Whitewater (Rachel Hatch Book 6)

by L T Ryan

  What's mine is yours. Take the hat. Let it watch over you in the times I am not there. But keep it tight, because I'll be there in its shadow keeping that light out of your eye. I'll be watching on from above and when your mother and I feel it is time, we will call you forth on the voice of an angel. It will sound of your mother's dovelike voice and you will hear it rush your ear riding in on the gust of wind I send. It will swoop off your hat, no matter how tight you pull it that day. Its removal will strip away the dark shadow cloaking your every step since your fourth birthday. The light you are bathed in will call you home to your mother and me, who'll be waiting with open arms to give you the peace in death that I could not give you in life.

  After Maria came into his life, Machado often thought about saying similar things to her but had not found the words. Machado's father had been a boisterous man who never seemed to be at a loss for words. Not a speaking man, Machado set out to write his feelings down. He'd secretly taught himself to write, practicing each night after Maria went to sleep.

  Machado was a perfectionist in all matters of his life. The letter he challenged himself to write was no different. It was also the only letter Machado had written or ever planned to write. He had finished before his last trip and it rested atop the pile of cash lining the wall of his pantry. The letter waited patiently, for Maria knew she was not to go into the pantry unless he was dead. She asked him how she would know whether he was dead. He answered with a number. “Two.” If Machado had not returned home within two days of his expected arrival, she was to immediately go to the wall behind the pantry.

  She never looked to see what was behind the false wall. Machado had a thin piece of fishing wire hooked to the inside and in all the years she'd lived with him, Maria never looked inside.

  Machado had grown weary of it all in recent years, but in his profession, retirement came in only one of two ways. Instant death, or a long, painful one. Machado had delivered both in equal measure over his years of service.

  Machado knew well enough that he would probably never be able to enjoy a proper retirement but the money, nonetheless, accumulated to a sizeable rainy-day fund. And for Maria, his little flower, the three-hundred-thousand dollars resting underneath the letter would surely be sufficient to give her a bright future, should his life abruptly end.

  She, of course, did not know any of that. She only knew that there was money if she needed it when he didn't return. He always wondered what her face would look like when she opened that pantry, knowing he would never get to see it.

  Machado sat across from Maria as she delicately picked at her food. She looked at him and did not see what everybody else saw. To Maria, her father's tattered and sun-beaten suit, worn by Machado every time he stepped out to do his employer's business, didn't signify the coming of the Reaper's scythe. To the teenager across from him, Machado wore the wide-brimmed hat and suit of matching color to honor the man he loved most, in the hopes his father was indeed looking down on him from above and would one day keep his word, calling Machado home when his path had run its course.

  And the item he revered above all others was the same one that had caused men to defecate themselves upon seeing it. Men died before intended, their hearts seizing at hearing its rattle. The snakeskin belt strapped to his wrist was the ungiven gift his father had planned to surprise him with on his ninth birthday.

  Machado had never told his father he knew the secret, having caught sight of him working on it in the shed behind their home one night, the same night a murderous thief killed his parents in front of him. The masked killer took the turquoise bolo tie before the sound of a neighbor dragging a metal trash bin spooked him. The thief grabbed a shoebox set aside on the nightstand before disappearing into the night through the window he'd first entered. Machado's snake belt was in that box.

  Machado spent three more hours inside that closet staring unmoved at the horror, unable to do more than breathe and blink. His eyes went back and forth from his dead parents to the open window. He imagined the slow breeze fluttering was the souls of his parents looking out the window and ensuring the bad man would not return. When the wind subsided altogether, Machado imagined their souls had deemed it safe, and he exited.

  Machado spent his ninth birthday making his wish come true. He’d paid a man money he found in the back of a false door in the back of his father's dresser. It’s where Machado got the idea for the one in his pantry now. The amount of money in the Machados’ dresser enabled the young Machado to hire a man to do what he was too small and weak to do himself.

