Maggie McCarthy Hits a Wall

by Scott Milder

Most nights Maggie McCarthy had to stuff cotton balls in her

ears to get to sleep. It was either that or cut her husband’s
throat with one of those wood-handled carving knives her mother
had given them on their wedding day.
The noises that came out of Randall’s throat when he slept were
truly disturbing. They weren’t snores, exactly. They were more
like the sound of an old man slurping soup through a straw, or
rain draining out of a gutter, or water sloshing over the edge of
a bucket. Except none of those analogies was really quite right.
What it sounded like was that her husband was, in fact, drowning
in a bowl of snot. And she figured that was pretty much what was
happening.
It had started about two years into their marriage, when Randall
began to put on weight. He’d lost a lot of it since then, but the
slurping and wheezing had only gotten worse. She spent almost a
year laying there, night after night, grinding her teeth and
trying to bury her head beneath the blankets and the pillow,
pressing the fabric tight against her ears, leaving just the
smallest hole around her nose through which to breathe. This was
before her mother had suggested the cotton balls.
Maggie was a smart lady, but she had always had this weird
rigidity to her way of thinking, a block when it came to solving
problems. She knew it, was reminded of it more often than she
would like to admit, but she didn’t seem to be able to do anything
about it. She always saw the problem but never the way around it.
It was like standing in front of a brick wall and trying to bash
her way through it instead of just turning left or right and going

1
around. Her dad used to joke that she’d make a great soldier but
would never make her way past Major. Her mom just told her
friends, with more than a little disgust in her voice, that it was
a good thing her little Maggie was pretty because she sure was
dumber than a bag of rocks.
Maggie wasn’t dumb. She just couldn’t bring herself to look left
or right when she came up to one of those walls. The wall offended
her. She believed in her heart of hearts that it was the wall’s
job to get the hell out of her way, not hers to go around.
The wall here, as she saw it, was her Randall. Her Randall, who
she had agreed to marry after he impulsively proposed to her on
their fourth date. That was the first night they slept together,
on a dirty mattress in the bed of his pickup truck under the
bright Southern New Mexico stars. Truth be told, there wasn’t a
lot of actual sleep that evening. If there had been and if Randall
had started making those noises, she might have called it off then
and there. But no, they hadn’t slept, and after they got married
and Randall opened up the garage and she started filling in at the
kindergarten in Alamogordo and they bought their little house down
the road in Carrizozo, even then he had the bad manners not to
start his nightly hullabaloo for another year and a half. Not
until she was good and settled and her mother had stopped
complaining to her daughter about the big Indian fella at the
dinner table.
Randall, who she loved dearly. Who never forgot an anniversary
or a birthday, who couldn’t afford to get her much for Christmas
but always somehow managed to pick out the perfect thing, the
thing she had wanted but hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask
for. Randall. Who sometimes at night she wished would just stop
breathing altogether.

2
 Randall was the wall. So she tried to bash her way through it.
She started by putting him on a diet, trying to get the weight
off, and when the weight came off but the snoring continued she
tried to get him to go to the doctor and get tested. Maybe he had
a deviated septum or something. She tried to play it off like
nothing more than spousal concern, but the bags under her eyes and
the sharpness in her voice betrayed her. She needed to get some
goddamned sleep.
Randall didn’t want to go to the doctor. He was Apache, and he
told her he didn’t trust the white man’s doctors and fancy
medicine. It was the white man who’d given his ancestors the
blankets crawling with fever, he said. It was bullshit, of course.
Randall just hated to sit and wait for anything. His idea of Hell
resembled the waiting room at Mountainview Regional in Alamogordo.
Later, when she was in labor with Vanessa and the doctor kicked
Randall out of the room because he kept trying to “help” Randall
went to a bleak little bar across the street to drink some beer
and watch football. He told the nurse at the desk to call him on
his cell phone if anything happened. It wasn’t that he didn’t
care. He just couldn’t sit in that motherloving waiting room, with
the dour nurses clack-clacking away on their keyboards and the
smell of disinfectant barely covering the stench of old piss and
vomit. Vanessa popped out an hour later with as little fuss and
muss as could be reasonably expected, just after the Colts scored
a touchdown off a Patriots fumble. The nurse called to tell him
the good news and, laughing, he clapped the bartender on the
shoulder and then used his company credit card to buy drinks for
the five or six old timers at the bar before going back across the
street to be with his wife and new baby daughter.
That was his thing about waiting rooms. But he couldn’t tell

