A Desperate Silence (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 3) (35 page)

     
He lifted his wrist to his lips and kissed his silver bracelet—the face of Coatlicue. Was the fever returning to weaken his mind? Why else would he think of Elena?

     
And then, fifteen miles north of Carrizozo, Renzo
felt
the child.

     
She was staring at him. Her eyes bored into the back of his neck like twin metal screws. He refused to look at her, keeping his gaze on the road ahead. On the gray strip of asphalt, the yellow center line had faded out to sorry, intermittent dashes. Otherwise, just before sunrise, the world was wide open. Potholes and ruts jarred the Cadillac's thirty-thousand-dollar suspension system. He'd hit a rabbit a few miles back. Bad luck.

     
He found himself counting the power poles that loomed out of darkness. He looked everywhere but at the child. After a few minutes his mouth tasted like wood. He realized his reaction was foolish. Why should he be spooked by some girl? Even if she was Elena's child, she wasn't a ghost.

     
He swallowed painfully, licked his lips. Finally, he tipped his head, pulling his eyes to the mirror to verify his gut instinct.

     
She was sitting up, staring with those big black eyes. She met his gaze.

     
His eyes slid away. She made no sound, not even a moan. By now, the tape on her wrists and ankles had certainly cut off her circulation. Her hands and feet had to be numb. But she didn't whine, didn't cry out or complain. She just kept staring. He adjusted the rearview mirror so the ghost disappeared.

     
He drove like that for another ten miles. He readjusted the mirror. Their gazes met, locked, did not waver. It spooked him.

     
His mother-the-
puta
had dragged him to visit the Virgin when he was a boy. The church had been filled with women, with cripples, with children, with the poor, the infirm, and the sick. The crowds had smelled of sweat and misery and pain—they had frightened a boy of five.

     
He'd seen women and girls overcome with the Holy Mother's blessing. They had fallen to their knees, palms up, tears streaming down their dusty cheeks. For hours, for a whole day, they would stay kneeling on bruised and bloodied knees. But they felt no pain, and their faces glowed with radiant peace.

     
The Mother's Blessing, they said, Spanish prayers rolling off their tongues.

     
She is the Holy Mother. She is always with us. She is Everything, Everywhere
.

     
She is here
.

     
His mother, too, had knelt in front of the statues, the paintings, the pictures. She had knelt with the other women, and she had wept. And now Renzo remembered who his mother had prayed for so fervently—her son.

     
He gasped. In the darkness of the Cadillac, ghosts fluttered around his face like pecking birds.

     
He felt for his gun, his fingers tightening around the butt of the .22 caliber. The cold gunmetal made him feel powerful. With his fingers on steel, he summoned the courage to look in the rearview mirror one more time. And then he knew what had been haunting him.

     
The Blessed mother at the shrine . . . Serena looked just like
La Virgen
.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

M
ATT
E
NGLAND HAD
been asleep for less than ten minutes when the phone rang in the hotel room of the Juárez Holiday Inn. Must be Vargas, he thought groggily.

     
But it was Dale Pitkin at E.P.I.C.—the only other person who knew where to reach the two men. Pitkin's voice was hard. "Bad news," he said. "The girl was kidnapped from Santa Fe. Sylvia went after the guy."

     
"Jesus," Matt said. In an instant, he was awake. "The cops know what to look for? Her license plate is . . . T-S-X-three-one-one."

     
"Matt, they know."

     
"A Toyota truck, green, 1996—"

     
"They
know
. They're cops. You're a cop. Pour yourself a shot of something strong and get dressed—"

     
"Give me what you've got." Matt gripped the phone hard.

     
"The details are sketchy. They're expecting the kidnapper to hit the border within the next two hours."

     
"Who is he?"

     
"The Cadillac's registered to a Martin Diaz. A nice upstanding citizen who died two years ago. It's all phony."

     
"No description."

     
"Just from Sylvia and then the cops along the way. White or Hispanic adult male."

     
"It's got to be the same guy who jumped Sylvia and the kid in Santa Fe." Matt gritted his teeth. "Vargas knows who he is—an assassin on the
federales
' payroll. What do they call them, godmothers?"

     
"A
madrina
." A beat went by before Pitkin said, "You and Victor better get your asses across the border."

     
Matt slapped the side of his head. "Shit! Sylvia's in my truck, not the Toyota. She borrowed my Ford. The damn thing doesn't go faster than seventy-five."

     
"It does now." Dale Pitkin cleared his throat. "The last report they got was five minutes ago from the highway patrol north of Carrizozo. The Cadillac was clocked doing ninety-nine miles per hour."

     
"There's no way she could keep up."

     
"When the cops didn't see your gal's Toyota truck, they started noticing a funky pickup. She's only fifteen miles behind him—he keeps slowing down when he hits the towns along Fifty-four."

     
"Goddammit, the cops move in, they'll freak the bastard."

     
"They know that. They're keeping a distance."

     
"What about the feds?"

     
"They've got air backup, a SWAT team ready to truck at the border, agents along the way. By now they've probably got a procession going behind the perp."

     
"He'll do the kid without blinking."

     
"At the moment she's his only bargaining chip."

     
"Sylvia?"

     
"In the meantime, your lady's stayed with him." Pitkin laughed. "She's a true American hero, amigo. If I were you, I'd get ready for a rendezvous. I'll keep you informed."

     
Matt's last words were, "Shit, she doesn't know how to switch to the second gas tank."

W
ITH THE
V
ALLEY
of Fire lava flow visible in predawn light, Sylvia saw the highway sign—
CARRIZOZO
8
MI.—
just as the truck's engine began to sputter. It coughed, caught, held another hundred yards, then coughed again. She swayed the steering wheel from side to side, sloshing the last of the gasoline around the tank. That might coax another two or three miles out of the engine. After that, the Ford would be running on fumes.

