We got stuck after the third or fourth turn. The tower had narrowed. Raoul’s shoulders hadn’t. Grunting, he wedged sideways in the confined space but couldn’t climb any higher with me in his arms. I got an elbow loose and pantomimed for him to put me down.
“It’s okay. I’ll take it from here.”
I wiggled out of his hold. Not am easy trick in that narrow space but I got both feet under me with only minimal damage.
“
Gracias
, Raoul.”
Nodding, he backed down step by slow step. When he disappeared around a turn, I craned my neck and guesstimated the remaining stairs to the wooden platform above my head. Ten? Twelve?
I could make it.
I hoped.
The first two steps I took upright, reaching one hand behind me to keep my gown from opening and exposing my tender bottom to the rough adobe wall. By the fourth or fifth, my jaw had locked. By the eight, I was on all fours with the gown bunched around my waist to keep it out of the way.
I crawled onto the platform, panting. Sweat dripped into my eyes. Incipient nausea churned in my empty belly. I stayed on my hands and knees, head hanging and hair dragging the dusty floor, until the nausea went away. Only then did I lift my head and survey the cramped space I shared with three monster bronze bells.
Please, God, do
not
let anyone grab one of those ropes!
I’d said a lot of prayers in the past few days, I realized as I inched around La Mediana. Been helped by some good people. Sooner or later, I needed to pay it all forward.
With that thought in mind, I scooted over to the low wall encircling the platform and dragged myself up enough to peer over the rim. I couldn’t see much at first. The sun was too bright, the glare too fierce.
I narrowed my eyes to a tight squint. The first object I spotted was a huge, flat, purplish mound some ten or fifteen miles away. Mendoza’s mesa? It had to be!
My stomach knotted. I hadn’t gotten very far in my desperate trek through the desert.
Gulping, I dragged my gaze from the distant mound and scanned Tapigua’s main street in both directions. Nothing moved. Not a donkey or a goat or a chicken scratching in the sun. Nor did I see any sign of movement among the brown furrows of the recently planted cornfield outside the village. Even the scarecrow in ragged white pants and a straw sombrero drooped in the hot sun.
I didn’t spot the search party until I’d crawled to the opposite side of the tower and inched my head above the wall. My heart almost jumped out of my chest when I saw them trudging up the sloping ridge. Six, no seven of them, trailed by two slow-moving vehicles. They were too far away to make out the features shaded by their hat brims.
I didn’t have to! I would recognize Pen’s sturdy figure, Sergeant Cassidy’s muscled-up torso, and Mitch’s long-legged stride anywhere! And that had to be Dennis’s frizzy orange hair sticking out from under the rim of a pith helmet.
After an initial leap of joy, fear almost crushed my chest. Mitch and my gang were out in the open, plainly visible to any of Mendoza’s troops that might be searching the area. They could be ambushed, be tracked by snipers, get caught in a deadly crossfire.
Reason reasserted itself in the next instant. Mitch was no dummy. He wouldn’t lead a search party into danger, especially unarmed amateurs like the members of FST-3. He had to have neutralized the threat.
Motivated by the image of Mendoza’s face smashed to a bloody pulp, I scuttled around La Grande and thrust my feet through the opening in the platform. I couldn’t trust my legs so I went down the steps on my rear. I picked up some splinters on the way but didn’t care. I was oblivious to everything but the need to get out of the tower and throw my arms around whatever team member I reached first.
Brother Fay must have heard my shout. He and Raoul and several other villagers came rushing down the aisle and met me as I hit the bottom step. As promised, the friar had pulled on a white dress and one of those priest-y things. You know what I mean. The two-sided vestment that goes over the head and drapes to the knees, with an embroidered gold cross on the front. His round face screwed up with worry as he reached out a hand to steady me.
“What is it? Why do you shout?”
“The people who are coming!” I gasped, remembering to preserve my modesty as I made for the door. “They’re my friends.”
Despite my surge of adrenaline-fed joy, I covered only a few yards before I stopped dead. Disbelief gave way to stunned amazement, then to a wave of hysterical delight. I plopped down in the middle of the dirt street, laughing my head off, and held out my arms.
