Warrior Mine: A Base Branch novel Read online

  Knuckles at the door, he stilled. She had that kind of mother. They wouldn’t talk guns at the table, but ten to one odds Carmen had taught her daughter the slick moves she’d used on the steps. Never underestimate an opponent or a person frightened out of their wits. He’d learned the hard way in the beginning of his career and had a small scar on his bicep to prove it. Sidestepping, he placed the log wall between them, instead of the hollow door. Then he knocked.

  Light footsteps shuffled across the floor, and then the lock snicked. One eye leveled about his sternum peered through a slit in the door. A wide circle, dark as semi-sweet chocolate, brimmed with lashes and nurtured a degree of sadness that shot him right in the heart. That gaze looked so much like her mother’s.

  God, what a softie.

  The door swung wide and she walked to the bed. Not backward exactly. Not forward facing either. No, both her eyes stayed planted on him. So he stayed put, watching her sneakers shuffle. Her gray sweatshirt with white polka dots kicked to the side. Its wide-cut neck revealed a red striped tank and a bit of her puny collarbone. Slim fitting dark jeans punctuated just how narrow she really was. When she came down the steps he hadn’t seen it. Her nerve and sneer had masked her fragility.

  The gun snagged his attention the moment she opened the door, but he didn’t worry. If she’d wanted him dead she’d have shot through the door or as soon as she’d cracked it.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” he queried.

  “No.” She sat on the edge of the bed and catalogued him from head to foot. The muscles in her face didn’t move much, like they too were as exhausted as the set of her shoulders said she was. “Are you going to shoot me?”

  “No.”

  “Kidnap me?”

  “No. I think you’ve had one too many kidnappings already.”

  “Molest me?”

  “God!” Vail head jerked back as though the little girl boasted a left hook Henry Cooper would envy. “No.” And boy did she. Direct. Watchful. Tiny. “Hell no,” he added for good measure. Too late he thought better of the curse and gnawed the inside of his cheek.

  “Okay.” She nodded toward a small wooden chair just inside the doorway. The top of her curly ponytail flashed black in the room’s fluorescent light, but shaded brighter at the ends in natural highlights.

  Vail stepped into the room and took the chair, leaving its back against the wall.

  “You’re bigger than I expected,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You were so quiet. When you snuck up on us…before, I thought you had to be small and skinny to move that way. Not that you’re fat or anything.”

  He folded his hands in his lap and—trying to make her more comfortable—lowered his eyes. The gun and red-tinged knife handle sat snug in the holster and sheath.

  Son of a bitch.

  He’d cussed more in his head and aloud in the last day than he had in the last year. It never occurred to him. Just like it never occurred to him to remove the holster before talking to a frightened child.

  “I’m…sorry. I…should have removed my sidearm. I didn’t mean for you to see what you saw. I’m sorry for scaring you then and now. That was never my intent.”

  Her little fingers shoved beneath her lap on either side as she nodded. “What is your intent?”

  “To return you to your mother.”

  Her hands flew to her mouth and her head bobbed like his grandfather’s cork, frequent and unceasing. Tears welled. The breaths expanding her slight chest came faster and faster.

  Vail’s instinct to run from the room as though it were on fire churned the blood in his veins. He shifted in the chair and, unaware, turned his feet toward the door.

  “I’m sorry,” she cried.

  “It’s okay,” he lied. Realizing his unease must be adding to her own, he settled. “Have you eaten? Could you eat anything, if I cooked it? Swear on my grampa’s prized pig it wouldn’t be poisoned.”

  Her brow furrowed. She shook her ponytail. “If I ate, I’d probably hurl and make you that much more uncomfortable.”

  Well, she was sharp. “Fair enough. I’ve cleaned the place up. So, you don’t have to worry about seeing anything.”

  “That’s what took forever,” she said with a tremulous laugh. “I thought you’d left, but I knew you hadn’t because you said to wait for you. For some reason, I knew you weren’t lying.”

  “I’ll never lie to you. The truth hurts sometimes, but at least it’s honest.”

