I Shall Not Want (47 page)

His gaze shifted away. He glanced at the men sitting around them, their faces divided between worry and interest. Hadley stood. “Amado,” she began. Clare got to her feet as well, wishing like hell her languages weren’t limited to written Greek and Hebrew. With dictionaries by her side.

She was good at reading faces, though. As Hadley spoke, Amado’s altered, from stony to pained, to horrified. He was hearing how his brother died. Clare laid her hand on Hadley’s arm. “Go easy,” she said.

“I want him to understand what’s at stake. There are more of those guys out there. If he knows
anything
, we have to have it.”

Amado straightened. He looked at the sky, the blue leached away in the heat of the sun. He looked at the other men. He looked at Hadley. “Come.” He turned and strode toward the bunkhouse.

“What?” Clare said, hurrying to catch up.

“I don’t know.” Hadley hustled after her. The grass in the lane was brittle, the strawflowers and Queen Anne’s lace already dry. The corn was stunted, with dull, cracked leaves.

“Tell him what I say, okay?” Clare lengthened her stride. “Amado. I met Isabel in the hospital. Did you know she had been wounded?”

Hadley spoke. Amado stumbled. Glanced over his shoulder at her. Resumed walking. “She is okay?”

“She was released on Friday.” She paused, just long enough for Hadley to translate. “She thinks you’re dead. It hit her hard. Very hard.” She thought of the young woman’s blank face while Hadley spoke and Amado replied in a low voice. The sense that Isabel had gone beyond caring.

“He says it’s just as well.” Hadley skip-hopped to keep up with them. They crested the rise. Below them, a thread of water trickled across the lane through a stony streambed. The bunkhouse baked in the sun beside it. “He says she’s not for him and he’s not for her. I dunno. Maybe she spun a romance out of a few meaningful glances?”

“I don’t think so.” Clare plunged forward and grabbed Amado’s arm before he could enter the old farmhouse. Tugged him around to face her. She touched the silver cross hanging beneath her collar. Hoped the black and white would have an effect on him, even if she was an Anglican woman, and not a Roman man. “What if she’s pregnant?”

Hadley copied her authoritarian tone.

Amado’s mouth opened. “
¿Embarazada
?” He looked terrified and hopeful.

“Oh-ho,” Hadley said. “You nailed that one on the head.”

“Tell him I don’t know. But he needs to come with me and let her see he’s still alive. If he wants to break it off with her after that, fine.”

He smoothed over his initial shock and listened to Hadley’s translation with an impassive face. He looked at Clare. She stared back. “Okay,” he finally said. “I go with you. For good-bye.” He nodded stiffly and disappeared into the bunkhouse.

“Huh.” Hadley propped her hand on her hip and fanned her face. “Me-thinks the lady doth protest too much. Or the man, in this case.”

“I’m not trying to play Cupid. I was worried enough about Isabel’s state of mind to put in a word with the hospital counseling folks. She blames herself for Amado’s death—Octavio’s death. You know what I mean. I think seeing him alive and well will let her forgive herself for accidentally setting her brothers on him. On his brother.” She batted away a buzzing fly. “Whatever.”

“Speaking of brothers, have you considered they might not be too thrilled if you bring yet another Latino guy to their farm?”

“I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.”

“Don’t you mean—” The sun-blistered door creaked open. Amado stepped out.

“Here.” He thrust something at Hadley. “
Esto es lo qué deséo el Punta Diablos
.” He sounded like a soldier at last laying down his arms.

Hadley stared at the black-and-white composition book in her hands. She flipped it open. Ran one finger down a handwritten page. “Holy shit.” She looked up at Clare. “The chief was right. It’s the distribution list.”

Clare eased her car up the Christies’ drive like a woman easing her way into the haunted house at the county fair. She knew there was nothing to be afraid of. But the sights, the smells, her sense of what-might-have-happened made her heart pound as she parked on the dusty grass and approached the porch steps.

Amado was an indistinct figure in her Subaru, waiting behind tinted windows. She had left the engine running, as much for a quick getaway as for the air-conditioning. She was lucky she had him with her—Hadley had been all for dragging him back to the station for formal questioning. Amado dug in his heels, saying only that he had found the notebook nearby and that he’d tell the police everything he knew after he had seen Isabel. Hadley had been torn between accompanying him and Clare and delivering the list to the station—so torn she had shifted back and forth, back and forth, on the balls of her feet, poised at her cruiser’s door.

