Loretta, Emma, and Madge took the same tack.
Flashlights played over us, blindingly bright.
One of the staters called, “Mrs. Sonterra?”
I wanted to laugh, all of a sudden. Hysterically. Mrs. Sonterra. I could get used to that.
“That’s me,” I said.
He scanned the four of us. Loretta and Emma were holding Madge upright between them. “Anyone else in the vehicle?”
I shook my head. My vision narrowed, then widened again, all in a few seconds.
Gunfire sounded in the distance. A distinctive pop, a pause, and then two more shots, in rapid succession.
Sonterra.
Madge gave one last bloodcurdling scream and started to run back down the highway toward the colorful sweep of lights. Toward Dave. Remarkably, after everything he’d done to her, and to her children, she was afraid for him.
One of the patrolmen sprinted after her, caught her easily, brought her back. “It’s all right, ma’am,” I heard him say. “It’s all right.” Then, to one of his companions, “Where’s that ambulance?”
I tugged at the sleeve of the nearest officer. “Help him,” I said. “Chief Sonterra—he’s back there—”
The radio on his service belt crackled, Special Agent Timmons’s voice, disembodied.
“Officer down,” he said with no inflection at all. “We need assistance.”
This time it wasn’t Madge who broke into a run, it was me.
Twenty-two
I was younger and faster than Madge, but I couldn’t outrun the long arm of the law. Within a dozen strides, I was caught and restrained, though I fought like a scalded cat. Two of the four State Patrol cars shot past, headed for the tangle of lights a quarter mile back along the highway.
Even from a distance, I heard the dashboard phone in the Hummer go off.
Emma did, too, and she dived for the button as I ran toward her. “Hello?”
“Is my wife there?” Sonterra asked.
I gave a strangled shout of relief, elbowing Emma aside. “Are you hurt?” I choked out.
“No,” Sonterra answered. “Are you?”
I shook my head.
“Clare?” Sonterra prompted.
“She’s okay,” Emma said, standing almost at my elbow. “We’re all okay.”
An ambulance roared into view and arrowed right past us. Madge was sitting in the backseat of a squad car, her head in her hands.
“What happened?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
“Dave’s dead,” Sonterra answered quietly. “He fired on us, and Timmons took him out.”
Madge was too far away to have heard what Sonterra said, but she lifted her head just the same. I thought I saw her eyes glitter in the darkness, like those of a wild creature, catching the briefest flash of light.
Sonterra said he’d catch up with me as soon as he could, and rang off.
In the meantime, a second ambulance arrived, pulling in behind the car Madge was sitting in. Two attendants got out, unloaded a collapsible gurney, and snapped the legs into position underneath it.
I wandered toward Madge.
“You’re safe now,” I told her.
“He killed Oz,” she murmured. “He killed Father Morales. He didn’t want anything to stop the money coming in—”
Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she convulsed.
The EMTs loaded Madge onto the stretcher, treating her on the move. I tried to squeeze her hand, but she was out of reach.
I watched as Madge was loaded into the back of the ambulance, numbly processing the last words she’d said to me. He killed Oz. He killed Father Morales….
Loretta approached. “Maybe one of the EMTs should check you out, Clare,” she said, taking hold of my arm. “Just in case.”
I shook my head. “I’m all right. I want to follow the ambulance to the hospital, though. Make sure Madge is okay, and look in on Suzie if I can.” Sonterra would be occupied for a while, of course, and I was feeling a lot stronger, now that the crisis was over and the shock was wearing off.
Loretta nodded and got into the Hummer on the driver’s side. I rode in the backseat, while Emma took the shotgun position, calling Sonterra to give him an update on our whereabouts.
“Anybody ever tell you you’re hell on cars?” my best friend asked, pulling out and gunning it to keep pace with the first ambulance. The second one was already headed farther along the highway, toward the scene of the shoot-out with Deputy Dave.
“Wait till I tell you about my wedding day,” I replied. “Oh, that’s right. You were there.”
