CHAPTER 60

CASEY HEARD JOSe SHOUT AND THEN A SECOND GUNSHOT. Her fingers found a tire iron and she clutched it tight.

The trunk popped open.

"Miss me?" Jose said.

Casey held the tire iron, sweating and breathless.

"I should knock you in the head,'' she said. But she dropped the tire iron and grabbed hold of him. He pulled her out, and she gripped the front of his shirt, planting a solid kiss on him.

"I did what they said," he said, "but it wasn't like that. I had to help some people. A container of girls, children, ready to go on a ship for Singapore. There was a big drug kingpin down in Nuevo Laredo who had the information I needed. That's all. I didn't do it for money. The drugs had nothing to do with me, but I cut a deal."

"Do I look like a give a shit right now?" she said, looking up at him. She kissed him again.

"Yes, you do," he said. He put his hand on the lower part of Casey's spine and led her to the truck. "They killed Amelia and my aunt, and someone is trying to make it look like me. Gage was one of them, but it wasn't him alone. They took Isodora and the baby."

"I know," Casey said. "I saw them.''

"You know where they're taking them?"

"Gage brought them to the eighteen-wheeler at the quarry," Casey said. "I don't know how many people were in it, but it's gone. I didn't get the plate.''

Jose scratched his chin. It looked as if he hadn't shaved in days. He looked at the windshield of his truck and shook his head.

"What did the truck look like?"

"The cab was red and it had a black rooster with a circle of words around it. Does that help?"

"You work with what you got.'' Jose wrapped his hand in his denim shirt to bang out the damaged windshield before helping her in.

"What about Teuch?" Casey asked.

"My guess is he stopped here to toss you into the river. We've got to get your car and then get out of here. When they find Gage's car, I need to be in another place."

Jose shut the door and circled the hood. He jumped in beside her, put the truck in gear, and took off toward the quarry. They rode in a terrible wind, unable to really talk. Jose asked her to point out the service entrance to the quarry and she did.

They pulled in and stopped and Casey said, "Check this out."

Jose cast a puzzled look at her cell phone.

"Listen," she said, then played back the video she'd recorded from inside the trunk.

"Play that part again," Jose said, grabbing Casey's arm.

"What part?"

"What Gage just said."

Casey reversed the recording ten seconds and hit play.

Jose didn't say anything. His hands gripped the wheel and he hunched his head forward as he put the truck back in gear and they bounced along the gravel road. Finally he slowed down and said, "It could be anything. Use your imagination. Those people are no one. They leave Mexico to come here. People down there don't hear from them and they have no idea what happened. The people here don't know if they went back to Mexico or got a better job somewhere else. That's what they figure. There's no record of these people. No one can check. No one can know anything. These people can just disappear because they don't exist."

"What about Nelly? Chase's maid?"

Jose pulled to a stop with his headlights shining on Casey's dusty blue Mercedes and shrugged. "She's an illegal, and one day she has trouble with the boss. Next thing you know, she's gone. Even if they want to complain, who do they call? No one.

"Get in your car and follow me," Jose said. "We can drop my truck a few exits down and head for the border."

"Why?"

"If that eighteen-wheeler is going to Mexico, we might beat it to the crossing. Even if we don't, I've got a friend there who might be able to help us pick it out based on the red cab and the rooster. He'll give us the plates, and we can track it down."

Casey hesitated and said, "I'm grateful to you, Jose, but are you going to tell me the whole story behind that news report?"

He stared out the empty window for a few moments, then said, "It'd be easy to say they made it all up, that my work brought me into close contact with the bad guys."

"That happens," Casey said quietly. "But there's more, isn't there?"

Jose nodded and clenched his hand, gently pounding the dashboard. "Not the prostitution. I have no idea where they got that. But I took some money. I could say it was because of my wife, but that's bullshit. These people have so much cash it's like lawn cuttings. I took some. I got caught. That's it. Am I dirty? I guess I am."

"How much?" Casey asked.

Jose shrugged and said, "About twenty thousand."

He held up his wrist, shaking the steel Rolex, and said, "I bought this watch with part of it."

Casey reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. "I've seen a lot worse."

Jose dropped his arm, sighed, and said, "Well, we've got to get your car out of here, either way. Come on. Follow me. If you want, we can dump this truck, get you some clothes and things, then hit the road. That's if we're still in this thing together."

Jose held out his hand.

Casey took it and nodded.

CHAPTER 61

CASEY WOKE AND BLINKED AT THE BLINDING SUN.

"You drove all night?" she asked Jose.

He gave her half a smile. "Like a stakeout. How 'bout we stop for some doughnuts?"

Casey's phone chirped. She opened it.

"Seventeen messages," she said, studying the numbers of the calls that had come in as she retrieved the messages. She listened to the first three before snapping it shut.

"Everyone wants an interview," she said. "You save some teenage mother and her baby from being beaten by Dad, the drug dealer; no one cares about that. But if you're a mentally ill woman lawyer going after a US senator and Susan Lucci played you in a crap movie? Do you even like Susan Lucci?"

"I see you more as Lucille Ball.''

"And you as Desi?"

"She was just the first redhead I could think of. I don't know who'd play me, maybe George Clooney.''

"Poor Lifetime can't afford George. I think you'll have to be happy with Lorenzo Lamas.''

"Fantastic,'' Jose said.

After a minute, Jose looked her way and said, "I waited outside your apartment, thinking of how to tell you the truth about all this bullshit. Then I fell asleep."

She thought about what that meant, then said, "The 'shrink' I saw was a friend of a friend, during the divorce. He gave me some Xanax to help me sleep, of which I took about three."

Jose nodded. "Ah, the media."

"Can we get some coffee?" Casey said, yawning. "And, yes, doughnuts. Doughnuts would be good.''

Jose pointed to a foam cup with a plastic lid in the cup holder between them.

"Still hot," he said. "You were sleeping too good. They didn't have doughnuts. I checked."

"Where are we?" she asked, peeling off the lid and sipping the coffee.

He nodded up ahead. Casey saw the lines of traffic, mostly trucks, and the booths filled with agents.

"My guy's on the midnight shift," he said, turning left and crossing the lane of oncoming traffic, pulling into the parking lot of the drab brick government building with its flagpoles for the United States and the State of Texas. "They got him on a desk right now, working on some unmanned-aircraft thing. Usually he's out on a four-wheeler."

Jose pulled into a space and flipped open his cell phone to let his friend know they'd arrived. A couple of minutes later, a man with bronze skin and a brush-broom mustache walked their way wearing the dark blue uniform of a border agent. Jose got out of the Mercedes and greeted him with a hug before the agent climbed into the backseat and reached forward to shake hands with Casey.