Mission Road (Tres Navarre #6)(65)

“It wasn’t me, chiquita,” Ralph told her. “I tried to help Frankie. You know that.”

“Wake up, somebody!” Alex yelled. “Aw, the hell with it.”

He dropped his keys and doughnuts on an end table and started up the stairs toward us. Footsteps behind us—at least two guys, running from the upstairs hall.

“Vato,” Ralph yelled, “vámanos!”

We pushed past Madeleine, who didn’t try to stop us. We ran toward the bottom of the stairs and Alex.

Two guards were coming behind us. Both were armed, but looked half asleep, baffled by what they saw.

“What are you waiting for?” Alex yelled. “Shoot them!”

One of the guards: “But—”

Alex started to say, “Shoot, godda—” when Ralph and I crashed into him. Not the most graceful takedown, but it worked. Alex crumpled backward in an unintended somersault.

Ralph and I burst through the kitchen doorway just as the guards opened fire.

RALPH RAN STRAIGHT FOR THE SERVICE exit. A bullet came through the window and shattered a bottle of brandy on the counter.

He hit the floor, put his back against the door.

“One more guy outside.” He reached up, threw the deadbolt.

The interior door had no lock, but it was right next to the refrigerator. I dragged the fridge in front of it. With all the adrenaline coursing through my body, I probably could’ve stacked a stove and a couple of cars, too.

Alex was cursing in the living room. He told one of the guards to wake up Mr. White. Madeleine said something and he yelled at her to shut up. Somebody battered on the interior door. The beer bottles rattled in the fridge.

The wall phone was right next to me. I thought about calling the police, but I decided it wouldn’t do any good. We already had enough people on the premises who wanted to kill us.

Maia was my only other option, but I hesitated. As much as we needed her, as much as I wanted to hear her voice, I didn’t want to put her in danger. I had a bad feeling that if I called her, it might be our last conversation.

A guard’s face appeared in the back window. I shot at the pane just above his head, then scrambled over to where Ralph was sitting.

“We need a third exit,” Ralph said. “Maybe a distraction.”

WHUMP.

The interior door shuddered. The fridge moved a couple of inches.

Brandy from the broken bottle was dripping off the counter. There were maybe a dozen more bottles left over from the party. Right by the gas stove—and the window above the sink.

An insane idea started to form in my head, but Ralph was way ahead of me.

“Check that drawer by the oven,” he said. “Find me some matches.”

As Ralph was lighting what might be our funeral pyre, I gave in to desperation. I picked up the phone.

Chapter 17

SUNDAY MORNING THE STREETS WERE DESERTED, which was not good for Maia’s safety. When she was angry and nervous, she drove as fast as traffic would allow. This morning, that was very fast indeed.

As so often happened for her, the answers had woven together in her mind at 3:00 A.M. Unable to sleep, dreading the onset of morning sickness, she had followed Ana DeLeon’s thought process through to the end. Maia knew who had shot Ana. An 8:00 A.M. call to the hospital front desk, a few questions about the police security detail had confirmed Maia’s fears about what he would do next.

Etch Hernandez.

Two things had decided her. First, the look on Kelsey’s face last night had not been the look of a guilty man. Stubborn, angry, defensive, yes. But guilty men don’t look quite so lost. They tend to have a smug calmness somewhere inside—a certainty that they are right and will be vindicated. Kelsey didn’t know what the hell was happening to him. He looked like a hopelessly outmatched boxer who’d decided to tuck in his chin, squeeze his eyes shut, and throw as many blind punches as possible before he got KO’d.

The second factor was the photograph of Hernandez and Lucia from Ana’s bulletin board. Maia had studied it a hundred times. She kept trying to read the strange uneasiness, the tense body language between the two partners. The way they stood together, the way Etch seemed entirely conscious of Lucia . . . Timing is wrong.

Maia wondered if Ana realized how ironic her notation was.

She suspected she knew more than Ana did. She thought she now understood the motive behind Franklin White’s murder, and that was the most disturbing puzzle piece of all.

She fishtailed into the hospital lot and took a reserved space.

She rummaged through the toolbox she always kept behind her driver’s seat—a few simple items that opened most doors. One was a stethoscope.

She tucked it in the front pocket of her blazer and headed toward the lobby.

As she walked, she thought about Tres.

She’d slept in his bed last night. The pillows smelled like him. The cat curled between her feet, but the sheets weren’t warm enough.

The longer Tres and she were together, the more she missed his warmth when they slept apart. He was always hot—always just a degree shy of a fever.

She woke to winter sunlight through bare pecan branches, the creaking of pipes and the smell of melting butter and fresh-baked cinnamon rolls downstairs.

Despite her uneasy stomach and her sense of foreboding, she ate breakfast in the kitchen with Sam and Mrs. Loomis.