Fatal Harvest (15 page)

“The USDA. They sent two, in fact. One is outside, and another one is in the house looking at your computer.”

Matt frowned. There was nothing on his computer of interest, but he still didn’t like anyone prying into his personal files.

“Why does the USDA think they need to protect Granny and Billy?”

“Something to do with Agrimax,” Hernando told him. Chuckling, he reached for the door handle. “The USDA thinks Agrimax is chasing you. If that ain’t the stupidest idea, I don’t know what is. But that’s the government for you.”

Cole opened his eyes and stared at the black void surrounding him. Nothing. Nothing but pain. His left arm throbbed. His left leg wouldn’t move. As if it had gone to sleep. He tried to think where he was. What had happened.

As he blinked, a faint shaft of light filtered into his con
sciousness, and he began to distinguish objects. A shape loomed overhead. A bridge? Or a building? Near it, a streetlamp…the source of the light. Brush, reeds, tall grass. Around him, a barricade of twisted metal. He reached up with his right hand and felt it. What was that? A steering wheel? But it had been bent into a distorted oval. Was he inside a car?

A memory shot into his mind. A rental car. A mad race down a narrow road. Mexico. And the woman beside him—

“Jill?” He stretched his arm out, frantically tracing the outlines of the mangled car around him. “Jill, are you there? Jill, talk to me. Answer me. It’s Cole. Cole Strong.”

That’s who he was, he realized. He was Cole, and he’d come to Mexico in search of Matthew. His son. Matt, was missing, had fled in fear. Cole had gone looking for him. But someone sideswiped the rental car. Ran them off the road. Then turned around and came at them again, head-on. A pair of silver headlights bearing down. Cole had fought to stay on the road, swerved at the last instant. The rental flew off the bridge and landed in this ravine.

“Help!” he called out. What was the word in Spanish?
“Ayudame! Ayudame!”

What day was it? He glanced at his watch. Four-thirty on Sunday morning. The accident had happened late Friday night. Had he been unconscious for more than twenty-four hours?

He had to get out of here! Make sure Jill was okay. Find Matthew. Why didn’t she answer him?

“Jill? Hey, Jill, are you there?”

His heart sank. What if she was dead? He thought of Jill Pruitt’s pretty face—bright green eyes filled with enthusiasm, brilliant smile, determined little chin. And that hair. All those bouncy golden curls.
“I’m a guardian angel,”
she had told him.

But he hadn’t been able to protect her.

Who had been inside that car? The crash had been no accident, of that he was sure. Who would stoop to such reckless action? Someone who had wanted to kill him, that’s who. The same person who wanted to kill Matt.

Cole gritted his teeth. He had to get out of this wrecked car. Grabbing the steering wheel, he tried to pull himself from his cramped position. Nothing. He didn’t gain an inch. His left leg was trapped. So was his left arm. Maybe if he just started shoving stuff out of the way, he could get loose.

He worked at it for a while, sliding aside everything that would move. A piece of dashboard. Broken glass. The door handle. He found the foam cup from Jill’s supper. How had it survived untouched when everything around it was smashed and shattered?

“Jill?” he called again, moving his hand around in the darkness. “Please answer me. Please be okay.”

His fingers brushed something soft and silky. He grabbed it. “Jill! Jill, wake up. It’s me, Cole!”

Hopeful, he ran his fingertips over the fabric. What had she been wearing? Why didn’t he notice these things? He recalled everything about her face. The arch of her eyebrows, the line of her nose, the pretty outline of her lips. But her clothes?

“Jill.” He tugged on the silky stuff, pulling it toward him. It was white. White, smooth, billowy…

The air bag.

“Great. Just great.”

Exhausted, aching, disappointed, he lay back. His arm ached and burned. The seat belt was cutting into his chest, and he wasn’t sure why. He tried to find the release button but couldn’t locate it.

