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THE CAUSES WERE NATURAL.
That was obvious because she was ancient. No medical examiner in the world, no medical examiner Widow had ever worked with, would even go beyond a quick look over the body.
Ten medical examiners out of ten would agree. Right there on the spot. They’d all agree with one glance. Claire Hood was ancient. It had been her time. A strange place, no doubt, but your time was your time.
No question.
Claire Hood had died right in front of Widow. Right at that generic, sandy bus depot. Right at a place where she didn’t want to die. Right at the time, she couldn’t afford to die. She had something left to do. She had unfinished business.
And the only person in the world who knew about it was Jack Widow.
*****
THE PRINCIPAL CALLED John Glock and waited for him to answer the phone. A static ringtone, an echoing whir, and then a hard voice that sounded like no one else on Earth answered and said, “Yeah.”
John Glock’s voice was unlike anyone else’s on Earth because eight years earlier, he had been stabbed in prison by a shiv made out of twenty-five pages of rolled paper, thick and ripped from a National Geographic magazine, fashioned and soaped into a weapon. It was a great murder weapon. After its use, it could be unrolled and flushed down a toilet.
Three inmates in a Texas prison had tried to take him out. They had succeeded in killing his friend, another former SEAL. But they had underestimated the man they were trying to put in the dirt. He had jerked the shiv out of his neck and whipped around and gored the closest attacker, twice, in his own throat. He’d jabbed the same shiv into the kidney of the second one as the attacker turned to run. And he’d killed the third attacker five weeks later after he got out of the infirmary. Now Glock spoke, but with a rough and hard voice because some words were harder to pronounce than others.
Glock had a tattoo that paid tribute to his fallen friend. It was a tattoo of a frog’s skeleton holding a trident, an unspoken symbol used by SEALs to honor their fallen friends. Glock had been a member of the SEALs for only four years when he and his friend were honorably discharged under less than savory circumstances. They had served their tenure and decided to go into business for themselves. That’s when they had met the Principal, a wealthy man who shared their vision, which was a non-inclusive vision for America.
Glock considered himself a patriot, and he considered the Principal to be a patriot. A wealthy man but a patriot just the same. They had a plan to keep America safe. They shared a vision of taking back their country.
The Principal said, “It’s me. I need your help.”
“What’s up?” asked Glock. He walked over to the small, thin-paned glass window in the trailer and pulled down the blinds with his fingers. He stared out over the giant lot of construction vehicles and cement trucks and Caterpillars and unmanned bulldozers and giant excavators that stood monstrous and silent like dinosaur bones in a museum. And the site he was on wasn’t the only one they owned or even the largest.
“We’ve got a problem. Our business is in jeopardy.”
“At what corner?”
The Principal said, “All of it. But primarily the Texas border.”
“What happened?”
“James Hood.”
Silence came over the phone. John Glock knew that name. And he hated the man it belonged to.
John Glock said, “Want me to call the Jericho Men?”
“No. We need professionals, not a bunch of militia idiots with guns,” the Principal said. He paused a beat and said, “But put them on alert. Just in case.”
“What do you propose?”
“You know what his being out means?”
“He’s not dumb enough to have done anything.”
The Principal said, “Think, John. Why else would he be out? The Feds know something. Or they’re sniffing around. Or they’re simply casting a net because they’re bored. Whichever it is, we don’t need them catching something with that net.”
Glock said, “Don’t be so paranoid. Maybe he’s running. In which case, they won’t find him. Either way, we’ll handle it like we always do.”
“We can’t take that chance, and you know it.”
Glock said, “Relax. We won’t leave him out there. He’ll be put down.”
“And anyway, we made him a promise. Remember? If he didn’t stay in for the full sentence, then we’d kill him and his family.”
“I know,” Glock said.
The Principal said, “We must keep our promise.”
“We shoulda killed him way back then.”
“I agree.”
“You know where he’ll go?”
“To see his wife and kid. And his mother, if she’s still alive,” Glock answered.
The Principal didn’t say anything. Glock wasn’t sure he was onboard with threatening the lives of three innocent females just to prove a point to one guy that they’d kill anyway, but he wasn’t going to leave them alive. Not his style.
“I’ve called three others to help,” the Principal said.
Glock said nothing. He didn’t need help, but it wasn’t his money. The Principal was the one with the cash. If he wanted to hire three other professionals to track and kill one man, then Glock wasn’t going to argue, and if James Hood was out long before his release date, that meant he was let out. And being let out by the Feds meant he’d made a deal.
“Meet with them and find the target. Kill him.”
The Principal hung up the phone.
Glock smiled. He was already in El Paso, Texas. If James Hood had just gotten out of prison, he’d have a head start, but that wouldn’t matter. Glock would start with meeting the kill team members, and then he’d track James Hood down.
*****
JEMMA COULD NOT REMEMBER the last time she had seen the guy driving the car that she was in. But he looked like her daddy.
She wondered where he was taking her. She still wore her good first-school-day clothes. She still had her lunch packed neatly inside a special lunch pail. It was special because her mommy gave it to her. It was a mint-condition collector’s item, from when her mommy was a little girl. It was made from cold steel but colored with warm pinks, and sunny yellows, and friendly whites.
Little ponies danced on the surfaces.
What did her mommy tell her it was called? My Little Horsey? Or My Small Pony? Or something like that. She wasn’t exactly sure about the title. She learned new things every day, and it was hard to remember them all.