     
The sun was just beginning to tint a heavy gray sky. Intermittent rain splattered the Ford's grimy, bug-spattered windshield. Thick smoke spewed from the rear of the truck. Hazy-eyed and sleep-deprived, Sylvia shifted in the seat, stretched aching muscles. The fact that she was about to roll to a stop had kicked adrenaline into her veins. It worked better than coffee.

     
Facts—meaningless in her present circumstances—raced through her overamped mind: Carrizozo; the town sat smack in the middle of the junction of U.S. 54 and 380, in a corner of Lincoln County; Billy the psychopathic Kid country. Hadn't the town grown up in the late 1800s because of the railroad? There'd been a gold rush around here somewhere . . . near Carrizo Mountain . . . placer gold discovered in the 1880s.

     
Something else drifted in and out of her consciousness. It seemed like ages since she'd read through Jim Teague's files, rather than mere hours. Obsessively, she'd gone over the coroner's report on the murders of Elena Cruz and the motel manager. All the time something had nagged at her—some similarity between their murders and the murder of the man Matt called Paco.

     
A name kept running through her brain:
Jesús
. . .

     
The weird boy the investigators had never been able to track down. The boy Cash Wheeler claimed had openly admired Elena Cruz. If he was still alive, he'd be in his late twenties, early thirties by now.

     
Sylvia gunned the engine, gaining as much roll as she could. Then she shifted into neutral, took her foot off the pedal, and sat back for the ride as two tons of metal coasted into town.

O
N THE OUTSKIRTS OF
Carrizozo, Renzo had slowed the Cadillac to twenty-five miles per hour. For the last twenty minutes, he'd watched the battered Ford pickup on his tail.

     
He'd seen its distinctively skewed headlights earlier—but only when he slowed. The truck couldn't keep up speed.

     
It could belong to a farmer heading to Carrizozo.

     
It could belong to someone who was on his tail.

     
He maintained a sedate speed through the small town, unsuccessfully attempting to ignore the rumble of his stomach. He was famished. A job always made him hungry. And he had his health to consider; he was still recovering from the run-in with
el lobo
.

     
When he was drifting on the drug, he could go for days without eating. But when his hunger finally caught up with him, he couldn't ignore the voracious craving.

     
The Cadillac needed gas anyway. One fill-up and he would make it all the way to the border.

     
He drove conservatively, his head swaying left, then right, until he pulled into the parking lot of the last truck stop at the edge of the small town.

     
His stomach growled again. He pulled up at a bank of gas pumps.

     
When he leaned over the seat and prodded the girl, she didn't move. He spoke to her quietly: "If you make any noise, I'll kill you." He left her locked in the car.

     
Inside the truck stop's orange-and-yellow café, he used the bathroom.
WASH YOUR HANDS
, the sign above the sink ordered.

     
While Renzo was busy at one sink, a food server emerged from one of the stalls. A kid. Pimply. Oily. He was still zipping up his grungy pants. The kid had started toward the door when Renzo called out softly. "Wash your hands."

     
The kid stopped, glaring defiantly at the intrusive stranger. But he saw something in the man's eyes that made him pull back. The fight went out of him like a puff of air. He washed his hands. With soap.

     
At the register, Renzo asked for a box to carry out five burgers, two orders of fries, and three Cokes. The pimply-faced kid watched him leave. It had been a mistake to speak up, but Renzo hated germs.

     
The girl was almost invisible through the tinted windows. He set the box on the warm hood of the Cadillac and unlocked the door. She hadn't moved.
But her eyes followed every move he made
.

     
Frustrated but trying not to show it, he unwrapped a burger and tossed it into the backseat. Maybe she was hungry. Let her eat with her mouth like a dog.

     
He turned—moving toward the gas pump—but stopped in his tracks with a shudder. Elena's floating head appeared in front of his eyes, and she screamed at him:
If you murder my child, you'll be cursed
.

     
The vision evaporated like a faint mist. But Renzo couldn't erase Elena's words. Was her screaming voice the result of the drugs in his body? Was his blood poisoned? Or had he seen a dead woman?

S
YLVIA HAD LOST
the Cadillac. He was out of reach. Serena was out of reach. Her only chance now was to pull over, find a phone, and notify law enforcement. Unless her hunch was right, and various agencies were already tracking their progress. She'd noticed more than one police car in the past fifty miles.

     
The truck sputtered out, and Sylvia guided the coasting vehicle into the brightly lit truck stop. She rolled up next to a row of pumps behind a massive tractor-trailer. She was in the trucker's lane. Tough; she was driving a truck, too. And it was out of gas.

     
She climbed wearily from behind the wheel. She felt like shit—sore, stiff, exhausted, hungry, with a massive headache. The thought of losing the child made her physically ill. She fell back against the truck's faded fender, energy draining from her muscles like water.

     
A man said, "Lady, you all right?"

     
Did she fucking
look
all right? She clutched her purse, ready to talk a quarter out of the guy—a cheap price to pay for asking stupid questions.

     
Her first priority was to call State Dispatch to alert them to her location. The Cadillac had to be within twenty or thirty miles.

     
She turned, pushing herself toward the station's minimart. She stopped in her tracks. She was staring at a black Cadillac Seville.

     
Sylvia strode toward the car. She didn't take time to think—to worry about danger. If Serena was inside, she might be able to grab her before he—

     
The kidnapper was standing at the rear of the big black car. He looked up, saw her, and his face went slack.

     
Seconds passed, maybe a minute. Sylvia lost any true sense of time. But she gave a soft cry when she saw the shadow of Serena's face pressed to the car's tinted rear window. She brought her hand to her mouth, bit down hard on her lip.