“Is there somewhere for you to land? Just with your shoes, though. I don’t want you to cut your hands.”
“Yeah. A table.”
I grunted as she swung her legs down, then her weight eased off of me as she stood up. I heard her knocking over God knew what as she climbed down. I stuck my face in after her.
“The door is right there.” I pointed to my right.
She turned the knob and it stopped.
“Okay, is there a button you can turn in the door knob? Or is there a latch you can turn above it?”
She peered close. “In the knob.” She twisted something.
“Okay, try the door again.”
She did, and smiled so brightly it nearly lit up the darkness. The door swung open.
“Great job! Now, can you hold Thunder?”
While she held the horse, I went in the office. On the far side was the open door to the interior of the barn, and on the adjacent wall, a desk. I searched the small room for a phone. Buried under Friday’s newspaper on the desk, I found one. I picked it up. It had a dial tone, thank goodness, but I realized I had no idea what Jack’s number was. I had his cell phone number programmed into mine, but Tanner and his skinny sidekick had taken that hours ago. I lifted the phone’s base and looked for speed dial buttons. Nothing. But there was one that held promise: Redial. I pushed it and held the receiver to my ear.
“Hello?” It was Jack.
I hadn’t expected to cry, but a sob broke from my throat.
“Mickey? Is that you?”
“No, Jack, it’s Emily, but don’t say my name. Say, hey, okay, Mickey.”
There was a pause. “Hey, okay, Mickey.”
“I’m in the barn office. Some of Paul’s men drugged me and locked me in one of their outbuildings, with a little girl. Jack, it’s Valentina. I have her. We escaped, and I have so much to tell you, later. But I was scared that they would be there with you.”
“Yeah, that’s great, but you’re right about that,” Jack said.
“I can’t let them find us. I’m going to take Valentina to the hangar and we’ll hide there until you can come for us.” I heard voices in the background, voices I recognized. Paul. Tanner. The tall, skinny guy. My hands trembled around the receiver.
“Sounds like the only thing you can do about it,” he said.
“Are you okay? Should I call for help?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I’ll call the vet myself in the morning. Meet me there?”
“Yes, thank you, Jack, thank you!”
“Be sure to keep an eye on the other horses though. It might be catching.”
A breath caught in my throat. “I will.”
“See you then.”
“Yes, see you then.”
As I hung up the phone, I heard the sound of the stall entrance opening in the far end of the barn. I tiptoed out of the office and shut the exterior door as quietly as I could. I sure didn’t feel groggy anymore.
“Someone’s coming. We have to go.” I put my finger to my lips.
Betsy put her finger to hers.
I lifted her onto Thunder’s saddle, and heard a noise right behind me. Glass crunching underfoot in the office. I looked from Betsy to the exterior door and grimaced, hesitating, then got the gun from my waistband again and stood by the door with it raised over my head in both hands. When the door opened, a man’s head poked out, and I lowered the butt of the pistol with all my strength on the base of his skull.
“Ugh phuh.” He landed on his face in the dirt.
“Good enough.” I said.
I slipped the pistol home in my skirt and hoisted myself up quickly behind Betsy. So much for avoiding strenuous physical activity for a few days after my surgery. Between riding, roping, and whatever you’d call what I’d just done, I’d be lucky if my uterus didn’t fall out on the desert floor before the night was over.
“Is he dead?” Betsy whispered.
“No, sweetie, he’ll just sleep for a while,” I said into her ear, my voice barely more than a vibration.
I squeezed my heels into Thunder’s flanks, and turned him north again. Behind me, I heard the bolt throw in the near end center stall entrance and the doors creak open. There was more than one of them. Spit. I dug my heels into Thunder’s flanks and he flew over the ground in the dark.
“Son of a bitch,” I heard a voice say. But if he said anything else, we were too far away by then to hear.
