Borderline (37 page)

More than anything she hated lies.

No. More than anything she hated liars.

Her hand trembled on the handle of the knife as if the hatred had taken over wrist and fingers and arm till Anna didn’t know whether or not she was going to end this one liar’s life.

Danny’s voice seemed to come from the devil in Anna’s mind: “Go ahead and kill her if you want to,” he said, and headed down the hallway toward Lisa and Edgar and Helena.

A
nna didn’t slit Nancy’s throat, though she probably should have. Leaving a dangerous person behind and unfettered was seldom a good idea. The sound of wood splintering let Anna know Danny had kicked in the door to the bedroom where Lisa and the babies—if Lisa hadn’t managed to open a window—had barricaded themselves. Flipping her wrist, she drove the haft of the knife into her hostage’s temple and was gone before Nancy hit the floor.

The door to the master bedroom was open, fresh wood showed clean where it had splintered around the lock. Knife in hand, Anna ran down the hallway. She had little fear of ambush; Danny wanted to get Helena and get out as quickly as he could.

“I’ve called the cops!” Lisa yelled.

Anna didn’t know if Terlingua boasted a police force, the town was so tiny, but she knew Lisa hadn’t called. Her satellite phone was on the mantel in the living room.

“Where is it?” Danny demanded. He did not shout. Though there were no near neighbors to hear, in his line of work he would know the value of not calling attention to himself.

Anna was through the bedroom door. A king-sized bed with a head- and footboard made of twisted wood Freddy must have collected from the river took up most of the small room. Walls and floor were bright with Mexican rugs and pillows. Perforated tin shades covered the bedside lamps and created rustic sconces on the walls.

In this cheery sanctuary the man Nancy called Danny radiated a darkness Anna could almost see. His broad shoulders blocked the light from the single high window; his long arms were simian, covered in dark hair. He had his back to her, facing Lisa, who stood on the far side of the bed with a single door behind her. The closet, Anna guessed.

Quicker than he had been before, Danny turned, hearing Anna’s arrival. He held up one hand like a cop stopping traffic. “You ladies don’t have to get hurt,” he said. “Just give me the baby and I’m out of here.” There was nothing of promise or negotiation in his voice. Danny was making a statement of fact. He had no compunction about hurting them to get what he came for; he just didn’t want the extra work.

Between him and the children stood Lisa, armed with nothing but courage. She had hidden Helena and Edgar and locked the door but hadn’t found anything with which to fight. It came to Anna almost as a revelation that there were people who did not expect violence, who did not run through scenes in their heads at night, private rehearsals for disaster, true innocents.

“Give me the kid,” Danny said. “We all go away happy.”

Danny had not a clue what it meant to individuals cursed with hearts to give “the kid”—any kid—into the hands of the likes of him.

“Get out!” Lisa shrieked, and began throwing things: a lamp, paperback books, a bedside clock, a cactus plant in a ceramic sombrero.

Babies started to cry, wails leaking from the closet where she’d stashed them.

Crooking an arm over his face to protect it from flying objects, his eyes fixed on Anna and the knife, Danny caught up a green-and-white-striped cotton throw from the bed.

He was so damn big. In the living room, seated, in the soft light of the kitchen, Anna hadn’t noticed how big he was. Huge. He seemed to fill the bedroom, his shoulders brushing the ceiling. Though on some level she knew she was suffering the same phenomenon people did when looking down the bore of a gun or, undoubtedly, into the gaping mouth of an alligator, the size of him was brought home to her in a visceral way.

The man would break her in two like a cheap chopstick.

Lowering the knife, she took a step back. “You know, Lisa, the guy is right,” she said, and was relieved that her voice sounded fairly normal, aggrieved with a bit of whine Chrissie would have been proud of. “He doesn’t want Edgar; he only wants the little Mexican girl. I don’t see how it will help anybody if we get hurt over this.”

Danny had that same wary squint she’d noticed when she’d first met him. As he listened to her it grew warier and squintier.

“You aren’t going to hurt the baby, are you?” Anna asked. “I mean somebody just wants a kid of their own to raise and love, right?”

