Borderline (43 page)

As they cruised down the highway at a slightly less alarming speed, Anna digested that bit of information.

“If all this mayhem was to cover up the fact he murdered several people, and wanted to murder Helena, going into a public place, guns blasting, would tend to be a little counterproductive,” Anna said.

Judith pounded the steering wheel with such violence both Anna and Helena squeaked in alarm.

“He’d do it because he’s gone crazy! You should have seen him up at the lodge after his two hired thugs failed to get the baby. They’re dead, did you know that?” she demanded.

Anna didn’t bother to answer.

“He told me. He said they’d called to get picked up because they had to ditch the car they’d rented. He had Kevin, his psycho protégé, go get them, take them to some deserted place west of Terlingua and shoot them.

“Oh God!” Judith shouted, and the car swerved dangerously. “I should have seen this coming. I might have been able to stop it, get him help. Darden’s got post-traumatic stress syndrome from so many wars and skirmishes and dirty political assignments that he doesn’t know if he is coming or going half the time.

“He worries about getting old, worries that he’s losing it. His mom has Alzheimer’s and he worries that he’ll go that way too. Maybe this was his way of trying to prove he was the man he used to be, and when it got screwed up it pushed him over an edge in his mind. Maybe he’s back in the jungles or deserts or villages or wherever he was for those years. I don’t know. I do know that he’s not thinking straight.”

“Maybe a public bloodbath is his way of committing suicide by cop,” Anna thought aloud.

“Maybe,” Judith said, and there was nothing in her tone but sorrow.

They drove in silence for a while and Anna had trouble remembering they were in a high-speed chase. It felt more like O. J. Simpson’s famous low-speed chase on the freeways of Los Angeles. Darden kept a safe but consistent distance behind them. Judith slowed down till the speedometer, at least as seen from the passenger seat, hovered around eighty miles per hour. The dusk that had been so lacerated by the slashing of headlights was settling into a deeper violet mood. Stars were coming out.

“I need to use your cell phone,” Anna said into this new and unsubstantiated peace.

Judith’s right hand darted away from the steering wheel as if on a mission of its own, then was snatched back into the ten-and-two position. “It’s in my purse,” she said. “And my purse is in the hotel room. Darden didn’t leave me much time for the niceties.”

An evil smell let Anna know Helena had run out of time for the niceties as well. She lowered her window a few inches. At eighty miles an hour the racket from the wind was considerable. Lajitas wasn’t too far from Terlingua if she remembered right, between fifteen and thirty miles, probably closer to fifteen. At eighty they wouldn’t have much longer on the road.

Breathing in the sweet smell of the desert—or as much as could penetrate the miasma Helena had instigated—Anna looked into the side mirror at the lights politely tailing them three car lengths back, the beams on low so they wouldn’t blind the driver in the car ahead, and couldn’t shake the dreamlike quality the night had taken on the moment Darden appeared at the door of the Martinez house wanting to know the gory details of the woman’s—Eleanor Cheevers’s—demise.

The hysteria with which she had left the house, the panic that she was harming a newborn by lugging it around like a satchel, was gone, worn out or dimmed by the events that came after. The fear and helplessness she’d suffered trying to outdistance Detroit’s finest automobiles had run its course as well. Oddly empty of emotion, Anna let bits of internal film roll. Gerry outlined Darden’s probably bloody history and proven violence where the good of his mayor was concerned. His mayor, and a woman he’d known since she was three years old, a woman he was in love with one way or another: sexual, filial, paternal or psychotic. At the breakfast the four of them had eaten together Anna had not been particularly attuned to the currents between Judith and her chief of security. In retrospect she watched Darden’s glances at Judith wavering from anxious with unvoiced concern to irritated and, once, frightened. Maybe frightened, Anna corrected herself. Reading faces was informative as far as it went, but human beings over the age of two had learned to lie with all their faculties. She didn’t think Darden had been guarding his expressions that morning but a lot of things factored into a twist of the lips or a raise of an eyebrow. Like babies, people might be smiling or they might just have gas.

