Tres Leches Cupcakes (36 page)

Rex eased off on the gas and let another car get in front of him. They passed a cop car with lights flashing on the side of the road. That, but for the grace of God, could have been Rex.

Each time they approached an exit, she worried the van was going to pull off into the desert, but they continued toward Santa Fe long enough for Sadie to know they weren’t taking Caro to the same place they’d taken her. She was relieved, but then it opened up the new fear of an unknown location.

When the van did finally slow down, it took an exit Sadie had never taken before. They hadn’t passed the airport yet, so they weren’t quite to Santa Fe. There was a closed down gas station at the base of the off-ramp and a few boxy homes scattered here and there, but it didn’t scream “residential area” and had a run-down look to it.

“Where are we?” Sadie asked. “Is this part of Santa Fe?”

“Not quite. It’s gonna become obvious we’re following them. I’ll turn the other way. Circle back.”

Sadie nodded, and Rex turned right as the van went left. He drove a hundred yards down the road before turning around on a ragged street. Another car got off the freeway and headed the same direction the van had taken—west. Rex fell in behind it.

There were scattered homes, most of them trailers placed with a lack of organization. Some of the lights were on inside the dwellings, but there wasn’t a lot of traffic. The car between them and the van turned onto a narrow road, and Rex slowed down so as to give the van more space. Luckily, the van didn’t pull onto a side street where it would have looked suspicious if Rex had followed them. Instead the van continued forward at least four or five miles before turning onto a dirt road. A mailbox was posted out front.

“It’s a driveway,” Sadie said.

“Watch them,” Rex said as he drove slowly past the entrance while Sadie surveyed the property.

“There’s a house back there,” Sadie said. “No lights on inside, but the headlights of the van lit it up for a minute. Trailer, I think.”

“Any other vehicles?”

“Not that I could see,” Sadie said. The property was far enough behind them that she had turned around in her seat. “There’s a shed and an old camper, I think. Lots of sagebrush and overgrown grass.”

Rex drove another quarter mile, then turned around, shut off his lights, and drove back the way they had come. She looked hard at the area surrounding the house. A window was now lit up inside. Rex stopped in front of the driveway. They both remained silent, but the unasked question hung between them.

“Now what?” Rex finally asked.

“How long has it been since that call?” Sadie asked.

“Twenty-six minutes.”

“Which means they’ll be calling any minute. I think you should tell them you have the pipe when they call. They’ll probably want you to meet them somewhere.”

“What if it’s a trap?”

“Which is why we should call Pete. Caro’s his cousin, he isn’t going to want anything to happen to her, which means he’ll be careful. He understands how people like this think.”

Rex shook his head; Sadie wasn’t surprised. “Okay,” she said, moving on. “Then I’m going to sneak up to the house and make sure Caro’s in there and that she’s safe. Do you have a flashlight?”

“I need to get out of the road,” Rex said, pulling forward.

“Head over there,” she said, pointing toward a dark, obviously abandoned trailer a hundred yards down the road. The windows were boarded up and a no trespassing sign had been nailed crookedly onto one of the plywood panels.

“I’m coming with you,” Rex said as he pulled in behind the abandoned trailer.

“You can’t,” Sadie said with a shake of her head. She put the lid back on the box with the pipe and set it on the floor at her feet. “You have to stay here to take their call and arrange the trade-off.”

“What if you don’t get back before they call?”

“Then leave. I’ll figure something out.” She’d find a way to call the police is what she meant. She’d paid attention to the road signs, and the number on the mailbox was 89. She’d break into one of the other homes and use their phone if she had to. Her focus right now, though, was to make sure Caro was there and to get close enough to figure out who these men were and what part Caro played in their overall plan.

“I can’t just leave you here,” Rex said, but he sounded annoyed, making her wonder if he wanted to leave her but couldn’t get past his own conscience.

“You will if you have to choose between Caro and me,” Sadie said. “Now, do you have a flashlight in here somewhere? I can signal you from the house with it, let you know I’m there, and you can pump the brakes—I’ll see the glow of the brake lights—to confirm you saw me.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“I worked with Cub Scouts for too long. The flashlight?”

“In the roadside kit,” he said, getting out of the truck and going around to the back door.

Sadie did the same, careful to be as quiet as he had been, and found a tire iron about the same time he handed her the small flashlight. She turned it on quickly to make sure it worked; it did. She had light and she was armed—it was a good start. If only her heart wasn’t racing.

Chapter 36

Okay,” Sadie said after they rounded the edge of the trailer. “I’ll flash the light once if she’s there, twice if she isn’t.”

“She has to be there,” Rex said.

Sadie nodded and kept to herself that the other part of her plan was to try to get Caro out of there. These men were killers, though she hadn’t made a big deal about it to Rex.

“And then you’ll come back to the truck?”

“Leave without me if you have to, I’ll be okay.” She was impressed by how calm she sounded despite how freaked out she was. She didn’t want to be alone in the dark desert. But this was for Caro, and Sadie had to make sure she was safe.

“I should have brought my gun,” Rex said.

Sadie almost made a joke about New Mexicans and their guns but decided now wasn’t the time. Instead, she did one more scan of the truck for anything that might come in handy. She wished she had the walkie-talkies she and Caro had used when they were doing her informant work.

They found a place for Rex to stand that gave him a solid view of the house and determined where Sadie would need to be in order to give the light signal and see his response. By the time she hurried across the street, it had been thirty-four minutes since they’d talked to Caro. Why hadn’t anyone called Rex back yet?

