One Last Look

by Linda Lael Miller

  He didn’t smile—at least, not with his mouth. His eyes reflected a sorrowful kind of humor. “The chief won’t like this even a little bit.”

  “Feel free to tattle,” I replied. “As soon as I’m far enough in that he can’t grab me by the ankles and pull me back.”

  Timmons tightened his grip on the flashlight and, an instant later, released it. I dropped to my knees and shimmied through the narrow mouth of the cave. It was deep, with only inches on either side. Suzie could have gotten in and out easily, but I wondered how her captor had managed it. Maybe he’d coaxed her somehow, but that didn’t seem likely, either. She would have been terrified.

  Sonterra was onto my game. His voice echoed through the passage. “Damn it, Clare!” he yelled. “Get out here!”

  I ignored him and kept slithering, hoping I wouldn’t meet a snake or a scorpion along the way. The air was close and dank, reminding me of the basement of the house on Cemetery Lane.

  The space narrowed, and I fought a fit of claustrophobia. What if I got stuck? What if I died of suffocation, or just plain fright, before Sonterra and the others could get to me?

  Assuming they’d even try, of course.

  Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it, a space about six feet wide and three feet high opened at the end of the flashlight beam. I paused, ran the light over the floor and walls. On the first pass, I saw nothing but root endings and a couple of sticks. I almost missed the crumpled scrap of paper—would have if it hadn’t stuck to my shirt.

  Heart pounding, I smoothed it and focused the flashlight beam.

  It was ancient and yellowed, torn from one of those notepads they put in hotel rooms.

  Palm Palace Hotel. Nogales, Arizona. There was a phone number, with an alphabetic prefix and no area code, but nothing else.

  Frustration uncoiled in my throat.

  What did it mean?

  “Clare!” Sonterra called again, from above ground, where there was sunlight and fresh air.

  Had Suzie been held at the Palm Palace Hotel? And how long had she been trapped in this hole? Had the mysterious “they” she’d mentioned on the cell phone bound her somehow, so she couldn’t crawl out? Or had they covered the opening with something too heavy for a small child, hungry and thirsty and certainly in shock, to move? And how many people were we looking for? Two? Five? A dozen?

  “Clare!” Sonterra again.

  Clasping the bit of paper in one sweaty hand, I made a silent vow. We’ll find you, Suzie. No matter what we have to do, we’ll find you.

  Sonterra was waiting when I squirmed out of the rabbit hole, like Alice on rewind. I didn’t even bother to stand up—I just tossed aside the flashlight and handed him the only clue I’d found.

  He scanned it, then pulled out his cell phone and keyed in the number.

  We all waited—Timmons, Deputy Dave, and me—watching Sonterra’s face as he listened to the rings.

  Dave started to speak, and Sonterrra silenced him with an upraised hand.

  Timmons gripped my elbow and helped me to my feet.

  Sonterra said, “Hello? Who is this?” He listened, then switched to rapid-fire Spanish. I didn’t get much of what he was saying, but I knew he’d asked a lot of questions, followed by a line of bullshit about a wedding. After a minute or so, he said adios and disconnected.

  “What?” I prompted, none too patiently, when he just stood there for a long moment, assembling his thoughts.

  “No luck,” he said too quickly.

  I didn’t believe it, and neither did Timmons, by the look on his face.

  Sonterra turned to Dave, who obviously wasn’t buying the dead-end story, either. “I need you to hold down the office for a while,” he said, as though a harsh word had never passed between them. “You’d better get back to town right away.”

  “Jesse’s already there,” Dave protested.

  “Jesse’s barely more than a crossing guard,” Sonterra answered.

  Rathburn didn’t budge right away, though it did seem that Sonterra’s assessment of the younger deputy’s abilities might have pleased him a little. “What are you going to do in the meantime?”

  “Write you up if you don’t follow orders,” Sonterra said.

  They glared at each other for a beat or two—it would have been a great place for the theme music from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly—then Dave conceded the battle of the wills and stormed back to his squad car. He had the radio handset to his mouth as he sped by us, tires spitting hard sand.

