by Jen Blood
“You’re not going alone,” Diggs said. “I’m in.”
Juarez didn’t look surprised by his decision. He didn’t look especially happy, either. He looked at Monty and Carl.
“I didn’t come all this way to sit around jerking off in the sand,” Monty said. “I’m ready to have a little fun.”
“I’m in,” Carl agreed.
Jamie retrieved her backpack and stood, dusting the sand from her butt. “All right, then. Let’s do this.”
Diggs helped me up, but I told him to go on without me. As the others were walking away, I caught Jamie’s elbow. “Can you hang on a second?”
She let the others go ahead.
“What’s up?”
“Do you have a dollar?”
She looked confused, but she pulled a change purse from her bag anyway. I stuffed the worn buck she gave me in my pocket, and handed her a folded piece of paper I’d been carrying around for the past day. Diggs was right: We needed to be ready for whatever was coming next.
“What is this?”
“A bill of sale,” I said. “You need a new base of operations, right? I just happen to own an island. It’s in Penobscot Bay—plenty of acreage, maybe slightly haunted, but it has a couple of outbuildings and a huge house, great land… It’s all yours.”
“What? You can’t give me your island.” She tried to push the paper back in my hand. I wouldn’t take it.
“The taxes are paid up. No zoning, no problems with noise or neighbors.”
“Erin, you don’t have to—”
“Yes, actually,” I interrupted. “I do. Whatever happens today, Diggs and I won’t be back for a while. The island might as well be doing something useful. I just have one request.”
She didn’t say anything, waiting for me to continue. Which I happily would have done, if I could have swallowed past the lump in my throat. Finally, I pulled myself together enough to speak.
“I’d like you to go back to Sally’s and get Einstein. Keep him with you until I get back. I think he’d be better off with you—happier.”
She didn’t argue. Apparently, even an outsider could tell there was no way life was going back to normal when this day was over. “It’s done,” she said seriously.
“Thank you.”
Before I could break away and try to catch up to Diggs, Jamie touched my wrist—carefully, as though she knew it was already a sore spot. When I looked at her, her eyes had gone dark.
“I know we don’t know each other,” she said. “Not really. What you’re doing is important, though.”
“Thanks,” I said awkwardly. She still wouldn’t let me go.
“The next year will be hard,” she continued. “You’ll lose more than you can imagine, in this fight. You just need to know what you’re doing isn’t for nothing.”
The reporter side of my brain kicked in, pushing aside my discomfort. “How do you know that? Do you have some connection to this that Jack doesn’t know about?”
She lowered her eyes. Let go of my arm. The darkness disappeared. “No,” she said. “I don’t have any connection to this. I just…” She looked embarrassed.
“You just what?” I pressed.
“You ladies coming or what?” Diggs called to us.
“We’re coming,” Jamie called back. When she met my eye again, a wall had gone up. There was something oddly vulnerable about her now. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out. Don’t worry about Einstein. He’ll be in good hands, I promise.”
And then, she walked off without another word.
My arm was still warm where she’d touched it. I thought of the dolphins. The feel of Diggs’ arms around me. The sight of my father, coming toward me after a decade away... The Before and the After.
You’ll lose more than you can imagine.
“Sol?” Diggs said, walking back toward me. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. I stepped up the pace, shaking off whatever the hell had just happened. “I’m okay.” I took a breath. Diggs eyed me with eyebrows raised. I didn’t need another heart-to-heart, though—I just needed this to be over.
“Let’s go get Kat,” I said. “And then, let’s get the hell out of town.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight - Kat
Despite their best intentions, ultimately Kat and Cameron spent the rest of the night and most of the next morning lost and running. Kat was covered with bites and scrapes and scratches, her body aching with hunger and fatigue. Cam didn’t look much better, though he held up well. Every hour or so, he would stop, shimmy up the nearest palm tree, and select the greenest coconut he could find. He used his Swiss army knife to drill into one of the coconut ‘eyes,’ then promptly handed it to Kat. The first time, she’d looked at him like he was insane. By the time the night was out, she accepted the gifts without question and drank deeply.
