“Fine. Let’s move,” Lobenzo announced. “Ándale.”
Lobenzo moved us with stealth and skill. A run-down pickup truck with three men crammed in the front seat led the lineup. Then an old sedan. Then his dark-tinted armored car with a driver and two bodyguards. Behind us, two guys on motorcycles intermittently passed us, flanking or falling behind, the roving watchmen. The spacing between the motorcade was carefully calculated, the weapons in the cars enough to take over a small country.
We hit the main highway until we reached the edge of the city and then left it quickly in our dusty wake. The smaller towns were sleeping unaware, not a light on during these overnight hours. The people who lived there would wake with the scrawny roosters, put on their coffee, and heat their tortillas. They wouldn’t know evil had passed by their doorsteps.
Our driver stayed on the phone with the men in the truck leading the way. Left, I would say. Left, he would say. Now right. Right. Follow this road past the used-car shop and the scrubby, over-chopped forest. Now stay on this one road for a while.
Lobenzo rode in the backseat next to me like we were just two travelers heading somewhere together. He smiled at me, which made everything worse. How could men like him even know how to make the shape with their faces anymore? It didn’t mean what a smile means. It was like how a farmer calls gently to a chicken so it will come to have its head hacked off.
I couldn’t get over how young he was. Once, he was a baby, just like me or anyone, with chubby cheeks and tiny little silky feet. We all start out the same.
“What are you thinking, Azules?” he asked.
I stared straight ahead.
“I suggest you converse with me. I speak; you answer. Understood?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“So?” He leaned in.
“I was thinking about how you became . . . this. About what your family might think.”
“Do you think they would be disappointed in me, Azules?” He smirked. “Let me tell you a story. My father used to tow old cars across the bridge from Texas. Mechanics in Montera would fix them. Buyers from all over Mexico came to get a good deal on a used car.”
He paused. “What does this have to do with that, you wonder. It is because the war on drugs became a war on all of us. If border security makes easy money difficult, the cartels will get it another way. Suddenly it was easier for the cartels to abduct the local jeweler and demand a ransom than get cocaine across the border. It was faster cash to kidnap the city planner’s children and threaten to kill them than build a tunnel to move marijuana.”
Lobenzo shrugged and stretched. “People stopped coming to Montera to buy cars because they were afraid of the violence. So, just like the cartels, we had to find new ways to survive.”
He leaned even closer. “Do you know about autoimmune diseases?”
I shook my head no. I didn’t know what he was getting at.
Lobenzo lit a cigar, the rancid smoke filling the car. “It’s when the human body attacks its own healthy cells because some message has gotten mixed. Montera was sick like that, the city attacking the city, the cartel turning on its own people and turning the streets into a festering sore.”
Lobenzo blew the smoke in a loose cloud at my face.
“When facing disease, you must build your immunities, find your antidotes,” he said. “Vaccines contain the very virus they aim to cure. I am turning attention back to the border. I will make trafficking more lucrative than feeding like vampires on each other. I became the cartel to fix the cartel. So . . . what would my family think? They would be proud.”
The car slowed. And there it was, the white stucco pharmacy with the big red cross painted sloppily on the side, the one I dreamed about, called out in the night about, waking Cade, haunting me.
It may as well have been the marker of my grave.
CADE
After Lobenzo hung up the phone, every fiber of my body burned with frustration. Here I was with his guys, staring at their guns, completely helpless. I looked at them. They looked at me. The minutes added up. They were daring me to speak by holding the silence. When I didn’t say a word, they tried to get under my skin.
“How long after she shows him the tunnel does he wait before he kills her?” The taller man spoke to his partner but kept his eyes on mine. They glinted.
“Maybe he already has,” he added. “And what shall we do with this one?”
He ran his sausage fingers across Jojo’s face, tilting it up toward him. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she silently trembled. I balled my fists, wrists tied at my back, while my jaw, my bones, clenched tight enough to shatter. One wrong move and we were dead.
Once my dad caught a rabid fox in a cage trap. In my head I was foaming and pacing like that, like my teeth had gone razor-sharp and I could slice myself from the inside out.
Jojo’s eyes were closed. I closed mine too. It was better not to watch the sunlight fade and know that the hours were passing with no sign of help. How much longer before the men got word about what to do with us? I had to believe that as long as we were alive, Jane was alive.
Mattey had been right, but I wasn’t wrong. We couldn’t do this on our own, but we also couldn’t have waited to try to save Jane. Sometimes by the time you see a snake, it’s already bitten you.
I prayed he’d reached Gunner’s mom.
I let my eyes flicker open. The tall man was picking his tooth. The other guy was playing with a pocketknife, flipping the blade open, clicking it shut. Flip. Click. Flip. Click. It was like listening to a timer count down.
The room was almost entirely dark now. I had to consider the possibility that no one believed Mattey. If the sheriff wasn’t well enough to help, who else would?
A little red light danced across the fat man’s head. What was it? I watched the wavering dot move across his skin. It seemed to be coming through the crooked shades.
