Читать книгу The Agent's Secret Child - B.J. Daniels - Страница 9

She smelled smoke. Just moments before, she’d been helping her daughter Elena look for her lost doll. Now, she stopped, alarmed. Her hand went to the small scars at her temple, memory of the fire and the pain sending panic racing through her. Why would Julio build a fire on such a hot spring day in Mexico?

Then she heard the raised voices below her in the kitchen and the heavy, unfamiliar tread on the stairs.

The feeling came in a rush. Strong, sure, knowing, like only one she’d ever felt before. And yet she trusted this one. Whoever was coming up the stairs intended to harm her and her five-year-old daughter.

Fear paralyzed her as she realized she and Elena were trapped on the second floor. The only way out was the stairs the man now climbed. Her husband had barred the windows and he had the only key. She’d often wondered: what if there was another house fire and Julio wasn’t home?

But Julio always left someone to watch over them when he was gone.

The lumbering footsteps reached the second-floor landing. She shot her daughter a silent warning as she scooped the child into her arms and hurried to the attic stairs at the back of the house.

Her heart lunged in her chest as she moved through the hot cluttered attic, frantically searching for a place to hide. She found the only space large enough for the two of them in a dark corner behind an old bureau where the roof pitched out over the eave and a pile of old lumber formed a small partition.

She could hear the men ransacking the house, their voices raised in angry Spanish she couldn’t make out.

When she heard the plodding tread on the attic stairs, she’d motioned to Elena to keep silent but the child’s wide-eyed look told her that she understood their danger, just as she always had.

The man was in the attic now, moving slowly, carefully. The other men called to him, their feet thumping on the steps as they hurried up to him.

“Where is Isabella and the child?” one of the men demanded in Spanish. He had a quick, nervous voice like the brightly colored hummingbirds flickering in the bougainvillea outside the window.

“I don’t know,” a deeper voice answered. “Montenegro must have gotten them out before we arrived.”

“Damn Julio. Find the money. Tear the place apart if you have to, but find the money.”

“What if he gave it to her?” one of them asked, only to be answered with a curse.

As the men searched the house, she hugged her daughter tightly, determined to protect her child as she had since Elena’s birth, feeling as defenseless and trapped as she always had.

The men eventually searched the attic, including the bureau drawers, while she’d held her breath and prayed they wouldn’t find her and Elena crouched in the darkness and dust.

She took hope when she sensed the men were losing momentum, their movements less frantic but no less angry and frustrated.

“He wouldn’t hide it in the house,” one of the men snapped in Spanish. “He was too smart for that. So why are we wasting our time? He gave it to the woman and kid to hide somewhere for him.”

“Shut up!” the nervous one growled. “Keep searching.” But he said it as he tromped back down the stairs and soon the others followed.

She waited until she thought they’d left before she crept from the hiding place and stole with her daughter down one floor to her bedroom. With a chilling calm that frightened her more than the men had, she packed a bag with a few belongings.

She started at a noise behind her. Click, click, click. Someone was still downstairs, she thought, glancing at the phone beside her bed. It was making that faint clicking sound as the extension downstairs was being dialed.

With that same cold calm, she carefully picked up the extension. Two voices. One coarse as sand. The other nervous and quick and now familiar.

“I want my money, Ramon,” the coarse one snarled.

“The woman must have taken it and the child with her.”

“Find them. Make them tell you where Julio hid the money he stole from me. Then bring them and the money to me. Comprende?”

“Si, Señor Calderone, I understand.” The man named Ramon promised on his dead mother’s grave.

She hung up the phone and finished packing. Since the day she’d awakened in the hospital after the house fire to find Julio beside her bed, she’d suspected her husband was involved with drug lord Tomaso Calderone.

She’d awakened in pain. From her injuries and the surgeries. From the confusion in her mind.

But it was awakening to find herself pregnant that made her close her eyes and ears to Julio’s dealings, thinking only of her baby, her sweet precious daughter. Julio had never shown any interest in either of them, leaving her alone to cook and clean and raise the child he wanted nothing to do with.

