by Sharon Sala
“I wasn’t planning on guests,” she muttered, as she took out the butter and a couple of eggs, and set about scrambling them.
“You want toast with your eggs?” Nick asked.
She paused, then turned around. He was standing at the toaster with the dwindling loaf of bread in his hand. She hadn’t expected him to help. Then she shrugged.
“I guess not. That wouldn’t leave any for the three of you.”
“To hell with that,” he said shortly. “We obviously haven’t been worrying about leaving anything for you.”
Once again, his behavior was so out of character. Something about him was off, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was that kept bothering her.
“Toast would be fine,” she said.
He slipped a slice of bread in the toaster and pushed down the lever.
Wayman and Lou came into the kitchen.
“That smells good,” Wayman said.
“This is for Amalie. She hasn’t eaten since noon yesterday, and you two ate all the soup that was left this morning. You’ve both been eating nonstop since we got here. And seriously…there’s not much left.”
Lou’s eyes widened; then he looked away, aware that he’d been eating more than his fair share of everything. He walked out of the house before someone decided to jump him about that, too.
Wayman frowned. “What’s Tug gonna eat?”
“You and Lou weren’t worrying about Tug when you ate all the soup.”
Wayman’s frown deepened. Amalie could tell by the look on his face that he was thinking of how much more they would have if she wasn’t alive to be eating. Then her toast popped up. She plated her eggs, buttered her toast and got a glass of water.
“I’ll eat in my room,” she said, and slipped out of the kitchen before Wayman could challenge her.
The moment she was gone, Wayman turned on Nick.
“If she wasn’t here, that would be that much more for us.”
“We don’t touch her,” Nick said.
“You’re not in charge!” Wayman shouted.
“I don’t care who the hell is in charge. I’m saying if you—or anyone—tries to hurt Amalie Pope, you’ll have to go through me to do it.”
“There’s three of us against you,” Wayman muttered.
“No. There’s two of you. Tug isn’t fighting anything but infection. And as for who comes after me first, you and Lou need to decide between you who it will be, because that’s who’s going to die first.”
Wayman paled. “You would kill one of us for some bitch we don’t even know?”
Nick laid a hand on the butcher knife on the cabinet without picking it up, making his point without any need to brandish it.
“I don’t hurt women,” he said softly.
Wayman grunted. He’d known a man like that once. His father. It hadn’t stopped him from beating the hell out of him and Tug when they’d been growing up, but he’d never laid a hand on their mother. It was a philosophy he understood.
“I better go see about Tug,” Wayman said, then made a point of examining his scraped arms as he walked away.
Nick listened to the sound of Wayman’s fading footsteps, then glanced out the kitchen window. Lou had the handsaw and was hacking awkwardly at a limb. When the door slammed at the other end of the house, he knew where Wayman was, as well. That left Amalie upstairs on her own. He decided to give her some time to eat her meal in peace, and began loading the dirty dishes into the dishwasher before going outside to give Lou a hand.
Stewart Babcock was coming out of a meeting when his cell phone began vibrating. He dug it out of his pocket and then answered.
“Babcock.”
“Sir, we have information on Agent Aroyo.”
“Finally,” Babcock said. “Talk to me.”
“He was one of four men who were arrested in Bordelaise, Louisiana, last Friday night.”
“Get me the name of the police chief and his phone number.”
“Already got them, sir,” the agent said, then added, “but you might have some trouble getting through. The town was hit by a tornado over the weekend.”
“All right,” Babcock said, as he took out a pen and notepad. “Just give me the information.”
The agent complied, and Babcock disconnected.
Within moments he was calling the Bordelaise Police Department.
Hershel was talking to Lee Tullius about the missing boy when the phone rang—and thank God the phones were back, he thought—when Vera called for his attention. “Chief, phone call for you.”
“Is it an emergency?” he asked.
She shrugged. “DEA?”
He sighed. “I’ll take it in my office. Wait here,” he told Lee, then headed down the hall. Once inside his office, he glared at the stack of paperwork waiting for him—he would get to it as soon as he got off the phone, he promised himself—and sat down, then picked up the receiver. “Chief Porter here.”
“Chief. Stewart Babcock, DEA. I understand you have some prisoners in your jail. By any chance, was one of them a man named Nick Aroyo?”
Hershel frowned. “He was here, but he’s not anymore,” he said. “Not him and not the drug ring he was running with.”
“You turned them loose?”
“No, sir. Last Sunday our town was hit by a tornado. Among other things, it took out the back of the jail, and as far as we can tell, the prisoners went with it. We don’t know if they were taken by the tornado or if they’re on the run. I had search parties scouring the area for days, and they found nothing to lead me to believe they were still alive. We called off the search a couple of days ago.”
“Damn it,” Babcock said. “Look, I want to send a team down to help you search.”
“You can send whoever you want, but they’ll be on their own. I can’t afford the manpower to go back out again, because we’re working the case of a kidnapped child.”
“Tough,” Babcock said. “What’s the ransom?”
