Chapter Thirty

Javier woke suddenly, as usual, looking around wildly for a moment before he placed himself mentally – in the front passenger's seat of his car, laying back, parked in the most remote spot of a highway rest area. He had made it to about an hour from Birmingham the night before, fighting traffic the entire way, before he absolutely had to stop and get some sleep. Besides, he didn't want to burst in on anyone in the middle of the night. So he'd also stopped to wait for a more civilized hour.

Stretching, he realized he had been in these clothes for far too long, so he grabbed his overnight bag and headed into the restroom. Stripping off his dirty t-shirt, he dampened it in the sink, then took it into the oversized handicapped stall to give himself a quick wipedown with it, shivering slightly as the cool morning air hit his wet skin – he had gotten completely used to the year-round heat in Ecuador. He quickly donned a fresh set of clothes and stuffed the dirty ones into the bag, then finished up with a more thorough wash of face and hands back at the sink, wiping his beard with the t-shirt and finger-combing his hair into some semblance of respectability by way of drying off his hands.

His cell phone buzzed in his pocket as he reached his car again: another email from KronosKai. Javier stopped dead, staring, then nearly whooped with relief – it was the long-awaited cell phone numbers, for both Christian and Letty. He sent a huge, heartfelt THANK YOU to the tracer immediately, accompanied by a generous bonus, then got to work.

He put his phone into Personal HotSpot mode, then set it on the dash and pulled out his laptop. Now that he had the numbers, he could use them in the program he'd downloaded from the dark web to pinpoint the units' locations, regardless of their service provider. The program wasn't as precise as some others he could have used, but it was good enough – it would get him to within a few dozen yards. Indeed, both phones' circles not only mapped to the address of the hotel the credit card had checked into the previous night, but they overlapped each other until he zoomed way, way in; only then did they separate. Apparently Letty and Christian – or at least their phones – were a few hundred yards apart at that moment.

Excellent. As much as he physically ached to call Letty directly and hear her voice again, he knew instinctively that was the wrong thing to do. Instead, he would call Christian, convince him of his own true identity and living status, and ask him to break it to Javier's grieving "widow". He knew he was asking a lot of the man, but it was the only reasonable solution he could think of.

He closed the laptop, picked up the phone and took it off HotSpot, and checked the time: eight a.m. in Birmingham. Much better. So he took a deep breath, let it out, and dialed.

In fact, the phones were separated because Christian had let himself out for an early-morning walk. Both he and Letty had had very rough nights. Letty seemed to be having trouble simply finding a comfortable position for her very-late-pregnancy bulk in the unfamiliar bed, tossing and turning every few minutes and moving all her extra pillows around – although she had seemed to Christian to be at least dozing for most of it. Hopefully she had gotten enough badly-needed rest in spite of the discomfort.

Christian's problem had been more mental than physical: he was wrestling with anxiety over the entire situation, as well as fear for the suddenly uncertain future, when it had seemed so serene and secure until just a few days before. At least there was one step he had been able to take on that front. Without telling Letty, he had made certain that, although the precise hotel they had checked into had been chosen more-or-less at random, the general location was not: they were within five miles of a very large, well-respected hospital. He had as little desire to deliver her baby in some shabby motel room, or on the side of a road, or even in a dodgy small-town clinic, as back in their own home during a hurricane. He would stay with her throughout her labor and delivery, as she had made abundantly clear she desired, but he wanted proper, expert professionals to actually do that job. Luckily, they had already agreed to stay put for several days, to see how Panama City came through, before deciding on their future course. He would make sure they stayed until after the birth, whatever it took.

The hotel, like all the rest within five hundred miles of Michael's landfall, had been nearly full, so they had agreed to share a room with two queen beds, passing off as cousins assisting each other through the disaster to stave off unwelcome assumptions. Unfortunately, that meant they were even more privy than before to each other's troubles. When dawn found him wide awake, he had quietly gotten dressed and let himself out to pace a few blocks in hopes of calming his mind and nerves.

Suddenly, his phone jangled in his pocket, and he grimaced. She must have woken up and was wondering where he was. When he glanced at the screen, however, it showed an unknown number. "Hello?" he answered.

"Christian?" It was a male voice, showing stress. "Christian Woodhill?"

"Yes. Who is this?" If this was a telemarketer, at this time...

"Oh, thank god!" the voice replied, positively oozing massive relief. So, not a telemarketer. Maybe.

"Who is this?" Christian asked, even more sharply. He wasn't in the mood for playing games, and couldn't quite place the voice, although it seemed almost familiar.

"I'll tell you, but you're not going to believe me." There was a trace of an accent, tickling Christian's memory.

This was getting irritating, though. He stopped walking, sighing heavily. "Try me anyway."

"It's Javier, Christian. Letty's Javier. Your wife used to call me 'Mexican Clyde'. I was sorry to hear about her, by the way."

Christian barely registered the last sentence. Now he was steaming. What kind of joke was this? "You're right, I don't believe you. Javier is dead," he said flatly, through gritted teeth.

