He hesitated, hand worrying the bulldog’s neck, said, “I don’t know. But I was scared. I started to run, and I fell and hurt my legs.” He pointed to the bruises on his knees and shins. “And then I don’t remember anything.”
“When you say ‘bad noises,’ do you mean screams or—”
“Crying,” Jin said suddenly, looking off somewhere herself. “I remember a dream too. Someone was crying.”
“Where were you?” Justine asked. “In your room? At home?”
Jin appeared puzzled but then said, “No. I was in like a bunk bed, because I was lying on my back, and I could reach up and touch the bottom of the mattress. It wasn’t very far.”
“You remember seeing that in your dream?” Justine asked.
“No, it was night. I could just, like … feel it?”
“And the crying?” Justine pressed. “Where was that? Who was that?”
“I don’t …” Jin said before her voice trailed off.
Malia’s mouth hung open. “I had that same dream too. Someone was crying.”
“Where?”
“Outside of where I was,” Malia said, growing agitated, tears starting to dribble. “Only I don’t think it was a bunk bed. I was in a box. I felt walls all around me. I heard the crying through the walls.”
“Was it a man or a woman crying? Your mom or dad?”
The oldest Harlow girl shook her head. “No. It sounded like a child crying. Not Jennifer.”
“Couldn’t have been Thom?”
Malia blinked, thought, said, “But I heard men talking and that stopped the crying, and then I heard loud noises like chains clanking, and something heavy hitting something metal. And then a sound like a jet, the way the engine sounds when it starts up?”
“I know that sound,” Justine said, paused. “The men you heard talking in your dream. What were they saying?”
“I don’t know. They were speaking Spanish.”
Chapter 57
DEL RIO’S FACE was puffy, bandaged. A carbon-fiber-and-canvas girdle wrapped and supported his torso. He was flat on his back, hitched to several machines and an IV, but breathing without a tube.
“I’m spending too much time in hospitals,” I said in weary greeting. It was past ten. Other than two twenty-minute catnaps, I hadn’t slept in nearly forty-eight hours. I should have listened to Justine, gone home, slept hard. But I felt I had to be by Del Rio’s side. It was my duty, and my honor.
Del Rio smiled, coughed, looked at me through a medicated haze. “They say it will all heal.”
“You can’t know how happy I was to hear that news, Rick,” I said, grabbed his hand and shook it. “How happy all of us are.”
“Don’t feel jack now, Jack,” Del Rio said. “But they got me on all sorts of stuff supposed to reduce the swelling.” He paused. “What-all happened? Nobody’ll tell me anything.”
I gave it to him in broad strokes, the death of Bud Rankin, the chase at the pier after the explosion, the identity of the kiteboarders, the sheriff trying to say Private should take the fall for the whole fiasco.
“What did I tell you?” Del Rio rasped.
I raised my hands in surrender. “I should have listened to you, but we had and have immunity. Anyway, FBI’s involved now. In both cases.”
“Both?”
I summarized Justine and Cruz’s trip to Mexico, the release of the Harlow children, and their spare and fuzzy recollections of their capture and captivity.
Del Rio closed his eyes. For a second I thought he’d lost consciousness, but then he said, “Those sounds she heard, the Harlow girl. Sounds like loading coffins on an airplane, right?”