“There never was a request for ransom. We’re leaning toward the theory that it’s either the father or a child molester.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then Babcock cleared his throat. “That’s a tough one,” he said. “As for the missing prisoners, if you do find them, you need to let me know immediately. Nick Aroyo is one of us. He’s been undercover with that drug ring for months.”
“The hell you say!” Hershel said, thinking back to the dark-eyed man who’d been so quiet during booking.
“Yes,” Babcock said. “So be on the lookout for my men. I’ll have them check in with you to get them started.”
“Glad to help out,” Hershel said, and they disconnected.
Hershel grabbed his hat and stomped out of the office, too pissed now to tackle the paperwork piling up on his desk.
Nine
A half dozen men were waiting in the outer office of the police department when Hershel got to work on Friday. Despite their matching haircuts and casual clothes, he would have recognized them by their serious expressions alone. When he noticed they were carrying, he knew he was right.
DEA.
Babcock’s search team had arrived.
The tall, sandy-haired man nearest the door stood up first, as the others followed. “Chief Porter?”
“That’s me,” Hershel said. “Gentlemen, would you join me in my office?”
Vera’s eyes were big as saucers, but she knew enough to refrain from comment.
Still, Hershel could only imagine what she was thinking. Six armed men waiting for him to walk in. She’d probably freaked herself out a half dozen times before he’d gotten to work.
As he walked past her desk, it occurred to him to wonder what the agents had thought about her. Sometime between last night and this morning she’d gone from red and curly to long and blonde. He sighed. Vera sure was fond of her wigs.
“Hold my calls,” he said shortly.
She nodded, watching curiously as the men followed her boss down the hall.
Hershel entered the office, stepped aside for the men to follow, then closed the door.
“Sorry, I don’t have enough chairs for all of you.”
“Chief Porter, pleasure to meet you, sir.” The sandy-haired man offered his hand. “Agent Edwards, DEA.” Then he went down the line, introducing the other men. As you’ve probably guessed, Babcock sent us. We’ll be helping you search for the missing prisoners. What exactly is the status of the search?”
“It was called off a couple of days ago. I ended up with four search teams going in four different directions for days. We were looking for prisoners, and also the body of a little boy who’d gone missing. However, we just learned last night that the child was not a victim of the storm but, we believe, of a child molester.”
The men were visibly concerned about the news.
“That’s a rough one. I take it you had no luck with the search for the prisoners, either?” Edwards asked.
“Not so much as a footprint or a shred of clothing. You understand that this is bayou country. That means swamps and gators in abundance. If those prisoners had the misfortune to go airborne, then land in the swamps, their bodies are long gone.”
Edwards blanched. He was friends with Nick Aroyo, and the thought of his friend meeting such a fate was daunting.
“If you don’t mind, we’d like to see the jail, then we’ll begin our own search from there.”
“Yeah, sure. They’re about finished with repairs. Still have to shingle the roof, but the concrete block walls have been replaced. Follow me.”
Nick and Lou had been working so intently on removing debris that they hadn’t noticed the sky was clouding up, or that the sun was momentarily hidden by a swiftly building cloud bank. They did notice that the air had gone dead still. It was like working in a sauna.
Amalie’s day had been unusually silent. She’d dug through the pantry and then through Nonna’s deep freeze, where she’d found a frostbitten package of frozen weiners and a half package of frozen hamburger buns. That meant there were ten weiners and four buns for five hungry people. She’d also found a small can of soup but wasn’t sure what to do with it. There wasn’t enough to share.
Once the men went outside to work, she’d been relegated to a chair on the back veranda.
Nick and Lou spelled each other using the handsaw, and little by little managed to whittle down the debris until the car was finally freed.
Lou whooped and yelled, then did a little dance.
“By God, we did it! We did it!”
Nick shoved his hands in his pockets, quietly surveying the rest of the problem. There was a crack in the windshield, and the back half of the roof was caved in. There was a hole in a door on the passenger side where a limb had gone through the metal, and the back window had shattered into hundreds of popcorn shaped pieces.
Wayman frowned. “How we gonna drive this thing? There’s no room for anyone to sit in the back.”
“We’re going to have to raise the roof.”
“The window’s busted out, too,” Wayman said.
“That’s the least of our troubles,” Nick said, eyeing the crushed metal.
Then he heard the back door slam and looked up. Amalie had gone inside. He started to go after her, then decided that if she hadn’t tried to run by now, she wasn’t going to do it today, so he stayed. Getting these men out of here had to be his top priority.
Back in Bordelaise, Agent Edwards and the rest of the search team had tried a street-by-street sweep around the jail, questioning people about the missing prisoners, but no one had anything to relate. Everything happening on a Sunday morning was the worst kind of luck from their point of view. All the businesses except a couple of gas stations and a restaurant on the other side of town had been closed, and the people who weren’t sleeping in had either been out of town or in church.
It was midmorning when they stumbled onto their first clue, and then it was by accident. The owner of a department store that had been hit hard by the tornado had just sold the damaged contents to a man who owned another store, and whose stock consisted of water and fire-damaged goods. The man who’d bought the contents was parked in the alley, loading up his purchases as the agents walked over.
