The DEA agent he reached first was breathing shallowly. His eyes were open, but there was a hole in his right temple, no exit wound Pete could find. He left him and crawled to the child.

  She couldn’t have been more than ten, a thin little thing, wild black hair curling around her shoulders. Pete felt for a pulse and found one. He ran his hands over her, searching for the wound, and found it in her shoulder, blood pumping warm over his hands.

  All he could think of was that she’d bleed to death before the ambulance could find them, the victim of this stupid, useless screw-up, and he looked up and saw it just a few blocks distant, a gray, dingy building like all the other gray, dingy buildings around it La Clínica Libre.

  His breath came out in a puff of steam—not quite Ana’s name, not quite a prayer—and he took the girl in his arms and started running.

  Chapter 7

  October 31, 1996

  Dr. Ana Gutierrez

  Ana passed the day in a state of nervous denial; she kept her mind on each thing in turn, Stitch this cut, treat this fever, counsel about his social disease. Halloween, even more than most days, was passing in a whirl of blood and bandages and crying children. Rafael wore rabbit ears and had a fluffy homemade cotton tail stuck to his lab coat. He was the one who soothed the frightened children, gave them candy treats, and was generally better liked. That was the way things fell out. Ana, for all her skill, was not warm and comforting; she’d long ago accepted it.

  Which was why she went to pains to find assistants who made up for her shortcomings.

  The day ended, as days will. As the last of their patients shuffled out into the darkness, Rafael leaned against the wall next to her, closed his eyes, and asked, “You want to talk about it, Ana?”

  Was she that obvious? The thought of confiding in him was very tempting. She flashed on the empty bed upstairs, saw the same thing reflected in his eyes, and looked away. Her fingers nervously pulled on her stethoscope. He had removed the bunny ears and cotton tail, and in some way she missed them. It was easier talking to him when he’d looked so—unthreatening.

  “I’m just—tired, that’s all.” No, that was the wrong thing to say; it led them back to the bed again. “I’ll snap out of it, I promise.”

  “Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” He poured her one out of a thermos, lukewarm and of mediocre quality, but she accepted it with a smile. “Bar’s open, Doctor. Tell me your troubles.”

  “Well, It’s—” However much she trusted Rafael, she couldn’t tell anybody about Rámon Cruz. “I just get lonely sometimes. I look at all these children, all these families, and I think, I could have had that kind of life. And I don’t know if I did right or not.”

  He nodded, poured himself coffee, too. They settled themselves in two of the waiting room chairs, facing out toward the empty street. A pale lemon moon had risen over the Rio Grande—a ghost moon, Ana’s grandmother would have said, to guide the spirIt’s. As she watched, it passed behind an unexpectedly dark cloud.

  “Forgive me for saying this, but you don’t really seem like the motherly type, Ana. You’re a good doctor, but you’re a little obsessive, too.”

  “Yes.” She remembered the bitter arguments with Pete over that very thing, over his need for a home and her need for a cause. They’d been far too different, and not just in skin tone. “Obsession doesn’t keep you warm at night.”

  She couldn’t believe she’d said it, but there it was, out between them. Rafael put his coffee cup down without quite looking at her.

  “I heard you had to leave Dallas because somebody threatened you. That true?”

  She was actually relieved to change the subject, though this one was no better in the long run. “Yes, that’s right. I worked for a women’s clinic, and the people there—we were targeted by an anti-abortion group. I started receiving hate mail. Somebody threw blood all over the door of my house one night.” Our house. Pete had been so afraid for her, but the fear had come out as anger. He couldn’t understand why she was devoting herself to the women’s clinic, and she knew how he’d felt about abortion. “My husband and I were in the process of getting a divorce, so I moved here. Back home.”

  “You’re Catholic, right?” Rafael asked. She nodded. “How’d you reconcile that with performing abortions?”

  It was a good question. She smiled bleakly and said, “What makes you think that I did?”

