One Wrong Step (27 page)

She examined the gash on her arm. She’d cut it heaving the chair into the window, and she could feel a glass shard embedded in her skin. She’d tied a sock around it to stop the bleeding and keep from leaving a trail, but she hadn’t had time to dig the glass out yet.

At least an hour had gone by since she’d escaped, meaning a search was probably under way. She didn’t know. She’d traveled over several rises, and she couldn’t see the house anymore. But that didn’t mean people couldn’t see her. Especially if they were combing these fields in a Humvee with a pair of binoculars.

Celie shivered, despite the warmth of the evening, probably because she was wearing only underpants on her lower half. Her blue jeans were back at Saledo’s, one ankle still tied around the decorative iron balcony beneath her window. She’d used the pants as a makeshift rope to shorten the drop between the window and the ground.

She paused to pluck some sticker burrs from her calves. She felt queasy, light-headed, and she didn’t know whether that was from pain or hunger. After deciding to make a break for it, Celie had wolfed down every morsel of food on her tray, but that had only amounted to a bowl of soup and two saltine crackers. Now her throat felt parched, and she wished she’d thought to drink more of the coffee. Maybe she should have improvised some kind of canteen, but she hadn’t had time. Besides the clothes on her back, she had only her Nikes and the four sugar packets she’d tucked into her shoelaces.

She tripped over something and threw out her hands to catch herself.

“
Ouch!
”

Pain shot up her right arm. A prickly pear cactus had broken her fall.

She looked around frantically and bit her lip to keep from bursting into tears. The last smidgen of daylight was almost gone. She had glass in her arm, a twisted ankle, and now a palm loaded with cactus needles. And she still hadn’t made it to the riverbank. She was out in the open. Alone, unarmed, and exposed. If Saledo’s men or, God forbid, some kind of helicopter started combing the area, she was a sitting duck. She’d thought she’d heard a helicopter earlier, but the sound hadn’t lasted, and she’d chalked it up to her paranoid imagination. Still, it was possible. Saledo had an airstrip and who knew how many expensive toys at his disposal.

She looked ahead and could barely see anything now. Her throat tightened as her predicament sank in. Shelter or no, darkness was falling around her.

Marco halted the Silverado on the south end of Saledo’s landing strip. He and John had spent the past ten minutes driving up and down the private road, looking for Celie.

“Maybe she made it out to the highway,” Marco said, “then hitched a ride into town.”

John looked out the window, dismayed to see the last purple glow of daylight fading behind the cliffs to the west. They had five minutes, max, before the countryside went completely dark.

“No way,” John said. “She doesn’t trust strangers, and she wouldn’t have wanted to be wandering along some highway half naked after dark.”

“You think she could have stolen a car? Maybe one of Saledo’s?”

“Shit, I don’t see how. But I guess it’s possible.” John looked out the window, his shoulders tensing at the thought of Celie out in that vast rugged terrain after dark. To the east, he knew a river ran more or less parallel to the highway, about forty miles into the city of Monterrey.

“I think she’s out there,” he told Marco. “She would have wanted to avoid roads and people, especially since anyone she’d bump into near here could be working for Saledo. I think she headed away from the house, probably toward the river, where she’d have some tree cover. I’m going to go look.”

“That’s got to be at least two miles,” Marco pointed out. “And you don’t have any daylight left.”

John opened the door. “Neither does she. You got a flashlight?”

Marco got out of the truck and went around to the built-in toolbox just behind the cab. He unlocked it and scrounged around inside, tossing John whatever supplies he could find: a MagLite, a wadded poncho, a first aid kit.

“Shit, where am I going to put all this?”

Marco produced a bag with a shoulder strap. He ducked inside the truck cab, and John watched him unzip the bag, pull out a stack of diapers, and toss them to the floor. Then he popped open the glove box, grabbed a PowerBar and a mini–Swiss Army knife, and shoved them into the pack. In the glow of the interior light, John saw that the bag had pale blue rabbits printed all over it.

He shoved the pack at John. “Here. I don’t have any water left, and I wouldn’t drink out of that river if I were you.”

