When Things Fail #2
Glen laughed delightedly. “Well, that’s a shame, ’cause I’m already married.” He managed to look a smidge embarrassed. “And he’s about your age, too, which seems to me like some sort of punishment for something I didn’t know I did.”
“I know,” Damien teased darkly. “Believe me, I know.”
The three of them laughed, and Damien went with Anthony and Chance to make sure the vehicles were stowed close to the hangar, leaving Bailey to walk with Reg and Glen to the plane.
“So,” Glen Echo said soberly as they walked, “I know you’re flying to get your friend—”
“Our brother,” Reg said. “Mine and Chance’s. And his partner in the Bureau—”
“And their pilot,” Bailey put in. “They wouldn’t leave Bird behind.”
“Bird?” Echo said, arching a brow. “Bird flew them? Oh hell, son—why didn’t you say so? We’d fly through a hurricane to make sure Bird’s all right. Best pilot I’ve ever known. Okay, then. How long have they been missing?”
“Well, they pushed me out of an airplane over the desert about a hundred miles south of Juarez five days ago,” Bailey said.
“This one,” he nodded to Reg, “has ways of tracking his brother’s phone.
They were holed up about a hundred fifty miles south of Juarez for two nights, and on the third, they moved about two miles north, and have been there since. ”
Glen grunted. “A hundred fifty miles south of Juarez,” he muttered, and then he stopped his swaggering pilot’s stride and turned toward Bailey. “What were they doing there?”
Bailey grimaced. “They were trying to track down a couple of, uhm, Bratva hit men who had links to a, uhm, local cartel—”
“Corazones de Sangre?” Glen asked, eyebrows raised. “Why would the Bureau send them to do that?”
Bailey felt so very small. “I, uhm, was a witness to a hit,” he said. “Dean said he was going to, uhm, bring the hit men in so they wouldn’t try to, uhm, silence me.”
Glen Echo dragged his hands through his hair. “So, Dean and his partner—”
“Marcus,” Reg supplied.
“Yeah. They were going to go off a couple of hit men in the middle of a cartel compound.”
Bailey and Reg glanced at each other. “They never said that in so many words,” Bailey said after a moment. “They…. Dean just said they were going to keep me safe.”
“Oh, baby,” Glen muttered. “I know what that means. Okay, then. Do you still have Dean on your illegal tracking software?”
“How do you know it’s illegal?” Reg squawked.
Glen stared at him. “Because he’s with the FBI, junior. Don’t shit yourself—I’m not getting anybody in trouble. If what you’ve got helps us get our people out, that’s fine. But you keep an eye on your equipment so we know if our folks are on the move, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Reg said, nodding his head. Bailey had seen the younger, more timid man swallow nervously, but he didn’t hesitate.
“Good man,” Glen said, with a hearty slap to his shoulder. He caught Bailey’s eyes. “And you, sir, have the appearance of a man who’s been through battle.”
“Only in the ER,” Bailey said, but Glen shook his head.
“That’s battle,” he said, without equivocation. “I don’t see you backing down.” He paused for a minute, and his eyes softened. “So what’s your personal stake here?”
Bailey couldn’t even smile. “Dean Royal,” he said, the name coming from his lips before he could stop it. “I’m not going back to his parents without him.”
Glen nodded like Bailey hadn’t just laid his heart out for the world to see. “Well, then, let’s get this show on the road.”
Fifteen minutes later found them up in the air, strapped in tight to the comfortable passenger seats in the front of the plane, their gear stashed in a corner of the cavernous space in the back.
Bailey had noted the four field gurneys, with sturdy vinyl padding and foldable all-terrain wheels, strapped to the side, as well as two ice chests that Glen had shown him were full of saline and plasma, which could be held up by eyebolts on the sides of the plane.
Glen had explained that his vehicles were made to be versatile. He could take rich folks into the mountains with their hunting/fishing/kayaking gear, or he could go searching for those same folks when they didn’t report back.
Underlying everything, Bailey noted, was the smell of wet dog.
Glen had chuckled. “Yeah, my brother runs a dog-training business for search and rescue hounds. We work together a lot, which is good because he and Damie live together, and Preston has certain rules about how long Damie is allowed to go without them hooking up.”
“Rules?” Bailey said, curious in spite of himself.
Glen glanced at him shrewdly. “Something along the lines of ‘Don’t make me hare into the wild yonder searching for you because I love you, you idiot.’ I’m thinking you could identify.”
Bailey thought about Dean pushing him out of that plane, with no promise of when he’d be back in touch. “A little,” he said darkly.
Glen nodded. “Thought so.”
And now here they were. They were not so far south that the sun had set already, but it was getting close to seven as the plane took off. Bailey had fidgeted in his seat, trying to put that jumpy, fretful feeling in his stomach to rest. They were doing something, weren’t they? He’d gotten help?
But Glen had been very frank about the twin-engine turbo-prop’s capabilities.
