chocolate all the time.
Ginny was looking forward to the party. Her mother-in-law, Amelia, would be in her element, spoiling her husband, her sons, and her grandkids. The children would be busy splashing around in the pool, the men would be out on the patio drinking beer, and the sisters-in-law would sit around the kitchen table drinking iced tea and griping about their husbands, all of whom were cut from the same cloth. To a man, all five of Amelia Torres’s sons were utterly incapable of lifting a finger around the house.
At the checkout stand, the cashier rang up the cake and then smiled at Pepe. “Whose birthday?” she asked.
“Mine!” he announced proudly, thumping his chest.
“And how old are you?” The cashier’s name tag said “Helen.”
It took some maneuvering on his part, but eventually Pepe managed to hold up three fingers.
“Three, really?” Helen asked.
Ginny and Pepe nodded in unison.
“Enjoy him,” Helen said. “They grow up so quickly. Do you need any help out with these?”
On Sunday afternoons, the store wasn’t normally that crowded, but today the open checkout stands all had lines, and the carryout clerks were totally occupied.
“No, thanks,” Ginny said. “I can manage. Don’t bag the cake, but double-bag the ice cream. Otherwise it might melt before we make it to Grandma’s house.”
A few minutes later, Ginny pushed the heavy cart out through the automatic sliding doors. The early-afternoon June heat was like a physical assault. It burned into her face and skin, and she was glad that the interior of her four-year-old and fully paid for Honda came with cloth seats instead of leather. The cloth might be harder to keep clean, especially when something sweet got spilled on it, but at least it didn’t fry your bare skin when you climbed inside.
Pepe was still blabbing away as Ginny angled the shopping cart through the busy parking lot. She had hoped that she would manage to convince him to take a nap before the party, but it was beginning to look as though that wasn’t in the cards.
As Ginny neared the Accord, she pressed the button on the remote. As close as she had to be before the doors unlocked, Ginny was pretty sure she needed to put in a new battery in her remote.
The parking lot was spacious. Even on this busy Sunday afternoon there were still plenty of open stalls, but a dust-covered minivan had parked close enough to her car that both tires were on her side of the designated parking lines. Creep, she thought.
With Pepe still in the cart, Ginny carefully loaded the groceries into the trunk, making sure the cake was properly wedged into a spot where it couldn’t possibly come to grief. The ice cream she set aside to put in the front seat along with her purse in hopes the AC could maybe help keep it from melting before she made it to her in-laws’ place on the far side of I-10. Pepe unfortunately took exception to her plan. He wanted to keep the cake with him, and he launched himself into a nap-deprived temper tantrum.
Once the groceries were loaded, Ginny lifted her son out of the car and then wrestled him, screeching at the top of his lungs, into his booster seat. With him screaming and kicking, Ginny was grateful that this car seat was a lot easier to operate than the backward-facing ones they had used when Pepe was younger. Then, with him properly belted but still howling, Ginny hurried to return the grocery cart to the cart collection point three cars away.
Even at the end of the aisle Ginny could still hear Pepe’s full-fledged screeching. Returning to her vehicle, she edged between the poorly parked minivan and her Honda. She opened the door and prepared to put her purse and the ice cream on the front passenger seat. When she tried to do so, however, she was astonished to see a man, a stranger, sitting there in the passenger seat. Not only was he there, he was holding a gun.
“Don’t make a sound,” he growled at her. “If you do, your baby dies.”
Ginny’s breath caught in her throat. A charge that seemed like electricity shot through her body. Her fingertips tingled. The car keys dropped from her suddenly clumsy hands. The key fob fell to the floorboard inside the car. Her purse and the bagged ice cream landed with a splat on the pavement next to the car.
“Who are you?” she demanded when she was able to speak. “What do you want? What are you doing in my car?”
“Open the door of the car next to you,” he said, pointing at the minivan. “There’s a roll-aboard suitcase on the front seat. Put that in the backseat of this car. Then close that one and get in this one. Don’t call to anyone. Don’t make any fuss or your baby dies.”
Ginny looked back over her shoulder at the grubby silver minivan. It looked innocuous enough-like a perfectly normal car. Surely this wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.
“Did you hear me?” the man barked. “Do it now. Move.”
Ginny looked at Pepe, who, still screaming in full meltdown mode, had yet to notice the stranger’s presence. With her whole body quaking, Ginny backed away from the Honda and pulled open the passenger-side door of the minivan.
The car was filthy inside and out. The passenger-side floorboard was full of trash-empty fast food and drink containers. But the roll-aboard bag was there on the seat, just as the man had said it would be. It was heavier than Ginny expected, but she hefted it out and lugged it over to the back door of her Honda. As she shoved it inside, she looked around desperately, hoping someone was aware of what was happening, but she saw no one-no one at all. The minivan was tall enough that it obscured her movements from the view of anyone coming and going through the store’s front entrance.
She started to reach down to retrieve her fallen purse and the ice cream. Then she stopped. If she left those items there, maybe whoever found them would be smart enough to figure out that something bad had happened. Then again, maybe whoever saw her purse sitting there on the ground might just steal it for themselves.
Trying to control her trembling body, Ginny got back into the car. The man sitting beside her was middle-aged, pudgy, and balding. There was a long scabby cut that ran from his eyebrow to his cheek, as though he had been in a fight of some kind. That was also when she noticed, for the first time, that the hand that held the gun was actually in a sling. One of his arms, the right one, was hurt and bandaged. Maybe that was why he had wanted help in moving that suitcase. Or maybe he thought that dragging luggage around a grocery-store parking lot might attract too much unwanted attention.
Ginny groped around on the floorboard and finally managed to find the keys she had dropped earlier. With her hand still trembling, she picked them up. It took several tries before she was able to insert the key in the ignition. When the Accord’s engine turned over, the AC fans came on full-blast, spewing hot air into the vehicle. Without putting the car in gear, she looked back at Pepe.
“It’s okay,” she said to her hysterical son as soothingly as she could manage, but her voice felt brittle, as if it might shatter into a million pieces. “We’ll be okay. Hush now.”
But Pepe didn’t listen and he didn’t hush. He kept right on howling. He had no idea that they were in danger. All he wanted was his cake.
Ginny turned to the man. “Why are you doing this?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“Don’t talk, drive,” he ordered. “Get us out of here.”
Ginny was an ordinary young woman-a young mother. This seemed impossible. Surely she and Pepe couldn’t be kidnapped by an armed assailant in broad daylight right in the middle of Tucson! But clearly the unthinkable-the impossible-had happened, was happening. Ginny also knew that if called upon to do so, she would fight for Pepe’s life with her last dying breath. That very real possibility forced her to try to calm herself. She held the burning steering wheel with both hands and used the pain on her palms to help bring her mind into focus. Her life depended on it; so did Pepe’s.
She strapped her own seat belt in place. As she did so she remembered that weeks earlier someone had sent her an e-mail about this very thing. Usually, she discarded those Internet chain letters without even looking at them. For some reason, she had read that one all the way through, and the advice had stayed with her.
The message had said that if you were ever carjacked, you should smash your vehicle into something stationary and then get out and run like hell. The idea was that the deploying air bags would probably knock the weapon out of the assailant’s hands, temporarily disarming him. Even if he ended up firing at you as you ran away, not that many people could shoot weapons well enough to hit a moving target.
But if I jump out and run away, she thought, what about Pepe in the backseat? He was strapped into his
