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  “But what about my bat?” the kid screeched. “My brother, man. He’s going to go crazy!”

  Brian turned to the kid and pointed a finger in his face.

  “To hell with your bat, and to hell with you, too, you evil little runt. I hope your brother does kill you. He’ll be doing the world a favor.”

  As they ran back to the food bank, Brian knew what he’d said wasn’t very Christian, but he was sick of this. These weird hippie families and messed-up poor people. All the drugs everywhere. I mean, they’d come here to help this morning, and Eddie had almost gotten beaten by some juvenile delinquent? How’d that make sense?

  Seamus was closing the back door of the station wagon when they got back to the food bank.

  “Did you win?” he asked as the kids quickly piled into the car.

  “Oh, we won, Gramps,” Eddie said with an innocent smile. “Could we go now?”

  “Is everything OK?” Seamus asked, staring at them.

  “Fine,” Brian said, nervously looking over his shoulder, back at the trailer park. “Could we get going, though, Gramps? I, uh, really need to use the bathroom.”

  “So do I,” said Eddie.

  “And me too,” Jane said. “Really bad.”

  “OK, then,” Seamus said, trying to turn the old car’s engine over. It wouldn’t catch.

  No, Brian thought. Please, God. Please help us.

  “Hold your horses, and, um, everything else,” Seamus said as he tried again.

  The engine churned and chugged, but again there was nothing.

  We’re going to be stranded, Brian thought. Stranded, and then the Lord of the Flies kids would come.

  Then it caught. The big old muscle-car engine finally fired up, rumbling happily.

  In the backseat, Brian crossed himself as Seamus got their rear in gear, and they finally pulled out.

  CHAPTER 38

  It was five-thirty A.M. when Mary Catherine led the horse out of the barn behind Aaron Cody’s house. It was still dark, and cold enough to see the plumes of the horse’s breath. She turned as a cow mooed forlornly somewhere off in the darkness to her left.

  “And a fine good morning to you, too, madam,” she said over her shoulder. “Wonderful weather we’re having, don’tcha think?”

  She smiled. When she could squeeze it in, her early-morning ride was by far the best part of her day. It was a moment to be still, a moment to be sane and serene before the kids got up and the chaos began.

  “OK, now, Spike. Here we go,” she whispered soothingly as she gently mounted the gray quarter horse. As usual, the four-year-old gelding had been a little skittish about getting saddled, but once they got on the trail, she knew they’d get along fine.

  It took the better part of half an hour to get up the range to her favorite spot. Spike knew it by heart by now, slowing by the high ridge’s edge even before she pulled the reins.

  “You get me, Spike, don’t you?” she said, patting his scruffy head. “Now if only you were a man, all my dreams would come true.”

  She watched in silence as the sun came up over the distant Sierra Nevada. As it did every morning, it literally put a chill down her spine. All that land. All that sky. The holy whistling of the cold wind as light split shadow and spilled down the rutted slopes.

  It was the America right out of a children’s book, she thought. Any moment now, down from the mountain, she’d see some cowboys chasing Indians alongside a steam locomotive with a little red caboose.

  As she took out the thermos she’d brought, she wondered what the daft, ever-wisecracking boyos in her hometown back in Ireland would say if they could see their skinny Mary Catherine all grown up and drinking her tea high in the saddle out here in the Wild West.

  Nothing was the answer to that one, she thought, taking a sip, since every one of those ragamuffins would be struck speechless for once in their miserable lives.

  Who was she kidding? She could hardly believe it herself, the way her life was turning out.

  When she’d heard about the nanny job in New York City, she’d originally envisioned taking care of some megawealthy power couple’s two children, wheeling them in an expensive stroller through Central Park when she wasn’t taking them to art museums or helping them with their French. The gig she got instead, of course, couldn’t have been further from her expectations. Instead of the power couple, her boss was the NYPD’s busiest detective, and he didn’t have two kids but two kids multiplied by five.

