The Parker Trilogy Page 51

  And Luisa’s situation was proving to be a textbook example of that.

  “How did she get into the checkroom?” Maggie asked incredulously.

  “I don’t know. It’s unlocked during the day. But it’s right next to the reception desk, which always has two people,” Kim said with exasperation. “Henry?”

  “No one in their right mind would even try it. But she did. She just flat out walked in, grabbed her backpack and walked straight out. Like she was going to 7-Eleven.”

  Maggie smiled bitterly. “She’s a girl from the street, Henry. She knows how to be chill beyond chill, and she knows that ninety-nine percent of getting away with stuff is acting like you’re not doing anything wrong in the first place. She probably just slung it over her shoulder, went straight to her room and called him.”

  “God, I hope not. Because, after what he did at your shelter?” Kim said, looking at Maggie seriously, “to call him to come here? That’s beyond reckless.”

  “Reckless?” Maggie spat. “She’s sixteen. Confused. Pregnant. The whole drive here she was in ‘rationalization mode’, trying to figure out a way to stop him by sacrificing herself. What’s reckless is how she was able to find a way to do so, within twelve hours of getting here!”

  The situation had gone from tense to confrontational. Putting her hands on her hips, still looking panicked but also now pissed, Kim looked at Maggie. “Listen, you didn’t tell—”

  “Ladies,” Henry said, evidently trying to calm things down, “for all we know that was her sister or best friend that picked her up. We can still make this right if we just get the ball rolling.”

  Kim and Maggie glared at one another a few seconds longer before they each nodded.

  “You call the director and the police,” Maggie said as she rubbed more sleep out of her eyes. “I’ll call Tonya and take my lashings. Then Luisa’s mom.”

  “Shit.”

  Maggie closed her eyes. “Yeah. ‘Shit’ is right.”

  An hour later and everyone knew the bad news. As expected, Tonya was beside herself that this had happened, but most of her wrath fell on the clinic and their staff.

  Luisa’s mom was not so kind. Understandably she was panicked and upset, and she made it clear that she felt her trust had been completely betrayed. But she also sounded defeated. As if what had already happened at Eden Hill had been enough to convince her that things weren’t going to go well anyway.

  Still, when Luisa’s mom began crying into the phone, it was almost more than Maggie could take. Trying to give herself something to work with, Maggie asked her if she knew what kind of car Felix drove. She didn’t. Maggie pleaded with her to call Luisa’s friends and find out. She agreed and hung up.

  Meanwhile, a Lomita sheriff’s car was at the clinic within ten minutes of Kim calling it in. Maggie decided to let Kim handle the ground troops while she made another call, this one to Detective Murillo. He wasn’t in, but his partner, Detective Klink, was.

  “What’s up?” he asked in a confident voice, after assuring her that he was up to speed on Luisa’s situation, including Maggie’s “concerns” about “another detective” on the case. Maggie took the hint. Murillo evidently trusted Klink, so she had no choice but to trust him now too.

  When Maggie told him what had happened, Klink didn’t sound so confident anymore. “Well . . . I mean . . . man. This girl has a hurricane of chaos all around her, doesn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said wearily.

  But Klink made her feel better with his instant, no-nonsense approach. “Okay. No need to bellyache about it. It’s gonna be hard to put out an APB on just a lowered black Nissan. We need more info. So, have the security guy call me. I’m gonna want him to comb over that footage of the car and try hard to get me at least a partial of the plate. Murillo will be here in about twenty minutes. We’ll see what we can come up with, but it sounds to me like that’s the Lomita Sheriff’s Department’s issue right now. We can tie the two together later. In the meantime, you keep working on the mom for info. Odds are, Luisa will call her at some point. Are they close?”

  “Yes, as far as I can tell. Definitely.”

  “Lover boy won’t want her to be, but she’s a double agent now. She’ll be trying to pacify him while also worried about not worrying her mom. We have to hope she gets a chance to get off a call. Get me her cell phone number so we can notify her carrier and get ready for a trace.”

