Beautiful Sacrifice (16 page)
“How long have you known Agent Jason Beaumont?” the officer asked without a pause.
“I don’t really know him. He’s Hunter’s friend. We came to the gallery so that Mr. Beaumont could get a feel for what’s available in the high-end artifact market.”
“How long have you known Hunter Johnston?”
Lina was on the hard downward spiral of an adrenaline jag, and she had answered all the questions at least three times. A fourth time was twice too many.
“As I’ve told you many times,” she said, her tone as impatient as she felt, “Mr. Johnston has audited several of my classes over the last year. We’ve had coffee and conversation. Now, if you don’t have any new questions for me, I’m exhausted and would like to at least wash my hands.”
Hunter must have reached the same point in the questioning process because he was striding through the various remaining cops toward her. He was close enough that he heard her last sentence.
“Unless you’re going to arrest us,” Hunter said, “we’re leaving. She’s a civilian and she’s kept it together better than anyone has a right to expect. She needs to chill, not to be grilled.”
“You know that we’re required—” began the cop.
“To ask questions,” Hunter cut in. “Once, twice, fine. Three times because you’re pissed. Now you’re just wasting our time.”
“With what you’ve given us, there’s not much chance of catching the shooter,” the cop snarled.
“No shit. Now let us leave or read us our rights.”
Someone with higher rank moved in. “Thank you for your cooperation,” she said to Hunter and Lina. “If we make any arrests, we’ll need you to identify the suspect or suspects.”
“You can reach me on my cell phone,” Hunter said.
“You have my cell number,” Lina said wearily.
“Your cooperation is appreciated,” the woman said, smiling professionally.
Hunter and the cops all knew that devils would be ice-skating in hell before there was any arrest. If the SUV was found on this side of the border, it would be stripped, likely reported stolen. Every description of the occupants boiled down to short, swarthy, and similar. More
indio
than Mexican. Like thousands of other Houston residents.
The description was useless for catching anything but overtime.
Hunter nodded to the cops, took Lina’s arm, and led her to his Jeep. It had escaped the bullets. The Mercedes parked in the next slot over hadn’t been as lucky. The rear window was blown into thousands of grainy, sparkling pieces.
Before Lina had fastened her seat belt, Hunter called the hospital Jase had been taken to, only to be told that Jason Beaumont was none of his business. Swearing, he called Ali’s cell number.
“It’s Hunter,” he said as soon as she picked up. “How is Jase?”
“In surgery,” Ali said, her voice raw. “He won’t be out for—hours. It’s—very serious.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
As soon as I wash Jase’s blood off me.
A hot darkness wrapped around the Jeep as it nosed out of the garage into traffic. Christmas lights sparkled everywhere in storefronts. Lina felt like she was dreaming.
Must be shock,
she told herself.
“Your apartment is closer,” Hunter said.
Lina shivered. “Yes.”
“Cold?”
“No.”
“Hang on, sweetheart. I’ll get you home.”
“No,” she said tightly. “I can’t go there. Those men were after me.”
“What?” Hunter said, giving her a fast look.
“They were speaking in a Mayan dialect. They wanted me.”
Hunter’s eyes searched surrounding traffic and the driving mirrors with quick glances. “You sure?”
“I grew up with Spanish and English as my primary languages. The Mayan dialect those men spoke was my third language. My great-grandmother prefers it, though she speaks Spanish very well. In case you didn’t catch it, the driver only spoke Spanish. He knew Jase was a cop.”
“I got that.” Hunter wove through traffic, checking mirrors, watching for any vehicle matching his maneuvers. “What did the others say?”
“They screamed at the shooter not to hurt me or El Maya would eat their balls and tear out the heart of every living relative they had.”
Hunter’s eyebrows lifted. “Is that a usual curse?”
“No. They yelled variations of the threat and made it clear that they wanted to…take me. El Maya wants me intact and unharmed.” Tears welled from her eyes and silently streaked her face, shining trails in the streetlight. “It’s my fault. All that blood, Jase’s blood, my fault.”
