Something told him the priest had been telling him the truth, which made him so furious he kicked open the door hard enough to slam against the wall.
So much for not waking the rest of the rectory. He ran down the steps and jumped into the waiting car, gesturing for Hector to step on the gas.
A bone white church van. Easy enough to spot. He pulled out his cell phone and began making calls.
* * *
“He says he can’t fly you anywhere near the U.S. border. Too many American surveillance jets.”
“I heard him, Father.” Jake stared at the skinny, greasy-haired young man who drew on his cigarette and stared back at him with cool arrogance.
Jake couldn’t believe it. He’d spent most of his military career fighting against drug trafficking, and now his and Clare’s lives depended on the assistance of this teenaged drug lord wannabe whose plane probably ferried tons of cocaine a year all over Mexico.
Suddenly the schoolhouse’s small office where they were all seated felt even more cramped to Jake, his tension rising to a dangerous point. “Okay, Cesar, where are you willing to take us?”
The pilot didn’t seem surprised that Jake had taken over the discussion from Father Gregorio. “Tampico, on the coast. I have business there.”
“I’ll bet you do.” Jake had muttered under his breath in English but Father Gregorio shot him an anxious look.
The priest had explained when they arrived at the orphanage compound that Cesar had left there at sixteen and proved himself amazingly resourceful in making his way in the world. He owned the plane. He lived in a house three times the size of any others in the nearby village, and he gave generous donations to the priests who Cesar insisted had saved his life when he’d been abandoned as a baby.
Jake knew Father Gregorio counted now on that allegiance. He watched silently as the priest pressed his hands together in supplication. “You were good to come so quickly when I called your house, Cesar. I woke you, I know. Tampico will be fine, anywhere as long as it’s far from this place but they must leave as soon as possible—”
“The gringo has money?”
Jake stiffened, Cesar’s question a pointed demand. He had cash but he and Clare still had a long way to go. He hadn’t risked using credit in Mexico for fear of being tracked. “I’ll give you two hundred bucks once we take off, then another two when we get there—”
Cesar’s burst of laughter had silenced Jake and echoed around the office. “You’re joking, Gringo, right?”
No answer came from Jake and Cesar quickly sobered. He leaned forward in his chair and jabbed the two fingers that held the smoldering cigarette in Jake’s direction.
“I’m no fool, Gringo. You must be in some big trouble not to take a flight out of Monterrey. Five thousand American dollars—”
“Jake, wait!“
Father Gregorio’s cautioning voice broke through the livid haze blinding Jake that had made him rise from his chair. His hands clenched into fists, he glanced from the priest back to Cesar who didn’t look quite so self-assured anymore, and then back to Father Gregorio who rose and stood between them.
“Cesar, I told you on the phone that this man is my friend. To help him is to help me. Don’t you remember him coming to the orphanage years ago? He played soccer with you and the other boys, gave you candy, brought us books for our school. He was husband to my beloved sister Isabella—”
“Isabella?”
“Yes, and you know she loved you like a younger brother—just as she loved all the children here. This man helps children at his home in her memory, Cesar. Honor her memory, too, and accept the money he’s offered you.“
“One thousand, then. In honor of your kind sister and the gringo who is your friend.”
Father Gregorio sighed and lifted up his hands as he turned to Jake, but Jake had already nodded his agreement at Cesar. A distant memory had struck him, and would have made him smile at any other time if the situation wasn’t so grim.
Cesar had been the scrappy, thin-legged boy making bets on the outcome of the soccer game, not for money then but pieces of cellophane-wrapped candy. He’d come a long way in not so many years. Sugar to cocaine.
“Where’s your plane?” he asked Cesar.
“Not far.” Cesar got up from his chair and moved to the door. “I’ll take you to the airstrip now.“
“Two minutes.” Jake followed Cesar out of the office as the telephone on the desk rang and Father Gregorio turned back into the room to answer it.
“I’ll meet you outside by Cesar’s jeep,” the priest called over his shoulder, but Jake was already heading down the hall to the bathroom where he’d left Clare just before Cesar arrived.
Jake had told her to see to her needs and wash her face, then he’d come back for her and they would find something to eat in the orphanage’s kitchen. There was no time now to look for food. He knocked on the door and wasn’t surprised when he didn’t get an answer.
Clare’s silent treatment had continued the remainder of the journey to the orphanage, and it had taken Father Gregorio to coax her out of the van. She’d refused to look Jake in the eye, making him feel as if she were pretending he wasn’t there.
Either that or the shock of what she’d witnessed was deeper than Jake had thought—but he didn’t have time to deal with that now. He turned the knob but the door didn’t budge. She must have locked it.
“Clare, open the—”
“Leave me alone.”
Jake leaned his forehead against the doorjamb. The hollow, emotionless tone of her voice cut him to the quick. She hadn’t even sounded like the Clare he’d come to know.
He hated himself even more to have helped bring her to such a state, his sense of failure once again raising its ugly head. “Clare, look, we have to get to the plane. Open the door…please.”
“Go away and leave me.”
