Hailey's War (28 page)

I hesitated, grasping her meaning. “An assassination is unacceptable to you?”

“
You
doing it is unacceptable to me,” she said. “You're not a murderer, Insula.”

I pulled my food basket toward me and picked up one of the few remaining french fries, even though I wasn't hungry. “In a way, I'm avenging my own murder. His guys shot me to death in Mexico, or at least that's what they thought. They dragged me off the highway so no one would find me. It doesn't absolve Skouras that I didn't actually die. He wanted me to.”

“But you didn't,
prima.”

“We haven't got a world of options here, Serena.” I was frustrated.

We were silent a moment. Then I said, “Look, we're not going to throw this plan together in twenty-two hours, anyway. When Costa calls back, we'll stall. I'll try to work out a deal in which Nidia stays with us until the baby's born. I'll tell him we'll work out a hand-over then.”

“He won't go for that.”

“He doesn't know where we are. He'll have to go for it or stick his thumb up his ass.”

“No, he's going to stick a
gun
up your ass when he finds you, that's what he said on the phone,” Serena said.

“Well, it's the best plan I can come up with,” I said. “We just need to stall while I go back to San Francisco and do enough surveillance on Skouras to get his routines down. Then I do the hit, and Nidia and her baby are safe.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The baby's value to Skouras is strictly personal. Once he's gone, there's no reason for his soldiers to keep this quest alive. They're just hired guns. If no one's paying anymore for the baby to be found, that'll be the end of the search.”

“Hired or not, the Greek's guys might take his murder kinda personal,” Serena pointed out.

“They won't blame Nidia for that.”

“You mean they'll go after you.”

“I'll be the one who hit Skouras,” I said. “They'll know that.”

Serena said, “I'm still in unacceptable-losses territory with this.”

I pried the lid off my drink and stirred the sepia-colored mix of Coke, water, and the remnants of hollow ice-machine cubes. “I don't know anymore who started this,” I said. “When I drove into that tunnel, I was a civilian noncombatant, and those guys shot me point blank. But then we took the fight back to them when we went after Nidia. We didn't have to do that. But however you look at it, we're engaged now. It's a war. And if someone's got to die before it's over, I think it should be Skouras rather than Nidia or one of your homegirls or me. Can we agree on that?”

She nodded.

I crumpled my napkin and threw it into the plastic basket. “Come on, then, let's head back.”

On the drive back to Julianne's place, I said, “So what was Trippy saying
about me?”

Serena looked blank.

“You know,” I prompted, “that I'm not really one of you guys?”

“Oh, that. Don't worry about it. She's young and insecure. She's my lieutenant, but then you came back to L.A. and took your beating, and suddenly you're at the center of the biggest mission we've ever done. She feels pushed aside. She'll get over it. When we get back to L.A., I'll do some Trippy maintenance.”

“You should,” I said, braking for a stop sign, then pulling through. “What she's saying wasn't wrong. I'm not really one of you. I've said that all along.”

She shrugged, not wanting to relive the argument we had on the phone.

“Hey,” Serena said, “slow down, you're gonna miss the turnoff.”

She was right. I braked as hard as I dared on the snow-wet road and turned, steering us up through the gauntlet of trees.

When we got to the trailer, Cheyenne came out to meet us. She looked shadowed and worried.

“What's up?” Serena said.

“Nidia isn't feeling good,” she said. “She's having cramps.”

“Cramps?” Serena asked. “Or contractions?”

The one advantage to Nidia going into labor early was that it blew away our
previous, half-baked theories about jacking a doctor to attend the birth. Nor did Payaso bring up his idea that Nidia could give birth to the baby alone. Instead, he did the guy thing: He turned the whole situation over to the women. Serena and I quickly decided to take Nidia to a hospital.

