“This is Kincaid.”
“Hunter, this is Raymond. We just got a call. Your mother has been in an accident. She’s in the emergency room at Providence, there in El Paso.”
She gripped the phone, “They say how she is?”
“They wouldn’t tell us. I made some quick calls to the El Paso P.D. They said it was a one-car; she hit a telephone pole and broke it off at the base, and she wasn’t wearing a seat belt. They said she had head contusions and possible internal injuries, but that was all unofficial.”
“Thanks, Raymond.”
“Call if we can help.”
She hung up and told Truman, then went to her car and drove across town to the hospital. When she identified herself, the charge nurse looked at her oddly, then told her that Belinda Kincaid was in room 312, and she could go on up. Hunter took the stairs to the third floor and entered the hallway. The door to 312 was closed, but she could hear murmurs inside.
Hunter opened the door and stepped inside before she saw the TV crew and lights focused on Ronnie, sitting on the side of his mother’s bed. He held Belinda’s hand while a young, beautiful redheaded female reporter in a short green skirt interviewed him, her hand resting on his shoulder. Hunter was almost out the door when her mother called, “Hunter! Don’t go, darling!”
She heard the bustling, hurried movements behind her and knew she was caught. Hunter turned, squinting in the bright lights.
CHAPTER 6
Anda didn’t fight the two soldiers. She knew there was no use. The men led her into Anacleto’s large tent, where one of them said, “Try to escape and we shoot you in the legs. Cleto won’t mind a little blood if it makes you behave.” The soldier didn’t wait for an answer as he and the other one left. Anda looked around, searching for anything that might help her out of this, anything to get her away from Anacleto and keep her and her baby alive.
The military tent was big and fully contained, with a center support pole and canvas walls and floor. Electric lights hung overhead and she could hear a generator in the distance. The bed was large, obviously not military, with covers and fluffy pillows. A nightstand beside the bed had a bottle of Oso Negro vodka and an empty glass on it. An ashtray was there, with a half-smoked cigar resting on the edge. Across the room a small refrigerator hummed. A table with a four-burner hotplate was hooked to a huge, chest-high butane tank and near it was a fold-up table with four chairs. A steamer trunk angled out from one corner and above it, some of the fat man’s shirts and pants hung from a stretched rope. She heard shuffling footsteps outside and then Anacleto talking to the two soldiers near the front of the tent. He would be coming soon.
Anda went to the hotplate and looked beside one of the burners. At the edge was something that had a trigger, and looked almost like a pistol with a straight handle. The barrel was square and the handle was red plastic. Anda picked it up and pulled the trigger. A small click sounded and a yellow flame burned steady from the end.
Anacleto laughed with the soldiers, telling them a story. Good, she had a little time, then. Anacleto liked to talk.
Anda bent to the butane tank and tried the hose. It was only on hand-tight, so she unhooked it. The hiss of gas was light, and she turned the valve up as much as she dared, not wanting the men outside to hear. She draped a dirty cleaning rag over it to muffle the sound. It worked, cutting the sound in half. She went across the room and waited, her nose a foot off the floor, watching the tent flap as beads of sweat glistened on her forehead.
When Anda smelled the gas, she opened the steamer trunk, pulled out all the clothes inside and removed the ones above her from the hangers. She got between the trunk and the canvas wall and covered herself completely with the loose clothes, leaving only the tip of the lighter sticking out at floor level. Even with the clothes blanketing her, Anda heard Anacleto’s loud, wheezing laugh as he finished his joke. She heard the tent flap open and close, then zip shut. The fat man took a few steps into the room.
Anda clicked the lighter.
The gas exploded with a whooshing, thundering roar, splitting one wall of the tent and expelling a roiling orange and red mushroom of fire that flashed across the compound like a volcano’s pyroclastic flow, engulfing the other tents and vehicles and setting off more explosions and many screams. Anacleto Holguin flew backward and hit in a rolling, smoking cartwheel against a pile of boulders thirty yards away.
The other tents shredded and flapped apart, sending rents of canvas fluttering in the air like kite tails. The butane bottle became an unguided rocket as it split on one end and the escaping gas ignited and shot flames like the engine of a fighter jet. The tank zigzagged across the ground like a blind, rabid dog, bouncing off boulders and careening through the terrain, leaving a trail of flames and burning brush behind. Everything within thirty yards of the explosion lay broken, smoking, or in flames. Colonel Felipe Godoy was unconscious in a pile of broken tables and upturned chairs, his uniform singed and torn.
One soldier staggered in circles. Burning brush cast odd shadows. The campfire that had been in front of the tents was gone, the coals blown away by the force of the blast. Anda crawled to her feet and tried to dig the stuffiness out of her ears with her fingers. She looked around, then walked to the collapsed, smoking outhouse. The door was intact, and Anda pulled it open. Maria and Alicia looked at her with glazed, stunned eyes.
“Did the world end?” Alicia asked.
“Almost,” Anda said. “We can get away now.”
The three women walked fast through the devastation and into the night. Anda led them up the side of one of the hills instead of along the bottom. As they climbed, they could hear the roaring butane tank ponging and pinging as it bounced off rocks and other solid objects in the draw. When they reached the top, Anda kept them to the high ground for the next several minutes. When Anda felt safe, she stopped for a breather. Alicia rubbed a bloody spot on her arm where a nail had punched when the outhouse collapsed on them. Maria was silent, looking at Anda.
“What are you thinking?” Maria asked.
“Our choices.”
Anda felt the tenderness on the back of her hand where the blast had flipped the pile of clothes away, exposing the skin to the flash of flame. She rubbed it as she studied the compound three hundred yards downhill. A noise caused them to glance at the draw, where reflections of approaching headlights were visible on the banded sand and gravel walls.
The women crouched behind a boulder and watched as the old stakebed truck entered the camp and stopped. The back canvas flap opened and soldiers poured out of the back and cab, all of them looking wildly around at the devastation. Anda saw Felipe Godoy walking toward the men, limping a little.
Anda told the women to stay where they were. She used the shadows and small arroyos to work her way down the hill within hearing distance.
Godoy said to the soldiers, “I think that idiot, Holguin,” He pointed to the unconscious fat man, “left that little girl alone too long.”
“The explosion?”