  “I don’t think you fooled him,” Timmons observed, eyeing the paper as Sonterra slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Who the hell were you talking to just now?”

  “The desk clerk of a rathole hotel in Nogales,” Sonterra said. “On the Mexican side. I’m going down there.”

  “Wait a second,” Timmons argued. “If you’ve got a lead, we can contact the federales—”

  Sonterra was already on his way back to the SUV, and I tagged right along. Timmons double-timed furiously after us.

  “Let me see that paper!”

  Sonterra ignored him and kept going.

  Timmons didn’t give up easily, of course. “You don’t have jurisdiction down there, Sonterra!”

  “Neither do you,” Sonterra threw back.

  “Well, damn it, I’m going with you just the same!” Timmons growled.

  “Not a good idea,” Sonterra said, practically shoving me into the rig. “They’re expecting a honeymoon couple. You tag along, Special Agent Timmons, and it’ll seem odd, even in that part of town.”

  Timmons flushed with frustration. “I’ll pull rank on you if I have to,” he warned, as Sonterra got behind the wheel and cranked up the engine. “Don’t think I can’t have your ass stopped at the border!”

  “Do that,” Sonterra snapped, “and a little girl might die because of it!”

  With that, we were rolling. I glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Timmons standing stiffly in the sand, scowling after us. I expected him to commandeer one of the other cars and follow, but he didn’t.

  “Good work, Counselor,” Sonterra said.

  I was still catching up. In fact, I’d barely had a chance to snap on my seat belt before we were off on our wild ride. “Do you have a good reason for cutting out the feds?” I asked when I caught my breath.

  Sonterra looked even grimmer than before, and he was silent for a full minute or more. “Don’t talk to me. I need to think.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself,” I said.

  Sonterra didn’t slow down at all as we hit the main road and screeched off toward Dry Creek. “The last thing I want is a bunch of suits and crew cuts closing in on the target and blowing the whole thing. The hotel is in Nogales, but it’s on this side of the border.”

  “And the kidnappers might have taken Suzie back there?”

  “Yes,” Sonterra said.

  “Tell me about the phone call you just made.” I wasn’t going to be put off as easily as Timmons had been.

  Sonterra looked grim. “I greeted the guy in English, and he answered in Spanish. I guess he doesn’t get a lot of calls in English, but he must have been expecting one, because at first he thought I was somebody else. Started spilling his guts right off the bat—said come quick, that the chiquita was muy malo. Then he must have realized his mistake, because he got testy. I played dumb and told him I wanted to rent a room for our wedding night.”

  I turned in the seat to look back. We had the road to ourselves, except for a tractor traveling about three miles an hour. “I’m not sure you made the right decision back there. Now you’ve pissed Timmons off, and the feds might actually have been useful, for once.”

  “Right,” Sonterra said. “Nobody would suspect a thing if thirty guys in brown shoes suddenly appeared in the lobby.”

  “Timmons is probably on the horn having a roadblock set up even as we speak. We’ll be lucky to get through Dry Creek.” I paused for a breath, pushed back my hair, which was peppered with d
irt. “Deputy Dave would love that—you on the wrong side of the cell door and him holding the keys.”

  “If Timmons is on the phone, he’s calling the border patrol,” Sonterra replied. We took a country road I’d forgotten was there, skirting the town entirely.

  My high school Spanish began to kick in. “Muy malo. That means ‘very bad.’ You could call the Nogales police, you know. If Suzie’s in this hotel, and she’s sick, they should take her to the hospital!”

  “I can’t take the risk, Clare. The hotels in that neighborhood are all dives. These are the kind of people who crawl under rocks when they smell a cop. A word from them, and the perps will grab Suzie and disappear again, maybe kill her in the process. God knows how long she was in that hole in the ground, and if they gave her food or water, there was no sign of it. There’s no telling how much more she can stand.”

  I settled back in the seat, trying to relax, or at least seem relaxed. “What are we going to do when we get there?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Sonterra admitted.

  “They couldn’t have known she had that phone.”

