by Ian Bull
“Are those good guys or bad guys?” a voice asks, making me jump. It’s Pauline in her Rosie the Riveter getup, snapping gum like she’s in high school.
“Not sure,” I say.
My anxiety increases a notch, so I pop a Klonopin. They could be working for the Zetas, who Boss Man already paid off to watch over us, and they’re just standing guard. They may even be the caterers ready to make us dinner, and they’re waiting for word from Sydney and Kat to drive up and start cooking. They could be from Hermosillo, with the explosives and the weapons promised by Boss Man. Or they could be working for the rival Sinoloa cartel and want in on the action. This is why I need my other department heads here. If Tina, Sydney, or Kat are texting the people in those trucks, I need to know.
“Want me to shoot out their windows?” Pauline asks. “I keep a Taurus in the cockpit.”
“Stop joking.”
“I’m serious. I shot a charging grizzly bear on the North Slope last spring. I plan to pack it when I’m walking alone through the scrub brush after I bail out.”
Pauline and I hear the jet overhead and see the dust from the Explorers at the same time.
“There’s Tina and the rest of the crew,” I say, pointing to the cars on the road.
“That’s a Gulfstream IV overhead. Sweet,” Pauline says, pointing at the sky.
I shiver. Boss Man flies a Gulfstream IV. The red and white coloring confirms it’s him. He’s supposed to be in La Paz, letting me handle this. The simultaneous arrival of Boss Man, the four Toyota trucks, and Tina’s caravan can’t be a coincidence.
“That jet is banking. She’s going to land,” Pauline says.
I’m hoping Boss Man just wants to check things. It’s late Friday afternoon, and we have fourteen hours before showtime, so he can fly back to La Paz in plenty of time. He’ll check the plane and place the parachutes, the water, the food, and the money himself. Or maybe he wants to go over the transmission. No problem. He paid for it, it’s his show.
The jet lands and taxis to the end of the runway, fifty yards from the DC-9. I walk toward it. The Ford Explorers reach the airstrip, but one peels away. Only the lead car drives up next to the Gulfstream. The staircase comes down from the jet just as Tina slams the door to the Ford Explorer and walks over to meet me. The other crew members stay in the car, with Peter in the front seat and Boss Man’s goons and the new guy, Vic, in back.
I smile at Tina and then shrug at the plane, silently asking her if she knows why he’s here. She smiles and shrugs like she doesn’t know either.
Boss Man exits his jet. He’s wearing a blue cashmere jacket and Maui Jim sunglasses, like he stepped right out of GQ. I’ll be dressing like him soon enough. I offer my hand, but he doesn’t shake. Instead, he gestures for Tina and me to follow him. We stop ten yards away so it’s just Boss Man, Tina, and me, the top three producers.
“We didn’t expect a last-minute inspection, but we’re ready,” I say, then point south of the airstrip toward the Toyota trucks. “They also just showed up, which has me concerned.”
Boss Man stares at me, his jaw moving fast on his chewing gum. He’s more tense than when I saw him on his yacht in Hong Kong Harbor a week ago.
“I’m here to settle the last American contestant I asked you to cast,” Boss Man says.
“You mean Brady Yourell?” I ask. “He’s going to be great.”
Boss Man, facing away from the Explorer, raises his hand. His goons exit the backseat, and haul out Vic Lowry, the turtle-faced new guy. His wrists are zip-tied together. The goons hold him off the ground by each armpit, his toes dragging, and stop behind Boss Man.
“Do you recognize him?” Boss Man asks me, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.
Vic spits out a mass of bloody phlegm and almost hits Boss Man in the back, but Boss Man doesn’t turn around. The guy with the black hair punches Vic in the side, and as he winces, I can see a bloody gap in his mouth. Vic is missing a front tooth. Fuck. Something huge is happening on my show, and I’m the last to know. My body starts to tremble from the ground up—calves, thighs, stomach, arms—and I must tense all my muscles to keep still.
“No, I don’t recognize him.”
Tina pulls out an American flag bandana, walks up behind Vic, and ties it around his forehead and shaved skull, hiding his modifications. He now looks like an all-American biker.
“This is Steven Quintana,” Tina says.
The man lifts his head and his eyes bore into mine. Now I recognize him, the bastard. My heart pounds a crazy rock rhythm in my chest that a fistful of Klonopin wouldn’t stop. Boss Man raises his hand again. On cue, the goons drag Quintana back to the Explorer and toss him in.
“When did you know?” I ask Tina.
“I saw him on the plane coming back from Hong Kong. I told Boss Man, who said to let him find us, if he can. When Peter told us about his new guy, ‘Vic Lowry,’ I suspected it was Quintana and told Peter to hire him. Douglas said it was better to find out what he knows than to scrub the show.”
“Douglas? Who’s Douglas?” I ask. Then I realize by the smile on his face that Douglas is Boss Man’s first name. She knows it, and I’m just finding out? She has been cheating on me. For how long? Did she screw him on his yacht off Maui? And how screwed am I?