Emma’s face appeared between the front seats, so pale that her freckles stood out even in the dark. “You’re not bleeding or anything, are you?” she asked.
I took a mental inventory. “No,” I said.
“Do you hurt anywhere?”
“No,” I repeated firmly.
“You might want to consider incorporating the Kevlar into your everyday wardrobe,” my niece suggested. “Do they make a maternity line?”
“Very funny,” I said, then I laughed, but it came out sounding a little raw.
“Keep talking to her,” Loretta told Emma. “I think she’s in shock.”
The Hummer picked up momentum.
I remembered my promise to Madge, that I’d let her sons know what had happened. “Fire up the dashboard phone again,” I said.
“Why?” Emma asked.
“I’ve got to call Madge’s son. His name is Dave, Jr., and he lives in Tucson.”
I listened while my niece got the number from information and made the connection. Leaning between the seats, I calmly related the facts, at least concerning their mother. I would leave it to Sonterra, or the FBI, to break the news about their father.
When we reached the hospital, I tried to see Suzie, but there was still a guard posted at her door, and I couldn’t go in.
Half a dozen of Timmons’s men showed up soon after we arrived—I recognized them from the bologna-sandwich assembly line that day in our kitchen—probably waiting for a chance to question Madge about Dave’s involvement with the coyotes.
We exchanged polite nods.
Loretta and Emma sat with me awhile, then went off to the cafeteria for coffee and sandwiches.
I didn’t have an appetite, so I settled in the main waiting room, on the first floor, to read outdated magazines. Loretta and Emma came back, and, when two hours had passed and Sonterra still hadn’t shown up, we piled into the Hummer and went back to Dry Creek.
It was after one when I heard Sonterra come in. I sat up in bed and switched on the lamp.
“Are you okay?” I asked anxiously, the instant he stepped through the bedroom doorway, while his words ran over mine. Same question.
Sonterra gave a raw chuckle and kissed my forehead. “Yes,” he said.
I slipped my arms around his neck, remembering Timmons’s ominous words crackling over the police radio earlier that night. Officer down. “I’m so glad you’re home,” I whispered, clinging a little.
“Me, too,” Sonterra said. He held me for a while, then pulled back to get out of his clothes. He pulled on a pair of boxers and crossed the hall to brush his teeth.
“Exactly what happened out there?” I asked a few minutes later, as he slipped into bed beside me. “In the desert, I mean.”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Sonterra said, turning off the lamp.
I cuddled close. “Spill it,” I said.
“Dave took a potshot at us from behind the passenger door of his Crown Vic. Timmons popped him. End of story.”
“It wasn’t about Madge,” I said.
“What wasn’t about Madge?”
“The car chase. Rathburn killed Oz Gilbride, and he shot Father Morales, too. Madge told me. He must have realized he’d pushed her too far after that last beating.”
Sonterra listened pensively.
“Well?” I prompted when he didn’t jump in with a reply.
“Plausib
le,” he said, yawning. “Even probable. I’ll have a warrant by tomorrow morning. We can search the Rathburn house then, and if there’s any evidence, we’ll know for sure.”
“I don’t suppose that ‘we’ includes me?”
“I was referring to myself, Timmons, and his crew.”
“Did anybody question Madge?”
“Couldn’t. She’s in surgery.”
I sat up, leaned across Sonterra, and turned the lamp back on. “Surgery? Nobody said anything about surgery when I was there—”
Sonterra pulled me down beside him again. “Internal injuries. Rathburn broke one of her ribs, and it punctured a lung.”
“My God,” I whispered. Madge had been on her feet when I found her on the patio. She’d tried to run back to her husband when we heard the gunshots, out there on the highway. Either she was the toughest woman on earth, or she’d been beaten so many times that she’d built up a tolerance to pain. Her body must have finally cried “uncle” when she had the convulsion alongside the road.
“Will she be all right?”
