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  Leila’s hand goes to her mouth, and she starts shaking her head.

  “No. No, no, no. No, that can’t be.”

  “When was the last time you saw Juana?”

  “I told you. The other day.”

  “What day?”

  A shrug, the woman wiping at her eyes as she watches a tractor-trailer breeze past.

  “Two days ago. I met her briefly. Many of the girls who come to us haven’t given birth yet. They want to find good homes for their babies. Other girls, they’ve already had their babies and want to find them good homes. I have contacts all over the state who keep an eye out for certain girls—”

  I cut her off.

  “Illegal immigrants.”

  Leila pauses to wipe at her eyes again, and nods.

  “Yes, undocumented immigrants. Most of them flee Mexico because they want to get away from the cartels and other gangs. They want their children to get an opportunity they never had. That’s where Little Angels steps in. Over the years we’ve started helping more and more of these girls. Most times Immigration finds them and sends them back, but by then they’ve put their babies in our care, and we find good homes for them.”

  “Juana wasn’t interested?”

  “She was. I think. I don’t know. She was nervous—I remember that. She clearly wasn’t ready to trust me yet.”

  “Did you give her money?”

  The woman’s frown looks convincing.

  “Money? No, of course not. We don’t pay any of the girls for them to give up their parental rights. None of us are in this to make money. Why would you ask that?”

  I hesitate, not sure I want to tell her about the cash. But then I figure what the hell, might as well lay all the cards out on the table.

  “Also in the duffel bag was a wallet containing five one-hundred dollar bills. They were crisp, like they’d just come from the bank.”

  Leila shakes her head.

  “I have no idea where that money would have come from. It most certainly didn’t come from me or anybody at Little Angels.”

  “When I spoke to you this morning, you seemed to know Juana was dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I could just tell. You know how sometimes you get a phone call, and before you even answer it, you know whoever’s on the other end is going to tell you something terrible? That’s the feeling I got when you called me.”

  “The men that killed her—any idea who they are?”

  I’m expecting Leila Simmons to shake her head again, tell me no, so I’m surprised when she offers up a slight nod.

  “I think I do, yes.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know their names. I’ve never actually seen them. But I’ve heard stories. About two men—one of them always wears a cowboy hat—who drive around the state hunting down these girls.”

  The woman pauses again, wipes at another stray tear. It looks like she’s on the verge of breaking out into sobs, but she manages to hold it in.

  “These men—from what I can tell—they take the girls and they … they do terrible things to them.”

  “Like what?”

  “Use your imagination. You said you found a pinkie finger. Stuff like that barely scrapes the surface. I know for a fact that right now they have another girl.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “One of the girls I met with recently. Her name is Eleanora. I heard that she was taken. That these men grabbed her off the street the other day.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Another girl—a girl who was with Eleanora—told me. She said she had ducked into a store to use the bathroom, and when she came out the men had already shoved Eleanora into their car.”

  “Do you know where she was taken?”

  Leila offers up another slight nod.

  “I believe so. These men, they have this place out in the middle of nowhere. It’s near an oil refinery. A shed. That’s where they take the girls.”

  “How can you know this?”

  “One of the girls managed to escape. She came to me, terrified. I told her we needed to go to the police, but she refused. The next day, she had run away. I’ve driven past the oil refinery but never got up the nerve to check for myself. Even though I should. I … I should do something.”

  “Did you ever call the police?”

  Leila lets out a desperate laugh. She looks on the verge of losing it.

  “Of course I did! They claimed they would send somebody out there, but I never heard anything. When I called them back, they told me to stop wasting their time. That’s when I contacted the FBI, but I never heard anything back from them, either. These men, you understand—they’re ICE agents. They have a lot of pull in the state. Heck, sometimes I think some of the cops in the area are in on whatever those two are up to.”

  ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A federal agency tasked, among other things, with protecting border security. They’d been working hard on deporting undocumented citizens for years, but recently that effort had been ramped up. ICE agents going from town to town rounding up men, women, and children. It made sense to see them often in a border state. What didn’t make sense was to see two of them openly murder a woman in the street.

  More vehicles speed past us down the highway. A few cars, a few pickup trucks, a few tractor-trailers. I watch them for a moment before turning back to the woman.

  “Okay.”

  She frowns at me.

  “Okay?”

  “I trust you. At least as much as I’m going to at this point. After what I saw last night, I wasn’t taking any chances. I wanted to make sure I would be putting the baby in safe hands.”

  Leila nods, and slips the sunglasses back on her face.

  “I understand. I will admit this has been frustrating, but I understand. Now, where is the baby?”

  “Alden.”

  “Alden? That’s over an hour away.”

  “Yes. It’s where her mother was killed.”

  Nine

  Meredith doesn’t look thrilled to see me. Or maybe she does and she just has a hard time showing it through the exhaustion painted on her face.

  “Where have you been?”

  She stands with her arms crossed, her chin tilted down. Her baby sits at her feet, crying its lungs out. Past them, farther in the house, the sound of cartoons is even louder than it was this morning.

