“Do you want to gamble with eternal damnation?”
“That is exactly what I’m doing,” the sicario said. “I know my days are numbered. Either way I am damned. This is my last chance at a new life. Send the reporter, or the girl will die. Wait. You anger me, Father. Maybe she will die anyway. Consider this your only hope to save her.”
The line went dead.
Shaking, Ortero fell back to the wall, sliding down to the floor.
What have I set in motion?
59
Near Phoenix, Arizona
A ngel dragged the back of his hand across his mouth to contend with his mounting tension.
Could he trust the priest?
It didn’t matter. Angel knew that the cartel was going to kill him when this job was finished.
That he had enacted his survival plan gave him a measure of relief as he walked across the abandoned hangar, focusing on Limon-Rocha and Tecaza ready at the small table. They’d changed into their police uniforms and looked like real cops sitting there, listening to emergency scanners, checking their weapons, waiting for a green light.
“They’ve got an alert out for a license plate belonging to Galviera.” Limon-Rocha tilted his head to the scanners. “Nobody can find him. Maybe he did the smart thing and changed the plate, or his vehicle.”
“So, do we go now?” Tecaza asked.
“Did you secure the girl?” Angel asked him.
“Yes.”
Angel’s cell phone rang. It was Thirty.
“Are you set?”
“We’re ready.”
“I’ve just contacted him and set up the meeting. Do you have a detailed map?”
Angel snapped open the new fanfold map. With one hand, he spread it over one end of the table and pinpointed where Thirty directed them to go.
“He will be at that location in two hours.”
“We’ll leave now.”
“And bring the girl. Let him see she is alive. He’ll be cooperative if he thinks he is returning with her. Then you do your job and come home. Twenty-five will want to thank you personally.”
“Personally?”
“You know he thinks you are the best.”
Angel swallowed the lie, tapping the phone against his leg as he studied the map before making precise folds.
“It’s time,” he said to Tecaza. “Get the girl.”
Tecaza, keen to get back to Mexico, strode to the room where he’d chained Tilly to the pipe. A moment later, a stream of cursing filled the empty building as he ran back to the table and riffled through the equipment bag.
“She got away.”
Incredulous, Limon-Rocha and Angel ran to the room. After confirming what they’d been told, they’d returned to see Tecaza climbing the stairs to the roof, a small case slung over his shoulder.
“She could not have gone far,” Tecaza said. “Ruiz, get your night-vision goggles! Help me look for her!”
Both men had military-issue binoculars that enabled them to see human images in the dark by perceiving thermal radiation or body heat. On the roof, goggles pressing over their eyes, they scanned the empty, flat land surrounding the abandoned airfield. Limon-Rocha searched clockwise, while Tecaza, cursing the whole time, searched counterclockwise, finding nothing but a sea of black, the edges occasionally dotted by distant lights.
A tiny flicker of brilliant white shot by the rim of Tecaza’s lens.
He froze.
He moved back slowly until he found it again.
Then another tiny white light shot across his lens, then another.
Like minuscule white orbs rising and falling.
Then a larger one between them.
They were hands. The middle glowing orb was a face.
All several hundred yards away.
“That’s her!”
60
Greater Phoenix, Arizona
T illy’s heart was bursting.
She was running on pure adrenaline. Each time she stumbled in the desert, her skin peeled and blood seeped from her cuts.
Don’t stop. You can’t stop. They’ll find you.
Her pulse pounding in her ears, she wanted to cry out- Please! Somebody help me! Please! -but she didn’t want to alert the creeps. Her hard breathing and soft whimpering pierced the night air.
In the distance behind her a motor revved. She looked back. Doors slammed, headlights swept and began undulating, accelerating in her direction. At the edge of the lights’ reach, Tilly saw a cluster of buildings and ran toward them. They looked like run-down wooden garages with steel drums and crates of junk inside.
The car lights shot through the gaps between the boards of the buildings, making the ground glow as shadows rose.
Hide! Run! Hide!
The car churned dirt into dust that swirled in the headlights as Tecaza braked near the buildings.
“She’s here. Spread out.”
Limon-Rocha and Tecaza used their night-vision goggles to probe the buildings. Angel had a flashlight and searched the perimeter.
Tilly had found a gully surrounded by tall grass and shrubs and scrambled into it, laying flat on her stomach. She could hear them talking, glimpsed them searching the buildings. A flashlight beam raked the ground near her as a silhouette approached.
She held her breath.
No, please! No!
A cell phone rang and someone answered in Spanish but ended the call abruptly. The silhouette suddenly veered. At the same time one of the creeps near the buildings called out, “I see her!”
Oh no! Please, no!
It sounded like Alfredo, but his voice was lower, as if he’d turned from her. The others were with him. Tilly risked lifting her head and discerned three silhouettes near the idling car. By their posture, it appeared two of them were using binoculars.
“Where?” one of them asked.
“There, to the left.”
“That’s a coyote.”
“No, that’s her. She got away behind the buildings, let’s go.”
Doors slammed. The car roared off.
Tilly waited, got to her feet and ran toward the lights in the distance. She kept her eye on the car, way off to her left bounding over the vast field.
Keep running. Keep running.
Her side began aching, burning.
Tears blurred her vision but she saw a house ahead.
Please, somebody help me!
Far off to her left, the car changed direction, headlights turned toward her, the engine growling.
Virginia Dortman gripped her knife and cut potatoes into chunks. She was making a salad and desserts for the hospital fundraiser potluck tomorrow.
Judging from the aroma filling the kitchen of her small double-wide, the pies baking in her oven should almost be ready. Give them a few more minutes, she thought, gazing out her window at the flat land stretching toward the abandoned airfield.
Look at those lights bouncing and waving around out there. It must be teenagers again. All that tomfoolery can get dangerous. One time, they started a fire. Virginia had a good mind to call the sheriff’s office.
She’d let it go for now. She had too much to do.
For the past year, since her husband died of a heart attack at fifty-two years of age, Virginia busied herself baking, volunteering and working at the library. But most of the time she feared for her son, Clay.
He looked at her from his framed photo atop the TV he’d bought her. Handsome in his dress blues, eyes intense under his white cap. He was a proud Marine, like his dad.
Clay had been posted to South Korea three months ago.
He was twenty-four.
Virginia whispered a prayer for him each day.
What was that?
Her attention shifted to her window.
Something outside was moving, approaching her house. She searched the night beyond the floodlights illuminating her property.
A coyote? No. That’s a -