Last Safe Place, The (34 page)

“I will get you some coffee and you can take it with you into the store while you do your shopping,” Pedro said, and turned to the table for a cup.

“Actually, I didn’t come here to shop.” The man’s tone was almost pleasant, but not quite. And Pedro had the strange, momentary impression that there were too many teeth in the man’s smile. “What I need from you, Pedro, is the key to the gate on the trail up to St. Elmo’s Fire.”

Y
ESHEB WATCHES THE
man’s jaw drop and almost laughs out loud.

“It is honorable of you to place yourself in front of Anza, but do you really think you could protect her?” Then he glances pointedly toward the motionless child on the hospital bed. “Either one of them, if I chose to do them harm? Which I won’t if you cooperate.”

Anza looked confused. “Papa …?”

Yesheb doesn’t quite know how to read the look on Pedro’s face. Clearly, it isn’t fear, though. It might have been recognition. Perhaps Zara told this man about him. After all, he is the caretaker of the cabin where she is staying, had been providing her groceries twice a week. And she must surely be lonely up there on the mountainside with nobody but an old man and a little kid to talk to. Yesheb feels a stab of jealousy. His carefully devised plan calls for the elimination of Pedro and his family—leave no witnesses. But now that task has taken on an added delight.

“The man who owns that cabin left strict instructions that I was to give a key only to his
invited
guests. You’re not one of them. Sorry.”

There is a calm in the Hispanic man’s response that unnerves Yesheb.

“Oh, but I am a guest. Not of Rev. Benninger’s but of the lovely lady who is staying there now. As a matter of fact, we’re engaged to be married. Very soon.”

Yesheb sees the man’s eyes widen slightly and his jaw clench. He
does
know. Oh, Yesheb will very much enjoy killing this man! He might even take his time doing so, inhale the intoxicating aroma of his screams. But first things first. He needs the key. His men could simply have picked the lock, of course, or blown it up. But the gate is a barrier between him and Zara and prophesies are clear that
he
must overcome every obstacle in his path on his own. And he will.

Turning casually, he picks up the electric cord that stretches from Angelina’s ventilator to an outlet on the wall. The moment he touches it, Pedro tenses to spring at him.

“Don’t!” Yesheb warns, “unless you want me to unplug this.”

“Go ahead.” Pedro’s voice is cold. “Pull the plug. See what happens.”

What an odd thing to say.

“Come now, let’s have that key so things don’t have to get … unpleasant.”

Anza squeaks out a little scream. “Papa, who is …?” She turns to Yesheb, her eyes pleading. “Sir, you don’t understand what will happen if you unplug Angelina’s ventilator.”

“Oh, yes, I do. The little girl here, Angelina—what a lovely name—will stop breathing. That’s what happens to a person in a permanent vegetative state without a ventilator.” His voice becomes hard, brittle. He drops the next words individually into the dead air that stretches out like a dark pool between them.

Four plops. “Give. Me. That. Key.”

“No.”

The simple act of calm defiance shakes Yesheb to his core. When he yanks on the ventilator cord and the plug leaps out of the wall socket, the action is almost as much in surprise at the man’s denial as in retaliation for it.

He expects the child to sigh out a breath and stop breathing altogether.

She doesn’t.

He doesn’t expect the whole world to erupt in a hoarse, honking cry.

It does.

If an air raid siren married a smoke alarm, their firstborn would be the sound that now blasts out a loudspeaker mounted somewhere on the front
porch of the building. With a revving-up, grinding-toward-a-crescendo quality, the wailing cry gets louder and louder until it threatens to burst Yesheb’s eardrums.

Before he has time to recover from his surprise, the bell on the front door of the store dings, he hears running footsteps and a man bursts through the saloon doors into the room. He is huge, has a full, bushy beard and long hair that’s soaked. Following in his footsteps is a woman with tattoos covering her arms and legs and close behind her is a woman in a paint-splattered suit jacket and long skirt. An old Indian man hobbles into the room from a back entrance, followed by a bald man with some kind of red mark splattered on the top of his wet head and a fat Hispanic woman with a herd of small, rain-drenched children.

