Extraordinary Retribution (3 page)

“Miguel, please!” she shouted, following behind him as he darted to the drawers, continuing to throw things into the two bags open on the bed.

“What’s going on? Dear God, Miguel, talk to me!”

He bent over and zipped one of the bags, his athletic frame moving in a fluid motion. He paused and turned his head toward her, speaking softly. “There isn’t time, Maria.”

“Isn’t time?” she asked incredulously. He resumed his frenzied packing. “Isn’t time to tell me why you’ve suddenly gone crazy on me? Packing up like you’re leaving me? Is that it, Miguel? Are you leaving me? Is there someone else?” Tears flowed over her cheeks as she began to cry.

“I wish it were that simple.”

She stared at him, half crazed. “Simple as leaving me for another woman? What on Earth are you talking about, Miguel?
You can’t do this
!”

“Yes!” he shouted, silencing her with a look of such intensity that she felt suddenly estranged from him, as if another, far more threatening man than her husband occupied the same flesh. “Yes, Maria, I
can
. I must. I’m sorry. God knows, I’m sorry for so much.”

Shaking her head slowly, she backed out of the room. Crossing the threshold of the doorway, she turned and ran down the hall.
She’s flooded
, thought Lopez as he multitasked, zipping shut the second bag, turning, and closing his bedroom door. Quickly, he stepped into the closet, reached above the upper shelf, and removed a wooden panel in the wall. Reaching into the open space, he pulled out an unusually wide briefcase, rotated it, and dropped it on the bed.

Kneeling down, he entered a combination, and popped the case open. Inside, metallic surfaces glinted, reflecting the lights of the room. Two weapons occupied the lower portion of the briefcase, gleaming in the black velvet. On the right was a standard government-issue Glock .40 caliber: a lightweight, polymer-framed, workhorse firearm. On the left, occupying fully two-thirds of the case, was an MP5K submachine gun, less than five pounds, able to fire fifteen rounds a second up to twenty-five yards. Ammunition magazines were embedded in the upper side of the briefcase. He pulled out each weapon, checked them over quickly, and returned them to the case. They would have to do until he reached the safe house, until he was better equipped.

He stood up and turned back to the closet, reached again into the recessed hole in the wall, and removed a black shoulder holster. Behind it, sheathed in leather scabbards, were several large hunting knives. One would be enough.

“Oh, my God.”

His wife stood in the doorframe, her tear-stained face frozen as she stared at the open briefcase. Her lower lip trembled, and she sought his gaze. Their eyes locked, but he said nothing. Slinging the holster on, he fastened it tightly, removed the Glock, slapped a magazine into place, and holstered the weapon.

“Miguel, who were those men?” Her voice was flat, emotionless.

He turned back toward the briefcase and closed it. He picked up a light jacket from the bed and slipped it on, concealing his firearm.

“Those men you were reading about yesterday, Miguel.
In the paper!
” Her voice suddenly rose in pitch and tone. “I
saw
you reading the article. You just froze on the photograph. And then–
this!
Who were they, Miguel? Oh
God!
Why are you taking
guns?
”

He slung one bag over his shoulder, grabbed the other in his right hand, and took the briefcase in his left. Moving toward the door, she stood in front of him, blocking the way.

“Not like this, Miguel. You can’t just leave like this.” Again tears were forming in her eyes. “What will I tell the girls?
Please!
They’ll be back from school in an hour!”

“I love you, Maria,” he said, his eyes toward the ground. “Tell the girls I love them, too.”

Grimacing, he brushed her aside and moved quickly down the hallway.

“
Miguel!
” came her low and agonizing cry. The primitive call dragged on as he walked out of the house, scratching into his mind as he approached a black four-wheel drive SUV.

The door squeaked open and then slammed shut, and Maria Lopez sank slowly to the floor against the wall, weeping uncontrollably. Outside, the SUV coughed, the engine turned, and her husband screeched out of their driveway and down the road.

