She glanced at her watch. “Want to say…one thirty?”
“Or two. I must get the file.”
“Fine. I’ll see you at two. How will I recognize you?”
“You won’t have to. I have seen your picture on the Internet.”
Leah disconnected and stared doubtfully at her phone. Going to Juárez when she was supposed to be covering the mall shindig was crazy, but her gut said that Señor Sánchez was the real deal. When he’d said that he had the story of a lifetime, she’d actually shivered. If he was pulling her leg, he deserved an Oscar, because she believed him. And if he’d been part of the original investigation of the girls, the mystery file might hold the key to breaking the story wide open.
God knew she needed a break – one big bombshell that could put her back on the industry radar rather than spending a career covering minor celebrity weddings and missing pets, tormented by the Wicked Witch of the Southwest.
Her heart beat faster as she slipped behind the recalcitrant car’s wheel and started the engine. She might have been thrown a few curveballs, but she was still at bat, and as long as she could swing, she was doing what she’d always wanted for a living, even if it was from the armpit office of the local fish wrap. The Juárez murders had been shocking and brutal, and her revisiting of the story had struck a chord. If she could follow it up with something nobody had ever seen before, it could be what she’d been dreaming of ever since her disastrous departure from the Herald.
Leah hurried home, thankful that her aunt was now closeted away with the AC blowing, watching her soap operas and crocheting more doilies that nobody wanted. Inside her apartment Leah ferreted around in her nightstand drawer and found her passport, issued when she’d moved to New York with visions of traveling the world in pursuit of the stories lesser reporters didn’t dare cover. Now its unstamped, blank pages were just another reminder of how far she’d fallen since then. She slid it into her back pocket, changed into a clean top, and was out the door with just enough time to grab a hasty lunch and walk across the bridge at the Paso Del Norte border crossing.
The Puente Internacional was dense with pedestrians trudging over the dry riverbed that delineated the Mexican border. The fifteen-minute walk in the heat of the day felt like an hour’s forced march, and when she passed through the Mexican customs building, she sighed in relief. Leah stepped from the immigration checkpoint into a dusty haze of Juárez exhaust and contrasted the antiseptic U.S. side to the chaotic pandemonium of Mexico, with vendors hawking every manner of snack and junk to anyone who would listen and cars growling past, blaring their horns as tempers frayed in the heat. A sweating one-legged man with copper skin and clown makeup on his face juggled bowling pins by a line of taxis, his dog beside him with a party hat affixed to its head and a tip basket clenched in its jaws. Leah deposited a dollar into the basket, mainly for the dog’s sake, and continued to the head of the queue.
The cab driver knew Mi Ranchito and, after they negotiated a price, swung into traffic with suicidal abandon, Banda music screeching from the car radio.
“Do you have air conditioning?” Leah asked from the backseat.
“Oh, no, señorita, I’m sorry, ees broken. But the breeze is fresh from the windows, no?”
Leah shook her head. “No.”
“Ees no very far. You will see.”
The cantina was a seafood restaurant with garish pink paint and a palapa roof. Leah paid the driver and ducked into the shade of the interior. Only a few tables were occupied, all by locals, and a young waiter led her to a corner beneath a ceiling fan that afforded slim ventilation. She checked the time, ordered a soda, and thanked the universe that she only had twenty minutes to wait before Sánchez was due.
Two hours later she paid her bill and stalked to the entrance, where the waiter had called her a taxi. She’d tried Sánchez’s number three times, with no answer, and had ignored a call from Margaret a half hour earlier, not wanting to deal with it. Leah fumed at having been suckered into a wasted trip as the cab wended its way back to the border. She’d squandered precious time she didn’t have on the empty promise of the story of a lifetime that had turned out to be a hoax.
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Table of Contents
Books by Russell Blake
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Excerpt from A Girl Apart