John pulled the strap over his head, positioning it across his chest so the pack rested on his lower back, out of his way. He tested the flashlight. It worked.

“I’ll check out the gas stations and rest stops along the highway, see if I can turn up anything,” Marco said. “You got your cell phone?”

“It doesn’t work down here.”

“Damn. Take mine. I’m almost out of juice, though, so don’t keep it on. Tomorrow at daybreak, I’ll come back here and wait. If I don’t see you after half an hour, I’ll come back at noon and again at six.”

John glanced up at the sky. He wasn’t sure what kind of moon would be out tonight, but it hadn’t risen yet. If Celie was out there, the world around her was black as tar.

“Contact Stevenski,” John said. “Maybe he can get someone looking on the outskirts of Monterrey, in case she made it there by car.”

“Will do.”

John looked east, the direction he hoped like hell Celie had gone. “Okay, I’m outta here.”

“They never located the nephew,” Marco reminded him. “He could be out there, too.”

John patted the Glock tucked into the back of his jeans. “Yeah, I know.”

Celie stumbled over the uneven ground, wishing desperately for some light. A half-moon had peeked through the clouds a few times to cast a faint, silvery glow over everything, but mostly it stayed hidden. Celie was trapped in the darkness, holding her arms out in front so she could feel for obstacles. She kept tripping over stones and bumping into bushes, and she’d even managed to stab her shins on an agave plant. She’d been walking east for what felt like ages, listening for the sound of a river. If she could hide out among those trees until morning, she’d have cover from anyone who came after her while she followed the river’s path in the daylight. She was counting on some civilization eventually, too. She’d seen cattle on Saledo’s property. Maybe there would be a ranch nearby where she could borrow a phone or get a ride to a police station.

The bushes rustled behind her, and she froze. She stood motionless as the noise approached. It sounded low to the ground, like an animal. Celie didn’t know what kind of wildlife lived around here and didn’t want to find out.

After a few moments, whatever it was moved off, and she continued her trek. Her pace was slow, but she had to keep moving. She needed to put as much space as possible between herself and Saledo’s men before morning.

She felt her way through the darkness with her feet and hands. Her senses had become heightened, like those of a blind person, she imagined. The earth sloped down here, then up. The ground cover was thick here, then nonexistent. Just the weight of the air told her whether she was in the midst of scrub brushes or out in the open. It seemed like ten hours had passed since she’d escaped the house, but she wondered if it was even midnight. Her muscles were so worn out, she felt as though she hadn’t slept in days.

Her ankle was throbbing, and she decided to allow herself a short break. When the clouds thinned, she strained her eyes in the moonlight, looking for a rock to sit on. She found one the size of a footstool and lowered herself onto it. Her throat was parched, so she loosened her shoelaces and ate two of the sugar packets. That got her saliva flowing, but the sugar coated her throat and made it itchy.

Celie felt her ankle. It was the size of a ham. She didn’t dare take her shoe off, or she’d never get it on again, and going barefoot out here would shred her feet in no time. She rubbed the tight, hard skin. The four-story drop—probably three stories, given that she’d dangled from the end of her jeans before letting go—had probably resulted in at least a sprain, if not a fracture. Whatever it was, it hurt like the devil.

Or, as McAllister would say, like a
motherfucker.

Tears sprang into Celie’s eyes, and she tried to blink them back. She wondered where he was right now, if he even knew she was in Mexico. She wished she had a cell phone so she could tell him she was alive. He was probably torturing himself, imagining her in a ditch somewhere with a bullet in her brain.

It had very nearly happened.

Wherever he was, Celie knew he was searching. She knew, deep down in her soul, he would do anything to find her, just as she knew, deep down in her soul, she would do anything to stay alive until he did. It was a pact. They’d never spoken about it, but Celie knew it was there. She wished now that she’d been brave enough to let him know her real feelings. If she ever saw him again, she was going to lay her heart bare and tell him she loved him. Even rejection couldn’t be as bad as leaving a thing like that unsaid.

Something howled in the distance, and it took her a second to realize it was a coyote. Of course. Because murdering henchmen and fractured bones and cactus needles and dehydration weren’t enough to worry about.