3
Maggie that so he tried to lay it off on the white man. It wasn’t
a card he played often, and it was halfhearted play at best. When
Maggie came right back at him with how he didn’t seem to mind
putting his thing in the white man’s woman he just grinned, kissed
her cheek, said something about how the white man’s woman was a
lot softer and nicer than any disease-ridden blanket, then ran a
callused hand across the ever-expanding bulge of her buttocks,
squeezed, and went off to work. That night, with her jaw clenched
and aching and her nose just barely poking out from under the
blanket and the wet soup sounds of Randall’s messy sleep settling
into her ears like a fine, fetid mist, Maggie not-so-idly
considered just rolling over, taking the pillow, and smothering
him dead.
She kept working on him and finally convinced him to go see the
doctor up on the reservation. This doctor was a white woman,
youngish, and she’d helped Randall’s mom fix her diet to keep the
diabetes under control. She had convinced Mildred McCarthy to stop
eating fry bread and drinking soda, and to get down from a pack of
cigarettes a day to half-a-pack. Randall, who’d been trying to get
Mildred to do the very same thing for almost a decade with
negligible success, had been suitably impressed. When Maggie
suggested he go see her he figured what the hell? There might be a
wait but it wouldn’t be as bad as Mountainview. And he’d started
to notice the flaky, not-quite-there look in Maggie’s eyes in the
mornings. Some part of him knew that this was his doing. So he
agreed, figuring the doc would poke a flashlight up his nose and
examine his boogers and probably tell him he needed surgery or
something. Fuck it. He could always say no.
As it turned out he didn’t have to wait at all. The young white
doctress had brought him into her little exam room within a minute

4
and had done her thing with the flashlight and asked him a lot of
what he thought were stupid questions, then told him he had nasal
polyps and gave him a prescription for a steroid spray. There was
no evidence of a deviated septum, she told him, but he could stand
to lose another fifteen pounds or so. That might help the snoring.
Getting rid of the polyps would help, too. She wanted to see him
again in three months. If the polyps were still there then maybe
they’d discuss the surgical option.
He’d smiled, shook her hand and said thanks, took the spray and
dutifully used it twice a day for the next three months. He told
Maggie through a mouthful of hamburger one night that he thought
it was making a difference. He could breathe better, he said. He
had more energy, which probably meant he was sleeping better. He
was sure the snoring would stop soon enough.
Maggie had smiled tightly through gritted teeth and nodded, her
hands wrist deep in scalding dishwater, a plate clutched so tight
in her hands that it cracked. The snoring the night before had
been so bad she had nearly wept.
At the end of the three months Randall went back to the pretty
white doctor lady and let her stick her flashlight up his nose
again. She asked a few more stupid questions. She asked if the
snoring had stopped. The answer was an emphatic no. The white
doctor lady frowned and told him the polyps were gone. Still no
evidence of a deviated septum. Maybe it was allergies, she said.
She gave him a prescription for some big white pills with thirty
refills and told him to stick with the steroid spray. Beyond that,
she said, there wasn’t much else she could do. His insurance
wouldn’t cover a trip to the sleep clinic in Albuquerque or one of
those breathing machines like what Maggie’s Uncle Frank used.
So he’d taken the white pills and kept squirting the steroid