Just then the window shattered.
A bullet sank into his face with a sick fwoop noise. The tall man slumped like he was bored and falling asleep, not dying. And then . . . he was dead.
Holy shit.
“Federal agents—don’t move!”
The shouts came from outside.
Lobenzo’s other guy slithered forward on his belly and started firing like crazy at the door. I leaned forward with all my might and yanked. The old cabinet door came off, and I rolled in front of Jojo, curling over her, using the cabinet door as a shield on my back to hide us from the spray of bullets.
Boom. Boom. They were trying to break down the door.
“Let me see your hands. Everyone put your hands in the air.”
A group of agents had stormed in the back too.
“I said hands up! Over your head. Now!”
Lobenzo’s guy was surrounded. He raised the gun in surrender.
I locked eyes with a guy in SWAT gear. He reached down and hauled Jojo and me up. We burst out into blinding police lights. A SWAT team surrounded the house. As people’s faces started coming into focus, I spotted Mattey. He grabbed Jojo like he was never going to let go, and he looked at me like he was never going to forget that I almost got her killed.
JANE
I was nothing special.
There are tragedies every day.
That was what I told myself as we waited in the car for word from Lobenzo’s first round of men heading into the pharmacy, the police cuffs still holding my arms at my back, a gun forever angled at my head.
The all-clear phone call came faster than I would have thought—Grande’s guys gunned down, the first round of his guards in the tunnel butchered.
“Are you ready to see if you are right?” Lobenzo asked.
I put one foot in front of the other, following orders.
The pharmacy smelled like blood. Like the pool deck in Mexico. I gagged at the sight of the murdered
men. Freshly glassed-over eyes stared back at me, saying, There are no good and bad guys here. Death is death.
“Keep moving.”
Behind the counter, in a closet, Lobenzo’s men had discovered a trapdoor. It opened to gaping darkness. Narrow rungs hung from wooden side supports. I couldn’t see the bottom.
“Go.”
I fumbled down with no hands for balance, banging my chin on a few of the rungs and falling the last few feet. I landed hard on my right ankle, wincing as it rolled beneath me.
The air changed immediately, damp and hard to breathe. Lobenzo inhaled like he was smelling a five-star meal, touched the walls like they were about to slip away through his fingers.
The tunnel seemed to breathe back, alive and reptilian. Sour and thick, the silence of being underground moved over us. We pushed forward down the throat, and I felt like a prisoner in a python that would take months to digest me. I would feel it finger to toe, artery to eyelid, death in the belly of the snaking tunnel.
Alamo and the Soup Maker doubled back from where they led the way.
“We found a panel with a ventilation system. Do you want us to turn it on?
“Yes. We need oxygen.”
“But if it alerts someone?”
“You kill them.”
Lobenzo motioned for us to continue. His men moved ahead, and within a few minutes we heard a big fan fire up, pushing the thick air. The tunnel closed in the farther we went. It had started out like a rocky sewer pipe tall enough to stand in, but within minutes it dropped to about four feet high and only about two people wide. In some places we had to go single file.
“Clear!” Lobenzo’s men would call out as they checked ahead for him.
Others brought up the rear, ducking backward, ready to fire at anyone coming up on us from behind.
Lobenzo glanced over at me. The spark in his eye was deeply unsettling. He did not have the flat gaze of Ivan or his other thugs. Lobenzo was vibrant, manic, with the wild energy of an utter sociopath.
“Do you know how much money this tunnel will make me?” he asked.
“No.”
“Hundreds of millions. Millions of millions!”
Just then: “Mira!”
Where the tunnel widened, shouts echoed off the wet walls, then gunshots. We dropped to the ground, protected by Lobenzo’s two guards, their bodies between ours and the flying bullets. One of Lobenzo’s men in the front went down. They were yelling in Spanish and kept unloading their weapons on each other. I covered my head with my arms. And then silence. Two of Lobenzo’s guys lay lifeless. Four of Grande’s guys were dead, one slumped against the wall, one on his back, another face down, the last crumpled mid-step.
“Just business,” Lobenzo said to me once his men motioned for us to proceed.
We stepped over the bodies. Lobenzo didn’t even look to see who he had lost. The tunnel wound on. It looked like the inside of an old boxcar, repeating over and over. Rounding the next corner revealed walls reinforced with wood and a track that extended into the distance, lit with dim construction lights. Ventilation. Electricity. And rail tracks.
His men cheered and clapped.
“Now we are talking,” Lobenzo exclaimed.
“Five hundred!” his guard announced.
“Since the start of the tunnel?” Lobenzo clarified the distance marker.
“Since the start.”
Lobenzo looked over at me. “There are roughly five hundred steps in a quarter mile. Let’s see how long the whole thing is. Your turn, Azules. You can keep count from here.”
I didn’t dare not to.
Five hundred and one, two, three . . .
We must imagine the spirit to be free from how life ends. I would vacate my body before it could hurt.
Six hundred . . .
