Don't Lose Her (21 page)

Chapter 36

G
od, that wail!

The cry of pain that speared through the door of the big cabin went straight to Rae's heart, and she had no check on her reaction the way Danny always did. She'd bolted, just turned and ran out the door and went straight for the woman's cabin as if the throat-burning howl had physically reached across the deck and dragged her to the room.

“Mommy?” she thought she heard, in a tiny girl's voice that she hadn't heard outside her own dreams for many years. And there it was, the nightmare appearing behind her open eyes as if the thing had happened yesterday, or this morning, or right this moment.

That day, years ago, she'd walked home alone to their trailer from the bus stop like she had dozens of times when her mother was too sick to meet her there. “Sorry, Rae-Jay, but Mommy's a little sick today, you know? But I do have your Oreos up there on the counter, baby.”

And indeed the package of Double Stufs was there, right next to the near-empty bottle of Allen's brandy, which Rae had always thought was named after her mysterious uncle whom her mom talked about having to go see, as in, “Got to go visit old Uncle Allen tonight,” as she walked out after doing her makeup and hair and whispering, “Girl, you still got it,” into the bathroom mirror.

But that day, her mother was not on the couch with the iced washcloth on her forehead when Rae walked in. At the tender age of seven, Rae had simply gone to the couch herself and found the remote for the TV and pushed the
ON
button. It responded with a howl that seemed to vibrate the thin walls of the trailer. At first, she was confused, as if the volume had been left up at maximum, and the noise caused her to start fumbling with the remote—before she realized the horrific sound was not coming from the television, but from down the hallway.

She got up from the couch and started toward her mother's bedroom and the ugly sound. At the time, she didn't know why tears were running down her face. When she got to the doorframe's edge and peeked around into the room, she saw the man on the bed first. He was in an unfamiliar pose above her mother, straddling not her hips this time, but her chest and shoulders. The fingers of his left hand gripped a fistful of her mother's beautiful hair, and in his right hand he held a knife with a flashing blade against her mother's cheek as he said: “Isn't gonna be so pretty no more for them other fellas now are you, Glory?”

In between Rae's mother's cries of pain as the knife edge cut deep into her perfect unblemished skin, she somehow sensed Rae's presence and looked over at her daughter with those penetrating green eyes and called out: “Run, Rae-Jay. Run, baby, just run.”

Rae had run. But it was the last time. She had not run from anything in her life since and never would: not from the funeral that followed. Not from the men who would later try to lure her and mistreat her and disrespect her, who ended up with a fist to their own faces or a gouge from a sharp key on the paint job of their fancy Town Cars. Not from the life she swore would not belong to anyone but her. Now, she was running toward the sound of a woman's cries of pain and not away, never away again.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Rae said as she entered the cabin and saw the woman lying on the bed, her back propped up, her knees in the air, her feet planted at the bottom edge of the mattress.
What, are you just gonna pop it out onto the damn floor?
she thought as she moved around the kitchen island and without so much as a plan grabbed a chair, positioned it at the end of the bed, and then sat between the V of those quivering thighs.

“OK, lady,” Rae said. “You're OK now. This is all gonna be OK.”

The cries had subsided. The woman had gone quiet but was breathing as if she was gulping air in short supply. Rae knew, and didn't know how she knew, that this was not a good thing, as she'd once seen a stupid girl get all hyper at a party in the woods back home and fall into one of these air-sucking binges to the point where she passed the hell out. Rae knew instinctively that a pregnant woman having a baby should not be passing out.

“Easy now, ma'am. Try to calm down, OK? Slow down that breathing, OK?”

Damned if the woman didn't just obey her. The lady calmed. Her breaths became shallow. She opened her eyes and focused on Rae's face and the tendons in her neck loosed. The throbbing blue vein plumped up on her left temple eased back into her pale skin.

“Oh God, thank you. Are you a nurse? Who else is here? Are you with a rescue team?” The woman started babbling, looking past Rae as if a damn ambulance crew was going to come through the door. But Rae knew the only one behind her was Danny, and she could see the flicker of disappointment in the woman's eyes.

It was the first time that Rae had actually seen the lady's face: her large green eyes all moist from the effort and pain of the contractions, her skin pale and perfectly unblemished just like Rae's mother's, and her auburn hair damp from sweat still beaded up on her forehead. She was a pretty woman, Rae thought, and then immediately wondered how a woman could still be pretty after all the shit she'd been through over the last few days.