Boss Man stares into space. “Tina then presented a plan that not only saved our show, but solved our biggest problem.”
He just said “our show,” which is a good sign. I breathe.
“Our biggest problem?” I ask.
“Quintana is the sixth contestant. He’s the American I’ve been looking for.”
It takes me a moment. “You’re putting Quintana on the plane?”
Boss Man smiles and nods at Tina like he couldn’t be more pleased. “Her idea is genius. We’ve floated him as a possible sixth contestant, and the pregame odds both for and against him are going crazy. He’s the missing ingredient we needed.”
“We tell his entire backstory in the intro package,” Tina says. “I pulled footage from the Internet already. It’s done.”
She’s right—he’s perfect. He’s the gung-ho Boy Scout who messed up Boss Man’s last production. He’s the US imperialist Army veteran who killed foreign babies. The betting will go into the stratosphere. It’s the perfect producing move, and she thought of it, not me.
“So the trip to Idaho was a sham?” I ask Tina.
“Kwong paid Dirk Kaler to send me that video. I edited it in a hotel room in Scottsdale,” Tina says. “I didn’t want to stress you with too many details.”
While we made love on the blanket above Malibu and in the hotel in Tucson, she was planning this. If I don’t do something, Tina will hijack my production. “What if he wins?” I ask.
“He won’t,” Boss Man says.
“What about the FBI? LAPD? Julia Travers?” I ask. “They must be looking for him.”
Boss Man raises his finger, then points it at me like it is a gun, and pulls the trigger. “Pow! That’s the only real question, Robert. How close are they? Do we pull the plug on years of work and a chance at a quarter billion dollars? Or do we stay another fourteen hours and hope they don’t find us? And if we do pull the plug, does that make it safer for me? For you? They’ll still pursue their investigation, regardless of what we do. Maybe we should go for the brass ring while we still can. So how do we assess that risk, Robert?”
He crosses his arms and stares at me, waiting for my answer. The wind kicks up, and I zip my jacket to the top to hide my shivering. I rack my brain for something to say. The blood-orange sun seems frozen above the horizon. The Toyotas in the distance stay still. Kwong stands frozen by the jet stairs. I hear no noise from the DC-9 or from the people inside the car.
“I don’t know,” I admit. I haven’t said that in years.
“She has an answer,” Boss Man says, pointing at Tina.
Tina takes her cue. “They don’t know enough to stop us in time.”
“How do you know?” I ask.
She stares at me with cold eyes I’ve never seen on her before, like the tiger shark that ripped me open in Maui. My arm tingles again, as if she might bite me.
“What three names?” I feel my armpits gush with fear sweat.
“He found Peter. He scoured the Western United States and found out Peter wasn’t as qualified as you thought, that he needed a GoPro and CCTV transmission expert, and got himself hired. Now the FBI is looking for him.” She nods at Peter in the Explorer. Peter stares at me through the windshield from the front passenger seat, full of hate.
Boss Man snaps his gum. “Peter and his tribe will disappear into Northern Mexico and live off the grid. When enough time has passed, I’ll help him get a new identity. He’s had a few already.” He says it like he’s picking up a lunch tab. “Who else?”
“He knows Ming is one of the prisoners. We haven’t figured out that connection yet, but he has ties to Hong Kong somehow.”
“And?” I ask. “Who’s the last person?”
Tina’s shark eyes open wide. “You. He knew your name.”
My fuckup hits me like a lightning bolt. “Velodrome…the day I quit,” I whisper.
Now I see real hate fill Tina’s face. In the Japanese restaurant in Koreatown, after our last day at Velodrome, she said she’d kill me if anyone ever found out about her. And if they know about me….
She steps forward, her fist in a claw, ready to scratch me. I step back. Sweat drenches my jacket, and my heart pounds like a drum machine. I’d kill for a snort of OxyContin right now.
“Whoa, but we can fix this,” Boss Man says as he steps between us. “Everyone must stay hidden for a long time. Tina must disappear with her son, too, which will be hard for them. That’s why I’m increasing everyone’s pay twenty percent, to make it worth the risk we all now face.”
“You are?” I ask. Is my twelve million turning into fourteen million?
“Oh, Robert—you’re not getting a bonus, though. The budget stays the same. I’m using your salary to pay for the bump.”
“My salary?”
“Because we’re changing the name of the game. It’s now called Seven Passengers, Five Parachutes.”
Tina and Boss Man stare at me, until I get it.
I run.
My college cross-country legs come back to me, helped with a dose of adrenalin. I run off the tarmac and into the grass. I must get to the trees in the distance, where I can hide. But the trees are five hundred yards away, and my lungs are bursting. The Toyotas roar up behind me, their headlights crisscrossing in front of me. The passengers inside yelp and sing, like Mexican cowboys chasing down a steer—I’m that steer. Two Toyotas pin me between them. The left one swerves into me and knocks me to the ground.