As he lay there, hurting and angry, he tried to pray. This was the perfect time to address God, if ever there was one.
Help,
he cried out inwardly.
Get me out of this!

The sun was coming up, he realized as he prayed. Now
he could see clearly through a gap in the metal. The structure overhead and to the left turned out to be a bridge. The streetlight had gone off. The blackness faded to pale purple, and then to shades of orange, pink and blue.

Cole wondered if God ever got tired of hearing him calling out for relief. That’s all their communion amounted to. Cole would find himself stuck in a bad situation and then cry for help.
Help me, rescue me, get me out of this mess.
He thought of Jill and her constant chatter about God. Obviously, the Almighty was a regular presence in her life, someone she turned to hourly, if not more often.

Matt must have the same kind of relationship with God, Cole realized. Otherwise, why would he be so committed to feeding the hungry? What else could have made him take the Bible to heart in such a real, concrete way? If you only got around to contacting God when trouble arose, then you didn’t think too much about
His
business—you were too busy worrying about your own.

That thought led him to recall his ranch, and he worried about whether Hernando was keeping a close eye on the calving, whether José was remembering to log the hoe-hands’ hours correctly, whether Pete had thought to order pesticide. Were the men watching the irrigation pipes? Had the diesel truck arrived to fill the tank so the employees could keep the tractors running? If only he could talk to them…

The cell phone.

Cole began to search the car again. In the growing light, he could see a lot better. The car lay upside down in a ditch, he realized, but somehow he had ended up on his back. Water seeped along the flattened roof, soaking his shirt and the seat of his jeans. He found the seat belt button and released the pressure that had been cutting into his chest. It did nothing to ease the pain in his arm.

Unable to find the cell phone and too exhausted to keep
looking, he called for Jill again. “Jill, are you there? Just say something! This is Cole. Please, just—”

His voice stuck in his throat as he caught sight of two pale fingertips protruding from under a piece of sheared metal right over his head.

“Jill!”

Dear God, please don’t let her be dead!
Reaching up, he touched the fingers. They were white, bloodless. Nothing. No movement. No life. Her body must be lying directly above him. Sick, spent, he slammed his fist into the car roof.
Not this! Not Jill!
She was too good, too righteous for something so awful.
Why, God? Why Jill and not me?

And where’s my son?

And how am I going to get out of this car?

“Help!” he shouted.
“Ayudame!”

A truck rumbled across the bridge, drowning his words. Before he could call out again, a car sped past. Then another truck. And another. He looked at Jill’s fingers.

“No!” His scream went unheard as a bus roared by. He grabbed the bent steering wheel and pushed as hard as he could. He had to get out. Had to get
out!
His good right leg found a toehold, and he pushed hard against it. In a blinding, shearing flash of pain, his left foot tore free. As agony swept over him, the world went black once more.

Matt got to Amarillo without a bit of trouble, and he had Hernando and Josefina to thank for that. Hernando had given him keys to one of the old ranch pickups that nobody used much—and no one would miss. And Josefina had packed a cooler with bean-and-cheese burritos, roast beef sandwiches, potato chips, plastic Ziploc bags filled with biscochitos and a large supply of Fanta orange sodas. Matt figured he had enough food to last a week. Most of the stuff was frozen when Josefina put it into the cooler, so it would keep awhile.

He didn’t make it to Amarillo until late Sunday afternoon,
because he stopped at a rest area and took about a five-hour nap. Maybe he was more tired than he knew. He felt weird about missing church, because he hardly ever had, and he wondered what the kids in his youth group were doing. Probably watching TV or playing video games. Or doing homework.

Now, as he took one wrong turn and then another while trying to find his grandmother’s house, Matt thought about the little street children who had been so kind to him in Juarez. They sure didn’t have a TV or a game system. They didn’t have a cooler full of burritos and sandwiches. They didn’t even have houses or families. They had nobody but each other.