5
shit up his nose, and the slurping and smacking continued and
Maggie darkly began to consider divorce. It broke her heart.
Randall was a wonderful man, and she didn’t know what she would
say to God and Jesus on her death bed when they asked her how she
could break her eternal marital bonds over something as small and
insignificant as a few unpleasant noises during the night. But the
alternative seemed too bleak to consider.
She finally confided all this to her mother, and her mother
looked at her bright but stubborn daughter as if she was looking
at a dim and unruly child. Dumber than a bag of rocks, she was
inevitably thinking.
Why can’t you sleep on the couch? her mother asked. Or make him
do it?
Maggie said no to that immediately. Randall was her husband, she
said, and if she banished him eternally to the sleeper sofa in the
living room then what good was there in being married? They’d be
roommates, not soul mates.
Cotton balls, her mother had said. Stuff ‘em in your ears. See
if that don’t do it.
Maggie had opened her mouth to argue, then stopped. A light went
on behind her eyes. A look to the left and there it was. The way
around the wall.
Cotton balls.
She’d tried it that night and, miracle of miracles, she had the
best night’s sleep she had had in months. She could still hear
Randall’s rutting boar noises, but the cotton reduced them to an
almost pleasant whisper, the whisk-whisk of a ceiling fan or the
cool drone of an air conditioner. She slept, hard, and woke up
with the sun beating through the flimsy curtains and Randall
screeching along to some Led Zeppelin song in the shower. She

6
pulled the balls out of her ears and lay there for awhile,
thanking God and Jesus for giving her such a wise sage for a
mother. Cotton balls. Wow.
Fourteen years later her mother -- a hard old Southern Baptist
ranch lady who never really accepted having an Indian car mechanic
for a son-in-law -- was long dead in her grave and Maggie and
Randall were still together. They had a daughter, Vanessa, whom
they both doted upon as if she were a prize show dog. Maggie
slept. Life was good.
And then she had to go and work for Jake Narcho.
*****
Maggie lay in bed and listened to her husband slurp and snore
and buzz saw his way through the night. Two unused cotton balls
sat clean and white on the night stand behind her head.
He lay on his side, back to her, and she watched the way the
thick muscles on his back pulled tight with every wet, labored
breath. She watched the moonlight shimmer and snake its way
through the thick black cords of his hair. She took in the scent
of him. It was a dark scent, musky and pungent, sweat and motor
oil and that underlying, undefinable, unmistakable Randall at the
bottom of it all, the Randall that had made her knees turn to
water when she had been a cheerleader at the high school in
Carrizozo and he’d been a second-string quarterback for the
Mescalaro reservation team. The Randall that had made her come for
the first time on the hard mattress in the back of his pickup
truck.
She listened to him wheeze and ran a hand down the bronze skin
of his back, across the stupid bulldog tattoo on his left bicep,
across his ribs and the knobby ridge of his spine. She wanted to
drink in every bit of him. Even the snoring.

7
 Because she knew, even though she couldn’t yet quite admit it to
herself, that she didn’t have much longer.
She had seen something. She had said something. And now it was
all gonna end.
Jake would see to that.
*****
She knew Jake Narcho’s reputation, of course, before she went to
work in his real estate office above the general store on
Carrizozo’s one main street. Everyone did. But she and Randall had
stupidly signed up for one of those variable interest rate
mortgages when they got their house, and there just wasn’t enough
work at the garage or enough days for her to substitute teach in
Alamogordo for them to get their bills paid on time. It was a
buyer’s market now so they couldn’t have unloaded the house at a
decent price even if they had wanted to. And Jake was the only
person in town looking to hire.
Still, she didn’t want to do it. She’d heard all the same
stories that everyone else had. But it was getting to the point
that every time the phone rang she would break out in a cold
sweat. Sometimes the creditors left ten, fifteen messages in a
week.
The day she went to interview with Jake she dressed up in one of
her two best Sunday dresses. The one with the high collar, not the
low one. It was still a tight fit, though, and as she sat there
holding her meager resume on her lap Jake’s eyes never left her
chest and the smile never left his face. He asked her what kind of
clerical experience she had. She told him she didn’t have much. He
threw back his head and laughed, the white hairs of his mustache
bristling out with each throaty exhalation, the mottled pink skin
of his throat looking like a bulging scrotum as it flapped against