As breakfast replayed in her head she remembered the reassuring tone Darden had used with Judith and her almost childlike reliance on him. It reminded her of the first time the three of them had met, in the chief ranger’s conference room after they’d been brought back from the rim of Santa Elena Canyon, how Darden had intervened with the offer of soda or a careful word when Judith sounded as if she were stressed—or about to give away something better kept secret.

She watched Darden at the door of the Martinezes’, unsurprised by the visit of the baby snatchers, how he’d asked for details about Helena’s mom that she might not have shared with others, how he didn’t show any interest in the brawl that had so recently taken place in the space they shared. Memory film fast-forwarded through Darden tracking her in his SUV when she and Helena walked to the Terlingua Porch, reappearing shortly after the mayor had come in an identical SUV, veering from the game of chicken because he “always” did, backing off when the chase became dangerous for Judith. She stopped the mind movie at the place where Judith gave every indication of having fun, of playing a game.

Readjusting Helena to her shoulder, Anna snuck a glance into the back. A leather strap snaked out from beneath the driver’s-side seat, narrow tooled leather with a single gold link attaching it to whatever was beneath Judith’s rump. Anna didn’t doubt for a minute that it was the mayor’s purse, the one she’d said held the cell phone, the one she’d said she’d left behind at the Chisos Lodge.

The SUV speeded up. From the corner of her eye Anna saw the sign for the Lajitas resort hotel flash by in a blink of halogen white.

“Oh shoot!” Judith said. “I overshot. There’s a place to turn around at a park down by the river. It’s not far; we’ll make it and back before Darden figures out what we’re doing.”

Anna said nothing. Darden already knew what they were doing. He wasn’t a lone psychopath, he was a member of a conspiracy, and Anna had obligingly hopped into the hands of the other member.

They were taking Anna and Helena to the river to kill them.

A
nna had less than five minutes to curse herself for a fool and mentally apologize to the mothers of the world for any stray thoughts she’d had over the years that they weren’t brave enough, or smart enough, or productive enough. Doing anything,
anything
, with an infant in arms was a near impossibility: thinking, fighting, moving, working, eating. Helplessness was how she’d seen it, but it wasn’t that the women couldn’t do for themselves. It was that they could not do for themselves unless they sacrificed their child. That women often chose to have more than one child was mind-boggling; it must require the courage of several prides of lions.

Courage Anna had always lacked.

Left to her own devices, she would not have taken Judith’s offer of a ride; she would have run for the desert hills and trusted to her own abilities. A baby made that plan unworkable. Left to her own devices, she might have thrown herself from the moving vehicle as soon as it slowed rather than be taken to the place where the grim reaper was supposed to be waiting. With a baby, that couldn’t be done. She daren’t even grab the wheel and try to wreck the SUV. Held in her lap, Helena probably wouldn’t survive the crash.

The actions left were the traditional actions of women with children: placating, lying, running and hiding. Anna chose lying; she played along so Judith would continue to believe all was going according to plan.

“Not much farther. There it is. Canoes put in here sometimes. Did you know that?” Judith chattered as they left the pavement and the SUV lumbered down a dirt and gravel path toward the water. “There’s room to turn this thing around a ways down. I remember it from coming here once.”

There was room to turn around on every side. This was the Chihuahuan desert, not the forested backwoods of Washington. Seven-forty-sevens could turn around pretty much anywhere one looked. Anna said nothing. She undid her seat belt and surreptitiously wormed her arm free.

Darden, creeping and black in his obese vehicle, didn’t show lights behind them and Anna wondered if he’d missed the turn into the park on purpose or by accident, if he was circling around to join the party from another direction.

“Hey!” Judith said, sounding surprised. “We lost him. Good for us.” The SUV rolled to a stop and she put on the parking brake.

Anna threw open the door, half fell out of the SUV and ran.

“Wait! What are you doing? Come back, damn you!” she heard Judith yelling after her. “Darden will be back and he’ll kill you!” Judith shouted. Then the engine revved and screeched, Judith trying to pursue her but forgetting she’d set the brake. A ratcheting sound was followed by the crunch of tires on gravel and a banging that had to be the open passenger door flapping as Judith drove over uneven ground.

