One Last Look

by Linda Lael Miller

  I thought I heard something inside.

  “Suzie?” I repeated. “Are you in there? Make a noise if you are.”

  Seconds passed, taking their sweet time. Then something crashed to the floor.

  My heart seized, and sweat broke out on my upper lip. The Palm Palace was a roach trap, but the doors were the old-fashioned kind, solid wood. I wasn’t going to break this one down without a bulldozer.

  Fortunately, I knew just where to find one.

  I located the inside stairwell and beat feet up a flight, bursting into the corridor. There was Sonterra, with his revolver out, and he had it aimed and ready to fire before he realized I wasn’t some low-life resident about to jump him.

  Even in the gloom, I saw the color drain from his face. He swore under his breath as he lowered the gun to his side.

  “Quick!” I blurted. “I think I found her!” I retraced my steps to the door on the floor below, and Sonterra followed, elbowed me aside when we got there, and tried it.

  Still locked.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Hurry!”

  He stepped back and kicked hard with his right foot.

  “Hey!” somebody yelled from a nearby room. “Wha—?”

  The lock gave way, but the security chain held.

  Sonterra used his shoulder the second time, and we tumbled in. I slammed hard into his back.

  Suzie lay on the floor next to a bed an animal wouldn’t sleep in, amid the shards of a shattered lamp base, her hands and feet bound with duct tape. Apparently, she’d hurled herself off the mattress in the process of knocking over the lamp to let me know she was there. And she’d used the last of her strength to do it.

  She looked up at Sonterra and me with the terrified eyes of a trapped animal bound for some diabolical testing laboratory.

  Sonterra laid the revolver within easy reach, crouched beside her, and cut away the tape with his pocketknife. “It’s okay, Suzie,” he said. “It’s me, Chief Sonterra. And here’s Clare. You called her on the cell phone, remember?”

  She nodded mutely, but she looked feverish, and I wasn’t sure she was tracking.

  He scooped her up in his arms, held her for a moment. “Don’t be scared. We’re going to get you out of here,” he told her. Then he handed her to me and reclaimed the revolver. “I’ll go first,” he said. “If it goes bad, hold on to Suzie and run like hell.”

  We’d barely crossed the threshold when the desk clerk appeared at the top of the stairs, a wiry little shadow in the gloom. Opened his mouth to protest, or maybe to yell for help.

  “Don’t make a sound,” Sonterra warned him, and cocked the revolver.

  He looked at the gun and nodded.

  We hurried for the fire exit.

  “Watch out for the junkie on the landing,” I said.

  The desk clerk, still inside, let out a loud yell. Now that Sonterra wasn’t aiming firepower at him, he’d sounded the alarm.

  “Hit the ground running,” Sonterra told me, stepping aside so I could go out first.

  I heard several new voices shouting behind us as we rounded a rear corner of the hotel and sprinted down the alley. Footsteps pounding down the fire stairs.

  How many people were after us? I didn’t take the time to look. I clutched Suzie with all my strength and fled.

  Shots pinged against the walls of the other ancient buildings lining the alley. I’d thought I was traveling full out, but now I was jet-propelled. Suzie made a pitiful, nonsensical sound and burrowed into my chest, as if trying to melt into my body.

  “Sonterra!” I called, without looking back, my heart thumping in my throat.

  “Run!” he shouted in reply, and a bullet struck the side of a Dumpster as I shot past it.

  I kept picking them up and putting them down, breaking my own speed record. I had no choice, with Suzie depending on me to get her out of there, not to mention the little passenger in my uterus. Still, a part of my mind stayed back, with Sonterra.

  Had he been hit?

  Tears burned in my eyes and throat like battery acid. Sonterra wasn’t invincible, after all; nobody knew that better than I did.

  Sirens whined in the distance. Too far away, too far away.

  I ran harder, stumbled as I erupted onto a sidewalk. Nearly knocked an old lady and her pushcart flat in the process.

  Suzie began to wail, a strangled sound that hurt my soul.

  “Jesus,” I cried, under my breath. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus—”

  I think I was praying. I’m not sure.

