The Terror of Tijuana

by S. J. Varengo

  Knowing Cole would be back any minute, he quickly navigated to an app of which he wasn’t usually a big fan. “Find My Friends,” in his mind, was for three groups of people: kids who literally used it to keep tabs on their friends, overprotective parents who felt they needed to know where their children were every second, and people who thought their significant other was cheating on them. None of this applied to this situation, but he set her phone to share its location with him and then put it back.

  Immediately, he felt guilty. It was his own insecurities to which he was pandering now. Damn you, Dan. Either trust her or don’t. But as the thought rattled around in his increasingly wine-muddled brain, he realized that while she didn’t need to be looked in upon, he needed to be able to do it. For another full minute, he toyed with turning the app off again. Finally, he reached the sort of compromise one makes with oneself after a bottle and two-thirds of the house’s best Pinot. I’ll leave it turned on … but I won’t look.

  An instant after making that decision, he saw Nicole making her way back. When she was about halfway, her phone buzzed on the table. He could see from the popup on the lock screen it was a text from J.J. wishing her a good trip and telling them that she and Tony were going to Taco Bell for their dinner. No big deal. Then his eyes widened as he realized he was able to read the screen at all. He’d left the phone face up. Cole always left it down when they were out, as a sign of commitment to sharing special time with her husband but keeping an ear out just in case. She was too close for him to flip it over without her noticing, so at the last minute, he grabbed it.

  As Cole sat, he said, “Text from Jayj. The kids are going to the Bell.”

  She laughed. “I swear Tony would eat that crap at every meal.”

  “Yeah! Heh-heh,” Dan said, immediately wanting to punch himself for delivering the worst fake laugh ever. He handed her the phone, and she glanced at the text then set it on the table. Face down.

  “So, about your question…”

  “I asked a question?” Dan said, partly because he was trying to back-pedal out of sounding so lame, and partly because the wine was making the memory of the unanswered question hazy.

  “Yeah, ‘Where does that leave you?’ Remember?”

  “Oh, that. Yeah.”

  “It leaves me almost with nothing. Maybe a couple of feet from square one?”

  Dan stopped chewing, never taking his eyes from Nicole as that statement sank in. Then he resumed. “That’s never where you like to be,” he said.

  “Nope.” She slid her chair a little closer and leaned so that her lips were next to his ear. “In bed next to you. That’s where I like to be.” Clearly the wine was working on Cole as well.

  Dan smiled. “Next to me?”

  Nicole returned the smile, adding a level of sexiness that made Dan very unhappy Nicole would be flying out of DIA in a couple of hours.

  “Next to you, under you, on top of you…”

  “Coley. You’re killing me.”

  “Ha! You know I’m good at that.”

  Her obvious double entendre caused Dan to miss a beat. But only one. “There’s enough time for us to…”

  But Nicole was already trying to catch the waitress’s attention. “Check, Lana? Please?”

  “Do you want to go back home?” Dan asked as he pulled a credit card from his wallet.

  “Waste of time.”

  “Okay. Maybe we can get a room…”

  Nicole was standing as the waitress took the card and ran it. “Waste of money. Come on,” she said. Moving toward the door, they walked by the register. Lana handed Dan his card as they moved briskly to the exit. Dan thought she might have flashed a discreet but knowing smile as he quickly signed the credit slip and raced to follow Nicole, who had already walked outside.

  When they got into the Mercedes, Nicole said, “Drive to the airport. Park as far from anything that you can, then turn off the car and put your seat all the way back.”

  Dan smiled and put the car in drive, squealing the tires a little as he left the Western’s parking lot.

  “Ooo,” Nicole said at the sound. “You’re the dangerous sort, aren’t you? A bad boy? Gets me hot.”

  “We’re practically orphans,” Tony Porter said to his sister as she drove them to the Taco Bell on Colorado Avenue, a few blocks from their home.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” J.J. asked as she slowed for a stop light that was cycling from yellow to red.

  “Dad retired a little while after Mom went back to work, but now he’s always running around with her. They’re never home.”

  “Okay. First off, we’re the ones who are never home. And the few weeks we are, they generally make a point of being home too.”

  “They’re not home now, are they? They left us to fend for ourselves, like a couple of puppies at weaning time.”

  J.J. turned to look at her brother as they sat at the red light. “Tone. Do you know that for your whole life you’ve never said much that makes sense, but you may have just uttered your masterpiece? ‘Puppies at weaning time?’ What time is weaning time anyway?”

  “Right now. It’s right damn now. It’s our summer break and Mom’s off to … to where? She didn’t even tell me.”

  “Me either. Just said one of the branches had some issues and she needed to check it firsthand.”

  Tony was silent for a moment. The light turned green. “What do you say when people ask you what your parents do? I always say, ‘Dad drinks Coors and swears at the Rockies on TV, and my mom runs a company that swabs up blood and guts.’”

  “I usually say, ‘My dad is a retired millionaire software baron, and my mother cries into her hanky all day because she didn’t stop after her first kid.’”

  “Screw you, Jayj. I’ll have a number twelve, steak, soft, Dr. Pepper. Get me a double-decker supreme too. And a chipotle chicken griller. TWO. Two grillers.”

