Paige Sisk leaned against her fiancé, Colton Rawls, her eyes drifting shut as she took a big hit of weed and passed the joint to Colton. Oh, man, all those dweebs who had gone on and on about the bad things that could happen to her in Mexico were so totally wrong. Mexico was the best. I mean, she wasn’t an idiot, she knew better than to score weed in front of some Mexican cop, though she’d heard all you had to do was flash them some green and the problem went away. Like she wanted to waste her money on bribes.

They had been here four days already. Colton thought Chihuahua was the coolest. He had some serious thing going about Pancho Villa; until they got here she thought it was, like, some house where ponchos were made. The only Pancho she’d ever heard of was in an old, old western where this silly-looking dude kept saying, “Oh, Pancho,” to an even sillier dude in a big hat, but Colton said no, this Pancho was the real thing. Like there were fake Panchos. But whatever. Colton dug it. They had gone twice to see this shot-up old Dodge where supposedly the real Pancho had been turned into Swiss cheese, just like Bonnie and Clyde.

As far as she was concerned, Pancho Villa was just a dead old fart. She didn’t care about his stupid Dodge. Now, if he’d driven a Hummer, that would have been cool.

“If he’d driven a Hummer,” she said, “he could have run right over those assholes who were shooting at him.”!!!El Paso, Texas

Milla’s cell phone rang. For a moment she thought about not answering it; she was dead tired, dispirited, and had a throbbing headache. The temperature outside was 107, and even with the air-conditioning in the SUV set on high, the heat coming through the windshield burned her arms. The image of Tiera Alverson’s battered face and the fourteen-year-old’s sightless blue eyes staring up at nothing wouldn’t leave her mind. In her dreams tonight she would hear the sound of Regina Alverson’s harsh sobbing when she heard that her little girl was never coming home again. Sometimes Finders succeeded, but sometimes they were too late. Today, they had been too late.

The last thing Milla wanted to do right now was take on someone else’s heartache; she had enough aches of her own. But she never knew who might be calling, or why, and after all, she herself had made finding people her personal crusade. So she opened her eyes just enough to find the right button to punch, then immediately closed them again to shut out the ferociously bright late-afternoon sun. “Hello.”

“Señora Boone?” The accented voice on the speakerphone filled the Chevy SUV. Milla didn’t recognize it, but she spoke to so many different people every day that there was no way she could recognize everyone. This was definitely business, though, because only when it concerned Finders was she known as Milla Boone. After the divorce, she had taken back her maiden name of Edge, but the public so associated the name Boone with the cause of finding missing children that she’d been forced to use it in all publicity and anything to do with Finders.

“Yes, this is she.”

“There is a meeting tonight. Guadalupe, at ten-thirty. Behind the church.”

“What kind of meeting—” she began, but the voice cut her off.

“Diaz will be there.”

The phone went dead. Milla sat up, her headache forgotten as adrenaline buzzed through her system. She clicked off the phone and sat very still, thoughts racing.

“Which Guadalupe?” Brian Cusack said from the driver’s seat, mostly in frustration, because he’d heard everything.

“If it isn’t the closest one, then it doesn’t matter.” There were several Guadalupes in Mexico, ranging in population from about fifty thousand down to a collection of only a couple of hundred souls. The one closest to the border qualified as a village.

“Shit,” Brian Cusack said. “Shit.”

“No joke.” It was after six; no one would be at the office to provide backup. She could try to track down people at home, but there wasn’t time to spare. If the meeting was at ten-thirty, then they needed to be in position at least an hour beforehand. Guadalupe was about fifty miles from El Paso and Juarez. In this traffic it would take them forty-five minutes to an hour to get to the border. It would be less hassle to park the SUV, walk across the bridge into Mexico, and pick up transportation there, rather than go through the paperwork involved in driving across, but the operative phrase was “less hassle,” not “no hassle.” When time was short, any hassle at all could mean the difference between success and failure.

They both had their passports and their multiple-entry tourist cards for Mexico; that was standard procedure, because they never knew when they’d be called on to cross borders. That was about all they had, though, other than a couple of night-vision devices that they had used searching for little Dylan Peterson—a successful find, thank God—and that had been left in the duffel as they then swung immediately into the search for Tiera Alverson. They hadn’t needed a lot of stuff in the Alverson case; the job had taken them to Carlsbad, New Mexico, and had required patience and time, not survival gear.

They would have to make do with what they had, because there was no way she could pass up an opportunity to get Diaz.