  The silence grew longer. She slowly reached over and put her hand atop his, and the touch of their skin made him draw in a deep breath and took right at her, hunger in his eyes, endless and dark, and she felt like she was falling into him, sucked in by the casual brush of their fingers. Her heart pounded so hard it hurt.

  “I should—” He cleared his throat. “I should get back to work. Restocking. In the supply room.”

  The supply room didn’t have a camera.

  He stood up and went that way, not looking back. Ana felt the absence of him on her fingers like frostbite, and she thought, What are you doing? but didn’t really care what the answer was. Better to make a mistake than never again feel.

  She stood up, deliberately casual, and adjusted her lab coat. She gathered up the empty styrofoam cups and threw them away, tidied up the meager, tattered Spanish-language magazines.

  She walked through the treatment rooms, one after another. Everything was in place, ready for the next day.

  The open door of the supply closet loomed large as she approached it.

  She froze just inside, closed her eyes and thought, I can’t, and as she drew breath to tell him, his hands closed around her shoulders and he kissed her, and her knees went weak at the shock of flesh on flesh. She hadn’t known she was so hungry. He tasted startling, hot and spicy and delicious beyond words, his lips soft and so very gentle.

  She pushed him away, knew she was shaking and her cheeks were red, knew he could tell how much she wanted him. Her hands stayed on his chest, as if glued there.

  “Ana,” he whispered. “Come on. You don’t have to fight it.”

  She remembered Pete saying that. Let go. The slow, exquisite rhythm of his body, his breath in her ear. Let go, querida. Let if happen.

  The memory shamed her.

  “Not here,” she said. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t say anything, but she saw the regret in his eyes as he murmured an apology. He brushed past her, out of the supply room. She heard him gather his books and papers, stuff them in a backpack, and leave the clinic.

  You’re a damn fool, Ana.

  The stairs to her apartment seemed longer than fifteen steps tonight. She flicked on Univision as she passed the couch and went to Gabriel’s room. He was asleep, snoring lightly, still sitting in his chair at the monitors. She turned off the pictures, one by one, and kissed him on top of his head.

  “Ana?” He started awake as she straightened, caught her hand. “Sorry. I think I dozed off.”

  “It’s okay.” She brushed his cheek with her fingertips. “Sleep well.”

  She let herself cry, silently, on the couch, until she was exhausted enough to fall into a restless, lust-warmed dream.

  She woke to the sound of distant banging. Gunshots, a lot of them. Not unusual in this part of town, but the quantity disturbed her; she dragged herself upright and rubbed sleep from her eyes, fumbled on her discarded shoes, and went downstairs into the chill.

  She had just reached the front window of the clinic when she saw a man stagger into the watery light of the ghost moon. He looked half ghost himself, too pale, and in his arms—

  Oh, God. She turned the key on the door and flung it open as he lurched toward it, grabbed the child in his arms, and carried her to the nearest treatment bed.

  “Ambulance is on the way,” the man gasped in English. There was bright red blood smeared on his hands, on the crumpled white of his collar. He was wearing a bulletproof vest.

  And then she recognized his face, as if a camera had suddenly spun him into focus. No time to feel anything. She dismissed the problem of Pete and focused on the child she was holding. Her pulse was good, but there was too much blood. She worked in silence, putting pressure on the wound from the front and stripping off the girl’s blood-smeared backpack when it got in the way. It slapped to the floor, too heavy for a child’s body. She kicked it aside to give her room to work.

  Pete reached down for it. She nailed him in place with a look, took the backpack, and moved it out of his reach.

  “It’s heroin,” he said. “They were using her for a mule.”

  “I guess you taught her a lesson she’ll never forget,” Ana said grimly. In the distance sirens screamed. “If she lives.”

  She sat by the window in the clinic, watching the aftermath with exhausted fascination—so many police cars, so many important-looking Anglos brought out of bed in the middle of the night. Reporters, too. She’d tried to give a statement to a reporter from the El Paso Times, but a cop had chased him off. She didn’t know how many cops had been inside the clinic—ten? Twenty? More than had ever entered it since it opened, she was sure. Mostly they’d looked around with that secretly pleased gleam in their eye; noting the old curtains, the well-kept but worn floor. No; it isn’t the Mayo Clinic! she’d wanted to scream. Whose fault is that? Who keeps cutting our funding?