  “She’s a minor. Any chance we can get this treated as an AMBER Alert or something?”

  “She’s under seventeen so she’d normally qualify. But sadly, no. You said the camera shows her willingly getting into that car, and this after she planned her own escape. No way it’ll get escalated to that level, Ms. Kincaid.”

  “It’s Maggie.”

  “Fair enough, Maggie. We’ll talk soon.”

  “Okay.”

  As she hung up the phone, Maggie felt a little better. Speaking of calling family, she needed to call her sister, Julie, and tell her where she was and what was going on. Glancing at the desk and couch, she looked for her cell phone before a realization struck her like a thunderclap. “Oh. My. God,” she said into the empty room.

  Hadn’t she put her cell phone in Luisa’s bag when they’d checked in, to pacify her and encourage Luisa that it was okay to surrender her iPhone? Yes! Yes, she had.

  And her cell phone had been on.

  Maggie’s phone was an Android. Which meant she could track it, almost in live time, using Google. Hope exploded inside her as she ran into the computer room and logged into the system. It only took a few minutes to access her Google account.

  She entered her Find My Device info and waited.

  The map loaded.

  Then, after a few seconds that felt like hours, a pushpin popped up.

  Her phone, and presumably Luisa, were currently at the corner of Elliot and Barrows in South El Monte.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  They should’ve known that trouble was coming that day. The sun was simply too bright for the dawn and was now blazing, burning at Parker’s squinting eyes, just beyond a sand-covered ridge about a quarter-click ahead.

  Dirt patches gave way to greenish fields of poppies in the foothills to his left. To his right were rolling dunes, the occasional dirt devil spinning aimlessly beneath the invisible finger of an intermittent wind that was probably driving the snipers crazy in the hills beyond them.

  But at this point, snipers were the least of their worries. Of greater concern were the bullets and mortars coming in from all directions. So many of them in fact, that the word “mayhem” was completely insufficient to describe what the world around them had become.

  Only three months before his discharge, and Parker had been sent here, to American Combat Outpost Keating, just outside of the town of Kamdesh and about twenty miles from Pakistan. His visit was “off the record.” He and two members from his unit, Molchan and Baer, were just supposed to be passing through for an intel mission further south.

  But the three-hundred Taliban insurgents surrounding them right now had a different idea entirely. They had attacked Outpost Keating while a hundred of their fellow Taliban simultaneously hit Operation Post Fritsche, nearby, destroying their mortar pit and preventing any reinforcements from coming to their aid.

  Around Parker, fifty-four US soldiers—comprised of members from the 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team and 4th Infantry Division—were fighting for their lives while the Afghan troops they had spent months training simply abandoned their posts and fled.

  “Take position behind the rocks!” Parker screamed, his boots crushing rocks and gravel beneath his feet as he ran to a collection of boulders, three to four feet tall, to his right.

  Molchan and Baer fell in behind him as a scattershot of bullets strafed after them. Once safely in place, Parker found a gap between two of the rocks and tried to get a look into the hills; his heart sank at the sight of the dozens of gun barrels glinting in t
he sunlight.

  Even more Taliban were running to the left and right, along the ridge, their beige tunics blending in perfectly with their surroundings, but the camouflage affect totally ruined by their maroon knit caps. Parker’s position gave him a clear view north and east of the base. He estimated a hundred men, easy.

  Wherever Parker looked, he saw his fellow brothers scrambling, returning fire, launching grenades or diving for cover.

  “What do we do, Park?” Baer said.

  Parker took a deep breath. “The guys below us are screwed if we don’t get them some cover. You take the right side of this pile. Work on the ridgeline across from us. There’s a cluster of those rat bastards over there, about twenty yards south of that rock with all those black lines in it. You see it?”

  Baer squinted, then nodded. “Got it!”

  “Molch! You’re our best shot. Take this spot that I’m at now. There’s a gap in the rocks that will allow you to take your time and pick some off.”

