Borderline

by Nevada Barr

  The second car was another SUV; Anna could see the black boxy shape against the lighter gray of the desert floor as it left the main road and turned down the lane toward the Martinezes’. Unsure what to do, she watched. There was no way she could outrun a four-wheel drive. In the dark she couldn’t run far without doing herself and Helena serious damage. No cover but the hill fifty yards away and that would have to be climbed. Alone, able to grab and hold and crab on hands and knees, it wouldn’t have been much of a challenge. With Helena and the night, she wouldn’t make it up in the kind of time that was apparently left to her.

  Running was out; standing and fighting was a bad idea. So she waited for a sign. When the gas hog turned from the road and began grinding across the sand and scrub toward her, she decided that was it.

  “Wait!” She ran to the passenger side of Judith’s SUV, which was already rolling, wrenched open the door and hauled herself and the baby in by unauthorized usage of the seat belt.

  Judith spun the wheel and gunned the engine. Had they been on pavement there would have been an impressive squealing of tires. The SUV had a big turning radius but Judith bettered the factory stats by a few yards. She nearly stood the behemoth on two wheels as she powered it around till the nose was pointed in the direction of the lane. Anna thought she would angle toward the main road or head the opposite way, toward Freddy and Lisa’s, but she did neither. Aligning her headlights with those of the oncoming car, she floored it.

  Anna had never liked the game of chicken and she yelled words she knew were permanently scarring Helena’s tender psyche as they hurtled directly at the other car. Darden didn’t swerve. Neither did Judith. Anna’s cursing became one long moan of anticipation. Had she been on her own, or the car traveling more slowly, she would have opened the door and taken her chances diving into the nearest sotol bush.

  Judith might have been yelling, as well, but in the clash of lights and the knowledge of certain death, Anna didn’t hear her. Squeezing her eyes shut, she held tight to Helena, hoped Paul wouldn’t be too handsome in his widower’s weeds and prepared to die.

  “Whooeee!” Judith was laughing. Anna opened her eyes. Darden was bumping out through the rough at an angle and they had reached the road in one piece. “He blinked!” Judith shouted as if this was a high school game of dare after several six-packs of beer and she had just won it.

  “Don’t do that again,” Anna snarled.

  “Sorry,” Judith said, but laughter was bubbling beneath the word.

  “Don’t,” Anna repeated, her anger at the danger to Helena and herself heating the word from the inside.

  Judith looked over at her, her face limned with the faint illumination from the dashboard. “I am sorry,” she said, and this time there was no laughter. “I wouldn’t have done that with anyone but Darden. I knew he would break first. He always did.”

  Anna wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean and was too furious to pursue it. Nobody ever knew what anyone else would do, no matter what the existing pattern. Lives—especially hers—shouldn’t be bet on the outcome.

  They reached the paved road and Judith turned toward Study Butte.

  “No,” Anna said. “Left toward the porch. The chief ranger is there. He has his radio with him. He can call in whoever he needs to.”

  “Is Bernie armed?”

  The mayor was the first person Anna had heard refer to Bernard as “Bernie.” Perhaps they had gotten close during the excitement of the past few days.

  “No,” Anna said. “He may have his weapon in his car.”

  “Then it’s a bad idea. Look.” Judith’s eyes flashed blue-green as she glanced in the rearview mirror. Two headlights jolted back onto the road and began bearing down on them. “Darden never goes anywhere unarmed. That car is fully loaded: automatic rifles, a couple of handguns that I know of. Bolted to the back of the seat is a piece that looks right out of Desert Storm.”

  Long guns that could pick off river rafters—or newborns—from a canyon rim a thousand feet above.

  Terlingua looked too much like Okay Corral country for the image of public carnage not to take root in Anna’s imagination. A wide brick porch loaded with people out to have a good time, a crazed ex-military man with automatic weapons, blood spattering the graying wood: though it was hard to think Darden was crazy enough to reenact Rambo, the Evil Years, it wasn’t a chance Anna was willing to take.

