Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

"She was released on Friday." She paused, just long enough for Hadley to translate. "She thinks you're dead. It hit her hard. Very hard." She thought of the young woman's blank face while Hadley spoke and Amado replied in a low voice. The sense that Isabel had gone beyond caring.

"He says it's just as well." Hadley skip-hopped to keep up with them. They crested the rise. Below them, a thread of water trickled across the lane through a stony streambed. The bunkhouse baked in the sun beside it. "He says she's not for him and he's not for her. I dunno. Maybe she spun a romance out of a few meaningful glances?"

"I don't think so." Clare plunged forward and grabbed Amado's arm before he could enter the old farmhouse. Tugged him around to face her. She touched the silver cross hanging beneath her collar. Hoped the black and white would have an effect on him, even if she was an Anglican woman, and not a Roman man. "What if she's pregnant?"

Hadley copied her authoritarian tone.

Amado's mouth opened. "¿Embarazada?" He looked terrified and hopeful.

"Oh-ho," Hadley said. "You nailed that one on the head."

"Tell him I don't know. But he needs to come with me and let her see he's still alive. If he wants to break it off with her after that, fine."

He smoothed over his initial shock and listened to Hadley's translation with an impassive face. He looked at Clare. She stared back. "Okay," he finally said. "I go with you. For good-bye." He nodded stiffly and disappeared into the bunkhouse.

"Huh." Hadley propped her hand on her hip and fanned her face. "Me-thinks the lady doth protest too much. Or the man, in this case."

"I'm not trying to play Cupid. I was worried enough about Isabel's state of mind to put in a word with the hospital counseling folks. She blames herself for Amado's death-Octavio's death. You know what I mean. I think seeing him alive and well will let her forgive herself for accidentally setting her brothers on him. On his brother." She batted away a buzzing fly. "Whatever."

"Speaking of brothers, have you considered they might not be too thrilled if you bring yet another Latino guy to their farm?"

"I'll burn that bridge when I come to it."

"Don't you mean-" The sun-blistered door creaked open. Amado stepped out.

"Here." He thrust something at Hadley. "Esto es lo qué deséo el Punta Diablos." He sounded like a soldier at last laying down his arms.

Hadley stared at the black-and-white composition book in her hands. She flipped it open. Ran one finger down a handwritten page. "Holy shit." She looked up at Clare. "The chief was right. It's the distribution list."

Clare eased her car up the Christies' drive like a woman easing her way into the haunted house at the county fair. She knew there was nothing to be afraid of. But the sights, the smells, her sense of what-might-have-happened made her heart pound as she parked on the dusty grass and approached the porch steps.

Amado was an indistinct figure in her Subaru, waiting behind tinted windows. She had left the engine running, as much for a quick getaway as for the air-conditioning. She was lucky she had him with her-Hadley had been all for dragging him back to the station for formal questioning. Amado dug in his heels, saying only that he had found the notebook nearby and that he'd tell the police everything he knew after he had seen Isabel. Hadley had been torn between accompanying him and Clare and delivering the list to the station-so torn she had shifted back and forth, back and forth, on the balls of her feet, poised at her cruiser's door.

"I promise," Clare said. "I'll bring him in to you as soon as we're done at the Christie place." Which would also give her time to call Sister Lucia and set her to find a Spanish-speaking lawyer. Russ would have never gone for it, but Hadley, flushed with triumph, her fingers leaving damp prints all over the MKPD's biggest haul of the year, was an easier touch.

Now, approaching the weathered mahogany door she had last seen flung open for cops and EMTs, she wondered if it might not have been a better idea to wait, to have come up here after he was questioned, with Hadley and Kevin Flynn and maybe even Lyle MacAuley in tow. Too late now.

"Fly or die," she said to herself, pressing the bell.

The shirred curtains in the window shivered. The door opened a hand-breadth. A thin teenaged girl peered out. "Yeah?"

It wasn't what Clare had been bracing for. "Um. I would like to see Isabel."

"How come?"

"I'm Clare Fergusson. I"-the specter of Pastor Bob caused a midcourse correction-"am the chaplain who spoke with Isabel at the hospital. I wanted to see how she was doing."

"She's fine." The door swung.

Clare stuck her foot in the jamb. "I'd like to hear that from her."

"You can't." The girl pushed the door a few times, but Clare's lug-soled sandal didn't move.

"Are you Porsche?" The girl looked more like a Chevy Nova, but Clare hadn't named her.

"Yeah."

"Porsche, your aunt told me that Christies stick together. That you help each other. Is that true?"

"Yeah."

"Then please let me speak to her. I promise you, you'll be helping her."

The girl looked at Clare's foot. She released the door, letting it drift open. "She's not here. I'm"-she checked behind her, as if someone might overhear-"worried about her. Dad and Uncle Bruce and Uncle Neil took the van and drove off, and as soon as they were gone, Izzy was on the phone with somebody. Then the next thing I know, this chrome-flap Hummer pulls in the yard and Izzy's out the door."

"And that worried you because-?"

"There were Mexicans in it! I almost went and grabbed a gun, 'cause Dad said we ever see another Mexican on our land, we better shoot to kill!"

"But she went with them? Voluntarily?" Could they be some of Janet's men? No. That made no sense. There was only one group of Latinos interested in the Christies. "When was this?"

"Just a bit before you showed up. That's why I was being so careful and all."

"Do you know which way they went?"

Porsche stepped onto the porch. She leaned over the railing and pointed to where the open pasture rose into a stretch of woods. It was just visible in the gap between house and barn. "Up that way. There's a sort of a road up into the mountain, leads to the high meadows. Same way Dad and the others went."

"They're all up there? Together?" Jesus wept! This mental midget is who Russ almost died for? Clare passed her hand over her face. That was unworthy. "Porsche." She tried to project patience. "Do you have a phone I could use?"

"Chief? You awake?"

"Mmm? C'mon in, Kevin." He opened his eyes. He'd been drifting, not dozing, wrapped in a warm Percocet-flavored cloud. He wanted to dial down the dosage this morning, to take back some small measure of control over his life, but by the time the nurse got around to him, he needed those two little pills rattling around in the plastic cup more than he wanted any sort of self-sufficiency.

Kevin's face came into view. "Hey." The kid smiled down at him like a proud dad looking over a newborn. Which, until he got the okay to get up to pee, wasn't too far off the mark. "Wow. It's sure great to see you."

None of the hospital staff had told him, yet, how close he had come to checking out. The heart surgeon and the orthopedic surgeon and the internist had gone over the technical aspects; right lung, pericardium, hip joint; the bottom line was he was going to be lying here, hurting, for a long time. After that, he'd be in rehab, hurting, for another long time. But no one said, You nearly died . He was learning that from his visitors' faces.

"Not as great as it is to see you," he said, getting a laugh. "What's happening at the station?" Kevin obliged his weak lungs by taking over the conversation at that point, rattling on in his usual Energizer Bunny way, allowing Russ to float in and out of awareness, until he connected the words twenty-two and ballistics test and confirmation . "What?" he said. "Go back."