  Finally, I rounded a corner, and there was Sonterra’s SUV. Juggling Suzie’s now-inert frame, I pried the keys out of the pocket of my sweatpants and managed to open the door.

  The thought of leaving Sonterra behind, maybe wounded, maybe outgunned, maybe even dead, weakened my knees. But I knew what I had to do.

  I laid Suzie on the backseat—she was unconscious by then—and jumped behind the wheel. Where was the nearest hospital?

  I watched anxiously for Sonterra.

  I was trying to figure how long I dared wait, given the condition Suzie was in, when he suddenly bounded out of the alleyway, half a block ahead. I threw the SUV into drive, and the automatic lock engaged. I gave the engine a shot of gas, flipped the button that would open the locks, and screeched to a brief stop so Sonterra could jump in on the passenger side.

  “Go!” he yelled.

  I floored it.

  We streaked out of that neighborhood in the proverbial hail of bullets.

  Thank God, the bad guys were lousy shots.

  Eighteen

  S everal desperate minutes after our hasty departure from the Palm Palace, I pulled over to the side of the road, laid my head on the steering wheel, and drew deep, slow breaths, trying not to dissolve into hysterics.

  Sonterra caressed my nape. “Take it easy, Babe,” he said. “The worst part’s over.”

  I wasn’t sure that was true. Suzie was obviously in very bad shape.

  Now that nobody was shooting at us, I whirled in the seat to look back at the child. She was still, and her eyes, though partially open, had rolled back in her head.

  “I don’t know where the hospital is,” I wailed.

  Sonterra pulled me close and kissed my forehead. “Shhh,” he said. “Get in the backseat with Suzie, and I’ll drive.”

  My knees were weak, but I jumped out of the SUV, jerked open the back door, and wriggled inside, pulling Suzie gently onto my lap. Meanwhile, Sonterra rounded the car and took the wheel.

  I held Suzie against my chest, felt her breath, faint as the beat of a moth’s wing, on the underside of my chin.

  “She’s alive,” I said, and began to rock her in my arms. Maybe I was rocking my own baby, too, and myself.

  I don’t know how much time passed before Sonterra whipped into the emergency entrance of a hospital. He shoved open the driver’s door, waggled his badge, and shouted, “Police! We need help!”

  Suzie was wrenched from my arms, whisked away on a gurney.

  Sonterra opened my door, already on his cell phone.

  “Mr. Post?” I heard him say. “We found your daughter—”

  I stopped listening.

  The emergency room doctors took charge and did what they could to stabilize Suzie, but it was a small hospital, and they weren’t equipped to provide the kind of specialized care she needed. Almost immediately, they dispatched her to Tucson by ambulance, and Sonterra and I followed in his car, having updated Dan Post by cell phone so he could meet us there.

  When we arrived, a few minutes behind the ambulance, Sonterra sat me down in the lobby waiting room.

  I stared into space, pulling myself together.

  “She’s pregnant,” I heard Sonterra say to someone in blue scrubs. To this day, I couldn’t tell you whether it was a man or a woman. Their response sounded like the teacher in the Peanuts comic strip. Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. I remember hearing Sonterra say, “About seventeen weeks.”
/>   I was given the requisite disposable garb, whisked to an examining room, checked over, and soon proclaimed to be disgustingly healthy, if a little the worse for wear. When the medicos were through with me, I stretched out on a couch in the lobby and went to sleep. A delayed reaction to stress, I guess.

  When I opened my eyes again, Sonterra was leaning over me, sprouting a seriously attractive five o’clock shadow, and grinning. “You know,” he said, “you’d make one hell of a cop.”

  “Is Suzie all right?”

  The grin faded. “She’s alive, Clare. That’s what matters.”

  I sat up and clutched at his arm, probably left a few scratches in his flesh. “Tell me the part you’re holding back!”

  “She’s catatonic.”

  I closed my eyes. “Dear God.”

  “Suzie is safe—that’s the important thing. She’s being treated, and her dad and stepmother are with her.”

