by Rick Mofina
When they were alone again, Cora, overwhelmed by the polygraph and Galviera’s call, contended with her emotions. Gannon put his arm around her. For twenty years she’d lived with the burden of believing she’d murdered a man and destroyed so many lives.
“I’m so sorry for everything, Jack.”
“Now you know the truth-you never killed anyone. You did the opposite, Cora. You gave comfort to a dying man. The San Francisco guys didn’t charge you, or arrest you. That’s a good sign. You can’t rewrite all the mistakes you made in your life-no one can.”
She nodded.
“All this time, I believed I was being punished for my sins, and maybe I was. But it’s strange how once I told everyone what I’d done, Lyle’s call came, like a karmic connection. Maybe now I’m closer to getting Tilly back than we’ve ever been.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“I feel it, Jack. It’s what Lyle said to me on the phone. His exact words were, ‘I’m going to see Tilly soon.’ I think it means he knows where she is.”
“Maybe not.” Hackett had returned and had been listening.
“Why not?” Cora asked.
“It could mean the cartel is luring Galviera with the promise of seeing Tilly. And there’s another key consideration.”
“What’s that?” Gannon asked.
“The cartel may also know that you were present when Eduardo Zartosa was murdered in San Francisco. If so, they may be planning to exact revenge. It’s what they do.”
Cora swallowed hard.
The security cameras at the FirstRate Gas Station had recorded Lyle Galviera in a ball cap and dark glasses, buying gas. They’d also captured clear pictures of the Arizona license plate on his Cherokee.
Within an hour those pictures were circulated in citywide and statewide alerts to all police and media. Within two hours, the FBI held another news briefing. They asked the public to help locate Galviera, or his vehicle, or the other suspects, to aid in the investigation of Tilly Martin’s kidnapping.
The appeal yielded few solid tips.
As the day gave in to the evening, Cora and Gannon returned to her home in Mesa Mirage, where she made a short statement to the news crews waiting in her driveway.
“I’m praying we’ll bring Tilly home and I beg anyone with any information to call police. Please.”
Exhausted, Cora went to Tilly’s room. She held a stuffed polar bear in her arms, looked out the window to the stars and asked God for mercy.
Tilly, I love you. Wherever you are, Mommy loves you.
57
Somewhere in Metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona
P it-a-pat pit-a-pat pit-a-pat.
Stones tapped and popped against the car’s undercarriage.
Where are they taking me? We’ve been driving for hours.
Tilly had a bad feeling with the new kidnapper, the younger guy. The way he stared at her had creeped her out. All the more reason for her to keep trying everything she could to get away from her monsters.
With a few deep breaths, she’d gathered the strength to resume working on her bindings. Her captors had paid no attention to them. The tape was still secure but she had been loosening it.
Again Tilly twisted her aching wrists against the tape until they were numb.
The car slowed, then stopped.
Weight shifted and doors opened, followed by low talking. Then she heard the rattle, clank and shuffle as they began unloading the car and carrying items away. Tilly was overwhelmed with a sense of finality.
What’s going to happen? What’re they going to do to me?
Footsteps approached. A key was inserted in the trunk and it opened to the night and something moved swiftly toward her, leaving her no time to react as her head was swallowed by a sack.
Hands lifted her from the trunk, her feet found the ground. Dirt, sand and small stones bumped under her sneakers. She sensed the still air of a vast, remote place before she was escorted like a blind person to another location.
They had not gone far when they stopped.
“Step up,” one of the creeps said.
Tilly raised her foot, feeling a step, then she found a smooth floor as they entered a structure. She was overwhelmed by the smell. It took her back to a school trip to ghost towns near Casa Grande. The decaying buildings were filled with birds’ nests. The walls were layered with “sun-cooked bird shit,” as Dylan Fuller had called it.
Now as they moved along, Tilly listened for anyone else who might be inside, anyone who could help her.
She heard nothing but creaking, dripping and the echoes of her own shuffling as they entered another area. Here Tilly sensed a dim light through the bottom of her hood as it was pulled from her head.
Standing there, she took stock of the room. It was as large as her classroom but illuminated by a naked bulb hanging like a noose from a pipe and wired to a car battery. The light created ominous shadows, for the room was abandoned, neglected. Paint peeled in sheets as if the walls were diseased. Tiles had fallen from the ceiling. At one end she saw a series of huge pipes horseshoed from the floor for about three feet before bending back into the floor like upside-down U’s as high as Tilly’s waist.
A mattress was pushed near one of the big upside-down U’s.
Tilly saw a chain.
Handcuffs.
The creep Alfredo nudged her closer. He wrapped the chain around one of the pipes, looped one handcuff around the chain, clamped the other on Tilly’s wrist, then snapped it shut on her.
The steel click destroyed the speck of hope she’d nurtured by loosening the tape.
Alfredo said nothing and removed her gag.
Before he left, he nudged the toe of his boot against a plastic bag. Tilly saw bottled water, potato chips, pastries, an apple and what looked like a sandwich.
