Jericho
Travis gripped the armrest as the plane pitched. The lady beside patted his hand and said, “It'll be okay. Just a little turbulence.”
He forced a smile and nodded, but he’d barely noticed. The turbulence wasn’t what had the contents of his stomach lurching.
His seatmate noticed the photo clutched in his other hand and smiled. “What do you have there?”
She was only being kind, making conversation to distract him. She did not want to see this photo.
His throat burned and he grabbed for the motion sickness bag in front of him. The lady tried to help, but nearly caused him to drop both it and the photo. Desperately, he ripped the bag open just in time to prevent them both from wearing the remains of the burger he’d eaten just before he'd gotten the call from London.
“Oh my God!” she gasped, and he glanced down to see the photo faceup in his lap.
His stomach wasn't quite done with its violent purge, however, so he couldn't stop her as she unlatched her seatbelt and launched herself down the aisle after the flight attendant.
Jesus, he thought, and fumbled for his wallet, trying to stave off an international incident. He lay his badge in the now unoccupied seat beside him as the flight attendant and air marshal approached.
They looked at each other, then examined his badge before discreetly steering the woman to another seat.
Eventually, he stopped heaving. The stewardess collected the bag, then brought him a fresh one and a water. He nodded gratefully and rasped, “I'm sorry. Case photo. I dropped it.”
She gave him a bright smile that read Not my circus, not my monkeys, and moved along.
The photo was dark and grainy, but it had been enough to make him hop a plane and fly four thousand miles.
His thoughts tumbled like clothes in a dryer. He should've called Brody. At least given him a heads-up. But no, not until he knew for sure. Besides, even if she’d been alive in this photo, nothing said she was now.
But God, what if she was?
Travis closed his eyes, remembering the last time he'd seen her.
They'd gotten to the port too early, which was classic Brody. Travis leaned against the side of his Impala and lit a cigarette. He managed a couple of drags on it before Jericho looked up from her cruise brochures and snatched it from his lips.
“Hey!” he protested, but she'd already tossed it on the pavement and ground it with her heel.
“Those things will kill you, dumbass.” She picked up the butt and threw it in a nearby container.
Travis looked to Brody for help. “She's your wife. Why does she nag me more than she does you?”
Brody laughed as he wrestled a suitcase from the trunk. “Because I always let her have her way and you don't.”
Travis snorted and fended off her attempt to grab the pack from his shirt pocket.
“Please.” She held out her hand and batted those big green eyes at him. “I love you. You promised me you'd quit.”
They stared each other down, but in the end, he sighed and slapped the pack in her hand. She grinned and launched herself at him, planting a smacking kiss on his cheek.
Despite what Brody said, he usually let her have her way, too.
“Promise you won't smoke while I'm gone,” she said.
It was a promise he'd kept. He'd never smoked another cigarette, even when she'd disappeared off that ship in the middle of their seven-day cruise. She'd been gone five years now, and he'd give anything he had if this lead--grim as it was--panned out.
He found himself thinking of things he shouldn't be thinking, which had always been the case with Jericho. She'd always belonged to Brody. Still, you loved who you loved, and you just kept your mouth shut about it. The fact that she'd never been his didn’t change a thing.
Jericho was the whole reason he'd joined the FBI in the first place, and attached his name all over her file. When he'd got that call from the inspector in London, his hopes had surged. As far as the world was concerned, Jericho James was dead, fallen overboard from a cruise ship on vacation to the Bahamas. Even Brody believed it. Only Travis and her mother had persisted, but now Caroline was gone, too.
An arrest made at a London brothel had turned up an American prostitute who insisted she was a victim of human trafficking and had once been held captive with another American girl named Jericho. She told the police they'd been hauled and sold like cattle at an auction. She had a few convincing details and one blurry photo.
The photo showed four naked girls, bound and gagged, their eyes wide and terrified. The one that could possibly be Jericho was almost obscured by another girl and she wasn't facing the camera. All he had to go on was her upper arm, the curve of her face and the profile of her nose. Still, it was enough.
When the plane landed, a redheaded officer waited with a sign bearing his last name at the gate.
Travis shook the man's hand as he introduced himself as Agent Darcy and asked if he had a bag to claim.
“I just have the carry-on."
The agent's face split into a broad grin.
“Well, nothing to slow us down then. I have good news! We conducted a raid this morning at a compound outside of Greenwich and we recovered your friend.”
Travis's eyes did a crazy dance. He wasn't sure he'd heard correctly.
Darcy clapped his shoulder. “Your friend is safe. There's been no announcement yet. We were waiting on you.”
Travis didn't find his voice again until they were inside Darcy's car.
