Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) (29 page)

In the distance, a pair of headlights bounced. Jack. My heart seized. At least I hoped it was Jack. I had no way of knowing if it wasn’t. I needed to act fast now, but I didn’t know what to do. My thoughts tumbled for slow, agonizing moments, then I pulled them together.

“Okay, Betsy, can you bring Thunder back out? We’re going to take one more ride.”

Girl and horse appeared in seconds. She was solemn, seeming proud to be in charge of the gorgeous creature.

Now two sets of headlights shot through the darkness toward us, bouncing up and down as both vehicles hit the bumps on the one-lane dirt road out to the airstrip. Two wasn’t necessarily bad news. If the first car hadn’t been Jack, then the second one surely was. A girl could hope, anyway.

“We’re going to ride out to the runway so we can have a good view of my friend Jack as he drives up.” I threw Betsy up onto the saddle and checked my waistband for the gun. It was still there. I jammed my foot in the stirrup and threw my leg over. “One more time, Thunder. Yah!”

The powerful hindquarters bunched and Thunder shot forward, down the worn grass leading to the airstrip. I wanted out of gun range in case one of those vehicles or both were the bad guys, but close enough to see what happened at the hangar. I had to gamble that the bad guys were packing shotguns or pistols— there was no way I could get out of range if they’d brought rifles with scopes. I shivered at the thought of night vision capability. However, even if they
did
bring the long-range guns, I had a really quick ride. I patted the horse’s neck as he ran.

I pulled Thunder up halfway down the runway and turned us back around. A Suburban was lurching to a stop at the hangar. Jack. Thank God. He looked around, not finding us, so I pulled the pistol out and shot it in the air. He turned toward the sound.

“Jack! Meet me here!” I yelled, as loud as I could.

He must have heard me or sensed me or just flat out guessed right, because he jumped into the plane in three strides. I heard the engine and propeller roar to life. The vehicle on the dirt road was only a few hundred yards away from the hangar. The Skyhawk started out to the runway, and I urged Thunder toward it at full gallop, his hooves pounding faster than the racing heartbeat crashing in my ears. When we were ten yards from the plane, I pulled back on the reins.

“Whoa, boy.” I jumped off, pulling Betsy with me, and slapped the horse on the rump. That’s when I noticed the brand on his flank: ΣSL. “Get, yah, get.”

He took off toward the ranch house at a dead sprint, the stirrups bouncing on his sides. As he ran from the runway, he passed a tall Indian in a gigantic headdress made of wooden stakes, his whole white-painted body naked except for his tall moccasins and black skirt. This was not Stella, no mere girl playing dress-up. A chill ran through me, and the Indian raised a hand in the air. “Mountain Spirit Dancer,” I whispered. I closed my eyes and reopened them, and he was gone.

I scooped Betsy into my arms, shaking off the ghostly vision. “You’ve been very brave, and I need you to do it one more time. Okay? Can you trust me?”

“Yes,” she yelled, over the roar of the propeller.

I stood off to the side of the runway. The plane lurched to a stop beside us. Jack threw the door open and I approached it from the rear of the plane—his warning before about the propeller in my mind—and handed Betsy to him, scrambling in after her. I strained to see back the way Jack had come. The chase vehicle careened into the hangar area and barely slowed down as it turned toward the runway. I slammed the door.

“Hold on, this will get rough,” Jack said.

I put Betsy in my lap and pulled the seat belt over us both as the little plane gathered speed and leaped and bucked down the runway.

“Do we have enough runway left for takeoff?” I shouted over the engine noise.

Jack didn’t answer. He pulled back on the yoke, hard, as I heard shots ping off the skin of the plane.

“Spit!” I screamed.

The front wheels of the plane lifted, dropped back to the sod, and lifted again as headlights bore down on the wing outside my window.

With a final jolting lunge, the Skyhawk lifted off the ground, perilously low, wings dipping from side to side. Betsy turned in my lap and buried her face in my chest with both her arms tight around my neck. She made a noise like an inward scream. I hugged her hard, my face buried in her hair. Three more bullets shook the plane in rapid succession. I held my breath—
please God, please God, please
—and the Skyhawk shucked them off and climbed, up, up, up into the night sky.

