The Ones We Trust (8 page)

“Okay...” I lean into the couch, feeling the soft leather crinkle and give under me, and think for a moment. “Rowing scholarship to UVA undergrad, followed by a master’s in journalism from Georgetown. After that, I slogged through a couple of shitty jobs until I found one I liked, which paid me approximately one-sixteenth of what you earned at Goldman Sachs. And I was never most eligible anything.”

“Engaged?”

“Almost. We lived together for a while, and we talked about it for longer than that.”

“What happened?”

“Timothy was a reporter, too, and his schedule was even crazier than mine. Most of the time, we were more like ships passing in the night than a real couple. Anyway, he didn’t like it much when I turned in my press pass. I think I was home too much for his tastes.”

Weird. Usually, talking about Timothy, about all the reasons we crashed and burned, is something I’m hesitant to do. I don’t like the way it awakens all those old feelings of hurt, the way his name on my lips tightens a sharp and rusty barbed-wire band around my chest.

But not tonight. Tonight I say the words without pausing to consider the subject, and then I brace for a pain that doesn’t come. What does come is a sense of instant and giddy relief at its absence. Huh.

If Gabe senses it, he doesn’t let on. He lifts a shoulder, a no-big-loss gesture. “In my experience, people who don’t stick around during the hard times weren’t worth having around anyway. That’s one of the few perks from this shit show, actually, that it sure cleans out your Rolodex.”

Even though I can’t detect a trace of bitterness in his voice, I read all sorts of things in his response. I read that in losing his brother, he’s lost a lot of others, too, either by watching them walk away or by cutting them loose. I read that some partings were met with a good-riddance attitude and some were more painful, and I can’t help but wonder which category the French-mustard ex falls into. And I read that, now that his Rolodex is trimmed down to a core group of people he knows and trusts, he’s not quick to add any new names into the mix. Will mine make the cut?

A yearning wells up inside me, and I bury my nose in my glass. All those things I thought and felt those first two times at Handyman Market still ring true. The more I learn about Gabe, the more I like him, and the more I want him to like me back. I don’t trust myself to say anything.

Outside my window, the sky has stopped dumping and the wind has settled, and the usual evening traffic has picked back up, people walking their dogs, cars sloshing past on the still drenched streets. But inside, it’s warm and dry.

Gabe reaches for the wine. “Can I pour you another?”

“Sure.” I hold up my empty glass.

Much later, by the time he finally gets up to leave, we’ve polished off the whole bottle.

13

The mind has a habit of getting hung up on one way of thinking. It’s kind of like that old riddle, the one where you imagine you’re on a sinking boat surrounded by hungry sharks. How will you survive? Your brain is so busy mulling over the possibilities—I’ll punch them in the nose, I’ll swim like the dickens, I’ll pray to every god there is for a miracle—that it misses the most obvious answer: stop imagining.

Kind of like how my mind got hung up on where to look for Ricky.

Because up to now, it’s been so hung up on searching for Ricky Hernandez on the American military websites, that it hasn’t considered other possibilities. What if he’s a foreign coalition soldier? What if he’s not a soldier at all? He could be a military contractor, or even an embedded journalist. The possibilities roll through my head in the middle of the night like an army on attack, plucking me from my dreams and lurching me upright in my bed.

I throw off my covers and launch myself out, snagging my robe from a chair on the way out of my room.

Downstairs at my computer, it takes me three hours and five cups of coffee to find Ricardo Manuel Hernandez, and when I do, my heart plummets at the address of the site I find him on: americancontractors.org, a website tracking casualty counts for Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to the website, Ricky was killed on January 12, a mere two months after he may or may not have watched Zach die on a nearby battlefield. A link sends me to WAVY, a local NBC affiliate near Virginia Beach, with a lousy four-paragraph report on the basics of his death.

VIRGINIA BEACH, VA—A civilian contractor for Intergon from Virginia Beach was killed in a roadside attack near Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sunday.

Ricardo Manuel Hernandez, 38, died while on duty for the private contractor when the vehicle he was driving was attacked. An explosive hitting the windshield killed Hernandez and another security worker, sources said.

A former mechanic, Hernandez worked for ten years at Portsmouth Auto Repair. His body is expected to arrive in Portsmouth on Thursday or Friday. Funeral plans are pending.

Hernandez leaves behind a sister, Graciela Hernandez, of Portsmouth.

A roadside attack near Kabul. Zach was stationed in Kabul, meaning if Ricky had been there for more than a few months, he and Zach would have been in the same place at the same time.

With unsteady fingers, I type
Intergon
into the search field.

According to their website, Intergon provides shelter, food and comfort to coalition troops across Afghanistan. I skim over their support operations—delivery of food, water and fuel, dining and laundry and housing services, morale and recreation activities—until my gaze glues to four little words at the bottom:
spare parts and maintenance
. I return to the army reports, skipping down to the mechanic sent to fix a valve on the broken-down MRAP.