  I imagined Suzie huddled in that gravelike space, with no light except for a tiny panel on a cell phone.

  “I think she expected somebody to find that cave,” I said.

  “Or we just got lucky,” Sonterra countered. He paused, and I studied his profile. He looked haunted. “We got the dogs out there as soon as we knew what a limited range the doc’s cell phone had, but we’re still talking about a lot of desert.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Sonterra,” I counseled, though I probably would have done exactly the same thing in his place. And I had my share of regrets—if I’d personally seen that Micki and Suzie took refuge in a shelter before I left Dry Creek for Scottsdale, instead of leaving them at Judy Holliday’s place, knowing Bobby Ray had been released on bail, they might both be safe, and Judy wouldn’t have been such an obvious target.

  Hindsight.

  Like they say, it’s always twenty-twenty.

  Seventeen

  N ogales is a small, dusty town, straddling the border between Arizona and Mexico. Sonterra seemed to know it well—he’d had a misspent youth of his own, as it turned out, and Nogales had been his Dry Creek—and he wasted no time getting there. Normally, the trip would have taken a little over an hour, but he brought the SUV to a stop on a shabby side street in forty-seven minutes flat, by the clock on the dashboard.

  “Where’s the hotel?” I asked, looking around. All I saw were littered sidewalks, bums, and boarded-up shops, marred with graffiti.

  “Three blocks east, if it’s the one I think it is,” Sonterra answered, leaping out of the car and pulling his service revolver and shoulder holster from under the driver’s seat. He pulled up his T-shirt and strapped it on while I stood there wishing I’d brought a gun, too. “If we show up at this dive in a late-model rig, they’re going to guess there might be a problem. Give me back my cell phone.”

  I handed it over. The thing had been giving intermittent beeps all the way from Dry Creek.

  Sonterra pushed the speaker button and tapped into the messages, then set it on the hood to make sure his revolver was loaded. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bums make him for a cop and pull a collective vanishing act.

  Message one: “Sonterra? This is Timmons. You owe me big for this one. Really big.”

  Message two: “Hi, it’s Loretta. I caught that early flight I was looking for, and Clare’s not answering her phone. Where the hell IS everybody?”

  Message three: “Chief Sonterra? You probably don’t remember meeting me at the picnic, but my name is Becky Peakes, and I’m calling to report a missing person. I work for Danielle Bickerhelm, and she didn’t come into the shop this morning. I went to her house, but nobody answered the door. So I let myself in—I have a key, you know, in case she needs me to fetch something—and she wasn’t there, either. But the place had been ransacked—” A beep sounded, then another message began. The voice was still timid, but even more nervous than before. “Sorry about that. It’s Becky again. I tried your office, but there was no answer. Will you call me when you get this message? Please?” She left a number, and hung up.

  “Shit,” Sonterra said, shutting off the phone and shoving it into his hip pocket. “Dave and Jesse should both be in the office. They’re probably at the Doozy Diner, pigging out on doughnuts and grousing about about how the department’s gone downhill since I took over.”

  “Aren’t you concerned about Danielle?”

  Sonterra looked down at his T-shirt, which bulged under his left armpit. “Right now, I’m concentrating on finding Suzie. Here’s the way I want this to go down, Clare. We walk into the hotel, playing lovey-dovey newlyweds. Then I say I’m going out for the luggage, and you sit in the lobby for five minutes, like you’re waiting for me. Got that? Five minutes. Then, no matter what, you come back here, get into the rig, and lock the doors.” He tossed me the car keys. “Got it?”

  “I want to help you find Suzie.”

  “I don’t give a crap what you want right now. Just once, do as I tell you. If you mess this up, Suzie might be the one to pay the price.”

  I sighed. He was right. I hate it when he’s right.

  The Palm Palace Hotel turned out to be anything but a palace. Made of old brick, the whole depressing structure seemed to lean slightly to the right, and the windows were painted black. It was the classic flophouse, the kind of joint junkies and hookers frequent.

  Later, when the pressure was off, I intended to ask Sonterra why he knew where it was.

