A Fly in the Garden: Chapter 25
DISCLAIMER: Most of these characters are not mine at all, but they are memorable. Thank you, Mr. Marlowe. The others? Yeah, they're mine
Epilogue 1: Five days later
Benny groggily shakes his head, trying to snap out of the slumber he has been in. He panics for a moment realizing that he cannot see. And – his hands are cuffed in front of him. He feels around, and recognizes that he is on a bed of some type. More like a cot than a bed. He also realizes he is blindfolded.
He lifts his cuffed hands to his face, and pulls the blindfold off and away from his face. He is in a small dingy cell. The cell is roughly eight feet by eight feet, with a small two by two window about eight feet up the wall. The window has vertical bars that match the bars for a door. That's when the smell hits him.
"Well, well, the sleeping beauty awakens," a voice on the other side of the bars and just out of sight beckons to him.
"Who are you? And where am I?" Benny bellows, trying desperately to sound intimidating. He certainly is not used to being caged.
The man behind the voice steps into view. Benny's face goes ashen and he actually skips a breath and begins coughing.
"God Almighty," he whispers between coughs.
"Not even close," Sam Carlos replies with a smile – if one could call it that. "Although I am honored to be placed in that company," he continues, chuckling.
"Mr. Carlos," Benny begins, knowing that he has one chance to plead his defense. He has heard about these impromptu 'trials' that Sam Carlos occasionally presides over.
"Mr. Carlos, I don't know what you have heard, or what has been said, but I promise I have done nothing – nothing – against you."
"Directly? No you haven't," Carlos agrees. "But you and I have a problem, Benny. Our problem is the women who were held on Angel Island. Women that you knew about. Women that you could have helped, but did not.
"Wait a second, Mr. Carlos, I didn't –"
"Benny, Benny," Carlos interrupts. "You need to be very careful what you say next."
Benny considers his options, and places his head in handcuffed hands and . . . and he begins to weep. This isn't how it was supposed to end. How it was supposed to turn out. He has a wife, a child. He is a criminal yes, but he is also a husband and father. Doesn't that count for something?
"I had the opportunity to speak with forty-nine women, Benny. I want that number to sink in with you. Forty-nine women. Forty-nine lives shattered. And you sat by and watched it happen."
Benny remains silent, save his quiet sobbing. He knows there is no defense that Sam Carlos will accept. Carlos' disdain for women as prostitutes is only surpassed by his contempt for the people who encourage or keep women in such a role.
"Forty-nine women, Benny. And for one unfortunate woman, she was held for 361 days. Mandy Elliot. She was nineteen years old, a year ago."
Carlos turns to the larger man who has joined him outside the cell, and begins speaking in Spanish.
"361 días. Es decir el tiempo que le va a mantener aqui, mi amigo."
He turns back to Benny, and translates for him. Your entire crew is dead, Benny. In some ways I believe you deserve to join them. But I also know you have a wife and a son. I . . . hesitate to orphan a child. So, for their sake, Benny, for their sake I will show you the mercy you have not shown others. You will stay here for 361 days. The same incarceration felt by Miss Elliot. You will leave this place a new man, Benny, just as she is a new woman today. Just as she was used sexually by predators – continuously – for 361 days, so, too, shall you."
The panic and fear on Benny's face almost . . . almost makes Sam reconsider. But he pictures the dozens of women he has spoken with in the past five days. It makes it all too easy.
"When your sentence is up, you will be a free man, Benny."
Carlos turns to the jailer and thanks him as he leaves.
"Gracias, mi amigo."
The larger man simply grunts, and spits on the cell floor a foot inside Benny's cell, and gives the former crew chief a leering, lecherous grin.
"Oh, and when I say free, Benny," Carlos concludes before he walks out of sight, "I mean you have to find your way home."
With that, Sam Carlos walks out of the cell area, and out of the building into the warm Mexico sunlight. He gazes down at Benny's wallet in his hand, containing the key documents Benny will need to get back across the border that is some fifty miles away.
He tosses them into the old and grimy trash can that sits outside the building, and walks briskly to the helicopter waiting for him some twenty yards away.