Once she got some of her strength back physically and Elena was old enough to travel, she’d tried to leave her marriage. But Julio had caught her and brought her back, warning her that she and Elena could never leave. They were his and he would rather see them both dead than ever let them go.

She had looked into Julio Montenegro’s eyes and known then that he felt nothing for her or Elena, something she had long suspected. She and Elena were his prisoners for reasons she could not understand. But for Elena’s sake, she’d never tried to escape again.

Instead, without realizing it, she’d been biding her time, waiting. She hadn’t known what she’d been waiting for. Until today.

With the bag in one hand and Elena’s small hand in the other, she crept down the stairs as soon as the lower floor grew silent again.

Julio lay sprawled on the white tile floor of the kitchen in a pool of blood, his eyes blank, his body lifeless.

Shielding Elena from the sight, Isabella moved to him, her gaze not on his face, but on the knife sticking out of his chest.

With a cold, calculating detachment she hadn’t known she possessed, she grasped the knife handle in both hands, and pulled it from her husband’s chest. Then she calmly wiped the knife clean on his shirt and slipped the slim blade into her bag.

She looked down at his face for a moment, wishing she felt something. Then, like a sleepwalker, she knelt and searched his pockets, lifting him enough to remove the small wad of pesos his business associates had obviously passed up as too trivial to bother with from his hip pocket.

It wasn’t much money. Not nearly enough to get her and Elena out of Mexico, let alone to some place safe in the States. But was there any place safe from Calderone and his men?

She started to rise, then noticed that when she’d lifted Julio, she’d also lifted the edge of the rug under him. The corner of a manila envelope was now visible beneath the rug.

With that same chilling calm, she raised Julio enough to free the parcel from beneath him and the rug. She stared at the large envelope, then the fire he’d built in the stove. Had he been planning to burn the envelope? Why else would he have built a fire in a room already unbearably hot?

She looked again at the envelope. She knew it didn’t contain the missing money. It was too lightweight, too thin, to hold the amount of money she feared Julio had stolen. But maybe it had information about where he’d hidden the drug money. Why else would he try to burn it just before he’d been killed, if not to protect his ill-gotten gains?

She grasped the hope. If she had the location of the stolen money, then maybe she could buy her freedom and her daughter’s from Calderone.

As she lifted the parcel to look inside, something fell out and tinkled to the tiles. The tiny object rolled to a stop and as she stopped to pick it up, she saw that it was a silver heart-shaped locket. It had no chain and the silver was tarnished and scratched, making it hard at first to read the name engraved on it.

Abby.

She stared at the locket. Should that name mean something to her? Was it one of her husband’s mistresses? One of her lost relatives?

She pried the two halves open and stared down at a man’s photo inside, her fingers trembling. Not Julio. Not any man she’d ever seen before. She felt Elena beside her and tried to shield her from the body on the floor, but saw that her daughter was more interested in the locket—and the photo inside.

“Papacito,” Elena whispered, eyes wide as she stared down at the photo of the stranger.

“No, my little bright angel,” she said softly, sick inside. For the first time, she let herself hate Julio. She’d never wanted him as a husband, but he could have been a father to Elena, who desperately needed a father’s love.

Instead their daughter preferred to believe a total stranger in a small black-and-white photograph was her father rather than Julio Montenegro, the unfeeling man who’d given her life.

A car backfired outside, making her jump. Hurriedly, she shoved the locket back into the envelope with the official-looking papers. Like the weapon she’d taken from Julio’s chest, she put the parcel into her bag. As she turned to leave, she saw her daughter’s lost rag doll and, wondering absently how it had gotten there, she scooped it up from the floor, took her daughter’s small hand, and ran.

JAKE CANTRELL stood back, sipping his beer, watching the wedding reception as if through binoculars. The Smoking Barrel Ranch had taken on a sound and feel and level of gaiety that seemed surreal, as if it had an alternate personality—one he didn’t recognize.