  Pete hadn’t said a word to her since the child had been taken away in the ambulance. He was standing outside next to a black van, arms crossed over his chest, head down. A red-faced Anglo with a pot belly was talking—no, shouting—at him. Ana felt a second’s sympathy, quickly shattered as he raised his head and looked in her direction.

  Dragging a child into their broken lives, a painful, obvious cycle. She stood up and left the window to pull the bloodied sheets from the treatment bed, pile them in the bio-hazard container, dispose of the bandages and her bloody gloves. She’d have to clean her sweater, too; she shrugged it off and put a lab coat on instead, buttoned up to conceal her lack of a shirt.

  The clinic door pinged for attention. She pulled back the curtain to tell whoever it was to leave and saw Pete standing there, his hands hanging limply at his side. He looked lost.

  “What do you want?” she asked, not too welcomingly.

  “I’m sorry to drag you into this.”

  “A little late for that, Peter. Thanks for the apology. You can leave now.”

  Past him, the police cars were pulling out, strobes dying away into darkness.

  “Your friends are leaving.” She nodded in that direction. “You should go with them.”

  “Jesus, Ana—” Suddenly, startlingly, he was crying; his shoulders shaking from the force of it. “Oh, Jesus.”

  As she went to him, she saw a photographer outside aiming his flash through the open window; she hit the lights and plunged the clinic into darkness, locked the door, and drew the shades with a vicious yank. With a doctor’s impersonal kindness she led Pete to a chair and let him sit, brought him a tissue and waited until the storm calmed.

  “Better now?” She kept her voice as neutral as possible. The sight of him so vulnerable hurt her deeply, in places she’d thought safely cauterized. “I’ll get you some water.”

  “Ana, I’m sorry. I know you don’t believe it, but I am. So sorry. There’s something I need to tell you—”

  “Not now.” The idea of sharing anything with him made her break away and get to her feet. She filled a cup from the water fountain and started back to him, checked herself as the telephone rang. She caught it on the third ring.

  “Ana?”

  Rámon’s voice. She’d forgotten about it, about him, about the thing that had made her so desperately nervous all day. But it was a new day, wasn’t it? All Saint’s Day now, the devils put to rest, the spirIt’s gone back to heaven and hell.

  He was sending a man to her, he’d said. But the man had never arrived.

  “Yes,” she said cautiously.

  “I can’t get to you. What’s happened?”

  “I don’t know. Shooting, lots of police. There was a wounded child.”

  Rámon said, “There’s a package in the backseat of your Pinto. Go outside and get it, take it upstairs and hide it. If someone’s with you, don’t let them see it. Ana, this is important, truly important. Do this for me.”

  She wished she hadn’t turned the lights off; the darkness disoriented her, made it seem that Rámon’s voice issued from the air over her shoulder, like the voice of a whispering angel. He sounded stronger today. Well enough to walk? Well enough to put something in her car?

  “I don’t know if I—”

  “Do it, Ana.” All the warmth vanished from his voice. “I don’t have time to let you think. If you don’t go, people will be hurt. Maybe a lot of people.”

  “What?” Her hand went cold, as if the phone had given her frostbite, “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve put myself in danger trusting you, myself and others. We could end up in jail or dead. Please, Ana. I swear to you, I won’t forget.”

  She knew he wouldn’t; Rámon was the kind of man who kept his word. She hesitated only a few seconds before she said, “Bueno,” and hung up the phone.

  “Ana?” Pete’s voice in the darkness, warm and close. She sucked in a startled breath and saw his tall shadow against the white gleam of a curtain. “Anything wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said sharply. Rámon was a wanted man, and here was Pete, too close for comfort. She had to get rid of him, no matter what she might have felt for him. “You can go out by the side door. They won’t be waiting for you there.”

