The Spy Wore Spurs

by Dana Marton

“Sorry to hear that,” she said. “Maybe Mikey will grow up to the task.”

  Jesus shrugged. “Machines are down half the time. He won’t put money into repair. Customers are leaving. They can get the same job done south of the border cheaper. If he shuts down the place…” He shook his head.

  “He won’t,” she rushed to reassure the man. They couldn’t. The mill employed probably half of the unskilled labor force in Hullett. If the mill closed, the town would collapse.

  “God willing.” Jesus nodded.

  “Do you hang much with newcomers these days?” she asked.

  “At church. A lot fewer people come across than used to. Tough to find jobs these days.”

  “Have you run into anyone by the name of Paco Molinero?”

  “Never heard of him? Why?”

  “Friend of a friend.”

  He nodded. “Are you staying for good this time?”

  “A couple of days. I brought Tommy’s ashes back.”

  Jesus’s face turned somber. “I’m sorry about your brother. He was a good man.”

  “Thank you. Say hi to Maria and the kids for me.” She liked Maria, a bright young woman, kindergarten teacher and a volunteer at the retirement nursing home. She’d even helped out with Tommy at the end.

  Jesus gave her a parting smile, then went back to his business of getting home to his wife and children.

  After he left, Grace snapped a few more pictures, catching Mikey Mitzner coming out in a thousand-dollar suit. The motor of the BMW roared to life, and it peeled away from its spot, looking out of place among the rows of cars, most of which looked ready for the junkyard.

  But if the mill was doing so badly, where had Mikey’s fancy car come from? He had no income that she knew of, save the mill. He’d never put himself out in school. His father’s money had pushed him through college, but he’d come back home right after, never worked anywhere but on the top floor of the mill, in the management offices.

  An issue she wanted to discuss with Ryder, but Lord knew where Ryder had gone off to. And this was prime opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted. Mikey was out. His office would be empty. If he made his money from something other than the mill…say dabbling in human trafficking…

  Anger flooded her at the thought and pushed her from the car. She left the camera inside—the telephoto lens would have made her too conspicuous—and flipped the lock before she closed the door behind her.

  Ryder was probably going to be mad at her. She paused. Then shrugged as she started out toward the mill. She wanted to see Mikey’s office without Mikey in it, and this was her chance.

  She hurried toward the front door, tucking her neck in, trying not to limp, trying to look like one of the secretaries, the few women who worked here.

  Sneak in, find proof of wrongdoing, sneak back out before Ryder figured out that she was missing. Piece of cake.

  Chapter Eight

  The workers used the back entry. Since she needed to get to the offices, Grace went in through the front.

  Daisy Webster sat in her chair for once, instead of chasing after another man on the factory floor. She looked up from her web surfing just in time to notice Grace. She wore some fancy fashion top with an asymmetric neck that plunged way too low. Rumor had it her fashion addiction usually took more than one man to support.

  “Hey, there, Gracie.” The greeting rang out in a cool tone. Daisy had endlessly chased after Tommy back in the day. Tommy had never paid her any attention, which earned a good deal of resentment from Daisy after a while, and that resentment had spread to include Grace. “Who are you looking for?”

  She would have preferred sneaking up the staircase without anyone noticing her, but there was no way to do that.

  “Bobbi Marzec.” She said the first name that popped into her head, loudly—even out here, you could hear the machines. Bobbi kept the office computers in shape and he’d been one of Tommy’s friends.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “He wants to buy Tommy’s dirt bike.” She stuck with the truth while going around the question.

  Daisy shrugged then went back to her computer, probably scanning online deals on fashion and fashion accessories. Grace headed up the stairs, hurrying.

  The mill offices sprawled on the top floor of the flat, three-story building. She passed several people on her way up, but didn’t know any of them. There’d obviously been some turnover since old man Mitzner had died. Mikey probably brought his own cronies on board, people who gave him their undivided loyalty and admiration, agreeing with all his ideas wholeheartedly.

  His father had a couple of tough old bird managers. Mikey wouldn’t like that, she thought, and her suspicions were confirmed as she walked by a row of offices, all with new faces behind the desk. The average managerial age had dropped at least twenty years since she’d last been here.

  Bobbi’s office was in the left wing of the top floor. She’d have to go there, too, at one point. In case Daisy asked him how the dirt bike deal went. But first she wanted to check out Mikey’s office; she had no idea how long he’d be gone.

  She went straight to the back. Nobody paid her much attention. Then her luck ran out. The door wouldn’t budge when she twisted the knob. If this was a movie, she’d pull some pins from her hair and would be inside under a minute, she thought. But her short hair didn’t need pins, and she wasn’t exactly comfortable with breaking and entering.

  She looked through the glass, but didn’t see anything suspicious inside: shelves, stacks of paper, a laptop in the center of the desk. No big sign on the wall that said, I Smuggle Drugs, or, I Support Illegal Immigration.

  Maybe she should wait until Mikey came back. She could then get into his office with some trumped-up excuse, look around surreptitiously while distracting him with some chatter. Although, what they could chat about escaped her. Neither she, nor Tommy had ever been friends with him.