Celie climbed to her feet, swiped away her tears, and got moving.

The beam from John’s flashlight swept from side to side as he trudged across the field. He’d been out here for more than four hours and hadn’t seen any sign of Celie, not even a footprint.

His watch beeped, and he stopped to reprogram it. For one solid minute, he called her name, then paused to listen for an answer. He’d been doing this for hours, and his voice was nearly gone, but it hadn’t helped worth shit. The only sound out here was the wind moving over the crappy thornbushes and the occasional coyote.

“
Fuck!
”

His strategy wasn’t working. When he’d first set out, he’d cut a direct line to the row of trees near the river. Because of the darkness and his ongoing flashlight sweeps, the journey had taken him more than an hour. As soon as he got close enough to hear the water running, he’d started using a grid system. He would parallel the river for five minutes, call Celie’s name for one, then turn west and walk ten minutes that direction, then call her name again. Then he’d reset his watch and walk five minutes south, call her name, then head back to the river again. It was tedious as shit, but this whole thing was a needle in a haystack, and this was the only method that made any sense. John refused to wander around out here like a dumbfuck when he knew from both his climbing and his scuba training that search-and-rescue efforts had almost no chance of success when people moved around haphazardly, missing big swaths of land and covering the same ground over and over.

John looked up at the sky, where a half-moon had risen in the east. Unfortunately, it was cloudy tonight, and he’d been able to use it for guidance only sporadically.

Something moved in front of him, and John swung the flashlight beam toward it.

An armadillo. Rooting around at the base of a plant.

John stopped, paused the timer on his watch, and took a second to catch his breath. The armadillo kept rooting, oblivious to his light.

John mopped the sweat off his brow with his T-shirt. He needed a drink. And not the alcoholic kind—more like a tanker full of Gatorade. He bent over and touched his toes, trying to limber up his stiff muscles. His flashlight shined down on some pebbles on the ground. He selected a couple, dusted them off, and popped them in his mouth. He spat out some dirt and swished the rocks around, relieving his cotton mouth. What he really needed was water, but he didn’t want to take the time necessary to mine the juice out of a cactus ear.

John reset his watch and resumed his course. In the distance, several miles to the northwest, he guessed, he heard the faint thrumming of chopper blades as another helicopter landed at Saledo’s. Half a dozen law enforcement agencies were probably taking the house apart by now, processing the scene and cataloguing evidence. They’d probably already dispatched a team of agents to search for Saledo’s nephew, too—probably put out an APB and stationed guys at the airport. Some murdering shithead gets loose, and law enforcement pulls out all the stops. Meanwhile, an innocent woman is lost in the wilderness, running for her life from the sick fuck, and she doesn’t even merit a canine unit. Just like back in Austin, all the authorities cared about was a high-profile arrest. No one gave a shit what happened to Celie.

No one except him.

Okay, Feenie and Marco, too. They cared, but not the way he did. Not to the extent that every step farther into the darkness was making his heart bleed.

God
damn
it.

John spit out the pebbles and wiped the sweat off his forehead. Why hadn’t he told her? He’d had years to do it, and he’d failed. He’d never let her know how he felt. He’d never told her that sometime between that day ten years ago, when he’d watched her swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…and then proceed to hold her head up and recount her worst nightmare in front of her attacker and a room full of strangers, sometime between then and yesterday, when she’d raced up to him in her purple jumpsuit and dragged him off to kiss him and tell him he was amazing, he’d fallen in love with her.

Shit,
he was stupid. He was a fucking idiot for not realizing how precious she was and holding on when he’d had the chance. He’d let her go, again and again, and now that he finally knew he loved her, she might be gone.

John’s watch beeped, and he checked the time. One fifty-five. In less than four hours, Marco would be returning to Saledo’s airstrip, and John hadn’t found shit.

He moved to reset the timer, and his flashlight beam reflected off something.

A shoe. With a Nike swoosh. A
shoe
sitting by itself in the dirt.

He swept the light around, trying to look everywhere at once. The flashlight beam landed on an arm, a leg, a
body
curled up on the ground.