Mission Road (20 page)

AFTER THE CALL, I DIDN’T CARE MUCH ABOUT THE KITCHEN
burning around me, or the men with guns outside. All I cared about was getting out, getting to Maia.

“Twenty minutes?” Ralph cursed Etch Hernandez with Spanish epithets even I had never heard. “That’s impossible,
vato.
”

“Bigger fire,” I advised.

We splashed more brandy, piled on grocery bags and washrags and cardboard boxes, and in no time we had a nice blaze going along the back wall. Soon the curtains and the back door were in flames.

Ralph smashed out a window with his baseball bat. He threw a Molotov cocktail toward the driveway and was rewarded with a loud
BA-ROOM
and some surprised yelps from the men outside.

“The kitchen’s on fire!” one of them yelled.

Full points for powers of observation.

They banged on the back door, found it too hot to touch.

“Around to the front!” somebody yelled.

Perfect.

The guys on the interior door hammered away with newfound zeal. The refrigerator rattled and rocked.

“Another few seconds,” Ralph said.

“Smoke,” I warned. “No time.”

I could barely see. Forget breathing.

Ralph climbed onto the kitchen sink. He kicked open the only window that wasn’t in flames and jumped. I was right behind him.

The diversion almost worked. At least, there was no one waiting to shoot us as we crashed through a pomegranate bush and tumbled onto the back lawn.

We wove between banquet tables, trying to avoid broken champagne glasses and soggy paper plates of leftover food.

We were just passing the pavilion tent, about halfway to the woods, when Alex Cole yelled, “Freeze!”

He had anticipated our plan well enough to position himself on the back veranda of the house. He’d exchanged his Krispy Kreme doughnuts for an automatic assault rifle. Even from halfway across the yard, I was pretty sure a full clip would turn us into Swiss cheese.

Ralph dropped his baseball bat. I lowered my gun. I couldn’t bring myself to drop it. Not yet.

Alex smiled. He should’ve shot us immediately, but he was too busy enjoying the moment, surveying us as if we were two more fixtures on the estate that would soon be his.

“Come on over,” he called amiably. “Let’s talk.”

Smoke boiled from the kitchen windows, making a black twister that stretched into the winter sky.

Behind Alex, the glass doors opened. Two mobsters wheeled out a very annoyed-looking Guy White in a hospital chair. Madeleine stood behind him, still in her painting clothes, still looking stunned.

I called, “Good morning, Mr. White.”

Alex turned involuntarily.

Mr. White snapped, “Watch
them,
you idiot!”

That moment of surprise was all we needed. Ralph and I dove through the doorway of the pavilion tent and hit the ground as the assault rifle opened fire, ripping through the cloth sides of the tent, shattering punch bowls and glasses.

The firing stopped.

My ears were ringing, but, miraculously, Ralph and I both seemed to be unharmed.

Mr. White was wheezing, “—thousand-dollar rental tent! Put that damn rifle away!”

Alex: “But—”

“Go get them, you idiot! Madeleine, you, too!”

Ralph and I were surrounded by broken glass ornaments and smashed finger sandwiches. Red punch made a waterfall off the edges of the tablecloth.

“Go out the back,” Ralph told me. “I’ll distract them.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“
Vato,
you got to get to Maia—”

“No, Ralph. We leave together. Come on.”

I didn’t wait for an argument. I ran for the back exit, but before we could bust through, the tent flap opened. I found myself staring down the barrel of Madeleine White’s pistol.

“Drop it,” she said.

I couldn’t think of anything better to do than comply. I set the .38 on a folding chair, in the middle of a platter of shrimp.

“Madeleine,” I said. “Thirty feet, we hit the woods and we’re gone. Maia is in trouble. Please.”

She stared at me bitterly, as if I were offering her an impossible choice—a decision where all her options were fatal.

“Step aside,” I pleaded. “Five-second head start. Anything.”

“I have a better idea,” said a voice behind us. Alex was standing at the front of the tent, his rifle aimed at my chest. “Why don’t you two come with me, and we’ll start the morning over again.”

•                           •                           •

I DISLIKE EXECUTIONS. ESPECIALLY MY OWN.

Guy White sat in his portable wheelchair in the gazebo, before the giant Christmas tree. He listened in deadly silence as I told him about my phone conversation with Lieutenant Hernandez.

Alex stood at his boss’s side, assault rifle ready. Two other guards, plus Madeleine. Our odds of survival were somewhere south of hopeless.

I noticed small details with perfect clarity. White had an oxygen tube strapped around his nose, but it wasn’t plugged into anything. There was a toothpaste stain on his burgundy Turkish bathrobe. His white flannel pajamas were missing the middle button. In the morning light, his skin was translucent, every vein in his hands and face inked in perfect detail.