  He sought the help of the local cobbler, who also doubled as a hitman hired to do the cartel's dirty work. Machado paid the assassin half up front with the demand that, upon finding the thief who'd murdered his parents, he'd wait to kill him until he could be there to watch.

  On Machado's ninth birthday, he held a private party. Only three people were in attendance. The boy, the cobbler, and the thief. Machado stood over the man bound to a table and gagged with the same red bandana he'd worn the night he’d killed Machado’s parents. He continued to look, refusing to let his eyes blink just like that night in the pantry, and watched as the beady eyes of the person responsible for robbing him emptied of life. Machado took back what was his, both the turquoise bolo tie and the snakeskin belt.

  The cobbler and his wife were unable to bear a child, so he offered the boy an opportunity to live with them. Machado accepted and, as time went by, Machado took an apprenticeship at his adoptive father's shoe repair shop. Machado proved himself a capable cobbler but found his true calling in the second profession to which he also apprenticed. His first contract came at the age of twelve. The list had grown through the years and he had long since stopped counting. In the criminal underworld he was revered as the Boogeyman.

  Maria saw through all of that, because she was the only person Machado had shared that with. And so she was the only person who saw him for the boy he used to be and not the killer he had become.

  Machado's chance encounter of meeting Maria had been a unique twist of fate, a crossroads of sorts. He'd been assigned to kill the girl's parents. They were low-level drug dealers who worked for Mr. Fuentes, but they had shorted him five-thousand-dollars on a transaction. Machado's expertise was sought to ensure the message would be clearly received by anybody else. Machado had a particular gift in sending those type of messages.

  On the day he'd planned to handle the task, Machado had arrived early to do his reconnaissance, but was dismayed to learn he arrived too late. A team of Fuerzas Especiales, or FES, were Special Forces like that of the United States Navy's elite SEALs, were already walking out. Maria's parents had been killed during the raid.

  The girl was never part of the contract, and so was not a target. He was preparing to leave when he saw her drift away from one of the military men absently guarding her. Maria's face was dotted with her parent's blood. She looked--as Machado had when first walking out of the pantry--shell-shocked and lost. She wandered away from the military man and he did not even notice. Machado did as was done for him when the cobbler opened his door to him.

  In the five years of living, Machado prayed each night that Maria had accumulated enough positive to erase the horror of that day. In exchange, she had done the same for him.

  He pushed his plate aside and took a sip of dark roast coffee. Dealing in death meant that Jose Machado was aware of his own mortality and thought of it often. It never bothered him before. He had always assumed that the bullet of another would find him someday. He'd killed too many people to think otherwise. He hoped it would be a quick death. Machado had been at the hand of too many long ones to wish the same end for himself.

  "Maria, you know where I keep it and you know what to do if I don't come back."

  His phone vibrated before she could offer a roll of her eyes which usually accompanied this conversation. She disliked talking about death and avoided it at all costs. Jose found that to be one of the things he loved about her.

/>   The call came from the only number who knew it.

  Hector Fuentes' right-hand-man, Juan Carlos Moreno was on the other end of the phone. In the brevity that only he could offer, he had explained that Rafael Fuentes had attempted to kill his father. And then Moreno had killed Rafael. Moreno went on to explain the bulletproof vest Hector Fuentes wore deflected but did not completely stop the blade. Then the call quickly switched to the business at hand.

  "I am indisposed outside of Rancho San Rafael cleaning up a bit of unpleasantness. Mr. Fuentes would like you to handle him? I'll send you their location. You might want to get moving. They're only thirty miles from your location but moving quickly and looks like they're heading for the river as we speak."

  "And how would you like this handled?"

  "Dead. All of them."

  "Consider it done."

  The phone clicked off. Machado took one last look at himself through the brown of Maria's eyes, seeing himself once more as the boy he was and not the killer he'd become. "I must go."

  "But papa, you just got here."

  "I know." He looked at the pantry with the money and back at the girl. "Two days."

  "Two days." She repeated through a forced smile.

