No help there. He could have been a Mendoza hireling or one of Mitch’s associates from either side of the border. I took my lower lip between my teeth, wincing when enamel scraped raw flesh, and tried another approach.
“How long have I been here in, uh . . . ?”
“Tapigua.”
“In Tapigua?”
“Miguel finds you three days ago. You have the concussion, I think.”
“You think?”
My opinion of his accomplishments dropped several notches.
“I could not do X-ray. Our machine breaks months ago. So I leave you to sleep and cure yourself.”
“Thanks,” I said dubiously.
“De nada. If you feel strong enough to eat, I will summon Elena. She and her daughters have tended to you these days and nights.”
I’d like to tell you I didn’t really care who had tended to me. I’d like to, but I can’t. Doctor or not, the mere thought of baby-faced Friar Fay emptying my bedpan or tugging my hospital gown over my bare thighs made me distinctly uncomfortable.
“First things first,” I told him. “What I need right now is . . .”
A deep-throated bong interrupted me. Father Doctor Alfonz smiled at my startled expression.
“That is La Grande. The largest of our bells. You will hear La Mediana next.”
Head cocked, he listened with obvious delight to a second, mellower dong.
“What’s with . . . ?”
“Wait.” He held up a finger. “Now La Bonita. She is the smallest and had the prettiest sound until she cracks.”
I contained my impatience while Bonita did her thing. She clanged three times, sounding flat even to my untrained ears. La Grande and La Mediana joined in for a final chorus. Wincing, I waited for the echoes to fade to ask.
“What’s with the bells?”
“It is Sunday morning. They summon the people of Tapigua to Mass.”
Sunday? I tried to remember what day Pipe Guy and pal had snatched me. Thursday, I thought. I’d spent the rest of that day in Mendoza’a guest cell and escaped in the middle of the night. That tracked with Friar Fay’s assertion that I’d been at his clinic for three days.
I don’t know why reconstructing the timeline gave me a panicky feeling. Probably because of the blank spaces I couldn’t fill in. What happened after my frantic call to Mitch? Had he assembled a task force? Tracked Mendoza to his hilltop lair? Gone in with guns blazing?
Or had he tried to follow my trail? Was he looking for me, along with Mendoza and this Hector Whoever.
“I need to make a call,” I said urgently. “Do you have a cell phone?”
“No. Tapigua is too remote for such service. There is a phone in my office,” he added, “but I do not think you are strong enough yet to get out of bed.”
“I have to.”
Wrong answer. I didn’t realize how wrong until I shoved aside the sheet covering my lower extremities and swung my legs over the side of the bed.
My bare feet thumped the floor. My hospital gown bunched around my hips. Father Fay’s round, worried face blurred.
“You must eat and regain your strength,” he said when I sank back against the pillows. “Tell me the name and number of the person you wish to contact and I will make the call for you.”
My dizziness subsiding, I waited while he fished a pen and crumpled envelope from the back pocket of his jeans.
“Call Special Agent Jeff Mitchell.” I gave him Mitch’s cell phone number. “If for some reason he doesn’t answer, call the Isleta office of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in El Paso.”
I couldn’t remember that number.
“Tell whoever you speak to where I am and ask them to give Special Agent Mitchell the message. Make sure they understand this is urgent. Do you have that, Father? Er, Brother?”
“Si. Special Agent Mitchell, Isleta office of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.”
I thought about asking him to contact one of my team members. Their numbers I could remember, but I didn’t have much confidence any of them would answer. Fridays and Saturdays Dennis competes in round-the-clock online chess tournaments, so he always sleeps past noon on Sundays. Pen attends a nondenominational service before junketing off to one meeting or another. Sergeant Cassidy clanks away on his Universal Gym and probably wouldn’t hear the phone. Rocky . . . Okay, I don’t know what Rocky normally does on Sunday mornings. I’m not sure I really want to.
“Please, let me know if you get hold of Special Agent Mitchell.”
“Si, si. And I will send Elena and her daughter to tend you.”
