Borderline (21 page)

There was enough of the southern sheriff in Paul’s tone that Martinez sat again immediately. “Just kill me now,” the ranger said. “I’ve seen it all, what’s to live for? A baby on a whitewater trip. Jesus.” He shook his head and appeared to be fuming at the risk they had taken with this unknown baby’s life.

“Appeared to be” was the phrase that caught in Anna’s mind. Martinez was smart and had excellent survival skills. Had it been otherwise he would not have lasted so long on the river or risen so high in the Park Service. Even schoolyard bullies knew that the best defense is a good offense.

Anna collected a plastic coffee cup Martinez had left on the log and threw out the last dregs of what smelled like Constant Comment tea, then sat cross-legged near Paul and cradled the baby in the basket made of her bones, the torn down comforter, sans most of its stuffing by now, used as padding. Having rinsed the cup out, Anna put an inch of water in the bottom and began dipping her finger in it then putting her finger to the baby’s lips. To her enormous relief Helena took it.

“We need to get water to the kids,” Paul said.

“I’ll go as soon as Helena’s got some in her,” Anna said. Helena took another couple of drops and Anna felt triumphant.

“Let me. I didn’t do the chimney.”

For a moment Anna looked from Paul to Freddy and Paul looked from Freddy to Anna and Freddy looked mystified.

“Will you be okay here with him?” Paul asked.

“With him and a gun,” Anna said. She was being flippant. Helena’s survival had buoyed her spirits and she felt little threat from Freddy. From Paul’s willingness to leave, she expected he didn’t sense evil either.

Paul took the flashlight and the water skin and slipped back over the lip of the slide. For a freefalling moment Anna felt utterly helpless. She had the Glock. And she had the baby. It was not an auspicious combination. There would be no feeding and firing simultaneously; it took both hands to drip water into Helena’s mouth and, with an infant on one’s lap, moving quickly was problematic. Not to mention firing a gun so close to a newborn would probably deafen it for life. No wonder women didn’t tend to favor war.

Panic subsided. Freddy’s nonthreatening vibes again.

The Glock handy at her right knee, Anna continued to attempt to lure Helena into sucking water from her little finger.

“Paul’s taking water to ‘the kids,’ plural?” Freddy Martinez
asked.

It jarred Anna to hear her husband’s name spoken so easily by the man they’d captured, but of course he would have heard her say it.

“Plural,” Anna confirmed.

“Let’s see if I can figure this out,” Martinez said. “You, your husband?”

Anna nodded.

“And … how many kids?”

“Four,” Anna said, then remembered Lori had been killed. “Three,” she amended.

“An unknown number of kids,” Martinez said, “climb up a rockslide to escape the rising river—”

“Among other things.”

“And you leave the kids and bring the baby and decide to attack a park ranger to hijack his water. Water, I might add, that I would have given you in any case.” He sighed. “Nope. I can’t figure this one out.”

The sinking feeling that had started when Freddy was so outraged at anyone bringing a baby on a whitewater rafting trip sank another foot or so. It was beginning to look as if she and Paul had pounced on the wrong man, a federal law enforcement officer and fellow ranger, no less. Not that rangers couldn’t kill innocent people; it was just that between shooing skunk kits out of campgrounds and telling people where the bathroom was there wasn’t a whole lot of energy left for mass murder.

Anna chose not to tell him of the cow, the raft, the woman and the emergency C-section, at least not at the moment. She told him there’d been a shooting, how many there were in the party needing to be rescued, and what kinds of resources the victims might require.

When she’d finished he rose and went to retrieve the radio where she’d dropped it on the saddle blanket. Anna made no move to stop him, she just watched. Martinez pushed down the mike button and repeated what she had told him to dispatch. Dispatch began ordering various people to various places.

Martinez came back and sat where he’d been before.

“Sorry about mistaking you for a venal craven murderer of children and trying to crush your skull,” Anna said.

“I won’t tell anyone you attacked me if you won’t tell anyone you won,” Martinez said.

Anna laughed. “Deal.”

“Can I have my gun back?”

“No.”

“Can I hold the baby?”

“No.”

T
hey made the entrance Judith had planned. A lovely couple, easy together, old enough to have power and young enough to keep it. The kind of comets people like to hook their hopes to the tails of. Because he knew what to look for, Darden could see the strain around Charles’s well-cut mouth, a pulling down and in of the corners. Stress suited him, Darden thought. The tautness of the muscles helped to diffuse the natural sensuousness of his lips. Judith’s knuckles, outshone by a couple of very fine rings, big enough to exude wealth, small enough to look as if a regular person could earn it, were white where she held tightly to her husband, keeping him on a short leash. Charles did have a bit of the rabbit-in-the-headlights look about him, but Darden doubted anybody would notice.

Well, anybody but Gerry, and whatever Charles’s other faults might be, running off at the mouth to the press wasn’t one of them. Pride, Darden thought not for the first time, a handy thing for people who knew how to use it. Darden didn’t know if he had much in the way of pride. He was proud that he could make a sharp heavy barbeque sauce and a light buttery béarnaise sauce with equal skill, but not so much so that he’d push anybody else into a hot stove for doing it better than he did. He was proud his chili won second place at the state fair, but not enough to bribe a judge or pour salt into a competitor’s pot when nobody was looking. He was about to mentally pat himself on the back for not housing that particular sin in his breast when he realized he was no better than Charles. He’d do anything—underhanded or otherwise—to keep his pride intact. Tonight he was swelled with the toxic stuff as he watched his beautiful little girl, in her neat powder-blue linen slacks and her white silk blouse, working the crowd like a pro.