4

F
ather Francisco Lopez placed the chalk down by the blackboard and dusted off his hands. Diagrams of regular three-dimensional solids decorated the board, along with several neatly written equations. He placed his hands on the back of the desk chair and looked out toward the students in his class.

“Make sure that you have the right limits on these – remember, the idea is that the volume of the solid will be swept out by the two-dimensional surface that runs through its length. In this example, of course, it’s a circle running through the length of the cylinder. Some of the other shapes might be a little more tricky.”

Students shifted restlessly in their seats. Few eyes were turned toward him.

“Any questions?” He scanned the young faces of his classroom. There was only silence. “Fine.” No questions either meant he was a rare genius lecturer or they were tuned out. With a suppressed sigh, he assumed the latter—surfing the net on their smartphones under the desks, text messaging, or just daydreaming.
Did students simply daydream these days?
He hoped so.

“Finish the practice set for chapter seven, and I want you to read once through chapter eight before the next class. All of this is AP test material, folks. It’s important.”

Students began to stuff their backpacks, engage each other in conversation, and generally begin the hustle to their next class.

“These integrals will be on the final, too!” Lopez shouted over growing din. “Math Team practice has been moved to
Wednesdays!
Don’t forget!”

He gave up and let the tide sweep through the room as he began to erase the board. As the diagrams disappeared, he felt his own energy drain as well, the distraction of teaching now giving way to the host of concerns swirling through his mind.

It had been a difficult week – his usual teaching load, a marriage, two funerals, and tonight’s coming mass. He had already met twice with the local city council, pleading a case for Hispanic families who felt terrified by the new Alabama anti-immigration laws.
US citizens
, he thought bitterly, who already were becoming second-class citizens because of the fears of immigrant workers. And the laws were achieving their goals. Fields were full of rotting harvests because no Americans wanted the jobs, schools with dropping enrollments, and businesses sucker-punched in a recession as the workers took their pay to other states. Meanwhile, he had to physically restrain a third-generation Mexican-American mother of four who practically attacked the mayor after her sons were picked up for “driving while spic.”
Papers, please.

Hanging over everything was the constant reminder that his Catholic school was bankrupt. The Church had decided to close it down.
They protect pedophiles in their ranks and turn children out on the street!
He felt like a heretic once again, crossing himself as he stacked his lecture notes.
Have we failed you, Lord?

He tugged absentmindedly at his thick salt-and-pepper beard, then rubbed his eyes. In his early forties, he felt older, even if he didn’t look it. He still had a full head of lush black hair from his Aztec ancestors, but his beard had begun to gray. His broad shoulders were hunched as if from the emotional weight he carried. These days, his eyes were often bloodshot, a product of sleepless nights worrying about his school and parish. His body was exhausted from serving as the parish janitor, maintenance man, and, recently, construction worker as he had rebuilt substantial portions of the aging dome. By himself. Budgets cuts, one after the other, had forced him to shoulder more each year. Stamina was at an all-time low.

He held out his hands, the muscled forearms accentuated by his dark skin, his palms broad and fingers thick. He knew he looked more like the stereotyped Mexican laborers than an ordained priest and mathematics teacher. He could see it in the mirror after a shower, his naturally thick musculature broadened additionally from years of performing a majority of the manual labor around the church. He could also see it in the eyes of his white neighbors, the double takes when people realized that he wasn’t the hired help. He wondered how many more years he would be able to rebuild the parish when it fell into decay, and, when he could no longer, if there would be anyone left in the church to replace him.

He tried to shake off these worries as a midlife crisis, a product of seeing half his life gone by and the second half perhaps filled with a litany of sorrowful events. The Catholic Church was struggling. He was struggling. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure who he was anymore. He felt his hand playing with the rosary in his pocket.
Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Amen.

His cell phone rang, startling him. Exhaling, he disentangled it from the rosary beads and entered the passcode. “Father Lopez.”

His adrenaline spiked. “Maria?” he said, trying to speak over the shrill shouts coming through his small speaker. “Wait, wait! Slow down a minute. He’s gone? Gone where?”