  I tightened my grasp on Sonterra’s arm as another thought rose out of the fog in my brain to slam me. “Bobby Ray—or whoever took her—might think she can talk, give him away—we could have been followed—”

  Sonterra smoothed my hair back, helped me stand. “Easy,” he said. “There’s a guard outside Suzie’s door. Nobody’s going to get to her. I promise you, Clare. Nobody is going to hurt her.”

  I bit my lower lip, wanting desperately to believe him.

  “Meanwhile, the State Police are all over the Palm Palace, looking for any trace of the desk clerk, the perps, or the shooters. If they find anything, they’ll let us know.”

  “I want to go home,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Sonterra agreed. The grin was back. “Just out of curiosity, what part of ‘stay in the car’ did you not understand?”

  I sighed, aggrieved. “Are you going to start ragging on me about that—now, after all that’s happened?”

  “No,” he answered, his arm still around me as we crossed the lobby and stepped out into the cool twilight, “but it’s on the calendar.”

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t do what you told me,” I argued, ever the lawyer. Sonterra’s car was still in the ambulance bay. “At the rate you were going, you’d never have found Suzie. And didn’t you just say I’d make a good cop?”

  Sonterra unlocked the SUV and helped me into the passenger seat. “I got carried away.”

  I waited until he came around and got behind the wheel. “I’m glad you weren’t shot,” I told him.

  He grinned wearily. “Well, thanks for that, anyway. I’m glad I wasn’t shot, too, and even gladder that you weren’t.”

  We headed for our place in Dry Creek, land of the free, home of the bones. Both emotionally exhausted, we didn’t talk much on the way.

  Special Agent Timmons, Loretta, and Emma were all seated around the kitchen table, when we came through the back door, finally home. Timmons looked like the head of a war council.

  Emma and Loretta took one look at me and simultaneously leaped to their feet.

  “What happened?” Loretta demanded, rushing to take my arm. She looked well, for someone who had been visiting her cheating husband in a federal holding cell.

  “I see you got an earlier flight,” I said.

  Loretta sighed. “What happened?” she asked again.

  “It’s a long story,” I answered. I met Special Agent Timmons’s inscrutable gaze. “We found Suzie, though.”

  “You’re wearing hospital clothes,” Emma said worriedly.

  I looked down at my scrubs, stuck for an answer.

  “Look at you,” Loretta said, steering me toward the back stairway. “You’re on the ragged edge. You need to lie down for a little while and recharge your batteries.”

  The miasma of the Palm Palace was still with me. “I want a shower first.”

  “Stay with her,” Sonterra told Loretta.

  She did. That’s the mark of a true friend. Somebody who will hose you down, put you in your pajamas, and tuck you into bed like a baby. Even more important, someone who knows you’ll rally, and believes in your strength, not your weakness.

  I slept like a dead woman.

  Nineteen

  “I ’m supposed to get married tomorrow,” I told Loretta the next morning, in the sunny kitchen on Cemetery Lane. Emma was at school, Sonterra was working, and I’d given poor Esperanza the day off with pay. Wednesday night’s archeological discovery in the basement had nearly done her in, and little wonder. I was still pretty shaken by it myself.

  “If you don’t manage to get yourself killed in the meantime,” Loretta said. She’d arrived twenty minutes before, hiking over from the Wagon Wheel B&B, carrying a large shopping bag from Saks. Switching on the TV, she got Esperanza’s Spanish soap opera and, thumbing the remote, scanned until she located the Food Channel.

  I was about to snoop in the bag when the phone rang, and I leaped on it, expecting an update from Sonterra on the newest mess: Danielle Bickerhelm’s disappearance. I was more concerned about Suzie, and I’d been calling the hospital at one-hour intervals since I woke up.

  The answer was always the same. Condition critical, and unchanged.

  “Hello?”

  “Clare?” Big, booming voice. Eli Robeson.

  I perked up. “Speaking.”

  “I hear you and Chief Sonterra found the little Post girl alive and got her out of a nasty situation. Good work.”

  I let out a sigh, staring out the window in the back door at the graveyard behind our house, remembering what it was like to see Micki’s body lying there, naked and blue and bloody. “Thanks,” I said. “But Suzie’s not out of danger yet.”

  “I know,” Robeson said kindly, “but she’d probably be gone by now if it weren’t for the two of you.”

