Borderline (23 page)

“When we got everybody fished out we were missing Chrissie,” Anna went on with her story. “We heard her screaming a ways downriver. She’d found a woman caught in a strainer and started shrieking. When you meet Chrissie, this won’t seem as farfetched,” Anna told Martinez.

Freddy knew there had been shots fired and he knew not everybody had survived, yet the mention of the woman in the strainer brought him up rigid, his back pulled away from the log he’d been leaning against. “Pregnant?” he demanded.

Anna stiffened and felt Helena stir in the crook of her left arm. Pregnant wouldn’t be her first assumption when told of a person caught in a strainer. Anna was a bit past the age when Helena would automatically be assumed to be hers, but there was no reason not to assume she belonged to a deceased member of the party.

“Yeah,” Anna said warily.

“Did she live?” Martinez’s eyes were too wide. Even in the vague light of the moon, Anna could see them spark black against the whites surrounding them. The liquid lines of his muscles were frozen now and he looked a man made of angles and edges.

“No,” Anna told him. “She died.”

“God dammit!” Martinez cried. “Mexican?” he demanded.

“Mexican.”

“God dammit!” and he started to his feet, his fists clenched as if he planned on battering Anna until she changed her story.

“Sit down.” Anna had the Glock in her hand and the muzzle pointed unwaveringly at his chest, the biggest target and nearly impossible to miss at this distance.

Martinez stopped cold, his hands still bunched into fists at his sides, the knuckles big and gleaming white in the reflected light from the desert floor.

“Sit down,” Anna said again. “You’re going to wake the baby.”

For a long miserable second Martinez stared down at her and Anna worried that, if she shot him, he would fall on Helena. Finally he sat, folding down with all the grace of a broken chair collapsing. He dropped his head in his hands with more drama than Anna thought the passing of a stranger, pregnant or not, called for.

“Did the baby die too?” he mumbled through his fingers.

It crossed Anna’s mind that the guy was psycho, had stolen Martinez’s gun, radio and horse and wandered Texas killing people. It wasn’t unheard of, not even in Anna’s limited experience with murderous psychopaths.

“The baby did not die,” she said carefully and without taking the Glock off Martinez. “I delivered her by C-section after the mother died. Helena—this baby—is the child of the dead woman in the strainer.”

Martinez lifted his face from his hands, his eyes glowing with a fanatic light—or that of a man pardoned at the eleventh hour. “No kidding?” he said, and the bizarreness was as if it had never happened. He spoke with the joyous clarity of a nice park ranger hearing the most fabulous news.

“This is the baby,” he said in a voice close to awe. “Venus, the child from the sea.”

“Helena. From the river,” Anna said tersely. It annoyed the stuffing out of her that he was messing with the name, as if he had a claim on the baby. She liked him better as a crazed killer. At least she could shoot him in that persona.

“I’ve got a new baby,” he said. “My wife gave birth to Edgar Allan Martinez six weeks and two days ago.”

A new father. That could explain the manic-depressive episode but Anna didn’t quite buy it. She wasn’t sure she bought the bit about his wife having a baby. Edgar Allan? Not an auspicious name, not to mention not exactly a Spanish name.

“Can I hold her?”

“Would you stop with that?” Anna snapped. “No baby. No gun. You sit and stop being weird. I’m too tired and hungry for anything but nice, ordinary, sane people. Or dead people,” she added, and was gratified to see that the pity was gone from his face and alarm had taken its place.

They fell silent. The small fire in the metal fire ring had gone out and a cool breeze was coming down from the Chisos. Anna wrapped the rags of T-shirt and sleeping bag closer around Helena. Without the sun the air had an edge to it and Anna wished she’d thought to drag the horse blanket back with her. Cold was seeping into her, mixing with fatigue and beginning to set up like concrete in her joints. Paul should be getting back now, Chrissie and Steve and Cyril with him. Regardless of the hazards of four people ascending the slide with a single flashlight, Anna knew there was no way Paul would be able to keep Chrissie on that rock overnight short of lowering a feather bed and shower down to it.