  “Yeah.” She swiped the backs of her hands under her eyes.

  “I know you’ve been here for a while, but we’re going to stay a few more days. Until I figure a few things out, this is the safest place for you. Can you handle that?”

  “What’s a few more days in this dump,” she shrugged.

  “Okay.” He shifted to stand. Sophia’s eyes bugged and Vail was shocked they could get any bigger. The poor girl was obviously uncomfortable. He eased back into the chair. “It’s late and I have to make a phone call,” he said by way of explanation.

  She blinked and shivered. Those big brown eyes darted this way and that while she thought. “I’d like to hear whatever call you have to make. You know, if you’re not going to lie about anything, you can talk in front of me.”

  “True enough.” Vail pulled a small phone from his cargo pocket. Satellite phones sure had shrunk since his active duty days. He stared at the keypad for a minute trying to remember the number he never dialed because he was always on the other end of the phone. After a beat his fingers took over, pounding out the long series of digits. A chime rang and he spoke. “Whiskey. Oscar. Lima. Foxtrot. Mike. Alfa. November. Two. Zero. Zero. Two.” After a couple more beeps silence stretched so long every hair on the back of his neck stood on end. “Hello?”

  A quavering female voice answered, “Commander?”

  Shit.

  He should’ve thought about this sooner. His poor secretary probably suspected he was calling from beyond the grave to remind her to file the bi-annual reports to the UN’s Audit Operations Committee. Everyone at the Base Branch office, except for Khani, thought he was compost. They’d had his funeral, buried him next to Ellie and Deanna. They didn’t know he’d been there for almost thirteen years already.

  “Yes,” he said. He realized how terribly uneventful the single word was, but Sophia’s fastidious gaze unnerved him. At twelve years old, she had the eyes of a trained operative. She’d have to, living with the likes of Carlos Ruez and his men. He promised to tell the truth. Yet, he found the need to protect her from the ugliness of the world took precedence. He wouldn’t lie, but he wouldn’t give her more to deal with tonight than the maelstrom she’d already witnessed.

  “Y… You’re alive? How? Oh my god,” Rhonda whispered, “I need to get Lieut—”

  “Rhonda, you’re not new to this job. You’ve seen and heard the crazy stuff that happens every day. I’m just fine, but no one can know that yet. No one.”

  “Oh…yes, sir. But you’re okay? I mean, I saw all the blood. I put a rose on your…” she broke off and gave a sniffle.

  Great, he’d made two women cry today. Since he could rely on Khani to cuss a longshoreman into a belly-up position and not ever think about crying on him, he spoke quickly. “I need to speak with LT Slaughter. She already knows. She’s the only one besides you, now.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m glad you’re all right, sir.” The line went quiet.

  Vail chanced a look at Sophia. Her shoes lay askew at the side of the bed. The knobby ends of her knees pointed to either side of the room. Ankles knotted, she clutched a pillow in the X of her folded arms. A crease ridged the skin between her brows as she continued to study him.

  “What the hell are you doing calling here? I thought you were smarter than that. Shit, I thought you were the smartest man I knew. And that’s saying something because the lot of you are hardly one step removed from apes to my way of thinking,” Khani rambled.

  “I hate to d
rop the average down a notch, but I need clean up on aisle five,” he said.

  “That’s not funny,” Khani growled. “If you’re bored, play solitaire. But you’re not getting out until I get some answers. And since you won’t let me question Ruez, I’m stuck going the long way around.”

  “I am out,” he said simply.

  A moment of silence hung in the quiet phone static while she tried to work things out. “Were you attacked?”

  “I found a lead. I followed it,” he said by way of answer.

  “By yourself? In your condition? Without getting my input or at least giving me a heads up?” Each question grew in volume.

  Sophia’s brows rose with each raised pitch. “Are you in trouble?” she mouthed.

  He thought about that for a moment, and then shook his head.

  Her baby fat cheeks rounded as her mouth thinned in a look that said, Yeah, sure you aren’t.

  “Hello,” Khani shouted, her irritation bringing the word straight from the top of Big Ben. “This is my job right now. Your only job was to heal.”