“I promise,” Clare said. “I’ll bring him in to you as soon as we’re done at the Christie place.” Which would also give her time to call Sister Lucia and set her to find a Spanish-speaking lawyer. Russ would have never gone for it, but Hadley, flushed with triumph, her fingers leaving damp prints all over the MKPD’s biggest haul of the year, was an easier touch.

Now, approaching the weathered mahogany door she had last seen flung open for cops and EMTs, she wondered if it might not have been a better idea to wait, to have come up here after he was questioned, with Hadley and Kevin Flynn and maybe even Lyle MacAuley in tow. Too late now.

“Fly or die,” she said to herself, pressing the bell.

The shirred curtains in the window shivered. The door opened a hand-breadth. A thin teenaged girl peered out. “Yeah?”

It wasn’t what Clare had been bracing for. “Um. I would like to see Isabel.”

“How come?”

“I’m Clare Fergusson. I”—the specter of Pastor Bob caused a midcourse correction—“am the chaplain who spoke with Isabel at the hospital. I wanted to see how she was doing.”

“She’s fine.” The door swung.

Clare stuck her foot in the jamb. “I’d like to hear that from her.”

“You can’t.” The girl pushed the door a few times, but Clare’s lug-soled sandal didn’t move.

“Are you Porsche?” The girl looked more like a Chevy Nova, but Clare hadn’t named her.

“Yeah.”

“Porsche, your aunt told me that Christies stick together. That you help each other. Is that true?”

“Yeah.”

“Then please let me speak to her. I promise you, you’ll be helping her.”

The girl looked at Clare’s foot. She released the door, letting it drift open. “She’s not here. I’m”—she checked behind her, as if someone might overhear—“worried about her. Dad and Uncle Bruce and Uncle Neil took the van and drove off, and as soon as they were gone, Izzy was on the phone with somebody. Then the next thing I know, this chrome-flap Hummer pulls in the yard and Izzy’s out the door.”

“And that worried you because—?”

“There were Mexicans in it! I almost went and grabbed a gun, ‘cause Dad said we ever see another Mexican on our land, we better shoot to kill!”

“But she went with them? Voluntarily?” Could they be some of Janet’s men? No. That made no sense. There was only one group of Latinos interested in the Christies. “When was this?”

“Just a bit before you showed up. That’s why I was being so careful and all.”

“Do you know which way they went?”

Porsche stepped onto the porch. She leaned over the railing and pointed to where the open pasture rose into a stretch of woods. It was just visible in the gap between house and barn. “Up that way. There’s a sort of a road up into the mountain, leads to the high meadows. Same way Dad and the others went.”

“They’re
all
up there? Together?”
Jesus wept! This mental midget is who Russ almost died for
? Clare passed her hand over her face. That was unworthy. “Porsche.” She tried to project patience. “Do you have a phone I could use?”

“Chief? You awake?”

“Mmm? C’mon in, Kevin.” He opened his eyes. He’d been drifting, not dozing, wrapped in a warm Percocet-flavored cloud. He wanted to dial down the dosage this morning, to take back some small measure of control over his life, but by the time the nurse got around to him, he needed those two little pills rattling around in the plastic cup more than he wanted any sort of self-sufficiency.

Kevin’s face came into view. “Hey.” The kid smiled down at him like a proud dad looking over a newborn. Which, until he got the okay to get up to pee, wasn’t too far off the mark. “Wow. It’s sure great to see you.”

None of the hospital staff had told him, yet, how close he had come to checking out. The heart surgeon and the orthopedic surgeon and the internist had gone over the technical aspects;
right lung, pericardium, hip joint;
the bottom line was he was going to be lying here, hurting, for a long time. After that, he’d be in rehab, hurting, for another long time. But no one said,
You nearly died
. He was learning that from his visitors’ faces.

“Not as great as it is to see you,” he said, getting a laugh. “What’s happening at the station?” Kevin obliged his weak lungs by taking over the conversation at that point, rattling on in his usual Energizer Bunny way, allowing Russ to float in and out of awareness, until he connected the words
twenty-two
and
ballistics test
and
confirmation
. “What?” he said. “Go back.”

