Hunter emptied two full magazines of .45 ammo at them as fast as she could pull the trigger. That many rounds so fast made them scatter for cover, and Hunter still hit two of the men in the torsos. They collapsed, out of the fight. Suretta made it to the brush just as one of Hunter’s rounds clipped her forearm, making the woman drop her weapon.
Hunter slipped in her third, and last magazine, looking for targets. Ike pulled and pushed Consuela’s limp body into the car and searched for Kelly, but she was gone.
Hunter told Ike, “Go, get them out of here. I’ll find Kelly.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“No! Get the others to safety. You can come back for us.”
She checked the dust on the road, spotted the young girl’s tennis shoe pattern, and followed it into the cedars and scrub brush beside the road, the pistol still in her hand.
Ike told Ramona to drive, get them out of here. The kids were all crying, and Consuela’s blood was on everything as Ike held her in his arms.
Anita cried the hardest, wanting to touch her friend, but Ramona wept and said, “No, my sweet, she is gone.”
Ramona turned the car around, driving toward the gate two miles distant. She reached across the seat and took Ike’s hand. He squeezed it softly, then let it go, saying, “Use both to drive, mi vida, my life.” So there it was, out in the open, and Ike was glad.
Suretta and the others hurried to the barn, where the pilot said, “Where’s the cargo? I need to get out of here if I’m gonna be on time.”
“They will be here soon.” She pulled her phone and when the party answered, she said, “They’re coming.”
She hung up and called again, “Jefe, Ramona was here.” She held the phone away from her ear as he yelled at her. The longer he talked, the madder she became. When he hung up, she put her phone away, took a deep breath, and said to Nadine, “He said to kill her if she interferes.”
“That’s bad shit, huh?”
“It won’t be our priority, just if she gets in the way again. The one I want is Hunter Kincaid. I want to tear that bitch apart.”
“How’s your arm?”
Suretta wiggled it, showing the bandage. “An inch lower, the bullet would have broken a bone.”
“What do we do now?”
“Let’s drive to the gate, see what happens when Ramona and those kids run into the people the boss sent. The timing should be just about right. When we bring them back, they go straight on the plane and out of our hair.”
“What about Ike, and the Kincaid woman?”
“If they surrender, they go with the kids on the plane and out of the country. Let somebody else deal with them. Otherwise, we can find a place and put them in a hole so nobody will discover them in a hundred years.”
“That little girl you killed, too?”
“That one, too.”
“Okay.”
“Right now, let’s find a high point and watch the gate, see what happens.”
Hunter tracked Kelly down in less than three hundred yards, and when she reached the girl, the grief showing in her face brought tears to Hunter’s eyes. They stopped in the shade of a cedar clump below the crest of a hill. Hunter put her hand on the child’s shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry, Kelly.”
Kelly wiped her eyes and said, “I know. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, but we can’t do anything about it quite yet. We will, though.”
Kelly said, “I didn’t know where I was going, I just ran.”
“Nothing wrong with that. They were bad folks. I ran, too.”
“That pistol you have, is it a machine gun pistol? It sounded like it, all those bullets so fast.”