“She's okay?”
Darcy gave him a sympathetic smile. “She's scared. Her situation was different from the other girl. I think she's been kept in seclusion and I don't even think she's been outside of that house in quite some time. But she seems reasonably well.”
Travis closed his eyes. “Are you sure it's her?”
“I left to get you almost as soon as we got back to the station. They will interview her, then collect DNA and fingerprints. But she claims to be Jericho James and she resembles her.”
At the station, Darcy pushed through the crowd and Travis followed on his heels.
Darcy snagged the sleeve of a passing officer and said, “The girl--”
“She's in the interrogation room. She keeps asking if she can go smoke. I told her she'd have to wait.”
Travis's heart sank and he forced himself to take a deep breath. All this way, and it wasn't her …
He glanced up at the one way mirror as they approached. The girl had her back to them, her slim body clothed in some tacky black pleather outfit with a shock of neon orange hair spilling down her shoulders. She was too pale, too thin to possibly be Jericho.
Bitter disappointment scalded him and Travis turned away. Then, through the open door he heard her ask the officer guarding her, “Please. Can I go somewhere to smoke? I promise I'll hurry.”
That voice nearly stopped his heart. Stepping inside the doorway he said, “Those things will kill you, dumbass.”
She stiffened.
“Travis!” she gasped, whirling to face him.
He couldn't say anything. He just held open his arms, and she hurled herself into them so hard she almost took them both down.
She felt so thin and wild in his arms--little more than bones and a heartbeat, but she held Travis so tight he could barely breathe.
A ragged, awful sound tore from his chest and he realized he was crying. Not just crying--sobbing, in a way he'd never allowed himself break down before. She was here, and she was alive.
Jericho was alive.
Carl
On my first day of work in the city, I got off my train at King and 4th street 51 minutes before I was supposed to. That accounts for a fifteen minute walk from the train station to the office, which is more time than it would’ve actually taken me, but it was my first day, so I calculated for spare. I was so scared something would go wrong that I didn’t even think about what I would do with the 51 minutes I had to myself, and took a breath of relief when I realized I had packed Slaughterhouse-Five in my backpack. It’s a book I have to read for school, but I think I would’ve eventually read it anyway even if it wasn’t. I don’t know why though, because it hasn’t gotten good yet and I’m worried that it won’t ever get good and then I’ll feel guilty for not admiring a book that so many people say is life-changing. I don’t even know why I picked a war story. They sort of anger me. But I’d like to think they anger me in a Mary O’Hare kind of way, so I decided I’d let Kurt Vonnegut go and just read the fucking book.
So anyway, I remembered there was a Philz nearby. I never really go to Philz, but it feels like I’m supposed to like it because everyone does, and I didn’t know where else to go, and I needed a place to sit down to read Slaughterhouse-Five. For some reason I also thought I could handle my coffee without milk that day, which was clearly false, and this is all to say that the whole thing was pretty much unplanned. So I sat down in this deserted corner of the coffee shop, not drinking my coffee, and I opened Slaughterhouse-Five. I took out a pink pen, I think. I’m really particular about my pens, and I’m almost certain it was pink. I think it would be unsettling if the pen was actually purple, or blue, because I characterized that whole morning by a pink pen and I’m not really sure how I would feel if I was wrong about the color. It probably wouldn’t change anything. I feel like it would.
I wasn’t really focusing on the book, because it wasn’t that interesting at that point, and also I was still distracted by my black coffee because I didn’t even think about the fact that it was black when I ordered it, I just sort of didn’t think, so I was sitting in this corner and completely not thinking about anything but thinking about a lot of unnecessary things at the same time. Then this super old disheveled black guy comes in and sits a few feet away from me and he had a walker that was right beside him that I guess he was using before. By the way, I didn’t know it was called a walker. I had to look up “what are the things that old people wheel around” on Google images to figure that out. Well now I know.
So he’s sitting there, and then he just starts mumbling a lot of words I can’t really make out. And he was also facing me, so I thought maybe he was trying to talk to me but I didn’t want to have a conversation with a person I couldn’t understand because it was 7:35am and I didn’t want to do something difficult or be a respectful fucking human being, I guess, so I just kept staring down at this page of Slaugherhouse-Five that I wasn’t retaining. Actually, I wasn’t even reading it. I was just looking at it so that I didn’t have to figure out if this guy was talking to me. I kept thinking, Should I ask him if he’s trying to say something to me? But then I realized that then I would have to talk to him, so I just stayed there, fiddling with what I think was a pink pen, and flipping a page every now and then so that it wouldn’t look suspicious. Not that he probably even noticed.