It was eleven o’clock before they finally found any semblance of civilization. By that time, the sun was up. The air sizzled. A cluster of grass-roofed huts lined a dusty road. Goats and chickens roamed free, a couple of mangy dogs slinking from yard to yard. Kids shouted, kicking a partially-deflated soccer ball in the dust.
All shouts came to a stop when the two limping, bloodied Gringos came into view, however. Cameron approached a stout, wary-eyed woman in a white dress as she primed an old fashioned water pump, chickens pecking the ground at her feet. Cam spoke to her in rapid Spanish, using a regional dialect Kat wasn’t familiar with.
The woman shook her head, responding to Cameron in a rapidf-ire, near-identical dialect. Kat was fluent in Spanish, but she could barely follow their conversation.
The woman gestured to the water pump, picking up half an emptied coconut shell. She mimed drinking, then dumped the empty shell over her head, scrubbing at her arms. Kat nodded gratefully. A drink of contaminated water and a sponge bath in the wide open spaces sounded heavenly at the moment.
Cameron smiled and nodded, then promptly grabbed Kat the moment the woman’s back was turned. A full half-shell of water was already in Kat’s hand.
“Unless you want to add dysentery to our growing list of problems, I suggest you put that down,” he said. “You’ve had enough fluid to keep you hydrated so far. We’ll find something else soon.”
“What kind of idiot do you think I am?” she snapped. “I’ve done Doctors Without Borders for years… I think I know enough not to drink the water.”
“Sorry,” he said. He let her go. “I just didn’t want to run the risk…”
“I know.” She eyed the water pump and the old plastic bucket beside it, the chickens and the goats and the mangy dogs. She shook her head with a sigh, and began to undress. “You know, half my stints with Doctors seem glamorous compared to the past twenty-four hours.”
“You lived on Payson Isle, though,” he said conversationally. He pulled up a patch of dirt and sat painfully. Despite the fact that Kat was down to bra and underwear, he showed no inclination to give her any privacy. “You must have gotten used to roughing it there.”
No running water and a lack of flush toilets was hardly a match for what they’d been through in the past twelve hours, but she knew what he was fishing for. “You have something you want to ask me, Cam?”
“No,” he said. He removed his shoes, then spared an inquiring glance up at her. His feet were bloody, she noted, with blisters big enough to make a grown man cry. He’d never said a word. “I just... I always understood how Adam got sucked into Isaac’s insanity. I could never quite see you with the Payson Church, though.”
“I was only there for a year,” she reminded him. “And I wouldn’t have been there that long if I hadn’t gotten knocked up.”
She finished washing herself as best she could, then reluctantly pulled her jeans back on. They were filthy, torn, and considerably looser than they’d been when she and Cameron first set out. When she was dressed again—more or less—she sat on a wooden crate beside Cam and reached for his left foot.
An unexpected flicker of vulnera
bility touched his eyes.
“Your feet are a mess,” she said. “Let me see if there’s anything I can do.”
“It’s all right.”
“Not if they get infected, it’s not,” she said firmly.
Reluctantly, he surrendered. Kat filled the coconut shell and dumped water over his long toes, scrubbing at the soles of his feet with her bare hand.
“You think they have a First Aid kit here anywhere?” she asked. “Or, better yet, a medical clinic?”
“Doubtful.” He closed his eyes when she swept her thumb across the tendon at the back of his right foot. She felt scar tissue there, alongside a blister the size of her knuckle.
“How did you, anyway?” he asked. He looked uncomfortable. Not in pain, necessarily, but acutely uneasy at her touch.
“How did I what?”
“Get pregnant. Out on Payson Isle.”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “The usual way.”
He laughed—actually laughed. She found herself fascinated that such a thing was even possible. “No. I mean, I know you were young, but I imagine you knew about the birds and the bees. You weren’t that young.”
