“Thanks for coming,” John said.
Marco shot him a look. He wore sweatpants and sneakers, and John strongly suspected he’d caught him at the gym this afternoon when he’d called. Given that Mayfield was probably two hundred miles from here, Marco had to have jumped right in his truck and hauled ass.
“This is my wife’s best friend,” Marco said. “If I don’t move mountains to get her back, Feenie will never speak to me again.”
Marco didn’t smile, and John knew he was only half kidding. John had known Marco nearly three years now, and his black eyes and perennial black leather jacket were reflective of his personality. This evening he looked like a thunderhead.
John stared out the window, and his stomach knotted. He believed Celie was alive—he had to believe that—but he couldn’t convince himself she was unharmed. And who knew what would happen when the feds and the Mexicans stormed in there, guns blazing?
“She’s resourceful,” Marco said.
John looked at him.
“If there’s a way to get out of there, she’ll find it. And if there’s not a way out, she’ll focus on survival. She’s good at that.”
A lump rose in John’s throat, and he stared out the window. He couldn’t verbalize what he was feeling right now, but it had to do with searing pain and the certainty that if anything permanent happened to Celie, he’d be dead inside.
He shifted his attention to the windshield, looking for some sign of a residence up ahead. The chopper was probably just now arriving.
“There it is,” Marco said, nodding toward a cliff where, in the evening light, John discerned the outline of a house.
Below it, probably a hundred feet down, John saw a flash of machine gun fire.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, going cold.
Marco reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a gun.
“I’ve got a backup in the glove box,” he told John. “Better help yourself.”
Rowe crouched behind the fountain in the courtyard, waiting for his cue. Suddenly the double doors flung open, and an armored member of the Mexican SWAT team gave him the signal.
Rowe ducked in first. Stevenski followed. They made their way up the central staircase, searching for the bedroom wing where they expected to find the hostage. Rowe’s nostrils stung as the acrid scent of smoke drifted toward him. Stun grenades had been used to help distract and disable Saledo’s guards, most of whom had been neutralized in the first-floor media room. Now the Americans were conducting a room-to-room sweep looking for the hostage.
Rowe and Stevenski did a brisk search of the second floor.
“Next floor,” Rowe ordered, heading up another flight of stairs. They passed a commando giving one of Saledo’s men an armed escort downstairs.
Stevenski said something in Spanish, and the commando shook his head.
“What was that?” Rowe asked.
“Still no sign of Saledo, the nephew, or Cecelia.”
They combed every inch of the third floor. Nothing. They stopped at the top of the stairs.
“I could swear I counted four stories from the outside,” Stevenski said.
“Then there must be another staircase.”
“Maybe in the back? Near the kitchen?”
Rowe had no idea, but it sounded good to him. They quickly descended the curving staircase and cut through the living room. A Mexican commando stood beside the door to the kitchen. Stevenski said something to him and entered, nearly tripping over the bullet-ridden body of a young woman just inside the doorway.
“Shit.” Stevenski stepped past her.
Rowe stared down at the woman. With her long black hair and startled eyes, she looked young and innocent—like she’d been caught in the crossfire. Rowe prayed Cecelia Wells hadn’t suffered the same fate.
Rowe spotted the AFI commander at the back of the kitchen talking to two of his men. Several of Saledo’s people kneeled on the floor nearby with their hands cuffed. Rowe approached the commander, glad the man’s English was better than Rowe’s Spanish.
“Sir,” he said, “we’ve swept three levels, but four are visible from outside. Any chance we missed a stairwell?”
The commander’s bushy black eyebrows tipped up.
“Fourth floor looks to be above the kitchen,” Stevenski added.
All eyes turned toward the ceiling. For an instant everything was silent, and then the commander barked something at his men. They leapt into motion, pulling open all the doors in sight—pantries, walk-in closets, broom cabinets, but no stairwells.
A shadow moved behind the commander.