The lunch pail was named after toys her mommy used to play with when she was a little girl, growing up in another country.
Maybe, she had been Jemma’s age. Maybe that’s where Jemma got her love of horses from.
Jemma wasn’t sure about what time it was. Not exactly. She didn’t own a watch. Not yet. Because she was still learning how to tell time, but she knew it must’ve been around noon because she yawned, again. Her legs dangled and waved, back and forth over the edge of the front seat of the car.
The guy who looked like her daddy was tall, but all grownups were tall to her. There was nothing special about his height that she could see.
He had offered her Gummy Bears, which was her favorite. Not Gummy Worms. Worms were gross, she thought.
She wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers. Or take rides from them. But her daddy was no stranger. He convinced her it was okay.
He said, “It was cool with mommy.”
At first, she didn’t trust him, but he had known her mommy. He knew her name. He looked like her daddy, maybe. So, he didn’t count as a stranger. Right?
It made sense to her. She had worked it all out.
The guy who looked like her daddy, let her sit on the front seat. She loved that.
Her mommy never let her sit on the front seat of her car. And her grandma never let her ride in the front of her old town car.
Jemma had to always ride in the backseat. She hated the backseat. It was boring.
She was big enough to ride in the front. She thought so.
That’s why she was glad to be in the front row, next to her own daddy.
She had felt she was old enough for more than two years.
She was about to have a birthday soon. She was going to turn seven. She was excited.
She wondered if that’s why her daddy was picking her up? Maybe he was surprising her for her birthday?
Jemma yawned again and stretched out her arms and hands as far as they would extend. She made a big deal out it. All kinds of sounds and moans and groans, like she had heard her grandma do, a million times.
Old people made all kinds of sounds, she thought.
Jemma twisted in her seat and stared at the guy who looked like her daddy.
She looked him up and down. And down and up. And back down. And back up, again.
He was her daddy. She was pretty sure. But he was different than she remembered. Her daddy didn’t have an arm tattoo. This guy had one. A big one. It was huge. She’d never seen anything like it.
It was a dragon or snake or some kind of monster from ancient Greece. She had learned about Greece in school. There was a book in the library she liked. It had plenty of pictures of monsters. There was one that looked like the one he had on his arm. It had three heads. Or ten heads. She couldn’t remember.
The monster in her book had a magical power. If you cut off one head, another grew back in its place. Or two more grew back—something like that.
The guy who looked like her daddy’s arm tattoo was a little different. She only saw one head.
The guy who looked like her daddy looked down at her. A quick, brief glance, only he held onto it for more than a second. He seemed to stare into her face, hard. Then he smiled.
Under the stubble, and the hard tan, she was pretty sure it was her daddy.
Almost sure.
Jemma wanted to talk with him and ask where they were going. She wanted to ask where he had been for the last two years. She wanted to show him she wasn’t in a car seat anymore. But he looked so serious that she decided not to bother him with what her teacher called ‘small talk’.
Some grownups didn’t like it, her teacher had said.
He had picked her up at her bus stop, where she’d been waiting in the early morning hours for the school bus.
It was her first day back at school. She was starting late this year because her mommy had been in the hospital. She was sick last year. And she was still sick this year, but her grandma decided it was time for Jemma to go back to school.
Jemma didn’t want to go back. She didn’t want the other kids to ask her why she’d been away for so long. Then, she’d have to tell them about her mommy.
There would be questions. Kids liked questions. Especially, the kids in her class. She’d have to explain to them why her mommy had lost all her hair.
They might pick on her for having a bald mother.
Her grandma had explained to her that her mother losing hair was a good thing because it meant she was getting better. The medicine did it to her.
Hair loss meant the medicine was working.
Jemma wondered if her daddy was taking her to meet her mommy somewhere, like a surprise. Maybe, an early birthday surprise.
Even though part of her wanted to know, she didn’t want to ask him. She didn’t want to say a word.
She knew he was her daddy. He had to be. She was almost positive.
He looked like him. He acted like him, only quieter. It had to be him. Right?
She wanted to know, to be certain, but she felt tired. Her eyes felt heavy.
She yawned one last time in a long, over the top way. And she craned her head, and pushed up off of the seat with her knuckles, and tried to look at the terrain out the window, but all she could see was Texas wasteland.
She saw a sign that read a funny word. She wasn’t sure how to say it, but she mouthed the letters anyway.
O-Z-O-N-A
She looked at it as the sign passed. She mouthed it again, wondered how to pronounce it.
Sound it out; her teacher would’ve said.
She recognized the Oz like Oz from Wizard of Oz, one of her favorite books. It was better than the movie; she thought because the book had action and blood and death in it. She liked that stuff.
The word name of the town they just passed was Ozona.
It was a cool word.
Jemma yawned again.
The time must’ve been close to her regular nap time. Not at school, but at her grandma’s house. Usually, her grandma would fix her a big lunch, and then she’d get so sleepy that she’d take a nap after.
This time she had not touched her lunch. But she was still sleepy like she was programmed to be.
She looked at the guy who looked like her daddy one last time. He looked tired too. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. She was about to ask him if he wanted to take a nap with her.
Before she could, her eyes got too heavy to keep open, and she laid her head back against the seat.
She was out like a light in seconds.