When a soldier’s head appeared as he climbed up the stairs, Minnie nearly jumped out of her skin. She took a shuddering breath and kept walking, not looking at him. She was going to have to pass almost in front of him. God this was stupid, he would notice something. Her bare feet for a start—his eyes were right at that level.
She hurried her pace.
“¿Apenas un momento, señora?” the man called.
Sweat broke out on her temples. What would a normal person do?
She looked over her shoulder and gave him a big smile. “I can’t stop, I’m very late,” she called out in Spanish, trying hard to emulate Carmen’s accent and pronunciation. She glanced past his shoulder. There was another soldier coming up the stairs. This one carried a rifle. It was Soto, but his head was down watching the stairs as he climbed.
“Stop just for a moment!” the first soldier called back. Minnie hurried around the curving balcony. The south wing corridor was about twenty yards away and the little foyer was just inside it.
“Hey, I said stop!” He was shouting now. Soto would most certainly be alerted.
She stepped onto the carpet in the corridor and was almost running as she reached the glass doors onto the foyer. She could hear the tread of the soldier behind her, echoing on the terracotta tiles in the rotunda.
She pushed the doors inward and shoved her way through. She curled her hand around the haft of the knife in her pocket and with her other hand tugged at the knot of shirt tails at her waist, listening for the footfalls of the soldier to change as he reached carpet.
She ripped the last of the buttons undone and held still, her back to the swing doors.
“Lady, I said just a minute!” he exclaimed as he barreled through the doors behind her.
Minnie spun to face him, a bright, enquiring smile on her face, the shirt pulled aside to reveal her bare breasts. “Hi there!” she told him, walking right up to him.
He stared at her breasts, his eyes widening and his mouth shaping into an almost perfect “O”.
Time slowed down. Sound became muffled. Minnie could hear her heart beat loud in her mind and it was steady and calm.
She withdrew the knife from her pocket when she was a pace away and triggered the blade as she whipped it toward him. He seemed to move sluggishly. He began to lift his hand to fend her off but she slipped the knife past it, aiming for a point just below where she thought his ribs would end.
The knife slid into him with little resistance, right up to the hilt.
Time restored itself to normal speed. Minnie stared at him as he looked down at his stomach and up at her. He looked surprised. Then he crumpled to the floor and the knife was jerked out of him because Minnie still had her hand curled around the handle.
His green shirt turned brown as the blood soaked it.
The hot, coppery taste flooding her mouth made Minnie sick. Her stomach cramped and spasmed and she put her arm across her face. It was only the lack of food this morning that saved her from vomiting. Trembling almost violently, she leaned down and wiped the blade on the man’s trousers as best she could and tottered toward the other set of glass doors at the end of the foyer. The balcony lay beyond.
She fumbled to knot her shirt together as she went. The buttons were beyond her capabilities right now.
The doors didn’t give under her hands and she stared at the handles stupidly until she thought to try turning them. The catch gave way and one of the doors swung open. She slipped outside.
It was the first time she had tasted fresh air in nearly a week and she took deep lungful’s of it, feeling a touch of calm return. The sky was low overhead, black with menace. The air was thick and warm. A storm was building.
She forced herself to keep moving. Soto would not be far behind.
The wide balcony ran the length of the north wing, ending in the decorative open-weave brick wall that was as good as a ladder for climbing. She hurried toward it, glancing out over the balcony to the grounds below.
Then she stopped.
Duardo was walking toward the palace along the concrete path that connected the two buildings. He was about halfway between the two. Farther behind him but hurrying to catch up, was Torrez. There was something about the way he steadily stared at Duardo’s back that made Minnie’s neck prickle with almost painful intensity.
She went to the balustrade to watch. As she spread her still trembling hands on the smooth stone, Torrez swung his rifle over his shoulder and brought it up to aim at Zalaya’s back, just as thunder cracked almost directly overhead with a noise like an explosion.
