Torched: A Thriller Read Free Page B

cleaned up
in the restroom before driving into Abilene for gas and breakfast. She stopped
momentarily to plug a few quarters into a pay telephone behind a Shell station.
    “This is Terri
James. Benny said that I should call you when I was getting closer.”
    “Hi, Terri,” the
woman replied. She had an easy Texas drawl. “Ben mentioned that you’d already
left Colorado. Whereabouts are you?”
    “Abilene. Is it
much farther?”
    “Seven hours, if
you put your foot down a little. Probably more like eight, though. Call me back
when you get into Brownsville. Same routine.”
    “Sounds good.
Thanks.”
    She hung up and
nosed the Subaru onto U.S. 83 and settled in for another tedious day behind the
wheel.
    ***
    The Pinkertons
had a beautiful home. It looked like something out of a postcard—a sprawling
Texas ranch with creamy sandstone walls and a gorgeous pine porch.
    Terri had
followed Penny Pinkerton from the parking lot of the H.E.B. Grocery until they
cleared the city boundary and found themselves jouncing down a gravel road cut
through the Texas countryside. They passed over a series of muddy canals until
rattling across a cattle guard and down a long driveway.
    Terri had
noticed the border fence just a few miles outside of town. It was unlike
anything she’d seen before. The brown, twenty-foot steel bars sprang from the
dusty ground like the spine of some enormous fossil. As she passed it, she imagined
the shadowy forms of men, women and children attempting to scale the imposing
structure. The indignity of it made her sad, and she muttered a brief prayer of
thanks for her good fortune to have been born in America.
    The fence cut
abruptly to the south long before they reached the Pinkertons’ ranch, though,
and she put it out of her mind as they reached the driveway.
    She pulled the
Outback adjacent to a series of huge cattle trucks and stepped out into a world
made beautiful by a south Texas sunset.
    “This way,”
Penny said. “I’ll send our boy out after your bag.”
    A rail-thin man
with a gray buzz cut and a bushy moustache sipped a beer in a rocking chair on
the porch. A tall man in his early twenties sat with him, idly plucking a
six-string acoustic. An elderly chocolate Labrador slept at the young man’s
feet, his tail swishing occasionally as he stalked jackrabbits through canine
dreams.
    It was idyllic.
    The young man
removed his baseball cap and grinned at her, standing and offering his hand.
“Bo Pinkerton,” he said. “Bags in the trunk?”
    “I’m Terri. They
are,” she said, taking his hand. She handed him the keys to the Outback. “Thank
you, Bo. Nice meeting you.”
    “Don’t mention
it.” His boots crunched across the gravel, and then the older man stood and shook
her hand.
    “Welcome, Ms.
James. I’m Blaine Pinkerton. You’ve come a long way.”
    She smiled,
nodding. “Got a long way yet to go, Mr. Pinkerton. Please, just call me Terri.”
    “Then I’m
Blaine. Cold ‘un?” He jerked his head at a tin bucket filled with bottled beer
on ice.
    “Please. I can’t
say a beer’s ever sounded so good, to be honest. Been a long couple of days
cooped up in that car.”
    His grin widened
and he pulled two bottles of Coors from the pail and twisted the caps off. He
handed a bottle to Terri and took the other to his wife. He kissed her and gave
her the beer and she thanked him.
    Terri was
flummoxed. These were Benny’s contacts?
    He’d mentioned
something about Blaine once working for the government, but she had a hard time
reconciling that with these jovial ranchers. She sipped her beer and silently
chastised herself for conjuring such stereotypes. She’d pictured G-men in
pinstripes, not this kind little family of Texas ranchers.
    If Vivian Bowles
had taught her anything, it was that appearances couldn’t be trusted.
    She sat in the
chair next to Penny, a pretty, fit woman with lively blue eyes and long white
hair that she wore in a braid down her back, and for about the