  He stood up from the table and walked back to the coatrack, grabbing his wide-brimmed black hat and walking out into the sunlight to march, once more, to the orders of the devil.

  Thirty-Seven

  The clotted blood clung to the gauze and angrily protested as Hatch adjusted the dressing on her left hand. Angela had Ayala's first aid kit ready to go the minute Hatch dove inside Ayala's beloved clunker.

  The teen, relying on a health class from high school, had done a great job patching her up with the limited supplies on hand. Angela cleaned the headwound from the pistol whipping and, using some medical glue, she sealed it enough so the blood no longer rolled down Hatch’s face. Her left hand was in bad shape.

  Hatch knew why Moreno had chosen the left, instead of her right, to dig around inside the web of her hand with the long black fire poker. It was her shooting hand. Few knew it had not always been that way. The blast that ripped Hatch to shreds and gifted her right arm the wicked branching of scar tissue served as reminder. She made the compensation in a failed effort to remain in service to her team after tragedy struck.

  In effect, Moreno's fire poker had only rendered one of her two dominant hands lame. She shifted the butt of the pistol to the right side.

  Wind, following the contours of the bullet-riddled Nissan, whistled loudly in the hole where Ayala's rear windshield used to be while he muscled the accelerator pedal with the bottom of his boot as they raced to the location on his phone’s GPS. He was using the address provided by his contact, the man who'd be meeting them and ferrying them the rest of the way to the crossing.

  Ernesto Cruz was Ayala's most trusted friend and confidant. When it came to keeping alive, Ayala trusted one man above all others. Hatch had already heard the story of how Ayala had first come to know Arturo Sanchez, the former special forces operator who protected him during the fatal drug raid that left two parents dead and their flower-drawing daughter missing.

  Hatch knew of the Fuerzas Especiales, Mexico's elite military unit with a specialty in maritime operations. She had had no direct experience with them during her time in the special operations community. Most of what she learned came by way of Alden Cruise, her former SEAL boyfriend, who spent several months in a water survival school with several of his Mexican counterparts.

  Hatch remembered Cruise talking about his experience, but beside their involvement in Operation Black Swan, where they recaptured Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman after his second escape from a Mexican federal prison, the only details she could recall now was how that unit got its nickname. The Fuerzas Especiales were more commonly known as the FES, coined after their unit's moto. Fuerza, Espíritu, Sabiduría. Strength, Spirit, Wisdom.

  Those same three words described what was needed of all of them if they were to survive these dire circumstances. This was something Ayala said Arturo Sanchez had in droves. And this would be the man leading them down the snaking path of the river.

  His combat skill was beyond reproach, but it was Sanchez's familiarity with Mexico's waterways, and his proficiency in navigating twists and turns of the Rio Grande, snaking its way across northern Mexico that would make all the difference in their escape attempt.

  Sanchez took to the water shortly after the shooting of Maria's drug dealing father and the unfortunate death of her mother. He found peace in the ranging rapids of the river and became a whitewater rafting guide. It wasn't long before Sanchez heeded the call to serve again, this time taking a different approach to it however.

  Ayala explained to Hatch that Sanchez hung his gun up after killing Maria's mother, vowing to never kill again. When Ayala reconnected with Sanchez years after the shooting, he told the military man about the work he was doing in freeing those enslaved and trafficked by the cartel. Sanchez used the snaked path of the river to transport victims to safety. And in cases such as Hatch and Angela's, finding a way across the border.

  Ayala pulled off the road and made his own path through the dirt and weeds until the Nissan could go no further. Thirty feet from the riverbank, Ayala parked and shut the motor off. He looked at the red pushpin on his cellphone's mapping system. He was in the right spot. But there was no Sanchez. And no boat.

  The trio left the car and Hatch scanned the perimeter. The only sound was that of the river. A white Lincoln town car skittered past too quickly for Hatch to get a view of the man driving, but took comfort in the fact she could see, in the passing blur, that he was alone.

