Hailey's War by Jodi Compton Page B

honest,” he said, “it occurs to me that if you needed an explanation for why a group of armed men would ambush you on the road, and you couldn’t tell us they were in search of money or drugs, a young woman would make a sympathetic substitute.”
    â€œYou don’t even believe that Nidia
exists?”
    â€œWe have only your word on that,” he said. “Look at this from my perspective: You’ve described your traveling companion as a Mexican-born teenager without money or connections. Why would she be of interest to men like that?”
    â€œI don’t know what kind of men they were,” I said, “so it’s hard to speculate.”
    â€œSpeculate,” he repeated, leaning back a little. “You have a certain level of education.”
    â€œI did nearly four years at West Point. I didn’t finish.”
    â€œThat’s the American military academy?”
    â€œOne of them,” I said.
    â€œWhy didn’t you finish there?”
    â€œI was discharged. Not for using drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I told him. “Listen, whatever you think of me, Nidia needs your help. She’s only nineteen. You owe it to her to have people looking for her.”
    Juarez hesitated, then said, “I must admit, you are convincing in your zeal.” He raised pen to notepad. “Tell me as much as you can about her and I’ll get her description out.”
    â€œTo the U.S. authorities, too?” I said. “In case these men took her back over the border?”
    He nodded.
    When we were done, I had one last question for him. I said, “The doctor told me that no one here knew my name.”
    Juarez waited for the rest.
    â€œDidn’t you identify me from missing-persons reports?”
    â€œI’m sorry, Miss Cain,” he said, “but no one matching your description was reported missing.”

twelve
    Sometimes one offhand comment can bring a truth about your life home to you. Until Juarez’s statement, I hadn’t realized how isolated I’d let myself get from other people. CJ, Serena, my mother in Truckee—there was no one who wasn’t accustomed to not hearing from me for weeks on end. My disappearance had not registered with anyone in my life.
    Except for this: I’d promised to see Serena on my way back north. I’d never shown up, yet she hadn’t reported me missing. Serena, who was the only person in my life who’d known where I was going. Wasn’t that an odd thing?
    It was she who had asked me to do this in the first place. She’d called me out of the blue, after we hadn’t spoken in nearly a year, wanting me to take a girl I’d never met to central Mexico. Conveniently, none of Nidia’s family, nor Serena nor her sucias, could do the job. Only a white stranger in the Bay Area seemed to be able to do it.
    A stranger to Nidia, that was. I was no stranger to Serena; we were friends, and now I couldn’t help pulling at the threads of that friendship, wondering how much they’d weakened in the time we’d been apart. Enough to allow her to set me up to be killed?
    Some time later, a nurse came in and gave me a pill. I didn’t ask what it was. Maybe it was a sleeper, because sleep came on fast.
    The next day, Juarez returned. I couldn’t tell from his long, sober face what he’d concluded about my story, but he blandly told me that when I was well enough to leave the hospital, I would be taken to the U.S. Consulate and would become their problem.

thirteen
    Seventy-two hours later, I was riding high in the cab of a Peterbilt truck , rolling across the dry, severe Arizona terrain, heading back toward California.
    I was exceedingly grateful for my military service, because having my fingerprints in the system had streamlined the process of proving who I was—and therefore my citizenship—to consular authorities. Of course, they’d wanted