Lifeblood (31 page)

Rachel darted into an open space between buildings.

Mistake! It was too cramped for all-out running. Then she got a good look at what was ahead: a dead end.

Gasping for air, she stopped, tried to clear her head. Her brain was fiercely demanding flight but couldn’t tell her how to get away.

Then she saw a break in the wall ahead. A door? She raced toward it. Yes, a door. She grabbed the knob. It wouldn’t turn. Locked. Of course. No one with any sense would leave a door like this unlocked.

Was this it, then?

She slumped against the door and desperately twisted the knob again.

It still refused to turn.

But under her weight the door swung inward.

Rachel careened over the sill into darkness. There were only two windows, both high up. Large boxes were strewn across the floor, some obviously empty. A warehouse of some sort?

She slammed the door shut, but it bounced back toward her. She tried to slam it again before seeing that the bolt was extended just enough to hit the frame and prevent it from closing. She struggled to slide the old bolt, but nothing budged. Two syncopated thumps pounded at the door from outside.

The skeleton-head had arrived.

She threw her weight against the door. She already knew he was built for trouble. Years ago, she had taken a few lessons in self-defense but had forgotten most of it. She might stall him a bit, but there was no way to keep him out indefinitely.

With wild eyes, she explored the walls for another exit or something she could use as a weapon. Finding neither, she waited for the next assault on the door, then yanked it inward, toward her.

Grunting, he stumbled over the sill as she had. But his momentum was too great. He fell.

Rachel kicked him, tried to land another blow on his throat, but missed.

He lunged, catching her by the hair.

She grabbed a wad of soft flesh on the inside of his upper arm, dug her nails in and twisted.

He yelped, let go of her hair, then raised his fist and came at her again, roaring like a wild beast, terrible eyes staring through the skeleton sockets.

She brought up her knee, but the angle was bad. His roar barely hiccuped, growing instead even louder.

He reached for her neck, but the mask was now askew and must have been blocking his vision.

She seized his wrist and pulled it toward her. His first two fingers clawed at her. She grasped them, bent them back, hard, and heard the cracking of two knuckles.

“Bitch!” he howled. The first sound she had of his voice other than the grunts and roars.

“What do you want from me?” she screamed.

“Nada,” he snarled.

As his wrist bent, she caught sight of a tattoo on his forearm, the letters EME above an eagle with a snake.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Ha!” he grunted, reaching behind him with his other hand. “You never hear of Mexican Mafia?”

“Yes.”

He whipped his fist forward and she saw the muzzle of a gun.

“You never will again.”

The gun bucked. She wasn’t sure whether she saw the flash of light at his fist level first, or heard the explosive pop first.

Then the second shot came, and with it a roaring pain as her body folded up like a carpenter’s ruler and sank to the concrete floor.

Chapter Sixty

When Rachel came to, she was in a crumpled position in a dark, cramped space. And something seemed to be jolting it from below. Her left arm was numb. Something was wet. Very wet. Her shirt.

Then she remembered the jarring staccato of the gunshots, the sparks of light, the rising pain.

How badly was she hurt? There seemed to be a lot of blood. Her jaw was sticky with it. And her hair.

She tried to turn over to see if she could see anything, some clue to where she was. Pain blazed through her arm and shoulder and her breath rasped like sandpaper in her throat.

Something thumped under her again.

Understanding began like a tiny pinpoint of light and grew.

She was in the trunk of a car.

Mr. Skeleton-head was taking her somewhere. Somewhere he could either leave her to die or finish killing her at his leisure.

And there was nothing she could do about it.

A pale glow near her forehead slowly penetrated her consciousness. Rachel raised her chin and stared at it. She wasn’t sure whether she was having trouble focusing her eyes, or whether there was just nothing to focus on.

The car ran over something and she bounced off the trunk lid. A groan rose in her throat.

Something long and heavy slid into her side.

The driver turned a corner, sluing Rachel’s head against something hard. Here the street was smooth and she could hear the wheels skimming across the pavement beneath her.