  Suzie was suffering from the effects of shock, severe dehydration, and exposure. I couldn’t bear to imagine her dead, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing that she was still unconscious. She’d have a lot to deal with when she woke up—her mother and Doc Holliday murdered, her own ordeal at the hands of her captors.

  “I don’t know how she’s going to come back from this,” I murmured, and caught Loretta watching me with concern. Behind her, a woman was chatting cheerfully on the TV screen and wrestling a lobster toward a pot of boiling water.

  “Kids are resilient, Clare,” Robeson said quietly.

  I realized that my free hand was resting on my abdomen, shielding my unborn baby from a world where little girls were bound with duct tape and hidden in holes in the ground, and in seedy hotels, surrounded by the dregs of humanity. Where lobsters were tossed, flailing, into a simmering kettle.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t followed up on those case files you faxed over,” I said.

  “You’ve been a little busy,” Robeson replied. “When Bobby Ray Lombard is apprehended—and he will be—I expect you to have a rock-solid case ready.”

  “I will,” I told him.

  Mercifully, Loretta turned to the Travel Channel, and I didn’t have to watch the lobster die.

  “Good,” Eli said. “I’d like you to come in on Monday morning for the staff meeting. Nine sharp. Can you be here?” He paused. “If you’re not going to be away on a honeymoon, that is.”

  “No honeymoon,” I said. “Not right away, at least.”

  “We can expect you at the meeting then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” Robeson answered. “Oh—before I hang up—I sent along a little wedding present. My wife specifically asked me to tell you that she had nothing to do with it.” He chuckled.

  I blinked, confused. I’d never met Mrs. Robeson. What kind of wedding gift would cause her to issue a disclaimer to a complete stranger? “Okay,” I said warily.

  “In the meantime, take care of yourself.”

  “I will,” I promised, and we hung up. “What’s in the bag?” I asked Loretta.

  She smiled, evidently reassured by the return of my acquisitive side. “Open it and see,” she said, setting aside the remote.

&n
bsp; I plowed through the tissue paper and found a wedding veil inside, a gossamer creation spilling from a wreath of pink-and-white silk roses.

  Loretta beamed. “I got you a dress, too,” she said. “I left it at the B&B. Too bulky to carry over here on foot.”

  “You bought me a wedding gown?”

  “I was afraid you’d show up for the ceremony in sweats and sneakers if I didn’t,” she joked. At least, I thought she was joking. “We’ll have lunch at the Wagon Wheel, and then you can try it on.”

  I stared at her mutely.

  Loretta’s delight wavered visibly. “It’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, I know women usually pick out their own—”

  I crossed the room and threw my arms around her. “Thank you,” I blubbered.

  Tentatively, Loretta hugged me. “Oh, Clare, you poor thing,” she said. “You’re positively on your last nerve.”

  I pulled back, sniffling inelegantly. “I’ll be fine,” I replied.

  “Right,” she said, looking unconvinced. “Go change. I won’t be seen in public with a woman wearing her boyfriend’s clothes.”

  I glanced down at Sonterra’s boxers and muscle shirt and laughed. God, it felt good to laugh, even a little bit.

  I went upstairs, showered, and put on a pair of fat jeans and a loose blouse, pausing briefly to wonder if Loretta had had the foresight to buy a wedding dress with an elastic waistband. I wasn’t huge, but I was expanding pretty rapidly. If she’d grabbed my usual size eight off the rack, we were in trouble.

  We took the Hummer. Loretta’s Lexus was ready to be sprung from the body shop in Tucson, but no one had had time to retrieve it. She’d used a car service to get from the airport to Dry Creek.

  As we passed Danielle’s house, I slowed. No police tape.

  Loretta had never met Ms. Bickerhelm, so I filled her in, finishing with, “I know her from somewhere. I can’t remember, and when I have time to think about it, it drives me crazy.”

  “High school?”

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe you were in the same foster home,” Loretta speculated.

  Something clicked, deep down. I’d been in at least a dozen of those, and the names and faces ran together, but I knew I’d never encountered anyone called Danielle while I was in the system, and said so.