8
his shirt collar.
Well, shit, he told her. It’s like old Charlie Wilson used to
say. You can teach ‘em to type but you can’t teach ‘em to grow
tits.
She hadn’t known what to say to that.
A week later Jake had called her at home. Whaddaya think,
sweetie? You wanna come on with us?
She didn’t, not really. But she happened to be looking down at
their bank statement at the time. There were an awful lot of minus
signs on it.
Sure, she told him.
See ya’ tomorrow, he said. Eight sharp. Wear something nice.
And he hung up.
*****
She worked for Jake, three days a week, for the next six years.
All in all, after she got past all his bluster, it wasn’t so bad.
Jake pinched her ass every so often, liked to compliment her on
her bras and her panty hose, and occasionally planted a wet,
leathery kiss on the corner of her mouth when she handed him his
morning coffee. But he paid well, paid on time, and she found the
work more interesting than she would have expected. Jake Narcho
was the power center in this region, and somehow he had figured
out how to swim upstream through the real estate downturn. He
played land like he was playing high-stakes poker, and it always
seemed to her that he had a flush or a full house. If not, he just
bluffed his way through it until the other guy folded.
Sometimes he’d explain things to her. A lot of it went over her
head, but a lot of it didn’t. He started having her sit in on his
deals to take notes. She paid close attention. The lines became
sharper and sharper to her, the pattern under the grid more and

9
more clear, and she started to think that maybe being dirty old
Jake Narcho’s secretary was only the beginning. She was especially
fascinated by the residential market in Alamogordo. She began to
harbor dreams of becoming an agent and going to work for Coldwell
Banker or Remax. Hell, why stop at Alamogordo? Why not
Albuquerque? Randall was a good enough mechanic he would have no
trouble opening up a garage there. He could quit with the three-
hundred dollar tune-ups and instead make a career customizing low
riders for the kids in the south valley and lifting trucks for the
rednecks in Belen. She could sell prefabricated houses to young
marrieds out on the west side, or faux-adobe McMansions to rich
retirees up in the foothills.
She knew about Jake’s other business, of course. His real
business. She’d heard the stories about the unmarked semi trucks
coming across the border, packed full of drugs or guns or people.
She heard about the payoffs to cops and corrupt FBI agents and
customs officers. She heard about the holes in the desert. But she
was just a secretary and a payroll bookkeeper, filing real-estate
records and taking notes and making sure everyone got their checks
on time and that all the taxes were sufficiently deducted and
paid. She heard the stories, but she never saw anything with her
own two eyes or heard anything with her own two ears to suggest
they were anything but that. Stories.
Maybe if she got good enough, she dreamed, she could even be a
broker all the way up in Santa Fe. Dealing with property that
started in the millions, taking home a ten percent commission on
every sale. They could put ‘Nessa in private school.
Why not?
Dumber than a bag of rocks her ass.
*****

10
 She sat at the window, wrapped up in her terry-cloth bathrobe
and staring out at the dark sedan parked across the street and its
lone occupant behind the wheel when she realized Randall had
stopped snoring.
She looked at him. He still lay on his side, back to her.
“Maggie?” He said.
“Uh huh?”
“You doing all right?”
She looked out at the sedan, saw the flare of the cigarette, saw
a waft of smoke billow up into the cold light of the street lamp.
“Yeah,” she said. “Just couldn’t seem to get to sleep.”
“My snoring bothering you?”
“No, hon. It’s fine.”
“I’ll take the couch if you want.”
“No. Just go back to sleep.”
For a moment she thought he had. Then:
“What’re you looking at?”
That little orange flare again. A little flash in the eyes. It
was Jorge. She was sure of it.
“Nothing,” she said. “The moon.”
She sat there like that for a long time, watching the sedan and
waiting for Randall to drift off.
“You want me to get you something?” Randall asked.
“No, hon. I’m fine. Go on back to sleep.”
After five minutes or so the snoring started up again. She
stared out at the car. At Jorge. She wondered if he knew she was
watching him, and decided he probably did.
*****
It had all gone to shit five months ago, but she hadn’t realized
it at the time. It wasn’t until she saw the guy’s picture in the