There were seven in the group that had adopted him—two Marias, José, Pedro, Marcos, Hernán, and their leader, Luz.
Luz
meant “light” in Spanish, and that’s what she had been to Matthew. After they ate, she had invited him to stay with them for as long as he wanted. When he agreed, imagining a little house and a mother like Josefina, Luz had led him to the far end of the alley—a dead end that butted up against a concrete-block building. This was where Luz and the rest of the street kids lived—a collection of cardboard boxes protected against rain by pieces of corrugated tin and sheets of tattered plastic.

Luz and the others considered themselves very lucky, she told Matt. Living next to I-FEED’s Mexico headquarters, they sometimes got rounded up by Hector Diaz and taken to a feeding station where they ate like kings and queens for a day. Besides that, the restaurant on the other side of the alley emptied diners’ plates into a collection of smelly trash cans near the children’s cardboard-box houses. This meant lots of half-eaten tortillas, fatty scraps from carne asada, and sometimes burned frijoles. What more could you ask for?

Well, glue, as it turned out. Matt could hardly stand to think about this, and remembering it made him so upset that
he ended up back on the outskirts of Amarillo once more. As he started trying to retrace his route back toward Granny’s neighborhood, he thought about Luz offering to share her glue with him. She was huffing—inhaling glue fumes. So were all the others, including little Hernán, who couldn’t be more than three years old and didn’t even have underpants.

It turned out this was what the street children did most of the day when they weren’t begging for money. They sniffed glue and then sat around in a daze, destroying their brains before they’d even had a chance to put anything into them. They had never been to school, and they knew nothing. Nothing at all. Didn’t know the world was round, didn’t know they lived in Mexico, didn’t know how to count or read. They’d never heard of God or Jesus. All they knew were the streets where they’d been born and dumped.

Heartsick, Matt had tried to tell Luz how dangerous it was to huff glue. She just laughed and urged him to try it. He pushed her away and retreated to the farthest corner of the biggest box and tried to sleep. It had been a terrible night.

At one point he woke up and found out that something even worse was going on. Even now, as he drove around and around in Amarillo, Texas, it just didn’t seem real to Matt. What happened was that Luz, who told Matt she thought she was eight or nine years old, had found a man. They were under a couple of burlap sacks in the alley. After they were done, he gave Luz money. And then she went out to look for another man. This was what she did every night, she admitted to Matt.

The next morning, Matt had taken Luz aside and had given her nearly all his cash, his watch, and his laptop. He told her to use whatever money she could get from selling his things to feed herself and the others. And not to use it to buy glue. And not to let any more men buy her body. He could barely speak to her without breaking down, but he talked in the sternest way he knew how—like a really firm father.

Luz hugged him, her skinny arms barely able to reach around his waist, and then she went skipping away with the little ones following behind. Matt walked all the way back to the bridge, all the way across to the Texas side, and all the way to the parking lot, where he found that his pickup had been towed. The whole time, he thought about Luz.

Luz was why, in spite of wishing he could be safe with Josefina and Hernando, Matt knew he was going to get that USB key to I-FEED. He understood now that both Hector Diaz and Josiah Karume were at the food summit in Paris. Mr. Banyon had been planning to travel there himself, and he had told Matt he’d scheduled a meeting with Karume, who was chairman-elect of the organization. Mr. Banyon intended to give the information to Karume at their meeting. So Matt decided he would find some way to get to France and complete the mission. He would turn the data over to Karume or die trying. What choice did he really have?

Somebody had to do something. Somebody had to feed Luz—or she would keep on huffing glue in order to dull her brain enough to let men rape her so she could buy food for the children who looked to her as their mother and protector.

And that wasn’t right.

It wasn’t the way God had planned the world. Jesus had commanded His followers to feed the hungry. He said whatever you do to the least of these, you do to Me. Luz was the least of these. In some mysterious way that Matt didn’t quite understand, whatever happened to Luz was happening to Jesus.