thirty-six

Two days later, I was lying by the edge of the road in Gualala. It was the only road down to Highway One from the Skouras place, the only one the tunnel rats could take to get groceries and supplies. It was also very lightly traveled, which was why I could lie on the roadside, stage blood staining my cheap disposable jacket, as though I had been in a hit-and-run.

Serena had wanted to play the victim. Her argument had been convincing: It was likely that the guys guarding Nidia were part of the ambush team in Mexico, therefore they’d seen me before. They’d seen me in the exact same position, at roadside. She’d worried that it’d be a tip-off.

I’d considered it but argued her down. “I’ll have my face turned away from him,” I’d said. “He’ll never make the connection to Mexico. It’s way too bizarre. You’re overthinking this.”

The truth was, this part was dangerous. I’d wanted Serena safe on the hillside, watching the house. Payaso and I would be the first team.

There was a vehicle coming my way. Serena, in the same surveillance spot I’d taken above the house, had already radioed down to Payaso and me that one of the guys was coming, allowing us to take our positions. I’d gotten the idea from something one of my West Point instructors mentioned, offhandedly, about overseas security and diplomat-protection postings. He’d said that terrorists and kidnappers like to put empty baby carriages in the road to get Americans to stop and get out of their cars, and that drivers have to be trained to ignore them. I’d used myself in lieu of the baby carriage—it would allow me to get into point-blank range automatically rather than trying to walk up behind the guy.

In our plans, we’d taken as a starting assumption that Skouras’s guys never left Nidia alone. For that reason, a roadside ambush was useful. A single guy would be easy to take down. We’d get the car he was driving, his keys to the house, and an extra weapon. Then we could walk right through the front door of the house, no trickery or door-kicking necessary.

I was sure, I’d told Payaso and Serena, that no one could drive right past a girl lying on the roadside motionless. “Even if this guy’s no Samaritan,” I’d said, “morbid curiosity alone will make him stop.”

If he didn’t, our job would get a lot harder. We wouldn’t have his keys to the front door. But we’d go through with the raid, anyway.

The engine sound grew stronger, louder. The air stirred around me as the SUV pulled up and stopped. A door opened and slammed. Athletic shoes made their squinching rubber-soled noise on the asphalt.

And then—what a fucking gentleman—he nudged me with his toe. “Hey,” his voice said.

I waited for him to sit on his heels beside me before I rolled over and stuck my SIG in his face, cocking it so he’d know I was ready to fire. “Don’t fucking reach for anything or I’ll put a round in your face,” I said. “Don’t test me. I will.”

He was the stocky guy I saw through the windows last week. Up close, he had almost innocent brown eyes, now wide with shock.

“It’s you,” he said. He was also one of the tunnel rats, it seemed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Teach me about roadside ambushes, prick. See how good I learn.”

Behind us, Payaso had come out of cover, holding his gun on the driver. I didn’t have to tell him to search the guy. We’d discussed it all in advance. “Get his everything,” I’d said. “Billfold, cell, gun if he has it. Who knows what’ll come in handy?”

Payaso did this, and then walked him off the road to bind him in duct tape.

I called after him: “Put on your gloves. I think duct tape holds fingerprints.”

Admittedly, it was unlikely that Skouras’s men had access to any law-enforcement computers, but if they did, they could learn Payaso’s real name from his prints. That was something even I didn’t know. Much less did I want Skouras having it.

I walked down to where we’d parked the Bronco out of sight. Our handheld radio was in the passenger seat. I picked it up and radioed Serena. “Warchild, this is Insula, we’ve achieved our objective down here. Over.”

“This is Warchild. You guys rock. What’s your ETA? Over.”

We should have stuck to cell phones. There was nothing like CB radio to inspire totally idiotic speech patterns.

I said, “ETA five minutes. Holler if you see anything funny, otherwise radio silence, okay? Over.”

I didn’t need to tell her any more. Her job now was to cover the house and driveway, to radio in if there were any unexpected visitors while Payaso and I were inside.

I drove the Bronco back up to the roadside. When I got there, Payaso was already behind the wheel of the SUV. I led him to the driveway of the Skouras place and tapped my brakes to make the brake lights flash, then pulled over. I shut off the engine, grabbed a brown paper grocery bag, and ran to the SUV. I climbed in the passenger side but didn’t stay there, getting into the back instead. If the other soldier was looking out the front window when we drove up, it was probably too much to hope that he wouldn’t notice that his partner had morphed into a Hispanic male, but if he did, well, there was no point pushing our luck by having a blond girl visible in the window, too.

I crouched on the floor. The grocery bag was mostly a prop, filled with crumpled newspaper to give it shape, but there were a few things we’d need at the bottom, and I dug them out. A ski mask. A canister of pepper spray. The duct tape.

When Payaso stopped the SUV in the driveway, near the house, I handed him his ski mask and the handcuffs.

“Anyone in the windows?” I asked, getting the pepper spray out of the bag.

“No, they’re clear,” he said. “Why don’t you have a mask?”

“The guy in the bushes down there saw my face already.”

I opened the side door, shook the pepper spray, and squirted a little into the gravel of the driveway. This would be a bad time for the nozzle to be clogged. It wasn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “Keys?”

Payaso pulled the keys from the ignition and handed them to me. I sorted through them, fast. One was a smallish mailbox key, one was a Honda key, probably to the guy’s private car. Three were what looked like house keys. I chose one at random, isolating it from the others between my thumb and index finger. Then I jumped out and raised the grocery bag to obscure my face. I walked fast to the front steps and up them, stopped at the front door. I stuck in the key I’d chosen. It didn’t go in. Dammit. I tried another. It slid in and the door swung open.

