booster. That was something Ginny insisted on. In her vehicle, not wearing seat belts wasn’t an option. And what if Pepe’s belt didn’t hold when she deliberately wrecked the car? What if it malfunctioned? What if he came loose and went smashing through the windshield? Or what if he was left alone in the car with an armed and dangerous criminal? All those ideas raced through her mind at once like waves of heat rising off the pavement.
Ginny took a deep breath and turned toward the man with the gun. “Where do you want to go?” she asked, straining to be heard over the noise of Pepe’s overwrought protestations.
“Mexico,” he said.
“Where in Mexico?” she asked. “Nogales? Agua Prieta?”
“I don’t care. Just get me across the border.”
The car parked directly in front of Ginny’s Honda, an SUV, pulled out of its spot. Relieved, Ginny followed it out. That way she didn’t have to back up and show the killer that she had left her bag of ice cream and her purse sitting there on the ground in plain sight.
If the guy wanted to go to Mexico, Ginny knew she had another problem. Her driver’s license was in the purse along with her cell phone. So was her passport, and Pepe’s, too. She and Felix had gotten Pepe a passport when Grandpa and Grandma Torres had taken everyone-kids and grandkids included-with them on a Mexican cruise in honor of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Since then, Ginny had discovered that racial profiling did happen. In southern Arizona, if you looked Hispanic, it was always a good idea to have plenty of government-issue ID available, especially if you happened to get stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint.
But this time, when she reached the checkpoints, she wouldn’t have ID of any kind. What would this man do then?
Suddenly she made the connection. It had been all over the news when she turned on her TV earlier that morning. Someone had killed four people out on the reservation last night. Was this the same man? If it was, this guy wasn’t just desperate. He was a stone-cold killer who probably wouldn’t think twice about taking another life-or two.
Ginny took a deep breath and glanced in the rearview mirror.
Behind her she saw a woman hustle up to one of the carryout boys. She was waving her arms and gesturing, pointing first in the direction of Ginny’s Accord and then back to the place where Ginny’s purse and her bag of melting ice cream sat abandoned on the burning pavement.
For one giddy moment, Ginny allowed herself to hope that help was on the way, but that moment of respite was short-lived. She knew it would take time for help to get there. She needed to stall long enough for that to happen.
“I need gas,” she said.
That was true. She had less than half a tank, and there was a gas station right there in the corner of the parking lot. She also had no money and no credit card, but maybe she could get inside long enough to ask for help.
“We’ll get gas later,” the man said, waggling the gun in her direction. “Get us out of here now. Go that way.” He pointed southbound on Campbell.
Ginny drove as far as the exit onto Campbell and signaled to turn left. Within a couple of blocks, Pepe finally finished crying himself out and fell quiet. It was his usual nap time. Tired from shopping and from crying, and still blissfully unaware of the danger they were in, he seemed to be falling asleep. Mentally Ginny uttered a prayer of thanksgiving. The sudden silence gave her a chance to concentrate on what she was doing and to get herself under control.
She tried desperately to remember everything she had ever heard or seen about hostage situations on television and in the movies. Wasn’t she supposed to get the guy talking? Isn’t that what hostage negotiators always did-try to establish a line of communication?
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
The gunman shrugged and didn’t answer.
“If you’ll let Pepe and me out somewhere, you can have the car,” she said. “We won’t tell anybody. Just let us go. Please.”
She knew even as she said the words that this was a futile hope. He would never let them go. She understood full well there was only one way this nightmare would end, and it would be with Ginny and Pepe dead. She would never see Felix again. Never have a chance to tell him good-bye. And she wouldn’t live long enough to see Pepe go off to kindergarten, or graduate from high school, either. Her eyes filled with hot tears, but she blinked them back.
“Don’t talk,” he said. “Just drive.”
Since there was nothing else to do, Ginny drove. She forced herself not to look in the rearview mirror. If that woman in the parking lot had noticed something amiss and had summoned help-if by some miracle someone was following them-she didn’t want to risk doing anything that might warn the guy that help was on the way. And if there wasn’t anybody back there coming to help? Then it didn’t matter anyway.
“What happened to your arm?” she asked.
He glanced down at his injured hand. Ginny looked, too.
“Dog bit me,” he said.
That was all he said. He didn’t explain which dog had bitten him or why, and Ginny decided not to ask for any further clarification on that score.
“Why did you choose me?” she asked finally.
“I drove around until I found a car with a car seat in it,” he said. “I figured while you were dealing with the baby it would be easy for me to get in your car. And it was.”
Crap, Ginny Torres thought. They told you that you should always put your baby in a car seat. That was supposed to make it safer. Not this time.
Tucson, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 1:48 p.m.
88? Fahrenheit
N ow that Annie and Amy were six, they were old enough that Kath Fellows was willing to risk leaving them alone for an hour or so at a time. On this particular Sunday afternoon she knew she’d be in and out of the neighborhood grocery store in far less time than that. So after giving the girls a pep talk and promising to bring them both Twinkies if they were very good, she left them in the living room with orders to stay there watching a video until she came back.
Kath was at the checkout line and just signing the credit-card authorization screen when one of the carryout boys came charging into the store yelling, “Call nine-one-one.”
“Why?” the manager called back. “What’s wrong?”
“There’s an old lady outside who said she thinks a woman and her baby were just abducted at gunpoint, from right here in the parking lot.”
As people hurried out the door, Kath followed, pushing her cart of groceries. A crowd was gathering around the supposedly “old” woman, someone who looked to be in her sixties, who was pacing back and forth, yelling excitedly, and pointing back toward the parking lot.
“He had a gun,” she said. “I saw it. He got in the car while she was putting the grocery cart away. When she came back to her car, he made her get something out of this one.”
The woman pointed toward a dust-covered silver Dodge Caravan. “She put whatever it was in the backseat of her little car and then they drove out of here in that. But her purse is still here-right there on the ground-and so are some of her groceries.”
Kath listened to the chorus of excited voices as she loaded groceries into the back of her own Odyssey on the far side of the parking aisle. By the time she finished, she knew that Tucson PD was responding to the manager’s 911 call because she could hear the siren of an approaching patrol car wailing in the distance.
“What kind of vehicle were they in when they left here?” the store manager was asking the distressed woman. He was still holding his cell phone and still talking into it.
“Tan,” she said. “Light tan. One of those foreign cars. A Honda, I think, but I don’t know for sure.”
“Which way did they go?”
“South on Campbell.”
“And what about the guy? Did you see him? What did he look like?”