She’d uttered the words in so soft a voice Jake had barely heard her. With one hand still on the knob, he splayed out the fingers of his right hand on the wooden door and pressed against it, testing how much force he might need to shove it open. Damn, breaking the door down on her wasn’t how he wanted it to be—
“Jake, God help us, you must go now! You must go!”
Father Gregorio had come flying out of the office and hurried toward him, the priest’s face as white as death. A few feet from Jake he stumbled but Jake caught him by the arm just before he fell.
“Gregorio, what—?”
“It’s Father Crispus. He was attacked in the rectory—an American, he said, looking for you and Miss Carson. They found him a short time ago collapsed on the floor. He didn’t tell the man where you’d gone to protect you. The American said he’d return and kill him if he said a word to anyone but Father Crispus insisted before he was taken to the hospital that we be warned.”
“Father Crispus was attacked?”
Jake spun around. Clare stared at them from the bathroom doorway with a face as pale as Father Gregorio’s. Jake wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms and assure her that everything would be all right but he wasn’t even convinced of it himself.
“Had to be Reed,” he said, glancing back at Father Gregorio. “He must have remembered I got married at Iglesia San Jose—remembered you, too, at least enough to follow up on a hunch. That means he might remember me talking to him a couple of times about the orphanage, and God knows what Pablo told him—shit, Gregorio, how could I have been so stupid? I might have led him right to you.“
“You came to me for help. Nothing could have pleased me more. But there’s no time—”
“No time is right.” Jake took Clare by one arm and Father Gregorio the other, and together they moved with her toward the exit. When they got outside, Jake was relieved that Cesar waited for them in his camouflaged jeep.
“Get in, Clare.“
“What about Father Gregorio?” she cried out, accepting Jake’s assistance to his surprise as he lifted her into the back seat. “You s
aid you told Mike about the orphanage. He’ll know we came here.”
Her voice was shrill, beyond panic, but there was no time to try to calm her. Jake turned back to Father Gregorio but the priest shook his head, his expression resolute.
“Do not fear for me. Reed won’t find me, I promise you.” He pulled Jake away from the jeep and lowered his voice. “Tampico isn’t north but it will work. Stay away from airports. Cesar is skilled enough to land anywhere. Make your way to the harbor and buy passage aboard a cargo ship for Matamoros. Once you’re there, go to the cathedral and ask for Father Sebastian Benevides, a trusted friend. He’ll do whatever he can to help you cross the Texas border into Brownsville. If I discover any news about Miss Carson’s son, I’ll leave word with him.”
Jake clasped the priest’s hand but there was no time to spare on a good-bye. Together they moved back to the jeep and Father Gregorio stepped over to the driver’s side door. “Cesar, I entrust their lives to you on this journey. Don’t fail me. There would be hell to pay.”
The pilot looked startled and appeared pale as Jake climbed into the jeep beside Clare and Father Gregorio waved them on their way. Why not strike fear of divine retribution into the Cesar’s heart? If it kept him from pulling any tricks, so much the better.
Jake glanced over his shoulder as the jeep sped away from the orphanage down a rutted dirt road but Father Gregorio had disappeared back into the schoolhouse. Clare stared over her shoulder, too.
“He’ll be all right,” he said to reassure her.
Clare met his eyes but he couldn’t read hers in the dark, the only light cast from the dashboard and the bouncing headlights.
“How can you be sure?”
Her words were so soft-spoken, she might have whispered them, but they held all the uncertainty and concern for Father Gregorio’s safety that Jake felt himself.
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure and he couldn’t bear thinking about it. Instead he grabbed Cesar by the shoulder. “Is there another way to the airstrip than down this road?”
Cesar had jerked in surprise, his eyes wide and apprehensive as he met Jake’s in the rearview mirror. “Yes, up ahead I can turn right. It’s a few miles farther—”
“Do it.” Jake pulled out his Glock and rested it on the back of Cesar’s bucket seat, hoping the sight of the pistol would make the young man drive faster.
If Mike was following another hunch, he might not be far behind them and the last thing Jake wanted was to meet him or any of his armed lackeys on this road. He turned to Clare to tell her to hang on but she already gripped the armrest, her body pressed against the door and her face turned away in a familiar posture that told him once again she didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
What the hell.
He turned back to the road as Cesar made a sharp right turn. Jake couldn’t deny no matter he’d just tried to shrug it off that whatever was eating her, ate at him, and more than he wanted to be thinking about right now.
“How long to the airstrip?” he shouted at Cesar above the roar of the jeep engine, not surprised that he sounded so pissed off.
“Ten minutes—”
“Make it five and you’ve got yourself another grand.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“They all say the same thing—no one has seen the priest. No one even knew he was here. They were all fast asleep—”
“Round up the kids. Maybe that will help to jog someone’s memory.” Mike saw surprise in the soldier’s eyes, but the man nodded and ran back to the orphanage dormitory. Mike turned his attention to the dusty black van parked a short distance from the schoolhouse.
“Bone white, my ass,” he muttered as children’s screams erupted, the two dozen troops who’d met up with him in half ton trucks a few miles south of the orphanage carrying out his order. That son of a bitch Father Crispus had lied to him—not only about the van’s color but probably about Father Gregorio’s destination as well.
