Lone Star Diary

“Maybe her friend knows something about the backpack, but my guess is it’s long gone, down the trail with that Coyote.”

“Her friend?”

“The girl traveling with her. Scared to death. She burrowed down in the sand behind the bushes while they killed this one.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“She’s back in Del Rio, in jail.”

Luke sighed. Ever since he’d gotten involved with these people, it seemed like he was forever springing somebody out of jail. Out at the Light at Five Points he and Justin Kilgore had shared the frustrating similarities in their work. Financial problems. Medical problems. Problems with the law. And lately, even political problems.

“Thanks a lot, Dad,” Justin had muttered as he told Luke about the trouble his father had stirred up. “Dad” to Justin Kilgore was none other than Congressman Kurt Kilgore. For the life of him, Luke couldn’t figure out why the congressman was so dead set against his son’s humanitarian work.

“What’s her name?” Luke dug in his jeans for his little notebook.

“Yolonda Reyes. I can have one of our guys go fetch her.” The guard reached for his shoulder radio and spoke into it.

And then what? Luke thought. Luke wasn’t about to send the child back to jail or to Mexico into the hands of the border judiciales.

An engine whined and the single headlight of a quad runner appeared out of nowhere, hurtling down the path in a cloud of dust, another young agent jostling high up on the narrow seat. The kid gave a two-fingered salute as he flew past. Medina saluted back as he hopped out of the way. Luke stepped back too, twisting his ankle as the heel of his cowboy boot rolled off a soggy diaper.

“Sorry,” Medina hollered as the roar of the quad faded into the darkness. “Joe flies around like a maniac.”

Luke knocked the dust off his sleeves as he regained his footing.

“You been at this awhile?” The guard gave Luke a wary once-over and Luke imagined the kid was noting the threads of gray in his hair and goatee, a certain cynicism around his eyes. But Luke’s weathered looks weren’t the result of age or even too many dangerous scrapes and long hours as a Ranger. If he had a hard-bitten look, it came from brooding too long. From seeing his dead child’s face in all its sweetest, most innocent poses every time he closed his eyes. He was acutely aware that this festering anger wasn’t healthy. He just didn’t know how stop it.

“Long enough.” Four years studying law enforcement, four years as a DPS trooper. A dozen or so as an active Ranger. Too much of it undercover in Mexico. Somewhere in all of that, he and Liana had managed to forge eight years of bliss before those little creeps had killed Liana and Bethany. It struck him that he hadn’t dreamed a good, clear dream about his wife and daughter for a while now. “Let’s get back to Maria’s case,” he said. “The family would like to have her stuff.”

The guard flipped up a palm like a traffic cop. “Since you’ve been at this so long, you ought to know everything from the crime scene is in police custody and staying there. And you know not to get your hopes up about ever getting it back…or catching this creep for that matter.”

“Haven’t let a creep go yet,” Luke stated flatly. Because he hadn’t. Medina still hadn’t figured out who he was. “In the meantime, I’m just trying to help this family obtain what’s rightfully theirs. They don’t even speak English.”

“Nobody does, man.” The agent said it with that sarcastic edge in his voice that was beginning to annoy Luke.

“They need an advocate,” he said calmly. “Right now, that would be me.” He dug a business card from the hip pocket of his Levi’s.

Medina took it and flipped the beam of his flashlight on it, thumbing the embossed seal of the Lone Star State. “Nice. I’m fresh out. Budget cuts.” Again, the guy’s voice was sarcastic.

Luke didn’t respond as Medina stuffed the card away in his flak vest. His silence seemed only to encourage the kid. “What, exactly, do these brothers expect? Last year over a million and a half of these types crawled up into the States.” Apparently Chuck Medina was determined to vent his spleen. “It’s like an invasion, man. This so-called border is a freaking sieve. The narco-militarist types, drug runners, Coyotes run the show down here. And they’re using assault rifles to do it. It’s a war zone.” He fanned an arm over the abandoned desert as they started making their way back to the main path. “Fear keeps the locals locked away, peering out of their houses over the barrels of their shotguns. And that’s just so they can keep the crossers out of their own front yards. They’ve given up on the outlying ranch lands. The few times a rancher had the guts to detain illegals for trespassing, the press crucified him as a racist vigilante. Some have even been sued. See all this crap?” The guard kicked at the trash, raising a plume of moonlit dust.

“It’s like this on practically the whole four-thousand-mile border. In the meantime, we’re caught in the middle. The Coyotes are making a killing off these poor people and nobody’s doing a thing about it. The illegals don’t trust anybody but the Coyotes until it’s too late. Until something like this—” He jerked his head back toward the crime scene. “Even if somebody had called 911, how could we get close enough to protect that young woman when the Coyotes let loose with a spray of bullets at the slightest sound and her rock-chucking compadres are ready to ambush us from behind every mesquite bush? And now we’ve got to worry about terrorists.” He finally stopped long enough to draw a frustrated breath.

