by Julie Miller
“Isn’t that a decision Mr. Calderón should make for himself?”
Santiago was silent for a long moment. Wyatt could tell he didn’t want to lose this particular battle of wills. But finally, he nodded and stepped back. “I will pass your message to Señor Calderón and give you his answer.”
Wyatt breathed a little easier as he watched Santiago walk toward the back of the cantina and pull out a cell phone. Calling Calderón, he hoped.
He let his gaze wander around the bar, looking for Elena. But she was nowhere in sight. Had she gone to the bathroom? Outside for some fresh air?
Or had she run into trouble while he was distracted by Santiago?
He spotted the other waitress—Mariana, Elena had told him. He crossed to the table where she sat drinking a glass of wine. “You’re Carlita’s friend, aren’t you?”
Mariana looked surprised to be approached. “I know her,” she said cautiously.
“Do you know where she went?”
Mariana looked around the bar. “She was still in the back the last time I saw her. Maybe she’s in the bathroom?”
“Perhaps,” he agreed. It was the most likely answer.
But his gut crawled with alarm.
* * *
THE VOICES DRIFTING TOWARD her through the night air were hard and mean. The voices of men used to doing what they wanted when they wanted, and to hell with who got hurt. Elena had known too many men like that in her thirty years of life, mostly professionally but sometimes personally.
Had she not heard the words, “la gringita,” she might have gone back inside the cantina, back to the noise and liquor and the unmistakable odor of desperate people living desperate lives. Places like Avalina’s weren’t often frequented by happy tourists. No, these small, seedy cantinas catered to downtrodden locals and the occasional weary traveler looking for something raw and authentic to break up the monotony of his life on the road.
They were also magnets for the predators, as potent a draw as carrion to a hungry coyote. From the next words she heard from the voices drifting down the narrow alley, she knew these men were predators of the worst kind.
“El Jefe is coming here to meet someone. It’s our chance. He’ll be away, and the others’ll keep our secret if we let them in on it.” She recognized the voice, she realized. El Pavón himself, Tomás Sanchez.
Elena pressed her back flat against the exterior wall of the cantina. Despite the cold wind, the adobe was surprisingly warm, having retained some of the sun’s heat from earlier in the day.
“If Javi finds out—”
“Who will tell? The girl? She’s already lied to try to get away. We’ll be careful. Leave no marks. She’s no virgin at her age, anyway. The gringas never are. She might even like it.”
Elena covered her mouth, feeling sick. They were talking about Brittany Means. She knew it, gut deep.
“He is already on his way here. If we go now, we can get what we want and be gone again before he returns.”
“And if José doesn’t go along?” The second man’s protests were halfhearted. Elena could tell he would do what Sanchez suggested. He was just looking for assurances that he wouldn’t get caught.
“He will disappear,” Sanchez said flatly. “Let’s go now, while we can.”
Elena slipped silently down the alley and searched the street on the other side of the building for the two men she’d overheard.
There. They were heading for a large truck with a canvas covering over the truck bed. Old Mexican army surplus, she guessed from the desert-camouflage pattern of the paint job. She edged closer to the truck, keeping out of the line of sight. Once Sanchez and the other man climbed into the cab of the truck, she made a snap decision.
Grabbing the tailgate, she stepped onto the bumper and climbed into the truck bed, staying low to keep herself hidden from view. The canvas covering blocked the view from the truck’s back window, which meant that while the men inside couldn’t see her, she couldn’t see them, either.
For however long it took the truck to reach Calderón’s compound, she had to stay quiet and stay put. She reached into her pocket and put her cell phone on vibrate, for she knew without a doubt Wyatt would be calling her the second he realized she had disappeared.
And boy, was he going to be pissed.
* * *
“SEÑOR CALDERÓN HAS AGREED to meet with you.” Raul Santiago merely stopped by Wyatt’s table, speaking with cool formality, as if he couldn’t be deigned to treat Wyatt as an equal.
