Authors: Catherine Palmer
One of the Agrimax thugs stood in the doorway leading to the living room. His big shoulder leaned against the frame, and he was cleaning his teeth with a toothpick. Granny must have cooked her usual fried chicken for their lunch. Matt could almost smell it.
When the doorbell chimed, the man straightened, tossed his toothpick to the floor and left his post. Peering through the living room, Matt saw the front door swing open. An Amarillo policeman stood framed in the afternoon sunlight.
As the thugs greeted the officer, Matt’s heart rate sped up to double time. Palms sweating, he inserted the key into the kitchen door. He turned it till he heard the catch click. Then he gripped the handle. As he eased the door open, Billy turned around. His jaw dropped.
Before Billy could speak, Matt held up a warning finger and beckoned. Billy’s expression altered from surprise to understanding, and Matt let out a deep breath.
Billy touched Granny Strong’s arm. She glanced up. On seeing her grandson, an expression of surprise and joy suffused her face. Billy motioned her to silence. Checking the living room door and finding the Agrimax men still engaged with the police, she and Billy rose from their chairs. Hand in hand, they tiptoed for the kitchen door.
Once all three were outside, Matt caught his grandmother’s free hand. “C’mon—we’ve gotta move it!”
Matt and Billy helped Granny down the steps. As quickly as she could move, they sprinted across Irene’s yard. When they reached the pickup, Matt threw open the door. He practically shoved Granny inside and then raced around to the driver’s side. Billy made a flying dive into the cab and landed right on top of Granny, who started hollering her head off.
Without waiting for Billy to shut the door, Matt fired the engine and put the truck into drive. Tires squealing, the truck peeled away from the sidewalk. Matt manhandled the large steering wheel in an attempt at a tight U-turn. The truck jumped the curb, taking out Irene’s mailbox and clematis vine before jolting back onto the pavement. Matt floored it down the street, turned left, blew through two stop signs, turned right, and got completely lost before braking to a stop in a cul-de-sac.
“Whew!” he breathed out as he leaned back. “That was intense.”
Billy shook his head. “Where’d you come from, Mattman? We thought you were in Mexico.”
“I drove here to Amarillo to pick you up, but it took me a while to figure out how to spring you from the house.”
“Who was that at the front door?”
“I called the cops.”
“Dude. That’s awesome.”
“Get off my lap, Billy Younger!” Granny snorted. “I can’t breathe. Good heaven’s, boy, you’re as big as an ox.”
“Josefina told me those guys were with the USDA,” Matt said as Billy righted himself. “But she was wrong. Those were the creeps who took me out of school on Thursday. They’re the ones who killed Mr. Banyon, man. They’re with Agrimax.”
“We know. About an hour after your dad and Miss Pruitt left for the airport, Granny Strong and I put two and two together. See, this Keeling jerk was searching your computer when he figured out that Miss Pruitt had deleted your term paper—”
“Young man,” Granny cut in, eyeing Matt like she meant business, “we need to get moving. If Keeling catches up to us, our goose is cooked.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Matt swung the pickup around the cul-de-sac and stopped at the cross street.
“Now then, we’re going to get on I-40,” Granny informed him.
“But I—”
“Turn right here onto Canyon Drive, Matthew. Right, boy! Didn’t you hear me say turn right?”
Matt decided not to question his grandmother’s orders. Planning things out hadn’t seemed to work too well for him the last few days. Besides, the breeze through the open window felt kind of good, and the clematis vine with its big
purple flowers had wrapped around the radio antenna and was waving back and forth like a banner. Matt realized he was actually happy for the first time since the Agrimax men had pulled him out of class.
“My, my, Matthew Strong,” Granny Strong said once they were blowing down the interstate, “you sure landed your poor old grandmother in some hot water.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, now, everything’s going to be all right. You just settle back, and tell me what’s happened. I know you got yourself into a peck of trouble, but don’t you worry. I’ll take care of you from here on out.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “Where are we going, Granny?”
