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“In there.” She jerked her head, hating the way the morning was turning out. She might have been able to stand up against Ryder in regards to Esperanza, but no way could she stand up against the six of them.
Game over.
She watched as they tried hard not to laugh at Ryder’s appearance in the overalls. But there was a lot of smirking going on as they helped him to the door.
He stopped in the threshold. “I appreciate the help, Grace.”
She didn’t say you’re welcome, just stood there with her arms crossed.
“I had a gun,” he said then.
Fine. She stepped to the hall table and pulled open the top drawer, then handed him his gun belt.
He left with a nod, followed by one of his buddies—built like a tank—who was escorting Esperanza. Half of the man’s left eyebrow was missing, giving him a fierce appearance. Esperanza looked about ready to faint.
The rest of the men inspected Grace’s living room as if they were undecided whether to leave or pull out a search warrant.
Twinky padded in from the direction of the kitchen; the Viking gave her a careful look.
Grace rolled her eyes. “What? You want to frisk the cat?”
The man’s startling blue eyes cut to her and he coughed. His face remained impassive, but he might have been trying to cover up a laugh. The others strode out and he walked after them.
She followed after Esperanza and gave the crying woman a hug. “Lo siento,” she whispered into her ear. I’m sorry. “I will do whatever I can to help. I’m going to look for your family, okay?”
And maybe Esperanza understood, because she slipped a folded-up piece of paper into Grace’s hands, careful so nobody would see the furtive maneuver, her red-rimmed eyes hanging on Grace’s face, begging. She looked as miserable as a person could be, but followed the men without resisting. Then she disappeared in the back of one of the vehicles, no longer visible behind the tinted window.
“I do appreciate what you did for me,” Ryder said again as he got into the passenger seat of the same vehicle.
Grace turned her back on him, marched inside the house, then slammed the door behind her.
Only then did she open the piece of paper.
Two little kids smiled at her from the photograph, a boy and a girl, their eyes laughing into the camera. Their parents stood behind them, a world of love in their eyes as they looked at their children. She turned the photo over. Paco, Esperanza, Miguel y Rosita.
Miguel was maybe two inches taller than his twin, his arms protectively around his little sister.
She had a picture in that same pose with Tommy, although the age difference had been bigger between them.
She glanced at the brass urn on the mantel and her heart constricted.
What if Ryder didn’t fulfill his promise?
Children, even American children, fell through the cracks every single day. What if nobody went to look for Rosita and Miguel?
She squared her shoulders. Somebody would, she decided.
Chapter Three
Ryder took notes at the SDDU’s new satellite site as Esperanza Molinero repeated her story. Raymund, better known as Ray, Armstrong, sat with them. The two of them were senior team members, based on length of service in the SDDU. The rest of the men busied themselves elsewhere so as not to overwhelm her and make her feel threatened.
“Did the guide bring a whole group or you alone?” he asked in Spanish.
“I sold my wedding ring so he would bring me. I came alone. I sold my bicycle and our furniture. Even the kitchen table Paco made me as a wedding gift. Where will my Paco eat when he comes home?”
Ray exchanged a look with Ryder that said he didn’t expect that issue to come up. Something Ryder had considered, as well. The man should have called his wife by now, got word back to her. If he hadn’t, he was possibly dead, or in some other bad trouble.
“Was your husband a drug mule? Did anyone give him any suspicious packages to take to the U.S. with him?” Ray asked, sliding lower in his chair, trying to look as small and nonthreatening as he could, a challenge for a big chunk of Viking like him. The blood of his marauding ancestors ran thick in his veins, there was no mistaking it. Mostly, it was an advantage, but not today. Esperanza eyed him warily.
Fresh tears welled in her eyes. “My Paco was a good man. An honest man.”
“The kids were given backpacks of school supplies from the so-called company representative,” Ryder put in, repeating what she’d told him at the ranch.
Ray asked Esperanza about that; she insisted that the bags contained nothing but notebooks and pencils. She looked confused, probably not understanding why they were asking her about the bags instead of her kids.
“Of course, she wouldn’t have checked the padding,” Ray said in English.
Ryder nodded. Exactly.
“You’re sure about his name?” He wanted to get back to the human trafficking. The same man who brought her over might be the guide for the terrorists, in the not-too-distant future.
“Dave,” the woman said then struggled with the next word. “Snebl.”