Putting me in my place, Wyatt thought. “When?”
“He’s on his way now.”
Wyatt looked up at the man, surprised. “Now?”
Santiago slanted a disdainful look at him. “Is that a problem?”
“No. Of course not.”
“I will introduce you when Señor Calderón arrives. You may wish to be less...American when you meet him. He has little affection for gringo arrogance.”
What a coincidence, Wyatt thought. I have no affection for psychopaths who terrorize and murder innocent people. Whatever their race or nationality.
Santiago left the table, giving Wyatt a chance to compose his scattered thoughts. Calderón was coming here? Everyone had seemed so sure he’d never agree to the meeting, which meant one of two things. Either the head honcho of Los Jaguares was in desperate need of distribution for his goods in America, or he already suspected Wyatt was a plant and he was coming to Los Soldados to handle things personally.
Wyatt hoped it was the former, not the latter. But the light weight of the Kel Tec P32 strapped to his ankle offered a little comfort.
He was more worried about Elena. She clearly hadn’t gone to the bathroom, or she’d have been back by now.
Keeping an eye on Santiago, who was at a table with Mariana, Wyatt pulled his cell phone from his pocket and checked for any missed messages. Nothing. He dialed the number for Elena’s cell phone and got no answer.
Damn it. Where the hell was she?
* * *
THE BUZZ OF HER CELL PHONE was muted by the flap of her purse but it still sounded unnaturally loud in the empty bed of the cargo truck. Elena curled herself around the phone to muffle the noise. It was the second time her phone had vibrated in the last five minutes. It had to be Wyatt, looking for her. When the phone hummed a third time, it was two short buzzes, signaling she had a text message.
She risked a look at the screen. It was from Wyatt. Where are you?
Typing slower than she’d like, since she could barely see the keypad of her phone, she typed in a terse explanation and hit Send. Before he could respond, she added a second message. Calderón’s on his way there. Keep him occupied and I’ll get Brittany out.
She could only imagine his reaction to that message but hoped he’d see the wisdom of letting her do her part to save his sister. She wasn’t some civilian who didn’t know how to handle herself in a sticky situation, after all. She was a field agent for ICE. This wasn’t her first rodeo.
The sound of the tires on the road changed, and she dared a quick peek under the canopy. They were on a bridge crossing the Rio Grande. No checkpoint that she could see. This bridge must have been built by one of the cartels as a border crossing.
She had a GPS tracker on her phone that could give her the exact coordinates of her position. Huddling with her back to the truck cab, blocking any light the phone display might cast, she checked the program and got her coordinates. Now she knew where she had to head once she got Brittany out of that compound.
As she was about to close the phone again, she stopped and texted the coordinates to Wyatt. It wasn’t backup, exactly, but it was better than going in completely alone.
The truck began to slow, and Elena closed her phone, sliding backward into the corner of the truck bed, where some smelly old horse blankets lay in a wad. She made herself as small as possible, covering up with the blankets. The smell of horses made her need to sneeze, but she fought to keep it inside.
She heard S
anchez and the other man talking as they got out of the truck and started walking away. The tickle in her nose increased until she could barely keep her eyes open.
A little farther, she thought. Let them get just a little farther from the truck....
She couldn’t stop the sneeze. Or the next two. But she pressed her hands over her nose, doing her best to muffle the sound.
The sneezes subsided and she froze in place, listening for any sign that the men walking away from the truck had heard her. She heard only the sound of cattle lowing in the distance and, somewhere nearer, the plaintive howl of a coyote.
She let a minute pass in silence before she ventured toward the back of the truck. A peek outside reassuring her that she was alone, she climbed out of the truck bed and dropped to the hard-packed ground below.
Some sort of outbuilding sprawled about a hundred yards away. Perhaps housing stables at one time, it had weathered in the desert sun and harsh north wind until the wood siding was a pale, bleached gray. But it was not entirely abandoned. She saw lamplight shining through the window.