“Oklahoma City. We’ll follow I-40 the whole way. Easy as pie.”
Matt swallowed. Oklahoma City. That wasn’t part of his plan at all. “Why are we going there?”
“You remember my Aunt Thelma?” Granny asked. “She had a twin, but Velma died a long time ago, back in ’56. They were my father’s sisters, you know, the only ones he had. Anyhow, Aunt Thelma lives in a quiet little neighborhood there in Oklahoma City. She’s ninety-three, can you believe that? Still lives by herself and she’s fit as a fiddle. Well, she has a touch of old-timer’s disease, I guess, but who wouldn’t at that age? Anyhow, she’ll put us up, and we can just wait there until this mess sorts itself out.”
“Great-Aunt Thelma? Wow.” Matt had heard of her, all right. He remembered her, too. She was a giant hawk of a woman, with fiery blue eyes and no-nonsense manners that had kept suitors at bay during her courting years. Unmarried, she had worked for the Oklahoma City telephone company until retirement, and now she lived on her pension. Matt hadn’t seen Great-Aunt Thelma since his mother’s funeral.
He glanced at Billy, who didn’t look too pleased about the situation. But he would perk up pretty soon, Matt figured. Once they got something to eat.
This was probably going to turn out all right after all. They would drop Granny Strong at Great-Aunt Thelma’s house and then head for the airport. He and Billy could talk everything through on their way to Paris.
Cole stared up at Jill’s fingertips as the sun set Sunday evening. The fingers trapped in the wreck were black now.
He had managed to work both his legs free of the metal that had been tangled around them. His left ankle, he feared, might be broken. At the least, it was badly sprained. He was hungry, too. Famished. He had tried chewing on some of the leaves that floated past him in the creek, but they tasted dead and brackish.
The main reason he couldn’t get out of the car was his left arm. It was still trapped. No matter how hard he pulled and twisted, it wouldn’t come free. And the pain was so intense that he had passed out more than once from the effort.
As the sky faded from violet to deep indigo, Cole heard something splashing through the creek. Something alive.
“Hey!” he called.
“Ayudame! Por favor!”
The idea that a child…that any human…might come close enough to hear him and yet fail to rescue him sent a stab of fear through his stomach.
“Help me! Please.
Ayudame!
”
A black, wet snout poked through the broken windshield, and a pair of brown eyes blinked at him. A dog.
Dear Lord, I can’t take much more of this.
“Hi, pup,” he said, fighting the lump of despair in his throat. “Go tell somebody I’m down here, okay? Ever heard of Lassie?”
The dog’s tail wagged. Stretching its head through the window, it licked Cole’s free right hand. Then it bounded up onto the car.
Jill.
The thought of an animal feeding on her body was more than Cole could stand. He pounded on the metal. “Hey, get away from there! Don’t do that!”
The dog leaped down near Cole’s head and gave his cheek a lick. Then it trotted off, splashing through the creek, as if finding a man inside a wrecked car were nothing out of the ordinary.
Cole let out a deep breath. At least the dog hadn’t disturbed Jill’s remains. Come to think of it, nothing had. No carrion birds had been flapping around the car. And really…now that his brain focused on the unthinkable subject…there was no odor. Only the smells of stinky creek water, heated metal and raw vegetation drifted around him.
For the thousandth time, Cole studied Jill’s black, dead fingers. And then he realized they weren’t her fingers at all. They were his.
Kneeling beside the narrow wooden bed, Jill prayed with every ounce of her being. When she could no longer find the words she needed, she petitioned the Holy Spirit to pray for her, counting on the promise of Scripture that He would intercede for her with groanings too deep to be uttered. As the hours passed and her knees grew cold and began to ache, she found that she stopped being able even to form coherent thoughts. So she simply spoke the names of those who weighed so heavily on her heart.