As soon as it was proved that this was in fact Grande’s master tunnel, I would jump out of my skin and send my soul into space so I wouldn’t feel what they did.
Seven hundred ninety-seven, eight, nine . . . eight hundred.
I would be slaughtered like Raff.
One thousand five hundred and seventy-three.
The tunnel started sloping up, and at the end of the slight hill we came to an abrupt stop at a service elevator. Alamo gathered three men and got on the lift. We waited. Nothing. Then a whistle. All clear.
Lobenzo, his guards, and I were the last to get on.
The open planked elevator cranked and clicked us up. Dark, blasted-out stone shifted to light cement as we popped up in some sort of warehouse surrounded by giant cargo boxes.
My mouth fell open.
Stamped on the sides of the containers: Maddison Electric.
We were in the far reaches of Savannah’s father’s factory.
The light at the end of the tunnel. It made sense now. The lightbulb factory, the electric supply warehouse. The tunnel at the end of the light. A play on words . . . and completely accurate. Savannah’s father was working with the cartels.
I could see Lobenzo drawing the same conclusions. His brow furrowed as his eyes flicked over the room and its contents. As he put the final pieces together, he started to chuckle.
“Of course. The richest man in Tanner, Texas. Garrett Maddison. The ‘Mad Son.’”
His men climbed up on top of shipping containers to peer outside.
“It appears we are on the very edge of the property,” Alamo reported. “The production facilities are a good half mile to mile away. There are oil wells to the west and more abandoned storage warehouses to the left and right of us. Absolutely no sign of anyone coming or going. This doesn’t seem to be a functioning section of the plant.”
“Secure the warehouse,” Lobenzo ordered. “It’s time to let the Mad Son know he answers to us now.”
A thin, sallow man piped up. He looked like he belonged in an office, crunching numbers, not pacing the room with an automatic weapon slung over his shoulder.
“What is it, Asesino?”
The Assassin cleared his throat, eager to share information he had.
“He has a wife and a daughter. The daughter’s name is Savannah.”
Lobenzo rolled his hands together into fists, cracking his knuckles, locking eyes greedily with the Soup Maker.
“Well then, I want Savannah Maddison by midnight.”
CADE
We had been rescued, but I was still a prisoner.
“I get why you want me to stay here, but I need to be with my friends,” I said.
The Homeland Security Investigation guys ignored me. Trying to talk to them was nothing like talking to Sheriff Healey. She knew us, was one of us. From the hospital she’d called the feds helping her department look into the bridge murders. They’d been asking me the same questions for hours and refused to acknowledge any of mine. I walked over to our open front door and stared out across the porch to the fields. In the distance I could see the barn. All I wanted was to be back inside those crumbling walls with Jane.
My phone rang. Jojo.
“Hi. Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine. Any word on Jane?”
“Nothing.”
“Shit.”
“Sophia?”
“The same.”
“Where’s Mattey?” I asked.
“He’s right here. You know these guys aren’t letting us go anywhere. You wanna talk to him?”
“Uh, no. It’s fine. Tell him . . . tell him thank you for me, okay? For getting us out of there in time.”
“You sure you don’t want to tell him that yourself?” Jojo asked and handed Mattey the phone.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Okay.”
“I mean it.”
Mattey paused, swallowed. “I didn’t leave because I d
on’t care about Jane, you know. It’s because I do.”
“I know.”
“Call as soon as you hear anything about her. Promise?”
“Of course.”
I hung up.
My dad sat on the couch behind me, drumming his fingers on the side of an empty beer can. One down, the rest of the six-pack to go.
“They’re not doing anything!” I muttered and kicked the leg of our sagging coffee table.
“Let it rest, boy. You heard the feds: ain’t safe. They’re on it. You made a big enough mess already. Let them do their jobs.”
“We’re investigating every possible lead.” The HSI guy who pulled me out of the flophouse finally acknowledged me—Chuck, I think he said his name was.
“Really? Because it looks like you’re babysitting me,” I shot back.
“Looks like you need it. We’ve got some more questions for you.”
Chuck was joined by another agent.
“So, let’s go over this again,” he said. “Jane told you she knows how Grande’s guys smuggle stuff into the country.”
“Yes.”
“And she said Grande killed her boyfriend and his associates before they could disclose that information to a rival cartel?”
“Lobenzo’s cartel. The Wolf Cub.”
“You believe you heard Lobenzo himself speaking on the phone?”
“Yes.”
“Have you heard him before?”
“No.”
“Then can you be sure it’s him?”
“I mean . . . I guess not. But that’s who Jane said was coming after her.”
“Because she knows where Grande’s tunnel is.”
“On the phone he told her to say where the tunnel was or he’d kill me and Jojo, and she said it’s called the tunnel at the end of the light.”
“And that was it.”
“He hung up once he had what he needed.”
The investigators sighed. We’d hit the same dead end again.
“I have a headache,” my father interrupted. “Where are my meds, Cade? Are we out, or did you pick them up from the pharmacy?”
Hide with Me Page 23
