Diego’s eyes burned through the puffed slits of his bruised lids.
“And?” I made myself ask.
“And they said, ‘You’ve been awfully quiet, boy. You got anything you wanna tell us? About a girl? A girl with real pretty blue eyes who maybe showed up here over the summer? A girl who asked for a new identity? One you gave her.’”
I froze.
“What did you say?”
“What do you think?”
“Did you tell them about me?”
“You shitting me right now? Do you think I would look like this if I’d talked? Do you think they would have gone after my girl if I’d talked?” Diego sputtered hoarsely. “But it doesn’t matter anyway. It wasn’t about asking me shit. It was about punishing me for not telling them. They already knew what they were looking for.”
THE WOLF CUB
Bright blue eyes, my bull’s-eye. The cell phone we took from Raff Santos when we killed him had been full of pictures of his girlfriend laughing, dancing, posing in a little white bikini.
When Alamo told me we hadn’t heard from one of our loudest informants in Tanner in months, I knew he knew something. That kid, Diego, always had stories to tell us, a snippet overheard in his auto shop, something the sheriff was planning. He liked to perpetually pretend to have important information.
So when we asked specifically about the girl . . . to get silence? Weeks upon weeks. It was strange. He was protecting someone close to him.
A bird is only quiet when its own nest is in danger.
Watch his every move, I told my men. Follow Diego. Take everything from every place he goes.
I wondered why anyone thought they could out-strategize me. I am the bullfighter, the rock star who breaks the guitar and lights it on fire, the gladiator who wins fight after fight.
Reach into the dirt of Montera. You will find bullets. They will be rusty. Tells you how long the battles have been going on for. It was a way of life now, death. Was that so bad? Death does not have to be an abhorrent idea. The Aztecs, for example—I once read they viewed death as little more than an incident in the continuity between this life and the next, and human sacrifice was part of that process.
Every life that was owed to us, the people who needed our tunnels, they simply wanted a chance. I didn’t decide what was wrong and right for them, what they were willing to sacrifice to get across. I only said, This is what you owe us. And I delivered. Drugs. Dreams. A promise. I was not the devil. I was a saint. Santo Lobenzo the powerful? The brutal? The wise? El intelectual.
I had my theory. And now I had my proof.
When my men broke into the house of Diego’s girlfriend, they found sketch pads. Charcoal, ink, pencil . . . the notebooks they brought me were full of drawings that 100 percent matched Raff Santos’s cell phone pictures. Someone was drawing portrait after portrait of the girl we needed, right there in Tanner.
I ripped out one of the sketches and issued an ultimatum.
“I want this girl by the end of the week.”
CADE
I finally found Jane outside the hospital. She was facing the wall, holding herself up with one arm.
“Where were you? I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“I—” Jane struggled to speak between sobs. “I snuck in to see Sophia and Diego.”
I’d never seen her really cry like this. Tears, yes, shoulders shaking, can’t breathe, no.
“It was definitely because of me, Cade. Lobenzo—the Wolf Cub—he knows I’m here in Tanner.”
“We’ll get help,” I told her. My blood felt icy at the reality unfolding fast.
“I’m . . . ,” she said between sobs. “I’m the worst person in the world. This is all my fault. All because I stayed.”
I took Jane’s face in my hands and roughly wiped the tears off her face. They needed to not be there. I wanted them gone. I pulled her close to me.
“I’m sorry about everything I said before, Jane. I didn’t mean . . .”
“Me too.”
I kissed her cheek. And then her lips were on mine. My mouth on hers. Her fingers in my hair. My hands on her the back of her head.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Mattey’s voice sliced through.
My hands went heavy and dropped to my side as I turned to face him. Jane turned red and stared down at her feet.
“Mattey . . .” Jane’s voice trailed away.
He shook his head.
“What are you doing, I mean, seriously?!”
“It’s not what you think . . .” I started.
“Then what is it? Sophia has a broken nose, three cracked ribs . . . and . . .” Mattey’s voice cracked.
“We didn’t know what was happening back here.”
“You do now. And you’re here making out. For real?”
Jane reached out to try to take his hand. He shoved her arm away, hard.
“Hey now,” I warned.
“You have no idea how bad it is. Sophia’s brain is bleeding. She’s in a coma,” Mattey choked. “I’m done keeping this secret. I just told Jojo. She knows Jane isn’t your cousin. She knows everything.”
“And your parents?”
“They don’t need this on top of worrying about Sophia right now. It’s too much to even begin to explain to them. It’s the police who need to know—immediately. Jojo and I are going, with or without you.”
“It’s with us,” Jane quickly said. She looked at me. “We have to.”
