Warm hands on her shoulders. “Minnie. Please, Minnie, God, look at me.”
“It just winged her arm,” Calli said gently.
Minnie rolled her head to find him. Duardo was looking at her, his face working. “You have to go,” she told him.
He reached up and tore the eye patch from his head, revealing his other perfectly good eye. “No, you don’t understand,” he said.
“You’re Duardo,” she told him. “But you have to get Téra—before word passes about who you really are.”
He looked around at the group of them hovering over her. “She’s right.”
“Téra is here?” It was Nick’s voice again, sharp with surprise. Minnie realized she could not see him because he stood guard over all of them.
“Go,” she told Duardo.
He looked at Nick.
“Yes, go,” Nick said swiftly.
He nodded and slid the eye patch back into place. “Where?” he asked Nick.
“The grotto.”
“Forty-five minutes,” Duardo promised. He lifted himself up and moved away.
Minnie struggled to sit up and held her head as the world seemed to swim. Yet she got to watch Duardo stride down the length of the balcony, the limp miraculously gone, before Calli and her father helped her to her feet.
Nick shepherded them down the balcony. “Still no alert,” he said, sounding worried.
Giggles gripped Minnie again. “There wouldn’t be,” she said, laughing harder. “I took out their entire security communications system. The only way they can spread the word is by telephone or by mouth. There is nothing left to broadcast with.”
Nick grimaced. “No wonder it was so damn easy,” he muttered. “Let’s go. Back to the grotto.”
The grotto turned out to be a narrow valley in the foothills behind the palace, filled with shade trees and a deep, dark pool of water that rippled with raindrops. They were soaked, but Minnie was glad of the mud beneath her bare feet. She could not have made such good time in dry weather and Nick, Calli and her father were moving fast.
In the grotto Calli turned to her. “Sit down. I want to look at your arm.” She was studying Minnie’s eyes as she spoke.
“I think it was just a momentary dizziness,” Minnie told her. “I’m fine, though my arm throbs like crazy.” She lifted the sleeve of the shirt and checked out her arm with as much interest as Calli. The bullet had creased the skin, leaving a two-inch-long furrow across the muscle. The rain had rinsed it clean. It wasn’t bleeding anymore, though the shirt sleeve was pink with diluted blood.
“It needs stitches,” Calli said.
“Is that a first aid kit on your belt?” Minnie asked, pointing to the pouch at Calli’s hip. “Just slap a field dressing on it. I’m fine. We have a long way to go.”
Calli stared at her. “All right,” she said at last, reaching for the pouch.
“By the way, you look seriously cool in all black,” Minnie told her. “You should wear it more often.”
Calli grinned. “I’d prefer a black evening sheath rather than combat wear, but okay.”
“I still can’t believe the way you just appeared. I can’t believe you came at all,” Minnie said.
Calli applied the field dressing, a frown forming. “You’ve handed out a fistful of your own surprises, you know.”
Nick, who stood facing back the way they had come, waved with the hand that didn’t hold the pistol and Calli nodded. “Quiet,” she murmured.
Minnie nodded, though she had understood Nick’s signal anyway.
A soft, three-note whistle sounded from among the trees and Nick relaxed. He whistled back and turned to face them, holstering his gun.
He came over to Minnie and lifted her chin, looking into her eyes. “No concussion,” he judged. “Tell me what happened to Carmen.”
“She’s all right. She stayed hidden in the palace for three days, then she got a message out—I don’t know who to, but I suppose it must have been you as you’re here. Then she got out. They found where she had been hiding and they figured out who it must have been, but they never saw her. She’s somewhere on the island. Duardo will be able to tell you more. He was the one leading the search for her.”
Nick absorbed the news and she could see him turning it over, examining it. “Then she is out of my reach for now,” he said softly. His expression softened and warmed. “You did well, Minerva Benning.”
She felt a warm glow of pride. “Thank you.”
Nick grinned. “I think you’re the only one who got it figured out fast enough. It wasn’t until you screamed his name that we realized Zalaya was Duardo.”