  “I couldn’t just let it go,” he huffed. “Take a moment and put yourself in my shoes. Could you let it go?”

  “Hell no,” she said with more than a hint of irritation. “Then you really do need clean up.”

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “How many bodies? And do you want a team to stay with you?”

  “Six and no. I may need one later, but not yet.”

  “Why am I surprised?” Khani muttered to herself.

  “I’ll send you the coordinates and be in touch.”

  “Give us a ring, if you change your mind about back-up.”

  “Will do.” He depressed the end button, sent a secure message with their location, and then slipped the phone into his pocket.

  “Where are we?” Sophia had scooted back to the wall. Her small shoulders and the crown of her head rested on the dark wood. And still she surveyed him from the corner of her eyes.

  “Northeast Kentucky.”

  “Huh,” she muttered. “Even though my mom and I have dual citizenship, I’d never been out of Mexico. I don’t think she has either. She’s probably ripping the country apart looking for me, but she’d never think to look across the border. She’d never find me, if not for you.” She straightened her head from the wall. “Did she hire you?”

  “Not exactly.”She opened her mouth to speak, but he spoke first. “I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. You’ve been through enough tonight. Sleep.” He stood and stepped to the doorway.

  Sophia bolted from the wall. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll keep watch downstairs.”

  “But…” She picked at the pillow's seam. “I…” Her cheeks puffed on a breath and she slumped back against the wall.

  Vail sat back in the chair. “What is it? Truth goes both ways here, all right?”

  “The truth hurts sometimes, but at least it’s honest. That’s what you said. It does hurt. I don’t want you to know I’m scared, but I am.” Moisture welled in her eyes.

  “Of me?” Vail asked.

  “No. Maybe I should be, but my gut tells me you’re a good guy.”

  “You have smart guts, Sophia. Listen to them always. They’re smarter than your brain, which doesn’t seem too shabby either.”

  She nodded at that and gave a half-masted smile. “Could you stay, for just a little bit longer?”

  “You got it.”

  12

  Carmen’s right arm reached high. Her back arched as she rose onto tiptoes. Like a rubber band set free, she snapped down with the force of her muscles. Whack! The racket connected with the tennis ball, deforming it for a split second before it sailed over the net and smacked high into the boxwood hedge.

  “You’re destroying the bushes,” Carlos Hersio-Ruez’s rapid-fire Spanish chastised from the narrow opening behind her.

  She didn’t turn. Didn’t speak to her father. She honed the hatred eating her alive from the inside, gripped the leather handle tighter, and repeated the process of impaling the shrubbery. What more could she do? The question had kept her up more hours in the last three weeks than should be humanly possible. At some point she expected sleep to claim her for more than twenty minutes at a time. Yet, it never did. It came in exhausted intervals, always interrupted by one of two recurring dreams.

  “Your brother will not be pleased,” her father pushed.

  Only one of the two dreams had a right to her thoughts. She should wake, pillow soaked through with tears, imagining her daughter huddled in a ball at the far corner of a dark glass room she could see into, but never enter. She should wake screaming her daughter’s name with her arm outstretched, trying to reach her.

  Whack! She pummeled another ball.

  “Carmen Félix-Ruez, stop right now, or I’ll call Manny and have him slice sweet Sophia’s cheek.”

  Carmen hated the name, but even more she hated the power her father, brother, and their minions held over her head like a guillotine. They toyed with the line, letting it loose a few inches, then a foot before hauling it back to the top to repeat the process. He wouldn’t hurt Sophia because they needed her daughter alive as leverage to keep her here. Christ knew it was the only reason she’d returned, the only reason she’d stayed as long as she had.

  Though she knew it would cost her, Carmen pivoted and backhanded the ball as hard as she could, using her anger for fuel.

  Whack!

  The yellow sphere’s impact left a red misshapen circle on her father’s cheek. His wide hand flew to the painful stain. “You stupid bitch! Men!”

