather than burst in on Gina’s parents and risk getting caught there, they hiked to Gina’s house outside town and sent Gina and Heck in while they waited outside in the windy darkness. Claire carried the whale now while Nick and Jace took turns holding the sleeping Lexi. If only, Claire thought, as she took her narcolepsy pill in the dark with a swig from Nita’s water bottle, Lexi’s dad and stepdad could learn to share the child like that.

They heard footsteps in the darkness. Then Gina, Heck and Nando rounded the corner where they waited, huddled like the refugees they were.

“He will help you,” Gina told them, “but it have to be at dawn he picks you up in Alfredito because of the rocks. Berto and I take you to the spot you waited before. Mamacita, she say you already pay for much gasoline, a fortune she found in her little jar.”

Claire blinked back more tears. Fifty dollars was a fortune? She knew Nick would insist on paying more, and he only had big bills left.

Nick said, “Berto and Gina, does Nando understand we need to go clear to the other end of the island?”

Heck translated for the old man, then explained, “He swear on his son’s soul he get you close as he can. He say there nice little beaches along there to put in. I think he guess where you going but did not say so. He does it for Gina since I told him I come back for her someday.”

Nando nodded through all that, so Claire wondered if he knew what was being said. He might have guessed where they were going, but he’d hardly figured out that his last remaining child intended to go with them.

Claire wiped her tears on the stuffed whale, remembering the last time she’d seen her mother, her father too, though they’d lost him far earlier. She was so exhausted she was losing control. What if she regressed, had a narcoleptic nightmare or, worse, had her muscles lock so she couldn’t move, couldn’t keep up? Would they carry her too?

“Come on,” Gina said, patting Lexi’s lolling head as she slept, then pecking a kiss on her father’s cheek. “I have a lantern, and I’ll lead the way, stay with you the night while Papa goes back in. The breeze is picking up, but we will pray it doesn’t rain on us, yes? Berto has a piece of plastic we can get under, extra one from the fishing boat. Come on, then, and we all get away. Berto says he cannot tell me where we meet that other ship, but we will find it tomorrow.”

Claire thought Gina must know too, unless she thought that some boat or pontoon plane would meet them offshore. After all, they were headed for an American navy base in hostile territory, crawling with marines. Worse, Gina had no clue she was leaving her homeland with people who were not who they said they were. She’d be stuck on a snowbound island in Northern Michigan for much of a brutal winter. But Gina had cast her lot with them, with Heck, and they owed her for her help. Together, they were safe so far.

As they started off down the dark road, following Gina, Claire held hard to the stuffed whale as if it was her lifeline instead of Lexi’s. Jace carried the child, and Nick steadied Claire with a strong hand on her upper arm. She knew she’d messed up the timing on her meds, which needed to be taken regularly. Was any of this even real? How she wished it was all some dreadful nightmare and she’d wake up next to Nick in Naples. But dangers had lurked there too, thanks to their other murder/suicide investigations—and thanks to that monster, Clayton Ames, who still haunted them here.

She fought to keep her balance as they went single file down the twisting path toward the now-familiar stretch of beach. Along the shore, the waves were whispering a warning, hissing at her. Dizzy, light-headed and scared, she thought for a moment she was plunging into the ocean again, bouncing, as their plane belly-landed and sank. She was in the rocking lifeboat. She was being followed by men with guns and by a stone woman who held a dead baby in her arms and stared at her—and that woman was her!

Was she looking in a marble mirror? She saw a woman there who loved two men. And most frightening of all, as her feet slipped in the shoreside sand, she knew she had not only her child with her but was growing one inside her too.

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