  Again J.J. looked at her brother in disbelief. “We’ve eaten before this, you know. You’re ordering like you just got rescued from a well after a couple of days of yelling up to Lassie to go get help.”

  Tony smiled in spite of himself. “You’ve been saving that one, haven’t you?”

  “For all you know. Or maybe I thought it up on the fly.”

  J.J. reached the speaker kiosk and opened her mouth to begin reciting her order when Tony shouted over her, “Number twelve, steak, soft, Dr. Pepper. Get me a double-decker supreme too. And two chipotle chicken grillers.”

  J.J. punched him and said, “Is twelve the menu item you want or your age, Anthony? Jesus.”

  “So that’s two number twelves?” came the young man’s voice from the speaker. Tony began to laugh hysterically.

  “No, just the one.” J.J. gave her portion of the order, uninterrupted this time, and pulled around to the window. Most Taco Bell workers in the world probably wouldn’t recognize the American Express Centurion card she handed him as anything special, even though it was considered one of the most exclusive charge plates in the world. But the young man who took it raised his eyebrows.

  “Wow. A Centurion,” he said. Then just as quickly, he realized the gaffe he’d committed, as calling out the brand of a customer’s card was, he assumed, a breach of protocol. He ran the card and handed it back. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Here you go.” He handed her the receipt and her card and then looked at her for far too long as he did. She grinned.

  Reading his name badge, J.J. said, “Thanks … Cark?”

  The window-server blushed a little. He said, “You’re welcome, Jennifer. And yeah. Cark. Nice, huh? When I got hired, my idiot manager asked me how to spell my name and I told her ‘Marc – with a c’ Five minutes later, I was Cark.”

  The fact that he remembered her name from the card caused J.J. to examine him a little more closely as the window slid shut while their food was prepared. He was tall, a little on the lean side, but with a handsome, kind face. In general, she avoided Denver boys. She wanted a man who woul
d worship her, not John Elway. But after three years at Notre Dame, she found that college boys were no better. Most, in fact, were markedly worse. Maybe a working-class guy was just what the doctor ordered. She decided to give him a little test as the window slid open and her offered her the bag.

  “So, how ‘bout those Broncos, huh?”

  He chuckled and said, “I’m probably the furthest thing from a football fan in the world, but even I know it’s baseball season.”

  Test passed, she thought to herself as she took the back. “You have a good night, Cark.”

  “You too, Jennifer.” He bent down a bit in order to see Tony and added, “You too, Number twelve.” Just before J.J. pulled out of the drive-through lane, Cark reached out and gave the jeep a tap on the roof.

  As he pulled out of the drive through lane, J.J. was laughing, Tony was frowning, and the bag was filling the car with the wonderful smell of Mexican-inspired food.

  “What a douche,” Tony said.

  “Aw, I thought he was sweet.”

  “You think anyone who makes fun of me is sweet.”

  “They generally are. Sweet people hate you for some reason.”

  “Why the hell would they like you?” Tony asked, reaching into the bag and extracting one of his grillers. “You’re about as cuddly as a paid assassin.”

  J.J. quickly turned her head away from her brother so that he didn’t see the sudden and involuntary change in her facial expression. She knew that Tony had picked the term because he was trying to come up with as cold-blooded a phrase as he could, and couldn’t possibly have known that, technically, that was exactly what she was. Nicole had insisted that she receive the payment for the cleaning job in South Carolina. Although she’d killed in self-defense, she had done it with the steeliness of a seasoned professional. In fact, after cleaning the mark, she secured a second man to a tree, knowing it was someone her mother had been longing to end for a very long time.

  Tony knew none of this, but his randomly chosen attempt at a burn had caught her off-guard. After regaining her composure, she made a dismissive sound and said, “Part-time assassin at best.”

  Tony laughed. “Oh. Yeah. You’re right. I stand corrected. If you only do it part-time, you’re still considered cuddly.”

  J.J. turned up the radio and, as she had hoped, the decision allowed them to ride home without further conversation as Tony tried, mouth full of chicken and chipotle-ranch dressing, to rap along with Jay-Z. By the time they pulled into the flower-bordered driveway, he appeared to have forgotten the whole assassin thing.

  “So do you think we can finally storm the high-rise?” she asked as they entered the house, moving immediately to the family room with its PS4 still paused on the seventy-inch wall-mounted screen.

  “Sure. All I was lacking was some of this unconverted stomach distress,” Tony said, indicating the bag of food.

  “Alright then, let’s finish this level before it becomes actual stomach distress.”

  6

  The Olmec Battery

  As Dan was pulling out of the airport after Nicole’s departure (and some of the most mind-blowing car sex he’d ever experienced), he touched the info screen on the Mercedes’ dash and picked the name “Neal” from his contacts. A moment later, he heard, “Battery World, if we don’t stock it, it’s juice you don’t need.”

  “Eww. No,” Dan said.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s horrible, Neal. Listen, you need to leave the slogan writing up to me.”

  “You got lucky one time with one commercial…” said Neal Dyson, the owner of a chain of battery stores in Colorado.