“Right. That’s right.” Confusion infiltrated the wariness. A positive sign, Anna thought. A better sign would be if his face was being infiltrated with blood but one had to take what one could get.

“Lisa, give the guy the river baby,” she said.

“Anna! What are you doing?” Lisa wailed, and the betrayal in her voice singed Anna’s insides.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Anna said harshly. “It’s not your kid. God knows it’s not mine. You want to die over this? Orphan your kids for some foundling? Some Mexican drug lord’s by-blow?”

“Anna!” Lisa cried again. The shock of Anna’s words was undoing her more than an unknown man kicking in her bedroom door.

“I’ll get the damn thing,” Anna said to Danny, who was standing in a pool of indecision holding the striped blanket. Stalking around the end of the bed to where Lisa stood between the children in the closet and the world, she threw her words back at the thug. “Get that other blanket,” she ordered, and pointed vaguely in the direction of the headboard. “It’s softer and smaller, easier to carry.”

Danny turned. Perhaps to get the baby blanket that wasn’t there, perhaps only because the cat fight had unsettled him to an extent he was obeying orders from Mom. Whatever the reason, for a second, his attention was not on Anna.

Sudden as a snake striking, she spun, brought the knife up from where she’d let it lie forgotten along her thigh, and drove the blade into his center mass with all her strength. He fell to the bed and Anna fell onto him.

“Get the babies out,” she yelled to Lisa and saw her jerk the closet door open and grab a laundry basket full of dirty clothes. The man beneath Anna bucked and roared and tried to rise. Slippery with blood, her fingers lost their grip on the knife and she had no idea where she’d hit him, if the blow was fatal or glancing.

Danny had fallen with his legs twisted, his left side on the bed, feet on the floor. Anna was across his upper body; their heads too close for comfort. Before the waking giant could head butt or bite, Anna grabbed an ear and a handful of hair and shoved his face into the pillow. Ramming a knee in the small of his back, she scanned him desperately for the knife. Blood led her eyes to the haft, and the haft was all that was protruding. She’d stabbed through his forearm and buried the knife in his hip, pinning his arm to his side. She let go of his ear, grabbed the knife handle and yanked. It didn’t budge. The blade was jammed into bone. Danny screamed and rolled, trapping her underneath him.

She wriggled and kicked and bit, clawed and pounded and shoved with not much more effect than Helena trying to resist a clean diaper. The pain in his arm and hip more intense than anything Anna could inflict with her feeble attacks, Danny didn’t seem to notice she was battering him. Roaring, he threw a punch over his shoulder with his free arm. Knuckles smashed into the side of Anna’s skull.

The impact stunned her. An off button was pushed in her head and strength ceased pouring from whatever conscious source it pours from. Muscles went slack, vision blurred, thought faded. It wasn’t more than a second or two before she brought herself back but it was too long. Danny was off of her. He had a fistful of her hair before she could do more than note this disappointing turn of events. Lifting her by her hair, he flung her toward the far wall with the ease of a brat throwing his sister’s doll.

The edge of the bed and Lisa’s penchant for strewing surfaces with colorful pillows broke Anna’s fall. In an instant she was on her feet. Raging like a wounded cougar, Danny moved between her and the door. Eyes crazy with pain and fury, he jerked the knife from his bone with a shriek and started toward her.

A crash of metal on metal reverberated through the house. Both of them froze. An engine screamed, followed by another grinding crunch louder than the first.

“What the hell is that?” Danny mumbled.

“Your ride,” Anna said.

L
ittle river otter, did you think I was going to throw you to the wolves to save my scaly old hide?” Helena, tucked in the crook of Anna’s arm, squeezed her eyes shut and pursed her lips. “I’ve never seen a baby this new with such a beautiful face,” Anna marveled. “Aren’t they traditionally red and wrinkled and pugdoggish?”

Lisa laughed. “C-section,” she said. “That little girl didn’t have to fight to get squeezed into the world. You just went and got her.”

“Did you hear that?” Anna said to the baby. “I’m the reason you’re gorgeous.” She was cooing and gurgling and generally making an ass of herself but she couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop. Being a fool for life felt so good.

