The boy’s stricken expression, the tears in his eyes, were strong reminders of the first time Mendez had seen a dead person, the unreality of it. She nodded again, with no humor this time.
“And then he looked up and he saw me in the window. He started running toward the house, and I could see the gun in his hand then, and I got the hell out of there.”
“How?”
“Out the window. You can climb out onto the porch roof and down the whatchacallit, the trellis, but I sort of shot off the roof and hit the ground and ran. I was down the street before I heard his car take off, but I was afraid to go home again. I mean, I saw him, and he’s got a lot of friends.”
“So what did you do?”
“I sneaked down to Mina’s house, and she gave me her phone, and she and ’Nesto and I hid out at her house until morning. ’Nesto had a cousin who’d lived down in these caves for a while, before La Migra deported him, but he said there wasn’t anyone using them right now, so we figured I could hide out here until you guys had arrested Taco.”
“That was your plan?”
“If I led you to Taco, his homeys would come after me, maybe even my mom. But I thought that if everyone knew you couldn’t find me, they wouldn’t go blaming me when Taco got arrested.”
In the backward logic of the gang world, it made sense. “So why did you have Brother Erasmus bring me here?”
Enrique’s defiant look wavered, and his gaze dropped. “I realized I was just thinking about me. Me and my mom. But then Erasmo asked about Gloria, and so I told him about her and how she was really nice and she really wanted to go to college and all, and when I was telling him about her, I began to think that I wasn’t being much of a friend to her. I have a responsibility to her too.”
The trio across from Sergeant Mendez seemed to sit a little straighter, either shouldering their responsibility or squaring off for the firing squad. Two twelve-year-old boys and a girl who’d just turned thirteen, facing her as if prepared for the fate she would march them to.
Must’ve been some conversation with that old man, she thought.
“Thank you for being willing to come forward,” she said. “It would have saved us all a lot of grief if you’d called me ten days ago, but you’ve done so now, and that lets me get on with my responsibility, which at the moment includes protecting you.” For a second, just a flash, she felt a powerful urge to stand up and walk away, to leave these kids to the safety of their hideout, far from vengeful gangbangers and the inadequacy of the legal system. But she couldn’t do that – they were lucky they hadn’t run into some adult animal out here before now. Or been inside when an earthquake collapsed the cave. Time to bring them home.
She told them to gather their things, a process that consisted of picking up two already full backpacks and standing expectantly. She stuck the flashlight in her belt and exchanged it for one of the propane lamps, running her eyes across the sanctuary. How much of the organization had the girl been responsible for? she wondered. Young Jasmina showed signs of becoming a formidable woman. Mendez was smiling to herself when she ducked her head through the entrance of the cave, but the moment she was out, standing between the sandstone cliff and the wood-and-duct-tape wall, she heard a noise that wiped away any thought of a smile, a sound that froze the blood in her veins and made her hands shoot out to block the children behind her.
“Back!” she ordered. “Get back!”
A shotgun, racking its shell into place.
She was blind, with the lamp in her left hand dazzling her sight of the darkness beyond, but she knew that sound, oh yes, and although it set her guts to crawling and the impulse to fling herself to the ground was almost more than she could resist, she was not about to let these three children walk into it.
The kids hesitated in confusion, then to her relief she felt them retreat, back into the dark and inadequate depths of the cave. She kept her hands outstretched, her face and chest crawling with the anticipation of the deadly blast. It couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away, no one could miss at that range, but if she turned her left side toward the gun, she might live long enough to get out her weapon and take him down as he climbed past her into the cave. She straightened slowly, leaving her hands out but shifting a fraction to the right as she moved.
“I want the kid,” said the voice from the night.
“You don’t want those kids. They’re just vagrants camping out here. I’d suggest you leave before my partner arrives.”
“You don’t have a partner. You left the station by yourself.”
Which was true, although he’d missed her brief stop to take on Brother Erasmus. It was also worrying. “You’ve been following me?”
“Just the last couple of nights. One of my boys heard you were on to the kid. He was right.”
“Those were your headlights I saw behind me, on the road.”
“Didn’t need to follow you closer. I could see where you were coming. Now, get out of the way.”
“I can’t do that,” she said. “And whoever you are and whatever you’ve done, you really don’t want to shoot a police officer.” If he thought she had no idea who he was, he might possibly be more inclined to back off, leaving Enrique for another day.
She heard a step, then another, and braced herself for action – throwing the lamp, dropping to the ground, or just dying, she didn’t know.
Then came a sound that didn’t fit: a patter of rainfall on a dry night, off to the side. She knew it had to be Erasmus and drew breath to shout a warning, but before the words could leave her mouth, there was a scuffle and a thump beneath a sudden exclamation. Then came the huge noise that she had been dreading and the brilliant flash that lit up the hillside.
What seemed a long time later, Mendez lifted her head off the ground. She was blind. And half-deaf, but over the ringing in her ears she could make out a high-pitched noise, a chorus of noises – screams – the kids, in the cave! She scrambled to her feet, vaguely grateful that she could move, that she hadn’t been cut in half by the shotgun blast. She staggered, crashing into something that gave way and bit at her hand: the pallet wall. She reached out more cautiously, then remembered the flashlight on her belt. She yanked it out and thumbed it on, and over the noise in her ears, the screaming voices seemed to diminish slightly.
Two steps took her to the cave entrance, and a quick sweep of the light showed the three kids wrapped in one another’s arms against the back wall, terrified but unharmed. Ernesto was the only one still screaming, his eyes tight shut, but the other two blinked against the light, and the girl’s mouth moved in speech: no blood, no shooter.
Mendez ducked back out the door, shining the beam along the path: nearly collapsed patchwork wall, smashed propane lamp, near-dead fire circle, path along the cliffs, a pair of feet.
Taco Alvarez lay stretched out with his feet toward the cave, blood on his forehead, hands empty of weaponry, one hand beginning to stir. The beam continued on and came to another pair of feet, white sneakers beneath a dark-brown robe.
Brother Erasmus stood, wooden staff in one hand, shotgun in the other. He blinked when the beam hit his eyes, but the smile on his face was beatific.
“Was he alone?” she asked. First things first.
“Alone, alone, all, all alone.”
She took the gun from him, peeled the shells out of it, and laid the empty weapon to one side. As she knelt to slap the handcuffs onto the groaning Taco Alvarez, the old man went past her to the entrance of the cave. When she looked up, all three children were wrapped around him like limpets on a rock, weeping.
Her cell phone, of course, couldn’t get a signal.
She was not about to leave these three kids out here while she went to summon help, and she was loath to put them into a car with their would-be murderer. In the end, she left Taco, cursing in two languages and with his feet bound by lengths of duct tape, in the gentle care of Brother Erasmus.