Two dark figures, silhouetted against an open doorway, caught her eye. Sanchez and the other man, perhaps? They seemed to be talking to another man who was blocking the doorway.
Suddenly, one of the two men outside made a quick movement and the scene lit up with a soft flare of light. Almost simultaneously, a crack of gunfire carried through the cold night air. Elena ducked behind the truck, peeking around the corner to see what had happened.
The man in the doorway crumpled to the ground.
They hadn’t been able to talk the guard into joining them, Elena thought. Once the other two men entered the building, she started running as quietly as possible toward the outbuilding.
There was enough light inside the building, and so little outside, that she dared to peek through the high-set windows to get a better look at what was going on inside. She had guessed right about the building’s former use. Definitely stables of some sort, with concrete and wood stalls to house a large number of animals at once. Might be part of the alpaca ranch. Or maybe the alpaca ranch had formerly been a horse ranch.
She edged her way down the outside wall, keeping an eye out for anyone approaching from nearby buildings or the hard-packed dirt road leading from the bridge. As she neared the end of the stable, she found what she was looking for.
Brittany Means, locked in one of the stalls. And the two men from the truck approaching her with clear intent.
It was now or never.
She reached the edge of the building and looked around the corner. There. A large set of double doors leading into the building. No padlock to impede her entry. But opening the large pair of doors would draw the attention of the men long before she could make her move.
She had to lure them outside instead.
Slipping back around the corner of the building, she reached into her purse and brought out the Smith &Wesson tucked in the built-in holster inside. Aiming for the rusty metal barrel standing about ten yards away, she squeezed off a round. The gunshot made her ears ring, but the round hit its mark, drilling a hole into the barrel.
Exclamations and curses in excited Spanish immediately followed the gunshot. Elena hurried back around the corner and set up for their reaction.
What she didn’t expect was to see them both burst from the stable, guns blazing. The one she didn’t recognize ran around the corner and skidded to a stop at the sight of her, his expression almost comical. But when he brought his gun up and took a shot at her, she had no choice but to shoot back.
His bullet fired well wide, slamming into the wall above her head. Hers hit him center mass. He fired another shot as he went down, the bullet pinging against the rusty metal overhang of the stable roof. It ricocheted into the ground fifteen yards away.
Elena set herself for Sanchez to come running. But all she heard was a loud cry of pain and then footsteps pounding away at a sprint.
She grabbed the gun from the fallen man’s hand and peered around the corner. Tomás Sanchez lay facedown on the ground, a pitchfork sticking out of his back.
About thirty yards away, she saw a slim figure racing into the desert, silhouetted by moonlight.
Brittany, she thought.
She took off after her.
Chapter Seven
When this was all over, Wyatt thought, and Brittany and Elena were both safe, he was going to have a long talk with Elena about going off on her own without backup.
Not that she’d listen. And, if he was being honest with himself, he probably would have done the same thing. He couldn’t have let the opportunity to hitch a ride to Calderón’s secret compound go by, either.
At least she’d texted him her GPS coordinates. Wyatt had mapped the location and found that she’d been somewhere just south of the Rio Grande, where the Texas scrub grass gave way to the matorrales of northern Coahuila.
“How sure are you this isn’t a trap?” Morgan, always the suspicious type, sounded skeptical as Wyatt outlined the situation over the phone. “You’ve been wondering if there are Los Jaguares spies inside ICE. What if Elena’s the spy?”
“She’s not,” Wyatt said without hesitation. Elena Vargas might be frustrating, prickly as hell and hard to get close to, but no way was she a spy for Calderón. “She’s in danger. She’s trying to find our sister and bring her home safely.”
“She should have waited for us.”
“Someone has to stay there at the ranch and protect the others.”
“Bull can do it.” Over the phone, Morgan was already on the move. Wyatt could hear his feet crunching on the river-stone walkway to the ranch-house garage. “Give me the coordinates again.”
Wyatt repeated them. “I’m not waiting for you. Just get here and wait to hear from me.”