  Judith was proving a good driver. As the SUV pushed closer she picked up speed and moved the ungainly vehicle around curves with surprising skill. Better than Anna could have done, she admitted to herself as she fastened her seat belt tight across her hips. Without a car seat, the baby would be dead if Judith ran into anything. Afraid trying to buckle her into the backseat in some fashion would be more dangerous, Anna held her and hoped for the best.

  Judith pulled onto Highway 170. She didn’t turn east into the park but west toward the tiny town of Lajitas. Darden started blowing his horn and flashing his lights.

  “Panther Junction,” Anna yelled.

  “Too far,” Judith said calmly. Considering they were being chased at high speed by a man believed to be a homicidal maniac, Anna couldn’t help being impressed by her control and alarmed by her detachment. “There’s a high-end hotel there,” Judith explained. “If we can reach it ahead of Darden, they can get their security to deal with him till the sheriff or posse or the cavalry arrives.”

  Lajitas was where Carmen and the merry band of rafters had put into the Rio Grande. That seemed so long ago, Anna wondered if Cyril and Chrissie and Steve had children of their own by now, if the river had changed course, if the rockslide had eroded down to a riffle of pebbles in a sedate stream.

  A sidelong reading of the speedometer told Anna they were nearing a hundred miles per hour. Doable on the straight roads of Texas, where there was lots of visibility. “If we’re lucky Darden’s flashing and beeping will catch somebody’s attention and we’ll get pulled over.”

  “There’s never a cop when you need one,” Judith said. The relieved laughter that had followed the game of chicken was gone, but on a level Anna didn’t want to dwell given her situation, the mayor seemed to be having a vicious kind of fun.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Darden’s lights flared closer and he stood on the horn. Startled, Judith jerked the wheel and the SUV dropped two tires off the pavement onto the shoulder of the road. For a sickening instant Anna thought the ungainly vehicle was going to roll but Judith regained control. The close call seemed to have an effect on their pursuer. Darden stopped blowing his horn and dropped back until he was several car lengths behind.

  Anna’s pulse slowed slightly and she found she could think instead of merely react. “Why would Darden want to kill Helena?” she asked.

  Judith sighed. “My husband has a habit of getting women into trouble,” she said. “This time the woman showed up at the lodge nearly nine months pregnant and demanded to see Charles. She found me instead. Her name was Eleanor Cheevers; she’s the daughter of the ambassador from Argentina and an English engineer. Well-placed enough to know the damage her appearance would cause me. Ms. Cheevers wanted money; that’s what they all want. I set her up in the Lajitas spa—at my expense, of course—and the woman agreed to refrain from contacting Charles until we could come up with the cash. I was buying time. At least I thought I was. Darden is a final-solution kind of guy. He thought killing her and the baby and making it look like the accidental drowning of a poor Mexican woman would solve the problem. Nobody puts a lot of time into investigating that situation.

  “He had his goons take her down to the Rio Grande. They were supposed to kill her and let the body float downriver to give the elements a chance to destroy any forensic evidence and, if they were lucky, never be discovered at all.

  “Evidently Ms. Cheevers proved a handful. She got loose and the river took her. Darden followed from the canyon rim to make sure she didn’t get out of the water alive. When she got caught in the strainer and you
saved her, he decided he had to kill her. She died on her own but the baby would be DNA evidence that could hook him to the murder. After that things got out of control.

  “Darden was trying to help me. He is the most loyal person I’ve ever known. My success is more important to him, I sometimes think, than it is to me. He knew if I found out, I’d call the police, so he didn’t tell me.”

  As they cruised down the highway at a slightly less alarming speed, Anna digested that bit of information.

  “If all this mayhem was to cover up the fact he murdered several people, and wanted to murder Helena, going into a public place, guns blasting, would tend to be a little counterproductive,” Anna said.

  Judith pounded the steering wheel with such violence both Anna and Helena squeaked in alarm.

  “He’d do it because he’s gone crazy! You should have seen him up at the lodge after his two hired thugs failed to get the baby. They’re dead, did you know that?” she demanded.

  Anna didn’t bother to answer.