“Get some more towels from the bathroom, Danny,” Rae said, ignoring the woman's questions. “And some water for her to drink.”

She did not turn around while giving the orders and instead actually reached out and gently pushed at the insides of the lady's knees, widening the view and recognizing the urgency. “Jesus, Rae,” Danny said from behind her. “You know how to do this?”

“The woman's having a baby, Danny, it ain't rocket science. You been down to Morgan's farm during calving season, right? Well, it's the same thing. You just help a little if you need to and let nature do the work.”

It was that last statement that made her look up again into the woman's face and say, “Sorry, ma'am,” with the realization of who exactly was doing all the work here. The lady's eyes were focused now. Even if she'd missed the distinctive sound of gunfire outside, she seemed rational and remarkably in the moment. Even Rae had flinched at the
pop, pop, pop, pop
sound and had told Danny to lock the door behind them. She was thinking of Geronimo and the sight of that damn knife in his belt. But the woman was thinking other thoughts.

Rae took a bottle of water that Danny brought over and offered it to the woman. She drank a little while looking directly at them. Then the lady asked the loaded question: “So, Danny and Rae, are you a couple, or just a couple of kidnappers?”

Rae's first reaction was to say something bitter, something about being the only two people here that could help her now, when the woman's contractions began yet again. But the pretty face twisted up. Now, all the woman could say in between her cries was, “Please, Billy, please.”

Then hell itself seemed to rush into the room when the door to the cabin exploded open with the sound of splintering wood and wrenching metal.

Danny started saying “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” but Rae kept her attention on the crowning head of the coming infant and did not look back.

Chapter 37

W
hen Diane came out of the contraction, she opened her eyes and felt relief—the tingling, burning sensation that her obstetrician had aptly warned of as a “ring of fire” had subsided. Then she felt hope as she began to recognize that a young woman was at the end of the bed, poised as if to help her. This was followed by confusion as names and utterances and connections began to make less and less sense.

“Oh, thank you,” she said when she realized that this young woman, not much more than a girl, was sitting there, looking oddly but attentively into Diane's eyes.

“Who are you?” Diane asked, and then looked past her. “Who else is here?” She was thinking rescue team, paramedics, cops, Billy.

But the young woman did not answer. Instead, she turned to the guy standing next to her, whom Diane recognized as the young man who had given her breakfast and been embarrassed when he'd walked in to find her nude on the bed after her shower. He was the one who'd hidden the cell phone she'd used to send Billy her plea for help, what, hours, a day ago?

The contractions had started in earnest after that trip across the room to reach the phone, and her sense of time had warped as she tried to keep track of how many seconds each one lasted and how much recovery time she had between the absolutely agonizing periods of pain and overwhelming urges to push.

When the girl ordered the guy to get more towels out of the bathroom and called him “Danny,” Diane had tucked the name away. Then the girl reached out and carefully pushed Diane's knees apart, and Diane wondered if the baby was crowning. It had to be crowning now with the sensations she felt, but she couldn't see from this angle.

Then she'd heard the boy say, “Jesus, Ray. You know how to do this?” and Diane was hoping the girl would say, yes, she'd been a midwife for years and knew exactly what she was doing, but instead she made some crude barnyard analogy. So Diane had focused instead on “Ray.”

It wasn't a man's name the boy had uttered before; it was a girl, this girl.

But before either could answer yet another contraction began, and all Diane could do was close her eyes and push, push, push. Intellectually, she knew these late contractions were supposed to last a minute, maybe a minute and a half, but damn, they felt like an eternity. Even if she couldn't see, the baby had to be crowning, its head showing, but AAAAAAAGH.
Damn it, child, enough already!

This time, when the pain subsided and Diane opened her eyes, the surprise wasn't a slick new baby, but the face of Max Freeman peering over the young woman's shoulder. Diane took a deep breath and felt such relief that when she heard the girl say something to Max about shooting someone, she asked where Billy was.

“He's coming, Diane. He's coming,” Max said. The seriousness of his face, his familiar face, and the realization that they'd found her, found her alive, and that finally this nightmare was going to end gave her both a sensation of relief and one of purpose.

“I'm having a baby, Max,” she said stupidly, and felt a smile come to her face, an actual smile she had not felt in forever.

“Yeah, I see,” Max said. “But it doesn't look like you're in any shape to wait, Diane. So maybe we need to get to it. Aren't you supposed to be breathing or something? Getting ready for one final push?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Diane said. “I need to do this. We need to do this.” She looked from him to the girl between her knees and made eye contact with this young woman she did not know. Diane still had no idea what role the girl had played in the nightmare.

