Which left him only one option.
Chapter 10
Ryder knew the moment he made the move that it was a mistake.
A big mistake.
If he’d thought first—not his greatest strength—he would just played along and taken down Mr. E when they were alone out in the brush somewhere. He could have done it easily.
And probably would have enjoyed it.
But what capacity he had for thinking first seemed to have vanished at the first sight of the baby. Or rather, this baby. Her presence enraged him; the thought of her in the hands of these slime balls for any length of time was damn near unbearable.
So at the first sight of her, he’d promptly forgotten the crash training course the feds had put him through. He did what had gotten him into trouble so often before—went with his gut reaction. He grabbed for the duffel bag.
Forgetting the little problem of four-to-one odds.
He had completely, thoroughly, lost his mind.
With a shout, Mr. E dropped the bag and lunged at him. Ryder spun, took him down with a kick that should have shattered his knee and an elbow to the solar plexus. It gave him time to back up and go for the Glock at his back. Mr. E was writhing on the ground, swearing and staring at Ryder in shock.
Ryder heard the shouts, the sound of the Jeep roaring up the slope like an angry cougar.
Oh, yeah. The other guys, Ryder thought stupidly. Three of them.
He grabbed the duffel bag and backed toward the truck, the Glock trained on Mr. E. The Jeep crested the bank in a spray of dirt, and the three men leapt out.
“Don’t shoot him,” Mr. E yelled at them. “His ass is mine.”
They were running at him, all three of them, guns at the ready. Mac 10s, he guessed from the shape. He held onto his own weapon, the only equalizer he had. He wasn’t sure who to train it on. Mr. E didn’t seem like the type to inspire enough loyalty to get the other two to put down their guns. Not when they’d have to explain to Alcazar later.
It looked like a standoff.
But he had the baby, and that made him the winner.
I’ll get you back to your mother, little one, he promised the baby silently.
“What the…?” one of the armed men asked.
“I knew the boss shouldn’t have trusted pretty boy here,” Mr. E said, getting to his feet slowly.
Damn, Ryder thought. Guess I didn’t break his knee after all.
Then again, when he tried to take a step, the man groaned loudly, and that leg nearly buckled. But he reached under his jacket and took out a matching automatic pistol. And now Ryder was looking at four weapons that could pump him so full of metal he’d probably reflect the Texas sun when they finally found him out here.
If they ever did.
“What the hell do you want with a baby?” the man who’d been behind the wheel asked, sounding more bewildered than anything. “No one’s going to deal with you, not with Alcazar running this show.”
“Shut up,” Mr. E said, and Ryder was pleased to see sweat beading up on his face.
“But he’s not a cop, we know that, what the—”
“Just shut up, Denny,” one of the other men said, and Ryder got the feeling Denny was the driver because they didn’t much trust him to react quickly enough to do anything else.
“Back off,” Ryder said, gesturing at them with the Glock.
“Pretty boy can’t count,” the one who hadn’t yet spoken said. “Four of us, one of you, jerk wad.”
“Gives me four targets,” Ryder said, feigning a cool he was far from feeling. The too-slight weight of the duffel felt like the weight of the world to him in that moment. “I’m not even going to tell you which one I’ll shoot first.”
“He had to know it was a baby, that’s why we’re here, so why was he so surprised?” Denny asked.
“Shut up!” one of the others said in exasperation.
“He was down for the deal, until he looked at the baby. I think—” that earned the beleaguered driver a chorus of derisive hoots, but he kept on doggedly “—he knows that baby.”
The hoots of laughter continued. Obviously they weren’t terribly worried about him, or his promise to shoot one of them. Not that he could blame them, not at these odds.
The laughter faded into jabs about Denny’s thinking abilities, but Ryder’s heart sank when he saw that Mr. E, instead of joining the chorus, was looking at him, brows furrowed.
“Shut up,” Mr. E said, but this time it was directed at his men.
Ryder suddenly didn’t like the taste of this at all.
“Put down that bag,” Mr. E said, and there was a world of menace in his tone now.
“Guess that makes you my first target,” Ryder said.
“Never mind your first target,” Mr. E said. “Here’s mine.”
And the hand that held his weapon shifted, lowered.
Ryder’s stomach clenched, sending a wave of nausea through him.
He was aiming at the baby.
“You won’t shoot.” It took Ryder a moment to get the words out past the knot in his throat, to pretend a casual callousness he was far from feeling. “Your boss won’t like it if you kill his investment.”
He hated even talking about the baby that way, but he had to in order to get through this.
Assuming he got through it at all.
“It won’t be my problem,” Mr. E said easily. “The story will be that you killed it.”
Ryder’s gut clenched anew.
“Put the bag down.”
Ryder stared at the man. It was like looking into the cold, reptilian eyes of a venomous Gila monster. And Ryder knew in that moment, without a doubt, that the man would do exactly as he said. He would murder a helpless baby without a second thought.
Ryder set down the bag.
Mr. E gestured at him with his weapon. “Now the gun.”
Ryder hesitated; once he gave up the gun, he was toast. And the baby would vanish, likely never to be found. But if he tried to shoot his way out of here, the baby could end up dead anyway.