I did the driving. Nidia was in the passenger seat, which was pushed back to accommodate her belly and also reclined into as comfortable a position as possible. She'd gathered her hair into a loose ponytail off her face, which was faintly beginning to shine with perspiration. But she didn't seem to be in any distress, just tense and inwardly focused.

Serena and Cheyenne were in the backseat. No one was talking. I was concentrating hard on the road ahead of me. The day was still warm enough, yet I imagined a rogue patch of ice causing me to slide the GTO disastrously into a ditch. The sun was low enough now that I had to fumble for my sunglasses.

At the hospital, the parking lot wasn't even half full, a good sign that Nidia wouldn't have to wait long to be seen. I parked us in a space that said
AMBULANCE ONLY
and cut off the engine. Cheyenne and Serena climbed out of the backseat, noisily closing the doors behind them. I didn't open my door, because I would have to find a more permanent parking space for the GTO. That's when I felt Nidia's small hand clamp around my wrist. I glanced over, and her alarmed eyes met mine.

“You're coming in, aren't you?” she said. “I only trust you.”

This was something new. I'd never heard her say anything like it before.

Serena opened the passenger-side door. “Ready?” she prompted Nidia. “Let's go in.”

I said, “Give us a minute.”

Serena shrugged and gently closed the door. I struggled to think of the right response. “Of course I'm coming in,” I said. “It never occurred to me not to.”

She didn't take her hand off my arm, the knuckles slightly pale. She said, “Back when I thought you were dead, when I was in that house in the hills, I prayed for your soul, every day. That God would take it into heaven.”

Maybe she was frightened because of the difficult hours of labor that lay ahead of her. Or maybe she was just emotional because her baby was finally hours from being in her arms. But I felt certain that she wouldn't lie about this. And I would have been lying if I tried to pretend that the knowledge didn't touch me, somewhere I hadn't known I was still vulnerable.

“Why didn't you tell me this before?” I asked. “Like, last night, when you nearly ran away and I stopped you?”

She said, “I thought you would laugh.”

“No, I wouldn't have,” I assured her. “Go on inside now. I'll be along as soon as I park the car. Things are going to be okay.”

Payaso and Iceman drove down a little later, and we slept in turns. Around
three
A.M
., I was in a quiet, dim waiting room on the hospital's top floor, stretched out along a row of linked chairs with padded seats.

We had ten hours, roughly, before Nicolas Costa would call. There was nothing to be gained by telling him that Nidia was giving birth—or, by that time, maybe
had
given birth—to the Skouras grandchild. I planned to go through with the plan I had come up with that morning. We'd need to stall for time if I was still going to hit Skouras.

That had become my word,
hit
. That was how I sanitized it to myself. That and reminding myself, over and over, that he'd done it to me first, or tried to. In Mexico, Tony Skouras's men took me to the limits of my fate, and it had been no thanks to them that those limits stopped short of death.

Soon I was going to repay them.

If I succeeded—and that wasn't a given—things would change once again as drastically as they had after Trey Marsellus's accident. Another flight, another new home. I had yet to think about where I'd go.

Closing my eyes, I remembered CJ's offer to lend me enough money to open a little bar and restaurant on the Gulf Coast. I'd never take him up on it, of course. I'd already taken ten thousand dollars from him that I could almost certainly never repay.

But for the moment, on a chilly December night, it was too comforting to slip into a fantasy of faraway warmth, and I did. I imagined a place in a small Louisiana town, down on the end of a pier, where I'd string white lights along the roofline and keep cold Jax beer in the cooler. At night I'd sweep up and wash dishes and watch the lightning out over the water. CJ would come visit me. I'd mix him up dirty martinis and cook Cajun food like he asked. He could play his guitar for my customers.

Sure, the good times. The ones you know are never really coming.

When I slept, I didn't remember my dreams, but I woke up paranoid, my hand
twitching for the SIG.

“Hey, Insula, take it easy,” Serena's voice said.