The air smelled of smoke. The column billowing up from the house could probably be seen for miles. Sirens wailed in the distance.

I’d lost the bear slippers somewhere between the kitchen and the gazebo. Under my feet, the frozen grass felt like ice shards.

“You expect me to believe this,” Mr. White said at last. “You expect me to believe a police lieutenant—”

“He has my girlfriend.” It took every ounce of my will not to run, to make a mad dash across the lawn. “He’s going to kill her. We have to leave
now.
”

“How foolish do you think I am?” White’s voice trembled with rage. He looked at Ralph. “Why did you kill my son?”

Alex Cole cleared his throat. “Sir, the police’ll be here any minute. If we’re gonna take care of these—”

“I want to hear,” White said. “I want to hear his reasons.”

“Sir,” Alex insisted, “the house—”

“Let it burn.”

The house obeyed that order. Flames flickered in the second-story windows.

White stared at Ralph, waiting.

If Ralph was scared for his life, he didn’t show it. His feet were flecked with grass, his sweatpants sooty, his T-shirt peppered with shrapnel holes and red punch stains. Bits of broken glass glinted in his hair. But he stood up straight, looked Mr. White in the eyes.

“I didn’t kill Frankie,
patrón,
” he said. “You did that.”

The old man’s tiny supply of blood collected in his cheeks. “How dare you.”

“Maybe you didn’t hold the murder weapon,” Ralph said, “but that doesn’t matter. Frankie died because he hated you. He told me what was going to happen. I just didn’t understand.”

“I trusted you—”

“To save him. I know. Couldn’t be done. Couple of nights before he was murdered, Frankie came into the pawnshop. He’d been drinking. He said he’d had an argument with you. Said you were trying to arrange a marriage for him.”

White closed his eyes, his face like paper. “It was for his own good.”

“Frankie confessed to me about killing those women. He said he couldn’t control the anger. He wished you’d sent him away, like you did Madeleine. He said Madeleine was the lucky one to get away from you.”

Madeleine stared at Ralph. White’s guards all wore the same expression—as if they’d just stepped into a nest of rattlesnakes.

“Frankie wanted out,” Ralph said. “He was going to keep killing until somebody killed him or you were forced to send him away. And you know what the worst is? I thought about doing it. About killing him. After he told me about the women . . . I was thinking to myself: I might have to do it. I even thought Mission Road would be the best place.”

Ralph looked at Madeleine, his eyes full of sympathy, as if she were the one with the terminal disease. “I’m sorry,
chica.
Some people can’t be saved. I’ve kept that in mind ever since Frankie died. Every time I had to hurt somebody, kill somebody—I pictured Frankie. And I pictured your father. I imagine you felt the same way.”

The specks of paint on Madeleine’s face, the streak in her hair, made me think of the portrait in Frankie’s closet—a twelve-year-old girl, composed entirely from shades of blue.

The sirens got closer. We were losing too much time. Even if I left right now, I wasn’t sure I could make it to Maia.

“I should kill you,” Mr. White said. With his translucent skin and the air tube around his nose, he looked like some sort of ancient, disoriented catfish, brought to the surface for the first time in its long life.

“Not going to solve anything,
patrón,
” Ralph said. “Let us go. Let us help Maia.”

Alex raised his rifle. “Let me, sir.”

White said nothing. His eyes were colorless in the morning light.

At that moment, I knew Alex would make the call for him. We would die. As soon as he shot Ralph and me, Alex Cole would come into his inheritance. He would become Guy White’s willpower, his voice, his decision-maker.

I was bracing to charge—to risk pushing Alex down and making a break for it—when Madeleine said, “Alex, put down the gun.”

Guy White had trouble focusing on his daughter. “Madeleine?” he said hazily. “Go to your room.”

“My room is on fire, Daddy.”

It was the first time I’d heard her call him anything but
sir.

She took a set of car keys out of her pocket, threw them to Ralph. “Go on. Help your friend.”

“What?”
Alex protested.

“Madeleine.” Mr. White’s face was weary and pale. “You have no right—”

She wheeled on him so fast his voice faltered.

“I—have—every—right.” She turned toward the guards. “My father isn’t well. I’ll watch after him. You two go to the front yard. Wait for the police.”

One of them said, “But—”

“He isn’t well,” Madeleine repeated, “so you’re going to listen to me. I am his daughter. I am responsible. Understand?”

“These men,” Mr. White said, staring at Ralph and me. His tone sounded watery, petulant. “They burned my house, they killed my son . . .”

He seemed to be trying to summon up his anger, but he couldn’t do it. His thoughts trailed off, lost in the smoke. He gazed at his mansion, now burning with an audible roar.

Madeleine raised an eyebrow at the guards. They got the message. They made a wide arc around Guy White’s daughter and left the gazebo, heading toward the front yard.

“The keys are for the white Lexus,” Madeleine told us. “Hurry.”

