Kelly jerked at the sound, and glanced back, but wasn’t hit. “Can you run faster?”
Anita nodded. They sped up and put some distance between them and their hunters.
Nadine didn’t expect the gun to be so loud up here out of the draw. She looked around, then put the pistol away and told her two accomplices, “We gotta catch them. Let’s go.” They took off at a run, trying to close the two-hundred-yard gap. Nadine also pulled out her phone and made a call, did more listening than talking, then put it back. They would have help, and soon. She told the others, “slow down, all we have to do now is watch.”
Kelly glanced back and saw that Nadine and the two others were walking now, so she had Anita and her do the same. They could see the Stripes convenience store a hundred yards ahead, across the main street. Kelly couldn’t make out the street name yet, but she would soon.
Inside the store they would be safe. The police would come and Kelly could tell them everything. And she would get to hug her mother after that. The thought made her eyes moist.
A black pickup turned into the baseball park complex and came at a slow, deliberate pace toward them.
Kelly felt her stomach turn to ice. It was Suretta. She thought about running, but Suretta stopped in the street after turning the pickup sideways across it. She emerged, dragging Ramona across the center console by her bound wrists.
They stood by the open pickup door, and Suretta pulled her knife, touching it to Ramona’s throat. “Anita, come here and I won’t kill your mother.”
Kelly was stunned. Suretta would kill this woman in broad daylight, and in this public place. Before she could say anything, Anita raced to her mother.
“Anita, no!” Kelly said, but she didn’t chase after the child because Suretta had her eyes trained on Kelly, and those eyes chilled the eleven-year-old.
Suretta waited for Anita to reach them.
Kelly tried to think of something, anything she could do, but she only felt helpless as she watched things unfold. Her heart ached, and she almost sagged to the pavement.
When Anita reached them, Suretta opened the rear door and ordered Ramona and Anita inside, then closed it. She turned to look at Kelly for a moment as if deciding something, then she beckoned her over, using one hand in a come here movement.
Kelly didn’t move.
Suretta took a deep breath, then reached into the cab of the pickup and withdrew the small pistol.
Kelly skipped off the road and hid behind the trunk of a large mesquite, peeking out at the woman. She glanced behind and saw Nadine and the two others not moving, but standing two hundred yards away.
Suretta looked at the increasing traffic on South Bell Street, and at the Stripes store on the opposite side of Bell, and thought about the risk of hunting down this tough, smart kid while people watched.
She touched the pistol barrel to her head in a salute, hopped into the cab, and drove south on Bell.
Kelly couldn’t breathe as she watched them leave, and her heart fell like a cold, heavy stone in her chest. She’d tried so hard to keep Anita safe, to protect her, and now she had failed. The emotion of it overwhelmed her, and all she could do was weep. Guilt and grief, so deep and black it was as if her father died again.
Moving out from the tree, Kelly walked on the pavement like some sad zombie, shuffling toward South Bell, almost unaware of the speeding cars crossing left and right in front of her, and the three women coming behind her. She stopped at the intersection of the two roads and could go no further. She stood there, weeping and alone, and she wished so bad for someone to hold her.
Chapter 17
Hunter overslept. She awoke to early morning noises of traffic passing, and the brightness of a sliver of sun peeking over the horizon. Shadows still clung to the ground and the low places, but the tops of trees and buildings turned gold in the morning light. She stretched in the seat, then exited the Jeep and stretched her legs, walking into the convenience store to buy coffee and something to eat that she could hold while driving.
She decided on coffee, two chorizo and egg breakfast tacos, and a bottle of water, since she’d emptied the one she bought yesterday. Carrying all of that made for tricky maneuvers because the store ran out of bags, and again when she had to open the vehicle’s door, but she got it done. She took a bite of the first chorizo and egg taco and sipped the coffee before she started up Bell Street.
There were only a few side streets that she hadn’t checked yesterday, so doing them first thing this morning would be a good way start. Looming in her mind was the fear that the children were already taken, already gone, that she’d missed them somehow.
Ike w
ould be throwing a fit right now to get out of the hospital, she thought. That would be the next place she went, after checking these last streets in the small neighborhood just across the river for cars she might recognize, but first she would cruise Bell Street and see what she could see. She had a hunch.
As she came up on the Sport Complex on the left, just before the river, Hunter spotted a black pickup pull out of the street and leave a small child standing in the road. A hundred yards further from Bell Street was a group of three women, walking toward the child.
Hunter slowed as she watched the child sit on the curb and cover her head with her arms as if she was crying.
It was Kelly.
Hunter turned into the Complex area on the road and stopped by Kelly.