“You weren’t holding the guns. The blood is all on the shooters’ ticket. Did you tell the PD?”
Silently she shook her head while the city’s petroleum-scented wind turned tears cold on her face. “No. Was that wrong? Should I have told them?”
For an instant Hunter’s fingertips slid down her cheek, bringing warmth to the cool flesh. “You did good. Right now I don’t trust anyone. Narcos have ears in every police department that is important to them. Houston is real important.” He put his hand on the wheel again. “You need to disappear.”
“Narcos? Is this about drugs, not the artifacts?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that anything we give the police will end up in places that it wasn’t meant to be.”
“Corruption?” she asked unhappily.
“Even if ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the Houston PD is on heaven’s short list, that still leaves plenty of people to pass information on down to hell.”
“God, we’re turning into Mexico.”
Hunter’s attention never left the traffic around them. “We’re as human as Mexicans are. Corruption happens. In some cultures it’s accepted, even admired, and certainly exploited just like any other business opportunity. Mexico…” He shook his head.
Lina watched Hunter’s stark profile while he told her what she didn’t want to hear.
“Mexico is circling the toilet,” he said bluntly. “Everybody knows it and nobody talks about it. The narcos are in open warfare with the
federales
. Silver or lead, take your pick. Bribery or blood. I don’t judge the civilians who only want to survive. The cops and politicians, well, I wouldn’t mind flushing those corrupt bastards before the rot goes any farther.”
“I know. It’s just…” Her voice trailed off.
“Yeah. When that greasy corruption takes a slice out of your honest life, it’s a shock.”
More silence, night and time flowing by.
“Anyone following?” Lina asked, her voice catching.
“Not that I’ve caught,” Hunter said. “Ease down, sweetheart. It’s going to be a long night as it is. No need to waste energy worrying about things you can’t control. Deep breaths. Slow. Long.”
Silently Lina practiced breathing while Hunter wove through traffic, making unexpected turns, sometimes going around whole blocks and ending up in the same place. She let herself drift, sliding down and down, back to where her heart wasn’t beating double time and screams weren’t clawing at her throat.
“Is your passport at your apartment?” he asked.
She looked at his face, dark planes and angles slashed by city lights. He looked as forbidding as any stone statue carved in reverence to forgotten gods.
“No,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I always carry it with me. Same for Mexican travel documents.”
Hunter almost smiled. “Same here. Need anything from work?”
“My computer.”
“Can you access it through an outside portal?” he asked.
She closed her eyes. “Yes. I have all the passwords.”
“You know how to use a handgun?”
Her eyes snapped open. “Handgun, shotgun, and rifle. Sometimes I worked alone at remote sites.”
“Ever shoot anything but a target?”
“No. I don’t particularly like guns.”
“Neither do I,” Hunter said. “But at least you understand which end bites and how to keep it from biting you. That’s more than most know.”
More time slid by with the night, fragmented into darkness and light, seething with unknowns.
“Why would someone called El Maya want me enough to kill for me?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know. When I find out, I’ll know who gave the orders that ended up with blood all over Jase.”
Hunter didn’t say any more. He didn’t have to. Lina understood that someone now had the kind of enemy that made nightmares look cozy.
L
INA WOKE UP WITH A START WHEN THE
J
EEP SLOWED AND
took an off-ramp leading to a street. Houston’s flash and glitter was nowhere in sight. Nothing but an overcast night and car lights whizzing by on I-10. Her neck hurt from sleeping against the window and her skin was chapped from scrubbing blood off in a gas-station restroom on the outskirts of Houston.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“South Padre Island.”
She rubbed her eyes. “The beach. That explains the salt smell.” She must have slept for hours. “Any word on Jase?”
“He’s out of surgery.”
The tightness around Hunter’s mouth made her stomach sink.
“And?” she asked unhappily.
“Still critical. Ali’s parents are with her, taking care of the kids.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Not your fault, any of it.” He stopped for a light. “You warm enough?”
She shifted the jacket he had put over her. “Yes. What about you?”
His eyes checked the mirrors as regularly as breathing. “I run hot.”