“Don’t go there alo—”
Wyatt hung up, made sure his phone was set to vibrate and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans.
He’d never met with Calderón, despite Elena’s request. As much as he might want the drug runner dead or captured, he wanted his sister and Elena alive and safe even more. The battle with Calderón had been going on for years and it could go on a little longer, as long as he knew Brittany and Elena were okay.
He had no trouble following the path of the truck in which Elena had stowed away. It was apparently a heavy vehicle, with newer tires that left easy-to-track prints in the sandy dirt road. Wyatt came to a bridge, fashioned with concrete blocks and a few steel girders. It looked steady enough to allow for the weight of a large military-style truck like the one Elena had described in her text.
But it would never hold up to the strain of an 18-wheeler, he thought. Which explained why Calderón wanted to use J-Bar-J land for his shipping routes. He could easily bribe some border guards to look past any irregularities in his shipping manifest, but the more time he spent on U.S. roads with his contraband, the more danger he was in of discovery. Taking the private road that wound through the J-Bar-J, he could take his trucks almost all the way to I-10 without scrutiny.
Wyatt parked his father’s Mercedes on the Texas side of the bridge, put on the emergency blinkers and got out to go the rest of the way on foot. He could make a more stealthy approach that way.
Wyatt hadn’t gotten far past the bridge when he saw a small compound of buildings in the distance, seemingly slumbering in the pale moonlight. But after a couple of seconds, he spotted lights inside one of the buildings, dots of gold in the ghostly bluish-white color of the structures.
A truck sat parked about a hundred yards from the building. Wyatt headed for the vehicle as silently as possible and laid his hand on the hood.
Still warm.
He moved toward the building with lights on and peeked inside. It looked like some sort of commercial stable no longer in use, though the stalls seemed to be in decent shape.
Then he saw the dark shape lying in the open doorway.
Kel Tec in hand, he edged toward the figure. It was a man, ly
ing in a pool of his own blood. A large hole in his chest told the tale. He was dead.
Wyatt turned away, flattening his back against the outside wall of the stable. He listened carefully for any sound that might give away the presence of another person. But all he heard were animals moving in the underbrush and, somewhere not too far away, coyotes baying at the moon.
Nearing the end of the building, he stopped just short, spotting another crumpled form lying in the shadow of the stable eaves. A second man’s body, this one gut shot. A couple of feet in front of Wyatt, something had gouged a hole in the concrete siding of the stable building.
A bullet gone awry?
As he started around the corner, a faint crunching sound was his only warning. Something swung through the air and hit him square in the chest, knocking him to the ground. His weapon hand hit the hard dirt first with a jarring crack, shooting numbness through his fingers and wrist. His Kel Tec fell away from his nerveless grip.
“¿El policía?” The voice was male. Close. Tight with pain. Wyatt looked up and found himself staring into the prongs of a pitchfork. And clutching the pitchfork handle in one hand, his face contorted with pain, was Tomás Sanchez. El Pavón. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped on the ground next to Wyatt.
“No,” Wyatt answered. “Ranchero.” He knew Los Jaguares loved taking police scalps. Sometimes literally. And while he knew who Sanchez was, he didn’t think Sanchez knew who he was.
“Why are you here?” Sanchez asked in English.
“Looking for a lost calf,” Wyatt answered. “Have you seen her?”
Sanchez just laughed. “You’re funny, vaquero.”
The sound of a vehicle approaching drew Sanchez’s attention away from Wyatt for just a moment, but when Wyatt tried to make a move to roll away, Sanchez drove the pitchfork downward, barely missing Wyatt’s wrist, and pinned his sleeve against the dirt. “You stay put,” he said.
Wyatt considered making another attempt to escape, but he’d never get his arm unpinned before Sanchez used the weapon hanging from his belt holster and finished him off.
He still had a chance to help Brittany and Elena. But not if he was dead. So he stayed put, as El Pavón demanded, and waited with dread for the vehicle still moving toward them to come to a stop.