Awareness of the source of the pale glow came all at once: a taillight. She ran her fingers over the space where the light was coming from. It was not large, but maybe….

She groped in the darkness behind her for the object that had slid into her. One end was angled to a small recessed cup, the other end was pointed. A tire iron. Grasping it, she scooted herself deeper into the trunk, and thrust the pointed end of the iron into the glow of light. A sharp pain stabbed through her chest, stopping her breath.

When the pain ebbed, she saw that the metal bar had missed its target.

Screwing her eyes shut, she willed herself to ram the bar again.

This time something buckled as it hit.

Slowly, agonizingly, Rachel forced herself to turn as far as she could onto her side and raised herself on her elbow. She tasted blood and realized her clenched teeth had bitten into her lower lip.

It hurts too much. I can’t.

But she managed the turn, and rammed the bar again. And again. From this angle her aim was better. At last the whole taillight assembly gave way, and the next blow brought the sound of heavy plastic cracking, then breaking away.

Did the driver hear it?

Apparently not. The car didn’t slow.

Now she could see daylight. The lens of the taillight must have fallen out into the street. If she could just get her hand out through the hole where it had been. She hated to give up that little bit of light, but could think of no other way, no other chance.

She eased her fingers toward the daylight.

Something bit into her wrist. She put her hand out into the open air, hoping against hope that there was a car behind this one, that someone, somewhere, would see her hand.

Minutes that seemed like hours passed. Rachel was wondering if she had passed out again when she heard the sound she wanted to hear more than any other—the whoop-whoop-whoop of a siren.

Not sure whether the police car was close enough to see, not even sure it was a police car, Rachel waved her hand wildly.

The wheels beneath her leaped into drag-race acceleration.

An electronically amplified voice rose over the sound of the engine: “Pull over and stop. Now.”

Mr. Skeleton-head did not slow. The car barreled on, picking up even more speed.

The electronic voice issued more orders. The car she was in didn’t change direction or pace.

Two claps, like lightning strikes, were followed by a loud hissing sound right beneath her head. The car began to rattle and sway, and something slapped rhythmically at the pavement as the driver finally braked.

The stop was sudden and Rachel was thrown to the back of the trunk, her bloodied hand ripped back inside, her entire body throbbing with wave after wave of pain.

Barely able to breathe, she heard the driver’s door open and the sound of feet running fast and hard. More than two feet.

Chapter Sixty-one

Soledad had let go of Gabe’s hand and run toward the plaza to bring Rachel a burrito she had chosen herself. Gabe called after her, but she was too excited to stop.

She was at the far end of the plaza trying to look into the face of every passerby who might be Rachel when she heard the noise. Soledad knew immediately what the sound was. She had heard more than a few shots fired back home in Mexico, and seen the blood that followed. Knives were more common, but there was always someone in town with a gun.

Face full of wariness, she tried to see where the sound might have come from. It was close enough to hear, but not nearby. A couple of kids followed by three adults came running toward her. “Gunshots,” someone yelled. The word echoed, gaining momentum, up and down Olvera Street.

Swept up in the crowd running away from the sound of the shots, she tried to look for Rachel and for Gabe, but she was too short to see anything but chests and armpits. She tried to stop and wait, stop and think, but the crowd would have none of that and kept pushing her along. She could do nothing to hang onto the burrito or the marionette and the thrashing bodies swept both away.

Soledad stumbled and fell against a heavy-set woman.

“Perdón,” the girl said, but the woman only scowled and kept moving.

The mass of people finally began to thin out and head in different directions. She leaned against the side of a building and tried to examine the tide of humanity as it passed. She stood there for a long time.

If only she had come here in a car, she could maybe find that. She began walking along Cesár Chavez trying to retrace the path of the taxi they had arrived in.

She kept going, hoping to see something familiar. When she came to the freeway, she recognized that and followed the street past it, then turned left at the first stoplight. But nothing else looked familiar. If only she had paid more attention.

