Carmen rethreaded her fingers and Minnie spotted the tremble in them as she moved, then they were hidden as she fisted her hands. Carmen gave a dry snort of derision. “What, were you stealing the boat to go get him?”
Minnie caught her breath at this accurate stab in the dark and Carmen’s eyes widened.
“My God, you were,” she breathed. She stared at Minnie, taking her measure. “Well, you’ve got guts,” she said at last. “I don’t know that I’d want to handle this boat on my own.”
“I watched Nick start the engine and I know how to use a stick shift in a car. I figured...use the engine all the way across....”
“And run out of fuel halfway, “ Carmen replied tartly. “This is a sailing boat. It’s supposed to be sailed. It’s just a tiny little six-stroke motor and a teaspoon’s worth of fuel.” Carmen ruffled her hair with one hand, her eyes narrowed. “No, you’d need to cast a short jib sail. Keep it simple—the spinnaker’s too much, though it’d be faster. Short-sheet the sail to keep it under control. It could be done. Although a second person would make a world of difference.” She refocused on Minnie. “So I’ll come with you.”
“What, are you kidding?” Minnie stood up.
“I’m drunk, but I’m not drunk enough to be stupid—”
“You were going to take on three guys you didn’t know, how stupid is that?”
Carmen’s eyes narrowed again. Into the hot silence between them came the silvery tinkle of a pulley slapping against metal, somewhere on the deck above them. Then Carmen gave a low laugh and the tension drained instantly. “Yeah, how stupid, huh? I gotta tell you, Minnie, for the last few weeks, I’ve been watching myself and wondering what the fuck I thought I was doing. I still can’t answer it. But I do know this, the idea of going back to Vistaria, to home, is really appealing. I don’t care what the troubles are there—I just want to go back to the places I know.” She shrugged. “Tell me if that, at least, makes sense?”
“Yes, it does. It really does,” Minnie confessed.
“So let’s go,” Carmen said, standing up.
“Now?”
“Why not? You got anything here to hang around for?”
Minnie thought about that. “I have more reasons to leave,” she confessed. She tapped the card on the table. “That’s one of them.”
Carmen looked at it. She started to smile slowly. “Holy cow, you were bullshitting those jerks. This dude here tried to put the pinch on you, didn’t he? You and your father, I’m guessing.”
“Something like that.”
“Then let’s get the fuck out of here, huh?”
“Wearing these?” Minnie said and touched her dress.
Carmen looked down at her own bright red satin and rhinestone creation and then up at Minnie and began to laugh. “Figure they’d notice us trying to blend in with the city folk on the Avenue of Nations?”
“They just might,” Minnie said with a smile.
“Let’s see what Nick has stashed away in the lockers. He’d stay out on the water all weekend at times, so I know he must have supplies here somewhere.” Carmen stepped past her, heading for the forward corridor where the bunks and lockers were and hesitated. “You don’t mind, do you? I mean, I can come, can’t I?”
She was asking. It was a rare gesture. Minnie had heard the ache in her voice when she had spoken of home and wanting to be back in places that she knew. So now she nodded. “I’d like you to come with me.”
Carmen’s smile was radiant and quite genuine. “Great.” She headed for the forward corridor. The boat rocked over the wake of a passing vessel and she put her hand against the bulkhead and her other to her temple.
“Why don’t I make coffee while you look?” Minnie offered. “Strong coffee.”
“Very strong,” Carmen agreed with a croak.
* * * * *
Two hours later, the last of the lights of Acapulco slipped below the horizon behind them, while the ghostly white jib and dark blue spinnaker pulled them through a treacle black sea. Minnie sat at the big wheel dressed in a pair of nylon overalls that smelled faintly of mold and more strongly of salt. She watched the compass and kept the boat pointing due west while Carmen climbed all over the sloping deck, adjusting ropes she called “sheets” and trimming the sails for better speed. Finally, Carmen climbed back into the cockpit next to Minnie and nodded her satisfaction, pulling the cable-knit sweater she wore away from her sweaty chest. “It’ll do until the wind changes.”
