Baby’s Watch

by Justine Davis

  Then the thing that was truly the most important belatedly hit him. Whoever or whatever it was…was it coming after her?

  Chapter 14

  It was right, Ana thought, that her ancestor’s gleaming weapon be used in this hunt. She knew in her heart that Elena Maria de la Costa would approve; she would count no cost too high for family. That it was a great-times-three granddaughter would make no difference; blood was blood, and you took care of your own.

  Unless and until they betrayed you.

  She had wondered if the ancestor she most admired, would have been ashamed of her for what she’d done, for leaving her father and the father of her child.

  More likely, for being fool enough to be taken in by them in the first place.

  But then she had gone back to that treasured diary, read again the tales of an older time, and of the spirited life Elena had led, and what she had thought of what went on around her. Elena’s true character, bold and smart and fearless, had shone through the pages, and as she had since the first time she had read those pages as a girl, Ana felt as if she’d known this long-ago woman who was forever linked to her.

  And she realized that Elena Maria de la Costa would have understood.

  And probably would have sliced Alberto before she left, Ana had thought then.

  Like Ryder was about to slice the man whose throat he had under Elena’s blade now. The man who had been so obviously stunned to see Ryder when he had pulled him out of the car parked behind the roadhouse tavern.

  “You’re dead!” he’d exclaimed then.

  “Exaggerated claim,” Ryder had said smoothly as he’d searched the man for weapons, jamming the lethal-looking handgun he found in the man’s waistband under his shirt into his own belt.

  Ana’s reaction hadn’t been so calm. The man’s words told her Ryder’s story had been the truth; he had tried to save Maria and they had killed him for it.

  Or rather, thought they had.

  The tentative trust she had put in him got a bit more solid in that moment. And she felt an odd ache inside, over and above her worry for Maria, an ache at the idea that this man had risked his very life for her little girl. She wished to reach out and touch him, to thank him, but now was not the time.

  Nor was it time to follow the other, unexpected and unlikely urge she felt; kissing this man would be intriguing, she was sure, but hardly appropriate just now.

  Instead, she studied this thing—she hesitated to call him a man—who had helped steal her little girl. She found her fingers curling, wishing it was she who held her ancestor’s blade to his scrawny throat.

  “You can talk to me now,” Ryder was saying, “or I can see that you never talk again.”

  “I tell you, I don’t know!”

  “Then you’re no use to me, are you?” He shifted, as if in preparation for that fatal slice of the blade. The man screeched.

  “If I knew, I’d tell you!”

  Ryder seemed to consider this. He glanced her way. She saw the question in his eyes, as if he were asking her if she was satisfied this was the truth. But there was something more there, an uneasiness it took her a moment to understand.

  He expected her to be horrified by what he was doing.

  She nearly laughed; if only he knew the anger she harbored, the craving to punish this man and all his partners in these heinous acts.

  The craving to slaughter, painfully, the man who dared lay his hands on her little girl.

  “I mean what I said,” she told Ryder softly. “I will stop at nothing. Nothing.”

  The man under the blade was watching this exchange, bewilderment on his face.

  “Who is this bitch? Who the hell are you?”

  “Me? I’m the guy you killed back there in that gully, remember?”

  The man looked at him warily. He scoffed, but there was a touch of uncertainty in his voice. Did he truly believe he was looking at a ghost? Ana wondered. Then she realized he was drunk enough that his thought processes were tangled. If they were ever clear, she thought, reminding herself again of what this man had done, what he did to make his money.

  And she, who had been a gentle loving child, thought she would relish nothing more than to see this man’s throat laid open like a filleted trout.

  “You some kind of cop after all?”

  “You’ll never know,” Ryder whispered, and shifted the gleaming blade.

  The man screamed, broke.

  “I swear,” he babbled, choking out the words as if fear were throttling him, “I don’t know anything. I got my orders from Duane, I just did what he told me. I just rode shotgun on the first leg, mostly, I never handled any of the brats. I hate ’em.”

  “Who took the next leg?”

  Ryder shifted the blade again, and Ana saw blood begin to trickle down the man’s unshaven neck. Funny how the stubble of beard looked simply unkempt on this man, but had looked oddly attractive on Ryder that night. Even then she’d wanted to touch, to feel the stubble rasp against her fingers. Another urge that was unexpected and startling.

  Right now, of course, his face was still swollen and reddened from the beating he’d taken. The beating he’d taken for her little girl.

  Yet he was still a very attractive man. Even now.

  Perhaps even more attractive now, she thought. Now, when he was so fiercely intent on the mission, on finding Maria.

  The trust she had put in him suddenly shifted form, as unwanted emotion slipped into the mix, making her nervously aware that she was letting things get confused in her mind and heart.

  That way lay disaster, and she tried to quash the feeling. She would focus on nothing but the search, think of this man as nothing more than the best tool she had at hand to use to find her daughter.

  “Marco,” the man finally gasped out, believing at last that Ryder would do what he threatened. “He lives in the motel, east end of Esperanza.”

  Ryder didn’t back off a millimeter. “Room?”

  “Nine.”