Jack leveled the plane off and leaned toward me. “Did you really just scream ‘spit?’”

“But I not understand. Why I can’t stay with Miss Emily?”

The words came from the sweet voice I’d grown to love like no other in one short day. We were sitting around the kitchen table at my mother’s house: Betsy, Jack, Nadine, Wallace, and me. I looked at my mother standing by the refrigerator, and she walked over to Betsy, crouched before the child, and reached for one of her hands before I even knew what she was doing.

“We wish you could, Betsy. You are welcome in our house anytime.” She looked at my friends one by one. “All of you are.”

I nearly dropped my eyeteeth over that one, and I reached out and grabbed my mother’s hand for a squeeze, then said to Betsy, “Wallace is going to find you a family with a mommy and a daddy. A really nice family, maybe with brothers and sisters for you to play with.”

So much had come to light in the last twenty-four hours. Not just that this little girl’s real name was Elizabet, changed to Valentina when her father had broken the girl and her mother free from Paul’s human trafficking operation. Not just that he’d put them on a bus to Amarillo via an Underground Railroad of sorts for illegal immigrants. Not just that this child with no country had Americanized her name to Betsy all by herself. But also that the man who died on Wrong Turn Ranch was her father, Alejandro, beaten by Paul’s men.

The police had pieced that together when they rescued the small army of immigrants that Paul had smuggled over the border with his import business. Paul had put the illegals straight to work in the tunnels from his property to a lucrative vein of silver he’d discovered under Mescalero Apache land. At least it was lucrative if the labor was free. Some of the immigrants—the kids and the young women—had a higher value when sold to the kind of people that liked their sex toys untraceable and disposable. A task force was at work now, hunting for the ones they knew about. All we could do for the others was pray.

By the time we figured out that Antonio Rosa was just a pseudonym for Alejandro, we weren’t even surprised anymore. How the man had scraped together the money to get his wife and daughter to safety, no one quite knew. We did know the ending though: Spike Howard—Paul’s private bounty hunter—floating face up in a hotel swimming pool in Amarillo. Sofia’s arrest and murder contracted by Paul. Tanner, suspected (at least by me) of murdering Maria Delgado, who police confirmed to be the person who sent me the AmarilloMama email with information that she might have learned while helping Sofia and her daughter. Paul, it seemed, had hired Jack so he could keep tabs on what we were learning. And then there was Betsy, now an orphan in a country that wouldn’t claim her as one of their own.

And it was that last part that I was leaving out in explaining things to her. That the U.S. government would have to decide whether Betsy stayed here or went back to Mexico. That I was no shoo-in to keep her, even if the INS let her remain in the U.S.: single, no kids, living with my mother, and months away at best from being approved by the foster care much less the adoption system. I kept my face smooth and smiling, though, because Betsy didn’t need to know any of this yet. And she might never know.

She stared at the tabletop. “Will you come see me?”

“Of course I will!” I said. I ignored the pain shooting through my abdomen from overdoing things so dramatically in the previous twenty-four hours and scooted my chair nearer to hers. She launched herself into my arms. I breathed in her sweet smell and let her hair dry my tears.

After a few minutes, Wallace stood and cleared his throat. “Okay, Betsy. Time to go.”

“I’m taking you to the Rainbow Room so you can pick out some clothes and a toy. Would you like that?” Nadine took Betsy’s hands and pulled her up.

“But I have clothes.” I had bought her a new set of Barbie pj’s at Walmart on our way here.

Nadine smiled. “So you do. But this will be fun.”

I stood up, too, and patted Betsy on the shoulder. “A girl can never have too many clothes.”

Betsy turned to me. “But I lost my backpack.”

I squatted, eye level to her. “I’m so sorry.”

“Mama said never lose it.”

“You can get a new one, honey.”

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Would you like me to see if I can find it for you?”

She nodded at me, round-eyed. “Yes, please.”

I stood up and let Wallace and Nadine lead her away.

