Nightfire! (The Corvette Nightfire Prequel) Read Online Free Page B

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dollars to the metal frame of the roof and then re-install the
liner so that noone would be able to tell that it had ever been
removed. The car, Día realized, was not only a birthday gift for
the leader of the Cartel of Sinaloa, but it would also serve the
purpose of transporting cash to him for drug sales that had taken
place in the United States. El Jefe would have double bragging
rights: for the car and the cash inside it.
    After he stole the Corvette, Día had prepared
Luna that there might come a hasty escape opportunity for them. In
the bed they whispered intimately, as if the baby could understand
what they were discussing if he heard them. Luna surprised Día with
unyielding anxiety about Rogelio:
    Por Dios, Día, if we run, we can't take the
baby! Anything can happen. We could be killed! We will be on the
run forever! We can't take our baby all over Mexico! That is no
life for our son!"
    "We can't stay here forever, either, Luna,"
Día answered. "I'm going to be caught one day by the gringo police,
or the cartel will kill us, or we will be deported and then sought
in Mexico by the cartel. We have to make a new life, with new
identities.
    "I won't risk Rogelio's life in the transport
of this car," Luna said pointedly, talking about the Corvette. "If
I have to go with you, we have to come back!"
    The discussion wore on through the night.
Finally, Día got Luna to agree on a plan that he didn't believe
would ever come to pass: that they would find a hiding place in
Mexico, and when the time was right, they would return for Rogelio.
Luna seemed uneasily to agree to this, but Día believed that she
also didn't think that they would be able to return.
    The next night, Luna shocked Día with news
that she had spoken to the woman of the ranch that she would be
making the trip with him.
    Luna said, "I began to tell her that we would
be back, but she interrupted me. She told me never to worry about
Rogelio, that she loved him as if he were her own grandson, and me
as if I were her daughter! If anything ever happened to us, she
said that she and her husband would raise Rogelio as if he were
their own!"
    The night of the transport of the Corvette to
Mexico, Día and Luna sat tensely in their seats as they approached
the border. With so much cash being under the headliner of the car,
and the car being a special birthday gift for the boss of the
cartel, there were escorts for the young Rarámuri couple: A
heavy-duty pickup truck cruised ahead of them, and a Ford Galaxy
full of young Mexican men drove behind them.
    "There should not be a problem going over the
river to Mexico," Día explained for the umpteenth time to Luna.
"They have made sure the border agents looking at the cars tonight
are the guys on their payroll." But he was nervous.
    Luna sat quietly, staring out the passenger
window.
    "So when it is time for us to get out of the
car, when everyone is making a big commotion about the car for El
Jefe, that is when we do what we always do."
    Luna didn't say anything, so Día added, "We
run. We run into the night. You stay with me. They won't notice us
or care about us at first. They will just be interested in the
car."
    The inspection at the U.S. gate was, indeed,
preemptory. The young man who looked at their papers did not even
look directly in their eyes. Día had seen him on the job before.
The truck was ahead on the bridge over the river. In the rear
mirror, Día saw that the Ford behind them also had passed through
quickly, as if it had been waved through. Día did not expect that
there would be anyone on the Mexican side stopping vehicles in the
"Nothing to Declare" lane. There seldom was. Sometimes a Mexican
Army troop-carrier sat nearby in the darkness with men watching and
pulling an occasional car over to question the driver, but this did
not happen often. Once over the bridge, they would drive through
the sleeping small town on the route to the city of Chihuahua, but
they would turn off shortly to a