The Midwife And The Lawman

Devon looked down and saw footprints leading into the mine. She stopped moving, stopped breathing. This would probably be a good time to turn around, get back in her car and drive away. Then she heard it. A sound like a dry, racking cough followed by faint sobbing, as though a child were crying, weak and fearful. She looked down at the footprints once more. They were very small.

Devon refused to listen to the voice of reason that was telling her only a fool would step foot inside that mine with simply a flashlight to defend herself. But she couldn’t ignore a child crying. She jerked on the wire mesh and it moved grudgingly outward, enlarging the opening enough for her to get through without crawling on her hands and knees. She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness beyond the oblong area of sunlight just within the opening. A small flurry of movement ahead and a little to the left attracted her attention. “Hello? Who’s there?” The crying stopped, but another bout of coughing broke the quiet. “I won’t hurt you. It’s all right. I’m here to help.”

She switched on the flashlight and took several steps, almost tripping on a bundle of thin blankets spread over what appeared to be an old mattress. She looked around. The flashlight beam picked out a lawn chair by the mattress, one of the aluminum ones with plastic webbing that folded flat, in the same green-and-white pattern as the one she’d been sitting on at Daniel’s place. Beside it sat a rusty camping lantern and a couple of plastic plates and foam cups. Next to those were two plastic, gallon milk jugs filled with water. A fire pit had been made in a natural depression in the mine floor.

The sniffling sound came again, followed by a hushed whisper. Devon couldn’t make out the words. She thought they might be Spanish, though. “Please come out,” she said in that language. “I won’t hurt you.” More rustling, as though someone was trying to crawl away. She narrowed her eyes. An area of darker shadows loomed on the mine wall. She moved a little more to her right and realized it was an opening to a smaller tunnel branching off the one she was in. Cool air brushed across her face and breasts. Perhaps it wasn’t a tunnel, but an air shaft, maybe even the one Teague Ellis had fallen to his death in. Devon dropped to her knees and trained the flashlight on the hole.

Two sets of dark eyes stared back at her from frightened faces. They were indeed children. Girls. Sisters, probably, from the similarity of their facial features. The elder held the younger cradled in her arms. “Go away,” she said in Spanish. “Leave us alone.”

One look at the little girl told Devon she was the source of the coughing. She was wearing jeans and a dirty Scooby Doo T-shirt. Her face was flushed with fever, her eyes glittering with tears. Her hair, black as night, was a filthy tangle around her face. The older girl’s hair was not quite as tangled, but just as dirty. She was wearing a thin, shapeless cotton dress and cheap sneakers.

And she was pregnant. Very pregnant. Even holding the smaller child close to her body couldn’t hide that.

Were the children illegal aliens hiding out from the authorities as they made their way north? Were the men that had brought them here still around? She hoped not. The child coughed again and she banished thoughts of Coyotes. “Soy una enfermera.” Devon’s Spanish was not as good as she needed it to be. She switched to English. “I’m a nurse. Let me help you.”

No response. Devon balanced the flashlight on a ridge of rock beside her, then hunkered down and held out her arms for the younger child. Suddenly she caught movement out of the corner of her eye and froze. Had she guessed wrong? Was the girls’ Coyote still here, after all?

“Jesse,” the little girl whispered.

Devon turned her head. A boy, as ragged and dirty as the girls, stood over her. He looked to be about fifteen, not yet a man, but almost. He was thin to the point of emaciation. He wore jeans and a faded red windbreaker over a ragged Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. Her little cooler was slung over his left shoulder, as were the two fleece blankets she’d left folded in the back of her truck.

“Get up,” he said in English.

Devon stood, her heart beating hard. He held a length of two-by-four like a baseball bat. He could kill her with a single blow and they both knew it.

“I’m a nurse. I—”

“Get away from my sisters,” he shouted. “I’ll take care of them. Just leave the flashlight and go. Get out and don’t come back!”

CHAPTER FOUR

DEVON HAD NOTHING to defend herself with but the flashlight, and it would be no protection against the two-by-four.

“Get out of here,” the boy repeated.

“Your sister needs help. She’s ill.”

“I’ll take care of her.” He swayed on his feet.

Devon spoke with all the authority she could muster. “Sit down before you fall down.” She reached out and grabbed the two-by-four from his hands. The unexpected movement and the strength of her grip surprised the boy enough that he let go, stumbling backward over the thin mattress and sitting down hard.