“Are you lost?” A car slowed, a window rolled down.

Soledad shook her head uncertainly. Policía. The face looked kind, but she didn’t like police. Maybe they were different here, but at home they could be rough and mean and one stayed out of their way.

Then her mind shook loose the perfect solution. There were a few scattered pedestrians. Soledad chose an old black woman hobbling along the sidewalk with a walking stick.

“Hospital?” she said. “Por favor. Dónde esta hospital?”

The woman frowned at her, but it was a thoughtful frown, not a forbidding one.

Soledad remembered the English words and pronunciation. “Where-is-hospital?”

“Are you ill, child?”

The girl shook her head vigorously, then said slowly. “I want hospital.” English words came better to her when she wasn’t nervous.

“Well, the closest one is Jefferson.”

Soledad nodded her head as vigorously as she had shaken it.

“Two stop lights.” The woman pointed behind her. “You understand stop light?” She pointed at the one on the corner where they stood.

“Yes.”

The woman held up two fingers. “Two stop lights. Then go that way.” She pointed north. “Keep walking. You will come to it.”

“Gracias. Thank you,” the girl said and began running. She did not actually want to go to the hospital, but she knew if she could find Jefferson, she could find Rachel’s garage from there.

999

Rachel had no idea how much time had passed when she opened her eyes again.

She blinked and glanced around the small, plain room trying to remember where she was and why. It looked like a hospital room. Her bed was narrow and railings had been raised on both sides. A couple of rectangular steel instruments, looking a little like robots in some space movie, stood just out of reach. There was a window, but she was too far from it to see much outside.

The walls once were yellow, but the paint was dull with age. The light from a ceiling fixture wasn’t bright and only succeeded in making things uglier. She lay there half conscious for a long time.

When her brain finally rid itself of sleep, a rush of dread went through her. Was this part of Jefferson’s secret black-market-organ wing?

Someone was sitting quietly on a chair in the shadows next to a closed door. He crossed his legs and folded his arms over his chest. The look on his face was one of patience. It bore the knowledge that he had been there for a long time, and would be there a good deal longer. Dan Morris.

She tilted her head toward him and now realized there was a tube at her nose and various other tubes elsewhere.

“What are you doing here?” Her voice was thin and hoarse. She tried to clear her throat but the effort made her chest hurt. “Why am I here?”

He nodded at her, raised a cell phone to his ear, pushed a button with his thumb and said something into it she couldn’t hear. Then he moved to the side of her bed and put his hands on the steel crib railing. The bright white of his shirt made his face seem even darker than it was.

“Welcome back,” he said, his eyes soft and dark. “We were hoping you would decide to stay with us.”

A woman in white pants and tunic pushed through the door to the room, moved immediately to the bed and put her fingers on Rachel’s pulse, her eyes on her own watch. The fingers were cold.

Morris went back to his post at the door while the nurse took Rachel’s blood pressure, then took her temperature with an electronic gadget that pinged.

“Well, now,” the nurse said cheerily, “this looks very good.” She jotted something on a clipboard and left.

Not to me it doesn’t.

The nurse had barely disappeared when the door swung open again and Emma, in a loose green dress and open white coat, strode to the bed.

“Why am I here?” Rachel asked as the doctor lowered the bed rail and went through the exact same process the nurse had.

“So we can monitor your progress. You were in critical care for a few hours. This is excellent improvement.”

“What happened?” Rachel asked, her voice still husky but becoming stronger. “How did I get here?”

“You were shot, Rachel. One of your lungs is collapsed, but it will re-inflate and you’ll be good as new.”

“Why was I shot?”

Emma’s eyes went blank. “I have no idea.”

“I think you do know, Emma. I think this whole thing, this whole cycle of strange happenings is tied together. And I think the link is this wing of this floor of this hospital.”

The three sentences exhausted Rachel. She looked at the ceiling, then back at Emma. “This thing have a contraption so I can sit up a little further?”