Witness To Kill (Change Of Life Book 1) (9 page)

“Do you, uh, f..f..fear f..” A rapid series of head-bobbing
clench-jawed guttural rents preceded his determined retry. “Are you, uh, uh, .
. . afraid of f..flying?”

Agent Clay Mark Walker clicked off his cell phone as
instructed by the flight attendant and spoke over the jet whine walled behind
them, sitting between Mary Catherine Wilson and the aisle in the coach section
where they waited for take-off clearance.

“No.” She pressed her lips together and shook her head,
turning gently away. She stared out the window as the wind riffled the shallow
pools like breath blowing over coffee, the reflected sky as black as the
tarmac. “Not really. Not much anyway. I was sitting here trying to remember
when I took my last flight.”

“I checked on-line,” Agent Walker continued as if he
considered keeping her entertained to be a part of his duty. “The weather
should be, uh . . .” His throat bobbed as he hesitated and swallowed, following
her eyes out to the dark and rain. “Should be b..better . . . down in Miami.”

She joined his apparent relief on completing the sentence
with her own anxious nod, obliquely studying him from the corners of her
averted eyes. Witnessing his labor from this close was not pleasant and she
preferred thinking to herself to making small talk.

Although the letter Ruggle’s courier dropped at the front
desk last night had instructed that she plan “at least” two days away, when Agent
Walker picked her up this morning he promised she’d be back in New Orleans in
time to meet Brian after school tomorrow. Mrs. Cloutier was staying with him at
the motel tonight, and Mary eagerly accepted Sherry’s offer to pick him up this
afternoon and drive him back to his new school tomorrow. She could call tonight
from wherever they were “billeted” Ruggle’s letter had continued, which
information was mandated to “remain classified” until they checked in, “for
reasons of security.”

Walking to the departure gate, she recalled, still gazing
out the window where raindrops were distorting the puddles into bands of
concentric fading wrinkles, Walker had looked like just another young
businessman in a charcoal suit and two-toned brown striped tie, his shirt starched
and gleaming white, but comfortably slack around his thin neck. Only someone
watching carefully would have noticed him flick his badge at the TSA-badged
security supervisor, a tall black woman who perused Mary for an instant before
switching the x-ray frame to “standby” for the moment of their passage. He was
on full alert as they walked through the terminal, scrutinizing faces out of
the crowd passing against them, narrowing his eyes more toward the males,
subtly sliding his body between theirs and hers. Without saying anything, from
time to time he stopped and bent to retie a shoe-lace or picked up a pay phone
to allow those following to advance past, and his hard blue eyes watched
furtively to make sure they all did. In spite of the vigilance, and despite the
three cases he carried, he walked with a lean measured grace, as if a kind of
compensation had been granted him for his staggering speech.

Mary did most of the talking, but she noticed when he was
focused on responsibility, like when he talked on the phone—when he was
on
business
—the hitches in his syntax dwindled to insignificance; in the
vagary of unstructured small talk the verbal stumbles grew to humiliating
heights. Away from the challenge of talking, Walker projected the serene
assurance of an experienced sea captain; when he knew he’d have to speak
without a chart, that captain’s confidence seemed to ebb to the look of a
stranded voyager.

Walker pointed at her feet propped on the carry-on bag
pushed under the seat in front of her. “Are you, uh . . . uh.” He stopped and
grimaced like he’d tasted something bad, then sobered his face, slowed a beat
and paused as if he was trying to shape them first in his mind, then transmit
wholly formed phrases to his reluctant tongue. “Do you jog?”

His face shined at accomplishing a properly paced
monosyllabic three word sentence.

Mary grinned wider than she needed to, said more and spoke
faster than she normally would have. “Well . . . “ She stretched it out
comically, grinning broadly under arched brows. “I
intend
to jog . . .
does that count? When I
plan
my days I always run lots of miles. What’s
the saying about the road to hell?”

She kept talking as if her words might gulp up the blank air
between them like little verbal
Pac Mans
, as if filling all the empty
space might spare his face its look of pain.

