by Linda Howard
Justin was curled in the ball shape of the very young, his legs still automatically drawing up into his prebirth position. She held her hat so it shielded him from the sun. A soft, pleasant breeze played in her short, light brown curls and lifted the baby’s wispy blond fuzz. He stirred, his rosebud mouth making sucking motions. Milla set down her basket and patted his tiny back, and he lapsed back into sleep.
She stopped at a display of fruit and began carrying on an animated, if fractured, conversation with the old woman behind the stacks of oranges and melons. Her understanding was better than her speech, but she managed to make herself understood. She used her free hand to point to the oranges she wanted.
She didn’t see them coming. Suddenly two men were bracketing her, their body heat and odor assailing her. Instinctively she started to step back, only to find herself blocked by their bodies closing in on her. The one on the right pulled a knife from the sheath at his waist and grasped the straps of the sling, hastily slicing through them before Milla could do more than give a startled cry. Time seemed to stutter, giving her freeze-frame impressions of the next few seconds. The old woman fell back, her expression alarmed. Milla felt the sling that held Justin to her begin to drop, and in panic she grabbed for her baby. The man on her left snatched the baby from her with one hand, and shoved at her with the other.
Somehow she kept her balance, terror twisting in her chest as she leapt at the man, screaming, fighting to wrest her baby from him. Her clawing nails scratched down his face, leaving bloody furrows, and he reeled back from the assault.
The baby, startled awake, was wailing. The milling crowd scattered, alarmed by the sudden violence. “Help!” she shrieked over and over as she tried to grab Justin, but everyone seemed to be running away from her rather than to her. The man tried to shove her away again, his hand on her face. Milla bit him, sinking her teeth into his hand and grinding down until she felt blood in her mouth and he was yelling in pain. She clawed for his eyes, her nails sinking into spongy softness. His yells turned into shocked bellows, and his grip on Justin loosened. Desperately she grabbed at the baby, managing to catch one tiny, flailing arm, and for one heart-bursting moment she thought she had him. Then she felt the other man moving in close behind her, and a searing, paralyzing pain shot through her back.
Her body convulsed and she dropped like a rock to the ground, her fingers scrabbling helplessly in the grit. With the baby clutched like a football under one assailant’s arm, the two men raced away, one holding a bloody hand over his face and screaming curses as he fled. Milla lay sprawled in the dirt as she tried to fight through the agony that gripped her body, fight for breath to scream. Her lungs pumped wildly but didn’t seem to be dragging in any air. She tried to get up; her body didn’t respond. A black veil began closing over her vision, and she managed to whimper, over and over, “My baby! My baby! Someone get my baby!”
No one did.
David had already repaired a hernia and was washing up while Rip Kosper, Susanna’s husband and the team anesthesiologist, did a final check of the patient’s blood pressure and heart rate to make sure he was okay before turning him over to Anneli Lansky, the nurse, for monitoring. They had a good group working here; he’d miss them when the year was up and they all returned to regular practice in the States. He wouldn’t miss the cramped, one-story concrete-block clinic, with its cracked tile floors and barely adequate equipment, but he’d definitely miss the group as well as his patients—and he’d miss Mexico itself.
He was thinking about the next case, a gallbladder, when he heard a commotion in the hallway just outside the door. There was shouting and cursing, some scuffling sounds, and high-pitched wails. He dried his hands and started for the door just as Juana Mendoza, another nurse, began yelling for him.
He hit the door, already running, and skidded to a halt in the hallway before he rammed into a knot of people that included Juana, Susanna Kosper, and two men and a woman who were clumsily carrying another woman. The crush of bodies hid the wounded woman’s face, but David could see that her dress was drenched with blood and he immediately switched into emergency mode. “What happened?” he asked as he kicked a box out of the way and dragged over a gurney.
“David.” Susanna’s voice was tight and sharp. “It’s Milla.”