He hadn’t been brought here for this and right now, he just wanted it to be over. Not that he wasn’t happy for Brady and Grace…now Catherine. He was. He just didn’t believe in happy-ever-after anymore. Mostly, he told himself, he was just anxious to get back to work.

But that was a lie. All day he’d felt an uneasiness he couldn’t shake. Like when he felt someone following him or waiting for him in a dark alley. The feeling hummed like a low-pitched vibration inside him, making him anxious and irritable and wary.

Mitchell had called a meeting later tonight. Jake wanted a new assignment, something that would take him away from the ranch for a while. Away from everything. Work kept him sane—relatively sane. It was also the only thing that kept him from dwelling on the past.

He felt eyes on him. Not just watching him. But staring at him. He shifted his gaze and saw Penny Archer across the room, standing with her back to the library door she’d just closed behind her. Earlier he’d noticed when she’d gotten a beep on the priority line. Noticing was something he was good at. That and finding people who didn’t want to be found.

It had to have been a business call. That was the only kind that would make the administrative assistant leave the wedding reception and the boisterous crowd, and disappear into the library. From there the hidden elevator would take her to the basement and the secret office of Texas Confidential. The true heart of the ranch. Its aberrant split personality.

Now he met Penny’s intent gaze and felt a jolt. She was as tough as they came. It took a lot to upset her. And right now, she was visibly upset.

He made his way across the room, knowing it had been the priority call that had upset her. Just as he knew the call had to do with him.

“What?” he asked, never one to mince words.

She motioned for him to follow and led him away from the crowd and the noise of the party, outside to a corner of the porch. In the distance, mesquite stood dark-limbed against the horizon, shadows piled cool and deep beneath them. The land beyond was as vast and open as the night sky.

“I just got the strangest call,” she said the moment they were alone and out of earshot of the others. Her gaze came up to his. “It was from a little girl. A child. No more than three or four. She spoke Spanish and—” Penny’s voice broke. “She was crying. She sounded really scared, Jake.”

“What did she want?” he asked, wondering what this could possibly have to do with him.

“She said her mommy was in trouble and needed help. She asked for her daddy.” Penny seemed to hesitate. “Her daddy Jake.”

He felt a chill even as a warm Texas wind whispered through the May night. He shook his head. A mistake. A wrong number. An odd coincidence.

“Jake, she called through your old FBI contact number.”

He stared, his heart now a sledgehammer. Only three people in the world had ever known that number and two of them were dead. “What did she say? Exactly.” Not that he had to add that. Penny could remember conversations verbatim. That was part of her charm—and the reason the thirty-four-year-old was Mitchell Forbes’s right-hand woman.

She repeated the Spanish words. “Then I heard a woman’s voice in the background. The woman cried, ‘No, chica suena.’ Then the line went dead. Of course, I put a trace on the call immediately. It came from a small motel on the other side of the Mexican border.”

Chica suena. The light in the trees seemed to shift. Lighter to darker. The porch under him no longer felt solid, became a swampland of deadly potholes. His world, the fragile one he’d made for himself here, spun on the edge of out of control. Just as it had six years ago. Before Mitchell had saved him.

From far off, he heard Penny ask, “Jake, are you all right? Jake?”

Chica suena. He hadn’t heard the unusual Spanish endearment in years. Six long years. Nor was it one he’d ever heard before he’d met Abby Diaz. It was something her grandmother had called her. It meant “my little dream girl.” And it suited Abby.

Abby Diaz had been everything to him. The woman he was to marry. His FBI partner. His most trusted friend.

His chica suena.

He bounded off the porch, his long legs carrying him away from the party and the faint sound of music and laughter. Away from the pain and anger and memory of the death of his dreams of love ever after. Away. But he knew, gut-deep, that running wouldn’t help. It never had.

Someone had found out about him and Abby. Had found out their most intimate secret. Daddy Jake. Chica suena. Someone wanted him running scared again. And they’d succeeded.