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She scanned the ridge above the clearing for the next logical point at which to take up a firing position on the trailer. She found it thirty seconds later. Off the trail to the left, about twenty-five yards through the brush, was an outcropping of rock that one could lie on and from which one could fire down on the trailer with pretty good cover.
She grabbed Jorge and pointed at the flat rock.
“Crawl over to that ledge and lay fire on that trailer and keep position until I tell you otherwise!” she screamed over the music.
Vida watched him go over the sights of her machine pistol. Jorge had emptied a magazine out of his AK-47 and was putting in another when it happened.
A clump of grass on the hill behind him suddenly, incredibly disappeared. From where the grass had been, a silhouetted figure rose up. He bobbed straight up out of the ground, silently, like a carnival-game Whac-A-Mole.
Only this mole was holding a rifle.
CHAPTER 103
THE SHADOWED FIGURE AND Vida fired simultaneously. Jorge pitched forward and off the outcropping as the figure disappeared.
Vida arrived out of breath at the spot where she’d seen the figure and looked down and stood there, gaping. She clicked on her flashlight. There was a hole in the ground with some kind of trapdoor attached to a chimneylike passageway with a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder lay a squat, gray-haired man, staring up at her with the side of his head shot open.
Vida laughed. The hippie! How do you like that? She’d done it! She’d truly whacked the mole!
Vida let out a breath as “Highway to Hell” ended. So that was where they were. The hippie had hidden the Bennetts literally underground.
No matter. She’d grabbed victory from the jaws of defeat. Even with her two friends dead, she could still pull this off and get back to Mexico with her twelve little boxed presents.
Vida changed the magazine in her pistol and slung it over her shoulder as she grabbed the ladder’s first rung and lowered herself. Slowly, ever so slowly, Vida made her way along the low-ceilinged corridor. It was strung with lights and had wooden loading skids for a floor. It looked just like the tunnel under the border at San Diego that had brought her into the country.
She turned a hard right-hand, ninety-degree corner, and there was a door. What the hell? The door was yellow and had rounded edges, like the door of a school bus.
Before Vida could take another step, the bus door opened inward.
Vida gasped at the young woman standing there. Her pale face, her blond hair. It was the nanny! The nanny, with a black gun in her hands.
Vida raised the machine pistol. She had brought it as far as her waist when the deafening shotgun blast sounded, taking off most of her left shoulder and the left side of her face.
Suddenly, Vida was sitting on the tunnel’s floor, still gripping the pistol. But, try as she might, she was unable to lift it. It was too heavy.
It was kicked out of her hand.
“Why?” said a voice.
Vida looked up with her good eye. The blond woman, Mary Catherine, was above her. So pretty, so American looking. Like a girl in a Coca-Cola ad.
Blood from the open artery in Vida’s neck sprayed softly against the dirt wall in a pinkish mist. She could actually feel the life going out of her, her heart slowly losing whatever magic it was that made it beat. Her soul was slowly losing its grip on her body, like a man hanging off the edge of a cliff. She was dwindling now, winding down.
“For money?” Mary Catherine said sadly.
Vida could see that she was crying.
“They’re just kids, you know. Kids. Don’t you remember being a kid? Don’t you have kids where you come from?”
Vida put her good hand to her belly, cupping it. Her baby. Her prince. The bright, searing pain of it all spiked through her. What would be, what would not.
The last thing she felt was a single tear running down the intact side of her face as the tunnel lights dimmed.
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 104
IT WAS A LITTLE before noon when I got out of the state-police car in the crowded yard out in front of Cody’s house. It looked like the entire Susanville police force was there, along with agents from the US Marshals and local FBI.