"No, I'm not. I was shot, but I wasn't killed. Listen – "

"This is some kind of sick joke," Christian interrupted. "And I am not going to listen to it."

"No, wait, please!" the voice said quickly. "I'll prove who I am. Just give me two minutes. Please?"

Christian heaved a sigh. Sometimes he was far too nice. He held up his other hand, looking at his watch. "Okay. Two minutes. Start talking, buddy."

"There were five of us in the Holiday Inn Express, in two adjoining rooms: you and Rhonda, me and Letty, and Agent Backup – I've forgotten his real name. Letty and I were in handcuffs, arrested by your wife, but Rhonda let her make drinks for everybody – martinis. And after Agent Backup freaked out when the storm sent the hotel sign through the window, you cooperated with me in getting him drunk, by playing a drinking game – the liar's game. After everyone had passed out, Letty got the handcuff keys and tried to escape, but she got no further than the door."

"Why didn't you go with her?" Christian broke in, asking in spite of himself.

Javier grinned, knowing he had him, even if Christian didn't realize it yet. "Because Agent Backup was lying across my legs. I couldn't move without waking him up. I made her go without me. Anyway, the manager knocked on the door just then to offer us new rooms because of the sign. A few minutes later, we were on our way down in the elevator, when the power went out again, and Agent Backup start ragging on Rhonda, real bad. So you decked him, knocked him out. Back up to the new rooms, to wait for the morning and the cinnamon rolls – which were really good – and Letty started working on Rhonda, until she figured out what buttons to push. So in the morning, we left Agent Backup handcuffed to the bed, like me and Letty had done it and escaped, and the four of us walked out to the Sprinter like gangsters." He waited a beat. "Do you believe me now?"

"Holy shit!" Christian breathed. His watch hand had sunk back down to his side without him even realizing it, as he stared blindly, mouth hanging open, across the street. "Javier?"

"Yes. It's me." At this, his first human contact with someone he used to know, Javier leaned his head back against his seat, tears prickling.

"But... Letty saw your body!"

"No. She saw a body, that looked like me. Hold on, I'm going to text you something – a picture." Pulling his phone away from his ear, Javier called up the photo gallery – it was still the same phone he had been carrying ever since they had left the South. He heard Christian say something, but just said, "Hang on a second." Finding the picture Marco had taken of himself and Miguel on the docks approximately fifty years ago, it seemed, he quickly texted it to Christian. "Got it?" he asked, phone back at his ear.

Christian pulled his own phone off as it beeped the text tone, opened it up, and stared at what appeared on his screen, jaw dropping again. "But... wha... Who is that?" he managed, phone to ear.

"Me and the guy I was meeting that night. You know why I was there, right?" He figured Letty had told him the whole story.

She had. "Yeah. Selling coke."

"Right. And in a one in a bazillion chance, the guy I was meeting to sell it to, looked exactly like me." He wasn't going to try to explain the real relationship just then. "We each had our middleman take a shot with our phones. And then, you know about the gang war?"

"Yeah."

"We both got hit. He died, and went into the water. It was his body that Letty saw later. As for me... I know this sounds crazy, but I swear to God it's what happened. I crawled away to find a spot to hide, and somehow, accidentally got aboard his ship. I woke up a few days later and a thousand miles out to sea, and I couldn't get a hold of Letty. I've been trying to find her ever since. Please, Christian, please..." His voice was suddenly cracking. "Tell me you know where she is."

"Yeah, I know where she is," Christian said immediately, and he could hear Javier sob in relief.

"She's there with you? In Birmingham?"

He took a second to register that Javier knew what city they were in, but only blinked. It somehow didn't surprise him. "Yeah, she's here with me. Well, not right here – I'm not in the hotel, I went for a walk. But yeah..." He managed to slow down and repeated it to her obviously overcome husband. "She's here." A beat. "Where are you?"

"About an hour away. You're in the Sheraton Hotel on Grand?"

"Yeah." Again, how did he know that? Christian shook his head, shaking it off.

"Christian... I can't just walk in out of the blue. Can you go and break it to her? Please? And I'll be there in an hour?"

Holy shit, Christian thought. How did I get roped into more Letty weirdness? This is the weirdest one yet. "Yeah," he found himself saying – although there really was nothing else he could have said. "I'll do it. Hey, Javier..."

"Yeah?"

"Drive careful, would you? Get here."

Javier chuckled, and at last Christian was absolutely certain he recognized the voice. "Oh, yeah. Definitely."

He'd made it back to the Sheraton and up to their room in what was, for him, record time. As he opened the door, however, he found Letty standing in the middle of the room, pulling on clothes in an absolute, obvious panic.

"Christian! Where the hell have you been?" Not waiting for an answer, she plowed ahead. "You've got to take me to the hospital. My water just broke!" As he stood there gaping at her, she took a step forward, and cried, "Christian! My baby is coming, RIGHT NOW!"