“You didn’t know?” She felt her chest squeeze. “God, you were there to...to...”
“Kill him,” Nick said softly, his smile vanishing.
Duardo slipped into the grotto, moving with trained silence. Téra was with him, her face pale and her eyes wide. Nick hurried over to Duardo. “Any trouble?”
Duardo shook his head. “Not worthy of mentioning.”
Téra shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.
Duardo was looking around the grotto and Minnie knew he searched for her. He had taken off the eye patch, but the moustache was still too much Zalaya for her to go to him readily.
Nick beckoned them all. “Let’s go,” he called softly just as it started to rain again. “Silence until I say otherwise,” he added.
Their trail was long, circular and took hours, but no one pursued them. Nick had come from an unexpected direction—the west coast of the island. The grotto was the east end of a low, easy mountain pass. On the western end of the trail, tucked behind a disguising wall of hacked-off branches and leaves, was a rusty all-wheel-drive pick-up truck.
“Minnie and Téra in the cab with me,” Nick ordered. “Everyone else in the back.” He handed Duardo his rifle and shepherded Téra and Minnie into the cab and settled behind the wheel. Then he reached beneath the steering column, his fingers tangling in exposed wires there.
“You stole it?” she said softly.
“We rented the boat in Acapulco,” he said, “but the only Vistarian currency anyone has are checks and no one in Vejia would have accepted a check with Nicolás Escobedo’s name on it. So we borrowed it.” He smiled at her. “Brace yourself. This will be a wild ride.”
Téra’s hand slipped into Minnie’s and squeezed. Minnie looked at her as the truck started, backfired and settled into an uneven rhythm.
“He told me you were the one who insisted he come back and get me,” Téra said. Two big tears welled and slid down her face. “I will never forget that.”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” Minnie tried to explain.
“He could only think of you, but you remembered. It was like that,” Téra insisted.
* * * * *
Nick drove out of the mountains as fast as the truck could safely manage and used secondary roads and cart tracks to reach the coast road. Once there, he pushed the truck to top speed, a bone-jarring eighty miles an hour, for there they were most vulnerable to being stopped and questioned. As they drove, the dark day turned to pitch black night and Nick flicked on the headlights only to curse softly as they feebly lit only a few yards of the road ahead.
He turned onto an unmarked, sandy trail that wound and turned for another couple of miles until it opened onto a white beach. He stopped the truck and turned it off. “Stay silent,” he warned Minnie and climbed from the cab. Minnie and Téra followed him as the three in the back jumped to the sand, all holding rifles of one type or another. Even her father was dressed in black.
Minnie shivered.
Nick jogged down the beach, his pistol out, glancing from side to side, until he reached a pile of seaweed heaped upon rocks. He pulled the seaweed aside and slid an inflatable dinghy out from beneath. It had an outboard motor attached to the stern and Duardo silently helped him turn it and drag it down to the water.
Everyone climbed into the boat as soon as it was afloat. Duardo an
d Nick used the oars to paddle a hundred yards from the beach before they started the motor and steered the dinghy out to the boat somewhere on the black ocean.
* * * * *
Nick and Calli stayed on the deck, getting the boat under way. It was a sailboat, which astonished Minnie until she realized that a sailboat could slide through night waters in near silence and on the open sea, with the prevailing southerly winds, was just as fast as a motorboat.
They waved everyone else toward the cabin, already preoccupied with their task.
The air inside the little cabin was stuffy and warm after the breeze off the ocean. The ceiling was too low overhead. The deck tilted as the boat moved under sail and Minnie clutched at the doorway. The tilting deck felt much too similar to the way the balcony had wavered that morning.
Téra glanced at Josh. “It is safe to speak now?” she asked in stilted English.
“Yes, I believe so,” Josh told her in Spanish.
She turned to Duardo, lifted her hand and cracked it across his face. “You pig! You sent me to that damn bordello to be raped! You let them do it! You even gave them drugs!”