Devon rocked backward, too, but didn’t fall. She trained her flashlight on the two girls, still huddled in the darkness of the smaller opening. “It’s okay. You can come out now.”

The older girl did as she was told, pulling the younger with her. Devon moved a few steps away so they could go to their brother. “Put your head between your knees if you feel faint,” she told him.

“I don’t feel faint,” he said, sneering.

“Well, you look faint. Go on, do as I said.”

“No.” But the defiant word ended on a moan and he dropped his head between his upthrust knees.

The older girl lowered herself awkwardly by his side and laid her hand on his shoulder. “Jesse, are you sick, too?” She spoke in English so Devon responded in the same language.

“I think he’s just hungry. When was the last time you had something to eat?”

Jesse didn’t answer. The girl looked at Devon and shrugged thin shoulders. “It has been two days for my brother. Yesterday Maria and I ate the last of the chick…the food.”

So that was what happened to Daniel Elkhorn’s stolen chicken. “Your brother needs to eat. There’s fruit and a peanut-butter sandwich in the bag on his shoulder.”

“Sylvia,” the child, Maria, whispered. “Tengo hambre.”

So now she knew their names, Jesse, Sylvia and Maria.

“Quiero plátano.”

“There’s a banana. And grapes and an apple.”

Jesse was upright once more, still pale, his mouth set in a tight line. Sylvia tugged the strap of the cooler off his arm, removed the lid and held out half the peanut-butter sandwich to him. He waved her away. “You two eat the sandwich. Just give me some water.”

Sylvia bent forward to whisper in his ear, her gaze skittering over Devon before she lowered her head, and when she was done he devoured his small portion in two bites. Devon hadn’t heard what she said, but had no trouble guessing she had urged him to eat to keep up his strength so that they could escape as quickly as possible.

She wasn’t about to let that happen.

Maria held out her half-eaten banana. “My throat hurts.” Again she spoke in Spanish, the language she was obviously most comfortable with.

“I know, sweetie. I have medicine in my car that will help her feel better.” Devon directed her words to Sylvia and Jesse equally. Brother and sister glanced at each other and then Jesse nodded slowly.

“You can help her.” He used both hands to lever himself up off the old mattress. Devon wondered if it, too, like the chicken and probably the lawn chair, had been stolen from Miguel’s grandfather.

Devon held out her hand to the little girl.

Jesse put himself between them. “We’ll all go,” he said.

Devon nodded. “Okay.”

She moved toward the opening of the mine shaft, half expecting to turn around at the entrance and find they’d all disappeared again. But they followed her in silence through the wire screening and down the path to her truck.

Devon lifted the hatch on the Blazer and opened the combination lock on her midwife’s box. The box contained everything she needed for a delivery—oxygen, masks for the mother and baby, suction equipment, a laryngoscope to open an airway for the baby if necessary. A second smaller box held her anti-hemorrhage drugs and the equipment she needed to do the necessary newborn tests. She handed Sylvia a sack of hard candy from one of the top compartments and another bottle of apple juice.

Sylvia nearly snatched the sack from her hand but murmured, “Gracias,” as she did so. Devon held out her hands to Maria, showing her a bottle of Tylenol. “This will help you feel better.”

Maria looked at her brother. Jesse narrowed his dark eyes but nodded permission. The little girl came forward and Devon gave her a Tylenol to swallow with the juice Sylvia handed her. Then Devon lifted the little girl onto the tailgate. She weighed next to nothing. “I’m going to listen to your lungs,” Devon explained. She glanced back at Jesse. “Does she understand English?”

He nodded. “Yes. But she doesn’t speak it very well yet.”

“She was going to be in special English classes in first grade but—” A sharp word from Jesse cut short what Sylvia might have revealed.

Devon pretended not to notice. She’d already come to the conclusion that the children must have spent considerable time in the States, for both Jesse and Sylvia spoke with little accent. She put the tabs of her stethoscope in her ears and put the disk against Maria’s chest. “Take a deep breath.” The little girl pulled in air, but the breath ended in another cough. Devon moved the stethoscope to the right side and repeated the directive, then she straightened, draping the stethoscope around her neck. The little girl was congested, but not dangerously so. With rest and food she would be fine in a couple of days.