“I did used to run a lot . . . a lot for me anyway. I built
myself up to four or five times a week . . . four or five miles. I usually got
out during the week when Brian was at school and Luis was working lunch. . .”
She took a breath through her nose and blinked. “It’s a pretty good place to
run . . . New Orleans, I mean. Only place I’ve run since high school. I just
ran back then, I mean I wasn’t on a team or anything.” She paused in thought.
“It’s low down here. Flat, you know?”

She smiled again, less inanely, thinking she sounded like
Sherry, or like someone who’d stayed in New Orleans for too long. “I’ve been
meaning to get out some where we are now. The streets out there are pretty
busy, and it’s not too interesting, strip malls. But I’ve got the time . . .”

She shook her head and snorted. “Not like I’m doing much
else. I just can’t seem to be able to get us settled into a routine, living in
that place.” She looked at another jet warming in the dark light. “On running .
. . or anything else for that matter.”

She sighed resignedly, still shaking her head. “I guess I’m
glad we’re . . . safe.” On
safe
she glanced at him pointedly, but got
only nothing back.

She turned back to the tarmac and the dismal morning. “It’s
pretty frustrating right now . . . for both of us. I’m worried this isn’t the
right thing to do . . . the right thing for him, you know? Maybe I should be
doing something else. I never dreamed they’d be talking to us about moving away
. . .
relocating
. . . That brochure Agent Ruggle sent says we might
even have to change our names. C
hange our names!
Can you imagine? They
expect us to change our whole lives,” she muttered, sitting back with both eyes
squeezed shut like someone trying to dispel the memory of a bad dream. She
opened them to find him staring at her through a wide-eyed look of distress,
the hard black rims in his eyes dissolved into blue. She sighed again deeply
and whispered into their sympathy. “Can you believe something like this can
happen to ordinary people?”

The steward’s public address instructions ended and they
were pushed back into their seats by the jet lifting off. After a few minutes
the rumble subsided and below them the terrain shrank and squared into a green
and brown checkered game board for giants.

“How about you, Mr. Walker . . . Agent . . . what I should
call you?
Mr.
seems kind of formal . . . bet you’re not much older than
I am.”

She peered at him, continuing the conversation for reasons
she couldn’t fully grasp. He was listening to her and holding a magazine, but
she could tell at the same time he was categorizing the passengers in the seats
around them.

“Anyway. How about you . . . do you jog?”

She chuckled knowingly before he could answer. “No jogging
for you, eh? You probably
run
don’t you?”

He hesitated and glanced around for another moment, then
laid down the
Sierra Club
magazine he was either reading or hiding
behind. “Yes. Every d..day I, um. When I can.”

His face up close was handsome, if strained. He was close-shaved
and his skin had the health and vibrancy of someone who spent a lot of time
outdoors. His lips twisted vigorously as he wrestled with the words.
“Thirty-four,” squeezed from between them like toothpaste from a nearly spent
tube.

She dived into the thick of his embarrassment. “Yeah,
thirty-four, that’s about what I thought. I just turned twenty-eight . . .” she
paused at his head nodding. “Oh right. Right. Of course. You knew that. Know
everything about me. Got it
all . . .
don’t you?”

Her voice was teasingly friendly, but there was a trace of
rancor in it as her running shoe toed the canvas briefcase at his feet. “Sum
total of Mary Catherine Wilson . . .
stored right in there.”

“No,” he answered in a near-strangled voice. “No. T..that’s
not true.” He frowned and shook his head, cleared his throat. It’s not like
that.” His eyes darkened in their effort to help, as if they were joining with
his mind to aid their physic brother, the recalcitrant mouth; his lips curled,
his throat lump jiggled, his head bobbed like it was trying to shake something
out. A barely audible “It’s Mark,” was the result of all that.

“Sure,” she agreed quickly. “
Mark.
I knew that. Mark
. . . works better for me.” She arched her brows and smiled. “Guess we’ll be
spending some time together.”