Jack and I waved goodbye to them from the front door, not stopping until the Altima taking Betsy away had disappeared from sight. When it had, I broke down completely. Sobs tore through me, and I buried my face in my hands. How could I lose another child in less than a week? I couldn’t be thankful that she might go to someone else, maybe even someone in Mexico. Everything in me screamed that she was meant for me, and me for her. God meant this to be, didn’t he? Wasn’t that why he’d thrown us together, her when she’d lost both her parents, and me when I’d lost everything else? Wasn’t it?

Jack put his hand on my shoulder, guiding me down the sidewalk toward his Jeep. I didn’t resist, but my body stiffened at his touch. Besides pushing me away, he kept secrets so large that they crowded all the air out of a room, and I had kept one of my own from him, too, that my procedure hadn’t been minor, and that it had serious consequences. I could go along with him now, but I knew better than to let him in.

“Come on,” he said.

He turned and raised his hand to my mother, who was watching from the living room window.

Mother gave him a thumbs up through the glass.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

We drove in silence from Bushland to downtown Amarillo. He parked on the street outside the Maxor Building.

“You’re taking me to work?”

“To the office.”

We got out, and I followed him to the elevators. We rode up together in silence and got off on the fifth floor. He unlocked the office and motioned me inside first. The silence bothered me. Something was missing. My heart lurched. Snowflake. In our frenzied escape, we’d left her in New Mexico.

“Snowflake—”

He smiled. “Is just fine. She’s having a fun vacation with Uncle Mickey and Aunt Laura.”

I nodded, relieved, but then asked the important question. “Why are we here?”

He took me by the arm. “Come on.”

We walked back to his office. He positioned me facing the wall of diplomas and pictures.

“What?”

He pointed to the photograph of Geronimo. “Read that.”

I stepped forward. He did, too, and put a hand on my shoulder. At first I shrugged and tried to move away from him. He was part of my loss, after all, by his own choice. But he just held on. I quit fighting him.

Then I read the engraved quote aloud. “There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God.”

I couldn’t breathe. I had told Jack of the Mountain Spirit Dancer on the runway, of Stella’s impersonating one to help the people her dad had enslaved, of Judith’s childhood story, of my dreams, and of Betsy’s drawing. He hadn’t said much at the time, but I realized now that this was his response, and it was, well, the most perfect answer ever, secrets or no secrets between us.

“Jack—”

He pulled me around to face him and wrapped both his arms around me, my arms and hands the only barrier between us. Tears slid down my face again. Faster and faster they came until I gave in to the sobs and let the anguish pour out of me.

They slowed and I found my voice. “They have to let her stay. She doesn’t have anyone.” I hiccupped and wiped my face with one of my hands. “I want her. I want to adopt her. What do you think, Jack? Do you think I’d be a good mother to her?”

Jack leaned back and held me in front of him with one hand on each of my shoulders. That dangerous dimple pulled the left corner of his mouth into his even more dangerous half smile, and his eyebrow lifted along with them. “Why wouldn’t they let you give a little Heaven to Betsy when you’re represented by the best family and immigration lawyer in a two-state area?”

For once, I didn’t mind that Jack hadn’t really answered my question.

I smiled and lifted my chin three degrees, forcing the river of tears into a new tributary across my face. “With the best criminal law practice manager on the fifth floor of the Maxor Building.”

He lifted the picture from the wall and handed it to me, and something like hope flickered in my chest.

The End

Multicolored strands of lights twinkled from every surface around the dining room of the Big Texan Steak Ranch, even from the antlers of mounted deer heads and the ears of one embarrassed-looking coyote. Only the buffalo head maintained its dignity. Well, he and the giant fiberglass Santa guarding the exit door. I’d wanted to come here ever since my rodeo-cowboy father ran off before my promised seventeenth-birthday dinner, but, in light of the news I’d just received, all of the decorations were suddenly a little too much. I cradled my iPhone between my ear and shoulder, one hand clutching the neck of my poncho and the other slinging my purse straps over my other shoulder.

