Inez pointed south to the river and Mexico beyond.

"You must hide! They are coming!"

Inez stepped to the blanket that was the back door then turned to her.

" Senora, I pray to God for you."

Inez disappeared through the blanket. Pray she might, but there was no god on the border. There was only the devil. El Diablo. And there was no place for an Anglo to hide in the colonias. There was no place for anyone to hide. The river blocked escape to the south, the eighteen-foot-tall border wall to the north. The colonias occupied a no man's land, on the American side of the river but the Mexican side of the wall. The U.S. government had built the wall to keep the Mexicans out, but they had fenced the colonias in. Everyone in the colonias now lived at the mercy of the Mexican drug cartels.

Including her.

They would take her across the river into Nuevo Laredo, just as they had taken so many other Americans, who had never been seen again. But she was not just any American. She turned to Maria and gestured to the back door.

"?Andale, andale! "

Maria lifted the child and carried her out back.

She was alone. She didn't need the stethoscope to know that her heart was racing; she could feel it pounding against her chest wall. She stepped across the dirt floor and peeked out the blanket door. She stared east. In the distance she saw women and children scattering from the dirt road and a cloud of dust kicked up by black trucks speeding toward her.

She did not have much time.

Everyone in the colonias knew of the Anglo nurse. But only the doctor knew who she really was. She had never revealed her true identity to anyone else, and no one here had recognized her. They had not seen her face on the news because there was no television in the colonias. They had not read about her or seen her photo in the newspapers because only the Mexican papers were sold here-the language of the colonias was Spanish. The colonias, like so much of the borderlands north of the river, were just suburbs of Mexico.