Diaz. The man was as elusive as smoke on a windy day, but maybe this time they’d be lucky.

“We won’t have time to pick up any weapons,” Brian said evenly as he seized an opening and muscled the big SUV around a poky white Toyota with huge rust spots on the door.

“We’ll have to make time.” They never took the chance of smuggling weapons through at the border; instead they had arrangements to buy weapons once they were across. Most of the time she didn’t need weapons—all she was doing was talking to people—but sometimes common sense dictated they be able to protect themselves.

She tried Joann Westfall’s number, hoping she could catch her second-in-command at home, but the answering machine came on. Quickly Milla left a message filling Jo in on the admittedly sketchy details of where they were going and why. It was her own rule that none of the Finders went off by themselves, or without letting someone else know where they were.

After two years, her first real shot at Diaz!

Her heartbeat thudded in her chest. Maybe this was the break she’d been hunting for ten years.

Justin’s kidnapping was shrouded in mystery, rumors, suspicion. No ransom had ever been demanded, and the men who had stolen the baby from her in the tiny village market that day had disappeared. But eventually she began hearing snippets of information about a one-eyed man who was never there when she tried to track him down. Then, two years ago, a woman had whispered to her that a man named Diaz perhaps knew about the matter. For the past twenty-five months Milla had stayed on his trail like a bloodhound, and except for maddening rumors, she’d come up empty.

To find Diaz, said an old man warning her away from her quest, was to find death. Best to stay far away from him. Diaz knew about, or was behind, the disappearance of many. She heard that the one-eyed man’s name was Diaz. No, that was wrong; the one-eyed man worked for Diaz. Or Diaz had killed the one-eyed man for mistakenly snatching an American baby and causing such a furor.

Milla had heard all of that, and more. People seemed afraid to talk about him, but she asked questions and waited, and eventually some sort of muttered reply would come. Even after all this time, she still had no clear idea of who or what he was, only that he was somehow involved in Justin’s disappearance.

“Someone’s setting Diaz up for a fall,” Brian said suddenly.

“I know.” There was no other reason for that phone call, and that worried her. She didn’t want to get involved in a plot of betrayal and revenge. First and foremost, she wanted to find Justin. That was what Finders concentrated on, finding the lost ones, the stolen ones; if justice was served, fine, but that was police business. She never hindered an investigation, in fact often helped, but her objective was simply to return children to their families.

“If things turn ugly, we’ll just stay low and out of sight,” she said.

“What if it turns out he’s the one you’ve been looking for all these years?”

Milla closed her eyes, unable to answer. It was one thing to say they’d stay out of whatever trouble was brewing, but what if Diaz was indeed the one-eyed man who had stolen Justin? She didn’t know if she could control her rage, which still seethed and bubbled inside her like a hidden volcano. She couldn’t just kill him; she needed to talk to the man, even if he was the one, to find out what he’d done with her baby. But oh, how she wanted to kill him. She wanted to tear him apart as surely as he’d torn her apart.

Because she had no answer, she concentrated on the here and now. She could do that; she’d gotten by for ten years by focusing just on what she could do right now. She and Brian were tired, hungry, and they faced a long night. Nothing she could do about the last point, but she dug into their stash of PayDay candy bars and opened one for each of them. The peanuts in the candy bar would give them energy. Now that he knew the candy was going to be his supper, instead of the steak he’d been fantasizing aloud about all the way home, Brian grabbed the PayDay and downed it in three bites. Milla handed him another one, which lasted slightly longer.

She always carried fruit on the jobs, too, but because they thought they were headed home, she’d allowed the supply to get low. They were down to one banana. She peeled it and broke it in half. Brian was already reaching for it before she got the thing peeled.

“Anything else?” he asked after he’d allowed her to eat her half.

“Let’s see. Two more PayDays. A roll of Life Savers. And two bottles of water. That’s it.”

He grunted. They’d need the PayDays to keep them going on the trip home. “Guess that’s supper, then.” He was clearly unhappy. Brian was a big boy who required constant refueling.

She wasn’t thrilled with the idea, herself. She opened the bottles of water, but they drank only a few sips each. The last thing either one wanted now was an overloaded bladder.

They had been to Guadalupe before, but she went through the box of maps until she found one that included the town, and studied the layout of the place. “I wonder how many churches are in Guadalupe. I can’t remember.”

“I hope to God only one, since that guy didn’t give us a name. Give me that roll of Life Savers.”