  “He told me. He said they’d called to get picked up because they had to ditch the car they’d rented. He had Kevin, his psycho protégé, go get them, take them to some deserted place west of Terlingua and shoot them.

  “Oh God!” Judith shouted, and the car swerved dangerously. “I should have seen this coming. I might have been able to stop it, get him help. Darden’s got post-traumatic stress syndrome from so many wars and skirmishes and dirty political assignments that he doesn’t know if he is coming or going half the time.

  “He worries about getting old, worries that he’s losing it. His mom has Alzheimer’s and he worries that he’ll go that way too. Maybe this was his way of trying to prove he was the man he used to be, and when it got screwed up it pushed him over an edge in his mind. Maybe he’s back in the jungles or deserts or villages or wherever he was for those years. I don’t know. I do know that he’s not thinking straight.”

  “Maybe a public bloodbath is his way of committing suicide by cop,” Anna thought aloud.

  “Maybe,” Judith said, and there was nothing in her tone but sorrow.

  They drove in silence for a while and Anna had trouble remembering they were in a high-speed chase. It felt more like O. J. Simpson’s famous low-speed chase on the freeways of Los Angeles. Darden kept a safe but consistent distance behind them. Judith slowed down till the speedometer, at least as seen from the passenger seat, hovered around eighty miles per hour. The dusk that had been so lacerated by the slashing of headlights was settling into a deeper violet mood. Stars were coming out.

  “I need to use your cell phone,” Anna said into this new and unsubstantiated peace.

  Judith’s right hand darted away from the steering wheel as if on a mission of its own, then was snatched back into the ten-and-two position. “It’s in my purse,” she said. “And my purse is in the hotel room. Darden didn’t leave me much time for the niceties.”

  An evil smell let Anna know Helena had run out of time for the niceties as well. She lowered her window a few inches. At eighty miles an hour the racket from the wind was considerable. Lajitas wasn’t too far from Terlingua if she remembered right, between fifteen and thirty miles, probably closer to fifteen. At eighty they wouldn’t have much longer on the road.

  Breathing in the sweet smell of the desert—or as much as could penetrate the miasma Helena had instigated—Anna looked into the side mirror at the lights politely tailing them three car lengths back, the beams on low so they wouldn’t blind the driver in the car ahead, and couldn’t shake the dreamlike quality the night had taken on the moment Darden appeared at the door of the Martinez house wanting to know the gory details of the woman’s—Eleanor Cheevers’s—demise.

  The hysteria with which she had left the house, the panic that she was harming a newborn by lugging it around like a satchel, was gone, worn out or dimmed by the events that came after. The fear and helplessness she’d suffered trying to outdistance Detroit’s finest automobiles had run its course as well. Oddly empty of emotion, Anna let bits of internal film roll. Gerry outlined Darden’s probably bloody history and proven violence where the good of his mayor was concerned. His mayor, and a woman he’d known since she was three years old, a woman he was in love with one way or another: sexual, filial, paternal or psychotic. At the breakfast the four of them had eaten together Anna had not been particularly attuned to the currents between Judith and her chief of security. In retrospect she watched Darden’s glances at Judith wavering from anxious with unvoiced concern to irritated and, once, frightened. Maybe frightened, Anna corrected herself. Reading faces was informative as far as it went, but human beings over the age of two had learned to lie with all their faculties. She didn’t think Darden had been guarding his expressions that morning but a lot of things factored into a twist of the lips or a raise of an eyebrow. Like babies, people might be smiling or they might just have gas.

  As breakfast replayed in her head she remembered the reassuring tone Darden had used with Judith and her almost childlike reliance on him. It reminded her of the first time the three of them had met, in the chief ranger’s conference room after they’d been brought back from the rim of Santa Elena Canyon, how Darden had intervened with the offer of soda or a careful word when Judith sounded as if she were stressed—or about to give away something better kept secret.

  She watched Darden at the door of the Martinezes’, unsurprised by the visit of the baby snatchers, how he’d asked for details about Helena’s mom that she might not have shared with others, how he didn’t show any interest in the brawl that had so recently taken place in the space they shared. Memory film fast-forwarded through Darden tracking her in his SUV when she and Helena walked to the Terlingua Porch, reappearing shortly after the mayor had come in an identical SUV, veering from the game of chicken because he “always” did, backing off when the chase became dangerous for Judith. She stopped the mind movie at the place where Judith gave every indication of having fun, of playing a game.