  Experience taught Hatch the reward of patience. She applied it in the silent vigilance as she watched the Lincoln whiz by and continued watching the direction it travelled for several minutes after it disappeared around a bend in the road, shrouded by a cluster of rocks and trees.

  Hatch didn't look away until the car vanished from sight. The reward of her diligence came in the red glow of the Lincoln brake lights illuminating. The car didn't stop, only tapping its brakes one time. Her hand instinctively hovering by the Glock tucked at the small of her back, Hatch waited until she felt the threat pass.

  Ayala sighed and uneasily rubbed at the moist air accumulating on his brown arms. Hatch could see the strain on the reporter's face. "It's a river, not a road. I'm sure your guy will be here. If not, we drive."

  "Driving would be more treacherous. Every passing car or truck has the potential to be loaded with the cartel's killers. Too dangerous. It's for this reason, we use the waterways whenever possible."

  "Okay, then we wait until we can't." Hatch saw that Ayala was still coiled tight as a barrack mattress. "If it's not that, what's eating at you?"

  "Goodbyes."

  "We're a long way off from goodbyes. We still have to get down the river to the crossing."

  "You. Not we." Ayala turned and, even against the obnoxious yellow of his Hawaiian pineapples peeking their way out from behind his fishing vest, looked blue. His sad aura was conveyed in the deep brown of his eyes. "I will not be making the rest of the journey with you."

  "I don't understand."

  Angela offered no response, verbal or otherwise, at Ayala's declaration. Hatch saw the lack of surprise in the teen. She assessed that Ayala must've already explained this to her in the interim while Hatch was having her less-than-pleasurable chat with Moreno.

  "I should have told you my story when you so bravely shared yours. It's something I regret and something I hope to reconcile someday. Now, however, is not that day. All I'll say for brevity's sake, is that my mother died in that water many years ago. I've never set foot in it since. Look at me." Ayala held his hands out in front him. "Look at how I'm shaking just being around it."

  Hatch did look and could see the tremors shaking his body as if a giant plow pushed along his entire body, spreading seeds which bore the fruit of its labor in the goosebumps popping up along hi
s outstretched arms.

  "I understand."

  Ayala stopped shaking almost immediately. "I thought you were going to give me another pep talk. Like the one you gave me on the rooftop."

  "The time for pep talks has long passed. Aside from that, I understand because I know the debilitating effects of fear."

  "I don't see it. That's because the worst scars, the ones that never truly heal, are always the invisible ones." Ayala's eyes drifted to Hatch's right arm and the damage it spoke of, written in the pale twisted vine extending the entirety of it. "If what you say is true, I can't imagine the ones I can't see."

  "You don't want to." Upstream, the red nose of a raft appeared.

  In the rear of the sun-faded raft sat a ruggedly handsome man. His bronzed nut-brown skin shimmered in the late afternoon light. The setting sun's beams played with the water droplets in the air, casting him in a hazy glow, making Arturo Sanchez appear as though Hatch was looking at him through the smudged lens of an 80's Glamour Shot camera.

  He navigated the raft to the rocky riverbank with a look of confidence matching the resume Ayala had heralded during their race to the river. The race now over, and Ayala's task of getting them there complete, it was time for Hatch to say goodbye.

  "I'd like to see your smiling face walk through my doors at Cafe Rosa someday, and you and I can reminisce on the good we've done. And talk of the crack that we put in that boulder."

  "Next time we talk again, I hope we don't just put a crack in it, I hope we've split the damn thing in half."

  "I'd like that."

  "Me too." Hatch hugged the man, favoring her damaged left hand while doing so.

  Ayala faced his fear, or at least a portion of it, by walking between the two women he'd saved, as they made their way the last few feet.

  The reporter turned human rights activist stopped dead in his tracks at the first wet rock, as if the water soaking its smooth surface was a forcefield barring further passage. And that is where he stood as Hatch looked upon the man who had risked everything to help a woman he didn't know find a girl he'd never met. A purity resonated in the kindness this man had shown.