Standing there, awaiting her fate, she felt the onset of tears but forced herself not to cry.
She could hear her captors in the next area, their low voices echoing as they talked quickly in Spanish with each other. She heard the digital chirp of a keypad and guessed one was making a call on a cell phone.
This was it.
Tilly sensed that whatever they were going to do to her, they would do it here.
She was so scared.
As she prayed, she looked to her left through the room’s only window well. It had no glass or frame. It was a low-set, large square opening to the vast night. On the horizon, Tilly saw a few small lights, twinkling like a distant shore, and wondered what they were connected to.
A house? With people living a normal life and children happy and safe in their beds, while she was imprisoned here waiting for whatever was to come.
Did anyone know she was here?
Was anyone rushing to save her?
Why was this happening? Why?
Furious, she yanked against her handcuff, rattling her chain against the pipe, causing a loud clanking of metal rings against metal.
Tilly looked at the pipe, at its upside-down U shape. It was about as big in circumference as a soda can, with a bigger circular collar at each end. In the middle it had several rings, each about three inches wide, that slid along the main pipe like bracelets.
Tilly focused on them.
One bracelet was out of alignment.
It seemed slanted.
Did she do that by jerking the chain?
Tilly slid the bracelets away from the slanted one. Then she slid the slanted one to reveal a clear two-inch gap in the pipe. A section had been removed, but the bracelet ring had covered the gap.
Alfredo never checked! The stupid creeps missed this!
Tilly’s heart raced.
Would the chain fit? She looked around-no one was near. Quietly and carefully she slid the chain through the gap.
Yes! Oh my God! Oh my God!
Then with the utmost care she threaded the chain from her handcuff. She let out her breath slowly. All that was fastened to her now was the one handcuff on her wrist. Its open mate d
angled from it and she held it to keep it from clinking.
She walked softly to the edge of the room, peered around the entrance carefully and saw a large warehouse area where her captors were at a table eating, surrounded by their luggage and equipment.
In the opposite direction, she saw a darkened hallway.
She moved slowly down the hallway until she came to another open doorway and night air.
And just like that she was outside under the stars.
Free.
In an instant she searched for her bearings, for any sign of civilization or help in the vast darkness surrounding her. She scanned every direction until she found the small lights blinking in the distance.
There!
Tilly ran toward them as fast as she could.
Blood pounding in her ears, her heart nearly bursting, she wanted to cry and scream at the same time as she ran for her life.
58
Lago de Rosas, Mexico
The phone in the priest’s rectory was an old wall-mounted touch-tone.
Father Francisco Ortero was folding his laundered shirts when it rang. He went to the kitchen and answered it.
“Is this Ortero, the priest who hears confessions in Lago de Rosas?”
The young male voice was familiar.
“Sí,” Ortero said.
“This is the sicario you promised to help.”
Several icy seconds of silence passed.
“I told you I would be calling, Father. You remember our discussion?”
“Yes.” Ortero adjusted his grip on the handset.
“And my proposal?”
“Yes.”
“I am about to finish my last job.”
“Don’t go through with it. Surrender, I beg you.”
“Listen to me. You made a promise in the confessional to help me.”
“You must stop.”
“Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”
Ortero thought of all the funerals of the innocents murdered by narcotraficantes that he had officiated; how the bloodshed had challenged his faith.
How much suffering does God allow?
“Father? Have you arranged for a journalist you trust to tell my story?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Take note of this information.”
The sicario gave the priest the time and the location near Phoenix, Arizona, where the journalist was to meet him tomorrow, confirming what the priest had suspected.
“Please, surrender. Police everywhere are looking for you and the others. Your faces are on all the news channels. Surrender!”
“It does not matter now. I am nearly finished.”
“Please, I beg you, no more killing. Surrender now and atone.”
“This is how it must happen. This is how it will happen.”
The priest was disgusted with himself. He was aiding a sicario. He squeezed the handset as revulsion and fear coiled within him. What he was doing was akin to the devil’s bidding.
“I am considering sending police,” Ortero said.
“You would break the seal of the confessional?”
“What if it did not matter? What if I stopped being a priest to stop the killing?”
“If you send police, I will kill the girl before their eyes in the most memorable way you could ever imagine.”
“I beg you to surrender.”
“The girl’s life is in your hands, priest. Your betrayal would result in her death. I have killed nearly two hundred people. Do you think I would hesitate to kill her? Do you want to gamble her life with an executioner of my stature?”
“Do you want to gamble with eternal damnation?”
“That is exactly what I’m doing,” the sicario said. “I know my days are numbered. Either way I am damned. This is my last chance at a new life. Send the reporter, or the girl will die. Wait. You anger me, Father. Maybe she will die anyway. Consider this your only hope to save her.”
The line went dead.
Shaking, Ortero fell back to the wall, sliding down to the floor.
What have I set in motion?
