Esperanza (43 page)

Mira’s expression didn’t change. “There’s more. Apparently your mother’s house was torched earlier this evening. Burned to the ground. Nothing left. Shep says that’s how Hernandez described it to him.”

Torched.
Tess pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
Everything gone.
And it was her fault. Because of her, her mother and niece were now on the run, her mother’s house had been destroyed, years of memories and irreplaceable memorabilia gone in a flash.
Mom, I’m so sorry.
She felt certain that the
bruja
inside Dan had made him do it, but didn’t say it. Even though Mira grasped the situation, Tess’s conclusion might be too big a stretch even for Mira.

“Mom’s going to insist on driving up to Key Largo.”

“It’ll put her at risk, Tess. Whoever did this may be trying to draw all of you off the island.”

The
bruja’
s promise.
Tess raked her fingers back through her white hair and exhaled slowly. “What do you think we should do?”

“Get out of the country as soon as you can. I spoke to a friend, a pilot who runs an air charter and cargo business here on Tango. He’s got a cargo flight leaving for the Dominican Republic in about an hour. From there, you can book a flight to Quito. He’ll charge you a couple hundred apiece. But there won’t be any record that the three of you were on the flight.”

“He can bypass TSA? Homeland Security? The State Department?”

“He operates on a whole other level, Tess.”

“Yeah? And what level is that?”

“The level of the very wealthy and the well connected. He’s a close friend. I trust him.”

“We’ll do it. We’ve got two cars, though, both paid for. Can we leave them with you?”

“You bet. I’ll put them in my garage.”

“I’ll give you the name of a doc my mother works with. He’ll help out
with the cars, come and get them.” Doc Brian would do a favor for her mother.

“How fast can you get your stuff together?” Mira asked.

“Ten minutes. We’ll follow you to your place.”

“I imagine there’ll be insurance questions about your mom’s house. We can deal with that through e-mail.”

“I can’t thank you enough, Mira.” Tess started to get out of her car, but paused. “Do you do this for all your clients? Is this normal? For you?”

“Normal?” Mira’s brows shot up, forming little peaks. “No way. This situation is so
not
normal that I’m going to have to visit Esperanza.”

“Ten minutes.” Tess got out of the car, wondering how to break it to her mother that her house was a pile of smoldering ashes.

When she entered the room, Maddie announced that the grand total in cash at their disposal was $497,000. Lauren said she had no idea where the money had come from. But Tess did. Her dad had squirreled it away, a bonus here, a stock sale there, money tucked away every year he had spent on the planet. He always told stories about how his grandparents had hidden money in their mattresses during the Depression.

“What’d she want?” her mother asked.

“We need to leave.” Tess told them what was going on, then added: “There’s something else, Mom. Your house has, uh, burned to the ground.”

Lauren’s expression shifted rapidly from incredulity to grief to shock to rage and then her face collapsed and she stood rapidly and walked into the bathroom. Tess and Maddie just looked at each other.

“Jesus, Tesso,” Maddie whispered.

“It’s the
bruja
inside him,” Tess whispered back. “It’s revenge against me.”

“So Dan wouldn’t realize what he was doing?”

“Probably not.”

After a few minutes, she and Maddie both got up and went to the bathroom door. Tess heard running water, her mother blowing her nose, then the water went off, Lauren opened the door, and Tess and Maddie wrapped their arms around her. Tess couldn’t grasp what this meant to her mother. She didn’t know what treasures the house had held, didn’t have any idea how emotionally vested her mother was in her home. She had not shared the house with Charlie, but the presence of Tess’s father had been everywhere.

She was surprised when her mother stepped back from them, her eyes still red from crying, and said, “Okay. I had my good cry. But here’s the deal. Anything Maddie and I owned that was of real value is in a storage unit in Miami, along with your stuff, in preparation for hurricane season. So the goddamn
brujos
are welcome to the ashes. That’s who’s responsible, right?”

“Probably.”

She waved her hand. “Clothes, dishes, furniture, shoes, even the house, that’s all replaceable. I’ve got you two, my passport, laptop, and everything I need to write my book. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Lauren Livingston, a study in resilience, Tess thought.

“How’re we going to carry all this money?” Maddie asked.

“Divide it among our packs,” Tess said. “Then we’ll have to tape the bulk of it to our bodies until we’ve gone through customs. We’ll borrow some masking tape from Mira. She’s going to keep our cars for us. Maybe you should call Brian, Mom, and ask him to phone Mira in a few days. Maybe he can handle the insurance claim on your house.”

“Good idea,” Lauren said. “But what about the thousands you owe in medical bills?”

“It’ll have to wait.” Sooner or later the bills would be sent to a collection agency and then to the police. One more addition to the list of her transgressions. Tess tossed the Prius keys to her mother, scooped up the keys to the Mazda 3. “Mira’s waiting outside. We’re going to follow her to her house.” Since the room was paid for through tomorrow morning, she left the key on the dresser, swept part of the money into her bag, and opened the door.

They were halfway across the parking lot when a cop car turned into the motel. Tess immediately did a one-eighty and walked faster to catch up with her mother and Maddie. It meant the Mazda wouldn’t make it to Mira’s and there was a good chance it would be impounded and towed off at some point in the next day or two. But if her mother could move forward after her home burned down, then Tess could walk away from her car.

