The Last Minute

30

Morris County, New Jersey

Leonie looked up from staring at the floor. The driver hadn’t planned on two victims, she supposed; he only had the one set of handcuffs and he’d chained Mrs Ming to another wooden chair. He’d bound Leonie with rope from a closet in the house. The living room was small, the wallpaper old and twenty years out of fashion, musty with grime. The house carried the feel of a way station, a place used infrequently. Leonie sat, her knees folded beneath her, watching the driver pace the floor.

The driver had moved into the front rooms, to watch the windows for Sam.

‘Help me,’ Mrs Ming whispered to her.

Leonie glanced at her. ‘I’m curious as to what you expect me to do.’

It wasn’t the answer Mrs Ming was looking for. ‘He’s not from the CIA. He’s not. They said they would send someone.’

‘The CIA?’

‘Yes!’ Mrs Ming said.

Leonie inched closer to her. ‘The CIA is looking for your son.’

‘A man who said he was from the CIA called me this morning. They said Jack might be coming home. To call them if he did. I… I didn’t know to believe him, but I went to the grocery, in case. I got Jack’s favorite things to eat.’ Her voice sounded lost.

Leonie looked at her. ‘Where is your son?’

‘I don’t know… ’

‘Tell me.’

‘He left, I don’t… ’

Leonie leaned back and head-butted the woman. ‘Tell me where he is!’

Mrs Ming howled in anger and pain.

‘Hey! Hey!’ the limo driver said, hurrying into the room, kicking Leonie onto her back. ‘Stop it!’ He murmured again into his open phone, too low to hear, and then clicked it off.

‘You’re not from the CIA!’ Mrs Ming said, blood oozing from the corner of her mouth, her forehead vivid with the imprint of Leonie’s head. ‘You cannot keep me here. You cannot. They will look for me.’

‘You,’ he said to Leonie. ‘You’re with Sam Capra.’

She said nothing and he responded, in his accented English, ‘Bitch, I am short on patience’, and he began to kick her. Hard. The first blow sent her across the room.

Then he asked her a question, received hazily through the pain, that made no sense to her at all. ‘Where is the woman called Mila?’