“Down!” Rowe yelled, and an armed man burst through the doorway. Time stretched out as Rowe reached for his gun, and a truck seemed to slam into his chest. He hurtled backward, smacking his skull against a wall, as gunshots reverberated all around him. The gunman staggered backward, red splotches blooming on his shirt. An instant later, half his head disappeared in a mist of red.
Stevenski stood off to the side, chest heaving, his gun poised to shoot again.
“You’re hit!” He rushed over to Rowe. His voice echoed through Rowe’s brain, but it sounded very far away. “Are you okay? Rowe? ”
Rowe tried to say something, but the force had pummeled his lungs.
This is how Kate felt. He let his head fall back and stared up at the ceiling, trying desperately to breathe.
John and Marco hopped out of the Chevy and took cover next to the adobe wall. The gate was open, and a guard lay beside it, having fallen dead right on top of his machine gun. John saw Marco eyeing the weapon.
“Have at it,” John told him. “I’ve never used one before.”
Marco moved to retrieve the gun, just as a Hummer halted inside the gate and members of the Mexican SWAT team jumped out. Marco shouted out warnings in Spanish so he wouldn’t be mistaken for a target, and then he stood up. John didn’t catch the rapid-fire exchange of Spanish.
“They killed Saledo,” Marco reported, “and the guards who aren’t dead have surrendered.”
Several commandos tromped through the gate. Marco spoke with them for a moment, and then they fanned out around the perimeter of the compound.
“No one’s found Celie yet,” Marco said.
“Shit.” John had caught something about a hostage, but they’d been talking so fast. “Where are they going now?”
“Searching for Saledo’s nephew. He’s second in command.”
“First, now, if his uncle’s dead,” John pointed out.
“One of the guards says he was here, but he left just before the raid. They’re checking Saledo’s vehicles.”
Another Hummer rolled to a stop behind the first one. Several Americans got out, including Stevenski, who had Rowe leaning on his shoulder. Rowe looked injured, but John didn’t see any blood.
John strode up to them. “Where’s Celie?”
Rowe shook his head and slouched against the wall, wheezing.
“Didn’t find her,” Stevenski said as Rowe loosened his Kevlar vest.
John saw two silver patches where bullets had smashed into Rowe’s chest. A few inches higher, and the agent would be dead.
“You need to lie down?” Stevenski asked, clearly shaken by his partner’s near-miss.
“Think I cracked a rib.” Rowe coughed and shook his head. “Could have been worse.”
“I’m going up to look for Celie,” John announced, starting toward the gate.
“Hold on,” Stevenski said. “I don’t think she’s up there.”
John’s stomach rolled. “Why not?”
“I searched the servants’ quarters, fourth floor above the kitchen. Found a room with the window busted out. Looked like someone jumped.”
“From the fourth floor?”
“Apparently. There’s no one under the window, so whoever did it survived, I think.”
She was alive. Maybe.
“Where’s the window?” John asked.
Stevenski turned and looked up at the house,
like he was trying to orient himself. “Let’s see, back side—”
“Show me.”
Celie hobbled across the field, swiping at branches and sticks, trying to ignore her left ankle and focus instead on her goal. She had to find cover. Soon. She could worry about her injuries tonight, from the relative safety of some kind of hiding spot.
She glanced over her shoulder to the west. The sun had dropped behind the distant ridge, and it wouldn’t be long before nightfall. She needed to reach the strip of trees she’d seen earlier from the air, which she assumed marked the course of the river.
She limped on, her shoulders hunched forward to keep her silhouette from standing out against the cacti and brush. If one of Saledo’s men spotted her out here, the chase would be over before it even began. Celie could barely walk on her ankle, much less run.
She examined the gash on her arm. She’d cut it heaving the chair into the window, and she could feel a glass shard embedded in her skin. She’d tied a sock around it to stop the bleeding and keep from leaving a trail, but she hadn’t had time to dig the glass out yet.