His eyes narrowed as the voice continued, hardly less shrill.

“What do you mean you don’t know? I don’t understand.”

Again the shouts over the phone, and Father Lopez could only shake his head. “Maria, hold on. You’re home? Can you wait? I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

The drive felt surreal. He had raced out of his office to the raised eyebrows of several nuns, threw his bag and disheveled stacks of papers into the backseat of his rundown Toyota Corolla, and likely gave the impression of a drag race start as he flew out of the parking lot.

The Catholic Church does not have the presence in Alabama that it does in other parts of the country, but his parochial school in Huntsville was still sequestered on a large parcel of land. He was driving quickly, however, and it didn’t take him very long to be out on the parkway, then to the interstate, flying toward Madison ten miles an hour over the limit, hoping he wouldn’t fall afoul of some particularly exuberant state trooper.
They love to nail a priest.
The early spring greenery of the countryside flashed unheeded in his peripheral vision.

He tried hard to focus on the road but was assaulted instead by the words of his brother’s wife, her panicked voice and unbelievable narrative. Miguel fleeing home? Armed? It was crazy. His older brother was the hero of the Lopez family. Football star, soldier, consultant for the government.
Superman
, Lopez thought, experiencing again the ever-present sense of failure.
Always in your shadow, Miguel.

When his brother had returned home from Washington, he had left the power and intrigue of the Northeast Corridors to settle back into the slower rhythms of the South. Father Lopez had hoped other things could be left behind as well. He had hoped it might mean a new start for his brother, for the family.
A new start for both of us.
Even if Miguel had avoided speaking with him, at least both Lopez sons could be present at family gatherings. It had been a start, one Father Lopez had hoped would lead to reconciliation. Perhaps a slow one, but time did heal many wounds.

Suddenly, one panicked phone call seemed to threaten all that, and he prayed to God that something terrible hadn’t happened to Miguel. Time had been forced into a wild overdrive, like the wailing engine of his rundown car racing down I-65.
We always stumble and stall, and then stand shocked when the bell tolls.
Horns blared as he roughly steered to the right lane and took the turnoff toward Madison and his brother’s house.

Maria came running across the lawn even before he had set the emergency brake. Even after several children, her stunning figure was intact. Lopez had watched men of all colors and stations follow her as she walked: tall, statuesque; a refined Basque face accented with long black hair and a Flamenco dancer’s stride. The glances were often envious toward his brother when the two were together.

Today, she was a wreck, her normally well-coiffed hair was in disarray, her face was pale. Her eyes were red and raw. She crashed into him, holding him tightly, hot tears running into his shirt.

“Francisco, I’m sorry,” she wept. “I didn’t know who else to call. Something’s terribly wrong.”

“Maria, let’s go inside.”

They sat in the sunroom. The kids had been sent off to her mother’s place. Maria Lopez sat still and composed, her emotional outburst now tightly under control. He watched her intently, listening to every word, as she recounted the events from earlier in the day.

“After he left, I didn’t know what to do. I told the girls they would be spending the night at their grandmother’s house. I came back, hoping to God I’d find him here again, that he’d say he had overreacted. Francisco, I’m
so
scared.”

“It’s going to be okay, Maria. He’s just likely working through something right now.”

Her face hardened. “I know what you’re thinking, Francisco. It’s what I thought at first, too. But it’s not that, it’s not an affair. I’m sure of it.”

Francisco Lopez only nodded, although the thought
had
crossed his mind as well. He thought he knew his brother, whatever their past differences. The Miguel he knew was still very much in love with his wife and would never have abandoned his family. He was sure of that. But the Miguel he knew would not have packed up in a day with loaded weapons and left his wife in tears. He wasn’t sure what to believe anymore.

“Has he talked about anything? Things bothering him?”

“No. Lately, he’s been so strangely silent. But I’m his wife. I
notice
things. He’s been obsessed with the news, with the
obituaries
. He tried to hide it, but I’d catch him poring over the obituaries in the paper. I found hundreds of trips to papers’ obituary sites in the web browser history.”