Whirlwind. Rick Mofina

had no cash.

      He’d told no one, but when Mason got out he intended to pull a few quick freelance deals to secure the cash for his investment. It was risky, but it was the best he could do.

      Whenever Remy visited Mason at the prison he’d tell her he needed $25,000 to start his carpentry business. Then they could live their dream in Oregon. That’s when she stunned him.

      “I can get the cash for us,” she said.

      A couple of months after that, she beamed from the other side of the glass, telling him that she was pregnant, how she’d answered an ad online to be a surrogate. When she delivered and signed off she’d get $60,000.

      Mason couldn’t believe his ears.

      But there Remy was, smiling, saying it was all legal, all handled by international adoption lawyers through a global network. They took care of everything. They’d flown her to one of their clinics overseas for the procedure. Remy would be due around the time of Mason’s release. She said giving up the baby was not a big deal for her. As a teen she’d had a baby and given it up to some couple. This time it was all planned, and again she’d help a childless couple.

      “And I’ll be helping us get closer to our dream, too. It’s all meant to be, babe,” Remy told him.

      This was a long way from the fifty dollars in gate money and the bus ticket the prison gave Mason when he got out. It left him thinking how now he wouldn’t have to pull off any risky deals. When Remy delivered the baby, he’d take $25,000 and dump her.

      Hard.

      Let her learn a valuable life lesson.

      He had other plans that did not include carpentry, kids or any white picket fences in freaking Oregon.

      When Mason was released from Hightower, Remy had things nicely set up. She already had a clean apartment for them in Lufkin where Mason started his first carpentry job, through a prison reentry program with a faith-based outreach group, the Fellowship of the Good Thief Society. They’d already helped him get the low-interest loan on his truck, which he needed for work, and they were very protective of an ex-con’s privacy.

      As part of the surrogate deal, Remy’s agency would pay all her medical costs and ensure regular home visits by nurses, and provide a small living allowance. But, if the mother backed out of the deal, or lost the baby, all coverage would cease and the mother could be responsible for repaying the agency fifty percent of what they’d paid out to cover medical costs so far.

      “They told me they deal with repayment by the mothers on a case-by-case basis,” Remy said.

      Remy and Mason kept the surrogacy secret and kept to themselves. Everything went well until the night he woke to Remy’s screams as she held herself in agony.

      “Something’s wrong, Mason! Take me to a hospital!”

      His first thought was to alert Remy’s agency nurse.

      “No! They can’t know! If I lose it, we lose everything! We’ve got to do this without them knowing at all! Hurry, call the people you work for. I saw in your file papers, the church fellowship that supported you, they’re connected to a medical network. There’s a twenty-four-hour emergency number.”

      Mason’s people were helpful and discreet. They’d immediately arranged for an ambulance to rush Remy and Mason to the Beau Soleil West Medical Center, a faith-based nonprofit hospital in Shreveport, a little over one hundred miles away.

      That’s where she lost the baby.

      The church group quietly covered all the costs and arranged to bring them back to Lufkin, protecting Remy and Mason’s privacy while they mourned their loss. Few people knew what had happened.

      Remy said they had to leave before the agency nurse came for her next visit. Once the agency found out what had happened, Remy would not only lose out on all that cash, but the agency would demand she repay them half of the thousands they’d spent on her.

      “We have to get away, Mason, so I can decide what to do.”

      He told his employer and parole officer what had happened and that they needed time away, for a “spiritual retreat,” to begin to heal.

      They pulled together all the cash they had and hit the road. They both tried to find a solution in between Remy’s postpartum bouts of psychosis.

      That’s how Mason got here.

      The speaker atop the menu board crackled.

      “May I take your order?”

      He ordered, and as he moved on down the line he wondered if his situation could get any worse. While idling, he reached under his seat and felt his Smith & Wesson .40-caliber pistol and the magazine, taking comfort in the fact it was there if he needed it. Then he licked the residue off of the small square of foil as he always did in a bid to prolong his comedown. There was no shortage of challenges.

      He glanced at the letters on the console, one reminding him of his monthly meeting with his parole officer, another from the Parole Division saying he’d been randomly selected for drug and alcohol testing. He had twenty-four hours to report to a District Parole Office to submit a urinalysis. Failure to appear would result in a case conference, which was not a good thing.

      Mason stopped at the first window and paid for the food.

      While waiting to pick up his order, he saw a new message on his phone. The number was blocked.

      Heard you are out and got access to 25k—about what you owe. DOA’s comin for your ass.

      13

      Dallas, Texas

      Stiff from five hours of hard sleep, Kate woke with adrenaline pumping through her. She sat up and switched on the TV news.

      Still live with wall-to-wall coverage of the storm.

      While watching, she checked her phone for new messages. Nothing. Again, she came to her photo of Jenna Cooper searching for her baby. Could I help her find him? Again, Kate felt like she had been punched in the gut. It had only been a few hours since Dorothea Pick dismissed her desire to follow Jenna’s tragic story.

      Why is she sidelining me and not the others? I need this job as much as they do. I can’t sit here until three in the afternoon to work in the bureau when one of the biggest stories in the world is happening all around me.

      Kate showered, dressed and bit into a stale bagel for breakfast as she went online and searched the long list of emergency shelters across the Metroplex. After making notes on those located near the flea market, she went to her car, determined to deliver a solid story today.

      I’ll prove that I’m as good as the others.

      Early-morning traffic was manageable. Thankfully she was familiar with her destination. First, she went to the flea market, where she’d learned that security had been tightened. For safety reasons, access was now limited to officials and media with valid accreditation.

      After Kate showed her Newslead ID, she headed across the debris-covered grounds to the Saddle Up Center, concerned that she was not going to find Jenna and Cassie Cooper here.

      Amid the barks of dog teams, search-and-rescue efforts were still continuing before the operation evolved into debris removal, Fire Captain J. B. Langston told her.

      “We’ve been going all night and we haven’t recovered a baby so far. We’ve extracted more injured survivors and fatalities. Several children and more adult victims, but no baby,” Langston said. “You know that people were swept up into the winds. I heard our guys found one of the center’s vendors in a tree, seven miles from here.”

      “Yeah, that was terrible. I read that in an Associated Press story,” Kate said. “Captain, do you have any idea where shelter survivors and their families were taken?”

      “Try Rivergreen Community Hall. There are a