The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online Page B

horror as the padlock clamped shut.
    â€œYes, we paid them.”
    â€œThen why?” He was starting to whine.
    She squeezed his hand until his whining turned to whimpers.
    â€œStop it,” she said. “Be quiet. Somebody will come soon.”
    â€œMy head hurts,” he said.
    â€œYou’ll be okay.”
    â€œI want to throw up.”
    â€œYou’ll be okay. Just stay calm. Don’t move if you don’t have to. Somebody will come.”
    To drive her memories of that time away she took the old woman’s hand again.
    â€œYou’re so very sweet,” the woman said.
    Pilar smiled, wishing that were really true.
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    It was nearly midnight when she disembarked at San Antonio International Airport. The airport was almost deserted, the shops along the concourse all closed up, nobody but a few bored custodians wandering around. Pilar never checked baggage on these flights back and forth between Washington, D.C., and San Antonio. Everything she needed, and that wasn’t much, she kept in her carry-on.
    She made her way with the other passengers down to the exits where she rented a car on her Monica Rivas credit card. Less than ten minutes later, she had the airport in her rearview mirror and was looking for a place to pull over.
    She found it in an abandoned gas station parking lot.
    She turned out the lights, rolled down the windows, and waited. Washington had been hot and sticky with humidity when she left. Here, in San Antonio, it was even hotter, but the night air was dry and still and scented by a nearby magnolia tree in bloom. It pleased her. Even if coming back here stirred up a lot of memories she’d rather forget, there was still something satisfying, even welcoming, like a narcotic sleep, about the South Texas nights.
    And with the windows open and the night air moving across her skin, she could almost hear Lupe laughing at the sparks rising on the hot air above the open fire they’d lit the night before they were to board the eighteen-wheeler and make the trip across the border. They were out on the black hills above Ciudad Juarez, behind a cluster of tarpaper shacks sitting on car tires. They didn’t have anything to eat but some gum she’d stolen from a shop down in the city, but that was okay. Lupe was happy just listening to her talk about the wheel of fortune and what was in store for them.
    â€œIf you start at the bottom of the wheel and rise to the top, that’s a comedy,” she said.
    â€œAnd if you start at the top and you go to the bottom . . .”
    â€œThat’s a tragedy,” she answered. “But that’s not us.”
    â€œWe’re like those sparks, right?” They both watched pinpoints of light rise into the air, winking out above their heads.
    â€œThat’s right. Our life’s a comedy.”
    Oh, how he’d laughed about that.
    And oh, how it hurt now to think about him laughing.
    At 12:30 A.M. , she took out her iPhone and called up a Gmail account that she shared with Ramon Medina, head of the Porra Cartel. The inbox contained a few junk e-mails, but those were unimportant. It was the draft folder with which she was concerned. The cartels had learned early on that the NSA routinely monitored international e-mail accounts. Anything going in or out of the country was scanned for key words and hot button topics by some of the most sophisticated software analytics ever devised. And when items of interest were developed, they were copied and read and the senders placed on the watch lists for more intensive scrutiny.
    The Porra Cartel had figured out ways to be careful. Anytime they needed to relay large amounts of computer files, as she’d done with all the information she’d lifted from Paul Godwin’s phone, they simply typed up an e-mail on the dummy account they shared and saved that e-mail in the draft folder. A simple routine was devised. When a scheduled check of the account was due,