  Molchan was a soft-spoken man of very few words, regardless of any situation. As expected, he simply nodded. But his face spoke, too, and it said one thing: he was worried.

  Parker rolled down the side of the ridge they were on and belly-crawled to the nearest guy with a radio. The name stitched on his uniform said “Horton.” Parker was just about to speak when a mortar exploded about thirty yards away, the percussion shaking the ground and rattling a hedge of nearby bushes.

  After the dust cleared, Parker had to scream just to hear himself. “What’s the scoop?”

  Horton was wiping grit from his eyes, his mouth grimacing with sand covering his teeth. He spat a few times before he answered. “We got a hundred enemy to the south, at least that many to the west. Air support is forty-five minutes away.”

  Forty-five minutes. It made sense, as the nearest air base was in Jalalabad. But still. They might as well have been flying in from Alaska at this rate.

  Parker nodded. “I counted about a hundred combined to the north and east.”

  Fifty-four men against three hundred.

  God help us, Parker thought as he scrambled back up the ridge to Molchan and Baer. Then, as quickly as he thought it, he dismissed it. Truth be told, he hadn’t seen God at all in this place. Just a bunch of different sides killing in his name.

  The bullets were whizzing overhead in droves now. Twenty minutes of taking and exchanging fire later, a unit of about ten men took position below them behind a row of sandbags. They were within earshot and Parker recognized Sergeant Roland, their leader, from playing cards the night before. “What’s the situation?” he screamed.

  Roland lay down on the ground and turned to look up at Parker with a wild look in his eyes. “We got people inside our wire!”

  That was bad. It meant that the outside perimeter defenses had been breached. From what he could see of the base from his position, it looked like the rest of the US Forces had collapsed to a tight inner perimeter.

  Parker wanted to scream at the stupidity of this whole place. Ignoring 3,000 years of military history, the army hadn’t built the base on high ground but rather down in a deep valley, surrounded by mountains on three sides and next to a raging river. It was a sniper’s wet dream, and once the wind died down they began to make it a reality.

  Two men, one next to the barracks up ahead and a second that was crouched near the wall of the latrine, each went down with single shots to the head. They fell in slow motion, heavy and hard to the ground.

  Then a series of mortars came screaming in. Parker lost count after the fourth, and when they were done the soundtrack of war began to play: screams, cries for help, shouts of orders and frustration. A dozen Taliban came charging through the main gate and were mowed down instantly by someone down there with an M-30.

  Parker yelled over his shoulder. “Molch?”

  “I’ve picked off eight or nine. Can’t tell if I got a tenth because he’s still kinda moving behind some shrubs.”

  “Baer?”

  When Baer replied, he sounded frustrated. “A few on the ridge but another half dozen that almost outflanked us to the right.”

  “How are we on ammo?”

  “Okay so far,” Molch replied.

  “Same here,” Baer chimed in.

  Another fifteen minutes passed as a lull in the battle arrived. Parker watched a few men from the 4th Infantry advance to retrieve some wounded, going back and forth three times, ducking sniper fire as they pulled the men to medics that had taken up a position behind some parked Humvees.

  When the blissful cries of two F-15s came cutting through the sky a little earlier than expected, the men around Parker shouted with joy as, conversely, like rats, the Taliban in the hills above began to scramble about madly. The bombs came in hard and on-target, erupting with unholy thunder as bits of the earth were ripped apart and entire clusters of the enemy were blown to pieces.

  But everyone knew the planes would pass and then have to circle around, which would take a little time. This would be the Taliban’s big push, because they were desperate now.

  The hillsides erupted with a sea of gunfire that carved in the dirt all around them and dangerously ricocheted off the rocks. It was incredible how much firepower was unleashed on them. Parker crouched in hard behind the boulder in front of him and looked up to see that Baer and Molchan had done the same.

