Adrian McKinty - Fifty Grand

She came back with a fifteen-year-old Cuban driver’s license and handed it over.

“You can have this if you want. No good to me.”

I looked at the black-and-white photograph of Dad in his Russian wool suit and that little mustache he thought made him a dead ringer for Clark Gable. Ricky and I used to tease him about it, but in fact he really did resemble the late Yuma movie star. Quickly I put the license in my purse for fear she’d snatch it back.

“This doesn’t much look like the man in the autopsy photographs. Do you have a more recent photograph?”

“Oh, Jesus. Never ends. Hold on. I’ll get you one.”

An inner voice warned me that this wasn’t necessary, I didn’t need a photograph, I just wanted to open the floodgates, to wallow in the emotion. Careful, Mercado, once the sluices open, they’re pretty hard to close. She came back with something she’d just taken out of a frame.

“Here,” she said. “I put them all away. It was too painful to have him around looking at me, but I couldn’t throw any of them out.”

The photograph was of her standing next to a bearded man, a little heavier, but with sharp brown eyes and mostly black hair. He had a sarcastic, self-mocking expression on his face. I hadn’t seen him for fourteen years but it was definitely him. He looked like one of those public intellectuals on Channel 1, talking about trade with China or the Glorious Revolution’s prospects in the twenty-first century.

“Satisfied?” Karen asked, taking the photo back.

“Perhaps I could ask you a few more questions for the record?” I wondered.

“You can have one more minute. This is all still pretty hard on me. And Jeopardy! ’s on early on Sundays and I never miss it. It’s a routine. Routines help you get through the day, don’t you find?”

“Yes. I don’t mind if you watch while we talk. Perhaps if I could come in for just a-”

“I’d prefer not.”

“So there seems to be at least some confusion, regarding Señor-”

“There’s no confusion. He bought that passport because he wanted to pose as a Mexican permanent resident called Suarez, so he could work in the United States.”

I smiled. “Ah, but this is where I am confused, Señora Suarez. Cuban defectors are automatically granted green cards, Social Security numbers, and so on, are they not? Why would your husband even need to pose as a Mexican?”

Something came into Karen’s face. A darkening. A suspicion.

“Where did you say you were from, Miss Hernandez?”

“I’m from the consulate in Denver.”

“Can I see some ID?”

Mierde .

On to me.

The old man must have prepped her. If someone comes asking about me, ever, check their credentials at once.

My mind raced while I fumbled in my purse. Who was he hiding from? He was a defector hero among the Miamistas. Cuban intelligence never went after defectors. There were literally millions of them in the United States: baseball players, boxers, politicians, doctors, engineers. And Dad was a lowly ferry attendant. What was his game?

“Well, this is a little embarrassing, Señora Suarez, but I think I must have left my papers in my other bag back in Denver. I could come back the day after tomorrow and show them to you if that will help?”

A slight nod of the head. A narrowing of the eyes. She didn’t like that one bit. A furtive sideways glance into the bedroom. That’s where she kept the guard dog or the phone or the gun.

“I’ll come back when I have my ID?” I asked.

“Yes, I think I’d prefer that,” she replied in a frightened monotone.

“Shall we say Tuesday at ten in the morning?”

“Fine.”

“Tuesday, excellent. Well, in that case I’ll be on my way. I apologize if I have inconvenienced you in any way and hopefully we can get this resolved next week.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

I smiled, turned, and walked down the driveway. Bye, Stepmom.

I didn’t look back but I knew she was in her bedroom, calling someone, looking for the emergency cash, packing a suitcase… Dad had told her about this day and the day had come.

I couldn’t begin to understand it.

Was his death not an accident? Was he something more than met the eye? Had Ricky gotten it completely wrong?

When the house was out of sight behind the trees, I crossed the road, vanished into the forest, and waited.

It took only an hour for her to load a beat-up eighties-style Volvo with suitcases and cardboard boxes. She turned right on Beech Street. I cursed at not having Esteban’s car to tail her, but it didn’t really matter. Right was south toward I-70, the big cross-country highway that could take her all the way to Los Angeles in the west or New Jersey in the east. I memorized the license plate, wrote it down for future use, walked back up the driveway, broke in through a side window. The white furniture was the only thing that wasn’t tossed, although the sofa had been pushed way up against the wall, maybe to give her room to pack.

And pack she had.

Drawers opened, clothes scattered, pictures ripped from the walls, a bed stripped. Method to the madness. They had rehearsed this .

No photographs, no diaries, no books.

No books. I thought at the very least I’d see some of his books, maybe flip through the titles while Karen made me a cup of coffee.

I rummaged in the trash but even that gave no clues, just a few nondescript bills. Everything incriminating gone. Tonight it would be burned and dropped in a trash can at some random truck stop.

I put a plastic bag over my arm and shoved it down the U bend of the toilet, but that was clean too.

I did the whole house. A quick brace and then a longer backward trace.

Nothing.

I sat on the sofa.

Memories. Guilt. Tears. Ricky said not to fall for that trip, and he was right.

Be like an alchemist. Transmogrify guilt to anger. Easy after Karen had brought his death so vividly to my mind.

I stood, addressed the void: “I don’t know what you thought you were doing here, Dad, I don’t know what you filled her head with, but you did a number on her, all right, just like you did on us. And… and I want you to know something: I’m angry at you, I’m angry that you left us, that you didn’t write, that you missed my quince and you sent nothing. I haven’t done a poem since you left, and Mom’s half crazy, and we’re all stuck in Cuba. You fucked us, old man, fucked us good.”

I left through the front door and had gone a kilometer along Beech before I turned and walked back.

Something was nagging at me. Something about the sofa.

In through the window.

No reason for her to move it.

I shoved it and found the place where she’d tried to rip up the floorboards.

She’d spent some time on it but she didn’t have a claw hammer and she was in a terrible rush.

I did have a hammer.

I smashed out the nails and ripped up the floor. One board, two boards. Dirt. A plastic bag. Inside the bag another bag, inside the second bag a gun.

Dad’s? I looked at it. It was strange. It was certainly a clue. If I had the time I’d check it out.

I sat back on the sofa. Sat there for a long time. Light marched across the floor.

The patterns changed.

A gnawing sound. A mouse investigating the mayhem. It looked at me with surprise.

Run, mouselet, I spare thee.

Yes. Run, run, run from the Cubans and enemies real and imaginary.

I fished in my pocket, found where I had written Karen’s license number, ripped it up, and flushed the pieces down the toilet.

You’ll be safe, Karen.

Safer, at least, than your husband’s killer.