Minutes later, Tess drove the Prius out of the lot, and followed Mira through the Tango hills. Mira called her en route to tell her that someone at the motel had reported seeing her. “I just heard it on the police radio.”

A tense urgency seized Tess—and a profound fear that something would go wrong at the eleventh hour. If the
bruja
inside of Dan put out the call to her minions—
millions,
Mira had said—they would descend on Tango Key in such great numbers, with such numbing power, that even the chasers wouldn’t be able to stop them. The feelings didn’t leave her even when she
pulled into Mira’s open garage. Tess parked next to a dark SUV, Mira left her VW behind the Prius, and the garage door clattered shut behind them.

Mira threw open the doors of the SUV. “Get down on the floor and into the back between the boxes of books and pull the quilts over you,” she instructed them. “I have the police radio on, so we’ll know what they know.”

Lauren wedged her body into the space on the floor behind the front seat, pulled a quilt over herself. Tess and Maddie climbed into the back well, pressed their bodies between boxes. Mira drew quilts over them. “Okay, five minutes or so and we’ll be at the airport.”

The engine hummed to life, the garage door clanked as it rose, the car sped off into the dark. It didn’t take long for the police radio to crackle.

“. . . this is Sergeant Travers. The suspect’s room is empty, but her car is in the motel parking lot. What would you like us to do with it, Agent Hernandez?”

“Impound it,” Dan replied. “Have it towed to the station and a truck will be out there tomorrow to bring it to Miami.”

“Do you want us to join the roadblock on the bridge? To help check cars leaving the island?”

“No, we’ve got enough men there already and we have men at the major marinas. You three should head to the airport.”

“No commercial flights fly in or out after dusk, Agent Hernandez.”

“What about private planes?”

“Uh, yes, sir, private planes do. We’re headed over there now. Over and out.”

“Shit,” Mira said.

The SUV picked up speed, turned abruptly to the right, slammed down over potholes. Branches slapped the sides of the vehicle. The boxes of books shifted as Mira took an abrupt left turn.

“We have a slight lead on them,” Mira said. “I’m calling the pilot now.”

What followed was a rapid exchange in Spanish that Tess couldn’t follow.

“The plane’s on the runway,” Mira said as she disconnected. “I can see it ahead. I’ll come up as close as possible to the plane, so when I stop, you guys flat-out run. I’ve got a pack for you to take with you. Clothes, snacks, makeup, shampoo, stuff to make life easier.”

Tess, now free of the quilts, sat up. She saw the airport at the bottom of the road, the runway lights, a Learjet idling on the tarmac. “The
jet?
” she exclaimed. “That’s your friend’s plane?”

“Yeah. And if he likes you, he’ll take you all the way to Quito.”

“He’ll like us,” Lauren said. “Count on it.”

“What’s his name?” Maddie asked.

“Ross Blake. Like I said, a trusted friend. Maybe I can talk him into taking me down there for a visit.”

Mira swerved into the airport’s charter area and stopped just short of the tarmac. Everyone scrambled out, hugged Mira good-bye, and she passed the extra pack to Tess.

“I owe you, Mira. That means we haven’t seen the last of you.”

“You’re right about that. Get out of here, fast!”

Tess raced after her mother and niece toward the waiting Learjet. As they flew up the stairs, sirens screeched, closing in. An attractive woman greeted them at the door, urged them to take their seats. Moments later, the Learjet lifted into the starlit sky.

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.

—Albert Einstein

Thanks to an upcoming election, Quito was a city under siege. Soldiers stood on every corner, gunfire echoed around the clock, a dusk-to-dawn curfew was in effect.

Ian had spent two weeks here, talking to travel agents, bartenders, hotel clerks, tourists, anyone and everyone who might be able to direct him to Esperanza. Apparently, no buses traveled there, no planes flew into the city, and even people who had heard of the place seemed clueless about exactly where it was located. It was inconceivable that a city could get lost in the Andes, but that appeared to be the case with Esperanza. His best advice had come from a hotel clerk, who told him to go to the ExPat Inn in Otavalo and hire a driver to take him to Esperanza.

Great plan. But the government-imposed sanctions on travel within Ecuador meant he needed a visa from the Ministry of Travel. So for the last five days, he’d stood in line at the ministry with hundreds of other tourists and Ecuadorians. Today was no different.

It was now one
P.M.
and Ian had been waiting six hours. A dozen people stood between him and the front door, giving him a shot at getting inside the building before the sun went down and the curfew went into effect. Three soldiers stood guard at the door, blocking it with their bodies. Every time people inside were ready to leave, one of the soldiers unlocked the door, another counted how many people exited, and a third waved an equal number into the building.

At one-thirty, when Ian was just eight people from the door and could actually see inside the building, the blinds were lowered and one of the soldiers announced the ministry would be closed until three for lunch. A roar of protest went up from the hundreds in line behind him and suddenly the crowd surged forward, toward the building.

Ian moved fast in the opposite direction, against the tide, shouldering
his way through throngs of enraged people. As the hordes converged on the building, soldiers fired tear gas into the crowd. The air quickly filled with the stuff and the panicked flew out in every direction, hundreds stampeding through the streets, diving behind cars, into open doorways. Then they started hurling rocks at the soldiers, the buildings. Windows shattered, cars were torched, tires set on fire, and clouds of dark, oily smoke quickly poured through the street. A full-blown riot had erupted.