Hailey's War

I led him to the driveway of the Skouras place and tapped my brakes to make the brake lights flash, then pulled over. I shut off the engine, grabbed a brown paper grocery bag, and ran to the SUV. I climbed in the passenger side but didn’t stay there, getting into the back instead. If the other soldier was looking out the front window when we drove up, it was probably too much to hope that he wouldn’t notice that his partner had morphed into a Hispanic male, but if he did, well, there was no point pushing our luck by having a blond girl visible in the window, too.

I crouched on the floor. The grocery bag was mostly a prop, filled with crumpled newspaper to give it shape, but there were a few things we’d need at the bottom, and I dug them out. A ski mask. A canister of pepper spray. The duct tape.

When Payaso stopped the SUV in the driveway, near the house, I handed him his ski mask and the handcuffs.

“Anyone in the windows?” I asked, getting the pepper spray out of the bag.

“No, they’re clear,” he said. “Why don’t you have a mask?”

“The guy in the bushes down there saw my face already.”

I opened the side door, shook the pepper spray, and squirted a little into the gravel of the driveway. This would be a bad time for the nozzle to be clogged. It wasn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “Keys?”

Payaso pulled the keys from the ignition and handed them to me. I sorted through them, fast. One was a smallish mailbox key, one was a Honda key, probably to the guy’s private car. Three were what looked like house keys. I chose one at random, isolating it from the others between my thumb and index finger. Then I jumped out and raised the grocery bag to obscure my face. I walked fast to the front steps and up them, stopped at the front door. I stuck in the key I’d chosen. It didn’t go in. Dammit. I tried another. It slid in and the door swung open.

Inside, the entryway was empty. No one was in my line of sight. I leaned back out, signaling Payaso to come.

I stepped quietly into the entryway, onto a floor of linoleum marked to look like distressed gray tiles. I listened for noise and heard it from the kitchen. The other tunnel rat was in there.

Payaso appeared behind me, masked now, gun in hand.

“Jeff?” a male voice said, from the kitchen. “That was fast. You forget something, you dildo?”

His footsteps drew near. Up close, he had that all-over-golden-brown coloring that some southern Europeans have: golden-brown hair and eyes, a touch of warmth to his skin tone, his jawline stub-bled in a lazy-fashionable way.

I didn’t let him get all the way to the doorway. Instead, I walked through it, pepper spray in hand, and sprayed him directly in the face, and when he yelped and stumbled back, I threw my hardest straight right. He fell, and as he pitched forward, I grabbed him around the neck and rammed a knee into his liver. It’s always tempting to aim for the testicles, but it’s harder than many untrained fighters realize to hit that sweet spot that causes instant incapacitation. Liver, kidney, solar plexus-these were all more accessible and nearly as brutal.

I wrestled the soldier onto his stomach and began wrapping his wrists behind his back with duct tape. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Payaso covering us, holding his gun two-handed like a cop.

“I got him,” I said. “Watch behind us, too.”

Serena’s surveillance had suggested that there were still only two guys living in the house-now both accounted for-but you couldn’t be too careful.

The soldier turned his head to the side, to where he could almost make eye contact. His nose was dripping blood from where I’d hit him.

“What the fuck?” he said. “Who the fuck are you guys?”

“Shut up,” I said, winding more tape around his ankles. “Is there anyone else in the house besides Nidia?”

“Who?”

“Nice try,” I said. “Is there?”

“Fuck you.”

I sighed. “I’m gonna leave you for a minute while I go get Nidia from upstairs. Don’t think my associate won’t shoot you if you give him trouble. Tip your head back and breathe deep; your nose will stop bleeding in a minute.”

Then, to Payaso: “Don’t let him provoke you into conversation, okay? We’re keeping this guy on a need-to-know basis, and what he needs to know is nothing.”

Payaso nodded.

I searched the rest of the house. It was a nice place: could have been anybody’s Lovely Vacation House with the sectional sofa and the flat-screen TV and the big, clean sliding glass door. You wouldn’t think two organized- crime guys and an imprisoned mother-to-be had been living here.

Outside the door that I believed to be Nidia’s, I tried the remaining two keys, the second of which slid easily into the lock. I took a deep breath and opened the door.

Nidia was in bed, her back to me, under the covers. The TV set was flashing, but without sound. In her position, I’d try to sleep most of it away, too.

But she wasn’t asleep. She rolled over and saw me.

Her green eyes had deep purplish shadows underneath them, and when she saw me in the doorway, gun in hand, her expression was one of amazement but not of relief. She didn’t seem to understand what she was seeing.

“You’re safe now,” I said. “We’re leaving. Get dressed.”

She stared.

“Andale,” I prompted. “Tenemos prisa.” Come on, we’re in a hurry.

Finally getting it, she scrambled up from the bed.

When Nidia saw Payaso, ski-masked, armed, and standing over the tape- wrapped, bloody-faced form of the soldier, she jumped and nearly backed into me, frightened.

I said, “Esta bien, he’s with me.”

Payaso hastily ripped off the ski mask and echoed me: “Esta bien, no tenga miedo.”

So much for protecting Payaso’s identity, I thought, seeing the soldier get a good look at his face. But it was clear that Payaso’s main priority was reassuring Nidia. He was staring at her: beautiful despite the shadows under her eyes, and real to him for the first time. If he’d had a hat to tip, he would have.

I looked at Nidia, then nodded at the tunnel rat. “You want to kick him in the ribs?”

“Como?” she said, confused.

“Go on,” I urged her, “it’ll be cathartic.”

She just stared at me. I realized I was pretty jazzed on adrenaline and success. I mean, little Nidia Hernandez was not going to kick this guy in the ribs, and it wasn’t just because she didn’t know what cathartic meant.

“Never mind. Let’s go,” I said.

The soldier’s nose had stopped bleeding, and his eyes had stopped streaming from the pepper spray, and as we left, he found his voice and his bravado, calling after me.

“You’ve signed your own death warrant, bitch,” he said coldly. “I recognize you now. We know who you are.”

I stopped in the doorway, then looked at Payaso. “Go on out to the car with Nidia,” I told him. “I’ll be right there.”

Payaso wasn’t sure. “Cuidado,” he said, but he took Nidia out.

When they were gone, I walked back to the tunnel rat and sat on my heels. It’d been a long time since I’d felt this way, high on adrenaline, sure of myself, full of purpose. It was making me overconfident. I knew it was pointless to engage with this guy any further, but I just couldn’t help myself.

“You guys know who I am?” I said. “I know who I am, too. I’m Staff Sergeant Henry Cain’s daughter. And to clarify, you’re the fuckup who just let a one-hundred-thirty-five-pound bike messenger