  “I needed to talk to you. Please. Give me five minutes.”

  An invisible clock ticked behind her, a stopwatch in Rámon Cruz’s hand. “I don’t have the time now, Peter. Maybe later.”

  “This is impor—”

  “It’s always important when you want it!” she stormed, and the anger she’d felt at seeing the wounded little girl flung It’self out of her and into his face. “That child was important. What did she do to you? Take a job from a hungry Anglo? Get out of my house! Get out!”

  She pushed past him, shaking off his outstretched hand, and opened the alarm-rigged emergency exit; bells exploded into clamor. A dry, cold breeze ruffled her hair and brought her the smell of ripe garbage and alley wastes.

  “Get out,” she repeated, loud enough to be heard over the alarm.

  He left. She averted her face as he passed, slammed the door behind him, and gulped in deep breaths as the bells shivered to silence overhead.

  He didn’t deserve that, she thought miserably. But among all the hurts they’d done to each other, that was insignificant. What had he called their divorce? The death of a thousand razor blades?

  She pushed away from the door, took the stairs two at a time. Gabriel was in his chair, wheeling anxiously from one window to another; he spun it in a tight circle at the sound of her approach, relief spreading over his face.

  “Man, I’ve been waiting—”

  “Later,” she said. “Call the police, tell them it was a false alarm. Everything’s fine.”

  “You’re sure? What was all the shooting—”

  “Later!” She used her keys to turn on the freight elevator and waited while it jerked and ratcheted It’s way down to street level. No one waiting outside in the dark; she hurried over to the Pinto and opened the door. The dim overhead bulb showed her a plain cardboard box, reused many times, with the flaps folded instead of taped. It was about the size of three shoe boxes stacked high, and unexpectedly heavy. She squirmed backward, arms laden, and almost dropped the box when she saw a man turn the corner and come toward her. Not Pete, thank God. The reporter from the Times—Hector? Hector Arridondo?

  “Busy night,” he said pleasantly. “Any comments, Doctor? I know you saw at least one of the victims—”

  “No comment.” She stepped into the elevator and brought the gate down. Her desire to make Pete look foolish had passed.

  “Not even about Peter Ross being involved?” He had a coyote’s smile, and he smelled blood. “Your ex-husband, right?”

  “He’s a pendejo. You’re a pendejo, too,” she said, and pushed the button for the second floor. “And you can quote me on that.”

  He was laughing as she pulled down the steel door.

  As the elevator struggled upward, she looked down at the box in her arms. Heavy. Heavy like the girl’s backpack had been. Rámon hadn’t told her not to look inside. Maybe he’d assumed—

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Ana unfolded the flaps of the box and looked in. Another box, this one sealed with strapping tape. She’d have to cut it open to take a look.

  I should, she thought I should find out why this is important to him.

  Instead, she folded the flaps back in place, ducked out of the elevator, and went to the other side of the second floor, where the supplies were stored. She tucked the box behind piles of old medical records and put a carton of latex gloves on top.

  It looked so innocent, sitting there.

  Rámon wouldn’t put us in danger.

  She was sure of that.

  Chapter 8

  November 3,1996

  Esmeralda Sanchez

  She woke up before dawn, with the sure knowledge that she was going to die. Her heart pounded hard, her skin sweated cold. She wrapped herself more completely in thin blankets and a handmade quilt handed down from her mother, and tried to remember the dream, but nothing came back except fire and fear.

  Don’t cry, Mama. A whisper touched her hair, soft as thought, and some of her trembling eased. Jaime was here, watching over her. You’ll find a way to stop it

  “Stop what, Jaime?” She spoke aloud to the darkness, to the fading dream. In the distance a dog barked; a pickup truck with a bad muffler chuffed up the hill toward the bridge. “Help me do this. I can’t do it alone.”

  It might have been a draft from the window, or the brush of a child’s lips on her cheek. A promise, she thought. Or an apology.