She waited, then nodded approvingly. “Mark. Always liked
that name.
Biblical
my mother would say. It’s a nice name.” As she cooed
it occurred to her she sounded like she sometimes caught herself talking to
Brian, speaking to this man as if he were a child, or an idiot. “We’ll just go
by Mary and Mark,” she shook her head happily and announced like she was
talking to a child. “So,” she glanced down and asked coyly, relieved to think
of something else to say. “What’s in the other case . . . uh, Mark? Spy stuff?”

His forehead reddened and his mouth worked before the words
tumbled out. “Ah, cameras. I take, um . . . I take pictures.”

“You take them for you . . . or for the FBI?”

“Both,” he shrugged diffidently. “For me. N..nature ones,
mostly for me.”

His head dropped back to his magazine. As she looked down at
her
People
she discreetly watched as he squinted and used his thumbs and
fingers to frame a photograph of a Bald Eagle’s nest looking over a river
valley.

Relieved of the self-imposed responsibility of talking for
both of them, she laid her magazine into her lap and turned back to the window
just as they broke through the cloud strata into the light. The plane’s steep
climb transformed the day from drawn-in melancholy to open sky as the world fell
away; the fierce attitude of the clouds facing the world was refashioned by
altitude into benign white cotton from this side. The earth had disappeared. As
brilliant and boundless as the dreams of youth, the sudden specter of broad
high heaven stabbed her so viscerally she almost gasped out loud; the startling
recast of the day permeated through her like an unrequited
urge
, the
morning’s gloom left behind like a nightmare on waking.

She twisted her knuckles on the pictures of a smiling Prince
William and Harry on horseback and stared out trying not to think of the
inevitable return to the reality waiting—a reality she knew that was only
hidden
by the wide clear blue, not
gone
—a hard reality waiting for her as
certainly as the hard dark ground lay waiting under the false floor
cotton-tufted beneath them.

*** *** *** ***

Tired of sitting all day, Mary stood alone in a corner of
the big room reviewing the information the agents had dispensed upstairs. They
had arrived three hours earlier, the silent driver turning off Flagler into an
urban canyon between the keystone walls of the United States Courthouse and the
lighter vaulting granite of a newer skyscraper, the broad blue and green vista
of Biscayne Bay switched into a narrow murky shadow as if someone had changed
channels during a travel ad.

They entered the courthouse through an unmarked side door
pushed opened by a dark-suited man even before the cab came to a full stop. As
they walked the long narrow halls another fretful suited man with a coiled
black wire running to his ear took long strides ahead of them, poking his head
around each corner before directing them forward like a military traffic cop.

The air under the artificial light of the close passageways
had a curious dark tinge to it, like metal only recently changed to gas. Walker
didn’t speak, but peered up and down the corridors just as carefully as the
other man, guiding Mary with a firm hand that never left her elbow.

Back in the windowless big room where she was standing, the
lights dimmed and the murmuring seemed to grow as if first act was being
announced in a theater lobby. In her briefing upstairs they had explained that
they would darken the room a few minutes before the lineup so that “if and when
she testified” she could explain that she’d been given adequate time for
her
eyes to adjust to the dark before making the identifications. Agent Walker
watched her from the opposite corner, looking over the shoulder of a stocky
Hispanic man he was talking with like they were old friends.

The end wall was covered by a dark full-length curtain. A
black janitor in a Dolphins cap ignored all else and hummed to himself as he
unfolded chairs from a wheeled rack, lining them in front of the curtain; she
could smell metal as he clanked them open one by one.

Men and women in suits and uniforms walked in and out,
talking in the solemn voices of funeral ushers. In the time since she’d arrived
she’d met a stream of police
persons
, attorneys, agents from the FBI,
IRS, ATF, DEA and others she couldn’t recall. Several wore military uniforms.
Lettermen.
She thought of Detective Sherry left behind in New Orleans and wished he
was here with her.

Although things felt subdued and even subterrane to her,
those in the gathering seemed charged with an excitement she could not even
grasp, much less share. A few of the men admired her in the frank way of men
looking at an attractive woman, but as a group they were professional if a bit
solicitous. Several of the suited men transparently tried to stroke her ego,
trying to make her feel important. In more than one of the sober faces she
recognized looks of concern and even sympathy.