  Dylan, she remembered suddenly. Dylan and Mikey had been on the high school football team together. Dylan because he’d had talent; Mikey because his father had bought the uniforms and most of the training equipment for the school.

  Maybe she could ask Dylan if the guys from the team still hung out at Mimi’s Bar and Grill. She could join them and get a feel for what kind of a man Mikey was these days. Dylan would be happy to take her along and reintroduce her to the old gang. Except she didn’t want to deceive Dylan about yet another thing. She was

  already keeping secrets from him—and owed him a big apology when this was over.

  She thought about shoving her shoulder against the door and simply pushing it in. But she had no idea how much noise that would make. Would the people sitting in the other offices hear her?

  She was no longer at war. The laws of war no longer applied. So she decided to stop at breaking and entering. She rattled the knob one more time, cast one last forlorn look at the locked office, then walked away. She hoped Ryder gained more useful information than she did. She walked past a young cleaning woman who was emptying the garbage cans. The woman scurried out of her way.

  She was Hispanic. So were a lot of other people in Hullett. She wore a turtleneck shirt, which was kind of strange. Not many people in South Texas wore turtlenecks, not in over one-hundred-degree weather. Then she realized why this one did, as she caught a glimpse of what looked like burn scars visible from the top.

  But it wasn’t the scar that piqued Grace’s interest. What made her take a second look was the woman’s skittish, beaten dog body language.

  Her eyes wouldn’t meet Grace’s. So she watched the woman for a few minutes as she moved from desk to desk, neck pulled in, eyes nervously darting around without making any eye contact with anyone.

  She’d seen women like that before, both in the States and during her overseas tours of duty—women who lived under threat of violence, who went to great lengths to become invisible. And this one seemed to be especially good at it. The few people in the offices and cubicles paid scant attention to her.

>   She was watchful, aware of her environment to the extreme, so only a few minutes passed before she caught Grace watching her. She startled, tucked her neck in and hurried toward the staircase with a worried look on her face, her cart rattling as she pushed it with increasing speed.

  Instinct drew Grace after her.

  The woman abandoned her cart on the landing at the top of the staircase and ran down. Probably illegal, Grace thought, taking her for INS. With the brace on her foot, she could never catch up with the woman, so Grace resorted to her best military voice. “Stop right there!”

  The woman froze and shrank. Turned slowly, and waited with her arms wrapped around her slight body while Grace hobbled over.

  “Why are you running from me?”

  Despair washed over her face. “No prison, por favor.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I just want to go home. No prison, señora. Por favor.”

  “I’m not with the police.” She stepped back to give her some space. “I’m not here for you. I just want to ask questions.”

  The woman rubbed her tears away with the back of her hand, and looked at her with mistrust. “All good girls. Everybody wants to go home. No prison,” she said in pretty good, if halting, English.

  Somebody had obviously threatened her with prison and had succeeded well with the intimidation. Being locked up seemed to be the only thing the woman could think of.

  Everybody, she had said.

  “No prison.” Grace drew a deep breath as a tractor trailer pulling up to the loading docks outside caught her attention for a second. “I’m here to help. Where are the others?”

  The woman inched back. She glanced at the brace on Grace’s foot. She knew that she could outrun Grace, but the fear still held her in place.

  “No prison,” Grace repeated. She reached into her pocket for her phone. Then she changed her mind and left it where it was. A call might scare off the woman altogether. She might think that Grace was calling in the reinforcements. Better see first if there really was something to call Ryder about. “I want to help you.”

  The woman hesitated another moment, then seemed to have come to some sort of decision. She hurried back up to her cart and grabbed a two-liter soda bottle filled with water then came back to Grace. She glanced around, nearly vibrating with nervous energy, then hurried down the next flight of stairs, but holding back enough so Grace could follow her.

  She ducked through a door with a sign that warned Employees Only, hurried along a dark and narrow hallway without windows, then into another staircase that went down and down. Then when they ran out of stairs, she pushed through the last door into some sort of a basement.

  Low ceilings, cobwebs, old fallen beams, rats scurrying along the walls. A single lightbulb hung from a wire in the middle of the ceiling, illuminating a twenty-foot-wide circle while leaving the rest of the creepy place shrouded in darkness.

  A sense of unease swept through Grace, a premonition that they weren’t alone. The short hairs at the back of her neck rose suddenly.

  The woman stepped forward, into the circle of light. Held back by instinct, Grace remained in the shadows.

  “Qué pasa?” came the challenge from a dark corner, the man’s voice cold and hard.

  The woman answered in Spanish, and Grace understood enough to know that she’d said something about bringing water. The man yelled at her for not bringing beer.

  He pulled a cord and turned on another light that illuminated him at last. He stood with his feet apart in front of a ratty old recliner that had stuffing hanging out the back. His clothes rumpled, he rubbed his eyes and stretched. He must have been sleeping in the dark. His short, dark hair stuck up in every direction, his forehead low and decorated with an angry scar.

  The woman tried to skirt around him as she got closer, but he grabbed her and fondled her roughly as he took the bottle from her. He let loose a cruel laugh as she tried to get away, his lips curling into a sneer.