Twelve hundred miles in six hours was probably the max, and it would be a buzzy dragonfly ride to Juarez, which was nearly a thousand miles away.
Still, Glen had a fuel stop planned at El Paso, and Anthony’d had the good sense to stop at a burger place for food, and the seats were relatively comfortable.
Bailey needed to chill out and pace himself—he knew this from med school, from the ER, from his entire life. A man learned patience when he was waiting for an emergency he knew for sure was going to come.
Still, after Reg was done eating, Bailey touched his elbow from the seat behind him.
The sky had smudged with purple night over the desert, and stars threatened to peek out overhead.
The droning of the twin engines was finally working its magic, and Chance had finished his food and curled up and gone to sleep with the dedication of somebody who probably still had two inches to grow.
Reg turned to him, pulling an earbud out as he did. “’Sup?” he asked, reinforcing how young he was compared to Dean.
“Has there been any movement?” Bailey asked, rubbing his stomach nervously for the umpteenth time in an hour.
Reg took his phone from his pocket—he’d been listening to music—and pulled up a screen, frowning. “Mm… hold up.” He touched the screen on Dean’s pulsating dot and grunted.
“What?” Bailey asked.
“It’s… well, he’s moved about a half mile in the last five minutes, but not linearly.”
Bailey squinted. “So he’s been running around?”
“Yeah. A lot, actually. And quickly. And hold on a sec….” A different pulsating dot joined Dean’s. “He and Marcus are still together—like, running in lockstep. But… oh wow.”
“Oh wow?” Bailey asked, and his voice pitched enough for Chance to mumble in the seat next to him. “Oh wow?” he said again, this time in a stage whisper. “The hell does that mean, Reg?”
“It means they’re on the move,” Reg said. “Fairly quickly—about a hundred twenty knots, actually, which is our airspeed, which means—”
“They’re on a plane?” Bailey actually found this was reason to hope. “Which way are they heading?”
“Northwest from their position—so exactly toward Juarez.” Reg glanced up from his phone and smiled hopefully. “They might meet us there. That would be… well, a little like we made a mountain out of a molehill, but….” He shrugged.
Bailey swallowed, trying to contain his relief. It wasn’t for certain; it wasn’t seeing Dean right there , but God, it was hope, right?
“Can I see your phone for a second?” he begged. “I promise not to touch the screen.”
Reg handed it over without question, and Bailey thought for the hundredth time that this family was sort of magical, and then he concentrated on the two dots.
Sure enough, much like one of those diagrams you saw in a commercial airliner, the dots were coursing a stately path along the very simple map presented on the phone’s face.
There was nothing much underneath it, but the dots continued to course, continued to—
“Oh shit!” Bailey squeaked, but it was loud enough to turn both Reg and Anthony toward him in their swiveling chairs. “Look!”
As the three of them peered at the little screen, the two dots slowed their course, slower, slower….
“If that’s a plane,” Anthony said gruffly, “it’s about to crash.”
“Oh God,” Bailey said. “How far away are they? How long will it take us to get to them?”
“Hold on,” Reg muttered. “Anthony, give me your phone so I can do some calculate—”
“Oh shit!” They all said at the same time. The two dots had stopped. And then they’d gone out, leaving nothing but the blankness of desert on Reg’s phone.
Bailey felt himself vibrating with fear, and Anthony took the phone from Reg’s shaking hand.
“Cell phones break in airplane crashes,” he said softly.
“And everybody, including my dad, says Bird is the best pilot he’s ever met.
Now I’m going to show their last known to our two pilots, and you two are going to take twenty deep breaths, do you understand me? ”
“Dean!” squeaked Reg.
Anthony cupped his cheek with undisguised tenderness. “Baby,” he said softly, “we’re going to get there. Did you do your calculations?”
“Four hours,” Reg whispered. “That doesn’t count getting gas in El Paso.”
“Then five hours,” Anthony said, stroking Reg’s cheek with a tender, work-roughened thumb. “You and Bailey here are going to have to put all your fears on hold for five hours. Can you do that?”
Bailey wanted to sob. He wanted to howl . He’d done this before—oh God, he’d done this before. He’d seen proof that all his heart’s plans had come to nothing but ashes, and he’d grieved. He couldn’t… he couldn’t… he couldn’t….
And he remembered Dean, getting in the shower behind him, holding him, talking him out of his mood. Talking about his family. Giving Bailey to his family. It was the best, most perfect gift a man had ever given him, and Bailey couldn’t pay that gift back now by giving up.
“Yes,” he whispered, wrapping his arms around himself so he wouldn’t fly apart. “I have to.”
“When you’re done telling the pilots,” Reg said, in a still, stony voice, “I’ll text Rory and Val. We’ve got a place to start. It could be so much worse.”
So much worse , Bailey whispered to himself. He knew what looks much worse looked like. But this wasn’t that, he reminded himself.
Not. Yet.