Tres Leches Cupcakes

by Josi S. Kilpack

  At one point she heard movement just beyond her rocks; she sat very still and breathed as quietly as she could. The person, or animal for all she knew, moved away. She pulled her arms inside her shirt and hugged her knees to her chest as best she could, holding her body tightly as she began to shiver. How cold would it get tonight? If they were still looking for her come morning, they’d surely discover her hiding place. What were her options? Was there no hope?

  There was always hope.

  She tried very hard to believe it. She had to believe it.

  “I don’t see any sign of her.”

  Sadie froze, and the name Horace came to mind. Was that his name? He wasn’t far away. She pulled her legs even closer to her body.

  A voice answered him, but she couldn’t make out the words.

  “Even with flashlights we’d have a hard time tracking her. Have you looked at this place?” He was close, less than ten yards away, she guessed. Would the moonlight reflect off her clothing? Off the silver-gray streaks in her hair?

  Another answer she couldn’t hear.

  “Wait,” Horace said. “There’s . . . there’s a cliff at the bottom of this hill and . . .” She heard his footsteps; was he coming closer? “There’s at least a thirty-foot drop. No way she survived that fall.”

  “You sure she came this way?” She could barely hear the Cowboy’s words. He must be at the top of the hill. Did it really end in a cliff instead of the arroyo she thought she’d seen? Had she so narrowly escaped death twice in one night?

  “I heard the scream and the fall, then nothing,” Horace said. “We’ll come back for her in the morning—assuming the coyotes haven’t finished her off by then.” She heard him turn away but didn’t dare believe it.

  “We ain’t leavin’ till we know she’s dead.”

  “She’s dead,” Horace said, sounding angry. “They’re all dead, just the way you like ’em.”

  “You watch your mouth!”

  “Or what? You’ll kill me too? We’ve put up with an awful lot we never counted on, but there’s no way you could talk yourself out of that one.

  “No one’s going to find her body before morning,” Horace continued. “And Padre says he needs us at the Fiesta. He wants us to . . .”

  The voices drifted away. Sadie was so tense, she felt sure her muscles were turning to the same stone currently embracing her. She strained to hear an indication of . . . anything.

  Finally she began to relax. But each ache and pain her anxiety had masked while on high-alert came back, and she groaned under her breath and tried to shift her position. Those men had brought her all the way out here, she’d seen their faces, they’d admitted to killing Margo and Langley. Why would they so quickly believe she was dead without any proof? It might be a trick.

  She pulled her arms and legs in even tighter, though they protested, and she whimpered. She needed to conserve as much body heat as possible. She didn’t dare come out and risk being discovered. She wasn’t sure she could muster up the adrenaline she’d need for another run should they be waiting for her. She dropped her head onto her knees and focused on remaining calm and warm. It was going to be a long night, but if her discomfort meant she would live to see another day, it would be a small price to pay.

  Chapter 32

  Sadie had to stay focused and awake even though her body wanted to sink into oblivion. She was more than tired. She was mentally and emotionally exhausted and overwhelmed. Teetering on the brink of panic for so long had worn through her reserves, and she found herself crying into her knees. For Margo. For Langley even. A fair amount of self-pity mingled with the tears as well. The self-pity, however, was a reminder of the escape she’d made—both escapes. One from the men who had kidnapped her, and the other from plummeting to her death. There had to be a reason for that, right? There must be purpose to her still being alive.

  To keep from drifting off, she started whispering to herself, outlining everything she knew about anything that seemed the least bit related to Margo’s disappearance and Sadie’s eventual capture. There were so many details to track, and she wished she had a notebook she could write them down in to make sure she wasn’t missing anything.

  Once she felt she’d verbalized everything she knew, she started putting the details together. Langley was Crossbones, and obviously he had some kind of a connection to the Standages, but Shel didn’t know that, despite his own connection to Ethan. Langley didn’t seem to have known about the bodies before Shel talked about them over too many beers. She didn’t think the Cowboy and Horace were working for Ethan—otherwise why would they be so threatened by her speaking to him at the Fiesta? Why would they be so curious as to what they’d talked about?

  Margo had something Horace and the Cowboy wanted—or at least whoever hired them wanted it—but they hadn’t found it at Margo’s house. They were desperate enough to find it that they’d hunted down Sadie, thinking she had it. But she didn’t. She and Margo had only spent time together outside of work on Monday. One day. One hour, really. Why would anyone think that would create a relationship strong enough in Margo’s mind to trust Sadie with whatever it was Margo was supposedly hiding?

  Unless Margo had hidden it from Sadie too. Considering Margo’s past associations, maybe she knew the item wouldn’t be safe in her possession. The Cowboy had said Margo admitted to handing it off. But how would she have transferred this mystery item to Sadie without Sadie knowing? And what could the thing be? A computer disk full of incriminating information? Surveillance video? The item had to be of considerable value to draw so much attention.

  They hadn’t driven in Sadie’s car, and Margo had only been to Sadie’s apartment once, and she’d been right there with Sadie the whole time. Margo hadn’t had an opportunity to hide anything. And Sadie had cleaned the room top to bottom just a couple of days ago and found nothing. Maybe Margo slipped the item into Sadie’s purse, but Sadie had reorganized her purse just last night and hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary. There simply was no opportunity for Margo to have handed anything off. Except . . .