“This is bullshit,” Alex growled. “They move an inch—”

“Alex,” Madeleine said, “you will stand down. Arguello, Navarre—go.”

Emergency lights flashed against the trees, maybe a block away.

We had no more time.

We left the gazebo, jogged over the frozen grass. Every step, I expected to be shot between my shoulder blades. I knew the only thing keeping us alive was Madeleine’s sheer force of will.

Somehow, her willpower held. We made it to the corner of the house. We found the white Lexus. By the time the police vehicles and the fire truck came screaming up Contour Drive, we were a block away, a column of smoke rising behind us from what used to be the White kingdom.

HERNANDEZ AND MAIA WERE WAITING
on the shoulder of Mission Road.

Hernandez sat on the hood of Maia’s car. He was immaculate as always in a chocolate-colored suit. No anger in his eyes—just a chill, dangerous calm.

Maia stood two feet in front of him. She wore her black wool pantsuit, a Band-Aid on the cut under her eye. Hernandez and she might have been mistaken for a rich couple, broken down on the side of the road on their way home from church.

I didn’t see a gun on Hernandez, but that meant nothing. Maia wouldn’t be standing there if she saw any chance of overpowering him.

“Plan?” Ralph asked me.

My throat felt raw. Neither of us was armed. Madeleine’s charity had not extended as far as providing firearms.

We were dealing with a killer, in a place where he had killed before.

“It’s you he wants,” I told Ralph. “Stay in the car. Let me talk to him.”

“He’ll kill Maia.”

A small hot wire threaded its way through my chest. I’d already decided I would have to take down Hernandez, one way or the other. If it came to Ralph or me getting hurt, there couldn’t be any choice. Ralph had a family.

But Maia being here . . .

“We go talk to him,” I said. “If it gets bad . . .”

We both knew there was no backup plan. We couldn’t call the police. Sunday morning, a cold winter day on Mission Road—there would be no witnesses, no passersby, no help.

We got out of the car.

When we got within twenty feet of Hernandez, he held up his hand—
stop.

“You’re late,” he said.

“Tres, go,” Maia pleaded. “Get away.”

She clutched her stomach. Her face was ashen. I realized why she wasn’t trying to fight Hernandez: She was in pain, close to collapsing.

I wanted to run to her. I wanted to get her safely into the car. Most of all, I wanted to pulverize Hernandez—to do to him what he’d done to Frankie White.

“How’d it happen, Etch?” I asked. “Did Frankie say something to you when you pulled him over? Something so bad you had to destroy him?”

“Franklin White deserved to die, Navarre. Surely we can agree on that.”

“Tres,” Maia said, “you don’t understand—”

Hernandez grabbed the back of her neck. From under his jacket he produced a .357 Magnum, identical to Ralph’s. “No need to confuse him, Miss Lee. Arguello, come here.”

I wanted to tell Ralph not to go, but my voice wouldn’t work. All I could do was stare at the muzzle of the gun against Maia’s throat.

Ralph stepped forward. “What’ve you done to my wife now?”

“Nothing yet,” Hernandez admitted. “Miss Lee interrupted me. But there’s time. Ana won’t be conscious for several hours at best.”

“Let Maia go,” Ralph said.

“As soon as you join me,” Hernandez said. “Right here by the car, please.”

“Ralph, no,” I said.

I thought about a story Maia had once told me, about a killer in San Francisco who’d controlled eight people with a Smith & Wesson .22. He’d directed his victims to tie each other up. Then one by one he shot each in the head. They could’ve overpowered him easily. Instead, they followed orders. They trusted the man’s reasonable tone. Maia and I had promised each other we would never allow anyone to control us like that.

And yet there I stood, frozen, as Ralph walked toward the BMW. He stopped where Hernandez told him, next to the left headlight, just out of reach of Maia.

“Now, Miss Lee,” Hernandez said, “go to your boyfriend . . . I’m sorry, your
client.
”

He gave her a shove. She stumbled forward. When she got close, I pulled her to me, hugged her tight. Her skin was warm. Her hair smelled of cinnamon.

“Stay back when it starts,” I murmured in her ear. “Please.”

“Tres—”

“Please.”

“What now, Hernandez?” Ralph spread his hands. “You shoot me like you shot Ana?”

Hernandez’s expression turned almost apologetic. “I thought about it. I truly did. But you know what? It’ll work better if I let you live.”

He turned the gun on Maia and me. “Start practicing your story, Arguello. I killed Frankie White. I killed these two with the same gun I used to shoot your wife. I’ll be amused to hear you try to convince Kelsey.”

“Lieutenant.” Maia’s voice quavered. “This isn’t what Lucia would want.”

