The Greatest Loss

Mike Wainwright, his wife, Harlyn, and the rest of their extended family is having fun on a Sunday night when the doorbell rings. Mike answers it for no other reason than he's closest to the door. What he opens is a mystery unlike any he has seen before. He's a writer and has been ever since he was laid off from the Riverside Post. In this instance, he has no idea who the black man is and is surprised when his wife recognizes him as "Jhim Peece!" Thus starts one of Mike Wainwright's most painful stories. While still considering himself as a reporter, he is going to find that the story revolving Jhim Peece and his estranged wife, Adriana, is going to be the most tragic one he will ever write. First there is the issue that Adriana is not an illegal as her husband claimed her to be, but an American citizen. Second is that when he finds her, she is being guarded by a violent ex-felon. While the issues between Adriana and the man he discovers is named Jeff Maness, are ones of mutual attraction and that he is not holding her against her will, he discovers that Jhim has been acting so strange that she left their home for that primary reason alone. However, all Jhim Peece wanted from Mike was for him to find his wife and he did. Now it appears that Jhim himself is missing and Mike wants to know why. That causes him to call Herman Ratliff, an agent for the FBI who works out of their Riverside office. They hold several conversations over the next few days and each time Ratliff is blunt, short and to-the-point with Mike. The upshot of their conversations shocks and surprises Mike because he is told that the only reason he has been allowed to investigate Jhim Peece is because the man is believed to be organizing a mass slaughter of at least fifteen illegals in the desert beyond Palm Springs. When he asks why Jhim asked him to fin d his wife, he is told that they believe Peece wanted Mike out of the picture because all sides agreed that he was a good reporter, a good investigator and if he heard what was happening, he might spoil that execution by his reportorial skills alone. It is only when Ratliff tells him that his wife, Harlyn, will be held complicit in those deaths that Mike pushes himself to find that Harlyn is truly in that desert beyond Palm Springs and Indio, but is trying to prevent those deaths and not cause them. It seems that Mike has been used by the FBI, the INS and a couple of other agencies to find his wife and that scene and little else. It is in the aftermath of that holocaust they prevented from happening that she tells him that she is pregnant. While completely unexpected because of their ages, each delights in the thought of having one more child. It is only when Harlyn dies in childbirth that Mike's life is hurled upside down. He disappears for over a week and only the mysterious appearance of a woman he comes to know as Concepcion Salas saves him. She finds him in a bar in Portland, Maine and she tells him "You don't know what you've." But all she has done is complicate his life. However, like the last line in the story reads... That is another story.