Minnie sipped the third cup of coffee Carmen had poured for her and put it back into the swinging cup holder. “You know, I’ve spent the last—well, forever, it seems like—trying to make someone listen to me about Duardo. Mostly Nick, but anyone at all would have done. No one was willing to do a damn thing. I never in a million years thought that the one person I’d end up talking into helping me would be you.”
“You’re a pretty queen-sized bitch yourself, honey,” Carmen said. “And just so we’re on the table with this, I’m not doing it for your Duardo.”
“You think he’s dead, just like everyone else.”
“You know it’s a long shot, don’t you?” Carmen said gently. “From what I heard about where he took the shot, even if he wasn’t dead when they pulled you off him, he’d have died not long after.”
“I can’t give up based on a percentage,” Minnie said. “Duardo was strong willed and had every reason to live—”
“You mean because he loved you?” Carmen interrupted.
“I wasn’t even thinking of me. Duardo had...energy. He loved life, he loved his work, his family. He had all these huge plans about the future. He just wouldn’t give up on that.”
“The bullet in his back might have been too much to argue with.”
“Maybe. But maybe not. I just have to know.” Minnie kept her eyes on the compass and the shining sea ahead of the boat.
“You have to know and I have to go. Well, maybe Grandma Karen was right, Minerva Benning. Maybe we are alike.”
“Just a little,” Minnie added quickly.
“Apenas muy un poco,” Carmen agreed. “Just a very little,” she translated.
Chapter Ten
Calli awoke to daylight and the unmusical call of seagulls outside the windows. She lay on her side, wrapped in Nick’s big arms, his leg resting on hers. A sense of peace and contentment settled over her and she sighed.
“Good morning,” Nick said softly.
“This is my country, Nick,” she said just as softly. “Your arms about me, your voice for me alone...that is all the home I will ever need.”
He kissed her cheek. “Mi esposa,” he said and she heard the happiness in his voice.
A rapid, heavy thudding sounded from the first floor and he groaned. “That’s the front door.”
“They’re back so soon?” Calli asked, dismayed. She had hoped for more time.
“I told them after noon or I’d have their balls.” He climbed from the bed and displayed taut buttocks, a wide back and stiffly held shoulders as he thrust his legs into jeans and pulled them up. The thudding continued. “It has to be something serious,” he told her, sounding apologetic.
“Of course it must and of course you must go,” Calli said, also easing down from the high bed. She saw her new negligee and gown on the stool at the foot of the bed and blinked. There didn’t seem to be a single detail Nick had overlooked in the frantic two days of preparation. She slipped them on.
“You don’t have to rouse yourself,” Nick assured her.
“For something so urgent they would risk your anger? I’m coming to hear it too.”
They both hurried down the stairs but at the foot of them, Nick waved her back behind the sliding doors of the formal lounge. “Wait until we know who it is.” He reached into the drawer of the antique secretary next to his hip and pulled out the loaded pistol always kept there. He moved to the door and stood not in front of it but to one side. “Who is it?” he called.
“Nick, it’s Josh Benning. For Christ’s sake,
let me in, will you?”
“Talk to me, Josh,” Nick called.
There was a silence from the other side of the door and Calli could almost hear the surprise in it. “For heaven’s....” came the mutter. “Is Calli still wearing your St. Christopher medallion?”
Nick smiled, opened the door and Joshua stepped in. He looked around, blinking in the cool dim light of the foyer. Calli moved out into the foyer so he could see her and he pushed his hand through his hair.
Minnie, she thought.
“Minnie’s gone,” Joshua said without preamble. “So’s Carmen.”
“Gone?” Nick asked sharply, pausing in the middle of putting the gun back on safety.
“As in disappeared. You know Carmen left the wedding early. Well, Minnie slipped off not long after you two got away. Their rooms haven’t been slept in.”
“Carmen’s a big girl,” Nick said, a resigned note in his voice.
