In Desperation (25 page)

Lago de Rosas, Mexico

T
he phone in the priest's rectory was an old wall-mounted touch-tone.

Father Francisco Ortero was folding his laundered shirts when it rang. He went to the kitchen and answered it.

“Is this Ortero, the priest who hears confessions in Lago de Rosas?”

The young male voice was familiar.

“Sí,”
Ortero said.

“This is the
sicario
you promised to help.”

Several icy seconds of silence passed.

“I told you I would be calling, Father. You remember our discussion?”

“Yes.” Ortero adjusted his grip on the handset.

“And my proposal?”

“Yes.”

“I am about to finish my last job.”

“Don't go through with it. Surrender, I beg you.”

“Listen to me. You made a promise in the confessional to help me.”

“You must stop.”

“Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”

Ortero thought of all the funerals of the innocents
murdered by
narcotraficantes
that he had officiated; how the bloodshed had challenged his faith.

How much suffering does God allow?

“Father? Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Take note of this information.”

The
sicario
gave the priest the time and the location near Phoenix, Arizona, where the journalist was to meet him tomorrow, confirming what the priest had suspected.

“Please, surrender. Police everywhere are looking for you and the others. Your faces are on all the news channels. Surrender!”

“It does not matter now. I am nearly finished.”

“Please, I beg you, no more killing. Surrender now and atone.”

“This is how it must happen. This is how it will happen.”

The priest was disgusted with himself. He was aiding a
sicario.
He squeezed the handset as revulsion and fear coiled within him. What he was doing was akin to the devil's bidding.

“I am considering sending police,” Ortero said.

“You would break the seal of the confessional?”

“What if it did not matter? What if I stopped being a priest to stop the killing?”

“If you send police, I will kill the girl before their eyes in the most memorable way you could ever imagine.”

“I beg you to surrender.”

“The girl's life is in your hands, priest. Your betrayal would result in her death. I have killed nearly two hundred people. Do you think I would hesitate to kill her? Do you want to gamble her life with an executioner of my stature?”

“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?

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!”

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
—

Virginia's eyes widened.

“Please, help me!”

 

Tilly ran up the wooden stairs to Virginia Dortman's front porch.

“Help me!”

Stunned at the site of a sobbing little girl at her door, Virginia's immediate thought was that this was a joke, set up by teenagers.

She opened her door, her disbelief turning to shock at Tilly's dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, frazzled hair and bloodied arms. When the kitchen light glinted off the steel handcuff dangling from Tilly's wrist, Virginia gasped.

“Oh my Lord, sweetheart, what happened to you?”

Tilly fused herself to Virginia, inhaling the smells of her kitchen, her apron, shaking so badly, her words spilled through a torrent of tears. “P-p-please…h-h-help…”

Virginia's next thought was calling 911, and she glanced toward her cordless phone on the sofa of her living room.

But before she moved to get it, her kitchen was awash in blood-red pulsating light.

A police car?

An unmarked patrol car halted at her doorstep, a red emergency light revolving on the interior dash. Two uniformed officers rushed toward Virginia. Confusion then recognition dawned, memory swirling with TV news images of a kidnapped child, drug gangs, fake police officers—
Oh, dear Lord.

“Release the child, ma'am!”

Both officers put their hands on their holstered guns.

“No!” Tilly screamed. “They're not police!”

“Ma'am, release the child! We have reports that a missing girl was sighted here. Now, release the child and step forward with your hands above your head palms out. Now!”

“No! Don't listen to them!” Tilly screamed.

A third figure left the rear of the car, disappearing in the night.

Paralyzed with fear, Virginia glanced to her counter for her knife.

“Freeze! Release her, now!”

One of the officers drew his weapon and pointed it at Virginia while his partner charged at Tilly. She broke
free, bolting to the living room for the phone just as Angel smashed through the rear door and seized it from Tilly.

The two men held her down, clamped the loose handcuff around her free wrist. One of the creeps, Alfredo, dragged her wailing to the car and locked her in the trunk.

Inside the house, Limon-Rocha held Virginia at gunpoint in a chair in her kitchen.

Angel entered, glanced at her, then picked up the knife she had been using a moment ago.

