Page 57 of Swerve
Unfortunately, Madison was a loss he’d had no choice but to cut. Such a waste though. She’d been great in bed. Impressed by his willingness to drop five hundred dollars on a pair of jeans. Happy with the fact that he drove a Range and took her to dinner at places frequented by politicians she watched on cable news. She liked his accent and bragged to her friends that she was dating a “rich Colombian.”
And he was, by any standard he’d ever imagined.
But then, he’d earned every penny of it.
He knew now exactly how far gone humankind was in the things people wanted in their secret lives. He knew too what those people were willing to pay for those things. Fortunately for him, there wasn’t anything he’d yet been asked to do that he wasn’t willing to do.
That made him invaluable. But it didn’t make him irreplaceable. Where his employer was concerned, no one was irreplaceable.
Even in his street life as a kid, he had never met anyone with the kind of ruthlessness his employer possessed. It was something they had in common.
It had been one of the coldest Januarys on record when he’d first arrived in the United States as a stowaway on a cargo ship that journeyed to Norfolk, Virginia. He’d hitchhiked his way to Washington, DC, and that winter had made him long for the climate of his birth. He had no money, no place to live, except for the nooks and crannies of the city where he saw other homeless people living.
One frigid Sunday morning, he’d slipped inside a church, taking a seat in a back pew, and listening to the man giving the sermon at the front of the sanctuary. He’d quoted a verse from the Bible during his message that had somehow branded itself onto Sergio’s heart. “And if thy right hand offends thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee.”
Nothing had ever made as much sense to him. He’d already accepted the fact that life had little rhyme or reason to it. Those words somehow gave him a vision for his future. A man had to take what was his, cull anything that didn’t serve him. This had become his own life theme, and maybe it was this that his employer had seen in him when she’d walked down the center aisle of the church that morning, noticing him just before she shook the pastor’s hand and thanked him for his sermon.
When he’d reluctantly left the warm sanctuary, turning up the collar of his thin coat and heading down the sidewalk with no destination in mind, she had been waiting for him. She’d asked if he might join her for lunch. There was a restaurant nearby that had a few Colombian items on the menu. He wondered, even as he nodded yes, how she’d known he was from Colombia. He hadn’t yet spoken a word, but then it didn’t take him long to figure out she knew things about people it didn’t seem possible she could know.
At the restaurant, she’d ordered him ajiaco, a soup with chicken, potato, corn, capers, avocado, and sour cream. It made him so homesick, he couldn’t speak, and she’d watched him inhale the food as if she were simply glad to have lent a helping hand to someone who needed it. And he’d had no reason to believe she was anything other than a nice Christian lady. She’d offered him a job that day, and he hadn’t bothered to ask what he would be doing because he hadn’t cared. She’d reached down and offered him a hand up, and he wasn’t about to question any of it.
But then there was another lesson he’d learned on the streets of Cartagena. When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Of course, the proprietor had an ulterior motive in helping him. But he’d ended up with a life as a result of that day. And he liked to think he’d earned it by his willingness to do whatever needed to be done. That was all he’d done tonight after all. Cut off the right hand.
If he’s learned anything from his employer, it is the necessary elimination of loose ends. First thing in the morning, he’ll make sure he’s tidied up each one. And everything will be fine. Life will go on.
He considers another tequila, but decides against it, recapping the bottle and putting it away. What he needs is sleep. And tomorrow, a fresh start.
Emory
“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”
?Ernest Hemingway
IT IS WHAT I want to believe.
With every fiber of my being, I will my own fear to the back of my brain. But it won’t stay there and, like a ball of yarn whose end isn’t firmly tucked to the center of the roll, continues to unravel.
“What’s next?” I finally find the courage to ask when we are a couple of miles from my house.
“We’ll hope to get a lead on the Rover,” Helmer says, hitting the blinker for the exit.
“And what if there isn’t one? Surely, he knows the police will be looking for the vehicle.”
The detective is quiet for a few moments, as if weighing his response. “The thing about criminals is that eventually they mess up. I like to operate under the assumption that they’ll do so sooner rather than later. I don’t have the personal stake that you have, Emory. But I do want to find this guy. What happened tonight feels like it happened on my watch. Whether he had anything to do with your sister’s disappearance, we don’t know. But I want him for what he did to Madison. And I’m going to find him.”
I hear the determination in his voice. Something about the strength I feel emanating from him rolls the ball of yarn back up again, and I put my focus on tomorrow, on another day that dawns with the opportunity to move forward.
~
WHEN WE REACH the house, he leaves the engine running, but gets out and walks me to the door.
“You don’t have to,” I say. “I’m good from here.”
“I’d like to check the house out before I leave.”
“Oh. Okay. Thank you.”