Jake had told him long ago about this orphanage north of Monterrey, but Mike had blown it off. The Church and all of its trappings and bleeding heart causes had never been his thing. Now he wished for the hundredth time he’d paid more attention. He had no doubt that Jake and Clare Carson had been here—damn it to hell, he might have missed them by only seconds—but where were they now?
Mike turned slowly around in a circle, his guns aimed into the pitch darkness beyond the compound’s lights.
Maybe they had heard vehicles approaching and they’d taken refuge in the fields. Maybe they had thought he wouldn’t figure out their destination so quickly or figured it out at all. He could kick himself that precious time had been wasted while he’d been busy calling his contacts, but the process of elimination in his mind had convinced him after he’d left Iglesia San Jose that Father Gregorio had headed north to this place.
A phone call he’d received only moments before storming the orphanage had confirmed his intuition. The bodies of three slain police officers had been found along a less traveled road Father Gregorio must have taken. That roadblock had failed, but Mike had no intention of failing now.
The twenty million felt so close he could taste it. He glanced at the frightened children spilling out of the dormitory while several teachers and priests were forced to their knees at gunpoint some distance away.
He’d never heard so much crying and screaming. The painful headache he’d suffered earlier had ebbed until now, but a young girl’s high-pitched wail in particular made him wince.
Okay, he’d start with her. A gun pointed to a kid’s head had worked wonders in the past in getting information out of people. That van had been parked just outside the schoolhouse, the office light on, the smell of cigarette smoke still lingering in the air, even the old dial-up phone off the hook and lying on the desk, so someone here had been awake and knew what the hell was going on—
“Fuck, no, don’t tell me…” Mike heard the distinctive rumble of an airplane engine before he saw the flashing wing lights above him at an altitude of two hundred feet and climbing. The kids must have heard it, too. The night had grown as still as a tomb or maybe it was the blood thundering in his ears that had drowned everything out.
Somebody tell him he was seeing things.
Mike stared into the starry blackness after the plane had disappeared and the sound of the engine had faded…not wanting to believe it though his intuition was howling that his twenty million dollars had just flown right over his head.
* * *
Clare had never seen such a beautiful sunrise.
That thought registered briefly like a brilliant shaft of light piercing the despair overwhelming her, suffocating her. She blinked and went back to staring out the porthole, no more notice given to the fiery pinks and oranges than if she’d been blind.
They had left Tampico on a cargo ship. She would never see Tyler again. She and Jake had turned tail and run with the certain likelihood one day soon that Mike Reed or Eduardo Ruiz would hunt her down, jam a gun to her head and pull the trigger—
“Clare, did you hear me?”
She froze. She didn’t trust herself to turn around to face Jake or to utter one word to him.
No, she hadn’t heard him enter the small cabin or anything he might have said to her. She stared at Tampico’s receding skyline and hugged her arms tightly to her chest in an attempt to hold back all the pain and venom threatening to explode.
“I said you should try to get some sleep. The captain says it’ll take a full day to get to Matamoros, maybe longer since the ship’s loaded to the gills with coffee beans.”
Coffee beans. She was dying inside and he was talking about coffee beans.
“I’ll go scrounge us up some food and then you can lie down for a while.”
“I’m not hungry.” To Clare’s relief, he exhaled as if in resignation, the door creaking as he closed it.
“I’ll be right across the way if you need me—if you need anything, okay?”
She gave him
the barest nod and he was gone, finally. She sighed but it did nothing to ease the crushing weight of the past few days’ futility. Outside the dark blue expanse of the Gulf of Mexico stretched to the coastline, Tampico now gone from view.
Where were the tears? She would have thought the torture of feeling as if her heart was being ripped from her chest would have made her hysterical, but her eyes were bone dry.
She had nothing left but a sense of hopelessness so acute that she could no longer bear to look out the porthole. An insane thought gripped her of jumping overboard to attempt to swim back to shore, to find some way back to Monterrey and the slim-to-nothing chance that she might yet rescue Tyler, but the fantasy was fleeting and left her more desolate.
What life could she possibly offer her son even if she managed somehow to get him back? He would never know a peaceful moment with her. They would always be on the run, hiding, looking over their shoulders, Clare fearing for her life every minute of every day and that someone would snatch Tyler from her again…
Clare had to walk two steps to sink onto the narrow bed, more a twin than a full size mattress but it was bigger than the fold-down cot in Jake’s tiny cabin across the hall. She’d been surprised he had paid extra cash for the second cabin since his funds must be getting short, but she was relieved too. She wouldn’t be forced to spend the next twenty-four hours with him in such tight quarters.
Strange how much had transpired since they’d had left San Antonio. A lifetime had passed, too, since she and Jake had played the newly married couple, and she winced at the thought.
He’d strung her along so easily. She had bought into everything he had told her when all the while he’d only been thinking of what he hoped to gain for himself by using her. So now he knew the identity of his wife’s killer but where was Tyler?
Where was Tyler?
It was too much. Her head aching, Clare couldn’t take any longer the thoughts and emotions pressing in around her. She kicked off her boots and lay down on the bed with her back to the porthole.
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