  But she’d done it. That was the funny part. By hook or by crook, over the last several years, she’d learned to effectively manage the rambunctious Bennett clan. Not only had she kept them mostly fed (those teens were bottomless pits), cleanly clothed, and educated, but what filled her with the most pride was that she was actually making strides in teaching them to take care of each other and themselves.

  Though her work was at times quite painful and sometimes seemed hopeless, she was managing to accomplish the hardest, most important, and most unsung job on the face of the earth-raising a large crop of good human beings.

  And just when she was cruising, just when she had achieved the mammoth task of getting down everyone’s schedules and tics in New York City, what happens? A criminal from one of Mike’s cases targets them all for assassination, and they’re ripped from their lives and deposited three thousand miles away, on a California cattle farm.

  It was the most recent events that seemed the most impossible. That someone was actually out to kill her and the kids, someone she had never met, had never done anything to-she just couldn’t understand how any human being could actually be that inhuman.

  But she knew it was true, of course. It certainly terrified her. Her dreams these days were mostly nightmares where she woke up expecting figures to be standing in the dark beside her bed. It had gotten so bad that she’d taken to loading one of the shotguns and laying it on the floor next to the bed, under a blanket. That helped, at least a little.

  She flung the dregs of her tea on the ground and tightened the cap on the thermos. She let out a sigh as she tucked the thermos back into the saddlebag. Sleeping with one eye open, with a shotgun under the bed, she thought, shaking her head. She was out in the Wild West, all right.

  As if reading her thoughts, Spike suddenly snorted out a kind of sigh himself.

  Mary Catherine laughed as she scratched Spike between his ears.

  “C’mon, old friend,” she said. “It’s getting late. I guess it’s time for us poor workhorses to get going. Time to head them off at the pass.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Mary Catherine got lost on her way back to Cody’s farm.

  It was her own dumb fault. As she led Spike through a stand of cypress and black oak, she’d spotted a smaller trail off the main one that she thought looked like a shortcut. But it wasn’t. After a while, the path started going up instead of down and turning in the wrong direction, north instead of south.

  She was just about to give up on it, about half a mile in, when there was a rustle on her right and a man stepped out onto the trail behind her. Spike, startled, wheeled around, rearing back on his hind legs, almost throwing her.

  Mary Catherine managed to calm the horse and get him completely turned around. She sat there, blinking at the figure. He was a scraggly, thin, young white guy in jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves cut off. Beneath his khaki bush hat, long brown hair fell to his shoulders.

  There was also an olive-colored strap over his arm, and then she saw the black barrel of the rifle sticking up over his back.

  Gun! she thought, freaking out. The cartel! They were here! We’ve been found out!

  “Can I help you?” the young man said, something sharp in his voice.

  Not the cartel? Some maniac, then? Mary Catherine thought, still round eyed and frozen in the saddle. An off-the-reservation militia person?

  Then she realized it. Why he seemed angry. She actually clapped a hand to her forehead.

  “Oh, no. I rode onto your pr
operty, didn’t I?” Mary Catherine said. “I’m so sorry. I’m staying at Aaron Cody’s place, and I went out for a morning ride. I thought this was a shortcut back. I’m such an idiot. I didn’t mean to trespass.”

  “Oh, Mr. Cody’s. I see,” the guy said, the tension in his voice immediately gone.

  He tipped back his hat and smiled, and Mary Catherine suddenly noticed how young he was. He was just a cute sixteen- or seventeen-year-old kid.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. “I’m Kevin. Kevin Norberg, Mr. Cody’s neighbor. You did wander onto our property, but don’t worry about it. The property lines are tricky. There actually is a shortcut back to Mr. Cody’s ranch, through our farm. I’ll show it to you if you want.”

  Mary Catherine paused for a beat, then took a breath.

  “OK,” she said. “Thanks.”

  She followed the kid off the path. She stared at the gun. It looked like a deer rifle. Was he out hunting? Spike hesitated once as the dirt trail descended through a gap in an outcropping of rocks, but she finally encouraged him to go through.