“So is Minnie,” Josh agreed. He pushed his hand through his hair. “I would have left it at that. But....” He glanced Nick, measuring him. “Your boat is gone too.”
Calli sank on the bottom step, watching Nick. He slowly put the gun back in the drawer, thinking hard. “Which one?” he asked. “Which of them took the boat? And where is the other one?”
“Minnie had every reason to take it,” Joshua said, almost apologetically. “She was desperate to find that man of hers.”
Nick shook his head. “She’s not a sailor. Carmen is. But why? There was no reason for her to go back to Vistaria.”
“Except that for Carmen, it’s home,” Calli interjected.
Both men turned to look at her.
“She’s been away at college for...how long, Nick? Seven years or more? That day on the balcony, she blasted you for shuffling her off to college so quickly. Off to college and away from her father. It was a sore point with her. And you went and lost her country for her.”
Josh winced.
“I’m phrasing as she would phrase it,” Calli explained.
“I know,” Nick said softly. He was staring into middle-distance. Thinking hard. “If Carmen is on the boat, then where is Minnie?”
Josh pushed his hand through his hair. “I’ve looked in every place I could think of. I even walked through that fashion mall thing.” He shuddered. “But Minnie has been hanging around this house most of the time lately. She has to be somewhere unexpected.”
“She is,” Calli said, as the idea burst into her mind like a sun emerging from eclipse.
They both looked at her again and Nick was smiling.
“Where’s the most unlikely, unexpected place she could be right now?” Calli asked them.
Nick’s smile broadened. “On the boat with Carmen.”
“Are you crazy?” Joshua asked, looking from Calli to Nick.
“It’s so crazy it’s logical,” Nick said. “They both have reason to go back to Vistaria and Carmen is a good sailor. But it’s a two-man boat at the minimum. She couldn’t do it herself. She has to have help, even if it’s someone just competent enough to take the wheel while she trims the sails.”
Joshua shook his head. “Are you actually listening to what you’re saying? You’re telling me that two women who couldn’t stand to be in the same room—who clawed each other to bloody pulp less than a week ago—that they’ve got together and are sailing into Vistaria? A country so overrun with insurrectos and so ground down under their heel that not even refugees can find a way off it...they’re sailing into that?”
“Exactly,” Nick agreed, pushing his hands into his pockets. “We don’t know how they got together and agreed to do it, but it doesn’t matter. We do know they’re on the boat.” He glanced at the old grandfather clock across the hall. “Depending on how long they’ve been sailing and how tight Carmen trimmed the sails, they could already be on dry land.”
* * * * *
“Tell me again why we’re here?” Minnie whispered. She wriggled as the long dry grass under the tree tickled her nose. Each movement made her nylon suit crackle. “And why this isn’t the most stupid idea you’ve had this year?”
Carmen waved away a fly. “Because this is the last place you saw Duardo and because I know this place inside out. Upside down and backward.”
Minnie stared at the front of the Presidential Palace, her heart tripping along unhappily. There were soldiers everywhere. She knew they were soldiers because most of them carried submachine guns hanging from their shoulders, but there wasn’t too much in the way of uniforms to identify them.
She and Carmen lay in the long wild grasses at the southern edge of the palace grounds. Carmen had led Minnie through deserted side streets and back alleys to what had looked like a farmer’s field, complete with waist-high wire fence, leaning fence posts and a border of shade trees. There was a three-meter-wide opening in the fence and the dirt between the posts showed tire tracks. Something stirred in Minnie’s memory. “I think I’ve been here before,” she said.
“Possibly. Nick would have used this way if there were people at the front.”
Minnie frowned. She remembered a car. Vaguely. “God, I really wasn’t paying attention,” she muttered. “Why haven’t the insurrectos shut this opening up tight? It’s bad security.”
“They probably don’t even know about it. Very few people in my father’s government knew it was here. It was primarily Nick’s escape hole. From the palace, it looks like these trees back up onto vertical mountain.” She nodded toward the sheer rock face just across the road. “It probably hasn’t occurred to them to even investigate this section of the boundary.”