***
The echoes of the gunshot shattered the silence of the night, and the cry of an owl followed them. I’d hated to use the gun, but it was the only way I could think of to get past the padlock on the hangar door. I’d just have to count on the wind to cover—or at least disguise—the location of the sound. Luckily, Thunder appeared to be used to guns, because he hadn’t even flinched. I slipped the lock off. I pantomimed for Betsy to take her fingers out of her ears, and she did.
“In here, sleepy girl.” I pulled the door up and motioned Betsy inside.
Betsy hesitated. “It’s dark.”
“Yes, but Thunder and I will be with you. Here, you hold his reins. I have to get the airplane outside, all right?”
I’d decided that if we needed to make a run for it, I’d have the plane ready. If all was well, putting it back in the hangar was no big deal for an old hand like me. And I was sure all would be well, and that we’d just sit here and wait in the dark for a little while, because, by now, Jack would have called the cops and Mickey and who knew whom else. The cavalry would be on the way.
Giving Betsy the job of holding Thunder’s reins seemed to help her. The calming impact the horse had on her was amazing, and I sensed a budding horsewoman. She led Thunder in and his hooves clopped on the concrete floor. I heard her whisper to him. “It’s okay, Thunder. I’m not scared of the dark, are you?”
I nudged along the base of the wall with my foot looking for the tow bar. My boot clanked metal. I reached down and lifted it. The darn thing wasn’t as light as Jack had made it look. I remembered that he’d somehow attached it to one of the plane’s three legs. After a few false starts I clamped it around the front one. I crouched down, leaned back, and heaved on the bar. The plane crept forward, inches at a time, but gathered speed. I did it again, over and over, until I had it clear of the building, where I removed the bar and tossed it into the brush.
In the distance, a pair of headlights bounced. Jack. My heart seized. At least I hoped it was Jack. I had no way of knowing if it wasn’t. I needed to act fast now, but I didn’t know what to do. My thoughts tumbled for slow, agonizing moments, then I pulled them together.
“Okay, Betsy, can you bring Thunder back out? We’re going to take one more ride.”
Girl and horse appeared in seconds. She was solemn, seeming proud to be in charge of the gorgeous creature.
Now two sets of headlights shot through the darkness toward us, bouncing up and down as both vehicles hit the bumps on the one-lane dirt road out to the airstrip. Two wasn’t necessarily bad news. If the first car hadn’t been Jack, then the second one surely was. A girl could hope, anyway.
“We’re going to ride out to the runway so we can have a good view of my friend Jack as he drives up.” I threw Betsy up onto the saddle and checked my waistband for the gun. It was still there. I jammed my foot in the stirrup and threw my leg over. “One more time, Thunder. Yah!”
The powerful hindquarters bunched and Thunder shot forward, down the worn grass leading to the airstrip. I wanted out of gun range in case one of those vehicles or both were the bad guys, but close enough to see what happened at the hangar. I had to gamble that the bad guys were packing shotguns or pistols— there was no way I could get out of range if they’d brought rifles with scopes. I shivered at the thought of night vision capability. However, even if they did bring the long-range guns, I had a really quick ride. I patted the horse’s neck as he ran.
I pulled Thunder up halfway down the runway and turned us back around. A Suburban was lurching to a stop at t
he hangar. Jack. Thank God. He looked around, not finding us, so I pulled the pistol out and shot it in the air. He turned toward the sound.
“Jack! Meet me here!” I yelled, as loud as I could.
He must have heard me or sensed me or just flat out guessed right, because he jumped into the plane in three strides. I heard the engine and propeller roar to life. The vehicle on the dirt road was only a few hundred yards away from the hangar. The Skyhawk started out to the runway, and I urged Thunder toward it at full gallop, his hooves pounding faster than the racing heartbeat crashing in my ears. When we were ten yards from the plane, I pulled back on the reins.
“Whoa, boy.” I jumped off, pulling Betsy with me, and slapped the horse on the rump. That’s when I noticed the brand on his flank: ΣSL. “Get, yah, get.”
