“Quien es Mira?”
“My wife. These were my good jeans.” I was probably in shock, and I’m allowed a warped sense of humor. I just chopped the head off a hellhound that was trying to eat a seventeen-year-old boy.
“Jesse? Jesse!” Funny, that didn’t sound like my wife’s voice, but sure enough, a woman was frantically calling my name. Kristyn pelted toward us, multicolored hair standing at sharp angles like a terrified hedgehog. I wasn’t even sure she’d known my real name, until that moment. “Ohmigod! Ohmigodohmigod! Did you see that?” For one horrifying moment, I thought she was going to hug me, and I braced for the excruciating pain. Instead she skidded to a halt, all but vibrating, she was so worked up, and blinked at our obviously injured state.
“Is that… blood?” Kristyn went as pale as Esteban and slumped toward the ground.
Somehow, I caught her with one arm. “Aw crap. C’mon, Kristyn. I can’t carry you. Don’t do this to me now.”
She whimpered, doing her best to keep on her feet, but she was now covered in the very blood that had her swooning. My day just wasn’t getting any better. It was Murphy’s Law at its finest, right here. This crap only happens to me.
I glanced at Esteban and chuckled. Then he snickered. Then we both burst out laughing. Groggy, Kristyn eyed us as if we’d finally lost it. I guess maybe we had. But under the circumstances, I think it was excusable. We laughed until our eyes watered and we were gasping for breath. We laughed so hard it hurt. We were still laughing when the ambulances started arriving.
There was a minor incident when I refused to leave until I checked on my truck. It was going heavily against me, but about the time one paramedic had a syringe full of sedative pulled out, the other one relented. I was allowed to hobble to the parking lot, leaning on Kristyn, who seemed to have recovered her moxie.
My truck was there, all beautiful in her rain-washed glory. And miracle of miracles, she was untouched (barring all previous damage, of course). In a tornado’s inexplicable way, the same forces that had trashed the shopping center had neglected the employee parking lot. All twenty or so cars sat there just as they’d been parked. I made a mental note to send Will and Marty back out to pick her up, then went along with my captors like a good boy.
Esteban and I had one brief moment alone, as the paramedics got us loaded into the same ambulance. He glanced at me, steadier now that his arm was secured to a board. “What happened to the baseball man?”
“Tell you the truth, kid? I don’t give a rat’s ass.” And that’s all I had to say about that.
23
They never found Nelson Kidd. I suppose it’s possible the tornado carried him off, and we’ll find his body years from now stuffed under some random rock by the terrible forces of nature. But I think it’s more likely he just vanished, ashamed to face what he’d done. Ivan sent word out to the other champions. He’ll never be able to pull the same stunt again.
Being the last person who saw him alive, I was of great interest to the police, no doubt aided by the almost- restraining order I had against me. Having two hundred thousand of a missing baseball player’s dollars in my bank account didn’t help, either. I spent the next two months answering questions of varying levels of accusation before a phone call from a former client (thank you, Mr. President) convinced them to look elsewhere. I heard later that his family had him declared legally dead. His grandson is now a very rich little boy.
The punch line of it all, at least to me, is that when Kidd said Verelli was tied up, he was being literal. The hotel housekeeping staff found the agent in his underwear, gagged with a sock and bound with miniblind cords. Someone managed to get a cell phone video of his “rescue,” and that ran on the Internet for weeks, Verelli being paraded before the world in his tightywhities and garters for all to see. I think I’m the only one who caught a glimpse of a black mark on the inside of his left arm. The video was poor quality, so maybe it was a shadow, or a cop’s finger, or my own vivid imagination. Or maybe Mr. Verelli was more of a believer than he let on.
Though sweet Trav tried hard to convince the police that I was his assailant, I had an airtight alibi from half the population of Sierra Vista. In the end, he finally confessed that Kidd had beaned him with the clock radio and tied him up to get him out of the way. (Hey, I can’t fault the old man. I wanted to shut Verelli up from the moment I met him.) Being caught in his lies pretty much ended his dream of painting me as the villain.
Unfortunately, that revelation cast suspicion on Kidd’s mental condition at the time of his disappearance, which necessitated more legal dancing around to see whether or not I got to keep the money he paid me. I’m still waiting to find out if it’s mine free and clear, and in the meantime… well, bills are piling up. That’s the way things go. We’re not even going to talk about the insurance company. They dropped me like a hot potato.
I came out of the adventure with seventy-two stitches in my left thigh, two in my face, and a torn gastrocnemius muscle in my right calf. Try saying that five times real fast. They glued my gashed knuckles closed. Oh yeah, and there was that case of mild frostbite on my toes (and Esteban’s). Lemme tell you, that baffled them. Dr. Bridget was unthrilled, to say the least.
“God was watching out for you again, it seems.” She gave me that withering female look, the one that makes you just want to crawl into a hole and die out of pure shame, whether you’ve done anything wrong or not.
I was put on bed rest. Within half an hour, it became couch rest, and in another ten minutes, it became lounging-on-the-patio-in-the-sunshine rest. I’m not one to stay flat on my back if I can help it.
My injuries did save me from spending that Saturday chopping an enormous tree into burnable chunks. It came down in my mother’s front yard in the storm, and her birthday party turned into a lumberjack contest. I sat in my comfortable lawn chair, foot propped up on a log, and offered helpful suggestions to my brother and cousins on just how to best go about it. I thought Cole was going to kill me.
“I swear, big brother, somehow you did this on purpose, just so you wouldn’t have to cut up this tree.” Cole swigged from a bottle of Gatorade as he took a break from swinging his splitting maul. Despite the rather perfect spring day, sweat ran off him in rivers.
“You can’t make this stuff up, little brother.” I grinned at him and raised my beer in salute. He just glared daggers at me and went back to work.
Paulo-er… Esteban-was also spared the ignominy of physical labor. In fact, he got the hero’s seat of honor for “saving” me from the tornado. I ask you, where’s the justice? He seemed rather overwhelmed by my mother, who is a force of nature in her own right. Motherless boys of the world, beware. She can spot you a mile away. She has meat loaf, and she knows how to use it. I think we left her house that evening with ten plastic containers filled with various foods “absolutely necessary to a growing boy.”
That growing boy also got to spend a good hour on the phone with his mother, most of it in such rapid- fire Spanish that even Mira had trouble following. It ended with tears I wasn’t supposed to see, and our all promising to look after Esteban until he could be returned safely home.
The other phone call… Well, I claimed that duty for myself.
That night, when the house was safely locked and everyone else had gone to bed, I hobbled into my den and called Rosaline. She broke down and wept when I told her Miguel’s soul was safe. I even told her about the river stones, and how I’d placed them at the feet of my little Buddha statue. Mira was the only other person who knew. Somehow, I thought the two women would understand.
“Gracias, Jesse. Muchas gracias, siempre.”
“He’d have done the same for me.” It was an uncomfortable call, despite the good news I was delivering. First off, I don’t deal well with crying women. Second, I couldn’t bring her husband back, even as badly as I wanted to. “Listen, if you ever need anything, you only have to call. You know that, right?”
“ Si, I know. You are an angel, Jesse Dawson. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise.” We hung up after the usual exchange of greetings for the families, and I sat in the silence for a long time. Eventually, footsteps shuffled in the hallway.
“Is she all right?” Esteban appeared in the doorway, dressed in one of my T-shirts and an old pair of sweats.
I thought about chiding him for eavesdropping, then realized I didn’t really care. “No. But she’ll be better now.”
He scratched at his hand, mostly encased in neon blue fiberglass. “Thank you for calling her. I… did not know