  Sadie gasped and straightened a tiny amount, enough for her back to twinge in protest at the sudden movement. When Sadie had gone into the bathroom to change before they’d left for the bar, Margo had said she needed to get her purse from the Land Cruiser—for lipstick, she’d claimed. She was back before Sadie had come out of the bathroom, but she had been alone in Sadie’s room for a short time. Enough time to have brought something in from the Land Cruiser and hidden it? Something hidden in a green shoe box, perhaps?

  She thought back to the moment when she’d pulled the green box out from under the bed. It was too light to have held shoes, and taped up to prevent being tampered with. It had been under the bed, shoved into a dark corner, barely discernible. If not for the fact that Sadie had been clearing everything from her room, if she hadn’t been leaving Caro’s for good, she’d have never given that corner under the bed any attention at all. The box could have safely stayed there until Margo devised a way to get it back.

  If Margo hadn’t paid the ultimate price for whatever role she was playing, Sadie would have been hurt at having been used. As it was, she felt nothing but sorrow and a growing sense of urgency about the discovery. That box was sitting on top of half a dozen other boxes, in plain sight, waiting to be found. Margo had died for whatever was in that box; Sadie nearly had as well. The idea of leaving her hiding place made her tremble, but she’d heard no sign of movement for at least forty-five minutes; and they’d said they were leaving.

  She waited until she’d accepted this next move as inevitable before carefully and slowly unfolding herself from the rocks. Her legs shook when she stood, and she had to hold onto the rocks and trees for those first few steps, while her muscles seemed to fall back into place. Every joint ached, every step was painful, and yet she had no choice but to move forward.

  Every few steps, she would stop and listen for anything other than the rustle of wind through the desert gr
asses. She peered toward the bottom of the hill she’d fallen down, looking for the edge of the cliff Horace had said she’d fallen off of, but just as she’d remembered, it ended in an arroyo. Even had she fallen to the bottom, she would very likely have survived. Had Horace said it was a cliff in order to deceive her into coming out of hiding? If they were set to ambush her, she’d be pathetically easy prey right now.

  She walked up the incline she’d fallen down—not nearly as steep as she’d thought—and crouched beneath a tree in order to listen and watch the area around her for any sign that the men were still there. She saw nothing, heard nothing, so she took a breath and continued forward. The half-moon didn’t cast as much light as she’d have liked, but her eyes had adjusted, and she was grateful for any light at all right now.

  She found the place where she’d made the sharp turn from the creek bed and looked both ways: the direction where the van had been, and the direction where she’d been taken. She spent a few minutes looking for the cigarette butt the Cowboy would have thrown into the brush before going after her. She found it and rolled it up in the cuff of her pants in hopes of preserving it for the police.

  Then she cautiously moved back toward the van’s parking spot and could finally breathe again when she saw that the van was no longer there. She continued to be hyper-vigilant of her surroundings, however. If Horace wasn’t trying to lure her out, why had he said there was a cliff? She thought over a few other things Horace had done that seemed out of character: he’d removed the ropes from her hands, and perhaps the fact that he hadn’t caught up with her even though he’d been less than a dozen feet behind her when she had fled indicated that he was an unwilling participant in the events of the night. It was paltry evidence to lead her to a positive evaluation of him—she remembered his aggressive treatment of her once she was in the van—but there was enough for her to question his dedication to the cause that the Cowboy seemed fully committed to. When she’d been hiding, he’d commented that things hadn’t gone as he had wanted them to go, that too many people had been killed. He’d blamed the Cowboy for that. Could Horace have let Sadie get away? The possibility didn’t give her many warm fuzzies since he’d still left her alone in the desert.

  Sadie followed the dirt road in the direction they’d come from, her heart thumping in her chest as she relived what had happened. She scanned the desert around her while rubbing her arms to stay warm. It was so cold.

  Would they come back to find her sooner than first light? How would Horace explain the lack of the cliff and therefore the lack of her body at the bottom of it? The dirt road joined a paved road, and the scraggly trees she’d used as a kind of cover became scarce, which would make her even more vulnerable, but what choice did she have? She had to get to that green box before anyone else did. The Cowboy had said she was hard to find, which meant they might not know where she’d lived in Santa Fe—after all, they hadn’t found her until the Fiesta.

  Everything hurt, but her head was especially painful, throbbing with every step. The blood had dried, but she was certainly not a pretty sight. She approached the two-lane road ahead, which she assumed led to the interstate. The sound of a diesel engine caused her to spin around and stare down the road several seconds before a single headlight came into view, lumbering in her direction.

  As she watched it approach, her heart rate increased, and she looked around before hurrying to an empty ditch and ducking behind the berm to hide herself completely. It might be the men coming back for her. But the van hadn’t been diesel, and she had seen two operating headlights on the van, one a little brighter than the other one.

  Instead of the engine passing her by and fading into the distance, it seemed to be slowing down. She pulled herself further into the ditch, controlling her breathing and willing whoever it was to pass her by. They couldn’t have seen her, could they?