  When they came out on the other side, Mary Catherine saw what at first she thought was a grove of tightly grown baby evergreen trees. But as she got closer, she could see that the long, neat rows of green weren’t trees at all but plants. Plants about nine feet high, with leaves that had long, thin light-green fingers and purplish buds with a strong, sweet smell, almost fruity.

  It was marijuana, Mary Catherine realized when she took a breath. Acres upon acres of pungent marijuana.

  She remembered then what Brian had told her about the encounter at the food bank. The kids there claiming that marijuana was the area’s largest crop. She looked out at the green sea of pot they were skirting. She knew that California’s Central Valley grew a huge amount of the country’s food, but that wasn’t the only thing the valley was supplying to the nation, apparently.

  Is it actually legal? she wondered. A medical-marijuana farm?

  Kevin, leading the way ahead of her, certainly didn’t act like his family farm had anything to hide. He couldn’t have been calmer if they had been strolling through Central Park. Or was that because of the rifle on his back?

  Mary Catherine decided to keep her questions to herself.

  “You sit that horse well, ma’am,” Kevin said as they walked through the forest of cannabis. “Are you working for Mr. Cody?”

  “No, just, um, visiting,” Mary Catherine said as calmly as she could.

  “From where? Scotland?”

  “Ireland, actually.”

  “Oh,” Kevin said with a nod, blushing a little. “I love the accent.”

  “Thanks,” Mary Catherine said brightly.

  “How you liking your stay so far?”

  “It’s a beautiful country,” Mary Catherine said.

  “You like country,” the kid said, “you’ve hit the jackpot.”

  They came upon a greenhouse. It was swathed in white plastic and had a table inside, covered with Styrofoam cups. Each cup had a little pot plant in it, like it was part of show-and-tell at a hippie kindergarten.

  On the other side of the building, in the distance, there was a white-haired woman in a gardener’s smock, squatting in a ditch. She was attaching some PVC pipes together in the middle of an elaborate irrigation system. She waved, and Kevin waved back.

  “That’s my mom,” Kevin said.

  Mom was also armed, Mary Catherine couldn’t help but note. In a holster on her hip was one humongous, long-barreled silver revolver. It was a.44 Magnum, Mary Catherine realized. She’d never actually seen one outside of a Clint Eastwood movie.

  This really was the Wild West, she thought, feeling a little dizzy.

  After another hundred yards, Kevin let her out through a cattle gate and pointed down the red dirt road.

  “You follow this till you get to the creek, and then you’ll see Mr. Cody’s silo down the hill.”

  “Thanks, Kevin,” Mary Catherine said, riding Spike through the gate. “It was nice meeting you.”

  “You, too, ma’am,” the polite young dope farmer said, with a tip of his hat, as Mary Catherine rode away.

  CHAPTER 40

  White light flashed in the pitch black and began fluttering. After a moment, a low and insistent electronic buzzing began sounding off, the measured pulses synched with the flutter of the light.

  Vida Gomez woke in the back upstairs bedroom of the safe house on South Alta Vista Boulevard in La Brea. She sat up and unplugged the charger from the encrypted cartel cell phone as she lifted it from the nightstand.

  For a fraction of a second, she stared at the green Accept and red Reject buttons on the smartphone’s screen. The more accurate choice would be Live or Die, she thought, finally accepting the call with a callused thumb.

  She didn’t say hello. In fact, she didn’t speak once. She just sat in the dark, automatically listening and memorizing the new orders she was being given.

  A half hour later, they were rolling backward down the suburban safe house’s cobblestone driveway in the team’s only legitimate vehicle, a black Honda Odyssey, Touring edition. Like Vida, the men were wearing shorts and T-shirts and sneakers. Instead of sporting their usual Kevlar vests and long guns, they were armed with small conceal-carry pistols, Glock 26 and Taurus PT 24/7 subcompacts in 9 mm. The orders were explicit that they keep a low profile.

  Avoiding the freeways, they headed south and then west along side streets, Venice Boulevard to Lincoln to Washington Boulevard. Vida, behind the wheel, had to consult the onboard GPS only minimally in order to find the way. She’d been utterly lost in the confusing city the first week she had been here, but now she was getting the hang of it.