At least an hour had gone by since she’d escaped, meaning a search was probably under way. She didn’t know. She’d traveled over several rises, and she couldn’t see the house anymore. But that didn’t mean people couldn’t see her. Especially if they were combing these fields in a Humvee with a pair of binoculars.
Celie shivered, despite the warmth of the evening, probably because she was wearing only underpants on her lower half. Her blue jeans were back at Saledo’s, one ankle still tied around the decorative iron balcony beneath her window. She’d used the pants as a makeshift rope to shorten the drop between the window and the ground.
She paused to pluck some sticker burrs from her calves. She felt queasy, light-headed, and she didn’t know whether that was from pain or hunger. After deciding to make a break for it, Celie had wolfed down every morsel of food on her tray, but that had only amounted to a bowl of soup and two saltine crackers. Now her throat felt parched, and she wished she’d thought to drink more of the coffee. Maybe she should have improvised some kind of canteen, but she hadn’t had time. Besides the clothes on her back, she had only her Nikes and the four sugar packets she’d tucked into her shoelaces.
She tripped over something and threw out her hands to catch herself.
“Ouch!”
Pain shot up her right arm. A prickly pear cactus had broken her fall.
She looked around frantically and bit her lip to keep from bursting into tears. The last smidgen of daylight was almost gone. She had glass in her arm, a twisted ankle, and now a palm loaded with cactus needles. And she still hadn’t made it to the riverbank. She was out in the open. Alone, unarmed, and exposed. If Saledo’s men or, God forbid, some kind of helicopter started combing the area, she was a sitting duck. She’d thought she’d heard a helicopter earlier, but the sound hadn’t lasted, and she’d chalked it up to her paranoid imagination. Still, it was possible. Saledo had an airstrip and who knew how many expensive toys at his disposal.
She looked ahead and could barely see anything now. Her throat tightened as her predicament sank in. Shelter or no, darkness was falling around her.
Marco halted the Silverado on the south end of Saledo’s landing strip. He and John had spent the past ten minutes driving up and down the private road, looking for Celie.
“Maybe she made it out to the highway,” Marco said, “then hitched a ride into town.”
John looked out the window, dismayed to see the last purple glow of daylight fading behind the cliffs to the west. They had five minutes, max, before the countryside went completely dark.
“No way,” John said. “She doesn’t trust strangers, and she wouldn’t have wanted to be wandering along some highway half naked after dark.”
“You think she could have stolen a car? Maybe one of Saledo’s?”
“Shit, I don’t see how. But I guess it’s possible.” John looked out the window, his shoulders tensing at the thought of Celie out in that vast rugged terrain after dark. To the east, he knew a river ran more or less parallel to the highway, about forty miles into the city of Monterrey.
“I think she’s out there,” he told Marco. “She would have wanted to avoid roads and people, especially since anyone she’d bump into near here could be working for Saledo. I think she headed away from the house, probably toward the river, where she’d have some tree cover. I’m going to go look.”
“That’s got to be at least two miles,” Marco pointed out. “And you don’t have any daylight left.”
John opened the door. “Neither does she. You got a flashlight?”
Marco got out of the truck and went around to the built-in toolbox just behind the cab. He unlocked it and scrounged around inside, tossing John whatever supplies he could find: a MagLite, a wadded poncho, a first aid kit.
“Shit, where am I going to put all this?”
Marco produced a bag with a shoulder strap. He ducked inside the truck cab, and John watched him unzip the bag, pull out a stack of diapers, and toss them to the floor. Then he popped open the glove box, grabbed a PowerBar and a mini–Swiss Army knife, and shoved them into the pack. In the glow of the interior light, John saw that the bag had pale blue rabbits printed all over it.
He shoved the pack at John. “Here. I don’t have any water left, and I wouldn’t drink out of that river if I were you.”
John pulled the strap over his head, positioning it across his chest so the pack rested on his lower back, out of his way. He tested the flashlight. It worked.