  “I’m sorry. Took longer than planned.”

  “You think? You said it would only be a few hours. It’s nearly two o’clock. I can barely deal with two kids at the same time by myself, but three?”

  I don’t say anything, letting her vent.

  Meredith juts her jaw and blows away a loose strand of hair from in front of her face.

  “My mom called and said she was going to come over, and I had to make up some excuse to keep her away. I told her I needed some stuff and that she needed to go to Walmart, and, like, I do need that stuff, but I still felt like I was lying to her, which is weird because I lie to my mom all the time, but this time it just felt, like, really wrong.”

  “Were you able to give Star a bath?”

  Meredith glances down at the crying baby on the floor, and when she looks up at me again, something has changed in her eyes. They’ve hardened a bit, and her voice ticks down an octave.

  “I want to know where you found her.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do. Or else I’ll call the police.”

  Blood starts thrumming in my ears, drowning out the crying baby.

  “Go ahead. When they get here I’ll make sure to mention there’s a chance you’ve got marijuana hidden somewhere inside. Probably not enough to get a conviction, but it’s not going to look very good for a single mother of two, will it?”

  The threat is a mistake, of course, but I can’t help myself. I’m not operating on much sleep, and somehow Meredith’s irritation is contagious. The angrier she gets, th
e angrier I get. Which isn’t helping matters, I know.

  Meredith’s eyes grow even harder, like stone, and she opens her mouth to speak, but I shake my head and hold out my hand to silence her.

  “Seven hundred dollars. That’s all I have left. Give me Star, and I’ll give you the cash, and we’ll both forget this ever happened. Deal?”

  Meredith doesn’t answer at first. Her burning glare is so intense I wish I’d applied sunscreen lotion this morning. But then she sighs, blows away another loose strand of hair from in front of her face, scoops up her crying baby, and motions me inside.

  “Follow me.”

  I step inside and let the screen door smack shut behind me as Meredith leads me deeper into the house. Her older boy sits on the living room floor, his skinny knees pulled up to his chest, his back against the sofa, watching the TV with a wide-eyed fascination that makes me surprised he doesn’t have drool falling down his chin.

  Meredith says, “This way.”

  She directs me into the next room, where a bottom-of-the-line crib sits in the corner.

  Star lies there, clothed now, asleep.

  Meredith leans down to place her own child inside the crib and picks up Star, a simple swap.

  She holds the baby even more tenderly than she’d held her own, smiling down at Star as she whispers.

  “She’s a good baby. Quiet. Didn’t give me no problems.”

  “You bathed her?”

  “Yes. And fed her. She was a dream. Her mom must be a happy camper.”

  She pauses, and I see the gears starting to shift again in her head, the questions that are starting to form.

  I slip the bills from my pocket—the wad of twenties, as well as the five crisp one-hundred dollar bills from Juana’s wallet—and place them on the table beside the crib.

  “Here’s the rest of the money. The three hundred from earlier this morning, plus seven hundred here, that’s one thousand dollars.”

  I watch her, waiting to see if she’ll ask any of those questions, but she eyes the money with an intense greed.

  Nodding absently, still watching the money, Meredith hands me the baby.

  Five minutes later I’m three blocks away, walking with the grocery bag again, Star nestled inside.

  Leila Simmons is parked next to the town’s only bank. By now the bank is closed, the parking lot empty except for our two cars. The flagpole is bare, but its snap hook smacks against the metal pole in the breeze, an insistent and random ding … ding … ding.

  Leila steps out of the car when she spots me heading her way. She stands there with the door open, and I can feel her need to rush forward. But she holds back, scanning the block as if people are watching, which so far I don’t think anybody is. It’s Saturday, after all, and most people are inside or have driven to a town that has far more to offer than Alden.

  Leila Simmons doesn’t ask where I’ve kept Star this entire time. She doesn’t ask who’s been watching her, who’s been taking care of her, or why I’m currently transporting her in a grocery bag. She simply takes the bag from me when I offer it to her, and she immediately turns and opens the back door. A child seat is already prepped there. Leila carefully extracts Star from the bag, secures her in the child seat, and gently shuts the door.

  Turning to me, there isn’t happiness on her face so much as relief.

  “Thank you.”

  “The money from the wallet—”

  “Keep it. I don’t know where it came from. Consider it a reward for keeping the baby safe.”

  I don’t want to get into how I gave the money to Meredith, so I nod.

  Leila watches me for another moment, and then she climbs into the car. She waves just once before she pulls out onto the road and heads north toward the highway.

  I stand there in the parking lot well after I’ve lost sight of her car. Still thinking about Star. Hoping that wherever she ends up, she’ll be safe.

  Ten

  There’s a brown paper bag waiting for me outside my apartment door. On the outside of the bag is taped a small folded piece of paper.

  I crouch down and inspect the piece of paper first. Lift the top half to read the note.

  Hope this helps things run more smoothly.