  She smiled. He wouldn't try to take her alone. He’d learned over the years that the weapon he’d painstakingly crafted had a will of her own. She’d enjoyed teaching him and his men with their every bloody cut and broken bone. For a long time she’d been obedient. It upset Sophia to see bruises on her hands and face from the fights. But they’d taken her baby from her. The incentive to play nice had vanished with her daughter.

  The ache of loss doubled her, but she hid the pain, morphing into a crouched athletic stance. One. Two. Three. Four. They skidded around the corner. “I see you remember,” she whispered. “One on one just isn’t fair for your boys, now is it?” She spoke English. She always spoke English to her father, brother, and the goons. It pissed them off because most couldn’t speak or understand a lick of what she said. It also separated her from them. Their atrocities. Their greed. Their family business. Their sins. And her. Her greed. And her sins.

  Freeing her daughter from the people who shared her blood and spilled that of others took precedence over everything else. The space in her brain wouldn’t allow concern for all the other people the AFO hurt, as long as it wasn’t her daughter. Failure threatened her singular task. So how was she supposed to save all of Mexico from her family, a group she couldn’t even stop from hurting her and Sophia? If that made her greedy, then greedy she was. Unapologetically so. Hence, her sins and the other dream that disrupted her sleep. Her wake too.

  “You stupid little whore. Why can’t you just follow directions? Be good for a change?” Her father shook his finger. “Raf and Saul, get her and lock her in the room. For three days, this time.”

  Go home and run the business, Carlos had said. Right. More like go home and be ordered around by idiots. She didn’t want any part of the business, but being a prisoner in the place she’d grown up was getting old. Her poor father didn’t seem to recognize his flimsy grip on power. The men rubbing their fists for a chance at her took orders from her brother, even when locked behind yards of metal and concrete. Her old man was destined for a bullet from his son’s barrel. He just didn’t know it yet.

  Perhaps, like her father, she didn’t see her own demise yet. Soon Carlos would grow tired of her disloyalty, decide the trouble outweighed the effort, and have her eliminated. If only her mother hadn’t died. How different things would be.

  Thoomp. Thoomp. The automatic ball feeder continued to serve,
buzzing fuzzy yellow balls past her face. One large step toward the men brought her out of harm’s way. Or closer, depending on how you looked at it.

  The two young men broke off from the group, moving wide to attack from the sides. Any person in their right mind would fear these two. It wasn’t that ink scrawled over their faces, dipped below the hem of their wife-beaters, and encased their arms. It was what the black doodles depicted. Faces, numbers, and acts of death polluted their brown skin. Heads severed from bodies. Bullets busting into a forehead. The skulls of Santa Muerte.

  Carmen wasn’t in her right mind. High on sorrow and rage, she winked at Raf and simultaneously launched the racket at Saul’s head. The crunch and subsequent howl proved her aim true. Love game for Saul. Raf barreled in quick and heavy, fury rippling the ink imbedded around his mouth and forehead. At the last moment, she bent at the knees and waist, guided his momentum over her shoulder, and then stood, helping him flip.

  The other men gave her no time to gloat, which was bad sportsmanship anyway. Though, integrity had no place in this life. Obviously it didn’t. She’d shot an unarmed man in the belly. Yeah, he’d been armed with his capable hands. Hands that, given the chance, would have inflicted serious damage. Why was she going over this again, when other men with less precision and more malice crowded her space?

  They circled like starved coyotes on a wounded animal. Her heart bled, but her body craved a good fight. The man in front of her, with a tattooed one and zero split between his sunken cheeks, flipped a knife from his jean’s pocket. His capped teeth greeted her in a smile.

  “Don’t kill her, for Christ’s sake,” her father yelled from far off.

  “I’ll kill you for Santa Muerte,” Ten whispered.

  Not unless I kill you first.

  He lunged fast, aiming for her belly, but would have needed a sword to sink flesh. The man behind her backed off, giving them the dance floor. Not a fan of this particular tune, she stood her ground. He ran in this time, using quick choppy steps, and stabbed higher. The blade glittered in the early morning sun less than a foot from her face.