The Hunted. Rachel Lee

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СКАЧАТЬ her uncle’s grunts and the creak of her mattress springs, wondering if her brother heard or cared when she’d lain in her bed afterward, crying into her pillow and counting the days, the hours, the minutes, until she could get the hell out of that house and never ever come back.

      Well, she’d gotten out. And she would never get back.

      The door opened, and he stood in the doorway with a bag in his hand. He tossed it onto the bed. “Get dressed. You go home.”

      He pulled the door closed as he left. He didn’t bolt it. First time ever. She pursed her lips, wondering what that meant. His words didn’t matter. She’d learned to ignore words. Home. Beautiful. Love. Whatever. But he hadn’t locked her door. That mattered.

      She opened the bag. Faded jeans and a green T-shirt. No bra or panties, but she hadn’t worn them in so long, she didn’t care. The jeans and T-shirt still had store tags clipped on. She bit the tags off and felt a tooth chip. It was the diet, the gritty tortillas that wore away at the enamel. But Dad was a dentist. He’d fix it.

      New clothes. The door not locked.

      She was going home.

      She washed up as best she could at the sink. Put on the jeans and the T-shirt. Brushed out her hair with her fingers. It had lost some of its blond luster, but the girl in the mirror still had the big brown eyes everyone had always talked about. Her face wasn’t quite as fresh. But with some exercise and makeup and a good diet again…Yeah. She could go home. She could be…

      …who?

      Candi was the name she’d used in Denver. Her parents had called her Candace. But no one had called her anything since she’d gotten here. Not a name, anyway. Just puta. Whore.

      Who would she be when she got home? Her uncle’s puta? Candi? Would she even remember what it meant to be Candace? Or would she take one look at her dad’s face, then look at his crotch and wonder how many half-and-halves it’d take to get her tooth fixed?

      “Are you ready?” he said, opening the door again. “You look good.”

      Words. Whatever.

      “Sure.”

      She followed him out of her room and then the front room and then out into the courtyard. She’d only seen it once before, when she’d been brought here. Looking around, she realized she’d been living in the servants’ quarters. Well, that fit.

      Terra-cotta tiles glistened in the morning sun. It had rained last night, and the air was thick with moisture and the sweet scents of the garish tropical flowers that bloomed in carefully trimmed beds around the courtyard. Not a stone, not a grain of sand out of place. That part was like home, at least.

      The black SUV was new, not the same one she’d come here in. The leather was baby smooth under her fingers as she climbed into the backseat. He got in front and pushed a button, and a little screen came down out of the roof. “Movie?”

      “Yeah. Sure.”

      He put a DVD into the dashboard player, and moments later the screen flickered to life. Bugs Bunny, speaking in Spanish. He’d bought the DVD for a child. Maybe a daughter. Maybe she was sitting where this man’s daughter usually sat, watching the same cartoons his daughter would laugh at while he drove her…where? To school? To church?

      She realized she knew nothing about this man. And that was probably why he was letting her go home. He was just another businessman in a foreign country. She didn’t even know what city she was in. She couldn’t identify him.

      She fought the urge to look around as they drove. Part of her wanted to memorize everything, to pick out some sign, some landmark, that she could recall when she got home and tell…someone. Someone who could come and find this man. Instead, she just watched Bugs Bunny make a fool of Elmer Fudd. In Spanish.

      They were climbing into the mountains. The man must have an airstrip up here somewhere. That would make sense. He could hardly put her on a commercial flight. She would probably be sitting atop a pile of cocaine. She wondered if it would be soft.

      “We stop here to pee,” he said, pulling off onto a side road. “More hours to the airport.”

      She didn’t need to pee, but that was fine. She was used to peeing on command. When Dad had taken the family to Yellowstone, he’d scheduled in every pee stop, a little X in yellow highlighter on his trip planner. She and her brother had giggled because Dad had used yellow for the pee stops. The thought made her smile.

      There wasn’t a bathroom. That was fine. Living on the streets had taught her the more basic skills of life. She pulled down her jeans, carefully tucking the fabric back between her ankles, turning her hips forward as she squatted, pressing a finger on either side of her urethra and lifting, so she would shoot out rather than straight down, keeping her jeans dry.

      She heard the schlick-schlick as he worked the slide, and she knew. Part of her thought about trying to run or turning to fight. But her jeans were around her ankles. There wouldn’t be time. It wouldn’t matter.

      Fuck it.

      Instead, she looked down at the leaves rippling under her stream, at how they flicked this way and that, and just waited. Her throat caught as she thought about Yellowstone, and she and her brother giggling at a yellow X. Back when she had been someone else. Someone innocent and soft and hopeful.

      She heard the crack an instant before the bullet crashed through the base of her skull and exploded every thought, every memory, every sadness, every hope.

      The blackness came fast.

      She was home.

      1

      Special Agent Jerrod Westlake sat at his desk in the FBI’s Austin office, looking out a window at the late-afternoon sky. The ordinarily exquisite February weather was about to give way to one of those window-rattling, tree-toppling thunderstorms for which Texas was known.

      He watched the clouds turn blacker by the second over toward Balcones. If it had been raining up in the hill country to the west, floods wouldn’t be far behind.

      But Jerrod wasn’t really thinking about the storm. At thirty-eight, he had a decade under his belt as an agent, and he looked at the building storm with the uneasy sixth sense that life was about to imitate meteorology.

      The case file that lay all over his desk, sorted into types and sources of information, screamed things that burned into his brain. Fourteen-year-old runaway female, last seen hawking herself on the streets of Houston. This time, unlike most times, she had been reported missing by another prostitute, an older woman who had tried to take the child under her wing and protect her. It was this woman who had reported the girl’s disappearance. Usually they just disappeared into inky silence, without a trace.

      Another rumble of thunder, too low to be audible, but strong enough to be felt, passed through the office.

      Lately too many of his cases seemed to settle around government contractors. The rush of often poorly overseen privatization of government work, coupled with the spending bonanza of the “global war on terror,” had led to a boom in contractor fraud. For a while, it had gone largely unnoticed and unchecked, but then courageous whistle-blowers had begun to come forward. Sadly, despite the whistle-blower protection laws, he knew that those СКАЧАТЬ