I rubbed sleep from my eyes. Serena was bundled into a heavy flannel shirt, and she looked cold. At least that was my first impression. Then I realized that there was something wrong with her face, a guarded apprehension that had nothing to do with physical discomfort. I thought of Babyface and Quentin and the rest of the tunnel rats, that somehow they'd found us despite every precaution we'd taken.

“What's up?” I said. “Did she have the baby?”

She said, “They're still getting the baby out.”

Serena wasn't a sentimental person, but
getting the baby out
was not the way she would refer to a mother giving birth.
Getting the baby out
meant something was wrong.

“What's going on?”

“Nidia must have had an undiagnosed heart condition,” Serena said. “A weak heart. It gave out during labor.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“She's dead.”

“She can't be
dead
, Serena.”

“I'm sorry, but it's true,” Serena told me. “They've got to get the baby out now, because I guess there's no oxygenated blood without the mother breathing, and … I thought you should know.”

People in TV and the movies were always breaking bad news to people by saying,
You'd better sit down
, but as soon as Serena told
me this, I thought,
I've got to stand up
. So I did. My legs were a little shaky, and once I was up, I didn't know what to do.

I said, “Do you know what practically the last thing I said to her was? ‘Things are going to be okay.' What a fucking idiot.”

“No,” Serena said flatly. “Of all the things you could have looked out for, this wasn't one of them. You did everything you could for her,
prima.”
She paused. “That probably doesn't help, right now.”

Nidia's baby was a healthy boy. I wish I could say that he gave a lusty, life-
affirming
cry just as the first rays of morning light slanted through the hospital windows and Serena and Payaso and the rest crowded around to marvel at his little fingers and his little toes, and it was a great life-in-the-midst-of-death moment. Maybe some of that even happened; I don't know. I was outside, where the fresh, cold air and the light was almost assaultive after the stale recycled air of the hospital. It had snowed during the night, and most of it was still fresh. I walked over to the quadrangle of lawn and I sat on my heels to touch it.

The first time I saw snow, we'd been based in Illinois. Like this one, that snowfall had come in the night. I had been afraid to touch it until my father did. In that memory, I can't see the features of his face, just his big bare hands, picking up the snow, showing me how it melted as he rubbed it between his fingers.

Like he'd done, I got my fingertips wet from the snow, then painted that wetness onto my eyelids. My eyes felt dry and bloodshot from poor sleep, and I felt the relief as the water sank in and stung my eyes, then ran down onto my cheeks like the tears.

Since I'd first heard her name, Nidia to me had been a series of imperfect motivations. I'd driven her to Mexico for some cash and maybe drugs, plus for a break from my daily life in San Francisco. Then I'd tried to find out whether she was alive or dead, because I'd needed to understand what happened in the tunnel and why. Finally, I'd taken on the job of rescuing and guarding her to prove to myself that, given the chance, I could have been a good officer.

Nothing I'd done had been because I'd known who Nidia was or cared about her, and now it was too late to try. Somewhere inside that religious, distant person had been a real girl who'd loved a real man, and later had a sexual indiscretion with another one, a man with whom she'd known there was no future. I'd never known that Nidia. Serena and I had both held her at arm's length for fear that her victimhood was some kind of catching illness.

Should that matter to a soldier? Wouldn't such personal feelings simply be an encumbrance? If so, why did I feel guilty for not having them?

I straightened up and went back into the hospital. We had things to think about, Serena and I.

But when I got to the neonatal unit, Cheyenne was sitting in the waiting room, her eyes reddened. Payaso was stretched out along several hard plastic chairs like I had been, sleeping with his head pillowed on a rolled-up sweatshirt. Iceman was doing the same, but sitting up with his head tipped to the side.

No Serena.

I turned to Cheyenne. “Where's Warchild?”

She frowned. “We thought she was with you.”

I walked the corridors, looked into other waiting rooms, checked the women's restrooms. No luck. But by then I had an idea about where she might have gone.