“Where did you cross?”
“I couldn’t see in the dark. We walked for a long time together. When he saw the storm, he said he was leaving. I gave him everything I had, all the rest of my money, my bag. But he turned around. He told me to keep walking.”
She was lucky he didn’t hurt her. Robbing people who came across the border was a common racket. If their guide didn’t do it, then one of the groups who made a living from robbing illegal immigrants did. The men and women usually brought their most valuable possessions with them to start a new life. The hits could be lucrative, and the victims couldn’t turn to the police, so the robbers nearly always got away with it.
Ryder shifted in his seat. His job was to defend his country and if he saw anyone breaking the law, do something about it. Either you broke the law or you didn’t. He preferred to look at things in black-and-white. He hated shades of gray.
He was a soldier. He got a command, he carried it out. There was no evaluation of the mission, no second-guessing his superior officer. That was how the army, where he’d started out, worked, as did his current team the SDDU, Special Designation Defense Unit, a top secret commando team.
But nothing seemed clear-cut here. The land along the border was its own universe. Some of the people he’d met were clearly criminals, others victims, some both at the same time. Motivations were complicated.
He thought of Grace Cordero—the definition of complicated. A smart man would leave that attractive bundle of trouble well alone. Like he was going to do. To get a good head start, he put Grace from his mind and focused on the woman in front of him.
“Please,” she begged them. “Help me.”
He did feel sorry for Esperanza. She didn’t cross the border with criminal intent, she didn’t want to stay and live off taxpayer’s money. She was looking for her husband and children because the authorities had failed her.
Yet, what she’d done was illegal.
He had no choice but to take her to border patrol and send her back home. No choice at all, even if a sharp-eyed beauty called Grace Cordero would hate him for it.
She didn’t believe in the system.
He did. He’d sworn to defend it.
“Doesn’t make any sense, if you ask me,” Ray said in English. “The Cordero ranch isn’t a known smuggling corridor. The terrain is too rough. There are easier points for crossing.”
Yet the man who’d shot him had been out there. Ryder smoothed his black cargo pants over the bandages on his thigh. He’d been to the emergency room and back, the wound had been disinfected again, his stitches inspected and pronounced exemplary.
He’d been forced to lie down while they’d dripped a full bag of IV fluids into him, and had plenty of time to think. Maybe the spot had been chosen specifically because the smugglers thought nobody would be looking there.
He listened as Ray asked Esperanza some of the same questions she’d already answered, wording them differently this time to see if he could trip her. But she stayed consistent. Nothing indicated that she was lying.
They had alerted border patrol to her presence, but not to the shooting. Their operation was top secret, dealing with a terror threat. His small team had come to the area on the pretense that they were surveying border traffic for a new proposal for increased funding for CBP, Customs and Border Protection.
They were more than a match for their enemies, the special team consisting of trained and experienced commandos who did this for a living. As much as they respected the work CBP did, several recent busts had proven that not all the border agents could be trusted. Some were on the take from the traffickers.
And this was one mission where Ryder’s team couldn’t take any chances.
“I was cold because I had to swim,” Esperanza was saying.
“Rio Grande.” Ray looked at Ryder. “Can’t believe she made it. The current can be a killer in places. Add the darkness and that storm.” He shook his head.
“I was scared that the water would rise to the ceiling and I would drown,” she said, not having understood the two men’s exchange in English.
Ceiling? Then it all made sense suddenly.
“Tunnel,” Ray and he said at the same time. Now at least they knew what they had to be looking for when they were out there scouring the land day after day. All that water from the rain had been running down and filling a tunnel.
“Do you remember anything about where you came out? In brush? Trees? Open fields?”
“In a ditch. I couldn’t see much in the dark and the rain.”
And no matter how hard they pressed her after that, she couldn’t give them any further information. So Ryder escorted the woman to the crossing point, talked to the guards and walked her across. They had her contact information, the village she lived in and the phone number of her priest, since her house didn’t have a phone line.
“Don’t come back,” he told her. “It’s not safe. Your children need a mother. You stay here, and I’ll go and look for them, all right?” he said in Spanish, and handed her enough money to get her to her village.
Tears streamed down her face. “Paco loves me. He wouldn’t leave me. He wouldn’t take my babies. He would die for me. I would die for him.”