“Come on,” I whispered to Jack, my boss—a man who can’t figure out if he’s a southern New Mexico rancher or a West Texas criminal defense attorney. Throw in the fact that he is mysterious, wounded, and part Apache, and you can probably see why half the women and nearly that many men in both locales had him starring in their own dreamland versions of
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Not me, though. In my dreams, he starred with me in
The Notebook
.

One eyebrow shot toward his hairline, and he answered at a normal decibel. “But we’re celebrating, and our food hasn’t come yet.” The celebration was for my graduation from the foster-parenting classes I’d been taking for the last two months. “And I really need to talk to you about something.”

In my ear, Child Protective Services investigator Wallace Gray answered. “Hello, Emily. I’d almost given up on you.”

“I just saw your texts.”

They’d come in a flurry, so by the time I’d read them, the whole story scrolled before my eyes. Two teens living in a CPS group home, Greg and Farrah, had run away and were reported as soliciting rides at Love’s Travel Stop, not ten minutes from where I now stood glaring at Jack. Love’s was a cross-country trucker mecca, situated right off I-40 outside Amarillo. The kids were likely to get more than the kind of ride they intended from the type of person who’d pick up runaways.

“I thought you’d want to know,” he said. Wallace and I had taken a special interest in the pair recently when we accidentally rousted them from an abandoned house while looking for a missing girl. They’d run away from us then, too.

“Definitely. Thanks.”

“Their caseworker is picking me up in ten minutes.”

“Who is it?”

“Byron Philly. I don’t think you’ve met him.”

“Uh-uh.”

“I need help. We can’t get there for half an hour. Any chance you can get there sooner, see if you could find them?”

I didn’t like the thought of Greg and Farrah out there in the cold. “We can be there in ten.”

“We?”

“I’m with Jack.”

“I hope you mean
with
Jack, and not just with him, if you know what I mean.”

I knew, but after one incredible-if-tipsy make-out session that seemed to be going somewhere, I had blown it with Jack, who didn’t seem big on second chances. As for me, my oops-I-prefer-men-who-dress-as-women husband, Rich, wasn’t officially an ex yet. Any day now, though.

A waitress sashayed up to our table. From her diminutive size, she couldn’t possibly eat here much, at least not the famous 72-ounce steak dinner. She popped a tray stand into place with her hip in a strangely provocative way, then balanced a load of food on it. Jack pretended to be staring at his phone instead of her tush. Her hands now free, she tossed a long braid behind her shoulder and turned to us with an electric smile, flashing a mouthful of metal.

“Who’s rare and who’s”—she glanced back at the tray again and frowned, as if still in disbelief—“grilled beefsteak tomatoes?”

Being a vegetarian in the cattle capital of the universe isn’t easy. I put my hand over the mouthpiece of my iPhone. “To go. Check, please.” Then, into the phone: “See you soon.” I hung up.

Her brown eyes made
O
s, but she pulled out a handheld waiter pad and tapped a few keystrokes. “Your bill will be here in a moment.” She smiled again. “Y’all come back, now, when you’ve got more time to enjoy your dinner.”

Jack sighed, long and vibrato, and pulled out his wallet.

***

The trip in the dark along the I-40 access road to Love’s only took us five minutes because I had stuck out my hand for Jack’s keys when we got to his Jeep Wrangler—a monstrosity of patchworked panels in colors neither nature nor the automobile industry had designed to be used together—and Jack had obliged. I turned the Jeep into the yellow, red, and orange rainbow of the Love’s compound, and it jounced and splashed in brown melted snow from earlier in the day. New flakes were beginning to fall, though, and it would soon be a blanket of white once again. I eased the Jeep across the apron of concrete past the noncommercial pumps and store, and onward toward the big-rig pumps and acres of overnight truck parking.

I glided to a stop. “Where do you think we should look?” I asked.

“I wasn’t aware you cared what I thought. You know, since you basically kidnapped me from my dinner.”

I threw him a side-eye look, but I smiled. “Can you please help me find the kids?”

“It takes a little longer than a quarter of an hour for a prisoner to develop Stockholm syndrome.” From my peripheral vision, I saw his one dimple indent for a nanosecond.