“I don’t know, Babe,” Sonterra said, and I knew by the way he hesitated that there was more bad news coming.
“What?” I pleaded.
He kissed my temple. “Suzie,” he said gruffly. “She’s taken a turn for the worse. She’s on life support.”
“No.”
“Dan Post and his wife are with her. There’s always a chance—”
“But not a good one.”
“No,” Sonterra admitted. “Not a good one.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to make the world go away. “I hate this planet,” I said. “It’s a crazy, rotten place!”
Sonterra held me very tightly. “Babe,” he said.
I clung to him. He doused the light again. “Why do we try?” I whispered. “Why do any of us even try to go on?”
Sonterra shifted onto his side, facing me, and laid a hand on my belly. “Because we might be able to make it better,” he said.
I broke down and cried then—for Suzie, barely holding on, for her mother, and for Judy Holliday. For Madge and Father Morales. Somebody else would have to cry for Dave Rathburn.
“It all sucks,” I said when I’d exhausted myself.
Sonterra kissed away my tears. “Some of it sucks,” he answered. “But then there’s the baby, and Emma, and Loretta.” He paused. “There’s Mrs. K and Waldo and Bernice—”
“Keep talking,” I sniffled.
“There’s you and me.” He lowered his voice to a breath, close to my ear, and a sweet shiver went through me. “There’s hot, slick, wet sex. There’s fresh coffee, and sunrises, and Christmas trees with those little bubbly lights in the branches. There’s baseball, and old movies, and watermelon on the Fourth of July—”
“I love you, Sonterra.”
He nuzzled my temple, and tightened his embrace. “There’s that, too.”
“More,” I said.
“Waking up in the middle of the night and realizing you don’t have to get out of bed for hours. Rain on the roof. Choices. Four years between presidential elections. Dr. Seuss. Jay Leno’s monologues.”
“I prefer Letterman.”
“You would.”
I nudged him.
“Chocolate. Train whistles. Making love by firelight, with an Anita Baker CD smoking on the stereo—”
I closed my eyes and gave in to sleep, like a child listening to a lullaby.
To my surprise, Esperanza showed up for work Monday morning, acting as if nothing had happened. Of course, word had gotten around about Dave Rathburn, and her presence confirmed my belief that she knew something. With Rathburn dead, the heat was off.
Sonterra popped in at home around ten o’clock, after I’d dropped a protesting Emma off at school. Loretta was probably still recovering over at the B&B, and Esperanza was dusting the living room. “I just left the Rathburns’,” SuperCop informed me, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “We found a Glock, with one bullet out of the clip. The ballistics test isn’t back yet, but the consensus is, it’s definitely the same gun used to kill Father Morales.”
I wasn’t really surprised, but I was briefly speechless, partly by the confirmation and partly by the fact that Sonterra was sharing that kind of information with me.
“Nothing on Bobby Ray or Danielle, I suppose?”
Sonterra sighed. “Zip,” he said.
For the merest fraction of a heartbeat, I was under the bed again, in Micki Post’s trailer, while Danielle Bickerhelm banged the mystery man. Then I heard Madge’s voice, in the car, after the book club gathering.
Those women at the meeting tonight? She’s been to bed with half their husbands.
“Damn,” I said. “It was him.”
“Who was him?” Sonterra demanded, frowning.
“Never mind,” I said. Danielle and Deputy Dave? It was only a hunch, and Sonterra would shoot it down if I told him before I had any evidence.
“Clare.” He scowled. Clearly, he wasn’t going to let it go.
Nobody ever died, I decided, from having holes punched in a hunch. “I was just thinking Dave Rathburn might have been the man Danielle boinked that night in Micki’s trailer.”
“Why?”
I sighed. “There’s where you’ve got me. I don’t exactly know why. It’s just a theory. The night of the book club meeting, Madge told me Danielle had slept with half the members’ husbands.”