Crumpled envelope in hand, he hurried out. I had barely settled against my pillows when he hurried back in with two people hard on his heels. One was a woman in a dark dress and white, bib-like apron with a large bottle clutched in white-knuckled hands. The other was a giant.
I kid you not! The man stood at least six-eight, with shoulders so broad he had to turn sideways to get through the narrow door. If Tapigua boasted a village tailor, this guy undoubtedly kept him in business. No way he could have bought his starched white shirt and Sunday-go-to-Mass suit off the rack.
“This is Elena,” Father Fay said, worry stamped on his chubby face. “And Raoul. He tells me strangers approach. They bring an evil-looking dog that sniffs the trail.”
“The policia?”
“One wears a uniform of some sort. The others do not.”
I wanted desperately to believe the one in uniform was Mitch but couldn’t take the chance. Friar Fay agreed with my assessment.
“We must hide you until we know who these people are and what they want. Raoul will carry you to the bell tower. They will not search for you there.”
“Their dog will.”
“Not if Elena washes away your scent with antiseptic. We must hurry now. Let Raoul lift you.”
He was a gentle giant, I’ll say that much for him. I’m not exactly a lightweight, but he hefted me easily and precipitated only a minor shaft of pain. Unfortunately, he wasn’t particularly attentive to little things like gaping hospital gowns. Elena clucked and twitched the gown over my exposed posterior but it flapped open again as Raoul followed Friar Fay out of the clinic.
I got my first glimpse of Tapigua from the giant’s arms. It sat on a low ridge, with an unimpeded view of the desert surrounding it. The village itself reminded me instantly of Dry Springs. Same dozen or so crumbling adobe houses. Same dirt road bisecting the town. Only instead of Pancho’s bar/cafe/motel/convenience store, the heart of this community appeared to be its church.
I’m not Catholic, but I’ve spent enough time in the Southwest to appreciate the artistry that goes into even the smallest of these local churches. Tapigua’s was no exception. Its adobe exterior had been painted deep ochre, the window and door frames a brilliant turquoise. A gloriously ornate stone facade decorated the front entrance. A Virgin Mary in bloodred robes smiled benignly down from a niche above the double wooden doors.
The bell tower was entered from inside the church. The very crowded church. It was crammed with villagers in their Sunday best, every one of whom slewed around in their pews and no doubt got an eyeful when the giant carted me into the vestibule.
“Raoul will carry you up the stairs,” Brother Fay told me hurriedly. “I will change into my vestments and meet these men with the dog at the door. I’ll stop them if they try to enter the church.”
He spun off to the right. When Raoul went left, something long and snaky slithered across my shoulder. I smothered a screech and jerked away. Not a wise move with my head aching, but relief preempted pain when I identified the snaky thing as one of the bell ropes.
There were three of them, each thick and fat and shiny from long use, with faded signs on the wall behind identifying their associated bells. As Raoul maneuvered me up a set of twisting wooden steps I sincerely hoped no one would latch on to one of those ropes and set off La Grande or La Bonita.
We got stuck after the third or fourth turn. The tower had
narrowed. Raoul’s shoulders hadn’t. Grunting, he wedged sideways in the confined space but couldn’t climb any higher with me in his arms. I got an elbow loose and pantomimed for him to put me down.
“It’s okay. I’ll take it from here.”
I wiggled out of his hold. Not am easy trick in that narrow space but I got both feet under me with only minimal damage.
“Gracias, Raoul.”
Nodding, he backed down step by slow step. When he disappeared around a turn, I craned my neck and guesstimated the remaining stairs to the wooden platform above my head. Ten? Twelve?
I could make it.
I hoped.
The first two steps I took upright, reaching one hand behind me to keep my gown from opening and exposing my tender bottom to the rough adobe wall. By the fourth or fifth, my jaw had locked. By the eight, I was on all fours with the gown bunched around my waist to keep it out of the way.
I crawled onto the platform, panting. Sweat dripped into my eyes. Incipient nausea churned in my empty belly. I stayed on my hands and knees, head hanging and hair dragging the dusty floor, until the nausea went away. Only then did I lift my head and survey the cramped space I shared with three monster bronze bells.