“Sorry about the outburst,” Freddy said finally. “When Homeland Security closed the border they killed a lot of people in one way or another, killed their hope, killed their income, some it just plain killed. Closing the border was a crime of violence. This woman was probably trying to cross so her baby could be born in America, in a hospital with proper medical care. The river came up and she got carried down canyon. Because she wanted the best for her child, we killed her. Jesus.”

Anna said nothing. She didn’t have a dog in this fight.

Martinez took a deep breath and blew it out noisily, then another exhaled on the noise. “Lisa—my wife—is a big yoga person. Can’t hurt.” He did it again and seemed calmer.

“Lisa just had the baby?” Anna wanted to see if the story would change at all.

“Edgar.”

“Eddie?”

“Never. Edgar. Lisa’s thesis was on Poe. She thinks the man was the greatest writer of the nineteenth century.”

Anna guessed Martinez was in his mid-forties. Lisa was probably the second wife. Or the third. A twenty-something wanting her own family on the tail end of her husband’s, whose children were already grown and gone. It was common enough: Sir Paul McCartney was frolicking with a child who would graduate from college when Papa was an octogenarian. Anna had never much liked the picture, but she suspected it was more because of the iniquities of aging from gender to gender than because it was evil in and of itself. Money was a factor, so the child might lose a father at an early age but there would be a Ferrari in the offing to take the edge off her grief.

Where the heck was Paul? She looked at her watch. It had died at twenty past three. “What time is it?” she demanded.

“No watch. It’s my day off.”

Anna remembered they were in the twenty-first century and rolled the satellite phone over so she could see its face. Paul had headed back down no more than forty-five minutes ago. It would be an hour before she could begin to expect him. She wished she’d had him leave some of the water. There was an inch left in Helena’s cup and the baby was fast asleep. Absurd as it was, Anna could not bring herself to drink it.

“If you’ll tell me the rest of the story, I promise I won’t do anything as horrific as preferring live babies to dead ones again,” Martinez said.

He’d recovered his sense of humor. The least Anna could do was to pretend she’d recovered hers. She proffered a fake laugh. The sound amused her so much she laughed outright. It would be good to have a distraction.

“Sure,” she said. “But no asking to hold Helena.”

“Holding babies is the best therapy there is,” Martinez said.

“You’re sure warm and fuzzy for a Texas ranger,” Anna grumbled. “What ever happened to stiff upper lip and smile when you say that, pardner?”

Martinez just smiled. She was beginning to like the smile. No light but that from the moon and the desert, his big white teeth in his dark face put her in mind of the Cheshire cat.

“So after the C-section . . .” Martinez cued her.

Anna told him the rest. Carmen’s death, Lori’s, Easter’s probable demise; he heard it all with solemn dignity, none of it yanking him up by his roots the way the news of the woman in the strainer had. Freddy Martinez was somehow connected to the dead woman, to the baby she held on her lap, a connection that moved him from rage to exultation and back again.

Careful not to disturb Helena, Anna moved the Glock closer to her thigh. Until she knew what that connection was she would keep both it and the baby close.

S
hortly after nine o’clock Darden was riding down from the Chisos with a seasonal ranger. The dinner was still in full swing and he hated to leave but it wasn’t his choice; it was Judith’s. Word that shots had been fired on the border resulting in the injury or death of tourists had become common knowledge almost before Darden had made it back through the gift shop to the dining hall. This common knowledge was not accurate. The few known facts had been passed through imagination, misinformation and self-interest until the final result was as screwy and varied as the end of a children’s game of Rumor.

Judith knew this phenomenon better than most. “I don’t care what is true,” she’d whispered to Darden after giving him his orders. “I care what I can use.”

Shots fired on the Rio Grande should come in handy in the next few days while she hammered out her platform on border control. He could have dashed out and tried to corner Bernard Davies, but he doubted that would do anything but get the ranger’s hackles up. Staying out of the way until they’d gotten things under control was the better part of valor and, too, he didn’t want to miss Judith’s announcement speech.