She handed over the Life Savers and Brian tore into the roll. He didn’t let the candy melt in his mouth; he put in three or four at the time, and crunched.

Milla got out her cell phone and called their contact in Juarez, Benito—no last name had ever been given. Benito was a whiz at providing them with wheels whenever they needed them, and not the rental agency variety of wheels, either. Benito specialized in beat-up, rickety pickup trucks that no one paid attention to, and which weren’t likely to be vandalized if left on the street unattended. That was because there was nothing left to vandalize in Benito’s vehicles. They were bare-bones, really not worth stealing. But they ran, and the one he delivered to them on his side of the border would be full of gas. The paperwork was always in order, too, in case they were stopped by the police.

Arranging for weapons was trickier. The Finders didn’t often have a need for weapons, and doing this always made her uneasy. Mexico had strict weapons laws; not that there weren’t plenty of weapons to be had; it was just that if they were caught with guns, they’d be in very deep doo-doo. She didn’t like breaking the law, but when you were dealing with human snakes, you had to be prepared. She reached their contact for illegal weapons and placed her order: nothing fancy, just basic self-protection. She never knew exactly what would be provided, but she expected cheap.22 revolvers, which they would dispose of before they returned to the States.

As she had expected, it was seven-thirty and getting dark by the time they parked the SUV, walked across the bridge, and cleared their paperwork. Benito was waiting patiently for them with a truly remarkable excuse for a truck, an ancient Ford that was more rust than painted metal. There was no tailgate, the passenger door was wired shut—presumably to keep it on the truck—and the windshield was held in place with duct tape. Literally. Despite their hurry, both Milla and Brian had to stop and blink at the derelict.

“You’ve outdone yourself this time, Benito,” Brian said in awe.

Benito grinned broadly, showing the gap where he was missing a tooth. He was short and wiry, age anywhere between forty and seventy, and he had the most consistently cheerful expression Milla had ever seen. “I try,” he said, with a New York accent. Benito had been born in Mexico, but his parents had crossed the border with him when he was small, and he had very few early memories of the land of his birth. Later he returned to his roots and settled down very happily, but he couldn’t shake his accent. “The horn doesn’t work, and if the headlights don’t come on when you pull out the knob, push it back in real hard and then kind of ease it out again. You gotta get the knot in just the right position.”

“Does it have a motor, or do we have to push it with our feet?” Milla asked, peering inside. She was only half joking, because part of the floor had rusted out and she could see the ground.

“Now, the motor’s a work of art. It purrs like a kitten, and there’s more power than you’d expect. Might come in handy.” He never asked questions about where they were going or what they were doing, but he knew what the Finders did.

Milla opened the driver’s door and climbed in, gingerly scooting across the seat and avoiding the hole in the floor. Brian handed her the case containing the two nightscopes, the one blanket, dark green, they’d had in the SUV, and the two bottles of water; she securely stowed everything while he slid behind the wheel.

The truck was so old there weren’t any seat belts; if the traffic police stopped them, they would almost certainly have to pay a fine. As Benito had promised, however, the engine turned over at the first turn of the key. Brian maneuvered through Juarez’s busy streets, then stopped in front of a farmacia, a drugstore. Milla waited in the truck while he went inside, where he met their contact, a woman they knew only as Chela. She was very distinguished-looking, neatly dressed, and looked to be in her late forties. She gave Brian a Sanborn’s shopping bag; he passed her some money so slickly that no one knew the transaction had taken place; then he was back in the truck and they were on their way to Guadalupe.

Darkness had fallen by then, and he fiddled with the knob for the headlights until they came on. Driving in Mexico at night wasn’t recommended, for anyone. Not only was that when most highway robberies occurred, but the heat retained in the pavement drew livestock to the highways. Hitting a horse or a cow was never good, for either animal or vehicle. There were also potholes and other hazards, which were more difficult to see at night. To make driving even more adventurous, Mexicans sometimes deliberately drove at night without their own lights, the better to see oncoming cars on hills and curves and avoid them, which was okay unless two cars traveling in opposite directions both had their headlights off. Then it became more like a game of blind chicken.

Brian loved driving in Mexico. He was still young enough, only twenty-five, that he enjoyed pitting his night vision and reflexes against whatever waited for him on the road. He was steady as a rock and didn’t know the meaning of the word “panic,” so Milla gladly left the driving to him, while she held on with a death grip and prayed.