  She heard a door squeak open then shut. She clenched her eyes closed. Why would they stop here? Oh gosh, was she about to be shot in the head?

  The sound of heavy footsteps approaching caused her to put a hand over her mouth to keep from whimpering. Then they stopped, directly above her. She stayed perfectly still, trying to convince herself that it was a coincidence.

  “Hey.”

  She stayed where she was. Maybe there was someone else he was talking to, right?

  “Hey,” he said louder.

  She swallowed and opened her eyes, tilting her head back as her eyes traveled up the large body of a man peering down at her. The single headlight lit him up from the back, making him appear that much more ominous. “You drunk, lady?”

  Sadie shook her head, but couldn’t find her voice.

  “You sick?”

  “No,” she managed to say, though her voice shook.

  “What you doing out here?”

  “I, uh, need to get to Santa Fe,” she said, slowly coming to her feet. She still had to look up at him, but at least he was right side up this time. He was Native American, with a large face and long, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “That’s why you’re in the ditch? ’Cause you need to get to Sandifay?”

  She looked past him to the truck. “Can you give me a ride to Santa Fe?”

  “You are trouble,” he said, narrowing his eyes at her. She scrambled out of the ditch, though she feared her stiff movements made her look like a zombie. He took a step back when she joined him at the side of the road.

  “I’m in trouble,” Sadie clarified. “And I have to get to Santa Fe. I can pay you when we get there—anything you want.” Even though Caro was angry and hurt, she would loan Sadie the money after Sadie explained how her purse was still in the kidnapper’s van. “Please, sir.” She stopped fighting her emotion and let it shade her voice, though the burden of feeling her own fear made her knees weak. “My life, and the lives of others, depends on this. Please.”

  She hadn’t realized she’d clasped her hands together, though the pleading was completely sincere. She stared at him, and held her breath.

  “What happen to your head?”

  Sadie raised her hand to the dried blood. “I fell,” she said. “I can get it taken care of when I get to Santa Fe. I’ll pay you whatever you want. Please.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her, then nodded. “Fifty dollars to take you to Sandifay.”

  “Yes, yes,” Sadie said, nodding quickly enough that it made her a little dizzy. “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars. Absolutely.”

  “And you ride with the boxes.”

  Sadie eyed the back of the truck that was filled with cardboard boxes of various sizes and containing who-knew-what cargo. “A hundred and fifty if I can ride in the cab.”

  He frowned, but she held his gaze. She understood why he didn’t want her in the cab with him—he’d found her in a ditch in the middle of the night after all—but she didn’t want to ride in the back of a pickup truck.

  “Two hundred.”

  “Deal.”

  Chapter 33

  Her driver took back roads to Santa Fe, which she didn’t think was even possible. What would have been about twenty minutes—she’d realized that she was about halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe—ended up being over an hour. Neither of them seemed to be in the mood to talk, so Sadie looked out the window, and he hummed along to the country music playing on the radio, though he rarely got the tune right. She clenched her jaw to keep her teeth from hitting together when they hit a bump or pothole in the road—the truck definitely needed new shocks.

  It was nearly midnight when they pulled up at the curb in front of Rex and Caro’s house. The garage doors were closed, and the lights were out. She hated waking them but she’d promised to pay this stern man who had saved her with his truck. She headed up the walk and tried to straighten her clothes.

  She automatically reached for the door handle to let herself in, then remembered she didn’t live here anymore and had put her key on the counter when she’d left Thursday afternoon. Instead, she rang the bell an
d waited while finger-combing her hair that she felt sure looked like it belonged on a Troll doll. After a few seconds, she heard someone approaching and exhaled slowly. Moments before the porch light flipped on and the door opened, she realized the footsteps belonged to Rex. Great.

  He was wearing a white T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms. He spoke before she had a chance to say a single word.

  “What happened to you?” He was staring at her head.

  She touched the dried blood. “It looks worse than it is,” she said, which was a lie. It hurt like crazy. “I know you’d rather I wasn’t here, but I’ve got a situation and I really need to talk to Caro.” She looked past him toward the hallway that led to her former apartment where the box was waiting. Surely Caro would have followed him out of the room.

  His expression changed from confusion to . . . apprehension. “She said she was with you.”

  Sadie startled as her eyes snapped back to meet his. “What?”

  “She said she was staying with you at your hotel in Albuquerque so she didn’t have to drive back to the Fiesta in the morning. She’s not with you? What’s going on?”

  The truck behind her honked, reminding her of her chauffeur. She held up one finger toward him, then turned back to Rex. “I need two hundred dollars,” she blurted out. She pointed a thumb over her shoulder. “He gave me a ride, and I told him I’d pay him. I was going to ask Caro, but—”

  “Where is my wife?” Rex asked, sounding angry.

  “I don’t know,” she shouted at him. “But I will do everything I can to find out once I pay this guy for the ride. Do you have two hundred dollars?” She knew he did. They had a safe in their room where they kept some emergency cash.

  “I don’t care about your ride,” Rex growled. “Where’s my wife?”