  When the mortar rounds hit just below of them—the first a thud, the second much louder—the world went dark with dirt, and then there was the worst possible sound of all in war: utter silence.

  Parker was in a deep haze, a fade-in, fade-out state of consciousness that was suddenly filled with a staccato soundtrack of screams and terror. He looked up and around.

  Big sun. Massive desert. Small lives.

  Parker’s heart sank as he remembered that Roland and his unit were down there.

  The F-15s were back overhead and Parker, feeling it safe to do so, rolled to his left to look below.

  The carnage was like something from a bad movie; there was blood and body parts everywhere, one man’s entire leg just sitting by itself upright against a stack of crates. As the dust cleared, Parker looked closer, trying to see any signs of life.

  He wished he hadn’t.

  To Parker’s horror, shuffling out of the dusty cloud below, came Roland, his jaw slack and eyes wide with shell shock as he looked around at his entire unit in horror.

  Molchan saw it to, as did Baer and a number of men below the ridge line, and everyone was screaming the same thing that Parker was: “Get down, Roland! Get down!”

  But the mortars had no doubt blown out his ear drums. And now? Now he was—

  The sniper bullet entered Roland’s right temple and plowed through his brain. Blood and grit went everywhere as he fell sideways to join the dead men around him. And that was the worst of it for Parker. The deciding point in his life that there was no God.

  Because, really, what reason in all the universe was there for Roland to live just long enough to see that? To see what had happened to his men? Why? Why was such a thing possible? And Parker began shouting, with rage and hurt, frustration and fear, because he’d had enough. This was the final straw. The man who had pulled a full house at cards the night before and sang the lyrics to The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” with mirth just twelve hours before had been reduced to this: a dead man, who moments before had warned Parker, hadn’t he?

  “We got people inside our wire!” he had said.

  Parker couldn’t stop thinking of the words . . .

  We got people inside our wire.

  Inside.

  Inside our wire.

  Getting closer.

  Closer.

  Shit! They’re everywhere!

  Absolutely everywhere. Getting closer.

  Too close.

  Inside our wire.

  We gotta get outta here! We gotta run!

  Don’t you understand? They’re inside our wire.

  Run!

  Trudy
was shaking Parker so hard from his sleep that her nails were digging into his biceps. “Evan! Wake up! Wake. Up!”

  When Parker came to, sucking air, he didn’t have to ask. The tears streaming down his face said it all.

  As did the horrified look in Trudy’s eyes.

  He hadn’t been “thinking” those words at all.

  He’d been screaming them out in the dead of night.

  Drenched in sweat, he fell into her lap and began to sob, because it was all he could think to do to stop the pain.

  Hector couldn’t believe his eyes.

  The demons were among clusters of prisoners that were staggered roughly every other cell, jeering at him along with all the “normal” looking inmates.

  The skin on their faces and arms was charred, so that you couldn’t even begin to guess at their ethnicity. They were of varying height and weight, dressed like their cellmates, and Hector noticed immediately that the easiest way to distinguish between them was either by the length of their tongues or their fangs.

  The “powers that be” had decided at some point early in the morning to transfer him to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility downtown, and now here he was. The irony of that was not lost on Hector at all.

  Hadn’t he just checked out of this same prison only three days before? Yes, he had. The memory of exiting the prison’s final door and feeling that first blast of cool air from the storm kissing his cheeks and combing over his head was still fresh in his mind. Bennie and Chico waiting in the car. Bennie’s jaw all busted up. Still. Three days. That’s all it took for his entire life to go upside down.

  Here he was again, in his lovely orange jumpsuit and prison-ordered white pullover shoes, marching past many of the same homies he’d triumphantly said goodbye to.

  And many of them were loving it. Some, the ones with the demon-like faces, way more than the others. Hector tried to keep his head down, to not look at them, but there was a perverse curiosity that kept making him glance their way, a fascination that this could all be real, countered by a real desire to blink away their faces and deny them as mere hallucinations of a tortured mind.