It was almost ten o’clock when they finally reached Guadalupe, perilously close to the time for the meeting. It was a small village of maybe four hundred people, with a single main street that was closely lined with shops, the inevitable cantina, and a variety of other buildings. Here and there hitching posts still stood in position. The road had deteriorated to mostly dirt and gravel, though there were patches of pavement.

They drove down the main street, verifying that there was indeed just one church; behind it was a cemetery, closely dotted with crosses and tombstones. Milla wasn’t able to see much during the drive-by; she couldn’t tell if there was an alley between the church and the cemetery, though she assumed there had to be room enough for a car to drive.

“No place to park,” Brian muttered, and she turned her attention back to the street. He was right; while there was physical space for parking, there wasn’t anywhere that wouldn’t attract the attention of men who didn’t like being spied on.

“We’ll have to go back to the cantina,” she said. Several cars and trucks had been parked there, providing camouflage for their truck. Brian nodded and continued past the church, keeping his speed slow and steady. He took the next right, down a narrow lane. When it intersected, he took the right turn, then worked his way back to the cantina.

He parked the truck between a 1978 Chevrolet Monte Carlo and an original-style Volkswagen Beetle. They waited and watched, looking for people on the street. Noise poured from the cantina, but a dog nosing curiously around doorways provided the only movement they could see. They each took a pistol and night-vision scope. Before Brian opened the door, Milla automatically reached up to turn off the dome light, only to discover it had been removed.

They slid from the truck and quickly blended into the shadows. The dog looked their way and gave an inquisitive bark, waited a moment to see if they responded, then returned to its search-and-eat mission.

There was no sidewalk, just the street with its obstacle course of potholes and chunks of pavement. By chance they were dressed fairly well for nighttime clandestine work, Brian in green cargo pants and a black T-shirt, and Milla in jeans and a sleeveless burgundy blouse, and they both were wearing rubber-soled work boots as well as dark green baseball caps with “FA,” for Finders Association, in light blue on the front. Brian was darkly tanned, but Milla’s bare arms were noticeable, so she draped the blanket around her shoulders. Now that night had fallen the temperature had cooled dramatically, and the blanket felt good.

They didn’t run, or slink from doorway to doorway; either would attract the attention of anyone watching. They walked purposefully, but without obvious haste. The bad news was that it was less than fifteen minutes until the meeting was supposed to take place. The good news was that only tourists were on time in Mexico, where punctuality was considered bad manners. That didn’t mean no one would be watching the church, but it improved their chances of getting into place unseen.

Seventy-five yards from the church, they left the main street and ducked down a tiny alley that brought them out on the near side of the cemetery.

“What’s the plan?” Brian whispered as he slipped one of the pistols into his pocket, then took out one of the night-vision scopes. “Do we get the jump on them, find out which one is Diaz, and take him away for questioning?”

“I doubt it’ll be that easy,” she said dryly. Because Brian was young and big and strong, and running over with testosterone, he had so far been able to handle everything that came his way. The crucial phrase was “so far.” She was much more aware of how quickly things could go horribly wrong. “We do exactly that if there are only two men, but if there are more, we don’t.”

“Not even if there are just three?”

“Not even.” If there were two men, she and Brian could catch them by surprise and keep both of them covered. Milla didn’t mind holding them at gunpoint while Diaz answered her questions. If there were more than two... she was neither stupid nor suicidal, and she certainly wouldn’t risk Brian’s life. It might be two more years before she had another shot at talking to Diaz, but that was better than having to bury someone. “Can you work your way around to the other side of the cemetery?”

“Has a cat got a tail?” Brian was not only ex-military, having joined the army straight out of high school, but an east Texas farm boy who had grown up ghosting through the woods while deer hunting.

“Then pick a spot where you have a clear view of the entire back of the church, and I’ll do the same on this end. Remember, if there’re more than two, all we do is watch.”

“Got it. But if there are only two, what’s the signal for moving in on them?”

She hesitated. Normally they used radios, but they’d been caught without much of their equipment. “Exactly three minutes after they both show up and begin talking, we move. If the meeting is shorter than that, we move when they do.” If the men meeting here were on the alert, the three minutes would give them time to settle down—she hoped. This wasn’t the best method of synchronization, but it was the best she could come up with under the circumstances. God only knows how long they would have to wait.