It takes less than a minute from the time he pulled the plug out of the wall for the room to fill with people—maybe two dozen of them. All of them look at him, surprised and confused, and he realizes he still has the ventilator cord in his hand. Instinctively, he drops it. Pedro takes two steps to the outlet, plugs the cord back into the socket and the screeching sound stops abruptly in mid-squall.

Into the silence that follows, Pedro says, “I warned you,” his tone surprisingly mild-mannered.

Yesheb’s eyes dart from one face to another around the room. It isn’t supposed to go down like this! He is in charge. How could this have happened? Oh, not just the people, the
opposition.
A powerful force has been set against him. He can almost see it, in fact, and the light makes him squint. He can certainly feel it, incredibly strong. The copper taste of fear fills his mouth and makes him instantly nauseous.

A woman’s voice purrs with derision in his ear.
Are you some cowardly dog that tucks its tail between its legs and slinks away?

Surely you’re not … afraid. Are you?
A man’s voice, speaking Arabic.

Then The Voice roars in his head with a volume ten times that of the siren.

You will stand!

Yesheb is far more frightened of The Voice than of any fate this world could deal him. The crowd’s shock is wearing off.

“What’d you set the alarm off for, Pedro?” the tattooed woman asks.

“Why’d—”

That moment of distraction gives Yesheb the edge he needs. He reaches into his shoulder holster and withdraws his Glock 22 and points it at Pedro. The crowd gasps. Pedro steps back in surprise.

Yesheb is in charge again.

“Give me that key—now!”

Still, the Hispanic man doesn’t respond with the fear Yesheb expects—
needs.
He merely looks around and asks, “You planning on shooting all of us?”

The fat Hispanic woman makes a strangled, squealing sound and crosses herself.

“There are only fifteen rounds in that Glock. You cannot kill everybody.”

“No, but I can kill …” he turns and shoves the barrel of the gun up against the temple of the little girl in the bed, “…
her!”

Pedro’s face turns white and Yesheb knows he has him. “But perhaps you’d like for me to kill her. You poached her brain like an egg in the backseat of a car eight years ago. Maybe it would be better for everybody if I blew what little gray matter she has left all over that wall.”

“
No!
Please …” Pedro’s face is a twisted mask of fear and indecision.

“I will count to three. One. Two. Th—”

“Okay! Just don’t … okay. I will give it to you.” He sticks his hand into his pocket and withdraws a key ring and begins to thumb through the keys on it.

“Don’t bother trying to switch keys on me; I know they’re all labeled.” Pedro looks genuinely shaken. Yesheb relaxes. Yes, he is running the show now.

When Pedro locates the key, Yesheb tells him to place it on the foot of the bed and step back. Then Yesheb plucks it off the starched white sheet like a frog snatching a fly.

He flashes a beautiful smile, his most engaging.

T
HE MAN GRINNED
, ugly and crooked, and Pedro measured the distance between them again. If the guy—the
stalker
—gave him the slightest opening, he’d lunge. But the intruder was careful to stay just out of Pedro’s reach. He was sharp. And absolutely devoid of humanity. No wonder Gabriella was terrified!

“You’re pathetic, you know that, don’t you,” the man said. He stepped away from the bed after he put the key into his pocket, but kept the gun carefully aimed at Angelina. “You think you’re such a hero.” Without turning away from Pedro, he spoke to the crowd. His voice dripped sarcasm. “You think he’s a hero, too, don’t you? The way he has stood up under such a load of pain in his life. The way he loves his children, sacrifices for them, takes such good care of them.” Yesheb made a humph sound in his throat. “You’re such fools.”

He turned slightly, didn’t move the pistol but caught Pedro’s gaze and locked on.

“I know you, the
real
you.” He literally hissed the words. “The you who holds his own daughter hostage, won’t let her leave home to get an education because
you
need her here.”

Pedro stared into eyes such a stark, arresting blue he could distinguish the color even from where he stood. It was the color of polar ice, frozen and lifeless.

The man nodded toward Angelina. “You took this little girl’s life and so you have given her yours in exchange. You’ve sacrificed everything for her—isn’t that right?” He lowered his voice in a mockery of the intimate way one friend addresses another. “Only it’s not for her at all. None of it’s about her or her future. She
has
no future and everybody knows it.”