“I believe you.” He spoke the truth. He believed in that kind of love between a man and a woman, even if he’d never experienced it himself. His parents had that.
He left her and walked back across to his car, feeling somehow guilty and inadequate, even if he was doing the right thing.
A text message with photo pinged onto his phone as he started the engine—a blue-eyed newborn with a pink ribbon in her hair. A birth announcement from Mitch Mendoza. Ryder grinned, happy for his friend, but he also felt a sense of longing. He wanted what Mitch had—his true mate, the one that could make him happy.
He wanted a partner like Mitch had found, someone who would fight by his side and go with him on missions, someone to have his back during the day and fill his arms at night. Mitch had been over-the-moon happy since he’d met Megan. The couple was assigned to the SDDU’s Texas office, but were on leave at the moment for the birth of their baby.
They had something Ryder had never had before. And he couldn’t help but want a taste of it.
He’d been thinking about a wife lately. Kids.
A call interrupted that warm little fantasy.
“Shep and Mo are heading back,” Ray said. “I’m about to leave for the Cordero ranch to look for the tunnel with the others. Jamie says last night’s rain washed away all the tracks. I don’t see how we can find the damned thing unless we stumble on it by accident. The report on Grace Cordero came in after you left, by the way. Squeaky clean. She has a hell of a service record. She did two tours of duty in Iraq. Are you coming out here?”
“I’m heading into Hullett to talk with the sheriff. Want to see if he has any information on Paco Molinero and those kids.”
“They came through with visas. I don’t think Paco could give us much on the human trafficking.”
A good point, but Ryder wanted Grace Cordero packed up and gone, and the quickest way to achieve that was to close the Molinero case as expediently as possible by finding Esperanza’s family for her.
Then Grace would go back to where she’d come from and his team would have free rein over her ranch. He didn’t like the idea of her out there alone, with criminal activity going on around her. She’d be unsafe and underfoot, a double negative.
He reached the next intersection and took the turn toward her ranch on impulse. But he found the driveway empty when he reached the house. His knock on the door went unanswered.
She’d better not be out there riding around the fields. He would have to warn her about that when he caught up with her. She needed to stay off the land until they figured out what was going on and found the damned tunnel.
He considered looking for her, but then he glanced at his watch and got back into his car. If he wanted to catch the sheriff at the office, he had to get going.
An hour later, he caught the man at his desk.
“So you’re not with CBP?” Sheriff Denholtz ran his thumb over his considerable mustache. His large belly fairly stretched his uniform. His cowboy hat sat on the desk in front of him. He was in his mid-thirties, pretty young to make sheriff. But he acted as if he’d had the job for decades.
“I’m affiliated with CBP.” Ryder gave his cover. Since his team had no idea who they could trust around here, the rule of thumb was to trust no one. “I’m working on a special project.”
“I thought the U.S. Customs and Borders Special Response Team handled those.”
“You’re right about that.” People liked to hear that they were right. When you were trying to build rapport, it didn’t hurt to say it. “This is different,” he added. “My team is here to survey the border situation and make recommendations for policy makers.”
“Strangers coming in, telling our local boys how to do their business.” Denholtz pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket and started chewing on it.
“I just need to have a list of Mexican nationals that ran into any kind of trouble here over the past two months.”
The man drew his spine straight. “We don’t have a smuggling problem in Hullett. I run a tight ship.”
“No doubt, Sheriff. Still, if I could get that list.”
The man sucked on the toothpick. “I’ll tell one of my boys to get right on it. I’ll have it faxed to CBP when it’s ready.”
“If you could fax it straight to me, it would be very helpful.” He scribbled the office’s fax number on the back of his fake card and slid it across the desk.
From the look the sheriff was giving him, he wouldn’t hold his breath.
He resisted the urge to take a tougher tone. He needed to gain the local law’s cooperation. If he pushed too hard, the sheriff might wonder if he had a special agenda, and his special agenda was top secret.
A deputy stuck his head in the door. “Gracie Cordero is here to see you, Sheriff.”
Surprise flashed across the man’s face, then a smile spread his mustache. He spit the toothpick into the garbage can and pushed to his feet.
Ryder gritted his teeth as the man passed by him without a word of apology for the interruption.
“Gracie, sweetheart. Ain’t you a sight for sore eyes?” The words filtered through the door the sheriff had left open behind him.
“Good to see you, Shane. How is Mattie?”