Then this barista comes up to him, and she tells him that she threw his coffee away because he didn’t come to collect it and it had been so long so it was cold. I thought this was really odd, because it hadn’t been that long at all. And then I realized that if he wasn’t in Philz when I got there, which he wasn’t, he must’ve ordered a coffee much earlier and then went on a walk or something… a walk. There I was, in the city an hour early because I was so worried about being late to work, and this guy who I couldn’t understand wasn’t even worried about picking up his coffee on time. I think the barista was kind of annoyed, but the guy did some more mumbling so she told him she’d make it again for him, and she did, and he thanked her, I think, and that was sort of the end of that.
But it wasn’t. Because the coffee didn’t shut him up. The guy was still mumbling. And still facing me. And it wasn’t even a big deal, but I kept building it up in my head like it mattered or something. I got mad at myself because I didn’t turn to him and ask him if he was talking to me, and I got mad that I was so annoyed that this guy wasn’t letting me read my book even though I was in a public place that he deserved to be in, and I got mad that I was getting so stressed about not understanding a guy that had taken a walk after ordering coffee. That’s the exact kind of person that I should be able to understand. It’s probably the best type of person.
My head got so loud and it felt like one of those dinners where my dad accidentally scrapes his cutlery on a ceramic plate and then apologizes to me because I always react so badly to that noise. It wasn’t even a big deal. I don’t know why I remember it so well.
I was so uncomfortable that I got up. He was still mumbling and (maybe) talking to me as I packed up my things. I tried to be slow and calm, like a normal person leaving a coffee shop. Maybe he noticed. He probably didn’t. I put the book in my bag and the pink pen back in its place and my fingers shook as they closed the buckle of my backpack and then I looked at him and stopped. He was moving his walker aside so that I could pass by him and walk to the door.
I wanted to cry. I hated that I got so stressed out about everything before then. This was just an old guy who took walks after ordering coffee and who moved his walker for me and I didn’t even try to have a conversation with him earlier when I know I probably should’ve.
Gratefully and ashamed, I said, “Thank you, sir,” and his eyes went big and he looked at me and said, “Sir?,” and I was confused by that.
He was mumbling a lot of things and I think what he was saying was that nobody ever calls him sir or he hadn’t been called that in a long time or something like that. I don’t know. I didn’t say anything, because he was still mumbling. Then he said, “What’s your name?”
I understood that. I told him my name and he sort of looked at me accusingly but in a good way and said, “No, really, what’s your name?” and I understood him again. So I told him that was actually my name, it was just a Hebrew name and when he heard that he said “Well, damn, are you Jewish?”
“Yes, yeah, I am,” I said.
More mumbling.
“Well, god, I would’ve never guessed that. I would’ve never guessed you were Jewish!” and he laughed to himself for a little bit.
I started walking away through the space he cleared up by moving his walker and I told him that I hope he’d have a nice day, and he yelled after me, unrelatedly, “Carl! My name’s Carl,” and then kept mumbling. I don’t remember if I said anything after that. Maybe I said it was nice meeting him. Maybe I just kept walking. Either way, he was still mumbling when I left the coffee shop, and I walked out a little bit confused but somehow a lot more calm than I was before.
I wondered why he was in Philz of all places, because his clothes were sort of torn up and he didn’t look too wealthy and Philz sells the most expensive coffee in the Bay Area. And honestly, it’s not even good if you don’t get milk. So then maybe he just really cared about quality coffee.
I started liking Carl more for that. He probably gets black coffee even if it’s not as good, because he seems like the kind of guy who could take it. Maybe that’s why he was mumbling the entire time, because all he drinks is Philz coffee without milk so his veins are filled with solely caffeine. Brewed blood. Pink ink. Or maybe he’s going crazy from having to use a walker and move it for judgemental teenage girls who shouldn’t be getting black coffee or reading Slaughterhouse-Five or not talking to him.
I don’t know why I think about Carl so often now. I’ve started to think that maybe he was talking to me the entire time, and just didn’t care that I wasn’t saying anything, and I like that about him, too. I always stop talking if I don’t think someone’s listening to what I’m saying, I don’t want to bother them. Maybe they’re concentrated on a line of a Kurt Vonnegut book they’ve read seventy-two times because they’re trying to avoid me, for example. But even if I was ignoring Carl, I couldn’t really ignore him, and somehow I ended up finding out that he doesn’t think I look Jewish and he thinks my name is sort of weird and he doesn’t get called sir a lot. So something came out of it, I guess.
To be honest, I still feel sort of bad about the whole thing, but I’m glad that it happened. Mostly, I’m just glad that I called him sir. I’d do it again.