Hoping Medina had talked himself out, Luke said, “It’s hard to sort out the good from the bad. I’ve gotten the same treatment.” So had Justin Kilgore. Crossers came in all shapes and sizes, all ages, all nationalities. But they all had one thing in common. Fear. Fear of getting caught. Fear of going to jail. Fear of authority. Fear of the gringo. Luke had worked hard to break through that fear and be one Texas Ranger they trusted. “You can’t blame them for being mistrustful, even when people are trying to help them.”

“I’ll tell you what’s sad,” the young border guard said, calmer now. “It’s the way these people accept their fate. Like they have no hope of anything ever getting better.”

“That’s the problem. They do have hope.” Luke sighed. “Otherwise they wouldn’t even attempt these crossings.”

The quad runner roared back up the rutted path, this time with a tiny young woman hanging on for dear life on the back. The driver got off and helped her dismount. She was so thin it hurt to look at her. Great, Luke thought, now he had a skinny teenager to deal with. “Her name’s Yolonda?” he clarified.

“Yeah. That little chica’s lucky she’s alive.” The guard spat in the dust, then hurried to follow Luke. “You know what she said? She said at least this time the Morales family would have a body.”

Luke stopped, turned, frowned. “This time?”

The guard hitched at his belt, suddenly self-important with information the Ranger didn’t have.

“The Morales’ father disappeared years ago.”

“Their father?” Luke processed this.

“He sent their mother the sign, but they never heard from him again.”

“The sign?” Luke squinted at Medina.

“The Lone Star. They’ll send it on a postcard or a trinket or something back home to Mexico. It shows that they’ve made it as far as a place called Five Points. I do not know why these people bother with such secrecy.” Medina shook his head. “Everybody knows Five Points is a key stopping place for crossers. Five highways going in every direction. Just a hop-skip to I-10.”

“I see,” Luke said. Five Points. He could practically see a puzzle piece locking in place. The Morales boys had failed to inform him of this little detail. Suddenly he knew exactly what he was going to do with this Yolonda girl: offer her asylum if she would tell him everything she knew. He could take her out to the Light at Five Points.

Luke thought of the people there and others he’d met when he’d gone to check out another murder in that small town, and like a rubber band, his mind snapped back to the woman named Frankie.

She’d given her full name, Frankie McBride Hostler, although the last name hadn’t rolled out as evenly as the first two, as if she’d choked on it. He had checked her left hand then, its slender fingers entwined with the other hand around the grip of a heavy revolver. A diamond the size of Dallas had winked at him in the blazing Southwest sun.

He’d never met a woman that way, while she held a gun on him in a firm firing stance. When she shot the head off the copperhead snake coiled less than a yard from his boot, he had decided this particular woman was something else.

Too bad this Frankie McBride…Hostler was married.

Five Points. He was headed back there for sure. Back to the home place of Frankie McBride.

CHAPTER TWO

My birthday. And I cannot believe I am actually writing these words in this journal: I am divorcing Kyle. I signed the papers yesterday. The weird thing is, ever since I made my decision, I’ve felt this enormous sense of…peace. Well, relief at least. And the strangest…euphoria from facing the truth.

My sister Robbie was right about one thing. Writing it down in this journal has clarified the hell out of things. I guess keeping a journal runs in our blood. Great-grandmother McBride started that tradition back in the territory days. I’ve been scribbling the most atrocious stuff in here, mostly about how I’d like to murder Kyle, but I couldn’t believe how seeing what Kyle had done written in black and white helped me face up to what I had to do.

I caught a glimpse of Robbie’s journal once. A cheap thing from Wal-Mart with a picture of a puppy dog on the front. That’s the main difference between me and my younger sister. She takes life as it comes and I manage it to death.

But I doubt I’ll change my ways. I’m turning forty today, and being fastidious and organized is in my blood, too. Like Mother.

I am terrified that I’ll end up like her someday. I seem to be well on my way. Fussing over another woman’s children, starting up another woman’s business, living in another woman’s house, a nineteenth-century rattletrap that would be condemned if not for the improvements Zack Trueblood has made to it.

Soon Robbie and Zack will be getting married and they’ll move the children out to the farm. The Tellchick-Trueblood Farm, Zack renamed it.

Then what? Will I become a boring little drudge? Fussing with the displays in the shop, lunching with lady friends, buying extravagant gifts for my niece and nephews? Will I fall into a sad little rut, a childless divorcée piecing together a half-life around her extended family, but in reality, so alone.

But even with all my fears, I can’t shake this feeling that I’m alive again for the first time in years. As if I’m breaking free. As if I could conquer the world.

And speaking of the world, time to get out in it. The sun’s up, and I want to get down to the store early. We’re putting up wallpaper today. Robbie’s coming in right after she drops the boys at school.