His smile didn’t waver.
“Impossible,” he said as his men stepped up beside him menacingly. “This is Mexican soil and a Mexican matter. If you persist in annoying me, I shall be forced to place you under arrest.”
I stared at him, trying to figure his angle. Will they try to take Perrine? I thought. Is that it?
I turned at a sound behind me to find my new Delta Force pals filling the hallway.
“Well, if you continue annoying my buddy,” said the monster soldier who’d smashed in the lake house door, “me and my friends will be forced to place you fellas underground, comprende? Now open that door!”
That was when it happened.
From the other side of the door came a crisp, sudden POP!
I bulled my way in past the Mexican colonel and through the door.
Perrine was still sitting on the stretcher we’d brought him in on, with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was shot through the head, and his brains were blown out against the marble lintel of the fireplace.
Another colonel inside the office shrugged as he holstered his pistol.
“I had no choice. He was trying to escape.”
I realized it then. They were cleaning up. Perrine knew too much. About the government, how far the corruption went. And still my family was missing. They’d killed the only man who knew where they were. Would this nightmare never end?
I lunged for the bastard who’d killed Perrine, but I didn’t get a foot before someone grabbed me from behind. There was a lot of shoving, a lot of cursing in two languages, but it finally died down. I started shaking as I broke free and headed for the mansion’s back door to the backyard, where they had just brought some of the Salvajes cartel guys they’d captured.
Someone is going to tell me where my family is, I thought as I reached for the handle of the French door.
I hadn’t gotten it halfway open when Emily slammed into me. She was grinning as she shoved a phone into my hand. I put it to my ear.
“Mike? Mike? Is that you?” said a voice. It was an Irish voice, an Irish woman’s voice.
I took the phone off my ear and stared at it. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. I slid to the floor. I put the phone back to my ear.
“Mary Catherine?” I said. “Mary Catherine?”
“Mike!” Mary Catherine said. “Oh, thank God, Mike.”
“But how-? Where-?” I sputtered. “Are you OK? Are the kids OK?”
“We’re all fine, Mike. The children, Seamus, me, and Mr. Cody are fine.”
CHAPTER 98
“What? How? Where?” came Mike’s voice from the old CB receiver in front of Mary Catherine. She pressed the red key with her thumb.
“Don’t worry, Mike. We’re hiding out in a place not too far from Mr. Cody’s, a safe place,” she said, and let the button off.
“But the cartel sent a video of them kicking in the front door in the middle of the night,” Mike said from the boxy unit’s speaker. “I thought you were kidnapped. I don’t understand.”
“For the last day, we’ve been hiding out at Mr. McMurphy’s house, up in the hills north of Mr. Cody’s,” Mary Catherine said. “We would have called you sooner, but there’s no phone service up here. I’m actually talking to you over Mr. McMurphy’s CB that he uses when he needs to contact someone.”
“A CB?”
“Yes. Mr. McMurphy contacts his friend a few miles away on the radio band, and then his friend patches him through to a phone. But the friend was away for a few days and just got back. That’s why we haven’t been able to contact you.”
“Wait. McMurphy?” I said. “Who the hell is he?”
“A nice man from town. He said he met you at church a few weeks ago when Seamus filled in to say Mass.”
I shook my head in disbelief as I remembered the Nick Nolte-ish hippie with the gun.
“Him?” I said. “How did he get involved?”
“Up here in the hills, he’s got a, um, unique farm, Mike. He keeps a low profile because of the business he’s in. He also keeps his eyes and ears open. He heard through the grapevine in town about the cartel looking around for us. He was coming by to tell us that we were in danger right as the cartel was heading for the house.
“He came in the back door and woke us up and walked us down in the dark through one of the neighboring farms, to his truck. He drove us up to his place in the hills, and we’re still here.”
“So I’m not dreaming?” Mike said. “You’re all alive and well?”
“You’ll not get rid of us that easy,” Mary Catherine said. “I’d put the kids on the phone, but they’re exhausted, and I’d just as soon let them sleep. Now that the coast seems clear, Mr. McMurphy is going to drive us down to the Susanville PD in the morning. How does that sound?”
CHAPTER 99
On an old dirt mining road in the rugged hills northeast of Susanville, in a place called the Tunnison Mountain Wilderness Study Area, a boxy Land Rover Defender with a whip antenna attached to its roof suddenly stopped as Vida Gomez put a hand to the driver’s chest.
She adjusted away the static on the radio monitor she held just in time to hear Bennett answer the nanny loud and clear in her earbud.
“That sounds good. I’m on my way back. I’ll meet you there.”
“My God! It’s him!” Vida said. “It’s Bennett himself. Tell me you’re getting this!”
In the seat behind her, Eduardo checked the frequency on her radio monitor, then rapidly clicked at a laptop that was attached to the antenna. The screen showing their present GPS location locked for a moment, and then a pin appeared, showing the estimated position of the transmission.
The pin began to pulse strongly as the nanny said good night to Bennett.
Eduardo checked the screen against his compass and the geological survey map spread out on the seat beside him. He had worked in the signal corps of the Colombian government catching narcoterrorists before he had met Perrine and switched sides. There was no one better in the cartel at radio tracking than he.
He pointed to the juniper-covered hill beside them, toward a stand of trees.
“The nanny and Bennett’s kids are less than a mile up there somewhere,” he said.
Vida got on the radio, and after a minute, another 4x4, an FJ Cruiser, rolled down the steep incline of the mining road from the opposite direction.
“You have a hit?” Estefan said from behind the FJ’s wheel.
“We just heard Bennett and the nanny,” Vida said excitedly. “The software is saying we are within a mile, that they’re up in those trees.”
“Good,” Estefan said. “About two hundred feet back up the road, I saw a tire track going that way.”
Vida smiled. She knew that the play after finding the Bennett safe house empty was to come up here to Northern California and conduct the search herself. Their contacts in town had put them onto an old, half-mad hippie doper who lived somewhere around here. His name was McMurphy, and not only had he given the cartel trouble in the past, but he’d actually been seen talking to the Bennetts at church.
She had tried to contact Perrine several times for running orders, but he wasn’t answering. It was his party, she knew. She could picture him in his tux, presiding over the events.
She felt a tug of envy at not being invited. No matter. In the back of the Rover were twelve air-shipment boxes with dry ice. Twelve little boxes that would be packed with twelve Bennett heads and would be on their way to Real del Monte by morning. Manuel would know soon enough her devotion to him.
Around Vida’s neck, on a gold chain, was the emerald ring Perrine had given her after she’d finally broken him down and they’d made love the last day of his stay. They didn’t use protection, and it was the middle of her cycle. She hadn’t taken a test, but she knew she was pregnant with his baby. It would be a boy, as handsome as his father.
Everyone had said what a charming man he was, but he was far better than just that. In their time together, he had been so kind to her, asked about her daughters, her life. He was like a father to her, or at least what she thought a father might be like, having never actually had one.
She sighed as a full-body tingle glowed all around her. Her, Vida. A simple farm girl. She’d always known she was special. That things would change for the better. And they would be getting better beyond her wildest dreams. For now, inside her, growing, was the Sun Prince.
“Vida!” said Estefan.
“Yes?” she said, shaking off the daydream.
“Shall we drive a little farther in or leave the cars here and walk?”
Vida grabbed her machine pistol and opened the door.
“Let’s walk, but quickly,” she said. “I want out of this shithole before the sun comes up.”