“Hold my hand, Max,” she said aloud. Max stepped over and took her hand and then for reasons she might never understand, she looked at the Danny kid and motioned with her other hand for him to come and take it. The kid moved to her side and Diane squeezed both of their hands as the ring of fire lit anew.

You didn't have to be a seer to know this was it, Rae thought to herself. The new guy in the room, this soaking wet guy with a gun, who obviously knew the woman and was here to rescue her, seemed to put the lady into an upbeat, let's-get-it-done headspace.

The woman, whom the new guy called Diane, asked for his hand and the guy gave it to her, which was good, Rae figured. But then she blew Rae away when she actually asked Danny to come over and hold her other hand and Danny didn't even hesitate, which maybe was good also.

The head of the baby was already starting to show and when this Diane person looked Rae in the eye, Rae saw her mother, heard her mother tell her to run. But goddamnit, Rae wasn't running again. Instead, she started telling the woman to push, push, and push.

The head got bigger, impossibly bigger, thought Rae, and then it seemed to slide past some final fraction of an inch and Rae could see an ear and a tiny chin and then what must have been a shoulder. With her finger, Rae reached and slipped the shoulder through, and God, the whole baby came sliding out onto the towels Danny had put down.

Holy crap—there it was, lying there. Instinctively, Rae picked up one of the clean washcloths and wiped the tiny face and it just opened up its little mouth and started in with high-pitched crying. There was no hanging her upside down. No slap on the butt. The kid just did it all on her own. This damn beautiful noise came out and filled the room.

I felt the very air in the room change, no more profoundly than if you walked from dark into light, cold into warm, storm into calm. The girl was urging Diane to push and I copied the mantra, like some stupefied fan in the crowd. Diane had asked for my hand and I gave it. Then she asked the kid for his and he stepped up like a trooper.

When Diane dipped her chin and started growling from the throat like a hair-raising lioness, her grip tightened to the point that my already-cold fingertips turned purple. It was as foreign an experience as I had ever had and I couldn't turn my eyes away, watching as the girl probed and caressed something down there as a nearly inhuman sound came from someone I felt somehow responsible for.

Then I saw the slick, wet form of the baby's head slip out into the girl's hands and Diane let out an “aaahhh” of relief that seemed to blur my vision. When I looked up at the kid across from me and saw tears running down his cheeks, I realized I was crying, too.

Then the baby started to cry and that pure sound, that announcement of life, infused the entire room with relief and wonder, and yes, a word I'm not sure I have ever actually used—joy.

“Oh, man,” the kid across from me said. “Oh, man, Rae, you did it! You delivered a baby! How the hell did you do that?”

The kid may have been confused as to who did all the work here, but the girl paid him no mind and wrapped the infant in a towel and placed the bundle up onto Diane's chest. The new mother seemed to fall into a rapture all her own.

“Your new baby girl,” the young woman said, and then sat down and leaned back in her chair.

Diane pressed her lips to the newborn's and said: “Victoria.”

Before long, a minute, two, maybe five, the newborn's crying and Diane's hushing tones were competing with and then overwhelmed by a mechanical sound coming from outside the room. Then the growing noise was joined by an amplified voice yelling: “This is the FBI. Come out with your hands over your heads. Come out now. This is the FBI.”

The two kids finally made sense of the cacophony and looked at me. Diane closed her eyes.

“Any weapons in here?” I asked them.

The kids looked at my waistband where I'd tucked the P226 Navy and shook their heads.

“OK. Then let's be cool. They've got to have paramedics with them. You two just follow me out with your hands on your heads and do what I do.”

When I came through the busted-open door of the cabin into the sunlight, I picked up on at least half a dozen men dressed in dripping wet SWAT gear moving up on all sides of the deck with weapons raised in firing position. Two entered the big cabin. Two more moved on top of the Indians still lying on the deck, preparing to flex-cuff them. Two more were already checking the body of the big man. I took three steps forward with my hands on the top of my head and all the guns swung to me.

“OK, OK, OK,” I said, and went down on my knees into a position of submission so that no nervous trigger finger would make a disastrous mistake. “Two more coming out behind me,” I said, hoping the kids were doing what I'd asked them to.

The men over the big Indian's body came first to me with the gun sights of their automatic rifles on my chest, dead center, as trained.

“Handgun in my waistband,” I said, as calmly as I could. “I'm not touching it. You take it, Officers.”

