He’s half asleep when the squish-squish of soft-soled combat boots jerks him into electrified wakefulness. He rolls onto his stomach on his cot and arches up so he can see out the bottom of the window. There are four of them, maybe more, creeping along the concrete sidewalk from the parking lot toward the front door of the church annex. In the wan light from the street lights, he can see that one, a very tall, muscular black man, is wearing a riot vest with POLICE and FEDERAL AGENT emblazoned on the front. The others are in combat gear. They are all armed with handguns.
ICE! With soldiers!
He ducks down as the raiding party huddles just outside his window. One of them whispers, in a southern accent, maybe East Texas or Louisiana.
– Are you sure about this, Lieutenant? It’s a church, darn it.
What’s a Texan doing in Portland?
The whispered response is angry, authoritative, frightening.
– Not now, soldier. We’re on a mission, on direct orders from the President.
– But sir, it can’t be right to breach the sanctuary of the church.
That’s right. A church is sacred.
– The annex is not a church. Your opinion is noted, but it’s irrelevant. Now do your job, soldier, and secure the rear exit.
– Yes sir.
– And remember, José Martinez is the one we want. We let the rest of them go.
He can’t move. It’s like he has already been tazed. He hasn’t been José since before he can remember. It’s their family secret: he was born in Guatemala and baptized as José. His mother carried him in her arms across Mexico to California, where his baby brother Mateo was born. But Mateo died from a fever. Back then, no one bothered to record the deaths of itinerant illegal farm workers, so José became Mateo, an American birthright citizen.
How did they find out? Did they torture my mother? They are bastards!
One set of boots squishes off toward the back of the annex, and the others head toward the front door. By an act of sheer will, he rolls off his cot, pulls on his shoes, touches the shoulder of the man in the next cot, whispers
– Shhh. ICE.
The word spreads instantly in the dark, and in seconds he is leading a dozen shadows down the unlit corridor from the annex to the main body of the church. They huddle together in the middle aisle, clinging to one other. The pre-dawn glow illuminates the stained glass figure of Christ on the cross, casting deep red and orange patches of light on them.
They wince and cringe in paralyzed terror when the sanctuary door swings open and blindingly bright flashlights sweep the interior. The frighteningly large, masked ICE agent stands in the doorway, but he doesn’t step over the threshold. He raises a bullhorn.
– José Martinez! I know you’re in there. Come out now and I’ll let the others go.
No one speaks. No one even moves.
– Come on, José. I know you’re there. If you don’t step forward, like a man, you will only make it worse for the rest of the people here. Are you a man, José? Or are you just a wetback coward?
His resolve is crumbling. They are going to get him eventually. Is it right before God to endanger the other terrified illegals cowering with him in the sanctuary? But can he survive ICE detention? He may never see his wife and children again. And Guatamala? He has never been there, knows no one.
He is about to step forward when the man who was sleeping three cots down from him, who hadn’t revealed his name, puts up his hands and walks forward.
– I am José Martinez. I surrender.
One of the women cries out, No, José, but he keeps moving toward the door.
A soldier steps forward, cuffs in hand. The ICE agent blocks him.
– Stand down. He has to walk out on his own. Then I will arrest him.
The man, whose name he learned later actually is José Martinez, walks to the door, where he is handcuffed. The raiding party then leaves, true to the ICE agent’s word.
José, called Mateo, falls to his knees and thanks Jesus for a miracle. The woman who cried out is inconsolable.
This is so elegantly and beautifully written — I truly enjoyed every line. The piece is strong and thoughtful, with a clear sense of retrospective moral clarity.
To me, the scene asks to be understood rather than felt in the bones, which places it outside the classic thriller mode. It offers the reader clarity and gravity rather than adrenaline — and it does that very well.
The name reveal is gold. It lands hard, and for me it resonates deeply, because questions of identity and moral injury are exactly where the kind of thriller I write tends to gravitate.
Happy New Year to you, and warmest regards from Hungary. 🙂
I keep coming back to your piece — I’ve reread it more times than I can count. It’s so deep, with so many layers, and what I love most is the cost of his decision — or indecision — and the consequences that follow. There are no clear right or wrong answers here, only choices that are right and wrong in different ways. I’m also intrigued by the mystery: were they really looking for him, or for the other José who was taken?
I miss seeing your work on the course blog. A lot has been happening there lately.
I’ve been busy. Christmas dinner, grandkids home for the holiday, a cousin in hospital 2 hours drive away, New Years, my Substack, an open house for the neighbours. Plus writing.
I love it that you find so much in all the stories you comment on. You accept the writers’ invitations to dive into the world they have created; when you do, you find things they didn’t even know were there.
When I was a lawyer, I saw writing as the taks of expressing my thoughts in words that would transport my thoughts precisely into my readers’ minds. That worked when the job was to create legal documents that would stand the test of time and communicate exactly what needed to be communicated to the courts, contracting partners, the tax department, heirs, etc., in circumstances of conflict, maybe decades later. There was no room for vagueness, nuance or suggestiveness. Clarity above all was my mantra.
Now that I’m retired and writing fiction, that trope doesn’t apply. As a creative writer, my goal is not so much to control what happens in my readers’ minds as to give them a framework in which they can imagine the undescribed elements of the story. The creativity doesn’t end with me. I point my readers in the direction of a story and invite them to use their imagination to flesh out the unspoken details.
Once a story is “out there” I relinquish partial ownership.
Please don’t feel pressured—I just wanted to express that you already have an impact on this community in the best possible way. Fiction writing is so addictive for me that sometimes I forget a writer has a life, too. Yep. Guilty as charged.
I really appreciate your approach to creating writing—and any kind of art—and it resonates deeply with me.
When I was in high school, we did a lot of “poem analyzing” in Hungarian Literature class. Which usually meant the teacher repeated what certain experts had written in our handbooks about what the poet had thought, meant, suggested, etc. with their piece. A classmate and I—both with Eastern Hungarian roots, both trained in critical thinking and transparent communication—were like: “How do you know? Did you ask him? Respectfully, we disagree—that makes absolutely no sense. The truth is, we don’t know what the poet thought, meant, or suggested… we assume it.”
What can I say… we weren’t exactly her favorite students. 🙂
Coming back to your thought, I just wanted to say how strongly I agree with you.
For me, my mood also shapes how I interpret a piece. The same work lands differently when I’m full of energy or completely exhausted; it varies with my emotional state, even with what I’ve read just before it, or whether the mood and pacing align with where I am in that moment. I find that truly fascinating.
Such a relevant piece for the times. You build the tension well, and hold the reader with his indecision. Only comment I have is where you say…’The frighteningly large,’… a small thing but I wonder if it could be conveyed another way… The ICE agent filled the door frame with his size…. or some other way? Frighteningly large, feels like telling rather than showing. But a great read, putting the reader in Jose’s body.
thanks
Kerry