Troubled Waters by Carolyn Wheat Page A

go limp, and sauntered toward the Layla .
    As she watched her former lover, former husband, the father of her son amble, then trot toward his beloved boat, Dana knew that as long as white powder made its way north, Rap would make money from it. And as long as she was part of the sanctuary movement, needing Rap and his boat to ferry refugees to safe Canadian water, she would live in dread of the day he was caught and his boat thoroughly searched.
    For today, she could live with it. But she swore to herself that next time she would take the hull apart with her bare hands before she loaded the refugees on board.
    The siren zeroed in on them, homing like a missile seeking its target. Jan speeded up at first, then slowed as she bowed to the inevitable. Next to her, Miguel turned eyes huge with fright on her. “Qué pasa?”
    Jan shook her head. What was happening? The worst, probably.
    In the back seat, Pilar began to moan. “La Migra,” she repeated, over and over, her voice a lament. “La Migra will find us. Madre de Dios.” She rocked back and forth, keening like an Irish widow. Panic turned Pilar from self-assured professor’s wife to peasant. She had never played her role better.
    Manuelito whimpered. Jan’s high dissolved in a cold-sweat bath. The danger rush had congealed into the certainty that this trip wasn’t going to end well, that capture was at hand. She had a sudden, sharp memory of wheeling Manuelito in a shopping cart while they bought him clothes for the journey. He’d pointed and giggled and kicked his little feet into her stomach.
    For one wild moment, she considered speeding up, racing the cops to the water’s edge in a mad hope that the family could get on the boat and make their escape before she was caught.
    Jan pulled to the side of the road. There wasn’t much shoulder; the road edged off into a ravine designed to catch rainwater.
    The car was a blue and white Ohio Highway Patrol vehicle, but Jan wasn’t surprised when the man who strode toward the van, sun glinting off his glasses, was Walt Koeppler of the Border Patrol.
    As if he’d known they’d be on this road. And driving this van.
    The van was the first line of defense this time. It wasn’t the church van, with Our Lady of Guadalupe written on the side in Gothic script; this was Ron Jameson’s specially designed vehicle, with a hydraulic lift for the wheelchair. He sat in the back, strapped in, wearing a bathing suit, an orange towel draped over his whale-white bony shoulders. Playing his part of cripple being taken on an outing by a friend.
    The theory was that the police would be watching for the white, green-lettered church van, not a red van with no lettering on the side. The theory was that not many cars travelled the old dune road to get to the lakefront. The theory was that the stop three days earlier had been a fluke, a coincidence, not to be repeated.
    The theory was full of shit.
    Second line of defense: the forged papers, the indignation bit. Jan watched Walt Koeppler’s determined glare as he approached the van, accompanied by a uniformed Highway Patrol cop. She decided abruptly to jettison the tantrum. He’d already seen Dana do that number. It wasn’t going to work a second time. Just be cool, pass the papers to him, and act as if the whole thing were a giant hassle. Boring, annoying, but hardly threatening.
    Koeppler’s first words were less than reassuring. “You again. I thought I warned you about transporting illegals.”
    â€œWho said they were illegal?” She tried for the flip, bad-girl tone that came so easily when she’d had a few belts. It was a lot harder to pull off sober.
    â€œYou gonna run phony paper on me again?”
    Stay cool. Not easy, with relentless farm-loving sun beating down on the roof of the van. Not easy, when a family’s life hung in the balance, dependent on the nerve of a woman sober seventy-nine