Please, God, do not let anyone grab one of those ropes!
I’d said a lot of prayers in the past few days, I realized as I inched around La Mediana. Been helped by some good people. Sooner or later, I needed to pay it all forward.
With that thought in mind, I scooted over to the low wall encircling the platform and dragged myself up enough to peer over the rim. I couldn’t see much at first. The sun was too bright, the glare too fierce.
I narrowed my eyes to a tight squint. The first object I spotted was a huge, flat, purplish mound some ten or fifteen miles away. Mendoza’s mesa? It had to be!
My stomach knotted. I hadn’t gotten very far in my desperate trek through the desert.
Gulping, I dragged my gaze from the distant mound and scanned Tapigua’s main street in both directions. Nothing moved. Not a donkey or a goat or a chicken scratching in the sun. Nor did I see any sign of movement among the brown furrows of the recently planted cornfield outside the village. Even the scarecrow in ragged white pants and a straw sombrero drooped in the hot sun.
I didn’t spot the search party until I’d crawled to the opposite side of the tower and inched my head above the wall. My heart almost jumped out of my chest when I saw them trudging up the sloping ridge. Six, no seven of them, trailed by two slow-moving vehicles. They were too far away to make out the features shaded by their hat brims.
I didn’t have to! I would recognize Pen’s sturdy figure, Sergeant Cassidy’s muscled-up torso, and Mitch’s long-legged stride anywhere! And that had to be Dennis’s frizzy orange hair sticking out from under the rim of a pith helmet.
After an initial leap of joy, fear almost crushed my chest. Mitch and my gang were out in the open, plainly visible to any of Mendoza’s troops that might be searching the area. They could be ambushed, be tracked by snipers, get caught in a deadly crossfire.
Reason reasserted itself in the next instant. Mitch was no dummy. He wouldn’t lead a search party into danger, especially unarmed amateurs like the members of FST-3. He had to have neutralized the threat.
Motivated by the image of Mendoza’s face smashed to a bloody pulp, I scuttled around La Grande and thrust my feet through the opening in the platform. I couldn’t trust my legs so I went down the steps on my rear. I picked up some splinters on the way but didn’t care. I was oblivious to everything but the need to get out of the tower and throw my arms around whatever team member I reached first.
Brother Fay must have heard my shout. He and Raoul and several other villagers came rushing down the aisle and met me as I hit the bottom step. As promised, the friar had pulled on a white dress and one of those priest-y things. You know what I mean. The two-sided vestment that goes over the head and drapes to the knees, with an embroidered gold cross on the front. His round face screwed up with worry as he reached out a hand to steady me.
“What is it? Why do you shout?”
“The people who are coming!” I gasped, remembering to preserve my modesty as I made for the door. “They’re my friends.”
Despite my surge of adrenaline-fed joy, I covered only a few yards before I stopped dead. Disbelief gave way to stunned amazement, then to a wave of hysterical delight. I plopped down in the middle of the dirt street, laughing my head off, and held out my arms.
Snoopy chugged up the rutted road ahead of the team. His glued-on plastic ears dragged the dust. His wire tail bobbed. Sensing a preprogrammed snack, he picked up speed on his toy-tractor wheels and aimed right for me.
His claw rose out of his back. His circuits hummed. Looking like a cross between a computerized shoebox and a mechanized tarantula, he humped over my outstretched leg and crawled up my chest into my arms.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FOR sheer glee, nothing tops a noisy reunion involving assorted friends and coworkers laughing and hugging and trying manfully not to cry while embracing each other in the middle of a one-street Mexican village with dozens of goggle-eyed townspeople looking on.
Mitch reached me first. Well, second after Snoopy. He detached the omnivorous little critter from my shoulder and tossed him aside. With that obstruction out of the way, he hauled me up and into his arms. I hung there, locked joyfully against his body, while we traded breathless questions.
“Are you all right?”
“How did you find me?”
“Did that bastard Mendoza touch you?”
“Tell me you nailed him!”
We interspersed the questions with kisses until Mitch finally raked back my tangled hair and gave a more detailed report.