11
paper, buried on page B16, that she realized what she had stumbled
into.
It started with the birthday presents.
Randall and ‘Nessa’s birthdays were only a eight days apart, and
over the years it had become their custom to combine the
celebrations into one night. There was a practical reason for
this. Randall was spending more and more time at the garage and
Maggie was working twenty-five hours a week at Jake’s. It was just
easier that way. They’d drive up to the Pizza Hut in Alamogordo,
gorge themselves on slices of pepperoni and breadsticks, and
exchange gifts.
Maggie had a friend of a friend who was a jewelry maker in Truth
or Consequences. The woman worked in pewter, mostly, although she
did cast a few things in silver as well. The silver was out of the
question, even if she was willing to cut Maggie a nice deal on it.
The bills weren’t quite so overwhelming these days, but things
were still tight.
But she’d managed to squirrel away about three hundred dollars
over the course of the last year. She wanted to get something nice
for her husband and her daughter. Something personal. Not another
twenty-dollar set of wrenches from Target or another blouse from
the discount rack at Old Navy. So she’d printed out a couple
pictures from her computer at work and mailed them to this lady in
T or C and asked if it could be done and what it would cost.
The lady sent her an email two days later. How about seventy-
five a piece? she asked. Maggie responded that that would be just
fine. How long would it take? A couple months, the lady responded.
Perfect, Maggie wrote back.
The necklaces had arrived in a small package at Jake’s office
that afternoon. She hadn’t wanted either Randall or ‘Nessa to see

12
them and start asking questions. Their birthday dinner was going
to be tomorrow night, and she wanted the necklaces to be a
surprise.
Randall’s necklace had a small pewter ornament fashioned to look
like the drive train from a 1958 Plymouth Fury, his all-time
favorite car. Why that one she didn’t know and didn’t care. All
that mattered was that he’d recognize it when he opened the box
and he’d like it. ‘Nessa’s was in the shape of polar bear sitting
on an iceberg. ‘Nessa had discovered polar bears when she was
assigned to write a paper about them last year, and had announced
to her bemused parents that she was going to college to become a
wildlife vet so she could go up to Alaska and help them. Randall
had asked what help she thought they needed, and ‘Nessa looked at
him like he was a turd. Maggie had laughed until she cried.
Maggie set the two necklaces on her little desk, side by side,
and marveled at the craftsmanship. The details were quite
striking. The lady in T or C could have sold them for hundreds of
dollars a piece if she wanted and if she could find customers who
were into drive trains and polar bears.
After a minute or two she realized Jake was hovering above her
left shoulder.
What’re they for? he asked.
Randall and Vanessa’s birthdays.
He exhaled in that long reedy way he always did.
Well shit, Maggie. Them baubles are real nice. I’m sure they’ll
be about as pleased as pigs in shit.
By Jake’s standards he might as well have been quoting a sonnet
at her. She was pleased in spite of herself.
I hope so, she said.
I know so, he replied, and handed her a stack of deal memos to