She kept to the thick brush and grass that lined the road, then darted across the driveway and went from a large bush to a small tree to a hiding place behind the shed, which was about thirty feet west of the house. From there she eased around the side and got a better view of the trailer. It was gray, old, and in disrepair. It sat on a concrete foundation, about half of which was covered in white lattice skirting. The windows were covered with either heavy drapes or old mini-blinds, which meant she had to get closer in order to make the visual confirmation of Caro. After crouching down as low as she could and still be able to walk with her incredibly sore muscles, she hurried across the open space toward the west end of the trailer.

Once there, she pressed her back against the metal siding, caught her breath, and then turned and went up on her tiptoes. She could just see over the windowsill—but even being this close, the blinds prevented her from seeing anything more than the movement of bodies. She could hear the murmur of voices and wondered if it were just Horace and the Cowboy in there or if the third man had joined them this time. She hated the idea of Caro being so horribly outnumbered, and that gave her more motivation to confirm whether or not Caro was even there. Rex was likely very antsy by now. She wondered if they’d called him yet.

She stayed close to the trailer and scooted around the back corner, hoping for another window that might afford her a better view. A large wooden porch—more like a deck, really—had steps coming down the side, parallel to the trailer rather than straight back from the back door. If she stood on one of the steps, she might be able to see through a gap where one of the blinds was bent.

Light caught her eye, and she moved back to the corner and peered around it to see a set of headlights coming down the driveway. It wasn’t a car—the lights were too high. It must be a truck or another van. She heard a door slam from somewhere in front of the house a minute later. She glanced toward Rex’s hiding place. He was probably completely freaking out over this additional member of the “party no one wanted to go to.”

The front door opened, and she heard moving feet, then voices, the shutting of the front door, and more feet walking around the lit portion of the trailer. This new arrival must be the third man—the man the Cowboy and Horace had been waiting to arrive to talk to her in the desert. They must have been waiting for him as well.

She edged back toward the window by the porch steps but froze when hinges creaked above her and the back door swished open. She dove toward the space below the steps where the heavy shadows were her best cover and moved backward until she realized she was no longer under the stairs, but under the porch. She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, envisioning all kinds of horrible bugs and rodents surrounding her. For the second time tonight she was in a totally creepy place she never imagined she’d go to on purpose.

“Describe it to me,” a man’s voice said—Horace, she thought. No one had come out with him. Was he on the phone?

Sadie looked up through the small spaces between the two-by-fours of the porch, but she could only see his form pacing above her.

“That’s it,” he said, sounding relieved. “Your wife will be very glad to hear that you found it. Here’s what we’re going to do: Get on I-25 and head south. I’ll call you in ten minutes with more instructions. . . . I said I’ll call you. And don’t call the cops—we’ve got an in at the department and we’ll know if you try to involve them. Your wife’s life
is
on the line here. . . . Yeah, you can talk to her.”

The footsteps above her turned, and Horace’s voice moved back inside the trailer. “He wants to talk to you. You have ten seconds to convince him you’re still alive, but he’d better—” The door slammed shut, and Sadie let out the breath she’d been holding. Caro was here.

Sadie crawled out of her hiding spot and went around the corner of the house to the spot where she knew Rex would be able to see her light. She turned it on and off one time, then waited several seconds before she saw the faint red glow of brake lights confirming he’d received the message. Horace had said he had an in at the police department, was that true? Could it be Marcus? Had Sadie been feeding him information all this time? She didn’t think so, and the heavy thoughts were simply more fuel for what she had to do right now—get Caro out of there.

Moving as carefully as she could, she returned to the back porch, taking a deep breath for strength as she ducked back under it. After Sadie’s sophomore year of college, she’d taken a teaching job in a small town in Southern Utah. The school district had let her and the other female teacher stay in a single-wide trailer not much different than this one. Because of that one summer, Sadie knew that trailers and mobile homes came with a trapdoor of sorts toward the center of the structure, usually accessed through a closet inside the house. The door led to the crawl space that accommodated the plumbing and—for the very bravest of homeowners—extra storage. Sadie’s roommate had once bet her an entire package of Fig Newtons that she wouldn’t go into that crawl space. Sadie had gladly lost that bet.

The crawl space of this trailer was perhaps three and a half feet high with a metal vent on each wall of the trailer’s cement foundation. Sadie took a breath and scooted toward the vent underneath the porch. It was attached to the cement with hinges rather than screws, and they squeaked loudly when she lifted up the vent, even though she went slow. The voices above her didn’t stop, however, and she was able to carefully hold the vent open while maneuvering her body through the hole.

The footsteps and voices were louder once she was underneath the trailer itself, increasing her anxiety as she shined the light around the horrible place. In addition to the concrete foundation, cinder-block supports made it look almost like a small city. Unfortunately the small city was tangled in spider webs, and as she moved her flashlight beam, something on the far side scurried away from the light.

Her every instinct told her to run, but instead she got onto her hands and knees—the tire iron in one hand and the flashlight in the other—as she made another, slower, scan of the crawl space. Her flashlight beam struck something bright green toward the center, and it took her a moment to realize it was a large plastic bin of some kind. Apparently these owners were the brave type willing to utilize the crawl space for storage.

She moved closer, having to hold the flashlight in her mouth to keep her balance as she crawled along the hard-packed dirt. Something squirmed beneath her hand when she put it down, and she squeaked but managed to keep from screaming outright. This might very well be her worst nightmare.