  Who was going to believe that Sonterra and I actually wanted to check into that place?

  I looked down at my sweats, filthy from my trip down the rabbit hole out there in the desert. Noted my reflection in the grimy glass door leading into the lobby.

  Just about anybody would believe it.

  “Drunk,” Sonterra cued me, draping an arm around my shoulders and slapping on a goofy smile.

  We went in.

  There were a registration desk, a few dusty potted palms, and a ratty couch that reeked of urine. A general miasma of mildew, vomit, and b.o. completed the olfactory onslaught.

  A small, rodentlike man of Spanish extraction stood behind the desk, sizing us up.

  Sonterra addressed him in slurred Spanish, giving me the occasional rummy glance as he spoke. As far as I could tell, he was asking if they rented by the hour.

  The clerk, wearing an outfit that resembled a vintage band uniform, replied in the universal language of greed, thrusting his palm toward us.

  Sonterra made a show of fishing out his wallet, all the while holding me close against his left side. I finally realized that my main function was to cover up the service revolver under his T-shirt, which was bruising me. I smiled dreamily up at him, trying to look like I was on something illegal.

  Fumbling, the way drunks do, Sonterra finally extracted two twenty-dollar bills and laid them in the desk clerk’s hand.

  More Spanish was exchanged. I thought the desk clerk looked suspicious, but then, working in a dive like that, he probably had plenty of reasons for taking a dim view of humanity in general.

  He gave Sonterra a key, and the game was under way.

  According to plan, SuperCop steered me toward the urine-soaked sofa. I wanted to retch, but I refrained, and actually sat down amid the stains and burn holes from dropped cigarettes. I comforted myself with the fact that I could always dip myself in bleach when we got back to civilization.

  Sonterra weaved his way out the front door, pausing on the other side of the dingy glass to ripple his fingers at me and grin like an idiot.

  I waved back, incorporating the middle digit.

  Five minutes can be a very long time when you’re sitting in a place like that, watching crack addicts and diseased hookers come and go. At four minutes, thirty-five seconds, gauged by surreptitious glances at my watch, I looked back at the desk clerk. He’d been observing me the whole ti
me; I could feel his gaze prickling the back of my neck.

  I thought about asking where the bathrooms were, to make conversation, but when he told me, I’d have to go in there if I didn’t want to arouse his suspicion. No way I’d set foot in the facilities in an armpit like the Palm Palace, let alone use them.

  “I wonder what’s keeping my husband,” I mused aloud, realizing a moment after the fact that I’d sounded too sober. Discretion being the better part of valor, I made a beeline for the front door.

  Sonterra had told me to go straight back to the car, and wait there for him, but of course I didn’t. I slipped around the back of the hotel, found a rickety fire escape on the alley, and slouched my way up the stairs.

  On the first landing, I had to step over a junkie of indeterminate gender, curled up in a fetal position. If he—or she—hadn’t blinked, I would have been forced to check for a pulse. Believe me, this was not someone I wanted to touch, but I felt a twist of pity, just the same. This shaggy, grime-caked specimen was somebody’s child. “Is there anyone I can call?” I asked.

  The creature shook its head and closed its eyes.

  Silently, I offered what could pass for a prayer, and tried the first-floor fire exit.

  Security just isn’t what it used to be. The door opened with a little shoulder action on my part, and I stepped into a dark corridor.

  I’d thought nothing could smell worse than the lobby. Here, people had relieved themselves against the walls. I almost tripped over a rat carcass and another zoned-out user, before I started turning knobs, and what I wouldn’t have given for a pair of Esperanza’s cleaning gloves. Like the fire exit, the doors were unlocked, and occasionally, the rooms were occupied. I waited, on each threshold, for my eyes to adjust.

  More junkies.

  More hookers.

  Just the sort of place a bride dreams of spending her wedding night.

  The last door on the right was locked. The floor creaked overhead, and I figured Sonterra was doing the same number up there.

  I felt a little thrill of dread and anticipation and knocked lightly.

  “Suzie?” I called, keeping my voice low and pressing an ear to the panel.