Then another tiny white light shot across his lens, then another.
Like minuscule white orbs rising and falling.
Then a larger one between them.
They were hands. The middle glowing orb was a face.
All several hundred yards away.
“That’s her!”
60
Tilly’s heart was bursting.
She was running on pure adrenaline. Each time she stumbled in the desert, her skin peeled and blood seeped from her cuts.
Her pulse pounding in her ears, she wanted to cry out-
In the distance behind her a motor revved. She looked back. Doors slammed, headlights swept and began undulating, accelerating in her direction. At the edge of the lights’ reach, Tilly saw a cluster of buildings and ran toward them. They looked like run-down wooden garages with steel drums and crates of junk inside.
The car lights shot through the gaps between the boards of the buildings, making the ground glow as shadows rose.
The car churned dirt into dust that swirled in the headlights as Tecaza braked near the buildings.
“She’s here. Spread out.”
Limon-Rocha and Tecaza used their night-vision goggles to probe the buildings. Angel had a flashlight and searched the perimeter.
Tilly had found a gully surrounded by tall grass and shrubs and scrambled into it, laying flat on her stomach. She could hear them talking, glimpsed them searching the buildings. A flashlight beam raked the ground near her as a silhouette approached.
She held her breath.
A cell phone rang and someone answered in Spanish but ended the call abruptly. The silhouette suddenly veered. At the same time one of the creeps near the buildings called out, “I see her!”
It sounded like Alfredo, but his voice was lower, as if he’d turned from her. The others were with him. Tilly risked lifting her head and discerned three silhouettes near the idling car. By their posture, it appeared two of them were using binoculars.
“Where?” one of them asked.
“There, to the left.”
“That’s a coyote.”
“No, that’s her. She got away behind the buildings, let’s go.”
Doors slammed. The car roared off.
Tilly waited, got to her feet and ran toward the lights in the distance. She kept her eye on the car, way off to her left bounding over the vast field.
Her side began aching, burning.
Tears blurred her vision but she saw a house ahead.
Far off to her left, the car changed direction, headlights turned toward her, the engine growling.
Virginia Dortman gripped her knife and cut potatoes into chunks. She was making a salad and desserts for the hospital fundraiser potluck tomorrow.
Judging from the aroma filling the kitchen of her small double-wide, the pies baking in her oven should almost be ready. Give them a few more minutes, she thought, gazing out her window at the flat land stretching toward the abandoned airfield.
Look at those lights bouncing and waving around out there. It must be teenagers again. All that tomfoolery can get dangerous. One time, they started a fire. Virginia had a good mind to call the sheriff’s office.
She’d let it go for now. She had too much to do.
For the past year, since her husband died of a heart attack at fifty-two years of age, Virginia busied herself baking, volunteering and working at the library. But most of the time she feared for her son, Clay.
He looked at her from his framed photo atop the TV he’d bought her. Handsome in his dress blues, eyes intense under his white cap. He was a proud Marine, like his dad.
Clay had been posted to South Korea three months ago.
He was twenty-four.
Virginia whispered a prayer for him each day.
Her attention shifted to her window.
Something outside was moving, approaching her house. She searched the night beyond the floodlights illuminating her property.
Virginia’s eyes widened.
“Please, help me!”
Tilly ran up the wooden stairs to Virginia Dortman’s front porch.
“Help me!”
Stunned at the site of a sobbing little girl at her door, Virginia’s immediate thought was that this was a joke, set up by teenagers.
She opened her door, her disbelief turning to shock at Tilly’s dirty T-shirt, torn jeans, frazzled hair and bloodied arms. When the kitchen light glinted off the steel handcuff dangling from Tilly’s wrist, Virginia gasped.
“Oh my Lord, sweetheart, what happened to you?”
Tilly fused herself to Virginia, inhaling the smells of her kitchen, her apron, shaking so badly, her words spilled through a torrent of tears. “P-p-please…h-h-help…”
Virginia’s next thought was calling 911, and she glanced toward her cordless phone on the sofa of her living room.
But before she moved to get it, her kitchen was awash in blood-red pulsating light.
A police car?
An unmarked patrol car halted at her doorstep, a red emergency light revolving on the interior dash. Two uniformed officers rushed toward Virginia. Confusion then recognition dawned, memory swirling with TV news images of a kidnapped child, drug gangs, fake police officers-
“Release the child, ma’am!”
Both officers put their hands on their holstered guns.
“No!” Tilly screamed. “They’re not police!”
“Ma’am, release the child! We have reports that a missing girl was sighted here. Now, release the child and step forward with your hands above your head palms out. Now!”
“No! Don’t listen to them!” Tilly screamed.
A third figure left the rear of the car, disappearing in the night.