Mr. E shifted his aim, once more pointing the weapon at the duffel bag.
“Fifteen bullets per second,” Mr. E said, with an evil glee that made Ryder feel deathly cold.
He knew what would happen to him. He felt that at least the baby would survive, in fact would probably have a good life somewhere, with parents willing to pay any amount for a healthy child.
Her mother, he thought, an image of the woman whose name he would now likely never know forming in his mind. The memory of her nerve, her steely determination, had haunted him for days now.
If it were she standing here, what would she do?
She would do whatever it took to protect her baby.
He knew that as surely as he knew his life was counting down right here. She would give up anything, sacrifice anything, to ensure her baby’s safety.
He dropped his Glock into the dirt.
When two of them grabbed his arms, he thought they were going to cart him back to Alcazar to decide what to do with him. He even had an instant to plot his escape, but the baby complicated things. He couldn’t, wouldn’t risk her getting hurt.
And then Mr. E moved, suddenly, putting his full weight behind a pile driver punch.
Pain exploded in Ryder’s gut. A starburst of light seemed to blind him for a moment. He thought his lungs must have collapsed under the force and he couldn’t draw breath. A second blow made his head spin. A third glanced off his ribs, but set up a whole new kind of pain.
He jerked against his captors but they only tightened their grip, yanking his arms back until his shoulders screamed a protest. Mr. E laughed. The sound matched the look in his eyes when he’d aimed his weapon at the duffel bag.
The first blow to his head made Ryder dizzy. The next snapped his head so hard to one side he thought he felt something rip. The next set up a ringing in his ears that he thought might never go away.
Through the pain, as Mr. E laughed
harder and put more power into each blow, Ryder began to realize this wasn’t just punishment for stepping out of line.
This was an execution.
Oddly, the idea of dying didn’t particularly terrify him. But then if he died no one would know what had happened to that baby.
He had to stay alive. He was the only one who’d gotten this far. If someone came in and had to start over, the baby would be long gone, lost forever to her mother. And her mother would never get over it. He knew that in some bone-deep way.
After Mr. E’s next punishing strike, he let himself go limp. His suddenly dead weight broke their hold as he started to sag to the ground. He had to hope neither of them noticed he was keeping his feet under him.
“Our turn now?” the man on his right arm asked hopefully.
“All yours,” Mr. E said. “Leave something for the vultures to feed on.”
The man who had spoken laughed, and let go of Ryder’s arm to step in front and add his own fists to the mix. In that instant Ryder made his move. Ignoring the excruciating pain that wracked him, he yanked his left arm free. For an instant he thought his legs weren’t going to cooperate. Then he got them working.
He ran.
He heard the shouted curses. Knew he had only seconds, if that. Heard the first shot. Then a spray of automatic fire. He let out a yell of pain. Stumbled backwards to the crumbling edge of the gully. Flailed wildly. Went over the edge.
In the instant when he hit the split boulder at the bottom of the ravine, heard an ominous snap in his chest and felt a sharp stab of pain, he thought he just might have finished the job for them.
Chapter 11
Ana nearly cried when the kids decided they wanted to stop at the mini-mart, the only business still open this late. It was not that she begrudged them their candy bars, but she wanted to get back to her baby. The stress of separation was about to make her scream out loud.
Since Jewel would allow them only one candy bar each—which, she told them sternly, they would have to save until tomorrow after the ice cream tonight—they talked about getting what they all liked and dividing up the goods among them all. And when two of them discovered a tiny souvenir T-shirt that said, “I found hope in Esperanza,” a play on the meaning of the town’s name, Ana felt ashamed of herself for wanting to cut their outing short.
“Absolutely,” Jewel said with a smile as she held up the little pink shirt. “Maria needs this. It is her color, after all.”
Ana touched Jewel’s arm, and the woman looked at her. “Your kindness,” Ana said softly, “and your courage humble me.”
“If you want to talk about courage,” Jewel retorted in an equally soft tone, “let’s talk about yours.”
Ana felt her cheeks warm. Jewel patted her arm in turn. “Let’s get you home to your little girl. You’ve been very good about staying away so long, so these short people here could have some fun.”
The kids reacted with groans at the short people joke, but Ana sensed they were not really upset; Jewel and Hopechest Ranch had given these children a sense of belonging, of being valued, that had been sadly lacking in their lives. They were blossoming under the tender care, whether it was on an outing like this, working feverishly at some craft, or playing with the multitude of toys scattered around the ranch house.
Jewel then turned to pay the cashier. When she had the bag in her hands, she explained that she would be holding onto the loot until tomorrow, earning her a chorus of groans. Jewel was not only kind and brave, she was very smart about children, Ana thought. And Ana admired the way she was instilling confidence in all her charges, and responsibility in the older ones, like Nicole.
Ana wondered if perhaps her kindness might extend to teaching Ana what she knew; she needed all the help she could get for the days to come when she would have to raise Maria properly, teach her what was right and wrong, what was important in life.
She herself, so far, could only serve as a bad example, she feared. But that was over now, behind her, and she would never make mistakes like that again.
