Whitewater (Rachel Hatch #6)(11)
"You're right about that." Hatch chuckled and slapped a hand on the blue ambulance's side panel.
Hatch waited for a gap in traffic and then hustled across the six lanes to the sidewalk in front of the station. Out of the corner of her eye, Hatch watched as Azul pulled out of the lot and headed back in the direction they'd come from.
A short, fat officer crammed himself into the wooden guard shack after arguing with an older woman. Whatever her complaint had been, the officer met her with resistance. The squat officer folded his thick arms across his ample belly and struck a pleased look as he watched the woman turn and stomp off. Hatch took the slight incline in the walkway to the guard house and passed the irate woman who cursed in Spanish until she was out of earshot.
All the effort in thwarting the older woman's claim caused the floodgates to unleash. Sweat poured out of the portly man's forehead. The unfit police officer scrunched his brow at the sight of Hatch approaching. His face screwed up in a question mark when he realized she was American.
"Can I help you?" he asked in broken English.
"I'm looking for somebody."
The officer whose nametag read Torres cocked an eyebrow followed by a toothy grin. "Mexico is a big place."
"I'm looking for a girl. A teenager. Seventeen. I need to speak with one of your detectives."
He looked ready to gaff her off, just as she'd witnessed him do to the older woman moments ago. But instead, he surprised her. "In through those doors. That's the main lobby. Someone inside will help you."
She turned and started to the door when Hatch heard Torres say, "ID." She turned to see his opened moist palm. Hatch hoped she could avoid using any official identification, but time hadn't been on her side and she had not been able get a quality fake. Besides the hunter killer team sent to silence her in Colorado, nobody was officially looking for her.
Reluctantly, Hatch fished out her license and handed it to him. She was grateful he did nothing more than eye it for less than a second before handing it back to her with a clipboard. A ballpoint pen was attached to the metal clip by a rubber band. "Sign."
Hatch was grateful the officer didn't write it. In the best impression of the worst doctor handwriting ever, she signed it using a name combining a little girl she loved more than anything with the man who'd saved her life. Daphne Nighthawk was scribbled in the first available line. She handed it back to Torres. He returned the clipboard to the rusty nail without even looking at her signature mark.
Quietly grateful, Hatch pocketed the license. "I know it's not my business, but what was the deal with that woman?"
"You're right, it's none of your business." The guard retreated deeper into his shack like a turtle retracting into its shell.
Hatch walked away and into the main lobby.
Seven
She first heard the screams upon entering through the dark tinted glass doors of Nogales' municipal police department. The screams, more of high-pitched wails, reverberated through the open space of the lobby with megaphonic proportions.
Hatch spent time inside a variety of federal, military, and local police department lobbies across the US and overseas while serving as an MP. Combative people in the lobby were nothing out of the ordinary. The mayhem wasn't always caused by a criminal either. She'd seen plaintiffs become convicts when lost in the heat of the moment. The door closed behind her as she surveyed the chaotic events taking place.
A wild-eyed man was wearing nothing but a frayed pair of jeans wrapped around his ankles and exposing his red boxers. Once inside, Hatch waited for her eyes to adjust from the bright light of outside to the incandescent light of the interior of the lobby. In the clarity that followed, she realized he was not wearing red boxers. They were, in fact, white. The blood covering them gave them a red hue. The leakage stemmed from several long gashes on the combatant's head and skull.
He kicked wildly at the two officers restraining him. A handsome officer with an amused look on his face stood nearby, far enough away to not be directly involved in the melee. He gave an authoritative nod of his head to the bigger of the two cops holding the blood covered man. The larger officer drove a wooden straight stick baton across the top of the man's head. In the US, this type of blow would've only been authorized under a deadly force encounter. He delivered an additional blow that caught the shirtless man in the side of his neck before the fighting stopped altogether.
The two officers wearing the unconscious man's blood on their green fatigues dragged him away in cuffs. Something about not wanting to stay a night in a Mexican prison came to Hatch's mind. This experience reminded her of the truth behind its meaning. She hated to think of the conditions Angela Rothman was experiencing at this very moment.
The blood covered man disappeared behind a closed door and the hum of normalcy returned after a brief silence. The handsome officer remained behind. His entertainment gone, he turned his attention to Hatch.
Officer Munoz, identified by his polished brass nameplate, was of equal height to Hatch, if not slightly taller by an inch. His boyish charms were packaged into a man's physique. Munoz had chiseled good looks and a neatly gelled crewcut. His uniform was custom fit with tapered sleeves that rolled past his elbow, cinching tight underneath his biceps and engorging the veins on his clean-shaven forearms. The Nogales lieutenant looked to be no more than thirty. He smiled, broadly displaying his ivory teeth as he approached.