Sonterra checked the clock, poured out his coffee, and sighed. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s just a theory. Let me know if you get anything solid.” A brief pause. “Esperanza’s here, right?”
Ah. The real reason he’d stopped by in the middle of a workday.
“Yes,” I answered, just as she came through the dining room doorway.
She stopped when she saw Sonterra, visibly steeling herself.
“I have some questions I want to ask you,” Sonterra said.
Esperanza swallowed, glanced at me, then nodded.
“Sit down,” Sonterra told her. He tried to sound cordial, but it was an order just the same.
Esperanza drew back a chair at the kitchen table and sank into it. I took one, too, just in case Sonterra thought he was going to elbow me out.
Sonterra stood behind a third chair, bracing his hands on the back and leaning in a little. Esperanza’s gaze slipped to the basement doorway, then dodged back to Sonterra’s face. She looked small, forlorn, and determined, sitting there, and I reached out to squeeze her hand.
“Clare told me she visited your trailer last night,” Sonterra began. His tone was no-nonsense, but he was making an obvious effort not to intimidate Esperanza. “What do you know about the coyote operation?”
Esperanza lowered her eyes to her hands, now clasped on the tabletop, and raised them again. “Father Morales,” she began. “He was not coyote.”
Sonterra waited.
I held my breath.
The housekeeper glanced at the cellar door again. “When we come here,” she said tremulously, “my family and me, I am meaning, was two years ago. They hide us down there. Locked door from this side.” She trembled. “My Maria, she get fever, while we are waiting for the false papers they promised. No one come, so I break out window, downstairs, climb out with her. I go to church, wanting help. Father Morales, he get Dr. Holliday. He ask who bring us here, to United States, who hide us. I was afraid to tell.” She fell silent, obviously flustered.
I watched Sonterra’s face while we waited out the silence. I should have had an award for self-restraint.
Tears welled in Esperanza’s eyes. “It was Oz Gilbride,” she said. “He pick us up in desert, bring here.”
Sonterra nodded slowly. “Who else was involved?”
Esperanza bit her lower lip. “I don’t know. But I think Rathburn, because it go on after Mr. Gilbride disappear, and I hear things. From other Mexican people. Father Morales, he thought so, too. He wanted proof first.” She blinked several times, rapidly, but th
e tears fell anyway. “He must have found something. He die.” She crossed herself.
Sonterra spoke carefully. “What did you do after you went to Father Morales, that first time? When Maria was sick?”
I’d been wondering the same thing. Oz or one of his henchmen would surely have noticed the broken window and counted noses. Finding two “clients” missing, they would have started a search, fearing word would get out that the chief of police was harboring illegal immigrants in his home.
Esperanza sniffled, and Sonterra brought her a paper towel to wipe her eyes. “Father Morales, he keep us until the bad men stop looking.” She paused and smiled shakily. “We all alike to them.”
A chill went down my spine. “The others, in the basement with you and Maria—what happened to them?”
She covered her face with the paper towel for a long moment, and her shoulders trembled. Eventually, she looked up again, fixing her gaze on Sonterra. “I not see any of them again. I think they go to other towns, or back home, but maybe—”
“Do you remember exactly how many people were with you and Maria, when you were here?” Sonterra asked very quietly. I knew he was thinking about the skeletons in the crawl space, as I was, and wondering if Esperanza and her little girl had narrowly escaped joining them.
She shook her head. “I never count. It very crowded. We get water from laundry sink and use buckets for—” She stopped, closed her eyes again. “It was summer. Very hot. No air. Maria so sick.”
“You didn’t report what was going on because you didn’t know whom to trust,” Sonterra concluded. “And because you were afraid of being sent back to Mexico.”
Esperanza nodded, groped for her purse before she realized it was still on the kitchen counter, next to the door, where she’d left it when she came in that morning. She looked at it with longing, but made no move to rise out of her chair. “I have card now. Father Morales help me get card. Maria do so good in school, and I get job—” She turned pleading eyes to me.
One Last Look Page 26