He took off toward the ranch house at a dead sprint, the stirrups bouncing on his sides. As he ran from the runway, he passed a tall Indian in a gigantic headdress made of wooden stakes, his whole white-painted body naked except for his tall moccasins and black skirt. This was not Stella, no mere girl playing dress-up. A chill ran through me, and the Indian raised a hand in the air. “Mountain Spirit Dancer,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and reopened them, and he was gone.
I scooped Betsy into my arms, shaking off the ghostly vision. “You’ve been very brave, and I need you to do it one more time. Okay? Can you trust me?”
“Yes,” she yelled, over the roar of the propeller.
I stood off to the side of the runway. The plane lurched to a stop beside us. Jack threw the door open and I approached it from the rear of the plane—his warning before about the propeller in my mind—and handed Betsy to him, scrambling in after her. I strained to see back the way Jack had come. The chase vehicle careened into the hangar area and barely slowed down as it turned toward the runway. I slammed the door.
“Hold on, this will get rough,” Jack said.
I put Betsy in my lap and pulled the seat belt over us both as the little plane gathered speed and leaped and bucked down the runway.
“Do we have enough runway left for takeoff?” I shouted over the engine noise.
Jack didn’t answer. He pulled back on the yoke, hard, as I heard shots ping off the skin of the plane.
“Spit!” I screamed.
The front wheels of the plane lifted, dropped back to the sod, and lifted again as headlights bore down on the wing outside my window.
With a final jolting lunge, the Skyhawk lifted off the ground, perilously low, wings dipping from side to side. Betsy turned in my lap and buried her face in my chest with both her arms tight around my neck. She made a noise like an inward scream. I hugged her hard, my face buried in her hair. Three more bullets shook the plane in rapid succession. I held my breath—please God, please God, please—and the Skyhawk shucked them off and climbed, up, up, up into the night sky.
Jack leveled the plane off and leaned toward me. “Did you really just scream ‘spit?’”
Chapter Twenty-seven
“But I not understand. Why I can’t stay with Miss Emily?”
The words came from the sweet voice I’d grown to love like no other in one short day. We were sitting around the kitchen table at my mother’s house: Betsy, Jack, Nadine, Wallace, and me. I looked at my mother standing by the refrigerator, and she walked over to Betsy, crouched before the child, and reached for one of her hands before I even knew what she was doing.
“We wish you could, Betsy. You are welcome in our house anytime.” She looked at my friends one by one. “All of you are.”
I nearly dropped my eyeteeth over that one, and I reached out and grabbed my mother’s hand for a squeeze, then said to Betsy, “Wallace is going to find you a family with a mommy and a daddy. A really nice family, maybe with brothers and sisters for you to play with.”
So much had come to light in the last twenty-four hours. Not just that this little girl’s real name was Elizabet, changed to Valentina when her father had broken the girl and her mother free from Paul’s human trafficking operation. Not just that he’d put them on a bus to Amarillo via an Underground Railroad of sorts for illegal immigrants. Not just that this child with no country had Americanized her name to Betsy all by herself. But also that the man who died on Wrong Turn Ranch was her father, Alejandro, beaten by Paul’s men.
The police had pieced that together when they rescued the small army of immigrants that Paul had smuggled over the border with his import business. Paul had put the illegals straight to work in the tunnels from his property to a lucrative vein of silver he’d discovered under Mescalero Apache land. At least it was lucrative if the labor was free. Some of the immigrants—the kids and the young women—had a higher value when sold to the kind of people that liked their sex toys untraceable and disposable. A task force was at work now, hunting for the ones they knew about. All we could do for the others was pray.
By the time we figured out that Antonio Rosa was just a pseudonym for Alejandro, we weren’t even surprised anymore. How the man had scraped together the money to get his wife and daughter to safety, no one quite knew. We did know the ending though: Spike Howard—Paul’s private bounty hunter—floating face up in a hotel swimming pool in Amarillo. Sofia’s arrest and murder contracted by Paul. Tanner, suspected (at least by me) of murdering Maria Delgado, who police confirmed to be the person who sent me the AmarilloMama email with information that she might have learned while helping Sofia and her daughter. Paul, it seemed, had hired Jack so he could keep tabs on what we were learning. And then there was Betsy, now an orphan in a country that wouldn’t claim her as one of their own.