13
file. That from a Plymouth? he asked.
Sure is.
Pieces a shit, you ask me, but it’s a real nice necklace.
They closed up at four the way they always did and Maggie spent
twenty minutes in the general store buying stuff for dinner. She
went to the video store and rented a couple movies. She was almost
home before she realized she’d left the necklaces in her desk
drawer. Dumb as a bag of rocks. She swore, loudly, and turned the
car around.
It was not Maggie’s habit to go into the office when she wasn’t
scheduled to work. Certainly not after closing time. Usually if
she left something she’d just wait until her next day in the
office to pick it up. If she had to get it right away she always
called to see if anyone was there. No real reason for that, at
least not in the front part of her brain. But after that afternoon
she figured she had always known what might happen if she just
stumbled in there unannounced.
It didn’t seem like a particularly big deal at the time. When
she got back to the office she saw but didn’t really notice that
Jake’s big Caddy was still parked in its accustomed space. She
also saw but didn’t really notice the plain beige sedan next to
it. Later, after she met the guy, she realized it was a rental
car.
She let herself into the stairway next to the store and made her
way up the stairs to the office. She stopped, key poised to slide
into the lock, when she heard the two sets of voices on the other
side of the door. Jake’s and someone else’s.
Murmuring. Then laughter.
Her mind raced. It was probably just Bill Weck down from
Alamogordo, talking to Jake about that plot of land they were

14
haggling over down on south 70. Or maybe Jim Deal in to discuss
the trailer court out by the missile range-
The door opened suddenly and she pulled back with a little
shriek. Jake stood there, looking at her, smile plastered on his
face. His eyes were hard.
Why Maggie, what on earth are you doing back here? he asked.
She stammered something about the necklaces and saw the guy
standing behind Jake. He was tall, clean cut, youngish and
handsome, with black hair and shining olive skin. His eyes were
bright and hazel. He wore jeans and a western shirt, but didn’t
look comfortable in them. He was clearly in from somewhere else.
Well, Maggie, this here’s Freddy McCourt up from El Paso.
Freddy’s thinking of buying old Jess Martinez’s ranch. Freddy,
this here’s Maggie, the best and most beautifulest secretary in
all of New Mexico.
“Freddy McCourt” stuck out his hand and smiled. His eyes bounced
down to her breasts briefly, then fastened on her own.
Hey there, Maggie. How’re you doing?
He had an accent like Jimmy Caan in “The Godfather.” No way in
Hell his name was Freddy McCourt, and no way in Hell he was from
El Paso. Oh my God, she thought, what is this?
But she just smiled and shook “Freddy McCourt’s” hand.
Maggie here got some custom-made necklaces for her husband and
daughter’s birthdays. Nice pieces a work.
“Freddy McCourt” smiled. Well isn’t that nice? he said.
That was all. Jake and “Freddy McCourt” made their way down to
their parking lot. Maggie went into the office, grabbed the
necklaces and left in a hurry, even though she knew the damage was
already done. She was a little amazed at how fast her heart was
beating.

15
 Two months later, there had been a picture of “Freddy McCourt”
in the Albuquerque Journal. She recognized the smile immediately.
It was an AP wire story from Denver, and it identified the man as
Ritchie DiScala, a nightclub owner in Denver who had suspected mob
ties out in Rhode Island. How he’d ended up in Denver the article
didn’t say. He was suspected of drug and weapons trafficking and
was alleged to have been involved with the smuggling of illegal
aliens across the border.
He had been found in the trunk of a burning car outside
Fountain, Colorado. He’d been shot three times.
Maggie read the story over and over again, her coffee growing
cold beside her, her heart thud-thudding away in her chest like a
series of low mortar blasts.
The next day she went into work as usual, and the first thing
Jake asked when she brought him his coffee was if she had seen
yesterday’s Journal.
Nope, she said, aware of the way beads of sweat had sprung to
her forehead and her heart was pounding away again.
He examined her for a moment, then shrugged and sipped his
coffee.
Looks like they’re gonna be putting in a spaceport down here
after all, he said. Hell of a waste of money, I say. Whyn’t you go
on out there and get Bill Weck on the phone? I’ma getting sick of
haggling with that fat old fuck over that piece of scrubgrass.
Even then that might have been it. Jake had gotten almost
imperceptibly colder to her, but maybe that wasn’t so bad. A few
less smacks on the ass and comments about her bra. She couldn’t
complain about that. And maybe she was just imagining it anyway.
But then the FBI man had tracked her down outside ‘Nessa’s
school last week and gave her his card. He told her to meet him in

