The Executioner

Seventy-Three

Anna stared at her husband, trying to read his expression. They had a very healthy relationship with very few arguments and plenty of frank conversations about most things, but Garcia never offered anything about his job or any of the investigations he worked on. Even without him saying so, she knew the question he’d just asked was much more than simple curiosity.

‘Do you remember a girl called Martha?’ she asked, leaning back on her chair.

Garcia squinted.

‘Strange girl from high school. Short chestnut hair, thick rimmed glasses, awful dress sense. She was a bit of a loner, always sat by herself right at the far end of the canteen.’

‘Doesn’t ring a bell,’ Garcia admitted.

‘She was one year below us.’ Anna snapped her fingers as she remembered something. ‘She was that junior girl who got bathed in ketchup and mustard by those stuck-up bitches from our class, remember? During that barbecue party in the football field?’

‘Damn, I remember that,’ Garcia said, widening his eyes. ‘Poor girl. She was covered from head to toe.’ He hesitated for a second. ‘Didn’t you help her out that day?’

Anna nodded. ‘Yeah, I helped her clean up. I lent her some clothes and took her to a Laundromat. She made me promise not to tell her parents – ever. We talked a few times after that, but she was very shy. Very hard to be friends with.’

‘Anyway,’ Garcia urged Anna. ‘What about her?’

Anna’s eyes focused on her glass of Italian wine.

‘This is April 1994, two days before our girls’ basketball team was due to play the quarterfinals of the California High School Tournament.’

Garcia felt a knot rise in his throat. ‘Against Oakland?’ he asked tentatively.

Anna nodded slowly. Her eyes still on her glass. ‘It was lunch break and Martha was sitting right at the end of the canteen, as she always did. I walked over just to say hi, but she seemed even more distant than usual. As small talk I asked her if she was coming to the game on Saturday. We were the underdogs and the team could do with all the support we could get.’

Garcia leaned forward, his interest growing.

‘Martha looked at me and freaked me out. Her eyes were different – cold, emotionless, like two black pits filled with nothing.’ Anna ran her fingers over her lips nervously. ‘Almost catatonically she said, “There will be no game.”’

Garcia saw Anna’s arms come up in goose bumps and he held her hand. She gave him a weak smile before carrying on.

‘I asked her what she was talking about. The game was advertised everywhere. You couldn’t walk five steps in our school without seeing a poster. We had the best girls’ basketball team our school had had in years, and that was our big chance.’ Anna paused again and with glassy eyes stared at Garcia. ‘Martha said, “Oakland’s not gonna make it. The bus’s not gonna make it.”’

This time the goose bumps were on Garcia. He remembered that year very well. The Oakland girls’ basketball team was supposed to arrive one day before the game. Their driver fell asleep at the wheel somewhere on Westside Freeway. The bus was involved in a head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler. No one made it out alive.

‘Jesus,’ Garcia whispered, squeezing Anna’s hand. ‘What day was that again?’

‘The day before it happened.’

‘You’re kidding?’

The temperature in their kitchen seemed to have dropped all of a sudden.

‘That’s why you quit the team,’ Garcia said, finally realizing it. ‘It wasn’t because of the accident itself. It was because of what this Martha girl told you.’

Anna didn’t admit to it, but Garcia knew he was right. ‘I never talked to Martha again. A few weeks later she left school.’

‘You never told me that.’

‘I never told anyone.’ She had another sip of her wine. ‘Somehow Martha knew it before it happened, Carlos. A whole day before it happened. I don’t know if she dreamed it or saw it in a vision or what. The fact is, she couldn’t have guessed it. No one could.’

Garcia let go of Anna’s hand and finished the rest of his wine in silence.

‘In answer to your question,’ she said, softly touching his arm. ‘I do believe there are some people out there who can see or sense things that the vast majority of us can’t. But not the ones you see advertised in the back of some magazines. People promising to tell you your future for a few hundred bucks. Those are just conmen. If they really could see the future, they’d all be living in Vegas making a killing at the casinos.’

Garcia smiled. ‘You do have a point there.’

‘What’s this about, babe?’

Garcia shook his head, his eyes averting hers. ‘It’s nothing really.’

Somehow, she knew that was all the answer she’d ever get.