Already this night Anna had lost a footrace with an automobile. She had no intention of doing it a second time. They wanted her in the river and that’s where she was headed. Headlights lashing her, she ran for the water and kept running till it was waist-deep and still she pushed on. The Rio Grande was low and she was grateful. Texas hadn’t been handing out much in the way of breaks for the last few days and Anna deeply appreciated this one. At the put-in the river wasn’t more than fifty feet across and tonight it ran slowly, almost languidly. The current pulled at her legs and feet but playfully, an invitation to swim rather than an invitation to drown.

The headlights of Judith’s SUV slammed into her chest and face with the impact of a solid object and Anna turned away, Helena clutched to her shoulder.

The water was cool but not cold and they sank into it until only their heads remained in the air. Tinier targets, she hoped, bits of oddly shaped driftwood lost in the darkness. The big engine roared with the anger of its driver and gravel rattled from beneath spinning tires. A tremendous splash followed and the headlights dimmed. Judith must have driven the vehicle into the river. Desperately wanting to look back, Anna kept her pale face away from the direction where Judith was still calling after them and let the river carry her gently downstream.

“Judith! Judy! Are you okay?”

Darden had arrived. Light as a bit of flotsam, Anna maneuvered herself and Helena toward the deep overhang of reeds. Helena’s diaper was filling with river water. Anna unstuck the tape and let it float away. As she watched the white bobbing against the dark water she realized she had finally done it, she had hit bottom. She was littering.

There wasn’t a reply to Darden’s shout and, as Anna’s spirits were rising at the thought of Mayor Pierson with a broken nose or her head bashed in by the windshield, she heard the woman shouting high and screechy: “Stay away, Darden. I told Anna what you did. She knows you’re here to kill her. You get out of here.”

“Judith, stop it!” Darden snapped, and there was silence.

They stopped talking; the night was too still and Anna too close for it to be otherwise. Even whispers would have carried over the water. As long as they kept each other busy, she and Helena were traveling. Reeds pushed out over the water two to ten feet, their stalks thick and yellow, leaves long, spiky and dark green. Uncut and without any creatures who liked to eat them, they’d taken over the banks and grown thick and tangled. Perfect for what Anna needed. Silt piled up nearer the bank and her feet touched bottom. Shrinking under the reeds, she was enveloped in total darkness.

Her invasion of these inky environs caused a stir. Around her she could hear the movements of those whose home she had invaded. A faint plop, a turtle sliding beneath the water, she thought.
Skritching
. Little birds awakened and scratched around for reasons held secret in their little bird brains. The unmistakable slithering rustle of a snake moving through dry grass.

Rattlesnakes were common in Big Bend, as were tarantulas, scorpions, black widow spiders and all manner of other animals who lived by tooth or claw or toxin. Lots of them came to drink at the river at night. Many would choose the cover the reeds provided as Anna had. Blinded and surrounded by them, Anna felt safer than she did with most of her own species—especially the two who had brought her here in dueling SUVs.

Resisting the temptation to put her hand over the baby’s nose and mouth lest she cry and give them away, Anna listened. Car doors were opening and closing and heavy objects being dragged. It sounded as if Judith was trying to salvage items from the backseat of the half-submerged Chevy. A weapon?

“I don’t need you, Darden, and Anna won’t come out if you’re here. She knows what you are.” Judith’s voice cut abruptly through the sounds of rummaging and Anna realized how close she was. The reeds that had so kindly taken her and Helena in weren’t very far downstream from where the SUV had charged into the water. Judith must have gotten whatever it was she wanted from the back of the car; Anna heard her splashing into the water.

Both Darden and Judith seemed to be playing that the other was the bad guy and they were the, if not good, then sane guy. Was it a game to keep Anna off balance? Were they both desirous of offing her and Helena but for different reasons? Even soaking wet, in the dark, hiding in the reeds with a baby in her arms, that seemed farfetched. Had Darden been in on the killings right up to but not including the murder of an infant and, by the way, a federal law enforcement officer?