Matthew Strong…Cole Strong…Billy Younger…Geneva Strong…Irene Williams…
Several times during her long hours of captivity, she heard the door open. Once a small Mexican woman entered the room bearing a tray of food—fragrant soup, warm tortillas, frijoles. But Jill refused to consider feeding her belly when there was a more critical need—prayer. The situation called for clarity of mind, and that meant fasting was in order.
As in the past two days since the two men pulled her from
the wrecked car, they came in and tried to make Jill talk. They asked the same questions over and over.
What did you do with the information that was on Matthew Strong’s computer?
You copied it onto a USB key, didn’t you?
Where did you put the key on which you copied that information?
What is the password to your e-mail service?
Will you agree to contact Matthew?
Will you lead us to him?
Jill had refused to speak. She had not said a word to either of the men from the moment they had carried her to their own car. They were evil. Her spirit sensed it, and she refused to be compromised by cooperating with them. They had caused the wreck. They had refused to help Cole, who she knew lay badly injured, if not dead. And now she understood they were part of everything that had happened since Matt was taken from Marianne Weston’s trigonometry classroom.
Jill lifted her head and gazed at the brilliant stars outside the window of the concrete-block building that imprisoned her. She had heard church bells ring that morning, and she sensed she was still in Mexico, perhaps somewhere near Juarez.
“God, You created those stars,” she murmured. “Jesus, You are Lord of the universe. I beg You—”
“Señorita?”
A tap on the shoulder drew her attention. Absorbed in prayer, she hadn’t even heard the door open. The woman who had come to her before stood beside her again, a plate in her hands. “
Comida, señorita?
You eat food?”
Jill glanced over the woman’s shoulder at the man who stood guard in the doorway. She shook her head. “I have to pray,” she told the woman.
“Jesus es mi pan y mi agua. Yo quiero nada…nada pero Jesus.”
“Hey!” the man shouted. “What are you saying to Maria?”
“I told her Jesus is my bread and water,” Jill said. “I want nothing but Jesus.”
“Don’t say another word until you’re ready to talk to us!”
“You won’t keep me from speaking to God,” she said, folding her hands and returning to her prayers as Maria hurried from the room. In some strange way, Jill realized, this confinement was exactly what she needed. In the frantic race from Artesia to Hobbs and then on to Amarillo, she had been too preoccupied to spend much time with the Father. Her own adrenaline had taken over, propelling her from one place to the next—finally leading her to join Cole on his flight to El Paso and to Juarez.
Now she was here, in God’s hands, and she had plenty of time to address Him. Oddly, in spite of her worries for Matthew and Billy and Granny Strong, she found it was Cole whose rugged face played through her thoughts again and again. In spite of his surly demeanor, she liked Cole Strong. Silent and thoughtful, he was as steady as a rock. Whereas she often found herself swept by her own enthusiasm into one quest or another, Cole had his boots planted solidly in the New Mexico soil. He knew where he came from and where he was going. He understood himself, and—she suspected—he was capable of profound compassion. Though he could change, adapting to loss and growth, in his essence Cole would always be the same. He would be a man she could rely on.
Why had she echoed Matt’s words—referring to him as a dry, old tree stump? Cole wasn’t anything like that. He was deep, still water. A river of nourishment and life. Suddenly she wished she’d had time to taste that water. To know its comfort, the strength of its currents.
‘Lord, keep him alive,” she murmured, speaking over a ruckus that had erupted outside her window. The Mexican woman—Maria—was yelling something Jill couldn’t understand. A chicken squawked, and a child began to cry. “Father,
please protect Cole from harm. Send him help, dear God. Send someone to rescue him. And while he’s waiting, Lord, turn his eyes on You. Open his mind to You. Knock hard on his heart, and keep knocking until he hears You.”
Jill twisted her fingers into a tighter knot, grateful for quiet again outside. She needed to sleep. She probably should eat, too. But how could she think about such things when lives were in danger? Now she understood that the two men who had passed themselves off as USDA agents must be with Agrimax or some other food company Matt had stirred up. Those men had told her captors about the deleted files. This meant Billy and Granny Strong were in their enemies’ hands.