Page 89 of Prisoner of War
Téra shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.
Duardo was looking around the grotto and Minnie knew he searched for her. He had taken off the eye patch, but the moustache was still too much Zalaya for her to go to him readily.
Nick beckoned them all. “Let’s go,” he called softly just as it started to rainagain. “Silence until I say otherwise,” he added.
Their trail was long, circular and took hours, but no one pursued them. Nick had come from an unexpected direction—the west coast of the island. The grotto was the east end of a low, easy mountain pass. On the western end of the trail, tucked behind a disguising wall of hacked-off branches and leaves, was a rusty all-wheel-drive pick-up truck.
“Minnie and Téra in the cab with me,” Nick ordered. “Everyone else in the back.” He handed Duardo his rifle and shepherded Téra and Minnie into the cab and settled behind the wheel. Then he reached beneath the steering column, his fingers tangling in exposed wires there.
“You stole it?” she said softly.
“We rented the boat in Acapulco,” he said, “but the only Vistarian currency anyone has arechecks and no one in Vejia would have accepted a check with Nicolás Escobedo’s name on it. So we borrowed it.” He smiled at her. “Brace yourself. This will be a wild ride.”
Téra’s hand slipped into Minnie’s and squeezed. Minnie looked at her as the truck started, backfired and settled into an uneven rhythm.
“He told me you were the one who insisted he come back and get me,” Téra said. Two bigtears welled and slid down her face. “I will never forget that.”
“It wasn’t quite like that,” Minnie tried to explain.
“He could only think of you, but you remembered. Itwaslike that,” Téra insisted.
* * * * *
Nick drove out of the mountains as fast as the truck could safely manage and used secondary roads and cart tracks to reach the coast road. Once there, he pushed the truck to top speed,a bone-jarring eighty miles an hour, for there they were most vulnerable to being stopped and questioned. As they drove, the dark day turned to pitch black night and Nick flicked on the headlights only to curse softly as they feebly lit only a few yards of the road ahead.
He turned onto an unmarked, sandy trail that wound and turned for another couple of miles until it opened onto a white beach.He stopped the truck and turned it off. “Stay silent,” he warned Minnie and climbed from the cab. Minnie and Téra followed him as the three in the back jumped to the sand, all holding rifles of one type or another. Even her father was dressed in black.
Minnie shivered.
Nick jogged down the beach, his pistol out, glancing from side to side, until he reached a pile of seaweed heaped upon rocks.He pulled the seaweed aside and slid an inflatable dinghy out from beneath. It had an outboard motor attached to the stern and Duardo silently helped him turn it and drag it down to the water.
Everyone climbed into the boat as soon as it was afloat. Duardo and Nick used the oars to paddle a hundred yards from the beach before they started the motor and steered the dinghy out to the boat somewhereon the black ocean.
* * * * *
Nick and Calli stayed on the deck, getting the boat under way. It was a sailboat, which astonished Minnie until she realized that a sailboat could slide through night waters in near silence and on the open sea, with the prevailing southerly winds, was just as fast as a motorboat.
They waved everyone else toward the cabin, already preoccupied with their task.
The air inside the little cabin was stuffy and warm after the breeze off the ocean. The ceiling was too low overhead. The deck tilted as the boat moved under sail and Minnie clutched at the doorway. The tilting deck felt much too similar to the way the balcony had wavered that morning.
Téra glanced at Josh. “It is safe to speak now?” she asked in stilted English.
“Yes, I believe so,” Josh toldher in Spanish.
She turned to Duardo, lifted her hand and cracked it across his face. “You pig! You sent me to that damn bordello to be raped! You let them do it! You even gave themdrugs!”
Duardo rubbed his jaw. “It was distilled water, little sister.”
If anything, her eyes blazed with more fury. She planted her hands on her hips. “What, so I would be awake through every disgusting moment?I hate you! I spit on you!” Her Spanish disintegrated and grew too fast and too full of slang and swearing for Minnie to follow after that.
Nick climbed down into the cabin and took in the torrent of Spanish, hiding his smile. “Inventive,” he murmured.
Minnie sighed and reached out to touch Téra’s shoulder. “You would never have had a single customer,” she told her.
“What?” Téra turned on her.“What do you mean?”
Minnie nodded at Duardo who was watching her warily. “Straight after they marched you down to the bordello, Zalaya visited Rosa, the manager. He got her to spread the word. I heard two officers speaking about it just before I destroyed the monitors. Zalaya let it be known that he wanted you first and any man who touched you before he did would wake up to find his balls beingsawn off with a rusty hacksaw.”