Brian faded away into the darkness, and Milla edged in the opposite direction, first away from the cemetery, then around it to the back. Taking cover behind a tall tombstone, she used the night-vision scope to look all around her, searching for someone—other than Brian—who was doing the same thing she was doing. There was no one lurking around the church that she could spot, nor was there anyone hiding behind another tombstone.

Still, she waited a few minutes and scanned the area again. Still nothing. She cautiously moved up to another tombstone. This part of Chihuahua State was desert, with cactus and brush, so there was no grass to muffle any sound she made. She went down on one knee and a rock dug into her leg, making her wince, but she controlled her reaction and didn’t make any sudden movements, just carefully shifted her position.

Something crawled across her hand. It felt tiny, like an ant or a fly. Again she controlled her flinch, but her skin crawled, and she had to fight the urge to shriek and jump up and down to fling the bug away from her. She hated insects. She hated being dirty. She hated lying on the ground, in close proximity to both dirt and insects. She did it anyway, and had trained herself to ignore the dirt and bugs. What she was doing was dangerous and she knew it; her heart was already pounding with sickening force, but that, too, she had learned to ignore. She might cringe inside, but no timidity at all showed on the outside.

She picked up the rock that had been digging into her knee, her fingers sliding over the smooth, triangular shape, kind of like a small pyramid. Hmm, that was interesting. Automatically she slipped it into her front jeans pocket. After a moment she realized what she’d done and started to dig the rock out of her jeans, to toss it aside, but she couldn’t make herself do it.

She had been picking up rocks for years now, always on the lookout for smooth ones or ones with unusual shapes. She had quite a collection of them at home. Little boys liked rocks, didn’t they?

After once again surveilling the cemetery and surrounding area, she moved in a crouch up and to the right, then again to the next tombstone, slowly working her way into position. Cupping her hand over her wristwatch, she pressed the button that illuminated the face: ten thirty-nine. Either the caller’s information was bogus, or the people were in no hurry to get here. She hoped it was the latter, and she and Brian hadn’t gone to all this trouble for nothing.

No. It wasn’t for nothing. Sooner or later, she would find her son. All she had to do was keep running down all leads. She had been doing this for ten years and she would do it for another ten, if necessary. Or twenty years. She couldn’t imagine ever giving up on her little boy.

Through the years she had tried to imagine what Justin’s interests would be, how they would change as he grew, and she had bought toys she’d thought he would like. Would he be fascinated by balls and toy trucks? Would he make motor noises as he crawled along? When he was three, she imagined him on a tricycle. By four, she thought, he would be picking up rocks and worms and things like that, putting them into his pocket. She couldn’t make herself pick up a worm, but the rocks... she could do rocks. That was when she’d begun collecting them.

When he was six, she wondered if he was learning how to play soccer, or T-ball. He would probably still like rocks at that age, too. But just in case, she’d bought a baseball and a small bat.

When he was eight, she imagined him with his adult teeth growing in, too big for his face just yet, though his cheeks would be losing the chubbiness of childhood. At what age did children start playing Little League? He’d have his own bat and glove by now, surely. And maybe someone had taught him how to skip a flat stone on the water; she began looking for the smooth, flat ones, so she’d have them for him just in case.

He was ten now, maybe too old for throwing rocks. He’d have a ten-speed bicycle—a gear for each year, she thought. Perhaps he was into computers. He was definitely old enough now for Little League. And maybe he had an aquarium. Maybe he could put a few of the prettier rocks in his aquarium. She had stopped buying toys, and though she did have a computer, she didn’t buy a bicycle, or an aquarium. The fish would just die, because she wasn’t home often enough to keep them fed.

Milla’s jaw set and she stared blindly across the night-darkened cemetery. She couldn’t let herself think that he might not be alive, so instead she imagined that he was living a normal, happy life, that he’d been found or bought or adopted by people who loved him and were taking good care of him.

That was the theory, anyway, that he’d been stolen and sold to an illegal adoption ring that provided black-market babies to people in the States and Canada who wanted to adopt. These people had no idea the children they’d adopted had been stolen, that families had been devastated and parents left bereft. She tried to believe that. She tried to comfort herself by imagining Justin playing, growing, laughing. The not knowing for certain what had happened to him was the worst, and anything was better than thinking he was dead.

So many of the stolen babies did die. They were stuffed into car trunks to be smuggled across the border, and if the heat killed eight out of ten, well, the ten hadn’t cost anything but effort, and the two remaining ones could be sold for ten, twenty thousand dollars each, maybe even more, depending on who wanted a baby and how much they could afford. The Federales had tried to comfort her by telling her that extra care would be taken with Justin because he was blond and blue-eyed, and therefore worth more. Oddly, it was a comfort, though her heart ached for the tiny Hispanic babies who wouldn’t receive that extra care because they were dark.

