Page 109 of Fish in a Barrel

“Gracias.” Without hesitation, she took a big bite, but then she looked around furtively, as though afraid somebody would punish her for eating it.

Great! Of course, the next part was a little more complicated. He tried once, but it came out as “eestass spando etso mwami,” and her expression of abject confusion made him remember the musical voices in Alba’s mother’s house and how patient they’d been teaching him their language.

He tried again.

“Estás esperando a tu mamá?”

She nodded. “Sí.”

He tried one more time and thought he might have done a decent job asking her what had happened, but she started to cry instead. The one word he got from her was “Hielo,” and just saying it made her cry harder. He pulled a melted Jolly Rancher from his pocket and offered it to her, and one of the obstetrics nurses hurried by out of nowhere and gave him an emergency teddy bear. That calmed her down for a moment, but when he looked up, Amal was staring at them both with troubled eyes.

“What’d she say?” Amal asked.

George touched the teddy bear gently and smiled as she held it tight, silent tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Hielo,” George said, typing it into his phone.

Amal stiffened. “Shit. Shit. Goddammit!”

“What?”

Amal’s face was suffused with fury. “Her mother’s being treated for trauma—sexual trauma, George.”

“But what does hielomean? Oh.” It had popped up in his phone dictionary.

“Hielo.Ice.”

“Shit.” George took a deep breath. “But—but she’s here. She’s documented. I saw you take her insurance card myself.”

“Yeah,” Amal told him, shaking. “But it’s been happening. Some officers abuse their authority. They threaten to deport anyway and then….”

George’s heart was suddenly racing, whether it was with rage or with fear he couldn’t say. He was facing the double doors that led through the metal detectors and the glass door separating the ER from the hospital entrance.

“They’re here,” he said, swallowing.

He and Amal met eyes.

“We’ve stitched her up and given her antibiotics,” Amal said tonelessly, and then he took a deep breath and his spine straightened. “I can stall them for five minutes. Can you get them out of here?”

George looked at the tiny girl clutching the teddy bear and swallowed. He and Jai had talked about prison, and how Jai might someday have to go. George had thought he was awfully brave for facing the consequences of his actions, however well-intentioned, with such stoicism. George himself, he’d thought, could never be that brave.

“Down the freight elevator and out through the custodian shed on the employees-only floor.”

Amal nodded and reached for a set of keys in his pocket. “My Jeep.”

George pulled out the set of keys for the piece-of-shit Toyota truck that Jai kept tuned up by sheer force of will. “My POS. See you in two days.”

Amal nodded, and they shook hands while exchanging the keys.

“Be safe,” Amal said, and George turned toward the little girl, summoning up the words forFollow me! Let’s go see Mommy!On his phone.

The girl’s mother was distrustful at first, but she spoke enough English for him to get the message across. That one word, hielo, was enough to make her eyes widen, and with her daughter, Lola, in his arms, he found himself sprinting through the hospital at top speed, not caring who saw them, just caring that he got this woman away from the people who had claimed the right to harm her.

He was in Amal’s Jeep, which was a damned sight more elegantly appointed than his own POS, that being what you got when you got scholarships to nursing school instead of student loans, and heading for Victoriana when his phone buzzed in his pocket. He fumbled for it and answered, expecting Amal’s voice on the other end telling him that it was all sorted out.

What he got was their coworker, Sherri, telling him that Amal had been arrested and taken into custody for hindering government authority, and that there was a warrant out for George’s arrest.

George thanked her, signed off, and then did the only thing he could think of.