“Does that make them stupid or lazy?” Minnie muttered. “I’d have checked.”
“C’mon,” Carmen encouraged her, stepping through the opening. “And quiet. We’re really on enemy territory now.”
They’d worked their way to the edge of the shady trees and lain down in the grasses to observe the palace and the administrative building and the personnel walking between them. Minnie wrinkled her nose again. “There’s something different here too,” she said. “When we were here....” She nodded. “Yeah, they’ve taken away the covering over the path between the palace and the admin building.”
Carmen propped her chin on her hands and studied the buildings. “Son of a bitch, you’re right,” she said after a moment. “Why on earth take the roof away? That’s stupid! It’s either hot or raining...either way, it was useful.” She rolled over on her back, patently pissed.
“What’s wrong?” Minnie asked. “They messing with your house?”
“Yes!” It was a heartfelt growl.
“Just imagine what they’ve done with the rest of the country then.”
“I’m trying not to.” Carmen rolled her head to look at Minnie. “I just hope Nick makes his move real soon. Something’s got to be done. Did you see all the market stalls along the square when we went through?”
“There weren’t any stalls,” Minnie pointed out.
“That’s right. It’s a Friday morning. We should have had to elbow our way through the people in the square. I’d planned on picking up something hot to eat there and there wasn’t a single stall in sight.”
“Lots of men with machine guns, though,” Minnie pointed out.
Carmen sighed and rested her forearm over her eyes. “Yeah, lots of guns,” she murmured. “I’m going to sleep a bit. We’ll trade watches until it’s dark, ‘kay?”
For the rest of the day, they dozed and watched the movements of the men between the buildings. In the mid-afternoon when they were both awake, Minnie pointed to the front gates. “There’s been absolutely no one coming in or out of those gates, have you noticed? There’s armed guards, the gates are closed and even the street outside is empty.”
Carmen yawned. “They’re gripping too tightly,” she said. “Keeping themselves apart, controlling too hard. Serrano must be getting desperate. No other country will recognize him. He’s killing the economy here, making the money dry up, so he ca
n’t even buy himself recognition. No wonder the Mexican government approached Nick.”
At that latitude, darkness falls early, even in summer. Once it was fully dark and even though they were both dying to move, they stayed where they were and discussed their plan. “After midnight,” Carmen suggested. “They’ll be asleep or sleepy—even the guards. Less people wandering the grounds too.”
Minnie chewed at her lip. “I think it should be even later than that. Serrano and his men strike me as the sort that party hard in the evenings—booze, women, gambling. The closer to dawn the better. They’ll be bedded down with a woman or sleeping off their rum.”
“Neither of us have a watch. That could be tricky to judge,” Carmen pointed out. “Wait too long and we’re back to daylight.”
“So let’s keep count of the number of windows still lit on the second floor. That’s where all the bedrooms are, right?”
“Along the north wing. Sure.”
“When they’re all out, or most of them, we make a move.”
* * * * *
Minnie nudged Carmen awake with her elbow. “Every light but one is out,” she whispered. The dark and still night seemed to demand whispering and her adrenaline had been steadily building the last few hours. “It’s been at least a couple of hours now since I saw anyone moving anywhere. There’s just that one last light. No one’s cast a shadow across the window, though.”
Carmen rolled over and studied the shadowed building. “The external spotlights are still on. Suspicious bunch, aren’t they? Never mind, we can go around the back way. There’s an old coal chute...well, you’ll see.”
They carefully got to their feet, stretched and massaged away kinks and cramps. Carmen spent a few minutes feeling around the ground beneath the trees. She straightened up with a satisfied sound and put something in the pocket of her oversized jeans. Then she led Minnie back along the line of trees until they reached the sheer rock face that provided an unscalable defense at the back of the presidential grounds.
From there, they could see the back of the building with the wide, elegant terrace and the paved section where, once upon a time, rows of cars and a helicopter or two had stood waiting to be used.
Black Heart Page 12