The man had a quick wit, I’d give him that, even if he rarely answered a question head on. “Thank you for the psychology lesson, Patty Hearst.” I let off the brake and we crept forward, salt crunching under the Jeep’s slow-rolling tires. “Okay, they’re trying to hitch a ride out of town, so they’ll be watching the truckers, but they won’t want to be seen.” I scanned the three sides I could see of the store. Nada. Not even Christmas decorations. Maybe Love’s didn’t celebrate the season.

“A lot of activity here for a Wednesday night.” Jack was referring to the fact that Amarillo basically shut down on Wednesday nights for midweek church services.

“I doubt that long-haul truckers go to Wednesday night church on the road.”

Big rigs were lined up at the pumps and covered all of the lot I could see. Engines rumbled, and dark gray diesel exhaust escaped the dual chrome pipes on each side of one truck’s cab, like puffs of smoke rings from the end of a cigarette. The sooty heaviness of it made me feel dirty.

Searching for the two teenagers catapulted me back to my own childhood for a moment. When I was young, my father had encouraged my obsessive love of all things Native American by teaching me to scout like an Indian. “A real scout gets close to the land,” he would say, as we’d get out of the car. “He tests for scents.” We’d sniff together. “He touches the earth.” Together, we’d lean down and run our fingers across dirt or grass. “That’s it, my little Sacajawea,” he’d say, and throw me up onto his shoulders for a ride.

Twenty-plus years later, I rolled my window down, and my hand itched to open the door, to get close to the earth, sniff it, and touch it, but I didn’t do it. Cold air bit my exposed skin. I pinched my poncho together high on my neck as a tight popping noise resounded from somewhere in the truck lot. Jack and I met eyes during a long silence, then three more pops blasted through the air in rapid succession.

“Backfiring truck?” I asked, even though I didn’t think it was.

“Possibly yes, but probably gunshots.”

And Greg and Farrah were out there somewhere. “We’d better check it out.”

I accelerated past the truck pumps and into the relative darkness of the parking area. I skirted the outside edge, and we peered down the rows. One after another revealed nothing but cabs with blackout curtains and hulking trailers with personality mud flaps—Dallas Cowboys, Yosemite Sam, the ubiquitous posing nude woman. I turned down the side of the lot farthest from I-40. Shadowy figures darted from between two rows halfway across the lot and into the field on the other side. One looked taller than the other, and they appeared to be holding hands.

“There they are!” I floored the Jeep, and we rocketed over the lot, gaining speed rapidly.

A tire hit a pothole and jarred us so hard I worried we’d broken an axle, but the Jeep kept charging forward. When we reached the spot where the two people had disappeared, I turned sharply to the left. Lighted asphalt gave way to dark field, and we bounced over clumps of prairie grass and God knew what else. Jack braced himself with one hand on the ceiling and one on his door’s armrest. The snow hadn’t melted out here, but it wasn’t deep, and the Jeep smashed through its half-icy crust.

“I can’t see anything. Can you pan the headlights?” Jack said.

I slowed and turned first to the left for twenty yards, then drove in a huge circle. When I judged that we’d completed a loop back roughly to where we’d started, I turned to the right to continue across the field.

Wham—crunch! The Jeep slammed into something immoveable. My head bounced off the steering wheel, and I bit my tongue, hard. Warm, coppery fluid oozed into my mouth.

“Mother Goose!” I yelled. “Are you okay?”

An enormous deflating airbag muffled Jack’s response.

“What?”

The bag fell away. “I said, ‘Other than I can’t breathe.’”

“Oh.” I pounded the steering wheel with one fist. “We lost them, and I wrecked your Jeep.” I turned to him. “I’m so sorry.”

He pushed the limp airbag off his legs. “I’m sorry your airbag didn’t deploy.” He turned to me and covered up what sounded suspiciously like a laugh with a cough. “You look like Count Chocula.”

I turned the rearview mirror to me and saw the blood trickles out of each corner of my mouth. I almost laughed, too. He reached over and wiped the blood from beside my lip, and the heat from his thumb seared my skin. I gasped, and he jumped back.