JANE
If I’d left Tanner when I was supposed to instead of running off to South Padre Island with Cade, I’d be long gone by now and maybe none of this would have happened. Although leaving Tanner when I was supposed to . . . would have meant never staying at all. Money or not, the second I stopped bleeding through the stitches I should have been on a bus toward somewhere fresh snow falls to cover the gray. Actually, I should have died in the cornfield. No, it would have been best if I’d been killed with Raff in Mexico. Then maybe none of this would be happening.
The ugliness had found me, hurting everyone who’d helped me. I would never forgive myself for what happened to Sophia. Mattey never would either. Or Jojo. How could I have been so selfish?
Mattey cleared his throat softly. Jojo had come out of the hospital to find us. Her eyes went from Cade to me and back again.
“All three of you lied to me.” Jojo’s eyes filled with tears. “And now everything I love about everything is going to be over. Jane, you know they’re not going to let you stay in Tanner. Who knows if any of us can? Everything, school, home—it’s never going to be the same. We don’t even know if Sophia is going to wake up. My sister . . . could die.”
“I’m so sorry, Jojo,” I whispered.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I can’t look at Sophia anymore or I’ll burn something down.”
“I never meant for—”
“I know,” Jojo cut me off.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. I’d do anything for the people I love. I would have hid you too, you know,” Jojo said. “Then this would be my fault too. But it’s not. And I’m glad for that. Because I don’t know how I would live with myself.”
CADE
We sat crammed together in the front of my truck, shoulder to shoulder, staring forward at the police station. When I texted Gunner, he wrote that his mom was on her way back from a specialist in Houston. Five hours away.
“I still say we should wait for the sheriff,” I said.
“You’ve been saying that for too long. We don’t have the luxury of time on our side right now,” Mattey said.
“What’s a few more hours?” I argued.
Jane answered instead. She sided with Mattey. “At this point, who knows? A few hours could mean more people hurt. That’s not something I’m willing to risk.”
She nodded. “We have to.”
I knew telling law enforcement was the right thing to do too. But my gut also screamed that inside this police station, it was the wrong group of people to tell. But we were stuck. They were our best bet because they were our only option.
“Fine. Let’s do this,” I said. Saying the words was like getting a bad piece of gristle in your steak, the meat all gray and tasteless, but you force the swallow and it goes down in a lump.
The cop working the desk looked annoyed as we walked in.
“And what can I do for y’all?”
“We need to . . .” I didn’t know what to say. What did we need to do? How was I supposed to explain this?
“My sister is the one who got attacked last night,” Jojo jumped in. “And her boyfriend. You had cops at the hospital interviewing them. Can we talk to someone? We have some important information.”
“Oh yeah, about what?”
“The Lobenzo cartel,” Jane said.
The guy squinted up at us. “For real?”
“Yes, for real,” Jojo barked at him. “Get us someone in charge or something. Hurry.”
“You kids better not be messing around.”
The officer gave us a discerning look but picked up the phone.
“Yeah, hey, Captain . . . Listen, I got a couple of kids out here saying they got some cartel issue. . . . Yep, they say it has to do with the carjacking last night.”
The police captain came out and ushered us into some sort of conference room along with a couple of other cops. Something about his face reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t place it.
“This is Detective Jordan and Detective Erickson. They’ll be helping gather some information,” he told us.
We sat down at a long table next to a white dry-erase board where someone had drawn some stick figures doing obscene things. There was half a cold pizza sitting on a metal chair.
“So let me get this straight,” the captain said after listening to our initial explanation. “You’ve been hiding this girl since June . . . from Grande’s Gulf Cartel . . . and this new one out of Montera. And now, almost half a year later, you think they just caught on and are coming to get you?”
God dammit, these cops know how to make you feel stupid. The captain glanced down at his phone a few times and then back at each of us. He was a squirrely-looking guy with splotchy pink cheeks and beady eyes. No, no. Don’t go there, I told myself. Not every police officer is like the rat that ran off with your mother. But still . . . I didn’t like the way his eyes lingered on Jane. And then, right on cue, there it was.
The captain pointed at me. “You’re Katie’s kid, aren’t you?”
My palms went all cold and sweaty. “What’s it to you?”
“No need to git your panties in a bunch, boy. She married my baby brother is all.”
“Yeah, well, she used to be married to my dad.”
“I’ll tell her you say hello next time I head on down their way. They bought a huge place on the water. Real nice.”
The condescending smile on his face made me want to jump over the table at him. No wonder he looked familiar. He was related to the loser she ran off with. What’s the damn likelihood he’d be the one here with us? The whole police force was crooked. I knew coming to them was a mistake. We had to get out of this place.
“You three wait back out there in the lobby. You”—the captain pointed at Jane—“come with me.”
“Where are you taking her?” I asked.
“I’m going to talk to you one at a time. Her first,” he said.
“How about me first?” I said back.
“How about you go on out and sit yourself down, like I say?” he snapped at me.