And it was that last part that I was leaving out in explaining things to her. That the U.S. government would have to decide whether Betsy stayed here or went back to Mexico. That I was no shoo-in to keep her, even if the INS let her remain in the U.S.: single, no kids, living with my mother, and months away at best from being approved by the foster care much less the adoption system. I kept my face smooth and smiling, though, because Betsy didn’t need to know any of this yet. And she might never know.
She stared at the tabletop. “Will you come see me?”
“Of course I will!” I said. I ignored the pain shooting through my abdomen from overdoing things so dramatically in the previous twenty-four hours and scooted my chair nearer to hers. She launched herself into my arms. I breathed in her sweet smell and let her hair dry my tears.
After a few minutes, Wallace stood and cleared his throat. “Okay, Betsy. Time to go.”
“I’m taking you to the Rainbow Room so you can pick out some clothes and a toy. Would you like that?” Nadine took Betsy’s hands and pulled her up.
“But I have clothes.” I had bought her a new set of Barbie pj’s at Walmart on our way here.
Nadine smiled. “So you do. But this will be fun.”
I stood up, too, and patted Betsy on the shoulder. “A girl can never have too many clothes.”
Betsy turned to me. “But I lost my backpack.”
I squatted, eye level to her. “I’m so sorry.”
“Mama said never lose it.”
“You can get a new one, honey.”
She shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Would you like me to see if I can find it for you?”
She nodded at me, round-eyed. “Yes, please.”
I stood up and let Wallace and Nadine lead her away.
Jack and I waved goodbye to them from the front door, not stopping until the Altima taking Betsy away had disappeared from sight. When it had, I broke down completely. Sobs tore through me, and I buried my face in my hands. How could I lose another child in less than a week? I couldn’t be thankful that she might go to someone else, maybe even someone in Mexico. Everything in me screamed that she was meant for me, and me for her. God meant this to be, didn’t he? Wasn’t that why he’d thrown us together, her when she’d lost both her parents, and me when I’d lost everything else? Wasn’t it?
Jack put his hand on my shoulder
, guiding me down the sidewalk toward his Jeep. I didn’t resist, but my body stiffened at his touch. Besides pushing me away, he kept secrets so large that they crowded all the air out of a room, and I had kept one of my own from him, too, that my procedure hadn’t been minor, and that it had serious consequences. I could go along with him now, but I knew better than to let him in.
“Come on,” he said.
He turned and raised his hand to my mother, who was watching from the living room window.
Mother gave him a thumbs up through the glass.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
We drove in silence from Bushland to downtown Amarillo. He parked on the street outside the Maxor Building.
“You’re taking me to work?”
“To the office.”
We got out, and I followed him to the elevators. We rode up together in silence and got off on the fifth floor. He unlocked the office and motioned me inside first. The silence bothered me. Something was missing. My heart lurched. Snowflake. In our frenzied escape, we’d left her in New Mexico.
“Snowflake—”
He smiled. “Is just fine. She’s having a fun vacation with Uncle Mickey and Aunt Laura.”
I nodded, relieved, but then asked the important question. “Why are we here?”
He took me by the arm. “Come on.”
We walked back to his office. He positioned me facing the wall of diplomas and pictures.
“What?”
He pointed to the photograph of Geronimo. “Read that.”
I stepped forward. He did, too, and put a hand on my shoulder. At first I shrugged and tried to move away from him. He was part of my loss, after all, by his own choice. But he just held on. I quit fighting him.
Then I read the engraved quote aloud. “There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God.”
I couldn’t breathe. I had told Jack of the Mountain Spirit Dancer on the runway, of Stella’s impersonating one to help the people her dad had enslaved, of Judith’s childhood story, of my dreams, and of Betsy’s drawing. He hadn’t said much at the time, but I realized now that this was his response, and it was, well, the most perfect answer ever, secrets or no secrets between us.
Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) Page 28