Hernandez’s eyes were glassy with self-loathing. He looked the same way Dr. Allen Vale had, standing on his estranged wife’s front lawn, just before he fired his shotgun. “Don’t talk to me about Lucia, Miss Lee. She never got what she wanted. She never had a chance.”

“Let them go,” Ralph said. “You want me, let them go.”

“I didn’t want you next to me so I could kill you, Arguello,” Hernandez assured him. “I brought you here to get the angle right. You’ll shoot them from here, you see, because they were about to betray you. They were about to turn you over to me. This is a good spot for betrayals, Arguello. One of the best.”

Wind rustled in the live oaks. Frozen leaves crackled like glass. I imagined Frankie White standing here in the final moments of his life. The last thing he would’ve seen: a stretch of barbed wire, a stand of cactus, a crumbling stretch of blacktop.

A car engine roared somewhere in the distance, the squeal of tires back toward South Alamo. I knew it couldn’t have anything to do with us. There was no luck along this stretch of road. Too many lives had ended here.

“It’ll be your word against mine,” Hernandez told Ralph. “Try convincing Kelsey. Tell him I’m going back to the hospital later to kill your wife. I’ll love to hear you plead.”

I squeezed Maia’s hand. I would shield her as best I could, put myself in front of her. Maybe I could charge Hernandez, close the fifteen feet between us, throw off his aim.

The car engine got louder behind us.

“You’re going to jail, Arguello,” Hernandez said. “Your daughter will grow up without you, knowing her father is a monster. You’ll live without friends, without your wife. You’ll have a taste of what my life has been like.”

“Etch,” Maia said. “You didn’t kill Frankie.”

I didn’t know what she meant, but Hernandez’s jaw tightened. “You think like Ana, Miss Lee. I’m afraid that’s why you need to die first.”

He raised the gun toward Maia’s heart and I charged, knowing I would die.

Fifteen feet. No chance.

But Ralph was a lot closer.

He tackled Hernandez and both men slammed against the hood of the BMW. The .357 exploded—a thunderclap in the cold morning air.

I crashed into them, tearing Hernandez away from Ralph, shoving the lieutenant to the ground. I slammed my fist into his nose and the Magnum skittered across the asphalt.

“Tres!” I heard Maia scream.

I turned around. Ralph stumbled backward. He collapsed against the barbed wire fence, pulled his knees up to his chest. Maia screamed again.

A shriek of tires. A black sedan fishtailed to a stop behind us.

Kelsey and a young plainclothes officer got out.

The younger guy drew his piece, aimed it at me. “Step away from the lieutenant!”

I was too dazed to wonder what they were doing here. I was too dazed to move.

“Now!” The young guy’s hands turned white on the handle of his gun.

Kelsey scanned the scene. He took in Ralph, Maia, the Magnum in the middle of the street.

“Stand down,” he ordered his companion. “Call an ambulance.”

“Sir?”

“Do it!” Kelsey barked. He marched toward us, grabbed the lieutenant and pulled him into a sitting position.

Hernandez’s nose was broken. There was a lightning bolt of blood under his left nostril.

“Kelsey? How—”

“Madeleine White,” Kelsey said tightly. “She called with an interesting story, suggested you might be here.”

“You believed her. You came with no SWAT team.”

“No, sir. I was hoping—”

“You could resolve things without force.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Full of surprises.”

Kelsey looked back at his colleague. “Bring me some handcuffs.” He looked at me grimly. “You, take care of your friend.”

“What?”

“
Now,
goddamn it,” Kelsey growled. “The ambulance is coming.”

Only then did I come out of my shock enough to realize what had happened.

Maia was kneeling next to Ralph. His face was coated with sweat. He was holding his gut. There was blood between the cracks of his fingers.

I rushed over to him, reached instinctively to move his hands, but Maia said, “Don’t, Tres.”

“Vato—”

“Damn it, Ralph,” I said, my voice cracking. “Why did you do that?”

He raised his eyebrows.
“Qué más?”

What else?

I imagined we were back at graduation night, sitting in the Brackenridge Park Skyride, Ralph trying to convince Frankie and me that anything was possible, trying to sell us on his crazy dreams as we balanced precariously a hundred feet in the air.

“
Vato,
tell Ana . . .”

“Don’t talk,” I said.

I heard a distant siren, or maybe it was just my desire to hear one. The ice on the road melted against my jeans, soaking into the denim.

“Remember what you promised,” he croaked.

“You’re going to get better,” I told him. “And when you do, I’m going to kick your ass, you hear me?”

He gazed at the bare branches overhead. He seemed to be looking for something. Behind us, I heard Kelsey snapping plastic cuffs on his superior officer, reading Hernandez his rights.

I put my hand on Ralph’s forehead. His skin was cool and damp.

By the time I was sure I heard a siren in the distance, Ralph’s eyes seemed to have found something to focus on—something small and bright and remarkable, far above us.