Fright tore through Minnie, sharper and harder than any fear she had felt that morning. She heard the little squeak of the balcony door as Soto stepped through but ignored it. She knew what she had to do. She gripped the stone and took a deep breath.
“Duardo! Behind you!”
He looked up sharply and spotted her. She pointed to Torrez and he spun instantly, alerted.
Torrez fired as he spun, but Duardo’s spin had pulled him out of the line of fire. The bullet smashed into the palace itself. Minnie could hear the sour “zing” as it ricocheted.
Even as Torrez tried to re-cock the rifle Duardo dived at him, grabbing the rifle and jamming it across the white-haired man’s throat.
“Get your hands up, woman!” Soto yelled.
Minnie turned to face him, knowing time had run out for her. She was content, knowing she had helped Duardo. As she turned, she realized she still held the bloody knife in her hand.
Soto saw it too. His face hardened. “Oh no, you don’t,” he muttered and aimed the rifle.
“Hey, asshole!” came a woman’s voice in English.
Soto looked up and to his left, his eyes widening.
A gun fired and Minnie saw a black round spot appear on his forehead. His fingers squeezed the trigger of his rifle as he fell back and an invisible force rammed into Minnie’s upper arm and sent her staggering. She fell against the balustrade and her head knocked sharply on the stone. At once her thoughts scattered as dizziness swamped her. She fell to her knees and still the floor swayed and rolled beneath her. She toppled sideways and felt the cool tiles beneath her cheek. As she lay, she heard the rain begin to fall heavily, hissing and pattering.
Hands were on her, rolling her onto her back.
Nick’s voice, low and fast. “Hurry,” he commanded. “Her shout will have roused them.”
“Minnie?” It was Calli’s voice. “Where did the bullet get you?”
Minnie looked up, blinking and swallowing convulsively. “Calli?” She giggled. “You climb the balcony again?”
“It’s shock,” her father said and she felt a light touch on her arm. She rolled her head to look at him.
“Dad?” Of all the astonishing events in the last few seconds, this was the most bizarre. Her father’s face moved into the field of her vision.
“Yeah, hon, I’m here.” He looked up at someone. “Just a graze.”
“She hit her head on the balcony rail as she went down,” Nick’s voice came again. Minnie couldn’t see him.
The sound of boots running along the balcony came to her.
“No, no, no....” It was Duardo’s voice. Minnie saw Calli look up, her mouth opening.
Warm hands on her shoulders. “Minnie. Please, Minnie, God, look at me.”
“It just winged her arm,” Calli said gently.
Minnie rolled her head to find him. Duardo was looking at her, his face working. “You have to go,” she told him.
He reached up and tore the eye patch from his head, revealing his other perfectly good eye. “No, you don’t understand,” he said.
“You’re Duardo,” she told him. “But you have to get Téra—before word passes about who you really are.”
He looked around at the group of them hovering over her. “She’s right.”
“Téra is here?” It was Nick’s voice again, sharp with surprise. Minnie realized she could not see him because he stood guard over
all of them.
“Go,” she told Duardo.
He looked at Nick.
“Yes, go,” Nick said swiftly.
He nodded and slid the eye patch back into place. “Where?” he asked Nick.
“The grotto.”
“Forty-five minutes,” Duardo promised. He lifted himself up and moved away.
Minnie struggled to sit up and held her head as the world seemed to swim. But she got to watch Duardo stride down the length of the balcony, the limp miraculously gone, before Calli and her father helped her to her feet.
Nick shepherded them down the balcony. “Still no alert,” he said, sounding worried.
Giggles gripped Minnie again. “There wouldn’t be,” she said, laughing harder. “I took out their entire security communications system. The only way they can spread the word is by telephone or by mouth. There is nothing left to broadcast with.”
Nick grimaced. “No wonder it was so damn easy,” he muttered. “Let’s go. Back to the grotto.”
The grotto turned out to be a narrow valley in the foothills behind the palace, filled with shade trees and a deep, dark pool of water that rippled with raindrops. They were completely soaked, but Minnie was glad of the mud beneath her bare feet. She could not have made such good time in dry weather and Nick, Calli and her father were moving fast.