Duardo rubbed his jaw. “It was distilled water, little sister.”
If anything, her eyes blazed with more fury. She planted her hands on her hips. “What, so I would be awake through every disgusting moment? I hate you! I spit on you!” Her Spanish disintegrated and grew too fast and too full of slang and swearing for Minnie to follow after that.
Nick climbed down into the cabin and took in the torrent of Spanish, hiding his smile. “Inventive,” he murmured.
Minnie sighed and reached out to touch Téra’s shoulder. “You would never have had a single customer,” she told her.
“What?” Téra turned on her. “What do you mean?”
Minnie nodded at Duardo who was watching her warily. “Straight after they marched you down to the bordello, Zalaya visited Rosa, the manager. He got her to spread the word. I heard two officers speaking about it just before I destroyed the monitors. Zalaya let it be known that he wanted you first and any man who touched you before he did would wake up to find his balls being sawn off with a rusty hacksaw.”
Téra blinked, absorbing this. Then she wrinkled her nose. “Eeyuuuwww, my own brother?” She spun and threw herself at Duardo, holding him tight. “I knew you weren’t dead. I knew it.”
Minnie slipped from the cabin, the air too stifling to bear. She climbed up to the deck and found Calli standing at the big wheel, the wind ruffling her blonde hair. A pair of pilot lights on either side of her illuminated the little wheel deck. She looked quite comfortable behind the wheel.
“Oh don’t worry,” she told Minnie. “We’re running under a direct wind—no tacking. Nick will take over when we get to the tricky stuff.”
“Some honeymoon, huh?” Minnie said.
“It has the virtue of being unique.”
“I can’t believe you shot Soto. Right between the eyes.”
“Practice,” Calli assured her. “Nick has had me doing target practice every day since we landed in Acapulco.”
Minnie crossed her arms. “Yeah, but that was big round targets with bull’s-eyes. Soto was living, breathing animal. I won’t call him human, as I don’t think he qualified, but he was alive.”
“He was about to shoot you. It was a no brainer.” Calli shrugged. She looked at Minnie. “Duardo told me about the soldier you dealt with in the foyer off the balcony.”
Minnie shifted uneasily. “I had to,” she said softly. “It was him or me.”
Calli nodded. “We’ve all been doing things we never thought we’d be able to do. Look at your father.”
Movement sounded behind Minnie and a hand touched her back as someone squeezed passed her. The boat was a small one and the deck cramped by sheets, the wheel and more.
Nick stepped behind Calli and looked over her shoulder at the compass set before the wheel. “Come around ten degrees, to due north.”
She adjusted the wheel and the boat moved obediently.
Duardo slipped past Minnie and she jumped, startled by his appearance. Her heart jumped too. He glanced at her and looked away and she realized that he felt as awkward as she.
“What I can’t figure,” Nick said to Duardo, as if he was picking up a conversation they had already started, “is why they tried to assassinate Zalaya at all. He was Serrano’s key to keeping everything under control.”
“It was Torrez who tried to kill Zalaya. He was a rejected lover and resented it,” Duardo said.
“No, it was Serrano who arranged it,” Minnie said and they looked at her, surprise on their faces. She shrugged. “Serrano was paranoid from the beginning. He hired Zalaya to protect his back from all the conspiracies he imagined going on around him. He had the roof of the walkway dismantled so he could see who approached the palace...everything to him was a plot to get him. In the end it was Zalaya himself he came to suspect and had to kill.”
“Why?” Nick asked sharply. She knew he was not disagreeing with her but asking for more information.
“Zalaya has a reputation for violence, evil tastes and horribly effective methods. Plus a head for intrigue. Yet in the last few weeks, Zalaya was getting less than spectacular results. Serrano complained of it—curious holes, he said. Then I came along and screwed things up. That’s when the holes became neon signs that even Torrez noticed. You played the part well, Duardo, but you weren’t quite ruthless enough and that was your undoing.”