Oh, but she had been. She almost rolled her eyes at the memory.
“Adam told me he couldn’t get anyone pregnant—that they’d done something to him. He was sterile.”
“He lied, then,” Cameron said.
“He said my getting pregnant was a gift from God. A miracle.”
“He lied, then,” he repeated, more firmly. Their eyes caught, and held.
“Yes,” she agreed. “He lied. And I was stupid enough to believe him.”
She found herself caught in a barrage of memories—the best and worst scenes from her brief time with Adam on Payson Isle. First kisses and first sex; the day Erin was born; sunshine and darkness and long cold nights on Payson Isle. The day she realized Isaac Payson’s interest in Maddie had faded, shortly after Maddie had given birth to a bouncing baby girl of her own.
The day Kat realized his interest lay elsewhere now.
“Are you all right?” Cameron asked.
She saw Isaac’s eyes on her, at church service after church service after Erin was born. The way he’d followed her. Sent Adam away from her, whenever he could.
“Katherine?”
Isaac, waiting for her in the greenhouse. The full moon overhead.
You have no right to deny this… No right to deny me. Adam doesn’t decide this. You don’t decide this. God has decided.
She started when Cameron reached for her, his hand cool on her arm.
“Kat?” he said again. “Are you okay?”
She pulled away abruptly. Stuffed the memory of those days on Payson Isle back down, as far as humanly possible. Past was passed—that’s what her father always used to say.
Lately, though, it seemed like the past had become brutally present.
She lowered Cameron’s now-clean feet to the ground.
“Fine,” she said briskly. “I’m fine. We should find some antiseptic for those blisters, though.”
She could tell he hadn’t missed her change in tone. He pulled his feet back and stood to take his turn at the water pump. His eyes lingered on hers, softer now. The change didn’t please her.
“That will wait,” he said. To her relief, he sounded just as brisk. They were back to business, then. Good. She could handle business. “We need to get moving. Find some food, to start with.” He pulled off his shirt. In the light, Kat noted half a dozen long, pale white scars on his back. “Then we’ll need to find a vehicle.”
She looked around. A single, rusted-out pickup was parked in a yard farther along the road. “And then?” she asked.
“Then?” He shrugged. “Then, we find Erin, get her, Diggs, and you the hell out of here, and put this thing to bed.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It won’t be. We’ll do it anyway.”
He leaned forward and dumped a shell-full of cool water over his head, splashing Kat in the process. She stepped back as he scrubbed the dirt from his scalp. When he looked at her, it was with an impish grin she wouldn’t have imagined possible a few days ago.
“Unless you want to wash my back, maybe you could give me some room.”
“Tempting, but I’ll pass,” she said dryly. “You finish up. I’ll see if I can scrounge some food.”
The woman who had loaned them the use of her water pump was named Maria. She had at least four kids as far as Kat could tell, along with mother and father, husband, and two brothers—all of whom appeared to sleep under the same grass-thatched roof. Kat tried an awkward, mostly-mimed introduction at the open entrance to the family’s palapa, but the woman was way ahead of her. Before Kat had even asked, plates were set on a wobbly wooden table inside. Maria put out steaming tortillas, scrambled eggs, and refried beans, gesturing to the food enthusiastically.
Humbled and grateful, Kat went back out for Cameron. He was dressed again, his graying hair already drying in the sun.
“Think you could eat?” she asked. “Maria has one hell of a spread in there for us.”
He nodded, but she could tell he was distracted. His head was up, his eyes sharp. “I’ll be in in a minute.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Just being careful,” he said. “Go on in—eat. Give me a couple of minutes.”
Nearly ten minutes later, Cam came in and sat beside her. Maria hovered over them, her aging parents seated in stony silence across the table. The floor was dirt; daylight provided the only illumination. Cameron asked the family a few questions while Maria bounced a toddler on her hip. A group of dark-eyed, smiling children played outside.