  “You said yourself it drew the most customers of any spot you’ve ever run. Hell, you paid me for it.”

  “Twenty American dollars, Dan. I’m a man of my word.”

  “Anyway, I’m not calling about commercials. Do you want to play eighteen tomorrow? Cole’s out of town on business.” Dan left it at that, as his friend didn’t know Cole’s line of work.

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Business also.”

  Dan laughed. “What kind?”

  “The Indiana Jones kind.”

  “Neal, what are you talking about?”

  “Where are you?”

  “I just… dropped Cole off at DIA.” He hesitated in the middle of the sentence as he thought about what had happened immediately prior to the aforementioned drop-off.

  “I have a well-loved bottle of Pappy that, with your help, won’t survive the night. Come on over.”

  “You home?”

  “No, Dan. I’m at the shop. Where everyone in the world keeps their ten-thousand-dollar bottles of bourbon.”

  “Home, then,” Dan said, smiling at his friend’s good-natured jibe. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Dan had met Neal just prior to leaving for South Carolina in the spring, and since returning, they’d become fast friends. Both were fans of word play, both were terrible golfers, and both loved good whiskey. It was a bromance made in heaven, although Nicole had jokingly suggested an origin much further south.

  “Watching you two is like babysitting your neighbors’ twin toddlers,” she commented one time as she walked into the kitchen to find the men laughing hysterically about something neither could remember when pressed.

  During their initial meeting, Dan had bartered for a laptop battery with a slogan for one of Neal’s commercials (which were consistently kitschy). Neal liked the idea, actually used it, and made a ton of money as a result. The first time they saw each other after the commercial began running, Neal handed Dan a twenty, saying, “I told you your idea was worth more than just the computer battery.”

  It was about a forty-five-minute drive from the airport to Neal’s house in Aurora. Dan used his GPS (only to find the fastest route – he took an inordinate amount of pride in his ability to navigate around Denver and its surroundings), then told the car’s AI to play the album Scheherazade and Other Stories by the 70’s alternative band Renaissance, which lasted almost exactly the same amount of time as the drive would take. As he cruised along listening to the soaring vocals of lead singer Annie Haslam (who had been one of his major crushes as a teen along with Linda Ronstadt and both Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart), he tried to lose himself in the music. But as rich and multi-layered as it was, and as good as it sounded in the speakers of the GT-C Coupe, his mind found its way of its own accord to his yet-unresolved feelings about Cleanup Crew, about Nicole’s roles in the organization, and about their daughter’s cool-hand in dealing out death. Much like her mother had when she was seventeen. The thought evoked an involuntary shudder. It was this that bothered him the most.

  J.J., who had only recently learned the origin of her name (Jennifer was Cole’s mother, June was the name Nicole had been given at birth), had been, if possible, even more calm than Nicole when they’d found her in front of a burning fishing cabin. The image of her standing there was one he had desperately tried to unsee, but of course, such things were not possible. He would never forget it, or all the things it implied.

  He still didn’t like letting Nicole go on cleaning missions alone. Despite the fact that he had only learned the truth about CUC last December, he now felt like he was not being a good husband if he let her go without him. Knowing now that her many business trips since “returning to work” after Tony left for college were really missions still made his mind whirl. Especially after experiencing two of them firsthand. Cole had nearly died in Romania, J.J. in South Carolina. For him to have let his wife (and now his daughter) walk into that kind of danger for so many years, (she hadn’t stopped taking missions until after she’d become pregnant with J.J.) … well, it didn’t sit well with him. He was neither a violent man nor the sort who went looking for trouble. But he was the sort that would defend his family with honey-badger level fearlessness and ferocity, even if it took him days to stop shaking once the adrenaline wore off.

  It was that fact a
nd the guilt he’d mentioned to Nicole that convinced him the cleaner’s life was not for him. He was sure that he would accompany Cole again in the future, but he was equally sure that he’d never look forward to it. And it was still so soon after the trauma of Carolina that he felt he needed a break.

  J.J. and he had talked only once about the horror in Greenville, and the conversation had mostly consisted of Dan apologizing to his daughter for letting her fall into danger, and her deciding that the best course for them was probably to pretend it had never happened.

  “Yeah,” Dan said aloud in the unpassengered car. “Like that’s even remotely possible. I’m not that good of a pretender.”

  The final notes of the album’s last song (aptly entitled “Finale”) faded in the car’s speakers about twenty seconds after Dan pulled into Neal’s drive. He’d gotten to know Neal well enough to know that his host was already aware that he’d arrived. The house had a top-of-the-line security system, and a tone would have sounded within as soon as the front of his car broke the invisible beam that ran between the two decorative stone columns marking the entrance to the driveway.

  Neal, who would by now be looking at Dan on his monitor, had gotten to know him well enough to realize that the reason he was taking so long to get out of the car was that he was listening to a song. Dan didn’t like to shut music off until it ended the way the artist intended.

  But the song did end, and Dan did exit the car. Neal, however, did not wait for him to ring the bell. He threw the door open just as Dan’s finger was moving toward the button.

  “Come on, get in here. No time for formalities. Your Pappy said to hurry.”