She would never trust so easily again.
He wasn’t going to make it.
With every step, he knew it. Every time he fell, he knew he couldn’t get up again. Every inch he gained, even when he was reduced to crawling through the brush, he knew was the last he could manage.
Yet he kept going.
He thought he passed out a few times, at least he seemed to remember waking up with his face in the dirt, with various insects scurrying over him, in anticipation of his certain death, or perhaps just drawn by the blood. Sometimes the thought of them feeding on him drove him a few precious yards farther. Sometimes he hurt so much he didn’t even care.
He told himself that if they hadn’t taken his truck and he’d tried to drive, he would have crashed it by now. It didn’t make his progress any less torturous. He didn’t know how long he’d been crawling. Didn’t know how far he’d come. Wasn’t even sure he was going in the right direction. He had to hope that his memories of the Bar None were guiding him properly. His conscience jabbed him anew. He had to tell her. Even if he died with his next breath, he had to tell her. She would do what had to be done to save her baby, he knew it. He hated that he’d blown it so badly, that it would be left to her, but it was down to that.
He had to get to her.
He kept on, for what seemed like an endless nightmare trek. Still he was startled when, the next time he forced himself to his feet, he saw the dark shape of Hopechest Ranch looming up in the darkness, just a few yards away. For a moment he thought he was imagining it, that some burst of wishful thinking had his mind seeing things that weren’t there in the darkness.
But from the fixture on the front porch, there was a gleam of light near the room where he’d found the beautiful, gutsy woman about to deliver the prettiest little girl he’d ever seen.
He blinked, his dazed mind telling him, belatedly, that it was okay to blink now. It had been the hardest thing he’d ever done, not to blink when Mr. E and his men had shone a bright flashlight down on him at the bottom of the gully. He’d forced himself to keep his eyes open, trying to approximate the blank stare of dead eyes, praying that they wouldn’t come down the slope, that his eyes and the twisted, awkward position of his body bent painfully back against the boulder would convince them he was already dead or close enough to it.
He hadn’t been sure they weren’t right, had been almost afraid to try to move when they’d laughed and gone, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to.
But he had. And somehow, he’d gotten here. The sight galvanized him, and he got his feet under him and staggered forward. He was going to get it done, the one thing that had driven him. He had to last long enough to tell her what he knew. It seemed an unfair burden to drop on a woman still recovering from childbirth, but the memory of her quiet courage that night, the steely determination he’d seen in her dark eyes, was the prod that had kept him going; she would do what had to be done, he told himself with every pain-wracked step.
He collapsed in a heap in the shadows beneath her bedroom window.
With a smile, Ana accepted the hugs of the children and the gift they had picked out for Maria. As Jewel led them off to bed, Ana walked down to the family room where a light was on. Nicole was on the couch, fast asleep, the controller for the video game still in one hand. Ana frowned; she had not realized this was what the girl would be doing. She had had an image in her mind of Nicole playing with Maria, as she often did during the day, the girl smiling as her baby cooed. It was the only thing that had enabled her to leave at all.
But perhaps she had only begun to play the game after she put Maria to bed, Ana thought, not wanting to jump to harsh conclusions. She gently took the controller, studied the unfamiliar buttons for a moment until she found the way to turn it off. Then she shut off the television.
Rather than wake Nicole, she took a throw from the back of an adjacent chair and spread it over the sleeping girl. She was good-hearted, surely s
he would have taken good care of Maria. And she had spoken often of taking care of her little sisters before their parents had tragically been killed.
Still, Ana had to check on her baby right now.
She turned and walked back toward the front of the house. All was quiet there now. She could hear Jewel speaking softly to the young ones, who had apparently followed her instructions in record time, no doubt to make sure they got their selected treats tomorrow. The house went silent so quickly Ana was amazed.
She heard Jewel’s footsteps as she went toward her own rooms on the other side of the house. Hoping Jewel would get some real sleep tonight, Ana headed down the hall and stepped into her own room, leaving the light off so as not to wake Maria. She tried hard to keep the baby quiet at night, for Jewel’s sake.
She started across the room toward the crib. Her anxiety had lessened now that she was back and all was apparently well. But she still wanted to see her baby. She walked carefully; her rubber-soled sandals tended to squeak on the tile floor, and she didn’t want—
The quiet groan from just outside stopped her in her tracks. She barely stifled a scream. Only the realization that whatever it was sounded like it was in great pain allowed her to keep from shrieking the roof down.
The fact that she could not be sure what it was she had heard calmed her instinctive fright a little. The sound had been so muffled, so muted it could have been anything, any kind of animal. That it had come from outside her window was unsettling, but not necessarily terrifying. She thought of calling for help, but the only other adult in the house was Jewel. She couldn’t bear to disturb her when she was getting so little sleep anyway, not without knowing what was wrong.
She tiptoed toward the window, keeping carefully to the shadows, thankful she had not turned on the light to betray her presence. The big, comfortable rocking chair, a gift from Jewel, was in front of the window. She stepped around it, thinking that if anything—or anyone—tried to break the window and come in, getting tangled up in that moving chair would give her enough time to grab Maria and make an escape.
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