  Ryder moved quickly then, using the man’s own belt to fasten his hands tightly behind him. He instructed Ana to find the trunk release on the car. She leaned into the vehicle, her nose crinkling at the smell of stale food she couldn’t see, and the faint odor of urine. She found the latch labeled with a drawing of an open trunk, and pulled it.

  Ryder searched the trunk first, thoroughly, and after pulling out the spare tire to look beneath, handed her a box of ammunition, which she assumed was for the gun the man carried.

  “I don’t want him warning anyone. Any problem with leaving him here?” he asked as he dumped the protesting man into his own trunk.

  “Only that he is still alive,” Ana said bluntly.

  Ryder chuckled. “He may not be, if no one finds him by tomorrow morning. It’s August in Texas, and it probably gets hot enough you could roast a chicken in there.”

  “That would be justice,” she said.

  The man looked at her as if he realized she was the biggest threat. “Who are you?” he wailed, looking at Ana.

  “Haven’t you guessed?” Ryder said, stuffing a greasy rag he’d found into the man’s mouth, thankfully stifling any further wails. “She’s an avenging angel, straight from God, and it’s judgment day.”

  He slammed the trunk lid down, cutting off the muffled scream.

  “Will you truly leave him there?” Ana asked after they had moved the car. They’d put it in a secluded spot in the strip mall’s parking lot, where any sound the man made would likely not be heard, until the world started to wake up again. Ryder had searched until he’d found the man’s cell phone, and a check of the number told him this was not one of the Del Rio ones.

  “Does it matter?” Ryder asked.

  She didn’t waste time pondering. “Not really.”

  “I didn’t think so,” he said, although he suspected should the man really die, she would feel a qualm of remorse. Ana Morales was a very complex woman, he was beginning to realize.

  And a very good one,
in an old-fashioned sense of the word he’d never applied to a woman before because it had never mattered. A good woman had never been something he’d hankered for; give him a party girl, out for fun, with no strings, every time.

  He’d go back to that, he assured himself. As soon as this was over, and Maria was back with her mother and these scumbags were where they belonged. He’d finish his job, break the ring, and go on about his life with a clean record. No need to get too drastic about changing. He’d just be smarter this time.

  “I’ll call my contacts, eventually,” he said. “Tell them where he is.”

  He didn’t explain that he couldn’t call them now, because they likely would try to rein him in, tell him to wait until they had agents in place. They might even pull him off altogether, now that things seemed to be on the verge of breaking loose.

  And there was no way he was letting anyone pull him off this now. Not until he had personally put that baby back in Ana’s arms.

  An image of what that would be like shot through his mind, of seeing that tiny bundle safely back with her mother, of the joyous expression that would spread across Ana’s face. It made him smile, even though it hurt his split lip.

  “You are smiling,” she said into the darkness of the truck cab.

  “I was thinking of your smile, when you have your baby back.”

  He didn’t know why he’d admitted that. Something about this woman seemed to make him run at the mouth.

  When she spoke, her words were soft. “You are a good man, Ryder.”

  That pronouncement, coming from a woman like Ana Morales, nearly made him laugh. But he couldn’t bring himself to correct her. He didn’t want her knowing just how wrong she was. He’d never really cared before, had known his bad-boy reputation attracted exactly the kind of woman he preferred, but this was different.

  Everything with this woman was different.

  When she reached out and gently put a hand on his arm as he drove, he just about jumped out of his skin.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  “I haven’t found her yet.”

  “But you will. I believe that.”

  As he slowed for a turn he glanced at her. She was watching him with a steady look that stabbed through to his soul as surely as if she’d used her blade on him.

  This was a woman who’d have your back. Forever.

  He nearly jumped again as he realized he’d actually thought the word forever in relation to a woman. But as he stared at her, feeling somehow bigger, stronger under the unwavering gaze of her dark eyes, he realized she was a woman who deserved nothing less.

  Marco was sound asleep when Ryder rousted him out after silently and easily breaking into the seedy motel room. It seemed clear that he was not living high on the proceeds of the smuggling ring, but then, that was typical. Alcazar drove a limo, the peons lived in dives like this.

  Marco was even more astonished to see Ryder alive. And thankfully for Ryder’s rapidly diminishing patience—he was hurting, damn it, and thanks to these bastards he had to grit his teeth and keep going—he broke much more easily.

  “Denny,” the man sputtered. “That’s who you need.”

  “Please,” Ryder said scornfully. “The guy you relegated to driving because you think he’s too stupid for anything else?”

  Even as he said it, Ryder remembered that it was Denny who had figured out he had some connection to Maria. Perhaps he’d underestimated the man. But he didn’t think he’d misjudged his colleague’s opinion of him.

  “That’s just it,” Marco said, eyeing the knife Ana was now holding even more warily than the commandeered handgun Ryder held. There was something about a woman with a knife that made some men very nervous. He’d been there himself a time or two, where if the woman of the moment could have laid her hands on a blade he probably would have been minus some body parts he was exceptionally fond of.

  “What’s just it?” Ryder prompted.

  “He’s the one who drove. He always drove.”

