Julia Spencer-Fleming - I Shall Not Want

"Where is it?" the man demanded.

Isabel whirled around. Said something. Spread her hands wide in bewilderment. Clare heard a moan beside her. She looked away from the drama for a moment. Amado's mouth was a perfect O of despair. And Clare knew, at that moment, what had been hidden that Isabel couldn't find.

He closed his mouth. His face set in lines of terrible determination. Ready to-what? Confess? Lie? What would they do to him to get the truth?

Clare, he was tortured .

Amado stepped out from behind the tree.

"No!" she whispered. She lunged forward, awkward on her hands and knees, and tackled him around the ankles. It was sloppy, but it worked. He went down with a crash into the rhododendron bush, setting a pair of crows cawing into the sky. From near the barn, someone shouted, "¿Qué es eso?"

She heard dull thuds, the swish of legs scissoring through tall grass. They had sixty seconds-maybe less. Clare knotted her hands in Amado's shirt and dragged him to her. She pointed to herself. "I say I have the book. El libro." She pointed at him. "You stay with Isabel." She rolled to her knees. "Wait. Be smart. Um, inteligente." She clambered to her feet and smashed through the bush before her nerve could desert her. The third man was halfway across the field, dragging Isabel behind him, waving his weapon like a machete, a.357 Taurus, just like the one she'd seen in the church kitchen, but holy God, this one looked twice as big, pointed at her.

"Don't shoot!" Clare threw her hands up.

The guy jerked to a stop. "Who the hell are you?" He stared as if her clerical collar and cross were as bizarre as the three studs sprouting from his upper lip. Maybe they were.

She had four heartbeats to figure how to play it. Looked like Isabel had the lock on terrified, and she didn't think the gangbanger would respond to ecclesiastical authority as well as Amado had. That left crazy.

"Hey!" She converted her upraised hands into a cheerful wave. "I'm Reverend Clare! I came to see Isabel!" She smiled wide enough to display her eye-teeth.

The guy's mouth formed the words What the … then he jerked the.357 up. "Get over here." He had a trace of an accent.

"Isabel, how are you?" Clare sauntered through the timothy and clover, smiling as if Isabel wasn't wide-eyed and trembling, as if there wasn't an enormous gun swinging like a compass needle between them. "Is there anything I can help with?" She hugged the startled girl. The guy opened his mouth again, but before he could order them back to the barn, she said, "Are you looking for the list of distributors? The one that belongs to these gentlemen?"

Isabel gaped at her. Then clicked her mouth shut. She nodded.

"Bitch, you said you had it!" The gangbanger lifted a fist.

Clare flipped one hand up. "I have it." She smiled at him. "Isabel didn't know." She looked into Isabel's eyes, letting her mask fall away. "Amado took it. For safekeeping. He's alive, Isabel. He wants you to be safe."

Isabel's mouth opened. Her eyes filled with tears and a desperate, dawning hope.

The Taurus stopped its movement, finding true north against Clare's rib cage. "How do I know you're telling the truth?"

"It's a hard-covered composition book, black and white. The entries are written in blue ink."

"Shit," he hissed. Clare kept a smile pasted on her face. Finally, he narrowed his eyes at her. "Where is it?"

Isabel clutched at her arm. Clare squeezed her hand, still smiling at the man. "I'll take you."

He poked the gun into her flesh. "You tell me. I'll go get it."

She shrugged. "It's locked in my office at St. Alban's. I'm afraid one of the seven or eight people working there today would phone the police as soon as they see you going in there." She brightened. "Maybe you can have a car chase through town! Now that would be something for the tourists to talk about." She turned to Isabel. "Do you think that would make people more interested in checking out our church? Or less?"

The faint hope that had lit in Isabel's eyes went out, quenched by Clare's obvious insanity.

"Shut up," the man said. He ran his tongue beneath his lip, frowning in thought. The studs rose and fell like buoys. He gestured with the.357. "Back to the barn." Clare linked arms with Isabel and strolled toward the angular structure. She could feel the gun behind her as if it were still pressed into her skin. If she could just put a little more space between them and the gunman, she could let Isabel know that the police were on their way. That all they had to do was survive for the next half hour.

The man said something in Spanish to his two buddies. One of them asked a question. Their captor answered. The he grabbed Isabel's thin arm, jerking her away from Clare. The girl stumbled and went down. Clare tensed. The Taurus swung back to her.

"You and me will go get this book. She stays here. If I don't come back in an hour, they'll kill her and her brothers. Got that?"

Clare nodded.

"Let's go."

She twisted her head around as she walked back to the entrance to the road. "Be brave, Isabel," she shouted. "Remember Revelation! God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

Mr. Personality shoved her. She stumbled, trotted forward, righted herself. "Are you a druglord?" She tried to sound like a teenybopper meeting a member of the latest boy band.

"What the hell is wrong with you, lady?"

They passed out of the sunlight into the shade of the forest.

"Do I get to keep the ten thousand dollars? You know, as a reward?"

"What? What ten thousand dollars?"

"The money that was with the notebook and the Ta-the gun. It was a big gun, like yours. I wouldn't know what to do with the gun, but I could sure use the money." She kept her voice loud and singsongy, copying a very sweet, very bipolar woman she had met during her clinicals in Washington.

"You got all that? Rosario's stuff?"

"Yep." She needed some way to remove him from the scene. A rock? A tree branch? She stepped over a fragrant pile. Sheep dung? The road was too wide and too clear for her to vanish into the underbrush, too twisting and uneven for her to lead him on a chase. Pick your ground real carefully , Hardball Wright said. It might be the only advantage you've got .

The car, then.

They rounded a bend and there it was, nose first in a stand of ferns, its rear quarter hanging into the lane, like a cow content to block the road while she grazed. The man circled around the back of the Subaru, pointing the gun toward her as he approached the passenger door. "Get in," he said.

She braced her hands on her hips. "What about my reward money?"

He laughed, a sound like a heat gun stripping paint. "I dunno. That was the rednecks' payment for taking out the garbage. You think you could be a garbageman for us? Take out our trash?"

Oh, God. The bodies in the shallow graves. She ducked her head, fiddled with the handle on the door. She couldn't think about that, couldn't think about Octavio, because if she did, she was going to lose it, and then she'd be just another terrified victim at the wrong end of his gun. She opened the door. Slid into the driver's seat. Keeping her face averted, she busied herself with the seat belt.

He knew fear. He expected it. Her only chance of doing this was keeping him off balance-by giving him something he didn't expect. She clicked the belt into place. He bounced into the seat next to her, sidesaddle, the better to keep the.357 aimed at her midsection.

She thumbed the audio controls from her steering wheel at the same time she fired up the car. Loud music bounced through the interior, cheerful and springy. She threw the transmission into reverse.

"Turn that off!"

"I can't!" she yelled.