Damage Control

time how much blood there was on the floor. He was wet with it. As that shackle also fell away, something tightened in his belly. It was the same panicky feeling from the other day when the gunmen first stormed their bus in Ciudad Juarez.

“Look at me, Tristan,” the man said. “Look at me, son.”

Tristan raised his eyes to meet the blue ones. The man smiled. “You’re going to have to trust me, Tristan. I want to get you out of here, but first I want you to make me a promise.”

“Who are you?” Tristan asked. His brain was starting to work again, and that seemed like a really important question.

“We’ll get to that later, I promise,” the man said. His big partner had somehow disappeared from view. “Will you make me a promise?”

Tristan nodded. “Yes. Sir.”

Another smile. “Okay. I’m going to help you stand, but then we’re going to hurry out of here. I don’t want you looking around.”

“Why?”

“Promise me.”

Tristan craned his neck and turned his head to see what the man was trying to hide, but Blue Eyes was too quick. A countermove for every move.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“With you,” the man corrected. “I’m going to help you get out of the bus.”

Tristan pulled his legs up under him and started to stand. “I can do it myself.”

The man put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back down. He was stronger than he looked. “I know you can,” he said. He took a deep breath, and the eyes turned sad. “Your friends are all dead, son. You don’t want to see that. That’s not how you want to remember them. Just look straight ahead and we’ll get you out of here.”

The knot in his gut tightened. “They’re dead? All of them?”

The man pressed his lips into a kind of pout. “I’m afraid so, Tristan.”

“How?”

“Scorpion!” the driver yelled, louder this time. “Can we save the counseling for later, please?”

Blue Eyes-Scorpion?-stayed focused on Tristan. “We’re going to go right now.”

With that, the rescuer grabbed the front of Tristan’s T-shirt in both fists and lifted him to his feet. As he rose, Allison’s head thumped against the floor of the bus, where she launched a spray of blood spatter from the gathering puddle.

“She’s dead,” Scorpion said. “She can’t feel anything. Just keep moving.”

Scorpion half carried Tristan as he stumbled down the center aisle of the bus. He stepped over what was left of the terrorist who had shot everybody, and he bumped up against Danielle, whose head was mostly gone. Scorpion seemed to sense when he was about to freeze because he pulled harder to drag him along.

Tristan tried to do as he was told-to look straight ahead-and he understood why he was supposed to do it. But the temptation proved overwhelming. When he finally got to the top of the stairs, he dared a look backward.

It was too awful to comprehend. Truly, they were all dead. These people who had shared this awful experience with him over the past week had all been mangled by bullets. None would ever speak again. Blood was everywhere. He didn’t know how that was possible.

But he knew he was alone now.

What about their parents? Who’s going to tell them?

“Keep going, Tristan,” Scorpion said. The rescuer planted his hands in Tristan’s armpits and nearly carried him down the stairs from behind. His rifle hurt as it pressed against his back.

Tristan stumbled on the last step and lost the flip-flop from his left foot. He watched it fall onto the grassy road cut, and as he reached for it with his toes, he saw-really saw for the first time-how bloody his legs and feet were. He could only imagine about the rest of him.

His stomach flopped, and he retched, but he hadn’t eaten in days. Nothing but bile came up.

The driver looked even bigger up close than he did at a distance. He was positioned just outside and in front of the door, his rifle pressed to his shoulder as he pointed the muzzle uphill.

“We’re ready,” Scorpion said, and an instant later, the man’s grip switched from the front of his T-shirt to the waistband of Tristan’s shorts-at the small of his back-and he jerked the pants up in kind of a power wedgie. Scorpion’s other hand pressed against the back of Tristan’s head, bending the boy into an inverted L. He maintained that position as they fast-walked across the rutted roadway to a rusty beige Toyota SUV.

Once at the vehicle, Scorpion opened the back door with the hand he’d moved from his head, and then Tristan found himself landing hard on the torn fabric of the bench seat. “On the floor,” he commanded. “Stay there till I tell you to get up.”

CHAPTER FOUR

With the PC secure in the backseat, Jonathan swung his M27 to his shoulder to cover Boxers as the Big Guy tossed his ruck into the backseat, slid into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. “First thing to break our way,” Boxers announced. “Keys were in the ignition.”

Jonathan opened the door to the shotgun seat, tossed his ruck on top of Boxers’, and they were moving even before he got the door closed. A few seconds later, after a violent J-turn, they were on their way, spewing a rooster tail of dust behind them.

“You okay, Tristan?” Jonathan shouted. When he didn’t get an answer, he looked behind him into the backseat, where the kid sat in a fetal ball on the floor behind Jonathan. Tall and lean to the point of skinny, the kid was all arms and legs. Filthy and sweaty and blood-smeared, Tristan Wagner’s exhausted expression gave him the look of an old man in a teenager’s body. Good thing he was crouched on the right side of the floor. If he’d been on the left, Boxers might have crushed him as he launched his seat back to make room for his legs.

The boy appeared to have slipped into that non-place that so many PCs-precious cargoes-retreated to as they grappled with the challenge of understanding the unthinkable.

“Tristan?”

The boy’s eyes rocked up to meet Jonathan’s. They were a shade of green that Jonathan associated with cats, not people. He looked ready to cry.

“It’s almost over for you, son,” he said. “I’m sorry for your friends.” He hoped that that last part hadn’t sounded like a throwaway line. He truly was sorry that they’d been killed, and he truly felt for the emotional grater that lay ahead for the kid. More than that, though, he wanted to keep the reality first and foremost in Tristan’s mind. Jonathan had seen too many rescued hostages slip into crippling denial. No matter how awful the truth might be, it was Jonathan’s experience that embracing it early on caused far less emotional trauma in the long run than did the slide into delusion.

As Tristan pressed his hands to his eyes and started to cry, Jonathan turned around to face forward.

“You want to tell me what the hell just happened up there?” Boxers said.

“I have no idea,” Jonathan said. “You got eyeballs on the guys who joined us. What did you see?”

“Looked like army to me,” Boxers replied. “Maybe police, I have a hard time telling them apart.”

“They fired the first shot, right?”

“That’s the way I saw it. They took out the driver, and then everything came unzipped from there.”

Jonathan tried to pull the details into some kind of recognizable form. No one was even supposed to know that they were here.

He’d been contacted the usual way, through a blind email address via a reference from another client. After the security checks were completed, and funds had been deposited in Security Solutions’s offshore account, Jonathan had made contact, via an untraceable prepaid phone, with a Beatrice Almont, who turned out to be the lawyer for the Crystal Palace Cathedral in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The name sounded familiar to Jonathan, and a quick Internet search reminded him that the Crystal Palace was spiritual home to Reverend Jackie Mitchell, a fire-and-brimstoner whose preachings were beamed throughout the world to her million-plus-member congregation.