“No, we didn’t get Mendoza. He was gone when we hit the mesa. We found the Hummer shortly after noon, but lost your trail there. We’ve been scouring a fifty-mile radius for the past three days. Didn’t pick up your trail until last night.”
Sounded as though I’d dusted up quite a storm with the creosote branches. I felt pretty proud of my puny efforts as the others crowded around.
“That’s when Mitch contacted us,” Dennis O’Reilly put in, his orange hair raining sweat beneath his pith helmet. “He wanted to know if we could program Snoopy to sniff out a very specific food source.”
“Me?”
“You,” Pen confirmed with a smile.
She’d dressed for the desert, I noted. Sensible boots, snug jeans, a long-sleeved blouse, and a floppy-brimmed explorer’s hat with a back flap to cover her neck and straps that tied under her chin.
“All we had to do was extract the scents embedded in the fabric of the name tape, separate your distinctive identifiers, feed them into Snoopy’s computers, haul him down to the wrecked Hummer. He took it from there.”
“That’s all, huh?”
I knew darn well the process couldn’t have been as easy as Pen made it sound. Rocky’s haggard appearance validated that.
Poor Rocky. He wasn’t built for desert search parties. His eyes were more red than white. His face showed a pasty shade of chalk and his chest heaved under the green U.S. Border Patrol blouse that Mitch had draped tentlike over his head and shoulders.
Sergeant Cassidy, of course, had barely raised a sweat. His boots sported layers of dust and his cheeks bristled with whiskers, but he otherwise looked strong and tough and un-weathered as he hunkered down to give the wide-eyed kids a demonstration of Snoopy’s skills.
Shrieks erupted as Snoop Dog zoomed toward a little girl with a big white ribbon in her hair before abruptly changing direction and taking off after an eight- or nine-year-old in a white pants and shirt and bolo string tie. The boy danced away, arms flapping as he led Snoopy on a merry chase, and Brother Fay pushed through the hubbub.
“These are your friends, yes?”
“Most definitely!” Safe and warm within the circle of Mitch’s arms, I made the intros. “Guys, this is Father Doctor Alfonz.
He patched me up when Miguel Samos plucked me out of tree and brought me to Tapigua.”
I could see them struggling to process the titles and names and tree bit but pressed ahead.
“And this is Elena.”
Practically the entire village had crowded around us now, as curious about the odd-looking strangers in their midst as my team was about them. Particularly the giant who wedged into the circle. Eyes narrowed, Mitch looked him up and down.
“This is Raoul,” I explained hastily. “He’s one of the good guys.”
“Nice to know,” Mitch muttered. He surveyed the chaotic scene and picked Father Alfonz as the one in charge. “We need to get Samantha out of the sun and hear her whole story. Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?”
“Best to carry her back to the clinic. She has not yet fully regained her strength.”
Mitch swept an arm under my knees, hefted me against his dusty chest, and followed while the priest led the way to his one-room medical facility. I caught the looks my team exchanged when they noted the cracked ceiling, paucity of beds, and ancient X-ray machine gathering dust in the corner.
“Brother Doctor Alfonz and his staff are a little short on equipment,” I explained as Mitch sat me on the edge of a bed, “but long on compassion. They kept my presence a secret until I recovered enough to tell them who I am.”
“Her uniform says she is military,” the priest offered by way of explanation. “But we don’t know if she deserts from the Army or is lost in the desert or becomes ill while on exercise with Mexican troops.”
His round face lost some of its boyishness.
“Then two policia come searching for her,” he related. “We know these two. They work for Rafael Mendoza. He is evil, that one.”
“You won’t get any argument from us on that, Padre.”
Mitch settled on the bed next to mine. It squeaked under his weight, but he ignored the sagging springs.
“Start at the beginning, Samantha. Tell me exactly what happened.”
The rest of my team ranged on either side of him. Noel kept Snoopy tucked under one arm, for which I was extremely grateful. The voracious little critter obviously thought he’d locked onto lunch. I kept a wary eye on him as I took them from the snatch outside the donut shop to my lunch with Mendoza to my escape into the night.
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