Duardo looked doubtful. “Serrano relied on Zalaya too much to get rid of him.”
Minnie shook her head. “He was grooming Torrez to take over. It was Serrano all along. Not a rejected boyfriend.”
“Then my use as Zalaya is truly at an end,” Duardo said.
“God, you weren’t thinking of going back in there, were you?” Calli asked, startled.
“It was worth considering.” Duardo replied.
“You can’t,” Minnie said flatly. “You have to come back to Mexico. Nick is going to need your help taking back Vistaria.”
Nick looked astonished. “How did you know I was going to say that?”
“It’s perfectly obvious,” she said truthfully.
They were all looking at her now. Calli said softly, “You’ve changed!”
Minnie grimaced. “Yeah. Zombie girl has gone.”
Nick grabbed one of the overhead sheets as the boat lifted over a swell. “So has the party girl, I think.”
Minnie looked at Duardo. “Yes. Her too. Zalaya killed her.” She turned away and threaded her way along the deck, ducking under the spinnaker to reach the prow and solitude.
Duardo followed her as she had known he would. She leaned back against the railing and faced him.
He gripped the railing next to her and his knuckles were white. “I would have preferred you never learn what I had to do there,” he said at last. “Part of me died when I realized that you were there and that I must deal with you as Zalaya would.” His chest lifted, as if he wanted to say more, but he remained silent.
She could almost feel his doubt and hesitation. He was trying to find a path through everything that lay between them. She relented and softly said, “I’ve been able to put together nearly all of it from your hints. I know you only did what you had to do. Serrano was watching you as closely as anyone else around him.”
He lifted his hand. “I was trying to protect you. You will never believe that, but—”
“I believe you,” she said softly.
Again, the awkward silence.
“You knew the end was coming,” she said. “A breaking storm. I understood that as well as you did. You didn’t expect to survive this day. That is why you insisted I find a way to leave.”
She saw his chest rise and fall. “You knew that too?”
“When I found the key with the knife, I knew.”
Again, a silence grew between them. Minnie desperately sought another way around the barrier.
“The story you tol
d me, about killing Duardo in the hospital.” She grimaced. “It sounds confusing put that way, doesn’t it?”
Duardo shook his head. “I think of Zalaya as something apart from me. It’s better that way. You want to know what happened in the hospital? How I came to be Zalaya?”
“Yes.”
“The story I told you as Zalaya was accurate to a point.”
“But what happened to you, after the helicopter? Carmen told me the door they took you through led to the infirmary, but...” She shrugged. “After that, I can’t connect the dots.”
“The bullet was too close to my heart,” Duardo said. “The surgeons shipped me off to the city hospital for better treatment. There happened to be a cardiac surgeon visiting, one of the best in the world. He operated. Later, when the Insurrectos had taken over the city, the hospital staff destroyed all my records and took my tags so I couldn’t be identified.
“The first I knew of any of this was when I woke up to find Vistaria in the hands of the Insurrectos, the president dead and Nick and those who would be with him—including you—nowhere to be found. I spent the next few weeks going through the most painful physiotherapy and rehabilitation I’ve ever experienced. Getting shot was easier.”
Minnie saw his ghostly smile.
“Your English is so much better,” she said. “It’s idiomatic, almost flawless.”
“Zalaya’s English was perfect. I spent every moment I could watching American television and reading novels in English. There were a lot of sleepless nights.” He shrugged. “It just had to be done.” He reached out for the rail. “I must sit,” he said. “My leg was not shattered as Zalaya’s was but it still aches if I stand for too long.”
Minnie processed that as he sat down. She sank to the deck beside him. “You really were shot in the leg?” she breathed.
He cocked his knee and rubbed at the hamstring as she had seen him do countless times in the last few days. “Of course. I had to withstand the closest scrutiny.”
“Ohmigod. You did it yourself.” She felt queasy and wrapped her arms around her stomach. “That was why Zalaya was in the hospital, wasn’t it?”
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