“I’ll check out the gas stations and rest stops along the highway, see if I can turn up anything,” Marco said. “You got your cell phone?”
“It doesn’t work down here.”
“Damn. Take mine. I’m almost out of juice, though, so don’t keep it on. Tomorrow at daybreak, I’ll come back here and wait. If I don’t see you after half an hour, I’ll come back at noon and again at six.”
John glanced up at the sky. He wasn’t sure what kind of moon would be out tonight, but it hadn’t risen yet. If Celie was out there, the world around her was black as tar.
“Contact Stevenski,” John said. “Maybe he can get someone looking on the outskirts of Monterrey, in case she made it there by car.”
“Will do.”
John looked east, the direction he hoped like hell Celie had gone. “Okay, I’m outta here.”
“They never located the nephew,” Marco reminded him. “He could be out there, too.”
John patted the Glock tucked into the back of his jeans. “Yeah, I know.”
Celie stumbled over the uneven ground, wishing desperately for some light. A half-moon had peeked through the clouds a few times to cast a faint, silvery glow over everything, but mostly it stayed hidden. Celie was trapped in the darkness, holding her arms out in front so she could feel for obstacles. She kept tripping over stones and bumping into bushes, and she’d even managed to stab her shins on an agave plant. She’d been walking east for what felt like ages, listening for the sound of a river. If she could hide out among those trees until morning, she’d have cover from anyone who came after her while she followed the river’s path in the daylight. She was counting on some civilization eventually, too. She’d seen cattle on Saledo’s property. Maybe there would be a ranch nearby where she could borrow a phone or get a ride to a police station.
The bushes rustled behind her, and she froze. She stood motionless as the noise approached. It sounded low to the ground, like an animal. Celie didn’t know what kind of wildlife lived around here and didn’t want to find out.
After a few moments, whatever it was moved off, and she continued her trek. Her pace was slow, but she had to keep moving. She needed to put as much space as possible between herself and Saledo’s men before morning.
She felt her way through the darkness with her feet and hands. Her senses had become heightened, like those of a blind person, she imagined. The earth sloped down here, then u
p. The ground cover was thick here, then nonexistent. Just the weight of the air told her whether she was in the midst of scrub brushes or out in the open. It seemed like ten hours had passed since she’d escaped the house, but she wondered if it was even midnight. Her muscles were so worn out, she felt as though she hadn’t slept in days.
Her ankle was throbbing, and she decided to allow herself a short break. When the clouds thinned, she strained her eyes in the moonlight, looking for a rock to sit on. She found one the size of a footstool and lowered herself onto it. Her throat was parched, so she loosened her shoelaces and ate two of the sugar packets. That got her saliva flowing, but the sugar coated her throat and made it itchy.
Celie felt her ankle. It was the size of a ham. She didn’t dare take her shoe off, or she’d never get it on again, and going barefoot out here would shred her feet in no time. She rubbed the tight, hard skin. The four-story drop—probably three stories, given that she’d dangled from the end of her jeans before letting go—had probably resulted in at least a sprain, if not a fracture. Whatever it was, it hurt like the devil.
Or, as McAllister would say, like a motherfucker.
Tears sprang into Celie’s eyes, and she tried to blink them back. She wondered where he was right now, if he even knew she was in Mexico. She wished she had a cell phone so she could tell him she was alive. He was probably torturing himself, imagining her in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in her brain.
It had very nearly happened.
Wherever he was, Celie knew he was searching. She knew, deep down in her soul, he would do anything to find her, just as she knew, deep down in her soul, she would do anything to stay alive until he did. It was a pact. They’d never spoken about it, but Celie knew it was there. She wished now that she’d been brave enough to let him know her real feelings. If she ever saw him again, she was going to lay her heart bare and tell him she loved him. Even rejection couldn’t be as bad as leaving a thing like that unsaid.
One Wrong Step (Borderline Book 2) Page 26