Snoopy chugged up the rutted road ahead of the team. His glued-on plastic ears dragged the dust. His wire tail bobbed. Sensing a preprogrammed snack, he picked up speed on his toy-tractor wheels and aimed right for me.
His claw rose out of his back. His circuits hummed. Looking like a cross between a computerized shoebox and a mechanized tarantula, he humped over my outstretched leg and crawled up my chest into my arms.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FOR sheer glee, nothing tops a noisy reunion involving assorted friends and coworkers laughing and hugging and trying manfully not to cry while embracing each other in the middle of a one-street Mexican village with dozens of goggle-eyed townspeople looking on.
Mitch reached me first. Well, second after Snoopy. He detached the omnivorous little critter from my shoulder and tossed him aside. With that obstruction out of the way, he hauled me up and into his arms. I hung there, locked joyfully against his body, while we traded breathless questions.
“Are you all right?”
“How did you find me?”
“Did that bastard Mendoza touch you?”
“Tell me you nailed him!”
We interspersed the questions with kisses until Mitch finally raked back my tangled hair and gave a more detailed report.
“No, we didn’t get Mendoza. He was gone when we hit the mesa. We found the Hummer shortly after noon, but lost your trail there. We’ve been scouring a fifty-mile radius for the past three days. Didn’t pick up your trail until last night.”
Sounded as though I’d dusted up quite a storm with the creosote branches. I felt pretty proud of my puny efforts as the others crowded around.
“That’s when Mitch contacted us,” Dennis O’Reilly put in, his orange hair raining sweat beneath his pith helmet. “He wanted to know if we could program Snoopy to sniff out a very specific food source.”
“Me?”
“You,” Pen confirmed with a smile.
She’d dressed for the desert, I noted. Sensible boots, snug jeans, a long-sleeved blouse, and a floppy-brimmed explorer’s hat with a back flap to cover her neck and straps that tied under her chin.
“All we had to do was extract the scents embedded in the fabric of the name tape, separate your distinctive identifiers, feed them into Snoopy’s computers, haul him down to the wrecked Hummer. He took it from there.”
“That’s all, huh?”
I knew darn well the process couldn’t have been as easy as Pen made it sound. Rocky’s haggard appearance validated that.
Poor Rocky. He wasn’t built for desert search parties. His eyes were more red than white. His face showed a pasty shade of chalk and his chest heaved under the green U.S. Border Patrol blouse that Mitch had draped tentlike over his head and shoulders.
Sergeant Cassidy, of course, had barely raised a sweat. His boots sported layers of dust and his cheeks bristled with whiskers, but he otherwise looked strong and tough and un-weathered as he hunkered down to give the wide-eyed kids a demonstration of Snoopy’s skills.
Shrieks erupted as Snoop Dog zoomed toward a little girl with a big white ribbon in her hair before abruptly changing direction and taking off after an eight- or nine-year-old in a white pants and shirt and bolo string tie. The boy danced away, arms flapping as he led Snoopy on a merry chase, and Brother Fay pushed through the hubbub.
“These are your friends, yes?”
“Most definitely!” Safe and warm within the circle of Mitch’s arms, I made the intros. “Guys, this is Father Doctor Alfonz. He patched me up when Miguel Samos plucked me out of tree and brought me to Tapigua.”
I could see them struggling to process the titles and names and tree bit but pressed ahead.
“And this is Elena.”
Practically the entire village had crowded around us now, as curious about the odd-looking strangers in their midst as my team was about them. Particularly the giant who wedged into the circle. Eyes narrowed, Mitch looked him up and down.
“This is Raoul,” I explained hastily. “He’s one of the good guys.”
“Nice to know,” Mitch muttered. He surveyed the chaotic scene and picked Father Alfonz as the one in charge. “We need to get Samantha out of the sun and hear her whole story. Is there somewhere we can sit and talk?”
“Best to carry her back to the clinic. She has not yet fully regained her strength.”
Mitch swept an arm under my knees, hefted me against his dusty chest, and followed while the priest led the way to his one-room medical facility. I caught the looks my team exchanged when they noted the cracked ceiling, paucity of beds, and ancient X-ray machine gathering dust in the corner.
