Jodi Compton - Hailey's War

I was not long on patience. This was not a pleasant place to learn it. As I waited, I reviewed the things I was here to find out. Was Nidia here? That was the key question. If so, how many men were guarding her? Was there an alarm system in the house? Was it the kind that went off loudly and alerted the household to an intruder, or was it one that silently tipped off a security team elsewhere? What about the simplest of security systems, a dog?

The night grew darker, making the inside of the house ever more visible through what windows were unobscured by blinds. I trained my binoculars on the window and observed. There were two men inside. Both were white and in their twenties. One was lean and cleans haven with gold-brown hair. The other was shorter, squat, with thinning brown hair and a chin beard. A television flickered in the room they were in. Occasionally one or the other got up, probably to go to the kitchen or the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of the shorter guy with a bottle of beer in his hand.

Except there was someone in the upstairs bedroom as well. There was light shining there, and a blue flicker as of a TV, but maddeningly, nothing was visible through the window except an expanse of beige wall and part of a sliding closet door. No one came to the window to look out. Dammit, weren’t prisoners always supposed to be looking out the only windows available to them, gazing in great melancholy at the outside and freedom? Nidia, come to your window .

She did not. The night grew darker still.

Finally the lights in the house went out. I gave the inhabitants of the house about twenty minutes to fall asleep, then I came out from under the bush to do my close-up reconnoitering. My legs shook underneath me and my muscles groaned from being folded for so long. I took the SIG out of my backpack and slipped it into the waistband of my cargo pants, and carried my flashlight in my hands.

The temperature had already fallen under the dew point, and the natural grasses were wet under my feet as I crossed the yard. Quietly, I circled the house. There was no chance of my getting inside tonight, nor climbing up to that window to see who was in the guarded bedroom. This was just reconnaissance of the outside, the doors and windows.

I saw no telltale wires or window stickers that would have suggested a security system, and that made sense. Most security systems were wired into a central office that would send out an armed guard when the alarm was tripped. If Skouras’s men were holding a hostage here, it wasn’t like they were going to want some rent-a-cop charging up here. Skouras’s men would TCB by themselves.

All the locks that I could see were standard, a dead bolt on the front door and a plain knob lock. Regular locks on the sliders. Nothing on the windows. A break-in would be child’s play for Payaso or Serena, if only I could predict whether the guys ever left Nidia here by herself. They might never do so.

I walked the driveway. It was a good quarter-mile long, all dirt, and about half that length was visible from the front of the house. So we’d be able to get halfway up in the Bronco before the guys inside would even know strangers were coming. All the way, if they weren’t looking out the windows and they had the TV or stereo on loud enough not to hear the engine.

The garage had a window. I looked inside and saw the looming shape of a black SUV, newer than the one I was driving. I raised the flashlight and aimed the beam down at the license plate, repeating the seven digits to myself several times until they were locked in my memory.

As I headed back up the hill to my bivouac, it occurred to me that everything about the house spoke of confidence. They didn’t have special locks and security. There was no dog. It was clear that they knew-or rather, thought-that no one was looking for Nidia.

That was probably the only thing we had on our side.

It was midmorning the next day when I finally saw Nidia .

I was under my sheltering bush, stiff, tired, and still hungry after eating two energy bars. The bright light of day made it hard to see anything that was going on inside the house. I’d only caught glimpses of the same two guys, moving back and forth, typical morning stuff.

And then motion outside the house caught my eye. I grabbed the binoculars.

Two people were walking the rolling unfenced land. One was the tall young clean-shaven guy. The other was Nidia. She was not only recognizable, she was recognizably pregnant, her stomach full and round.

Her reddish hair had not been cut, so that it now hung well past her shoulder blades. I couldn’t see her expression clearly through the glasses, and I was glad about that. Because this was an abomination. They looked like they could have been lovers, or a young husband and wife expecting their first child. He was close by her side, almost solicitous, in case she stumbled.

It sickened me. Three months of that. She’d lived in the hands of strange young men who pretended to be taking care of her, when I suspected they’d be ready and willing to kill her when the time came. Three months without contact with anyone who cared about her, her family, her friends. If I’d had a rifle, I might have shot him. I had been a good enough shooter at school to do it.

Taking a steadying breath, I lowered the binoculars and withdrew deeper into the bush.

“Tell me again, why you didn’t stay up there another day?” Serena asked me .

“I could have,” I said. “But even if I’d spent three or four days in research, there’s no guarantee their schedule wouldn’t change the day we go up there. I just want to go up and do this, soon.”

We were in a narrow, windowless theatrical-supply store. I was watching what I said, not wanting the clerk to overhear anything suspicious.

Serena was looking at a lovely and fairly authentic-looking diamond choker. Paste, of course. All around us were romantic things: jewelry and feathers, yards of satin, glass slippers. It was dissonant in the extreme with everything else Serena and I had purchased today. That list would have given anyone pause: pepper spray, duct tape, gloves, ski masks, handheld radios, and another pair of binoculars.

“You and me always make the most interesting shopping trips together, prima,” Serena told me, raising her eyebrows. She was thinking, I knew, of the trip we’d made a year ago to the Beverly Center.

“I hope we live to make a few more,” I told her.

I’d planned the raid on the drive home, and had quickly realized that I wouldn’t need as much gang backup as I’d thought. Later, if we got Nidia out safely, we’d need more guys, to guard her in shifts. But for now, based on my reconnaissance, we were only going to be taking down two unsuspecting guys in an isolated house. What it would require was a fire team, not a squad. If Payaso, Serena, and I couldn’t do this by ourselves, we probably couldn’t do it at all.

The clerk ambled down the counter toward us. “What can I help you girls with?” he said.

“Stage blood,” I told him.

Two days later, I was lying by the edge of the road in Gualala. It was the only road down to Highway One from the Skouras place, the only one the tunnel rats could take to get groceries and supplies. It was also very lightly traveled, which was why I could lie on the roadside, stage blood staining my cheap disposable jacket, as though I had been in a hit-and-run.

Serena had wanted to play the victim. Her argument had been convincing: It was likely that the guys guarding Nidia were part of the ambush team in Mexico, therefore they’d seen me before. They’d seen me in the exact same position, at roadside. She’d worried that it’d be a tip-off.