59
Near Phoenix, Arizona
Angel dragged the back of his hand across his mouth to contend with his mounting tension.
Could he trust the priest?
It didn’t matter. Angel knew that the cartel was going to kill him when this job was finished.
That he had enacted his survival plan gave him a measure of relief as he walked across the abandoned hangar, focusing on Limon-Rocha and Tecaza ready at the small table. They’d changed into their police uniforms and looked like real cops sitting there, listening to emergency scanners, checking their weapons, waiting for a green light.
“They’ve got an alert out for a license plate belonging to Galviera.” Limon-Rocha tilted his head to the scanners. “Nobody can find him. Maybe he did the smart thing and changed the plate, or his vehicle.”
“So, do we go now?” Tecaza asked.
“Did you secure the girl?” Angel asked him.
“Yes.”
Angel’s cell phone rang. It was Thirty.
“Are you set?”
“We’re ready.”
“I’ve just contacted him and set up the meeting. Do you have a detailed map?”
Angel snapped open the new fanfold map. With one hand, he spread it over one end of the table and pinpointed where Thirty directed them to go.
“He will be at that location in two hours.”
“We’ll leave now.”
“And bring the girl. Let him see she is alive. He’ll be cooperative if he thinks he is returning with her. Then you do your job and come home. Twenty-five will want to thank you personally.”
“Personally?”
“You know he thinks you are the best.”
Angel swallowed the lie, tapping the phone against his leg as he studied the map before making precise folds.
“It’s time,” he said to Tecaza. “Get the girl.”
Tecaza, keen to get back to Mexico, strode to the room where he’d chained Tilly to the pipe. A moment later, a stream of cursing filled the empty building as he ran back to the table and riffled through the equipment bag.
“She got away.”
Incredulous, Limon-Rocha and Angel ran to the room. After confirming what they’d been told, they’d returned to see Tecaza climbing the stairs to the roof, a small case slung over his shoulder.
“She could not have gone far,” Tecaza said. “Ruiz, get your night-vision goggles! Help me look for her!”
Both men had military-issue binoculars that enabled them to see human images in the dark by perceiving thermal radiation or body heat. On the roof, goggles pressing over their eyes, they scanned the empty, flat land surrounding the abandoned airfield. Limon-Rocha searched clockwise, while Tecaza, cursing the whole time, searched counterclockwise, finding nothing but a sea of black, the edges occasionally dotted by distant lights.
A tiny flicker of brilliant white shot by the rim of Tecaza’s lens.
He froze.
He moved back slowly until he found it again.
Then another tiny white light shot across his lens, then another.
Like minuscule white orbs rising and falling.
Then a larger one between them.
They were hands. The middle glowing orb was a face.
All several hundred yards away.
“That’s her!”
60
Greater Phoenix, Arizona
Tilly’s heart was bursting.
She was running on pure adrenaline. Each time she stumbled in the desert, her skin peeled and blood seeped from her cuts.
Don’t stop. You can’t stop. They’ll find you.
Her pulse pounding in her ears, she wanted to cry out-Please! Somebody help me! Please!-but she didn’t want to alert the creeps. Her hard breathing and soft whimpering pierced the night air.
In the distance behind her a motor revved. She looked back. Doors slammed,
headlights swept and began undulating, accelerating in her direction. At the edge of the lights’ reach, Tilly saw a cluster of buildings and ran toward them. They looked like run-down wooden garages with steel drums and crates of junk inside.
The car lights shot through the gaps between the boards of the buildings, making the ground glow as shadows rose.
Hide! Run! Hide!
The car churned dirt into dust that swirled in the headlights as Tecaza braked near the buildings.
“She’s here. Spread out.”
Limon-Rocha and Tecaza used their night-vision goggles to probe the buildings. Angel had a flashlight and searched the perimeter.
Tilly had found a gully surrounded by tall grass and shrubs and scrambled into it, laying flat on her stomach. She could hear them talking, glimpsed them searching the buildings. A flashlight beam raked the ground near her as a silhouette approached.
She held her breath.
No, please! No!
A cell phone rang and someone answered in Spanish but ended the call abruptly. The silhouette suddenly veered. At the same time one of the creeps near the buildings called out, “I see her!”
Oh no! Please, no!
It sounded like Alfredo, but his voice was lower, as if he’d turned from her. The others were with him. Tilly risked lifting her head and discerned three silhouettes near the idling car. By their posture, it appeared two of them were using binoculars.
“Where?” one of them asked.
“There, to the left.”
“That’s a coyote.”
“No, that’s her. She got away behind the buildings, let’s go.”
Doors slammed. The car roared off.
Tilly waited, got to her feet and ran toward the lights in the distance. She kept her eye on the car, way off to her left bounding over the vast field.
Keep running. Keep running.
Her side began aching, burning.
Tears blurred her vision but she saw a house ahead.
Please, somebody help me!
Far off to her left, the car changed direction, headlights turned toward her, the engine growling.