"Home, Junior Boy," he tells the large man sitting behind the controls once he gets inside. He closes his eyes, and begins whistling a tune from his younger days, before starting to hum the lyrics from the old Scorpions tune that was a party favorite.
Take me, to the magic of the moment,
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams
With you and me
Epilogue 2: The next day back in San Francisco
It's just after midnight, and Jimmy Blankenship sits in silence, the fear totaling consuming him and rendering him speechless. He sits on the deck of the large cruising yacht, scared into submission by the three men on the craft. His hands are tightly bound in front of him with a rope. He has tried and tried and has made no headway with this damn infernal knot.
Jimmy was taken at gunpoint in his hotel. He had made it as far as Monterrey in the old truck, and was looking to stay off the radar. He has sent his daughter, Sydney, to his mother across the bay in Richmond for a couple of days. Sydney was only too happy to miss a couple of days of school.
He has been careful. No air flights, no credit cards. He isn't sure how these bounty hunters found him. But find him they did, and immediately took him to the cruiser that was anchored just a few hundred feet offshore.
Suddenly, from down below, however, a new face shows. One that he hasn't seen before. The face is tight and menacing. The man looks of Asian descent, probably Filipino, Jimmy figures. Not that it matters.
"Mr. –"
"Blankenship, Junior Boy," laughs one of the crew. "You forgot his name already?"
"Ah yes, Blankenship. Jimmy," Junior Boy chuckles. "I will get right to it. I know your wife closed out your account. Left you penniless. Ah, women, what are you going to do, am I right?"
The small crew laughs as the cruise up the Pacific Coast has been uneventful. Now, after a starboard bank, the reddish-orange arches of the Golden Gate Bridge come into view.
"Anyway, Mr. Blankenship, my employer felt that her actions were quite unfair," Junior Boy continues. "You worked very hard for your money, sir, and hard work should be rewarded."
The large man takes out a large suitcase, which he opens.
"Three hundred thousand dollars," Junior Boy tells him. "All in small bills, that will be easier to spend. That's about what your share was before your wife absconded with all of your monies. Not a nice woman, I must say."
He closes the suitcase and then sets it at Blankenship's feet.
"This belongs to you, sir," he tells a now very confused Jimmy Blankenship, smiling broadly. Compliments of Mr. Sam Carlos."
With that, the larger man suddenly whips out another rope, this one much shorter. He loops the rope through the suitcase handle and then quickly ties a strong knot around Jimmy Blankenship's ankles.
"Noooooo!" the former MUNI bus operator screams as he is lifted high overhead by the large man and tossed overboard. The weight of the suitcase does its job, pulling Blankenship beneath the frigid San Francisco waters.
"Who says you can't take it with you?" Junior Boy marvels aloud, to great laughter from the crew as they continue under the bridge, heading for the piers of Fisherman's Wharf.
Epilogue 3: Two weeks later in Mid-March, in San Diego, California
Mara Blankenship is content. For the past three weeks since the fiasco at Angel Island, she has been on the run. A quick trip to transfer all of their funds – save some fifty thousand in cash – to an offshore account was the only stop she made, as she hopped on a flight with a false ID and made it to Phoenix, Arizona. There, she had used a small portion of her cash withdrawal to buy a small car. Everything was handled under her new assumed name – Harper Marks. She just couldn't resist the irony of her selection, and smiles every time she has to pull out any identification.
New car under her feet, she had driven here to San Diego, where she has always wanted to live and retire in the first place. The first couple of weeks of retirement have been wonderful. She's not an unattractive woman, and has met a couple of men. But she's looking for the right one.
With the right bank account.
This afternoon she is shopping in Old Town, San Diego. She has just sampled a few drinks at a local restaurant and now is enjoying the spring breeze that blows through her recently dyed hair as she wanders from store to store in the marketplace.
"It's a beautiful day . . . a beautiful life," she thinks to herself as she picks up a souvenir trinket from the shelf, and inspects it before putting it back.
She smiles as she hears someone behind her whistling. She recognizes the tune, and starts humming along to herself, the lyrics to the song's chorus ringing in her head.
Take me, to the magic of the moment,
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow share their dreams
With you and me
A/N: We will return to this AU soon. Thank you for all of you reading, following, favoriting and reviewing.
Paris is still on my mind and in my prayers.