For a moment the words didn’t make sense and he looked around, expecting to see his wife behind him. Then Susanna’s meaning kicked in and he saw the wounded woman’s unconscious, paper-white face, saw the froth of soft brown curls around her face, and everything tilted out of kilter. Milla? This couldn’t be Milla. She was at home with Justin, safe and sound. This woman who looked as if she’d bled out just resembled his wife, that was all. It wasn’t really Milla.
“David!” This time Susanna’s tone was even sharper. “Snap out of it! Help us get her on the gurney.”
Only his training enabled him to function, to step in and lift the woman who looked like Milla onto the gurney. Her dress was bloody, her arms and hands were bloody, her legs and feet and even her shoes were bloody. No—just one shoe, a sandal that looked just like a pair Milla often wore. He saw the pink nail polish on her toenails, and the delicate gold chain around her right ankle, and he felt as if all his insides caved in.
“What happened?” he asked, his voice hoarse and faraway and not his own, even as his body moved into action and they rapidly wheeled Milla into the surgical bay he had just left.
“Knife wound to the lower back,” Juana said, listening to the babble of voices around them before they closed the door and shut out most of the noise. “Two men attacked her at the market.” She caught a shuddering breath. “They took Justin. Milla fought them, and one of the men stabbed her.”
Rip, alerted by the hubbub, burst back into the room. “My God,” he blurted when he saw Milla; then he fell silent and began readying his equipment.
Justin! David reeled from the second shock, and he half turned toward the door. Two bastards had stolen his son! He actually took a step away from the gurney, toward the door, to race out and search for his baby. Then he hesitated, and looked back at his wife.
They hadn’t had time to clean the operating room, or restock the supplies on the trays. Anneli ran in and began grabbing what they’d need. Juana wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Milla’s limp arm and swiftly pumped it up, while Susanna used the shears to cut away Milla’s clothing. “Blood type O positive,” Susanna was saying. How did she know? Oh, yeah, she’d typed Milla’s blood before Justin’s delivery.
“Sixty over forty,” Juana reported. Moving so fast her actions were a blur, she started an IV line in Milla’s arm and hooked up a bag of blood plasma.
He was losing her, David thought. Milla would die right in front of him, unless he snapped out of his shock and acted. From the position of the wound, the knife had probably hit her left kidney, and God knows what other damage had been done. She was bleeding out; she had only a few minutes left before her internal organs began shutting down—
He pushed everything else out of his mind, and shoved his hands into the fresh pair of gloves Anneli held out for him. He didn’t have time to scrub up; he didn’t have time to search for Justin; all he had time to do was reach for the scalpel that was promptly slapped into his palm and call on every ounce of skill he had. He prayed, he cursed, and he fought time as he cut into his wife’s body. As he’d suspected, the knife blade had hit her left kidney. Hit it, hell; it had all but sliced the organ in half. There was no saving the kidney, and if he didn’t get it out and the blood vessels tied off in record time, there would be no saving Milla, either.
It was a race, savage and merciless. If he made one misstep, if he hesitated, if anything was dropped or even fumbled, then he lost, and Milla lost. It wasn’t surgery as he was accustomed to doing it; it was battlefield surgery, fast and brutal, with her life hanging on every split-second decision and action. While they poured all of their available blood into her, he fought to keep it from pouring out of her just as
fast as it went in. Moment by moment he stemmed the bleeding, searched out every severed vessel, and slowly he began to win the race. He didn’t know how long it took; he never asked, never found out. How long didn’t matter. All that mattered was winning, because the alternative was more than he could bear.
2
Ten years later
Chihuahua, Mexico
Paige Sisk leaned against her fiancé, Colton Rawls, her eyes drifting shut as she took a big hit of weed and passed the joint to Colton. Oh, man, all those dweebs who had gone on and on about the bad things that could happen to her in Mexico were so totally wrong. Mexico was the best. I mean, she wasn’t an idiot, she knew better than to score weed in front of some Mexican cop, though she’d heard all you had to do was flash them some green and the problem went away. Like she wanted to waste her money on bribes.