  Readjusting Helena to her shoulder, Anna snuck a glance into the back. A leather strap snaked out from beneath the driver’s-side seat, narrow tooled leather with a single gold link attaching it to whatever was beneath Judith’s rump. Anna didn’t doubt for a minute that it was the mayor’s purse, the one she’d said held the cell phone, the one she’d said she’d left behind at the Chisos Lodge.

  The SUV speeded up. From the corner of her eye Anna saw the sign for the Lajitas resort hotel flash by in a blink of halogen white.

  “Oh shoot!” Judith said. “I overshot. There’s a place to turn around at a park down by the river. It’s not far; we’ll make it and back before Darden figures out what we’re doing.”

  Anna said nothing. Darden already knew what they were doing. He wasn’t a lone psychopath, he was a member of a conspiracy, and Anna had obligingly hopped into the hands of the other member.

  They were taking Anna and Helena to the river to kill them.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Anna had less than five minutes to curse herself for a fool and mentally apologize to the mothers of the world for any stray thoughts she’d had over the years that they weren’t brave enough, or smart enough, or productive enough. Doing anything, anything, with an infant in arms was a near impossibility: thinking, fighting, moving, working, eating. Helplessness was how she’d seen it, but it wasn’t that the women couldn’t do for themselves. It was that they could not do for themselves unless they sacrificed their child. That women often chose to have more than one child was mind-boggling; it must require the courage of several prides of lions.

  Courage Anna had always lacked.

  Left to her own devices, she would not have taken Judith’s offer of a ride; she would have run for the desert hills and trusted to her own abilities. A baby made that plan unworkable. Left to her own devices, she might have thrown herself from the moving vehicle as soon as it slowed rather than be taken to the place where the grim reaper was supposed to be waiting. With a baby, that couldn’t be done.
She daren’t even grab the wheel and try to wreck the SUV. Held in her lap, Helena probably wouldn’t survive the crash.

  The actions left were the traditional actions of women with children: placating, lying, running and hiding. Anna chose lying; she played along so Judith would continue to believe all was going according to plan.

  “Not much farther. There it is. Canoes put in here sometimes. Did you know that?” Judith chattered as they left the pavement and the SUV lumbered down a dirt and gravel path toward the water. “There’s room to turn this thing around a ways down. I remember it from coming here once.”

  There was room to turn around on every side. This was the Chihuahuan desert, not the forested backwoods of Washington. Seven-forty-sevens could turn around pretty much anywhere one looked. Anna said nothing. She undid her seat belt and surreptitiously wormed her arm free.

  Darden, creeping and black in his obese vehicle, didn’t show lights behind them and Anna wondered if he’d missed the turn into the park on purpose or by accident, if he was circling around to join the party from another direction.

  “Hey!” Judith said, sounding surprised. “We lost him. Good for us.” The SUV rolled to a stop and she put on the parking brake.

  Anna threw open the door, half fell out of the SUV and ran.

  “Wait! What are you doing? Come back, damn you!” she heard Judith yelling after her. “Darden will be back and he’ll kill you!” Judith shouted. Then the engine revved and screeched, Judith trying to pursue her but forgetting she’d set the brake. A ratcheting sound was followed by the crunch of tires on gravel and a banging that had to be the open passenger door flapping as Judith drove over uneven ground.

  Already this night Anna had lost a footrace with an automobile. She had no intention of doing it a second time. They wanted her in the river and that’s where she was headed. Headlights lashing her, she ran for the water and kept running till it was waist-deep and still she pushed on. The Rio Grande was low and she was grateful. Texas hadn’t been handing out much in the way of breaks for the last few days and Anna deeply appreciated this one. At the put-in the river wasn’t more than fifty feet across and tonight it ran slowly, almost languidly. The current pulled at her legs and feet but playfully, an invitation to swim rather than an invitation to drown.