A mechanic.

I return to the obit and stare, openmouthed and wide-eyed, at my screen. Ricky was a mechanic.
A mechanic.
One who would know, surely, how to fix a broken-down valve on a tank. My heart races and my skin tingles and my blood pressure explodes like a grenade.

I didn’t just find Ricky.

I found his connection to Zach.

Only now it’s quarter to six, and I’m about to be late for rowing, an offense my teammates do not tolerate. I yank on my clothes and race to my car. By the time I make it to the river, the boat is in the water and the girls are milling around on the dock, casting annoyed glances at their watches.

I spend the next two hours and fifteen minutes beating out my excitement on the waters of the Potomac, mulling over every possible scenario to explain Ricky’s presence on the battlefield the day Zach died, and his absence from the official army reports afterward. He fell asleep in one of the vehicles he was working on, only to accidentally awaken in the middle of a battle. He grabbed a gun and started shooting for his life, taking down Zach in the process. He threatened to expose whoever shot Zach, and someone silenced him permanently. The possibilities are endless.

One thing, however, is clear: Ricky Hernandez was there when Zach died.

And my gut is telling me he saw something he shouldn’t have.

* * *

Handyman Market is packed with last-minute Halloween shoppers, their arms loaded with orange and black decorations, their bodies lined up in long, snaking lines at both registers. I shoot up the middle aisle in my damp rowing clothes, dodging customers and swinging my head left and right, searching for Gabe.

In the flooring section, I run into an apron-clad handyman, a handsome surfer type named Jeff, and ask if he’s seen Gabe. “Sure I have,” Jeff says, shoving his hands in his apron. “Gabe’s in the back.” He grins, and his perfect white teeth are as blinding as his blue eyes.

But as lovely as Jeff is to look at, he’s not going to be winning
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
anytime soon.

“Um, could you maybe go get him for me?”

He starts, and his smile drops a half inch. “Oh. Right. Be right back.” Jeff lopes off as if he has all the time in the world, disappearing after an eternity through an Employees Only door.

After he’s gone, I stand there for a minute or two, alone amid the waxes and cleaners and mops, shifting from one foot to the other in a bout of caffeinated excitement. I check the time on my cell, then peek through the window on the swinging door Jeff disappeared through. Empty.

I turn back as a heavyset man in a stained Members Only jacket comes around the corner. He passes a disinterested gaze over me, then heads to the display of pumpkins at the back end of the store. Distractedly, I watch him rifle through the pile, picking each one up and inspecting it before exchanging it for the next. He takes all the livelong day with each one, checking for perfect shape and size and color, and I’m about to tell him Trader Joe’s has pumpkins twice the size for half the price, when Gabe emerges through the door with a box of hammers.

“I found Ricky,” I say the instant I see him.

Surprise flashes across his face before he drops the box onto the floor and shoves it under the bottom shelf with the toe of his boot. “Where?”

“You’re not going to like it.” I pass him the printout and give him a few moments to read, and digest, Ricky’s obituary.

He points to the date the article was written. “This was just two months after Zach.”

“I know.”

Gabe unties his apron, yanks it over his head and wedges it in a messy ball between spray bottles of carpet cleaner on the shelf. “Let’s go. I want to hear the whole story.”

“Okay, but did you make the connection? Ricky was a—”

Gabe silences me by wrapping a giant palm around my bicep and pulling me up the middle aisle. “Not here.”

We hustle through the store and out the double doors. The street is strangely quiet for a Friday morning, no pedestrians rushing up the block with shopping bags, no cars whizzing past. With no one around to hear us, I feed him the most important line from what he just read. “Ricky was a mechanic.”

“Which means he knew how to install a truck valve.”

“That’s an awfully big coincidence, don’t you think?”

Gabe plants his boots at the edge of the curb, pausing to check for nonexistent traffic, then ushers us both across the street. “I don’t believe in coincidences, not anymore. But it would explain why Nick didn’t remember him. If we’re thinking this through right, Ricky would have lagged behind my brothers in the second convoy with the busted truck.”

My mind sticks on his words, the ones about Nick not remembering Ricky, and I pull Gabe to a stop outside the glass door to Starbucks. “Gabe, wait a minute. Nick doesn’t remember Ricky? What if his name on that transcript was a mistake? Maybe that’s why we’ve never heard his name before.”

Gabe grimaces, and he leans his head close, even though there’s no one around to hear him anyway. “Nick is a little...confused. Not a lot of what he says these days makes any sense.”

Poor Nick, though I guess it’s understandable. I imagine any man crouched fifteen feet away when three bullets tore through his brother’s skull would be not only confused but scarred for life. In Nick’s case, it also sent him squirreling underground. No one has seen or heard from him since his honorable discharge back in the spring.

Gabe tugs on the door handle, and the scent of coffee and autumn spice wraps around us like an invisible fog. “Let’s sort through all the facts before we jump to any conclusions.”