The sound of air rushing and rippling over the canvas top was white noise, something she had stopped hearing after the first half hour on the road.
“Are we being followed?” she asked.
“I lost them after the gas station.”
Scattered lights told of houses and strip malls hacked out of scrubland and stilted above storm tides.
“If no one is following, why are we here?” she asked.
“Because we have to assume that whoever wants you has my Houston address by now. Ditto for Brownsville and my uncles’ homes. My cousins have kids. I don’t want them in the line of fire.”
She opened her mouth, closed it. There was really nothing to say. He was right. She should have thought of it herself.
“My uncles are working their contacts,” Hunter continued. “They hear something good, we’ll hear it.”
“You’re obviously more used to this kind of thing than I am,” she said. “What do you do when you disappear for days or weeks at a time?”
“I work for the family security company.”
“Doing what?”
“Securing whatever needs it,” he said.
She didn’t give up. “What does that mean?”
“Exactly what I said. My uncles’ company specializes in cross-border security issues for corporations and individuals.” Hunter’s glance flicked to the mirrors again. Still nothing that ruffled his instincts. It was late enough that traffic was light, which made checking for tails much easier.
“Where were you the past two weeks?” she asked bluntly.
“I missed you, too,” he said, smiling.
“Hunter—” she began impatiently.
“My most recent job was outside of Cozumel,” he said before she could rip a strip off him with her sharp tongue, “ransoming a rich debutante who thought that bad things only happened on TV, and that getting knee-walking drunk was safe in a Mexican dive.”
“Was it dangerous for you?”
“It had its moments. They decided to up the ransom and threw a bullet tantrum when I refused. I grabbed the young mistress of the universe and beat the bad guys to the airport.”
“No wonder you weren’t shocked by what happened in the garage,” she said.
“Don’t bet on it. A friend’s blood is always shocking. I’ve just had more experience on the adrenaline ride than most. It doesn’t hit me as hard on the up or the down.”
She let out a long rush of air. “Remembering to breathe is the hardest part for me.”
“Harder than holding a bloody rag against a wound?”
“Philip wouldn’t let me go on a dig with him until I could handle weapons and had a basic understanding of field medicine,” she said neutrally.
“How old were you?”
“Nine. I had to prove myself every summer I spent with him. The tests got harder every year.”
“Sounds harsh,” Hunter said.
She shrugged. “It was useful. I stitched and bandaged more than one deep machete cut. It was years before I understood that Philip upped the difficulty every summer because he wanted me to fail. When I figured it out, I confronted him.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t answer. He usually doesn’t.”
Hunter’s mouth tightened but he kept it shut. She wasn’t the first child to have a dickhead for a father and she wouldn’t be the last.
Even at this time of night, Gulf Boulevard’s party houses were flashing like beacons. With the ocean just across the boulevard, it was always vacation time for high-school and college kids, and the older men who preyed on them. The fact that it was the holiday season just put a more colorful gloss on the hunting grounds.
Hunter took it all in without really seeing it. He was looking for the unusual, not the routine.
He turned the Jeep off the boulevard and entered a long, sandy, cracked asphalt driveway leading away from the ocean. The beach house he headed toward was small, one-story, on stilts, and old enough to have lived through too many of the Dirty Coast’s hair-raising hurricanes. A latticework fence shielded the space between the floor of the house and the ground.
When Hunter turned off the Jeep, Lina heard the muted breathing of the surf beyond the boulevard, flat waves lapping against the sand. The salt air was sticky on her skin, cooler than Houston had been, but still warm enough to make the thought of walking on the beach alluring.
“You need help getting out?” Hunter asked as he came around the Jeep.
“I’m not a baby.”
“No argument there,” he said, standing next to her, close, breathing in her presence. “But I’m betting you’re stiff from playing on concrete and then taking a long drive.”
Lina took off her seat belt, grabbed the purse she had hung on to through all the chaos, and started to slide out. It was a good thing she used the roll bar to steady herself, because Hunter was right. Her knees were crying. He braced her until she worked some of the stiffness out.