She was stellar: strong and smart and convincing without losing her charm. Unfortunately the press—and it was they who this week in the wilds was primarily aimed at—were distracted by the smell of blood from the direction of the border. Several had disappeared but came wandering back, looking disappointed. Gerry, he didn’t see again. She must have gotten in on the excitement one way or another.

The mayor’s entourage had no shortage of vehicles but in his experience, car trips bred conversation, so Darden cadged a ride from a boy ranger. The kid had to be twenty-one—he had a gun on his hip—but with his downy cheeks and acne, he looked about fifteen. Clearly it galled him that he was patrolling campgrounds when the most exciting thing that had happened all season was happening without him. A good subject to pump for gossip, Darden thought.

As it turned out, no pumping was necessary. It hadn’t taken but one interested look—and that was overkill—to set the kid off. Boy Ranger was anxious to let Darden—whom he mistakenly thought was still Secret Service, a delusion Darden did not disabuse him of—know that, though not chosen to help with the rescue, he was definitely in the know.

“I gotta make one more pass through the campground before I head down,” the kid said. “You’d be surprised how much trouble campers can get up to.”

Darden would be surprised but he didn’t say so. “You figure those people on the river were camping?” The segue was about as awkward as it could get, but it forced the conversation Darden wanted back on track.

“Oh, yeah, for sure,” the kid said. “They were with this commercial outfit out of Terlingua. There’s been radio traffic about it all night. A couple of people were shot, from what it sounds like, and there was a ranger from Rocky Mountain on the trip with her husband and kids, I guess.”

The kid drove like little old ladies are supposed to and seldom do. He gripped the steering wheel at an eleven and one position and leaned forward as if he was afraid the car would try to break away on its own if he let down his guard for an instant. If the kid didn’t have neck and back trouble already, he would by the time he was thirty. Which, at the rate they were creeping around the snaky black-top between tent sites, he’d be by the time they started down to headquarters.

“They didn’t know what they were doing and lost the raft at the slide. That’s a rapid about a mile or so in,” the kid said. “I’ve been through it half a dozen times. It’s a piece of cake if you know how to read the water.”

Darden knew he was supposed to be impressed so he murmured: “Impressive,” and all was well; the kid powered on.

“Was the ranger leading the trip?” Darden threw in to keep the kid on subject.

“No, the ranger was this woman named Anna Pigeon. She got mixed up in some funny business on Isle Royale and killed a guy. I guess she flipped out over it and they put her on administrative leave. From what I heard, it was a righteous shooting. Me, I wouldn’t bat an eye. So you have to shoot a bad guy? Isn’t that what we’re hired on for?”

The last bit sounded like a quote and Darden wondered who the lucky ranger was that this boy wanted to be like. He didn’t have any desire to meet him.

“Anyway, they didn’t make the rapids and lost all their gear.”

Finally they were done with the dangerous campground patrol and turning onto the main—the only—road leading down from the Chisos Mountain Lodge to the park headquarters below. Darden heaved a sigh of relief before he could stop himself. He’d wanted the gossip, but the kid was a pain in the patootie, the sort of person who drains the life out of life by trying too hard. It occurred to Darden to overlook it due to the ranger’s youth, but he didn’t. This kid would be the same at thirty and forty and fifty, mid-level boring at some oversized firm, kissing up and talking down.

Darden took off his seat belt. Not that the kid was so bad it made him suicidal but, with his present physique, there was no way to get comfortable with the belly band cutting one way and the shoulder strap another.

The kid slammed on the brakes and Darden nearly bashed his head on the dashboard.

“You have to wear your seat belt in all government vehicles,” he said. “Safety issues.” Then, realizing he sounded like the little prig he was, he added: “I don’t bother with them when I’m on my own, when your number is up, it’s up, right?”

“Riiiight,” Darden said sourly, and put the belt back on.

“What was it I heard about shots being fired?” Darden said when they had again reached their snail’s pace. The ride with the kid had been a bad idea, but he might as well get out of it what he could.

“I guess somebody was shooting at them or something.”

The boy ranger went on after that, but Darden had quit listening. The opening sentence didn’t bode well for even a scrap of truth making it into subsequent statements.