While one covered me, the other stepped forward and yanked the P226 Navy away. The sound of yet another outboard engine whirred as reinforcements arrived on black inflatables.

The words
clear, clear, clear
were coming from the cabins. Only then did someone with the look of authority come out of the growing phalanx in dark clothing and a baseball cap. I recognized him immediately as Agent Howard, from the street where Diane had been abducted.

“Well, well—Private Dick Freeman,” he said, his eyes hidden again by sunglasses. “I see you've found your friends.”

He nodded at a place behind me and I turned to see the two kids on their knees while other agents bent to zip-tie their hands behind their backs.

“No, Agent, my real friend is the judge who has just given birth to her baby in that room and is in need of immediate medical assistance.”

Howard glanced behind the kids at another agent who was half inside the doorway and nodding at my statement.

Howard went for his radio and called for an immediate landing of the medical evacuation chopper to the south side of the platform.

I put two and two together and asked the obvious.

“You've been waiting?”

Agent Howard did not answer.

“You've had a medevac team hovering above us? For how long?”

“Until we could get eyes on the ground, Freeman—real eyes, professional eyes. Team eyes.”

I wasn't one of them and didn't want to be. When I'd gotten here, I wasn't so sure how long I was going to be waiting in the shadows. My first plan had been simply to gain intel, swim back to my kayak, and phone it back. Hearing Diane's wails of childbirth pain and misjudging them as the sound of her possible abuse had moved me to action. No one had yet tried to cuff me as I talked to Howard, so I rose to my feet. I don't like being looked down on. I admit I enjoy the height advantage I have over most people. Howard did not object.

“So what made you finally move, Agent?” I asked.

He turned his sunglass lenses to me. “ShotSpotter,” he said.

I knew the lingo. ShotSpotter was a new technology law enforcement was using in the city that detected the noise of a weapon firing and supposedly put a pinpoint location on the distinctive sound. How accurate it might be out here, I had no idea.

Howard turned away from me and indicated the body of the big Indian, now being ignored by the federal team as they moved about the secured camp.

“I'll assume that is some of your close work, Freeman?”

Even though it was technically a question, I stayed silent.

“When the ShotSpotter picked up four firings of a weapon, we moved in the interest of potential harm to the hostage.”

“So how long have you been waiting out there out of sight for an indication of potential harm, Agent?” I said, copycatting his vernacular. “An hour? Three hours? You knew I was here. You were using me.”

Howard almost cracked a grin, a smarmy little twitch at the corner of his lip.

“We've known exactly where you've been since the day you showed up at the federal building, Freeman. Your old-school cop car is parked about three miles in that direction,” he said, nodding to the northeast. “Your cell phone is much closer, probably a stone's throw away. I was a bit surprised you hadn't used it yet.”

“Yeah, well, I was busy,” I said, and then felt some urgency to explain myself. “The dead guy was apparently the leader of this little tribe. I shot him in self-defense. His knife is about four feet off the dock over there in the water. His prints will be all over it.”

While Howard and I went back and forth, a helicopter outfitted with pontoons came sweeping down out of the southern sky with a whooshing of wind and landed just off the dock. The rotors slowed to a stop. Lines were tossed, and the machine was pulled dockside.

First out was a medical team that disembarked with their gear and strode past us into the cabin where Diane still lay with her baby. Billy was out the door of the chopper right behind. He was dressed in a white oxford shirt and odd-looking rubber boots and stopped only for a second to take my hand and say, “Thank you, Max,” before moving on to see his wife and newborn.

“You're going to have to be debriefed, Mr. Freeman,” Howard said, still looking off away from my face. “So don't go swimming off, OK?”

He walked away, giving out orders as he went, and left me standing there. I was a suspect in a deadly shooting; the cause and veracity of my self-defense claim had yet to be determined. I had probably broken more than a few laws inserting myself into a federal investigation. What tribal laws I may have broken, I didn't give a shit.

The two cuffed kids had been moved out of the way and were sitting cross-legged with an armed agent standing guard. In all the hustle, they had not yet been separated and were whispering together; getting their stories straight, I figured.

I walked over, assuming that since Howard had been talking with me but had not cuffed me, the guard would allow it. I went down on my haunches.

“Whoever you two are, whatever your involvement in the kidnapping of that woman in there is, you helped her give birth to her baby,” I said. “Use that, for yourselves and for whatever comes after. Otherwise don't say a word to anyone until you have a lawyer.”