“Don’t treat me like I broke some law,” I shot back. “We’re here to report a crime, so I don’t have to do a damn thing you say.”
“Really? Because last I checked, harboring a fugitive was a crime.”
“How is she a fugitive?”
“You said she took cartel money from Mexico. Smuggled it across international borders . . .”
“Cade?” Jane’s eyes were wide and scared.
“This is bullshit,” I argued. “Come on, Jane. Jojo, Mattey, let’s get out of here.”
I reached for Jane, but the detectives muscled between us as the captain steered her through the far door.
The click of the lock might as well have been the click of a gun to my head. I was helpless. Jane was on her own.
JANE
Everything was wrong.
“Everything will be fine,” the police captain told me, guiding me down a narrow hall with his hand on the small of my back.
Warnings blared in my head.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I want to get some more info from you. You said you took money that belonged to the Grande cartel from your dead boyfriend and ran.”
I nodded.
“And you think this other cartel . . . that they’re after you because you have information about a tunnel they want?”
“That’s right.”
Something was not right about this man.
“Hang on. Stop there.” He snapped a picture of me on his phone.
“What was that for?”
“Documenting things.”
“With your cell phone?”
There was nothing normal about what was happening. I started to scan the hall for an exit. There was only one, at the far end.
The police captain’s phone beeped. The second he looked down at it, I started racing toward the door. I heard him shout, “Hey, hey, stop.” I threw my weight against the door and popped it open, but as I burst outside, he kicked my feet out from under me. I went down hard on the concrete steps. The captain pulled me up and threw me against the side of a cop car, cuffing my hands behind me.
“What are you doing?” I struggled as he shoved me into the car. I kicked at the door and the back of the seat. “Stop! Let me go!”
I started screaming as loud as I could. How could the other police officers not see what was going on? Wait, there was a cop standing back by the door. He angled a security camera away from the parking lot and stood there with his arms folded. They were in this together.
“Cade!” I yelled. “Cade! Help!”
I knew he was inside. I knew he couldn’t hear me. But I yelled for him anyway, because I had no one else to yell for. The captain fired up the lights and sirens, drowning me out, and peeled out of the lot.
“Where are we going?” I asked as he merged onto the highway at the edge of Tanner.
“I’m taking you to see my boss.”
“The police chief?”
“The Wolf Cub. Lobenzo.”
CADE
There was no reason they should have taken Jane alone to the back like that. I stormed out of the police station, scouring the outside of the building for anything strange. That captain’s brother is cartel. That means he is too.
Jojo and Mattey followed me out. Right then, a police cruiser pulled out of the back lot and disappeared around the corner. In the back window was the unmistakable flash of Jane’s face and bright blue eyes.
“Get in!” I gestured to them. “Now!”
“What the hell is going on?” Jojo demanded.
“Jane is in that police car!”
“What? Why?”
“I have no idea. But that captain is crooked.”
“You think every cop is,” Mattey countered. “Are you sure?”
“You heard him. He’s my mom’s boyfriend’s brother. That says it all. You wanna wait around and talk about it some more while Jane is frickin’ being taken?”
Confused, but prompted by the urgency in my tone, Jojo and Mattey got into my truck. It took everything to not
peel out in pursuit, but I was trying not to draw attention to myself. The cruiser merged onto the highway and then took the first exit. I wove through traffic to keep up.
“We need to call 9-1-1,” Jojo said.
“Are you for real right now?” I said. “9-1-1? So this captain can respond to a call about himself? No way!”
“Well, what are we going to do then? Drive him off the road?”
“I don’t know, but we have to at least see where they’re taking her.”
The only thing I could clearly focus on was keeping track of that police car. Left. Now right. Behind the bus.
Finally, the car slowed down along a quiet neighborhood street and backed into the driveway of a run-down house hidden behind a fence. I drove past, praying no one noticed us, and parked around the corner down the road a little ways, rolling over the grass and going right in between some trees so the truck was hidden at the edge of some woods.
“Who can we call to help then?” Mateo asked.
“We gotta go try and get her,” I said.
“That’s insane! There’s no way we can do this alone,” Jojo said.
“You saw what they can do.” Mateo was dead set. “No way.”
“You want to let Jane be the next Sophia?” I asked.
Mateo got a look I had never seen before. For every bit of fire in Jojo’s eyes, his anger was ice. I knew what I was stoking when I said their older sister’s name. But I still wasn’t expecting what came out of his mouth next.
“I always go along with what you say. Don’t tell how you got a black eye. Don’t say I stitched you up. Keep a girl a secret in your barn. Not once, Cade, have I ever told you, No, this is a bad idea. And you’ve had some bad ideas. But this one is the worst.”
“We don’t have a choice.” I tried to calm him down.
Hide with Me Page 21