They had been here four days already. Colton thought Chihuahua was the coolest. He had some serious thing going about Pancho Villa; until they got here she thought it was, like, some house where ponchos were made. The only Pancho she’d ever heard of was in an old, old western where this silly-looking dude kept saying, “Oh, Pancho,” to an even sillier dude in a big hat, but Colton said no, this Pancho was the real thing. Like there were fake Panchos. But whatever. Colton dug it. They had gone twice to see this shot-up old Dodge where supposedly the real Pancho had been turned into Swiss cheese, just like Bonnie and Clyde.
As far as she was concerned, Pancho Villa was just a dead old fart. She didn’t care about his stupid Dodge. Now, if he’d driven a Hummer, that would have been cool.
“If he’d driven a Hummer,” she said, “he could have run right over those assholes who were shooting at him.”
Colton surfaced from his fog to blink in confusion. “Who drives a Hummer?”
“Pancho Villa.”
“No, it was a Dodge.”
“That’s what I’m saying.” Impatient, she elbowed him. “If he’d been driving a Hummer, he could have smashed them flat.”
“No such thing as a Hummer back then.”
“God!” she said in exasperation. “You are so literal. I said if!” She grabbed the joint and took another hit, then got up from the bed. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
“Okay.” Happy to have sole possession of the joint, Colton settled back on the pillows and gave her a little wave as she left the room. She didn’t wave back. Going to the bathroom didn’t make her happy; there was only one on this floor, there was a magazine instead of toilet paper for wiping, and it smelled really bad. But Colton had insisted on staying here instead of in one of the nicer hotels, because the rooms were so cheap. Well, of course they were cheap; what fool would pay top price to stay here? And it was really close to the marketplace, which was neat.
She felt really mellow from the weed, but not so mellow that the bathroom didn’t bother her. The lock was broken, too. A shoelace had been tied around the knob, a nail driven into the frame right beside the knob, and to latch the door you wrapped the loose end of the shoelace around the nail. It did hold the door shut, but she didn’t put a lot of faith in the method. So whenever she had to be in there, she absolutely raced to finish her business.
Oh, shit; she’d forgotten to bring the flashlight. The lights hadn’t gone off yet when she was in the bathroom, but everyone insisted it did happen occasionally, and she was afraid of the dark, so that was one warning she’d listened to. She tried to hurry, but really, you can piss only so fast and she had waited until she was miserably full because she hated using this bathroom. Crouched over the toilet—no way was she going to sit on that thing—she kept going and going and going, and her legs began to ache so bad she thought she might actually have to sit down after all, and then what could she do, boil her butt?
But finally she finished, blotted herself with a page from the magazine, and groaned in relief as she stood from her awkward, crouched position. If she could ever get Colton away from Chihuahua and Pancho Villa’s bullet-riddled Dodge so they could continue their vacation tour, she was going to insist that they stay at better places.
She pulled up her shorts, rinsed her hands, and dried them on her bottom because she’d forgotten to bring a towel with her, then unwound the shoelace from the nail. The door swung open and she turned out the dim light as she stepped into the dark hallway. She faltered, coming to a stop. There was supposed to be a light on in the hallway. There had been when she went into the bathroom. The bulb must have blown.
Chills ran down her back. She so didn’t like the dark. How was she supposed to make it back to their room when she couldn’t see a thing?
A board creaked, to her left. She jumped a foot high and tried to scream, but her heart was in her throat and all she could manage was a squeal.
A rough hand clamped over her mouth; she got a dose of really bad B.O., then something hard slammed into her head and she slumped, unconscious.
El Paso, Texas
Milla’s cell phone rang. For a moment she thought about not answering it; she was dead tired, dispirited, and had a throbbing headache. The temperature outside was 107, and even with the air-conditioning in the SUV set on high, the heat coming through the windshield burned her arms. The image of Tiera Alverson’s battered face and the fourteen-year-old’s sightless blue eyes staring up at nothing wouldn’t leave her mind. In her dreams tonight she would hear the sound of Regina Alverson’s harsh sobbing when she heard that her little girl was never coming home again. Sometimes Finders succeeded, but sometimes they were too late. Today, they had been too late.