He leaned forward and spit words at Pedro the way cowboys spit tobacco juice on the ground. “You do everything you can—pump air into her lungs and food into her stomach—focus your whole life and your kids’ lives on keeping Angelina alive so your great sacrifice will make
you
feel better. That’s not love, my stupid little friend, that’s guilt—the ultimate selfabsorption. All of this …” He gestured toward the hospital bed and medical paraphernalia. “… is about
you, not Angelina
—as much now as it was the day you were too busy, too caught up in what was going on in
your
world to notice that your baby was roasting like a Thanksgiving turkey less than fifty yards away.”

Pedro was so staggered by the man’s words, he could not move, could not breathe. And that was exactly what the guy intended. Like throwing a stun grenade into a crowd, the stalker used the shock he had produced to take three steps and grab the arm of the closest child—six-year-old Serena Sanchez, who was standing beside her wide-eyed mother. Julia Sanchez
cried out and reached for Serena, but the man yelled at her to shut up and stand back and held the gun to the little girl’s temple. Julia clamped her hands over her mouth and didn’t move.

“I don’t want this kid. I have no reason to take her with me; she’d only get in my way. I’ll let her go when I get to my jeep
if
you all move aside and let me walk out of here. If you don’t … well, I’ll blow the brains out of a little girl who actually has some.”

The crowd parted like the Red Sea. The man shoved Serena ahead of him through the doors into the store. Pedro heard the jingle of the bell on the front door when it opened and when it closed. The sound released the crowd like the opening bell of a horse race and they all rushed into the store to look out the front windows.

Pedro did not move. It seemed that he stood motionless for a long time, but it was probably less than thirty seconds before he heard the commotion out front that freed his paralyzed legs. He got to the saloon doors as Serena burst through the front door of the store and into her mother’s arms.

Then there was pandemonium all around him. His neighbors surged back into his kitchen babbling. Anza rushed to Angelina, threw herself across the child and sobbed. Voices assaulted him, people wanting to know what had happened, who the man was, why—

Pedro ignored the questions and fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone, his hands shaking. He pulled it out and dialed 911. The voice of the dispatcher who answered sounded as rattled and frantic as he did.

“I want to report a …” What? What had it been? “… a man with a gun threatened a bunch of people in St. Elmo and he ees on his way up to St. Elmo’s Fire to—”

“Is this about the escaped convicts?”

“What?”

“There was a prison break half an hour ago. Men with automatic weapons blew a hole in the perimeter fence—is that what you’re calling about?”

“No, but—”

“Sir, I’m sorry. I can only deal with life-and-death emergencies right now.”

“This
is
a life-and-death emergency!”

“I will take your name and phone number and somebody will get back to you as soon as possible.”

Pedro hung up. The police would not come to Gabriella’s aid in time to do her any good. A prison break. How convenient. Surely … He let the thought go, turned, pushed his way back through the crowd to the gun rack above the fireplace and grabbed the .30-06 hunting rifle. He snatched his rain jacket and hat off the hook by the swinging doors as he headed into the Mercantile. There was a box of shells for the rifle under the cash register.

T
HE STORM ABATED
while Yesheb was in the store, but the sky is pregnant with more rain and threatens to give birth any minute.

Yesheb should be elated as he drives along Chalk Creek Canyon Road to the turnoff that will take him to the jeep trail up the mountainside to St. Elmo’s Fire. He has the key in his pocket! He is on his way.

But he isn’t elated. The voices have been berating him ever since he shoved the little girl back toward the store, leapt into the jeep and sped away.

Yesheb couldn’t even execute his own plan, they say. Things went terribly wrong. The shopkeeper is still alive. The man who helped Zara defy him, her friend, her confidant and maybe even her …
lover
escaped the retribution he deserved.

And there were witnesses! Oh, minions like that could be paid off; he could purchase their silence with pocket change. That wasn’t the point. They had
seen,
watched Yesheb come close to losing in a battle of wills.

Yesheb had not shown well. Not well at all.

While the other voices rail at him, The Voice remains silent. Yesheb knows why. The Voice understands. The Voice recognized the forces that stood against Yesheb in that place, the power the mustached fool didn’t even know he possessed. Yesheb should have displayed his own strength. He should have overpowered the Opposition, annihilated it.