Inside, the entryway was empty. No one was in my line of sight. I leaned back out, signaling Payaso to come.

I stepped quietly into the entryway, onto a floor of linoleum marked to look like distressed gray tiles. I listened for noise and heard it from the kitchen. The other tunnel rat was in there.

Payaso appeared behind me, masked now, gun in hand.

“Jeff?” a male voice said, from the kitchen. “That was fast. You forget something, you dildo?”

His footsteps drew near. Up close, he had that all-over-golden-brown coloring that some southern Europeans have: golden-brown hair and eyes, a touch of warmth to his skin tone, his jawline stub-bled in a lazy-fashionable way.

I didn’t let him get all the way to the doorway. Instead, I walked through it, pepper spray in hand, and sprayed him directly in the face, and when he yelped and stumbled back, I threw my hardest straight right. He fell, and as he pitched forward, I grabbed him around the neck and rammed a knee into his liver. It’s always tempting to aim for the testicles, but it’s harder than many untrained fighters realize to hit that sweet spot that causes instant incapacitation. Liver, kidney, solar plexus—these were all more accessible and nearly as brutal.

I wrestled the soldier onto his stomach and began wrapping his wrists behind his back with duct tape. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Payaso covering us, holding his gun two-handed like a cop.

“I got him,” I said. “Watch behind us, too.”

Serena’s surveillance had suggested that there were still only two guys living in the house—now both accounted for—but you couldn’t be too careful.

The soldier turned his head to the side, to where he could almost make eye contact. His nose was dripping blood from where I’d hit him.

“What the fuck?” he said. “Who the fuck are you guys?”

“Shut up,” I said, winding more tape around his ankles. “Is there anyone else in the house besides Nidia?”

“Who?”

“Nice try,” I said. “Is there?”

“Fuck you.”

I sighed. “I’m gonna leave you for a minute while I go get Nidia from upstairs. Don’t think my associate won’t shoot you if you give him trouble. Tip your head back and breathe deep; your nose will stop bleeding in a minute.”

Then, to Payaso: “Don’t let him provoke you into conversation, okay? We’re keeping this guy on a need-to-know basis, and what he needs to know is nothing.”

Payaso nodded.

I searched the rest of the house. It was a nice place: could have been anybody’s Lovely Vacation House with the sectional sofa and the flat-screen TV and the big, clean sliding glass door. You wouldn’t think two organized-crime guys and an imprisoned mother-to-be had been living here.

Outside the door that I believed to be Nidia’s, I tried the remaining two keys, the second of which slid easily into the lock. I took a deep breath and opened the door.

Nidia was in bed, her back to me, under the covers. The TV set was flashing, but without sound. In her position, I’d try to sleep most of it away, too.

But she wasn’t asleep. She rolled over and saw me.

Her green eyes had deep purplish shadows underneath them, and when she saw me in the doorway, gun in hand, her expression was one of amazement but not of relief. She didn’t seem to understand what she was seeing.

“You’re safe now,” I said. “We’re leaving. Get dressed.”

She stared.

“Andale,” I prompted. “Tenemos prisa.” Come on, we’re in a hurry.

Finally getting it, she scrambled up from the bed.

When Nidia saw Payaso, ski-masked, armed, and standing over the tape-wrapped, bloody-faced form of the soldier, she jumped and nearly backed into me, frightened.

I said, “Esta bien, he’s with me.”

Payaso hastily ripped off the ski mask and echoed me: “Esta bien, no tenga miedo.”

So much for protecting Payaso’s identity, I thought, seeing the soldier get a good look at his face. But it was clear that Payaso’s main priority was reassuring Nidia. He was staring at her: beautiful despite the shadows under her eyes, and real to him for the first time. If he’d had a hat to tip, he would have.

I looked at Nidia, then nodded at the tunnel rat. “You want to kick him in the ribs?”

“Como?” she said, confused.

“Go on,” I urged her, “it’ll be cathartic.”

She just stared at me. I realized I was pretty jazzed on adrenaline and success. I mean, little Nidia Hernandez was not going to kick this guy in the ribs, and it wasn’t just because she didn’t know what cathartic meant.

“Never mind. Let’s go,” I said.

The soldier’s nose had stopped bleeding, and his eyes had stopped streaming from the pepper spray, and as we left, he found his voice and his bravado, calling after me.

“You’ve signed your own death warrant, bitch,” he said coldly. “I recognize you now. We know who you are.”

I stopped in the doorway, then looked at Payaso. “Go on out to the car with Nidia,” I told him. “I’ll be right there.”

Payaso wasn’t sure. “Cuidado,” he said, but he took Nidia out.

When they were gone, I walked back to the tunnel rat and sat on my heels. It’d been a long time since I’d felt this way, high on adrenaline, sure of myself, full of purpose. It was making me overconfident. I knew it was pointless to engage with this guy any further, but I just couldn’t help myself.

“You guys know who I am?” I said. “I know who I am, too. I’m Staff Sergeant Henry Cain’s daughter. And to clarify, you’re the fuckup who just let a one-hundred-thirty-five-pound bike messenger kick your ass and take Mr. Skouras’s unborn grandkid away from you. You think there’s a Christmas bonus in your future?”

He snarled, “You’ll be dead by Christmas. You have no idea how badly you’ve fucked yourself up here.”

I let him have the last word.