Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

"No cuido. Deseo encontrar a sus amigos y ayudarles. ¿Cuántos de ellos están fuera de allí? ¿Cualquier persona estuvo lastimada?"

"What's he saying?" Flynn asked.

"Same thing I was," Knox said. "How many are there, is anyone hurt."

"Russ." Clare's voice was insistent. "I know how many men there were."

Of course she did. He was surprised to find a part of himself amused. Smack-dab in the middle of police business. Just like old times . He braced his hand against his thigh and stood up.

"Sister Lucia said there were eight men in the van. They were headed for Michael McGeoch's dairy farm."

He pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. "Mike McGeoch's farm? On Lick Springs Road?"

She shook her head, loosening more strands of hair. "She didn't say where." Donald Christie was looking at her, curious about her BDUs, maybe, but he didn't show any signs of trying out his charm offensive. Of course, she didn't have everything out there on a platter, like Knox. A jackass like Christie wouldn't know how to appreciate a woman like Clare.

He turned to the injured man. Karl and Annie were helping him to his feet. In the light from the ambulance's interior, the kid's face was gray beneath his caramel skin and thin beard. Annie frowned. "You'll have to ask the rest of your questions at the hospital, Chief. We need to get this guy and the other one back."

"Okay. Thanks, Annie." Russ pointed toward the Christies. "You two. Get to the pump truck and get briefed by John Huggins about the search before you call in any of your family." Thankfully, they shambled off without protest. "And remember what I said!" he called after them. "Knox. Kevin."

"Yes, sir."

"Yeah, Chief?"

"You two keep the van secure until the tow truck gets here. Kevin, show Knox how to write up the accident report."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw desert camo sidling past him. "Where are you going?" he asked.

"To help with the search." Clare's expression said, What did you think I was going to do?

Help with the search. Of course she was. It was too much to hope she might stay out of it for once. "I'm taking off now ," he growled.

"Oh, I'll get a ride."

He sighed. Motioned to his junior officers. "I want you two to see that Reverend Fergusson gets back to her car. And then that she goes home ."

"You want us to stay for the search, Chief?" Kevin sounded as if there was nothing he'd rather do more. Hadley Knox, on the other hand, looked appalled.

"Yeah. I do. Knox, you're the only other Spanish speaker here. Make yourself available as necessary."

"Yes, sir."

"Are you headed for the hospital, Chief?"

He shook his head. "I'm going to the McGeoch place and let them know all their farmhands have run off."

Clare's face, outlined in the gathering dark by the flash of red-and-whites, changed. She got it.

"You know him, Chief?" Flynn continued.

"Oh, yeah." He sighed. "He's my brother-in-law."

Amado heard him before he saw him. One of his own, no flashlight, no badly accented shouts of, "We are not I-C-E! We want to help you!" Just the thudding of footfalls and the whipping, crackling sounds of someone running through the forest. Idiot . There was a little moonlight shafting through the bare branches and pines, but not enough to make it safe to race all out as if you were sprinting down a street. He had spent enough time hiding in the dark. The trick was to go slowly. To let yourself see where you were headed and then to move like smoke, silently, safely.

Thank God it wasn't his little brother thrashing through the trees. In the confusion after the accident-men swearing and groaning, Sister Lucia insisting she was all right despite her bloody head and shallow breath-he had seen Octavio's arm. Known at once the boy would have to go to the hospital. Where, without papers or a green card, he faced deportation. Amado had stuffed his own GW-1 permit and identity card into his brother's pocket. " You will be Amado," he had said. " I will be Octavio." Octavio looked at him blankly, eyes glazing over with shock. "Just keep saying it over and over," Amado had urged. "You are Amado Esfuentes. You are Amado Esfuentes."

"I am Amado Esfuentes," Octavio parroted.

Amado had stayed as long as he dared, until the lights of the police car came over the hill. Then he, along with the rest of the able-bodied, fled into the woods. His ID would ensure his brother's safety. They resembled each another, and the pitiful excuse for a beard Octavio was growing blurred the differences between their faces. Anglos had a hard time looking past the color of a man's skin, anyway.

A loud thud, followed by a grunt, brought him back to the present: Esteban. He was the only one stupid enough to blunder through the dark like that. Amado debated, for a moment, staying put in his half-hollowed log. Then he heard a faint whimpering noise. Mother of God. Why his family had ever let the boy out of the house, let alone sent him north, was beyond Amado's understanding. Resigned, he heaved himself out of the shadows and headed-slowly, silently-toward the snuffling sounds.

The poor kid was sprawled out on the forest floor, trying to stuff his weeping back into his mouth. It took some of the younger ones that way. Amado had seen it before. Tell a boy he's a man and carry him two thousand miles away, into a cold and alien place. He misses his mother, he misses his girl, he misses his home. He swaggers around like a fighting cock, to hide his fears, and cries in the dark when he thinks no one can hear him.

Amado had been that boy-once. He paused behind a cluster of pines and coughed, to give Esteban the chance to set himself to rights while he still thought himself unseen. "Is someone there?" Amado said.

The figure, anonymous in jeans and a quilted jacket, shoved up abruptly and scrambled backward, face pale and terrified. Shit! An anglo . He faded farther back into the shadows, ready to disappear, when the boy, still moving backward, slammed himself into a tree, making Amado wince. He wasn't Esteban, but he certainly moved with the same grace and coordination. His baseball cap flew off, revealing a tumble of long blond hair.

Not a boy, then. Not a boy at all. The girl held her hands up in front of her and whispered something in impossibly fast English. Pleading, he could tell by the tone of her voice, but for what? Help? Amado stepped into the shaft of moonlight so she could see him, his hands out and open, his arms relaxed. "I won't hurt you," he said, but of course, she couldn't understand him. She balled her hands up into fists-badly-and said something, a thread of defiance over her fear. He recognized one word: police.

"I'm not the police," he said. Slowly, keeping his arms spread wide, he sat on the rusty mat of pine needles beneath them. Making himself smaller. "No police."

"No police," she said in English.

He nodded. "No police." He smiled at her. "I milk cows for a living." He mimed the old-fashioned way of milking teats. "I pitch manure." He flung a few invisible loads with an imaginary pitchfork. "And I roll hay"-no way to indicate that-"and I wipe the shit off my boots at the end of the day." He wiped the soles of his boots on the forest floor. Quiet talk, the kind of nonsense he murmured to the stock while he worked. All the words that, together, meant I'm no threat to you .

She stepped away from the huge pine that had been holding up her backbone. She bent a little, getting a closer look at him. In the moonlight, he could see she wasn't a girl, either, but a woman, around his own age. He also got a clue as to why she was hiding from the police in, presumably, her own country. She reeked of marijuana.