The inside of the Jeep sizzled and popped with electricity as we stared at each other. Then he broke eye contact and fumbled for a flashlight from the glove box and opened his door. I put my fingers to my throat. They bore witness to the slowing of my jackrabbit heartbeat.

“I’ll go assess the damage.” Jack jumped out, leaving his door ajar.

I shivered, cold from more than his sudden absence. It was snowing harder now, and—this being the coldest and snowiest winter in one hundred years in Amarillo—of course the wind was blowing it straight sideways at what felt like a bajillion miles per hour, right through Jack’s open door. Flakes dappled his empty seat, closer and closer together. People had died of hypothermia in warmer conditions than this. The heater was already on high. I leaned over and shut his door, or slammed it, rather, then put my cheek on the steering wheel and looked out the side window into the night, shivering.

A white face under a black knit cap appeared like a specter outside the window. I screamed before I could stop myself. It was the young man we’d been chasing. Greg. I rolled down my window.

“Hey,” he said. “I know you.”

“Yes, you do, Greg. I’m Emily. We met when you were squatting in that deserted house by Llano Cemetery. Where’s Farrah?”

A female face with one brown and one green eye framed by pixie-short black hair materialized from the darkness behind him, her body blending with the night. “Are you hurt?” The girl pointed at my bloody face.

I used the back of my hand to wipe some of it away. I glanced at my hand. Now I had smears of blood across it. “No, I’m fine. My friend is seeing if our Jeep is, though.”

“It’s not,” she said.

“Your front end is, like, wasted,” he said.

Ugh. And here I was trying to scrounge up enough money to get a place of my own—as in, not with my mother. “You guys have created a bit of excitement tonight.”

Greg harrumphed. “Maybe.”

“How would you describe it, then?”

“I’m not going to let the same thing happen to Farrah twice.”

“What do you mean?”

Farrah put her hand on Greg’s upper arm. “It’s okay.”

He shook his head. “It’s not. No one believes us about what that, that”—he threw up his hands—“monster did to you.” He glared at me. “He should be in jail. Why do they take his word against hers?”

I knew that Farrah claimed she’d been sexually abused, that CPS was investigating the father—although it didn’t feel right to think of him that way—in their last foster home, but that they hadn’t reached a conclusion yet. “I’m sorry—”

Farrah stepped between Greg and me. “There’s an older boy in the group home. It was about to happen again. I’m not stupid. So Greg said we had to go.”

I heard clanging from the front end of the car. “I can understand that.” Better than she knew, thanks to a drunken lout from the Tarleton rodeo team. He got a feel of my breasts and a knee to the balls. I was maybe thirty pounds heavier than her, though, and seven inches taller. Suddenly, I understood her vulnerability in a way that I hadn’t when I’d heard her story third person from Wallace. “But where will you go?”

Greg moved forward, too. Both of them were so close I could have touched their cheeks. “We’ll be fine. I can take care of her.”

A sharpness rent my chest. “Let me help you.”

“You can’t. No one can.”

“I can try.”

Farrah smiled with her mouth only. “Thank you. Really. It’s . . .” She trailed off.

I gestured toward the backseat. “Hop in, where it’s warm.”

Both kids took a step back, then another, as the boy shook his head. “We wanted to see if you were okay. We have to get out of here.”

“Wait! At least take my card. It has my office number and my cell number. Call me if you need anything,
please
.”

I pulled a card from the outer side pocket of my handbag, where I’d learned to stash them for easy access. People in need of a criminal attorney were often in a hurry to get someplace else, it seemed. The card had the addresses for both the Amarillo and New Mexico offices for Jack’s firm. I stuck it out the window. Snow fell and melted on my bare hand. The wind flapped the edge of my wrap, and I held on to the flimsy cardstock with a tight grip between thumb and forefinger.

Greg leapt forward and snatched the card, then retreated just as quickly. The two kids took another step back and the snow and the night swallowed them whole.

Jack hopped back in the car, letting in a gust of icy air and swath of falling snow with him. “You hit some kind of concrete stanchion.”