They were in the middle of a conversation, the toddler babbling happily, Maria’s parents finally drawn out of their silence, when Kat saw Cameron’s head come up.
“What is it?” she asked immediately.
He held up his hand. Then, he shot off a question to Maria in rapid-fire Spanish. Fear crossed the woman’s face. She shook her head. Cameron said something more, his voice suddenly laden with tension.
Maria’s eyes went wide. Outside, the sound of the children’s laughter gave way to an eerie stillness.
Cameron got up from the table so suddenly the chair toppled behind him. The toddler bouncing on Maria’s hip started at the noise. Once he’d recovered, he started to howl.
“We have to go,” Cam said. Kat was already on her feet.
There was an entrance at the front and back of the primitive structure, both of them open. Cameron herded Kat toward the back. A dog barked nearby. The toddler wailed, his voice amplified in the small space. Maria continued talking to them... Pleading with them, Kat was sure by the tone alone. With Cameron on her heels, practically pushing her forward, Kat flew out the back door.
Straight into the business end of Lee’s AK-47.
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Diggs
Coba is a Mayan village of about thirteen hundred people on the Yucatan Peninsula. Despite a long day of travel, we still managed to pull into the dusty parking lot outside the ancient Mayan pyramid known as La Iglesia by six that night. Jamie was behind the wheel, driving a van Juarez had rented at the air strip in Valladolid. Solomon had gone monosyllabic again. The sun was still up, producing a damp, smothering heat that easily outmatched the van’s shaky A/C.
There were a few tourists with floppy hats and elaborate cameras still roaming, but otherwise it seemed the place was empty. Two cars and another van were the only vehicles in the lot, which was ringed by grass-roofed booths and sleepy-eyed vendors. I didn’t see any sign of Jenny or her cohorts.
Carl was the only one missing from the party, as he’d rented a second car. That car would be the getaway vehicle for Solomon, Kat, and me when the moment arrived. Our plan was in place, then: We would do the exchange with Jenny, handing over the memory card and a copy of the list we’d decrypted from the card. As soon as we had Kat, Solomon and I would take her with us in our getaway car, bo
und for the Cancun airport. Meanwhile, Juarez’s team would return to Jamie’s plane and head back stateside.
Assuming, of course, that nothing went wrong.
Right now, that didn’t feel like a very realistic assumption.
“So much for meeting in a public place,” Juarez said once we were parked. He eyed the dusty parking lot critically.
“The place will be deserted by ten,” I said.
“At least we’re here early enough to do some recon,” Monty said. “I want to check the place out. No sense sitting around here waiting for an ambush—I say we make use of the time we’ve got.”
Beside me, Solomon nodded seriously. “He’s right. We should scope the place out, see if we can make sure we have an edge.”
“I didn’t mean you, sweet cheeks,” Monty said firmly. “I was talking more to the people in the van who didn’t almost die a couple days ago.”
“I’m doing a lot better,” she said.
“A lot better than what?” I said. “Forget it, ace.”
“I wasn’t talking to you either, actually,” Monty said. “Sorry, Diggs. You keep your girl entertained, and stay the hell out of the way.”
I tried not to be offended. It wasn’t easy. Solomon looked at me knowingly. “Sorry, slick. Guess you’re not the Great American Hero we always thought you were.”
“It’s not that,” Juarez said. He twisted around to look at us. He and Jamie were up front. Monty had claimed the bench seat in the middle, relegating Solomon and me to the far back. “But I don’t want anyone to be alone while we’re doing this. There’s safety in numbers.”
“Relatively speaking,” I said.
“Relatively speaking,” he agreed.
“Sucks for you,” Solomon said. “If you’re stuck with me, that’s definitely going to cut into your sightseeing time.”
“I think I’ll live.” Though, having said that, it was hard not to get swept up in the lure of Coba, even under the circumstances. I wouldn’t have minded taking a stroll around.
“Yeah, right,” she said knowingly. “You’re getting that look in your eye.”