  Grace’s hands fisted at her side. She noted the distance between them, the fact that the man had a gun tucked into his belt. She moved forward, then stopped as the idiot let his prey go at last.

  It seemed he wasn’t serious about doing harm to the woman, at least not this time. He lifted the bottle to his lips to drink. The woman scurried back to the stairs and ran up. Grace could hear as the door closed behind her at the top.

  Okay. Now what?

  She was about to follow, not fully understanding why she’d been brought here, when the man lowered the bottle and took a few steps toward the back wall, to a wooden door she hadn’t seen before. He unlocked the door and tossed the bottle of water inside.

  She caught a glimpse of what looked like a prison cell, an impression of blinking faces, red eyes, stringy unwashed hair, thin bodies covered in rags. The closest thing she could liken it to was a painting she’d seen on a school field trip a million years ago, about the hold of a slave ship.

  He slammed the door shut with a bang and turned the key. Then he sat back into his recliner and pulled out a tattered copy of a magazine and began to flip through it. She couldn’t make out any of the writing from where she stood, but could see that the pages contained mostly nudity. Which didn’t bode well for the women locked up inside. And explained why they would draw back when the door opened, instead of rushing forward.

  Grace drew a slow breath and assessed the situation, careful to remain in the deep shadows as she skirted the lit areas, picking her steps carefully in the dark. She needed to get out of here and call Ryder. He had to get his team over here.

  She made it over to the dark stairs, crept up without making any noise, her heart beating in her ear, sweat beading on her brow. An eternity seemed to pass before she made it to the top. Her hand was on the door handle when it was yanked open from the outside. Another scruffy man stood in front of her, his eyes narrowing.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked and without waiting for an answer, kicked her down the stairs.

  * * *

  SHE WASN’T IN THE CAR.

  Maybe she went for a walk to stretch her legs. Or could be she got tired of waiting for him and caught a ride with a friend, Ryder thought, but his instincts said otherwise. He was pretty sure she would have at least given him a call to let him know not to wait for her.

  The most likely explanation, and also his least favorite, was that she’d gotten tired of waiting and had come after him. But why didn’t she call? Maybe she was in a situation where she couldn’t. He didn’t like the thought.

  He leaned against the SUV and looked toward the building. The heat was stifling, the air dry. He wanted a cold drink, but that would have to wait.

  To call her or not was the question. If she was snooping around somewhere in there, the phone’s ringing could call attention to her. Then again, she was a smart one. Smart enough to turn her phone off if the situation called for it.

  Her number was in his address book, so he selected it and pushed the green button. The call did ring out. But instead of Grace, a man’s surly voice spoke on the other end, with a heavy accent. “Who the hell is this?”

  Ryder slammed the phone closed and ran toward the building.

  * * *

  TWO AGAINST ONE. They were stronger and unbruised, while her recent injuries still ached all over. Grace fought for her life, holding nothing back. She ducked. Punched. Punched again. Kicked.

  “Stop!”

  They ignored her, of course. But she made another play for time, anyway. “I’m just looking for a friend. I just want to talk.”

  But they didn’t seem in a talkative mood.

  Her top-notch military training came in handy, especially since the other two were street fighters, fighting mean and dirty. They came at her at the same time, giving her no respite. Still, she could have probably handled them if the brace didn’t throw her off balance.

  One tripped her at the end, and she crashed to the hard ground. The next second they were both on top of her.

  Pain sli
ced through her ribs, bringing back memories from the battlefield. She couldn’t allow herself to be captured again. She fought like a cornered animal, blind now with fear as the past and the present overlapped in her mind. I’m home. This is different.

  But terror overrode her brain.

  Her attackers took full advantage.

  Boots connected with her side, her chest, knocking the air out of her.

  “Who are you? Why are you here?” This guy, the newcomer, didn’t have an accent. He sounded like a local boy, but she didn’t recognize him.

  She pressed her lips together and waited curled in a ball until they were done with her. She wasn’t going to fight her way out of this basement, not when either of them could pull a gun at any time and shoot her in the head. The key was to stay alive long enough for Ryder to find her.

  He’d called. At least, she hoped it’d been him on the phone a minute ago. Then he would know she was in trouble.

  Rough hands grabbed her, picked her up. One of the men opened the door on the back wall, the other one tossed her into the holding cell where she lay at last, exhausted and defeated, in a heap.

  For a long minute, she could hear nothing but her own labored breathing. Then someone held a water bottle to her lips. She couldn’t see anything in the dark, but she’d caught a long-enough glimpse before to know who she shared the cell with.

  Someone whispered a few words to her in rushed Spanish.

  “No habla Español. Lo siento,” she whispered back.

  Small hands tugged her farther from the door. Voices conversed in hurried whispers, so low they were barely a breath.

  “Who are you?” she asked the darkness. “How many people are there here?”

  A few whispered names. One who spoke English said, “Seven.”

  She sat up gingerly, gritting her teeth against the pain. “Why?”

  Silence followed, then, “We were sold to a man here.”

  Okay, she knew stuff like that happened. But coming face-to-face with it, in her hometown, made her stomach constrict into a cold ball. Maybe something like this had happened to Paco.