  With the lack of traffic, they arrived at Marina del Rey in under thirty minutes. Vida had never been to the up-scale seaside area before. The pastel-colored high-rises and palm trees reminded her of a trip to Miami she had taken as a child.

  They left the van in a parking lot and went out along one of the docks. It was an enormous marina, the berths containing at least a thousand vessels. The forty-two-foot sportfishing boat they were looking for was the third one down on the left of Dock 29. In the predawn murk, Vida could just make out its name on the stern, Aces and Eights.

  The middle-aged American loading the bait bins on the deck was scruffy and blond and had a beer belly and enormous, scarred hands.

  “Help you?” he said, dropping his bucket to the deck with a hollow bong.

  “Are you Captain Scanlon? Thomas Scanlon?”

  “I am,” the big blond man said.

  “We’re the Raphael party,” Vida said.

  Captain Scanlon looked at Vida, then at the six hard-faced killers behind her.

  “Permission to board granted,” he said, waving them on.

  Everything was all set up, the rods and reels, the charts. Even fishing licenses for all of them had been provided in case there was some kind of problem.

  Vida stayed with Scanlon up in the flying bridge as they cast off. The American completely ignored her as he piloted the boat, humming to himself as he checked his charts and the compass on the computer in front of him. She wondered how many runs like this he had done for the cartel. This wasn’t his first. She was sure of that.

  They met other sportfishers as they headed for the mouth of the marina. One of them, carrying a party of what looked like female college-volleyball players, hailed Scanlon with a horn blast. Scanlon honked back twice, laughing merrily.

  “Enjoying yourself?” Vida said coldly.

  “Siempre,” Scanlon told her with a wink. “Always.”

  That makes one of us, Vida thought, grasping the cool railing of the bobbing ship and trying to keep down the churning contents of her stomach.

  CHAPTER 41

  Scanlon cut the engines when they were eleven miles out. He went down and started setting the baits on the sea rods and parceling them out to the men.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Vida told him, sti
ll up on the flying bridge.

  “No?” Scanlon said skeptically, looking up at her. “Coast Guard has drones now, sweetie. Attached to them are cameras that can see through your pants and count the dimples on your ass from five miles up. What do you imagine the Coasties are going to think if they see your buddies here, out on this fishing boat, standing around?”

  “Fine,” Vida said, checking her watch. She went back to scanning the horizon with her binoculars.

  “You’re sure we’re in the right place?” she said.

  “As if my life depended on it,” the captain said as he showed Eduardo how to cast.

  The ship came into view from the south a little over an hour later. It was huge, a Handymax-class oil tanker, its rust-streaked black hull two football fields long from stem to stern. There wasn’t anyone visible on its deck. It was flying a Guatemalan flag.

  This is it, Vida thought. It has to be.

  She thought the ship would stop, but it didn’t even slow as it passed, about a hundred yards from the starboard side of the fishing boat. She craned her neck up at the deck.

  Shouldn’t there be someone up there? Or is this the right ship?

  The ship passed on. As the fishing boat bobbed in the tanker’s swell, Vida scanned the choppy surface to see if something had been tossed from the opposite side. But there was nothing.

  Scanlon was opening the cooler on the deck below when she placed the barrel of the Walther to the leathery back of his red, sun-beaten neck.

  “What is this?” she said. “Where is it? You brought us to the wrong place.”

  Scanlon, unfazed by the gun, cracked his can of Bud as he slowly turned around. “Why would I bring you to the wrong place?”

  “To double-cross us,” Vida said. “We weren’t given the coordinates. Only you were. You bring us here, to some bullshit point, then send another boat to the correct spot to grab the shipment for yourself.”

  Scanlon laughed and swigged his beer.

  “Lady, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. “Listen, Perrine and I go way, way back. We got drunk together in Paris at a NATO thing back when I was a SEAL. Ask around. Your buddies on the ship got spooked or tipped off or something, OK? I’ve been doing this shit for twenty years. It happens all the time. We go back to shore. You call your people. You’ll be — ”