“The ballistics test matched up one of the Christies’ twenty-twos with the bullet that killed John Doe number one.”

“We didn’t have a warrant for their twenty-twos.”

“Since there were multiple shootings from several firearms in the incident where you… you…”

“Got shot.”

“… the state required ballistics tests on all possible weapons. MacAuley figured that ought to include all the available guns in the Christie house.”

“Did he, now?” It hurt to smile, but in a good way.

“Well, as he said, how did we know the Punta Diablo guys didn’t use one of the Christie guns and then replace it? Of course, there’s no way of telling who might’ve used it, but it gives us something to hang our hats on.” That last phrase was pure Lyle.

There was a knock at the door. Kevin turned, and from his prone position in the bed, Russ could see the slice of his face where his smile cut out.

“Oh,” the kid said. “Hi.”

“Am I interrupting?” Russ could hear Hadley but not see her.

“No, I was just—”

“Because I can—”

Russ hoisted one hand to a ninety-degree angle with the bed. His exercise for the day. “I think I can stand the excitement of both of you.”

“I don’t know if you can stand this excitement.” Hadley replaced Kevin at the bedside rail. “Look at this.” She dangled an 11-by-14-inch evidence bag over his bed. It contained a kid’s composition book. “I know I should’ve taken it straight in, but I wanted you to see it before it goes to CADEA.”

Kevin got it first. “Is this it?” He leaned over her shoulder. “The dealer list?”

Hadley looked at him, lit up like the Fourth of July. “It is.”

“Oh, man. CADEA will be shining their noses on our backsides for this.” Kevin grinned at her. They bumped fists together, something Russ would look like an ass doing; then there was a confusion of looking down and stumbling around, and next thing Russ knew the notebook had dropped onto his bed and his two youngest officers were a good five feet apart, so he had to crane his neck to see both of them. Hadley launched into an account of how the thing came into her hands, word-spinning as much as Kevin was prone to do. The part about Amado-Octavio-Amado clicked for him—
that
was why the boy had been so nervous during questioning—and he brushed past her apologies for handling the notebook without gloves on—“I didn’t have them in my pocket, Chief, because I was just there to translate.” He threw the brakes on when she said she let Amado—the real Amado—go. After he’d just proven he’d been in possession of the Punta Diablo’s distribution list.

“I thought it would be okay, Chief. Reverend Clare promised to bring him to the station after they’d spoken to Isabel Christie.”

Clare. Godamighty. He was going to have to get out of this hospital a lot faster than predicted, or she’d be running the damn force.

Kevin’s phone rang. “Sorry.” He checked the number. Flipped it open. “Kevin here.”
Harlene
, he mouthed. “No, I’m visiting the chief.” Hadley shut up. “What?” Kevin said. He glanced at her. “Yeah. I will. Hadley’s right here with me, I’ll tell her.”

He closed the phone. Looked at Hadley. “Reverend Clare called from the Christies‘. A group of Latinos in a Hummer just picked up the sister and went up the mountain after the brothers. We gotta hurry. She said”—he looked at Russ for the first time, as if he just remembered he was lying there—“she’s going up after them.”

Branches twisted and whipped at the windshield. Clare gripped the steering wheel and eased off the acceleration as her Subaru humped over another kidney-jarring tree root. How far did this goat path go? How far did they dare drive? The last thing she wanted to do was burst onto the scene like a clown car driving into a circus ring. “Amado…?”

He leaned forward in the passenger seat as if the extra inches would help him see their destination. “Isobel,” he said, in an unarguable voice. “We go help.”

From the moment she had conveyed, in Spanglish and sign, who Isabel Christie was with, Amado had been dead set on following her. She couldn’t let him go alone, she argued to a mental tribunal consisting of her bishop and Russ. It wouldn’t have been—

Consistent
was the bishop’s word.

Stupid enough
, Russ said.

“Stop.” Amado raised his hand. She braked, pitching them forward. “I think… close.” She inched the car as far off the trail as she dared and killed the engine.

Amado opened his door. “You stay!” Shades of Russ. God, she wished he were here.