“Brother Doctor Alfonz and his staff are a little short on equipment,” I explained as Mitch sat me on the edge of a bed, “but long on compassion. They kept my presence a secret until I recovered enough to tell them who I am.”
“Her uniform says she is military,” the priest offered by way of explanation. “But we don’t know if she deserts from the Army or is lost in the desert or becomes ill while on exercise with Mexican troops.”
His round face lost some of its boyishness.
“Then two
policia
come searching for her,” he related. “We know these two. They work for Rafael Mendoza. He is evil, that one.”
“You won’t get any argument from us on that, Padre.”
Mitch settled on the bed next to mine. It squeaked under his weight, but he ignored the sagging springs.
“Start at the beginning, Samantha. Tell me exactly what happened.”
The rest of my team ranged on either side of him. Noel kept Snoopy tucked under one arm, for which I was extremely grateful. The voracious little critter obviously thought he’d locked onto lunch. I kept a wary eye on him as I took them from the snatch outside the donut shop to my lunch with Mendoza to my escape into the night.
“I owe you big time for that business with the signal booster,” I told Rocky. “Worked like a charm.”
He puffed up and lost some of his pasty white.
“I owe you, too, Brother Alfonz. And the people of Tapigua. I don’t know how to thank you for all you’ve done for me.”
“It is enough if you have rid us of Mendoza.” He turned an anxious face to Mitch. “He is gone, yes?”
“The house on the mesa was deserted when our task forces swooped down on it. Looks like he and friends moved out in a hurry.”
The priest made the sign of the cross. “Pray God they do not return.”
“We also raided his Mexico City residence. Or rather, one of my associates and a squad of Mexican counterparts did.”
“Paul Donati?” I asked, all too well aware of how much Mitch must have wanted to be in on that raid.
He nodded. “They burst in on Mendoza splashing around in his pool with his wife and kids.”
“Oooh, boy,” I murmured. “Bet Teresa Baby loved that.”
“Who?”
“Mendoza’s girlfriend-slash-administrative assistant. What happened?”
“Paul says they took Mendoza in and leaned on him. Hard. But without you or a single witnesses to corroborate that he orchestrated your abduction, they couldn’t hold him.”
“What about the nametag? Didn’t that link him to the kidnapping?”
“The tag was left on my doorstep in a sealed envelope. No prints, no DNA.”
“We’re almost certain we lifted Mendoza’s scent from the fabric,” Rocky explained, “but without a valid sample to compare it to, we can’t say with one hundred percent assurance.”
“There was no note?”
“Just one typed line,” Mitch replied. “ ‘Vengeance was slow in coming but would be sweet,’ ” he quoted.
Mendoza wasn’t the only one out for vengeance. I had a score to settle now, too.
“Did Paul by any chance lean on Teresa?” I asked.
“The girlfriend?”
“Right. Slender, dark haired, with—excuse the expression, Father—
puta
shoes.”
Mitch blinked at the description and shook his head. “I’m sure he did, but she must not have had anything significant to contribute.”
“The hell she doesn’t! Call him. Find out where she is now. In the meantime, Father, could I trouble you for my uniform? I need to get dressed.”
“You have not regained your strength! You must eat and rest.”
“Maybe Elena could roll up some tortillas to go. Where are my clothes?”
He looked dubious but gestured to a row of rickety metal lockers leaning against the far wall. Dennis O’Reilly opened the first to reveal a pitifully small supply of bandages and tape. The second contained pillows, blankets, and bedsheets. The third held stacks of paper-wrapped slippers and folded peek-a-boo hospital gowns like the one I was wearing. The last locker, thankfully, disgorged my ABUs and boots.
The guys, secular and otherwise, departed long enough for Pen to divest me of my gown and dress me in the under- and outerwear Elena had thoughtfully laundered.
I felt a little dizzy and had to sit down while Pen dragged a comb through my hair and tied it back in a loose braid. The dizziness passed after a moment. The pain in my temple subsided, too. The thrill of seeing Mitch and my team had spurred a near-miraculous recovery. That, and the heaping platters of rice and carne asada Elena insisted we all devour before we departed Tapigua.
My belly full for the first time in what felt like a week, I was ready to roll. Unfortunately, the break for lunch had given Mitch time to reflect.