The thought made him uncomfortable and he shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. Instantly he was sorry as his big toes smashed against his second toes and started up the whole shooting match of foot pain. Maybe when Judith started speaking he’d take a seat somewhere, he thought, but knew he wouldn’t.

Towing Charles—who was going to have to be removed soon by the increasing distraction he was showing—Judith had worked her way through the assembled press, remembering family names of those she knew, asking about basketball games and graduations and birthdays, smiling at the rest like they were going to be just as good friends once they got to know each other, and was heading into a clot of people less likely to respond to glad-handing. The people she was here to ignite, preferably with her own fire.

Darden watched them: those determined to hate her and those determined to keep open minds and those determined to be part of the drama and the spotlight, whatever it turned out to be. Whoever they were, they had to admit she made a nice change from the incumbent, a jowly, overweight liberal who didn’t get his nose hairs trimmed as often as somebody who went on camera ought to. In a way the convention at Big Bend was the incumbent’s party. Which was why Judith decided to crash it. Governor Bloward—a name even those in his own camp couldn’t resist changing to Blow Hard occasionally—wanted to reopen the border between Big Bend National Park and Mexico. Mexico had set aside a huge tract of land across the border from Big Bend as a natural area and were doing a good job of husbanding it, given they had about a half a ranger for a zillion acres. Bloward had a dream of making Big Bend an international peace park like Glacier in Montana was with Waterton in Canada, half the park in one country and half in another. Before 9/11, the border closure and the Mexican drug wars, Big Bend had been an international park in all but name. Bloward wanted to turn the clock back “to a time when we had hope,” he liked to say. And he’d point out that Homeland Security didn’t close the border between Glacier and Waterton.

Of course, Canada wasn’t in the middle of a drug war. The White House was lobbying for a one-point-four-billion-dollar aid package to Mexican law enforcement. It seemed like big money, but it was chump change compared to the fifteen-plus billion Americans were pumping into the drug lords’ armies to keep their supply of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines pouring in.

Bloward’s argument was that the stretch of wilderness border along the southern edge of Big Bend wasn’t ever going to be a major smuggling route for the cartels. No roads to speak of and acres of patrolled nowhere to get across before reaching any major markets. To that end he’d had his minions in the academic world plan this “summit meeting” of the brains on either side of the issue.

Not the brains, Darden corrected himself, the intellectuals. Big difference.

His eyes roved the room looking for signs of incipient trouble, a habit so ingrained he found himself doing it even at children’s piano recitals. Kevin stood near the entrance to the lodge dining room, natty in a suit.

About time, Darden thought. The young agent was also scanning the room; when his eyes locked on Darden’s, he started across the room. Darden shook his head and pointedly looked at his watch. Now was not the time. He needed to focus on Judith. And Charles. His happy-husband façade was starting to crack. Darden noticed his free hand was returning ever more frequently to his front trouser pocket where, he presumed, the satellite phone was kept. Darden wasn’t sure who it was Charles was so desperate to be in contact with but he could make an educated guess. Given cell phones were the next best thing to broadcasting live on the air, he’d rather Charles didn’t make a show of it tonight.

Kevin didn’t acknowledge Darden’s mime show. Darden didn’t even register on the kid’s radar. Kevin hadn’t been looking for his boss to explain where in the heck he’d been for the last forty minutes, he’d been searching out Judith, lost in a snarl of tall men on the far side of the dining room. Then again maybe he was looking for the boss, Darden thought. The thought nettled him. Not that he’d ever had any illusions that he and not the client was the boss—even if he had made the client hotcakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse when she was five. It nettled him to be kept out of the loop. It was disrespectful. And it was dangerous.

Judith caught Kevin’s eye before he plowed into her act and stopped him with a nod and a smile. Darden started to relax, then Kevin winked at Judith. Before the shock wore off, anger flashed under Darden’s breastbone and the well-publicized hug between Monica and Bill replayed behind his eyes. The appetites of the powerful translated into heartburn for everybody else. For an instant Judith’s face froze mid-smile, then she broke eye contact and was back in the middle of a conversation with a graying professor Darden recognized from a liberal talking-head show out of Dallas as if she’d never had any interest other than in his dry theories.

Looking smug, Kevin was about to strut back to the sidelines when he saw Darden. Darden crooked a finger once and the smirk evaporated from the young agent’s handsome face. He looked around as if salvation might appear in the shape of somebody behind his shoulder that was the real target of Darden’s displeasure, but he was alone in a sea of innocent bystanders.

Darden met him halfway and put a fatherly hand on his shoulder to escort him genially out of the dining room.

“Don’t tell me you’re knocking off before the show’s gotten started?” Gerry, with her instinct for news, had appeared out of nowhere.

Darden’s fingers tightened on Kevin’s shoulder till he could feel the kid wincing under the pressure of his thumb.

“Just getting a little air, Gerry. Too much IQ in here for an old warhorse like me. I’ve got to get out and think like a rock for a few minutes.”

“Hah,” Gerry said, and, taking a drink, looked at him over the edge of her wineglass, up through her heavily mascaraed eyelashes. The trick had probably worked like a house afire when she was eighteen, and it was still working. Maybe it was the half-laugh of self-mockery that sparkled in her eyes. Then the reporter winked and Darden knew she’d seen the exchange between Kevin and Judith and knew why he had decided to take Kevin for a short walk outside.

Gerry laughed and, turning away, said, “Don’t let the lizards get you.”

The gift shop had stayed open to accommodate any shoppers of the party and Darden smiled at the girl behind the cash register as he took his agent out into the parking lot behind the lodge.

Kevin had morphed from smug to scared to sheepish to belligerent in the time it had taken Darden to excise him from the party. Defensiveness had him puffed up like a toad in the clear glow of the desert moon. Darden had no time for theatrics.