Starbucks is a little busier than outside, but not by much. There’s a cluster of mothers in workout gear in the leather chairs by the front window, a long-haired college student with his nose in a calculus book and a handful of folks behind laptops. Gabe and I settle on a table in the front corner, semi-secluded behind a display of travel coffee mugs, and I hold it for us while Gabe gives the barista our orders.

He returns a few minutes later with a plain black coffee for himself, and a large pumpkin spice latte and two blueberry muffins for me.

“I haven’t had breakfast, and I just rowed for two hours straight,” I say, feeling an overwhelming urge to explain my order, even though Gabe doesn’t seem the least bit interested in my questionable diet.

He points to the article, neatly folded on the table between us. “Start at the beginning.”

I do, attacking the first muffin and telling him between sugary bites about my midnight epiphany and my subsequent computer search. I’ve barely begun when he holds up a hand to pause my story.

“Wait a minute. You’ve been up since two?”

I nod, swallowing. “I’ve had a lot of coffee. Anyway, I had been so focused on searching through the military databases, I didn’t even consider the fact that he may have been a foreigner, much less a civilian.”

“You searched every coalition list?”

“Only the European and Latin American countries. I figured those would be the most likely to have a name like Hernandez.”

His eyes widen. “What’s that, six or seven countries?”

“Eight. The UK was the largest to comb through, and I would have gone back to check the other countries if I hadn’t found him on the American contractors website.”

Gabe gives me an impressed look. “You really are excellent at research, aren’t you?”

I let out a little laugh, then continue my story of this morning’s events. Gabe leans forward in his chair, planting both elbows on the table and listening with squinted eyes. When I get to the part about Ricky being a contractor for Intergon, I explain a few of the theories I came up with on the boat, which widen his eyes and straighten his spine like a series of electric jolts.

“And I checked the map,” I say. “The explosion that killed Ricky happened about fifteen miles from where Zach was killed, just two months earlier.”

We fall silent, and I reach for my latte, take a long pull. Warm liquid lands in my belly, but it does nothing to chase the chill from my bones. It’s one thing to suspect the army is hiding something, another thing entirely to have proof.

Gabe is the first to break the silence. “Call the sister. Set up a meeting. And I want to be there, in the room, when you talk to her.”

Something I can’t quite put my finger on surges at his request—fear? nerves?—and I swallow it down. “No way. You look exactly like your brother, and your face has been all over the news for the past year. If she owns a television set or subscribes to a newspaper, she’ll recognize you. Besides, what am I supposed to say? That we suspect her dead brother is tied to Zach’s death somehow? She won’t let us anywhere near her.”

“So feed her a story that he fixed up your car, or you’re old friends from school. You’ll think of something.”

“You’re asking me to lie?”

His answer is immediate. “I’m asking you to go undercover.”

I lean back in my chair and consider his request, my heart ramming hard enough to crack my ribs. Whether knowingly or unwittingly, Gabe has just pinpointed a heated debate in the news community. On the one hand, he’s not wrong. Undercover reporting
is
a common technique, and not just for a few rogue reporters. Big-name journalists have long been rewarded for crafty approaches to getting a scoop, even if that reward is only a byline.

But for every reporter who’s ever lied or misrepresented themselves to a source, there are just as many who are dead set against it, who contend that as reporters, our role is to
tell
the truth, not obscure it.

“Come on, Abigail. Journalists do it all the time. As long as the fib is for the greater good, say, to expose corruption in jails or child labor in factories or bullying in high schools or racism in the Ku Klux Klan, what’s the big deal? You’re manipulating your story to extract a bigger truth.”

Gabe is right on this point, too. Journalists often look to the philosophy of utilitarianism when making these kinds of decisions. If the actions taken are on behalf of the public, if they are done for the good of the majority, then what’s wrong with a harmless little lie? The boundaries are vague at best.

But still. Something about it kicks the air right out of me.

“I’m not a journalist, remember?” My voice sounds weird. Hollow and high and...wrong.

“You’re seriously going to sit here and tell me you have zero plans to write about Ricky?”

“You make it sound like you want me to.”

“Somebody has to. Why not you? You’re the one who found him.”

I give him a halfhearted shrug, but my lungs won’t loosen. My heart won’t settle. I rub a knuckle over my breastbone, but an ache pulses and pounds behind my sternum, blooming into a spiky knot that’s not from worry or resentment or dread.

It’s from longing. Longing clings to me like static electricity I can’t bat away.

I want to be the one to write about Ricky. I want that byline. Even after everything that happened with Chelsea, even after everything I’m learning about Maria, Ricky’s story feels like
mine
, and I don’t like the greedy rush that warms my skin at the realization.

Gabe misreads my silence as doubt, and he reaches across the table, across cups and wrappers and crumb-laden napkins, and wraps his big hand around mine. “Please, Abigail. For me. Please, call Graciela.”