She stumbled into a puddle, the splash as loud as a whale breaching. The cold water startled her.
Another frightening thought. The guard, knife drawn, could be following her.
She clicked off the flashlight, blinked against the darkness, and listened for footsteps. Only the drip she had heard before, but in the confined space, magnified into watery explosions. She turned the beam back on and continued deeper into the tunnel. Without warning, her right knee buckled, and she toppled into a hole, bracing herself with one arm. Pain shot through her wrist, and something sharp pierced her hand, which immediately started to bleed. It felt as if she'd fallen on a railroad spike or a piece of sharpened bamboo.
She scrambled to her feet, tore off a piece of her dress, and made a bandage, stopping the blood flow. Aimed the flashlight into the hole. What was that? A white, bony… oh, God… rib cage! A human skeleton lodged into the dirt. She had stumbled into a human grave and slashed her hand on a human bone. A woman from the brothel? A customer? Some personal enemy, a long forgotten victim of violence? The horror of a lonely death without prayers.
Who would bless her, Marisol wondered, if she was entombed in this passage to hell?
She played the flashlight across the floor of the tunnel. No other skeletons. No other holes. She picked up the pruning shears, which had fallen from her apron. Then hurried along, bent over, faster now, until she came to an obstruction.
A door! The end of the tunnel.
Old and ornate, with carvings of cherubs. A doorknob of green glass, an antique look.
The door was locked.
Marisol played the flashlight beam around the door frame. Dry-rotted wood. She dug at the frame with the pruning shears. Sawdust dribbled out; the wood crumbled. She freed the lock from its latch and pushed the door open.
A dark room. Cool. A basement. Crates covered by decades of dust. She wiped off a box, checked the stenciled name: Valley Improvement Society. She was in the right place. The building next to the brothel, the place the rich politicians gathered before traveling underground for their pleasure.
A set of stairs. A door open at the top.
She moved cautiously up the stairs, flinching when they groaned under her weight. On the ground floor, an ancient pool table, a long wooden bar with a cracked mirror. More cobwebs, overstuffed furniture draped in dust covers.
A haunted house.
She raced to the front door. The knob turned but the door wouldn't open. She put her shoulder to it. It didn't budge. Shined the light along the door frame.
The door was boarded with wooden planks, nailed from the outside. Pushed again, but the wood held tight. Thick, sturdy nails. No way to force her way out. She fought back tears.
She checked the windows. The glass broken, but two-by-fours crosshatched the openings here, too.
Intended to keep people out, the fortifications trapped her inside.
A noise.
She stood frozen in place.
A car engine.
She moved to one of the windows, peeked out between the boards. A car approached slowly, turning sideways in the driveway. A rack of lights on its roof, a star painted on its side.?La policia!
But she had seen policemen at the brothel. Everyone, it seemed, worked for Rutledge.
The driver's door opened. A man in uniform got out and took several steps toward the building. Backlit by the car's headlight beams, he threw off a shadow ten feet tall. "Marisol! Marisol Perez. You in there?"
She stayed quiet.
"You're safe now, senorita," the man called. "I'm the chief of police."
Why should she trust this man? Except for her father, what man could she trust?
"I'm here to help you."
Help me do what?
The policeman stepped back to the car, opened the rear door, and pulled a boy from the backseat. Her breath caught in her throat.
Could it be?
He was the size of her Agustino, but she could not make out the boy's face.
"Lemme make it easy for you." The policeman's tone had gone hard. "We've got your kid. Give a signal you're in there."
"No! Mami, hide! Run!"
Tino's voice!
The policeman grabbed Tino's neck. "I don't want to hurt anybody."
Tino flailed, tried to twist free. "I'll kill you, cabron." Sounding as if he was choking.
"Let him go!" Marisol screamed, pounding a fist against a window plank. "Let him go! And take me!"
EIGHTY-FIVE
The old truck wheezed to a stop alongside an earthen levee. Payne heard a chuga-chuga. The pump station. Peering up from the cargo bed, he saw the grille of an old Chevy poking out of the dirt, where it had been left after a flood thirty years ago. He had passed this place on his horseback ride.
Rutledge leapt out of the truck cab and trudged up the slope, his boots sinking into the wet clay, the color of cinnamon. The rain had slowed. Lightning blinked to the northwest, the storm past them now.
Payne waited until Rutledge had crested the levee, which stood twenty-five feet above the surrounding fields. Louisville Slugger in hand, Payne climbed out of the cargo bed and scampered on all fours up the levee. He lay on the ground at the top, peering at the pump station straddling the stream. A concrete-and-steel structure resembling a dam, the station channeled water into three separate culverts. Utility poles topped by sodium vapor lights gave the streams an orange, toxic tint.
Payne watched Rutledge at the foot of the levee, yelling into his cell phone.
"Where the fuck are you! Do you have her?" He whisked the Tejano from his head and slapped it against his thigh, shaking water from the brim. "Okay, good work, Javie. Now get her the hell over here."
Javier Cardenas again. And he has Marisol.
Payne sized up the situation. One man with a kid's baseball bat against one man with a gun and knife. That was bad enough. But two men with guns? He had to take out Rutledge before Cardenas got here.
Rutledge walked along the shoreline, crouched on his haunches, and peered toward the sluice pipe, the artery that carried the lifeblood of his empire. Payne calculated the distance between them. Down the side of the levee and across a flat space to the culvert. Ninety feet. Maybe a hundred.
Rutledge's back was turned. Payne figured that the noise of the pumps and the angry flow of the water would mask his footfalls. It better. The fear rose in his chest, and for one paralyzing moment he questioned whether he could do it. Then he thought of Tino and Adam, and all that had been lost, and all that could still be saved.
Payne got to his feet and crab-walked down the muddy slope, cutting a diagonal path across the levee.
Eighty feet away.
Rutledge stared into the water. Was he looking into his past? Three generations of men who lusted for land and water. Men who built wealth and power on the backs of the poor, all the while telling themselves they were pioneers and visionaries and men of the soil.
Seventy feet.
Payne's Nikes squished in the mud, the suction slowing him down.
Sixty feet.
Rutledge rose from his haunches and stretched his neck, working out a kink with the palm of a hand.
Fifty feet.
Payne raised the bat to shoulder height. Tripped on a rock embedded in the muck. Caught himself but lost a step.
Forty feet.
Rutledge cocked his head, as if sensing something.
Thirty feet.
Payne planned his swing. He'd smash Rutledge's skull right above the temple.
Twenty feet.
Rutledge pivoted. "You? You sorry son-of-a-bitch!" He pulled the big revolver from its holster.
Payne drew back the bat.
The gun was waist high, the barrel sweeping toward Payne's chest.
Three more steps. I won't make it.