Angel took stock of Virginia's double-wide trailer, the photograph of her Marine son. Running his finger along the serrated edges of the blade, he looked into her eyes. They glistened with terror.

“I am very sorry,” he said.

Phoenix, Arizona

L
yle Galviera kept the Cherokee a few miles under the speed limit, moving south along the freeway.

The AC had quit. His hands were sweating on the wheel. He opened the windows and concentrated.

This was it, his only shot.

The cartel had given him the location for the meeting. He knew the area but still had a long way to go. Amid the multilane streams of headlights and taillights, he checked his mirrors again, glad the guy in California who'd provided him with the Cherokee and new ID had put several different plates in the storage bin.

“Never know when you might need 'em.”

Galviera had switched to a Colorado plate a few hours ago. There was no margin for error here. As the road rushed under him, he looked out at the ocean of city lights and floated with memories of his father.

His old man had driven a bus all day, taking every overtime shift. At home, his mother kneaded the cords of stress from his neck. His old man worked extra hours because he wanted Lyle to be the first in the family line to go to college.

Make something of yourself. Make me proud.

It had happened; Lyle was accepted at Arizona State and, man, it brought tears to his father's eyes. Then came
the day Lyle was called to the faculty office. A phone was passed to him and he heard his mother's voice:
“Come to the hospital!”

After they buried his dad, Galviera dropped out and worked like a dog as a bicycle courier and delivering pizzas before finally carving his own business out of nothing.

Nothing.

He nearly lost it all when his first marriage ended but he triumphed, battered but wiser. Then he met Cora, admired how she'd survived her own problems. They were alike; they were good together. They had dreams but he'd put them on hold because his company was in trouble.

He refused to lose it.

He pounded the wheel with both fists and cursed.

Tilly kidnapped, Salazar and Johnson murdered, leaving me a wanted man, a marked man. Half of the money is mine. I earned it. I need it. Without it, I lose everything. I can't lose.

He could fix this.

The solution lay behind him under the tarp in the sports bags filled with cash—cash from high school pot-heads hustling fast food to suburban soccer moms, university dope smokers, music types, movie types, bottom feeders, high flyers, pimps, hos, street trash, tripped-out execs and all-round losers; drug users from every scene of the American dream. Three million dollars in unmarked bills for Tilly's life.

No one knew about the two million he was hiding for his own use.

This was it.

He came to an industrial wasteland at the city's edge, a railcar repair depot that had closed down after an explosion some thirty years ago.

In the darkness, the Cherokee crawled by the crumbling brick buildings rising like headstones from the yard.
Galviera's instructions were to go to the tallest building, park at the base and wait in the car with his lights off.

He turned down a road that ran between two long tracks, both lined with weatherworn box and hopper cars. He followed the dark road to the metal tower that supported a deteriorated storage tank, the tallest structure in the site.

He parked near the base.

He waited, watching the strobe lights of jetliners sailing by overhead. After nearly an hour, his rearview mirror glowed with the headlights of an approaching vehicle.

It stopped behind him.

Two figures got out, carrying flashlights, and came to his passenger and driver doors, where one directed a blinding beam into his eyes. “Mr. Galviera?”

He glimpsed a shoulder patch—a uniform—and his heart sank.

“Yes.”

“Step out of the car, please, with your hands above your head, palms out.”

Galviera complied, grappling with the fact it was over as they patted him for weapons. The men kept the light burning in his eyes before taking him to the rear of their vehicle, where another figure stood in the dark.

The trunk opened and Galviera's heart lifted.

Light washed over Tilly—bound, haggard, scared, but alive.

“You brought our property, Mr. Galviera?”

“Yes, in the back, under the tarp. In the bags.”

One of the men opened the rear door of the Cherokee, dropped two laden sports bags on the ground in front of the car and unzipped them to display thick bundles of cash. He took one and fanned the edges.

“Did you bring all of it?”

“It's all there in all the bags. Let me take Tilly and go. Our business is done.”

“No.”

“We each fulfilled our obligations. You can count it.”

“We're not going to count it here.”

“Why not?”

“We're not done, not yet.”

“I don't under—”

Stars exploded across Galviera's eyes.