  It hit him then, belatedly. Of course. If Denny drove, then he knew where they’d gone.

  “Where is he?”

  “At this hour? At home, I guess.” When Ana shifted the knife in her grip and took a step toward him, the man scrabbled back in the bed like a frightened crab. “He lives behind the church, over on Boone Street.”

  The irony of that bit deep as Ryder grabbed a belt from the back of a chair. With it, he found some nylon shoelaces freed from a pair of worn shoes on the floor by the bed and tied the man up. He crossed the room to a small closet, searched it, then shoved the man inside and closed the door.

  He searched the small apartment until he found another handgun and a cell phone—again not one of the ones with the Del Rio prefix—and took both. There was a landline phone on a table, and when he indicated it, Ana quickly severed the cord with her knife.

  With a certain amount of relish, Ryder thought.

  He smiled inwardly at the memory of Marco’s expression when he’d seen this gloriously angry woman contemplating him with that lethal blade in her hand.

  “I wonder,” he mused aloud as they headed toward Boone Street, “if he thinks living behind a church means some salvation will seep into him.”

  “If so, he is a fool.”

  “The rest of them would agree with you that he’s stupid,” Ryder said. “But I’m not so sure. He’s the one who figured out I…knew Maria.”

  He felt more than saw her gaze sharpen, something about the way she turned slightly toward him in the passenger seat of the truck, and then went very still and quiet.

  “I am sorry I doubted you.”

  He wasn’t sure what had brought on the change of heart. Perhaps she’d sensed that he’d been more than willing to follow through on his threat, if it would help them find Maria. The realization had startled him; for all his sins he’d never been one to treat human life lightly. Nevertheless, he knew it was true.

  What he didn’t know was why. And it was too big of a tangle, sitting somewhere south of his heart near his gut, for him to try and sort out now.

  As they pulled up to a stoplight—he didn’t want to risk attracting any attention, even though the streets of little Esperanza were deserted at this hour—he flicked her a sideways glance. “You just keep right on doubting me, and everyone. Until you have your baby back.”

  After a moment she gave a short, sharp nod.

  When they got to the small apartment above the garage behind the picturesque white clapboard building with the traditional steeple, there was a light on inside. At least, he thought there was; it seemed faint, and flickered oddly. A fire? Surely not, not in August. And not in this little place, that he doubted very much had any kind of a fireplace.

  Unless it was…a fire.

  Ryder tensed. This guy was their best lead, and Ryder wasn’t about to let him toast himself before he talked.

  He gauged the strength of the door; the building was old, and the paint on the door and the jamb was weathered, peeling. There was no lock other than the one in the doorknob, no dead bolt visible, something Ryder found odd for a man in his kind of business.

  His final assessment was that he could probably take it down with one good hit. He didn’t want to think what the effort would do to his already bruised body, but there was no other option. There were no balconies near the two windows, no other possible access points that he could see. He pulled the weapon he’d liberated from Marco free of his belt, then motioned Ana to stand back so he could back up on the landing for a running start.

  “It is locked?” she whispered.

  The man was apparently the main driver on the network that smuggled stolen babies, Ryder thought, and whispered back, “Of course it’s…”

  His voice trailed away as he thought of all the times in his life when he’d overlooked the obvious. Tentatively he reached out and tested the knob.

  It turned. Easily.

  He gave her a sheepish look, but she didn’t seem incline
d to be critical. She merely nodded and waited.

  But she had her three-times-great-grandmother’s knife in her hand.

  If I were the man who had her baby, I’d be a hell of a lot more worried about her than me, Ryder thought.

  He backed to one side of the door, motioned her behind him, and when she’d moved, he reached out and turned the knob.

  The door creaked open like the sound effects from some old spooky movie. Great burglar alarm. Maybe that was why he didn’t bother with new locks. Nobody’d sneak through that door.

  Nothing happened.

  “Candles,” Ana whispered, so close no one more than six inches away could have heard her. Her breath brushed warmly over his ear.

  Ryder suppressed a shiver, and suddenly, inanely, realized the truth of the old joke, “Blow in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere.”

  But then he caught the scent that had made her say it, a sweet, warm aroma that reminded him of a woman in Amarillo, who had always wanted candles burning when they had sex. Which in turn reminded him that he hadn’t thought that way of another woman since he’d met Ana, a realization that only furthered that tangle in his gut.

  Get on with it, he told himself.

  He inched forward, weapon at the ready, safety off, a round chambered. He didn’t want to kill the guy before he talked, but he didn’t want to die, either.

  He made a quick, sharp move with his head, just enough to get a glimpse into the room. Ana had been right. Candles, a small row of them, were burning on a low table near the center of the room. They were also the only light in the room, which made it difficult to see into the shadowy corners. He’d have to—

  He froze as he heard a sound from inside. Footsteps. His grip on the Mac 10 tightened.

  Then there was a rustling, a slight thump, as if of something hitting the floor.

  The voice that came out of the darkness startled him. But the words shocked him even more.

  “I’ve been waiting for you. Come in.”

  Chapter 15

  Denny was the only one who hadn’t been surprised to see him alive.