Page 77 of The Midnight Knock

“You don’t have to. Just take the gun.”

Ethan looked Ryan in the eye. Looked at the gun. Without another word, he took it.

“Thanks, kid.” Ryan nodded at Stanley. “Don’t let him go anywhere.”

It took most of the way to room 5 before Ryan could persuade Fernanda to share the name of the girl they were carrying. Kyla. He’d never met a Kyla he didn’t like.

Fernanda was a different story. She was chilly, vaguely haughty, spoke from behind a thick shell of superiority, the kind only rich girls can grow. Ryan suspected it was a defense mechanism, and he also got the feeling Fernanda really, really didn’t like him, and even though he had no idea why that could be, she was clearly in no hurry to share. The woman seemed determined not to say a word more to Ryan than necessary, but he wasn’t daunted.

Before he and Fernanda left the office, Ryan had cleared up one thing with the twins. “Were you serious earlier? That if we want to see tomorrow, we need to figure out what happened to your cousin?”

Thomas had struggled to speak. “We have a place, a place to—”

Ryan waved this off. “You don’t have anywhere to hide. If you did, you’d be there already. You just want to know who killed the girl. I can’t blame you.”

One of those awfulSHRIEKShad echoed across the desert, set off all sorts of alarm bells in Ryan’s mind. He’d never heard anything like that in all the time he’d lived in this part of Texas. He’d never heard anything like that in hislife, full stop, and he didn’t care for it. Not one bit.

Tabitha had said carefully, “The situation here is… worse than you think.”

“You mean worse than the fact someone’s murdered your cousin?”

“Yes,” Tabitha said.

“In what way?”

“It’s… hard to explain.”

AnotherSHRIEK, this one from behind the door in the back of the office. Ryan had flinched. “You trap those things in your spare time?”

“Not exactly.”

“Why did you say we have until midnight to figure this out?”

Thomas had finally cut in. He sounded angry. He sounded scared. “No more questions. Either help us or don’t. The night’s already ruined.”

Everyone in the office had peered at him, even Ethan. Ryan said, “Ruined?”

Thomas had clammed up tight. When Tabitha had tried to speak,he gave her a sharp hiss. The woman hadn’t seemed thrilled about it, but she’d held her tongue. Ryan had frowned. He’d come back to these two.

Now, in room 5, he helped Fernanda settle Kyla onto the bed closer to the wardrobe, the bed whose mattress was slightly askew. Before the moment could linger, Ryan said, “I used to work for Frank’s operation, you know.”

Fernanda reached a hand under Kyla’s back. She withdrew it, now, to reveal a standard-issue, nine-millimeter Glock, the type all of Frank’s thugs carried around.

Fernanda pointed the gun Ryan’s way. “Get out.”

“I was quitting the outfit when I got arrested. That was around the time they started trafficking people.” Ryan held very still. “The guns and the drugs—whatever, someone was going to move them across the border. But people? Slaves? No. I couldn’t handle that. I refused to work for them after that.”

“I said get out of my room.”

“I wanted to stop the trafficking. Truly. I was dating Stanley’s daughter at the time. She felt the same way.”

“I won’t tell you again.”

Ryan said, “How long you been in the States?”

Fernanda hesitated. She said, “That is no concern of yours.”

“Judging by your accent and your attitude, I assume you came from a little money. Enough money to get the right papers to enter the US, but not quite enough for a plane ticket. You and a bunch of other good-looking kids got on a bus. You needed a cheap ticket for some reason, but who doesn’t at your age? Y’all thought you were safe. You and the other kids didn’t realize you were in trouble until the bus went off-road and started pulling up to the Rio.”