Mortal Prey Read Free

beside his brother.
    Dominic now shook his head. “You have lost the baby.”
    “Oh, God.”
    Dominic reached out and touched her covered leg. He was tough as a ball bearing, but he had tears rolling down his cheeks. He said, “We’ll find them. This won’t pass.”
    She turned her head away and drifted. When she came back, they’d gone.
     
    SHE WAS IN the hospital for a week: missed Paulo’s funeral, slept through a visit by Paulo’s father. On the fourth day, they had her up and walking, but they wouldn’t let her go until she had produced a solid bowel movement. After that painful experience, she was wheeled out to one of the family’s black BMWs and was driven to the Mejia family compound in Mérida. Paulo’s father, rolling his own wheelchair though the dark, tiled hallways, met her with an arm around her shoulder and a kiss on the cheek.
    “Do you know what happened?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “No. I don’t understand it yet. We’ve been asking everywhere, but there is no word of anything. Some people who might, in theory, have reason to be angry with us from years ago have let it be known that they were not involved, and have offered to help find those who were.”
    “You can believe them?” she asked.
    “Perhaps. We continue to look…. There was a strange circumstance the day Paulo was killed.” He hesitated, as if puzzling over it, then continued. “Two men were killed at an airstrip not far from here. Shot to death. One was the airstrip manager and the other was an American. There was no indication that they were involved with Paulo’s assassination. With that strip, there is always the question of unauthorized landings”—he meant drug smuggling—“but still, it is a strange coincidence. The American was identified through fingerprints. He was not involved in trade, in”—he made a figure eight in the air with his fingers, meaning drugs— “but he served time in prison and was believed connected to American organized crime, to the Mafia. A minor person, he was not important. We are asking more questions of our police, and our police are talking with the Americans. We will find out more, sooner or later.”
    “When you find them,” Rinker said through her teeth, her cold eyes only inches from the old man’s, “when you find them, kill them.”
    His eyes held hers for a moment, doing an assessment of the woman he knew as Cassie McLain. They didn’t know each other well, but the old man knew that Paulo’s involvement with her was more than casual; knew she’d been pregnant with one of his own grandchildren, this tidy blond American with the perfect Spanish. After the moment, he nodded. “Something will be done,” he said.
    “This dead American at the airstrip,” she said, at the end of the audience. “Do you even know where he was from?”
    “That we know,” he said. He closed his eyes for a minute, parsing the information in his head. He smelled lightly of garlic, and had fuzzy ears, like a gentle Yoda. There was a legend that in his early years he’d had an informer hung upside down by his ankles, and had then lit a fire under his head. According to the legend, the informer stopped screaming only when his skull exploded. Now Mejia opened his eyes and said, “He lived in a town in Missouri, called Normandy Lake. A woman who lived there told the Missouri police that he’d gone to Cancún on vacation. She said she would come for the body, but she didn’t come. When the police went back to the house, she had gone. She’d packed all her personal belongings and had gone away.”
    “That’s crazy,” Rinker said, shaking her head. But her brain was moving now, cutting through the glue that had held her since the shooting, and she was touched by a cool tongue of fear. After a moment, she said, “I don’t want to go home. I’m a little frightened. If it would be all right, I would like to go to the ranch until I can walk. Then I think I will go back to the