When Danny was made aware that the metallic crunching sounds were Nancy bashing her way through Anna’s Honda with the rented Chevy Malibu with every intention of leaving him behind, he’d had a moment of reflection. Deciding being stranded in Terlingua with a bad knife wound and a kidnapped baby would be worse than returning to whoever had sent him with the mission unaccomplished, he’d limped from the bedroom as fast as he could and joined his compatriot in the rampaging rental car. Lisa had only made it a few hundred yards out into the sage, headed for their nearest neighbor. When she saw them leave she came back to see if Anna had been hurt or killed.

Terlingua and her sister city, Study Butte, had a permanent population of under three hundred souls. There was no police department. The county sheriff handled most complaints. Lisa called the park and the sheriff, and an all-points bulletin was issued for a smashed-up Mailbu.

The Honda was totaled, Lisa’s car scraped down the passenger side, and the house a wreck of blood and thrown and broken domestic items. Lisa and Anna and Edgar and Helena sat at the table in the kitchen full of joy because they were all there and healthy. Nothing irreplaceable had been damaged.

“Why would anybody want to steal a baby?” Lisa asked.

There were the usual reasons but Anna knew she meant this baby, Helena—who would want to steal her badly enough to send thugs to do it?

Anna had said something to Lisa when she was trying to distract their attacker. She’d said: “Some drug lord’s by-blow.” The words came back to her now. “It has to be because of who her mother was. If the mother was an important person, maybe the daughter of a member of a rich drug cartel, Helena could be wanted for ransom.”

“Most bad guys kidnap good people’s kids,” Lisa said. “They’re not scared of the police. A drug lord, that’s something else.”

“If Helena’s mom was running from kidnappers—or maybe from her father or husband—and her death in the river was an accident of sorts, mightn’t they want the child back? Maybe Helena’s got an inheritance floating around that unsavory types want to collect for her.”

It crossed Anna’s mind that Freddy, who had a connection to the first woman drowned with her fetus, and an unusual interest in this case, Freddy, who was on the canyon rim where Anna and Paul had expected a shooter, had cavalierly ended his career with today’s speech. A new baby, a boy in college—he would be in need of money. Freddy had been on both sides of the river his whole life. Everyone knew him. It was not only possible but probable that he knew drug dealers, smugglers and illegal aliens. Was it not also possible that he had engineered the kidnapping and it had gone sour, the woman and her unborn baby swept away by the river?

Freddy knew every inch of the river, better than anyone in the park. Better than anyone in the world, most likely. The location where Chrissie found Helena’s mother troubled Anna. For her, at least, it negated the possibility that the woman was a Mexican national crossing to have her child on American soil. If Freddy had taken her and wanted to hide her where she wouldn’t be found until he collected ransom, taking her deep into the canyon might not be a bad idea. In her condition she couldn’t swim out. There was only the one place anyone could climb out and it was a hard climb. All Freddy would have to do would be to find a place she’d be neither heard nor stumbled upon by rafters and that was easy enough. She’d be where he, as the river ranger, had every excuse to be. Santa Elena and the Rio Grande would effectively hold her prisoner so there was no need to take the risk of bringing anyone else in on the deal.

Maybe it wasn’t kindness that motivated Freddy to ask his wife to wet-nurse Helena, but a desire to keep the baby out of the hands of the authorities until he could figure out what to do next. Maybe he’d decided if thugs kidnapped the baby from his house, he’d be off the hook and have the baby to sell to whoever he was selling her to.

Anna didn’t like the way that played out but, so far, it was the only plotline that made any sense.

“Ready for some lunch, little one?” Lisa’s voice cut through Anna’s thoughts. She’d finished feeding Edgar and was waiting to trade babies with Anna so she could feed Helena. Anna took Edgar and, using a towel the way Lisa had shown her so she wouldn’t get baby spew down her back, she patted him and was startled at how well she’d learned to do it in such a short time. Not that patting a baby was such a complex task. Just weird.

Lisa tucked Helena comfortably in her arms and the baby took the nipple as if it was meant for her all along. “She’s a good eater,” Lisa said, and Anna felt absurdly proud of her tiny protégé.

Watching Lisa suckle the baby, Anna was as sure as she’d ever been about anything that, if Freddy was the one who started this mess, his wife knew nothing about it.