16
a diner in Roswell the next day.
Roswell! she had said. I can’t go to Roswell tomorrow!
You can and you will, unless you want me showing up at your work
tomorrow and handing you a subpoena.
She was pretty sure he couldn’t do anything like that, but she
wasn’t completely sure and he knew she wasn’t sure. So she had
made up an excuse and had gone to Roswell to meet the man.
The man asked her about Ritchie DiScala. She told him she’d
never seen or heard of him before. The man told her he knew she
was lying. She told him she wasn’t, but she was sweating again and
her heart was pounding and she could see her lie written all over
the FBI man’s face.
They were trying to attach Jake to this DiScala guy, and they
wanted to do it through her. And the horrible thing was she could.
They’d protect her, the man said. If need be they could put her
and her family in the witness protection program. But if she
didn’t cooperate they’d consider prosecuting her as an accomplice.
An accomplice to what he didn’t say. He asked her if she’d ever
seen the federal prison in Canyon City. She told him she hadn’t.
He said they’d give her a week to think about it.
She didn’t tell any of this to Randall. Instinctually she knew
she’d be putting him in danger if she did. She had no intention of
doing what the FBI man wanted. She was pretty sure he couldn’t
force her.
But Jake was even colder to her the next day, and the day after
that he called her and told her she was fired and to come in and
get her shit. She didn’t bother to ask why.
That night she saw Jorge parked in front of the house for the
first time. She didn’t know Jorge, not personally. But she knew of
him. Everyone did. He was part of Jake’s other business.

17
 What are they waiting for? she wondered. But she knew.
Jake liked her. He didn’t want to hurt her. He was making up his
mind. She’d seen him do this over and over again in his real
estate deals. He’d mull something over for a few days, and then
he’d pounce.
Once she saw Jorge she had no doubt that he was going to kill
her.
*****
She sat there listening to Randall snore and watched Jorge
watching her from the car outside. The cigarette flared. Smoke
wafted out the open window.
She held the FBI man’s card in her hand.
His name, he had told her, was Special Agent Karl Webb. She’d
called him that afternoon after she had decided that, yes, Jake
really did mean to kill her. She had gotten his voicemail and left
a message for him to call her back.
But then she started thinking. The FBI man had flashed his ID,
but so fast she had barely had a chance to look at it. The more
she thought about it, the less it made any sense to her. Why
accost her in front of ‘Nessa’s school where anyone could see them
and then insist on meeting the next day in Roswell? Why all the
threats?
Why did the card in her hand look so much like Jake’s?
She had looked up and called the local FBI office in Albuquerque
and asked to speak to Special Agent Karl Webb. She was told by the
woman on the other end of the phone that there was no one by that
name in that office. Maggie had thanked the woman and hung up.
She’d left a message for him. To call her.
This, she realized, was what Jake had been waiting for. He was
waiting to see what she’d do. He’d goddamned pushed her into it,

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in fact, and it wasn’t fair.
The cigarette flared. Smoke wafted out the window. She listened
to Randall snore and told herself I’ll wake him now and tell him.
We’ll get ‘Nessa and go. Randall’s a big man and he has a shotgun
and there’s only one of him out there.
But what if that’s what Jake wanted her to do? What if there was
a car parked up the street where she couldn’t see?
What if she got her whole family murdered?
There was a wall in front of her. A big brick wall, and her nose
was pressed up against it and she couldn’t see anything else. She
wanted to look left, look right, find her way around it. But she
didn’t know how. She never had.
She dozed off an hour or so later with those thoughts and the
sound of Randall’s wet snores in her head and when she woke up at
around six a.m. Randall had covered her with a blanket and had
already gone off to work. The sun was just starting to filter down
through the thin clouds above.
She looked out the window.
The car was gone.

© 2008 by Scott Milder

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