Edwards first thought the guy was a looter; then he saw a half dozen other people inside the store and realized they were in the middle of some sort of cleanup.
“What’s up?” Edwards asked.
“Not much,” the man said, as he dumped the load he was carrying and went back for another. An employee passed him with another load of clothes.
Edwards read the sign on the side of the van—Good As New—and figured out the rest. Just as they were about to move on, he caught sight of a color in the armful of clothes that made him look twice. The only places he’d seen that particular shade of orange had been on hunting vests and prison-issue jumpsuits.
“Hey! Do you mind if I take a look at that load?” Edwards asked.
“Talk to the boss,” the man said, as he dumped the load and went back inside.
“I will, when he comes back,” Edwards muttered. “In the meantime, I feel like shopping.”
Agent Lord grinned at Agent Smith, and then they both stared as Edwards actually climbed up in the van.
“Are you serious?” Lord asked.
Edwards grabbed the orange sleeve sticking out of the clothing pile and pulled.
“Bingo,” he said softly, then held it up so the others could see. “Look what we have here.”
Within the hour, Edwards, Lord and Smith had found three other jumpsuits just like the first. And that was when they knew they were looking for live men, not gator-ravaged bodies.
“You gonna tell Porter?” Smith asked.
Edwards frowned. “They had their shot at searching, and this is our clue to follow. If we find out anything definitive, I might rethink it.”
The agents bagged the jumpsuits as evidence, then headed for their SUV’s. Now they knew the escapees were wearing regular clothes, the next thing the men would have needed were wheels. The agents spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon running down reports of missing cars. Dozens upon dozens of cars had disappeared during the storm and were slowly turning up all over the area. They needed to cross-check the records to see if any were still unaccounted for.
By the time they stopped to eat some lunch, they’d managed to clear all the reported cars except for two.
They grabbed some sub sandwiches from Pinky’s Get and Go, while Edwards gassed up their two vehicles. Assuming the escapees had found something to drive, it was time to branch out. They split up into threes, then began checking all the small gas stations and houses in the surrounding area, checking to see if anyone had seen strangers on foot, or driving one of the two cars that were still missing.
Everyone they talked to made a point of telling them that they’d already spoken to Chief Porter or one of his men, but the agents persevered.
It was after three-thirty when Agents Edwards, Lord and Smith came upon a bridge spanning a wide, deep creek. As they started to pass, Lord suddenly yelled, “Stop! Big white Lincoln down in that creek! Wasn’t one of those unaccounted for cars a Lincoln?”
Edwards, who was driving, put the car into Reverse and backed up. It wasn’t until they got out that they began to realize the car had not been dumped in the creek by a tornado. There was a hole in a four-wire fence, and some small bushes had been broken off at ground level in a direct line with the car’s trajectory. Which meant that someone had driven it—or pushed it—into the creek.
“Five days is a long time in this heat. I hope to God no one’s in it,” Smith muttered, as Edwards climbed down the steep slope and waded into the water.
Moments later, Edwards called back, “It’s empty. Run the plates.”
Smith ran back to their SUV and grabbed the list they’d been working.
“It was reported missing from Bordelaise!” he yelled.
“It was probably dumped
by the storm,” Lord said.
But Edwards knew better. “It couldn’t have been. The storm came through here first, then hit Bordelaise. Tornadoes do not pick up debris in one place, then go backward fifteen miles to dump it.”
“Good point,” Lord said.
Edwards pointed to Smith. “Get a tow truck out here, stat. I want this car out of the creek. The water isn’t over the dash. We might still be able to lift some prints. If we’re lucky, we might find out who was driving this baby.”
More calls were made, and within thirty minutes a local showed up with a tow truck, hooked onto the bumper of the car and pulled it out of the creek.
Edwards grabbed some gear out of the back of their SUV and began dusting every dry surface for prints. Every time he would find one, he photographed it and e-mailed it to Quantico. Aroyo’s prints were on file, and he’d already contacted a tech, who was processing the info as it was received. With luck he would confirm Aroyo soon.
Nick slapped a mosquito that lit on his arm, then swatted at another one buzzing around his ear. Now he knew why Amalie had gone into the house earlier.
“Let’s give it a rest,” he said. “The mosquitoes are chewing me up alive.”
“I’m hungry, anyway,” Lou said.
“Me, too,” Wayman said. “And I need to go check on Tug.”
“Whatever we eat tonight, there will be no second helpings,” Nick said, as he started toward the house.
“Why the hell not?” Lou asked, as he hurried to catch up.
“For the same reason we’ve been saying for days—we’re running out of food.”
Lou frowned but didn’t comment. There was always tonight, after everyone else went to bed.
As they entered the kitchen, they saw thawing weiners and buns, sitting in a puddle on the counter, but Amalie was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s the bitch?” Lou asked.
Nick glared. “Maybe she’s in the bathroom. Wash up,” he said. “I’ll look for her.”
“I’m gonna check on Tug,” Wayman said, and left the kitchen.
Nick followed, thinking he was going to have to check upstairs, when he and Wayman both heard voices down the hall and realized Tug was awake—and talking to someone.
