Hailey's War

The morgue wasn’t that different from the rest of the hospital. It had the same vaguely synthetic smell of recycled, conditioned air, the same sound-absorbent flooring. Only the sound of the climate-control system was different here, louder. It was here that I found Serena, sitting with Nidia’s body. She was crying.

Serena, Warchild, crying for the little vic she’d claimed to disdain. This was a private moment. I decided to slip out the way I’d come in.

Except then my cell phone rang. Serena looked up. When she saw me, she knew who was calling. I did, too. Costa. Our deadline had arrived.

Serena watched with wet eyes, both of us silent, as the phone rang a second, then a third time. Once more and it would go into voice mail. We couldn’t afford that, no matter how ill-equipped I was to deal with the situation at the moment.

I connected the call. “Hello?”

“Good morning, Miss Cain,” Costa said. “I’ve conferred with my client. We’ve come up with an arrangement for you to bring Miss Hernandez to us.”

He went on about how Nidia had been well cared for physically and medically before, and how that would continue. Then he started to tell me about the meeting place they wanted me to bring her to. I cut him off.

“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “She’s staying with us until the child is born. That’s nonnegotiable. We’ll be in touch afterward about a hand-off.”

“What makes you think any of this is negotiable?”

“You want the baby,” I said. “That’s your only reason for doing any of this.”

“For someone in your bargaining position, you strike me as almost arrogant,” he said.

“My position’s pretty good. I’ve got what you want and you’re the one calling me to get it.”

“You know, when I said yesterday that no one understood what was motivating you, that wasn’t entirely true,” he said. “I think I understand the root of your reckless behavior. Miss Cain, I know the reason why you had to leave West Point.”

I hung up on him.

forty-eight

“Did you hang up?” Serena said.

“We were getting nowhere.”

“What did he say to you, at the end?”

“Nothing.”

“He said something.”

“He was just messing with me. He thinks he’s smart.” I put the cell phone away and walked to Serena’s side. The sheet covering Nidia was pulled back to reveal her face and shoulders. Her eyes were closed, but she didn’t look asleep. She looked diminished, lifeless.

Serena said, “You stalled him.”

“That was the plan.”

“I know, but things have changed,” she said. “You could’ve told him what happened. You could’ve arranged to hand off the kid and get yourself off the hook.”

“I know.”

“So you’re still doing this?” Serena said. This meaning the war with Skouras, protecting Nidia’s baby even without Nidia alive to know about it.

She had prayed for me, Nidia, even though she’d believed me to be dead. As far as I knew, no one had ever prayed for me alive. I owed her something.

“I am,” I said. “Are you in?”

Serena nodded. “I’m in.” She slid off the stool. “Come on. We’ve got some planning to do.”

“Go on without me,” I said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Her footsteps receded, the door closing with a faint gust of air. I stood a moment longer, looking down at Nidia.

“Pray for us, kid,” I said.

forty-nine

Three days later, we were at a rest stop off Highway 101: Serena and I, Payaso, and the baby I’d come to call Henry. I sat on a picnic table, holding him. He was freshly diapered and had had as much formula as I could get him to take. Now, content, he regarded me with milky eyes that hadn’t decided on a color yet.

Indecision marked all our lives today. We had no idea what we were going to do about Henry Hernandez. Serena and Payaso were looking to me to make that decision, as they had with most of our choices thus far. Most, but not all. They’d made a crucial one late yesterday that had changed the game.

Serena came out of the restroom, shielding her eyes against the sun, finding us. She walked over. “It’s on the radio,” she said.

“We knew it would be,” I said. “Infant son of adolescent Mexican single mother, taken at gunpoint from a maternity ward by a cholo and his girl… Yeah, Skouras’s gonna know whose baby that was.”

Serena said, “I was doing what I thought was right.” It wasn’t the first time she’d said it.

“I know,” I said.

Yesterday, Serena and Payaso had, in essence, kidnapped Henry from the hospital nursery. I had been back up at Julianne’s trailer, getting some badly needed sleep after the restless night in the hospital. They hadn’t called to consult me. They’d made an executive decision.

There would have been some difficulty in getting Henry out otherwise. None of us were legally related to him, and the county foster-care service had been about to step in. Serena and Payaso, with their deep-seated distrust of the system, weren’t about to let that happen.

“For Skouras’s men to take him out of a foster home, that’d be child’s play,” Serena had told me afterward. “You think some skinny white do-gooders are going to be able to protect him? He needs to be with us.”

She and Payaso had recounted it for me. Cheyenne had been the third party, the getaway driver. They’d taken Payaso’s GTO to the hospital, Cheyenne waiting in Iceman’s Taurus two blocks away. Serena had gone up to the maternity ward and signed in as Encarnacion Hernandez, aka Teaser, Nidia’s now-deceased cousin. It was an ID that would only lead back to Nidia Hernandez and family, not to any of us. Serena had gotten permission to hold the baby and strolled with him as close as possible to the exit. Covertly, she’d texted a single character to Payaso, an exclamation point.

That had been the signal for him to fire two gunshots in the stairwell before running out a ground-floor exit to the GTO. With the hospital’s security officers headed toward the sound of the shots, Serena had escaped with Henry. She’d jumped into Payaso’s car, and they’d driven two blocks to where Cheyenne was waiting in the Taurus. Serena had lain down out of view in the backseat holding the baby, while Payaso had gone the other way in the GTO, both cars slow and careful.

When I’d stopped yelling at Serena for taking such a big step without me-this after making such a big deal of setting me up as the leader of this whole endeavor-I’d realized that she and Payaso had been right about Henry not being safe in the foster-care system. And their plan, however audacious, had worked. The news reports had only the color and model of Payaso’s car, not the specific make, and no license number. And nothing at all about the Taurus. I had to admire both the nerve and the planning.

But what they’d done had meant that we’d have to leave Truckee. As soon as the news went out, Skouras’s