But what if—what if he was one of the unlucky ones? Did the bastards who trafficked in stolen babies and ruptured lives even take the time to bury their tiny victims? Or did they just toss them in a ditch somewhere, to be eaten by—

No. She couldn’t go there. She couldn’t let the gruesome thought finish forming in her mind. If she did, then she would lose control, and that was the one thing she absolutely couldn’t do right now. If the tip played out and someone actually showed up at this secret rendezvous, she had to be ready.

Scanning the cemetery once more, she picked out her destination tombstone, one heavier and more ornate than the others, with a nice thick base that would completely conceal her if she was lying down. She got down on her stomach and belly-crawled the rest of the way, lying prone and positioning herself behind the tombstone so that she was at a slight angle and could easily move her head just a little to the right and see the entire width of the church, as well as down the right side of it. Now all she had to do was wait.

The minute hand on her watch crawled around. The hour hand moved to eleven, then past. Finally, at eleven thirty-five, she heard the sound of a car engine. She was immediately alert, though she knew it could just be a farmer heading home from the cantina. She watched closely, but there was no flash of headlights, just the sound of the engine growing closer and closer.

The dark hulk of a car turned at the far back corner of the church, and crawled to a stop about a third of the way down.

Milla drew a deep breath and tried to control the sudden leap of her heart. Most of the time these tips led to nothing but a wild-goose chase, but this time the geese were actually within reach. With any luck, she was about to get her hands on Diaz.

Colton surfaced from his fog to blink in confusion. “Who drives a Hummer?”

“Pancho Villa.”

“No, it was a Dodge.”

“That’s what I’m saying.” Impatient, she elbowed him. “If he’d been driving a Hummer, he could have smashed them flat.”

“No such thing as a Hummer back then.”

“God!” she said in exasperation. “You are so literal. I said if!” She grabbed the joint and took another hit, then got up from the bed. “I’m going to the bathroom.”

“Okay.” Happy to have sole possession of the joint, Colton settled back on the pillows and gave her a little wave as she left the room. She didn’t wave back. Going to the bathroom didn’t make her happy; there was only one on this floor, there was a magazine instead of toilet paper for wiping, and it smelled really bad. But Colton had insisted on staying here instead of in one of the nicer hotels, because the rooms were so cheap. Well, of course they were cheap; what fool would pay top price to stay here? And it was really close to the marketplace, which was neat.

She felt really mellow from the weed, but not so mellow that the bathroom didn’t bother her. The lock was broken, too. A shoelace had been tied around the knob, a nail driven into the frame right beside the knob, and to latch the door you wrapped the loose end of the shoelace around the nail. It did hold the door shut, but she didn’t put a lot of faith in the method. So whenever she had to be in there, she absolutely raced to finish her business.

Oh, shit; she’d forgotten to bring the flashlight. The lights hadn’t gone off yet when she was in the bathroom, but everyone insisted it did happen occasionally, and she was afraid of the dark, so that was one warning she’d listened to. She tried to hurry, but really, you can piss only so fast and she had waited until she was miserably full because she hated using this bathroom. Crouched over the toilet—no way was she going to sit on that thing—she kept going and going and going, and her legs began to ache so bad she thought she might actually have to sit down after all, and then what could she do, boil her butt?

But finally she finished, blotted herself with a page from the magazine, and groaned in relief as she stood from her awkward, crouched position. If she could ever get Colton away from Chihuahua and Pancho Villa’s bullet-riddled Dodge so they could continue their vacation tour, she was going to insist that they stay at better places.

She pulled up her shorts, rinsed her hands, and dried them on her bottom because she’d forgotten to bring a towel with her, then unwound the shoelace from the nail. The door swung open and she turned out the dim light as she stepped into the dark hallway. She faltered, coming to a stop. There was supposed to be a light on in the hallway. There had been when she went into the bathroom. The bulb must have blown.

Chills ran down her back. She so didn’t like the dark. How was she supposed to make it back to their room when she couldn’t see a thing?

A board creaked, to her left. She jumped a foot high and tried to scream, but her heart was in her throat and all she could manage was a squeal.

A rough hand clamped over her mouth; she got a dose of really bad B.O., then something hard slammed into her head and she slumped, unconscious.