In the grotto Calli turned to her. “Sit down. I want to look at your arm.” She was studying Minnie’s eyes as she spoke.
“I think it was just a momentary dizziness,” Minnie told her. “I’m fine, though my arm throbs like crazy.” She lifted the sleeve of the shirt and checked out her arm with as much interest as Calli. The bullet had creased the skin, leaving a two-inch-long furrow across the muscle. The rain had rinsed it clean. It wasn’t bleeding anymore, though the shirt sleeve was pink with diluted blood.
“It needs stitches,” Calli said.
“Is that a first aid kit on your belt?” Minnie asked, pointing to the pouch at Calli’s hip. “Just slap a field dressing on it. I’m fine. We have a long way to go.”
Calli stared at her. “All right,” she said at last, reaching for the pouch.
“By the way, you look seriously cool in all black,” Minnie told her. “You should wear it more often.”
Calli grinned suddenly. “I’d prefer a black evening sheath rather than combat wear, but okay.”
“I still can’t believe the way you just appeared. I can’t believe you came at all,” Minnie said.
Calli applied the field dressing, a frown forming. “You’ve handed out a fistful of your own surprises, you know.”
Nick, who stood facing back the way they had come, waved with the hand that didn’t hold the pistol and Calli nodded. “Quiet,” she murmured.
Minnie nodded, though she had understood Nick’s signal anyway.
There was a soft, three-note whistle from somewhere off in the trees and Nick relaxed. He whistled back and turned to face them, holstering his gun.
He came over to Minnie and lifted her chin, looking into her eyes. “No concussion,” he judged. “Tell me what happened to Carmen.”
“She’s all right. She stayed hidden in the palace for three days, then she got a message out—I don’t know who to, but I suppose it must have been you as you’re here. Then she got out. They found where she had been hiding and they figured out who it must have been, but they never saw her. She’s somewhere on the island. Duardo will be able to tell you more. He was the one leading the search for her.”
Nick absorbed the news and she could see him turning it over, examining it. “Then she is out of my reach for now,” he said softly. His expression softened and warmed. “You did well, Minerva Benning.”
She felt a warm glow of pride. “Thank you.”
Nick grinned. “I think you’re the only one who got it figured out fast enough. It wasn’t until you screamed his name that we realized Zalaya was Duardo.”
“You didn’t know?” She felt her chest squeeze. “God, you were there to...to...”
“Kill him,” Nick said softly, his smile vanishing.
Duardo slipped into the grotto, moving with trained silence. Téra was with him, her face pale and her eyes wide. Nick hurried over to Duardo. “Any trouble?”
Duardo shook his head. “Not worthy of mentioning.”
Téra shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.
Duardo was looking around the grotto and Minnie knew he searched for her. He had taken off the eye patch, but the moustache was still too much Zalaya for her to go to him readily.
Nick beckoned them all. “Let’s go,” he called softly just as it began to rain again. “Silence until I say otherwise,” he added.
Their trail was long, circular and took all night, but no one pursued them. Nick had come from an unexpected direction—the west coast of the island. The grotto was the east end of a low, easy mountain pass trail. On the western end of the trail, tucked behind a disguising wall of hacked-off branches and leaves, was a rusty all-wheel-drive pick-up truck.
“Minnie and Téra in the cab with me,” Nick ordered. “Everyone else in the back.” He handed Duardo his rifle and shepherded Téra and Minnie into the cab and settled behind the wheel. Then he reached beneath the steering column, his fingers tangling in exposed wires there.
“You stole it?” she said softly.
“We rented the boat in Acapulco,” he said, “but the only Vistarian currency anyone has are checks and no one in Vejia would have accepted a check with Nicolás Escobedo’s name on it. So we borrowed it.” He smiled at her. “Brace yourself. This will be a wild ride.”