The last thing Milla wanted to do right now was take on someone else’s heartache; she had enough aches of her own. But she never knew who might be calling, or why, and after all, she herself had made finding people her personal crusade. So she opened her eyes just enough to find the right button to punch, then immediately closed them again to shut out the ferociously bright late-afternoon sun. “Hello.”
“Señora Boone?” The accented voice on the speakerphone filled the Chevy SUV. Milla didn’t recognize it, but she spoke to so many different people every day that there was no way she could recognize everyone. This was definitely business, though, because only when it concerned Finders was she known as Milla Boone. After the divorce, she had taken back her maiden name of Edge, but the public so associated the name Boone with the cause of finding missing children that she’d been forced to use it in all publicity and anything to do with Finders.
“Yes, this is she.”
“There is a meeting tonight. Guadalupe, at ten-thirty. Behind the church.”
“What kind of meeting—” she began, but the voice cut her off.
“Diaz will be there.”
The phone went dead. Milla sat up, her headache forgotten as adrenaline buzzed through her system. She clicked off the phone and sat very still, thoughts racing.
“Which Guadalupe?” Brian Cusack said from the driver’s seat, mostly in frustration, because he’d heard everything.
“If it isn’t the closest one, then it doesn’t matter.” There were several Guadalupes in Mexico, ranging in population from about fifty thousand down to a collection of only a couple of hundred souls. The one closest to the border qualified as a village.
“Shit,” Brian Cusack said. “Shit.”
“No joke.” It was after six; no one would be at the office to provide backup. She could try to track down people at home, but there wasn’t time to spare. If the meeting was at ten-thirty, then they needed to be in position at least an hour beforehand. Guadalupe was about fifty miles from El Paso and Juarez. In this traffic it would take them forty-five minutes to an hour to get to the border. It would be less hassle to park the SUV, walk across the bridge into Mexico, and pick up transportation there, rather than go through the paperwork involved in driving across, but the operative phrase was “less hassle,” not “no hassle.” When time was short, any hassle at all could mean the difference between success and failure.
They both had their passports
and their multiple-entry tourist cards for Mexico; that was standard procedure, because they never knew when they’d be called on to cross borders. That was about all they had, though, other than a couple of night-vision devices that they had used searching for little Dylan Peterson—a successful find, thank God—and that had been left in the duffel as they then swung immediately into the search for Tiera Alverson. They hadn’t needed a lot of stuff in the Alverson case; the job had taken them to Carlsbad, New Mexico, and had required patience and time, not survival gear.
They would have to make do with what they had, because there was no way she could pass up an opportunity to get Diaz.
Diaz. The man was as elusive as smoke on a windy day, but maybe this time they’d be lucky.
“We won’t have time to pick up any weapons,” Brian said evenly as he seized an opening and muscled the big SUV around a poky white Toyota with huge rust spots on the door.
“We’ll have to make time.” They never took the chance of smuggling weapons through at the border; instead they had arrangements to buy weapons once they were across. Most of the time she didn’t need weapons—all she was doing was talking to people—but sometimes common sense dictated they be able to protect themselves.
She tried Joann Westfall’s number, hoping she could catch her second-in-command at home, but the answering machine came on. Quickly Milla left a message filling Jo in on the admittedly sketchy details of where they were going and why. It was her own rule that none of the Finders went off by themselves, or without letting someone else know where they were.
After two years, her first real shot at Diaz!
Her heartbeat thudded in her chest. Maybe this was the break she’d been hunting for ten years.
Justin’s kidnapping was shrouded in mystery, rumors, suspicion. No ransom had ever been demanded, and the men who had stolen the baby from her in the tiny village market that day had disappeared. But eventually she began hearing snippets of information about a one-eyed man who was never there when she tried to track him down. Then, two years ago, a woman had whispered to her that a man named Diaz perhaps knew about the matter. For the past twenty-five months Milla had stayed on his trail like a bloodhound, and except for maddening rumors, she’d come up empty.