Dance of the Bones

LANI AWAKENED TO THE SOUND of a door slamming shut and the smell of peanut butter in the air. Peanut butter? Why peanut butter? Was Henry hungry and making a sandwich?

She looked around. The car was parked in the driveway of a two--story house with lights on downstairs. There were houses on either side with no lights showing in either one and very little traffic on the street. She guessed that they were in a residential area somewhere in Tucson, but she had no idea where. Then her eye caught the slowly moving lights of a descending airplane. That put them in the southwest side somewhere near Tucson International Airport.

Lani tried pulling her arms loose, but the tie wraps didn’t give. Her shoulders were screaming in agony from being trapped in one position for such a long time. How much time had passed since Henry had given her that first shot? Long enough for him to drive from Sells to Tucson. And after the second one? Long enough for night to fall.

Henry Rojas was clearly fleeing for his life. That meant that once he finished whatever he was doing in the house, he would most likely kill Lani. What would happen if she could somehow open the door and fall far enough out of the vehicle so that her body was half in and half out? Maybe a passerby would notice and stop to help. The only problem was that there were no -passersby—no cars driving slowly through the neighborhood and no one out walking a dog. And when she did attempt exiting the vehicle, it didn’t work. Henry had locked the car. She could reach the door handle, but not the button to unlock the door.

Resigned to her fate, Lani settled back against the car seat as best she could. What would happen to Angie and Micah? Dan was a good man and an excellent father. If she was gone and he was left alone with the kids, he’d do a great job of raising them. She also knew that her parents would do everything in their power to help.

But just thinking about Dan made her want to weep. Only yesterday he had tried to warn her about the dangerous smugglers she and Gabe might encounter out near Ioligam, and he had been right. The dangerous smugglers had been there all right, but it turned out that none of them were strangers, not at all. As for Henry Rojas, someone who should have been above reproach? He was likely the most dangerous of them all. Dan hadn’t seen that one coming, and neither had Lani.

She tried to keep an eye on the street. Trusting the drug to keep her sedated, Henry hadn’t bothered to gag her. If someone came by, she intended to scream her head off. Otherwise, she knew that her best chance of living was to continue doing just what she’d been doing all along—-pretending to be asleep. It seemed unlikely that he’d do whatever it was he planned right here in the car. He’d need transportation of some kind that wasn’t filled with either a dead body or blood and gore. She could only hope that at some point he’d have to loosen the tie wraps that bound her. That would be her one opportunity to fight back.

“I’ll head--butt that son of a bitch all the way into next week,” she swore to herself. “Then I’ll run like hell.”

AVA LOOKED AT HER WATCH again and wondered what was taking so long. At this point Henry was over an hour late in making the delivery, and she was growing impatient. Or maybe Jane Dobson was the one worrying and watching the minutes tick by. At this point, it was hard for Ava herself to remember exactly who she was at the moment or who she would be at any given time. That was something to bear in mind. As of now, Ava Richland was over. Going forward, Ava would always be someone else.