Téra’s hand slipped into Minnie’s and squeezed. Minnie looked at her as the truck started, backfired and settled into an uneven rhythm.
“He told me you were the one who insisted he come back and get me,” Téra said. Two big tears welled and slid down her face. “I will never forget that.”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” Minnie tried to explain.
“He could only think of you, but you remembered. It was like that,” Téra insisted.
* * * * *
Nick drove out of the mountains as fast as the truck could safely manage and used secondary roads and cart tracks to reach the coast road. On the coast road he pushed the truck to top speed, a bone-jarring eighty miles an hour, for there they were most vulnerable to being stopped and questioned. As they drove, the dark day turned to pitch black night and Nick flicked on the headlights only to curse softly as they feebly lit only a few yards of the road ahead.
He turned onto an unmarked, sandy trail that wound and turned for another couple of miles until it opened onto a white beach. He stopped the truck and turned it off. “Stay silent,” he warned Minnie and climbed from the cab. Minnie and Téra followed him as the three in the back jumped to the sand, all holding rifles of one type or another. Even her father was dressed in black.
She shivered.
Nick jogged down the beach, his pistol out, glancing from side to side, until he reached a pile of seaweed heaped upon rocks. He pulled the seaweed aside and slid an inflatable dinghy out. It had an outboard motor attached to the stern and Duardo silently helped him turn it and drag it down to the water.
Everyone climbed into the boat as soon as it was afloat. Duardo and Nick used the oars to paddle a hundred yards from the beach before they started the motor and steered the dinghy out to the boat somewhere on the black ocean.
* * * * *
Nick and Calli stayed on the deck, getting the boat under way. It was a sailboat, which astonished Minnie until she realized that a sailboat could slide through night waters in near silence and on the open sea, with the prevailing southerly winds, was just as fast as a motorboat.
They waved everyone else toward the cabin, already preoccupied with their task.
The air inside the little cabin was stuffy and warm after the breeze off the ocean, and the ceiling was too low overhead. The deck tilted as the boat began to move under sail and Minnie clutched at the
doorway. The tilting deck felt too much like the way the balcony had wavered that morning.
Téra glanced at Josh. “It is safe to speak now?” she asked in stilted English.
“Yes, I believe so,” Josh told her in Spanish.
She turned to Duardo, lifted her hand and cracked it across his face. “You pig! You sent me to that damn bordello to be raped! You let them do it! You even gave them drugs!”
Duardo rubbed his jaw. “It was distilled water, little sister.”
If anything, her eyes blazed with more fury. She planted her hands on her hips. “What, so I would be awake through every disgusting moment? I hate you! I spit on you!” Her Spanish disintegrated and grew too fast and too full of slang and swearing for Minnie to follow after that.
Nick climbed down into the cabin and took in the torrent of Spanish, hiding his smile. “Inventive,” he murmured.
Minnie sighed and reached out to touch Téra’s shoulder. “You would never have had a single customer,” she said.
“What?” Téra turned on her. “What do you mean?” she demanded.
Minnie nodded at Duardo who was watching her warily. “Straight after they marched you down to the bordello, Zalaya visited Rosa, the manager, and got her to spread the word. I heard two officers speaking about it just before I destroyed the monitors. Zalaya let it be known that he wanted you first and any man who touched you before he did would wake up to find his balls being sawn off with a rusty hacksaw.”
Téra blinked, absorbing this. Then she wrinkled her nose. “Eeyuuuwww, my own brother?” She spun and threw herself at Duardo, holding him tight. “I knew you weren’t dead. I knew it.”
Minnie slipped from the cabin, the air suddenly too stifling to bear. She climbed up to the deck and found Calli standing at the big wheel, the wind ruffling her blonde hair. There was a pair of pilot lights on either side of her, illuminating the little wheel deck. She looked quite comfortable behind the wheel.
“Oh don’t worry,” she told Minnie. “We’re running under a direct wind—no tacking. Nick will take over when we get to the tricky stuff.”
Black Heart Page 25