  I open the bag and glance inside. A box of Imodium A-D. Forty-eight tablets. Which is probably all the corner store had.

  “Ha, ha. Very funny, you dumbass.”

  Erik, of course, is not here to appreciate the insult. I glance at his door, think about knocking, giving him a kiss for his trouble. When I first met Erik, he was always quiet, brooding. It felt like he took himself too seriously. But once I got to know him, especially on an intimate level, I found he could be really sweet, as well as silly. It’s not the type of thing you’d expect from a guy who used to be a Marine, and maybe that’s why I like him.

  I decide not to knock on his door, though—he’s probably working, anyway—and instead let myself into my own apartment.

  Even though the place has always felt empty, today it feels even emptier.

  I have to admit, having Star here last night was a nice change of pace. Granted, the preceding events that led to her entering the apartment were not ideal, but the simple fact that there was another living body in the apartment felt nice, if only for a moment. The baby had barely been in my possession for twelve hours, but I felt like I’d grown a bond with her. Not a strong bond, no, but a bond nonetheless.

  It had physically hurt having to give her to Leila Simmons, and that was why I hadn’t bothered to say goodbye. Hadn’t bothered to look inside the grocery bag one last time. Hadn’t bothered to reach in and feel her soft skin. Even when Leila pulled her from the grocery bag and strapped her into the car, I had looked away.

  I feel confident that Star is in good hands. I did as much research on Leila Simmons in as little time as possible, but I had a good sense that she was genuine when we met. After all, I’d made her drive a long distance. I couldn’t blame her for feeling jerked around, but it was the only way to know she was on the level.

  One of the girls I met with recently. I heard that she was taken.

  Leila’s words echo inside my head, unbidden.

  I close my eyes.

  “No.”

  They have this place out in the middle of nowhere.

  I shake my head suddenly, as if that might dispel the words from my memory. No luck. If anything, my wanting to forget she ever said those words makes them come again, even stronger.

  It’s near an oil refinery. A shed.

  Of course when she mentioned another girl had been taken by the two men from last night, I heard every word and immediately wanted to ask more questions, but my focus—my entire world at that moment—was on making sure Star would be taken care of. Nothing else mattered.

  I’d purposely not asked Leila Simmons any questions about the girl or the location of the shed because I didn’t want to get involved. It wasn’t my place. Not anymore. The person I used to be—the one who did non-sanctioned hits for the government—would have demanded to know more about the girl and the location of where she was being kept. Because that person felt a need to right every wrong. To fix every slight. To correct every injustice. There were people in the world who were helpless, who were weak, and the person I’d been felt I had no choice but to stand up for those in need.

  It had been noble, maybe, but it had also been stupid. Had gotten me into trouble from time to time. Had even gotten some of those close to me killed in the process.

  No, I hadn’t asked Leila Simmons about the girl or where she believed the girl had been taken, because that person no longer existed.

  A yawn hits me, hard, and I glance at the clock hanging on the wall.

  Almost three o’clock.

  I’ve been awake now for over twenty-four hours. I need sleep, and I need a lot of it. Which means I’ll have to call off work tonight. My boss won’t be happy, but he’s never happy.

  I still have the disposable, the one I had used to
call Leila Simmons. I dial the bar and wait through ten or twelve rings before Brenda, one of the daytime waitresses, answers.

  I ask, “Reggie in?”

  Brenda recognizes my voice, asks how I’m doing, doesn’t give me the time to answer when she says to hold on a sec.

  The sec takes about a minute, the phone having been placed on a table so the music and voices can be heard in the background, and then the phone is picked up and Reggie clears his nicotine-addled throat.

  “Yeah?”

  “Reggie, it’s Jen. I can’t come in tonight.”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  That Reggie, he’s a charmer.

  “I’m not feeling so good.”

  “It’s Saturday night. We’re gonna be packed. You need to be here.”

  “I’m telling you, Reggie, I’m not feeling good. Best I don’t come in.”

  “Yeah, and whatcha got?”

  I think about the Imodium A-D in the paper bag, and decide with this situation the more graphic the better.

  “The shits, Reggie. I got the shits.”

  Eleven

  I stand in the middle of an empty street, a gun in my hand. I three-sixty the street, at first not knowing where I am or what I’m doing there, but little by little recognition starts to settle in.

  The houses around me. The macadam cracked and warped in places. The dark cloudless sky.

  This is a place I’ve been before.

  This exact location.

  Almost a year ago.

  The heart of Culiacán sits several miles away from where I’m standing. Its lights shimmer off in the distance, but I don’t hear the sounds of the city. Of course I don’t. Because this is a dream.

  There is complete silence. Like I’m stuck in a vacuum. Like I’m in outer space. I’m certain that if I lift the gun in my hand and fire off a round I wouldn’t hear a thing.

  I don’t lift the gun and fire off a round. Instead, I start forward down the street. My footsteps don’t make a sound. My own breathing—if one even breathes in a dream—is noiseless.