Chapter 47
* * *
Steven Quintana
Day 15: Saturday Morning
Outside Cananae, Mexico
“Stop with the filming,” I say.
“You don’t have a choice, Honu,” Peter Heyman says, pushing the camera up into my face. When I look away he slaps me, but I can’t slap him back because my wrists and ankles are zip-tied to the metal folding chair I’m sitting on.
“What is this for?” I ask.
“It’s for your Up Close and Personal. Just like the Olympics,” he says. “Except in this game, you’re gonna die.”
I’m wearing a red, white, and blue bandana that Ms. Curly Hair tied around my skull, which makes my head throb even worse, and they also punched out my left eyetooth, which shoots pain into my skull with every heartbeat. It’s the same tooth Julia kicked out two years ago. We were in the parking lot of the Egyptian Theater. She was just a terrified movie star, and I was the asshole paparazzo stalking her.
She was right again. I blew it. They’re going to stick me on that plane in a few hours, and I’m going to have to fight Ming and some other dangerous guys. And they’re selling me as the ugly American.
“Look to the left, then slowly look into the camera, like you want to kill me.”
I give him his hero shot, just to get him to go away.
“Done,” Peter says and walks out with the camera.
“Can I have food and water now?”
He opens a plastic water bottle and squirts water in my open mouth. “I’ll tell them that you’ve been a good boy. Someone will feed you.”
He walks out. I’m alone in this trailer, which has white walls and a pushpin board covered with maps. Pens and pencils are scattered on the floor. I need to lie down. I need to pee. I need painkillers. I need to eat. But none of it matters, because I’m going to die.
Unless Julia finds me. Maybe the AmEx card will work. Maybe they’ll find the message I wrote on the bathroom wall before someone erases it. The odds are slim.
The guy with the short black hair from the jet never turned around. He’s the guy in charge. He was the money guy behind Constantinou’s snuff film in the Bahamas that I ruined. He gathered all the investors, I know it. They were probably best friends, laughing on yachts and jets, making their plans to turn millions into billions. But he denied me even seeing his face.
I won’t see him again. I won’t see the woman producer again. I’ll never know their names, or how they did this. I’ll die not knowing, as the goddamned star of their show.
Mr. Black Hair and Mr. Brown Hair come in, wearing the same black outfits they wore at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
“What’s with you guys? Johnny Cash fans?” I ask.
Mr. Black Hair tears a Rice Krispy treat from its package and stuffs it into my face. The sweet snack hits the exposed nerve of my tooth and I recoil in pain, but he keeps shoving the treat into my mouth. I chew fast to keep from choking, and I taste my own blood mixed with sweet marshmallow.
“Want another, smartass?” Mr. Black Hair asks me.
“That’s a German accent. Northern. I bet you’re from Dusseldorf. What’s your name?”
Instead of answering, he opens another Rice Krispy treat and shoves it even harder into my mouth. I chew fast to keep from choking.
“Want another, smartass?” he asks again.
“No thanks. But I need to pee again, please.”
“Wet yourself. We don’t care.”
“That might not be good for the show, you never know.”
They confer in whispers. Mr. Black Hair cuts the zip ties behind my back, and reties my wrists together in front of me. He ties a belt behind me before cutting the ties locking my ankles to the metal folding chair.
Mr. Brown Hair pulls on the belt from behind and hauls me to my feet. It feels good to stand and move my limbs—I spent the night sleeping upright in the metal folding chair, and my hamstrings and calf muscles are cramped.
They push me outside the trailer door and down the two metal stairs to the ground. They drag and pull me to the back of the trailer so I’m staring at a sea of yellow scrub grass stretching forever. It must be about six in the morning.
“Piss,” Mr. Black Hair commands, and I do. The idea of running flashes through my mind, but they’d chase me down, just like they did to Snow yesterday.
Eight people swarm under the DC-9, dashing up and down the stairs and in and out of the trailers, carrying boxes and tools.
“How long before it starts?” I ask, finishing my business.
“You’ll know when it happens,” Mr. Black Hair says.
Someone sits in an office chair under the nose of the plane. It’s Snow. His wrists are zip-tied to the armrests and his ankles are tied to the wheels, just like I was. He’s weeping.
“What’s up with him?” I ask.
“He begged to see the final stages of his dream project being put together. The bosses agreed,” Mr. Black says. “But he’s gonna die on that plane, just like you.”
“Can I be tied to an office chair like him, then?”
They don’t answer me, and instead haul me back inside the trailer.
As they tie me against the metal chair again, I feel a glimmer of hope. Snow may be my only ally on that plane, if I can get him to stop crying.
Chapter 48
* * *
Julia Travers
Day 15: Saturday Morning
Cananae, Mexico
The white Pemex gas station on the outskirts of Cananae looks crisp and new. This town feels like a place where nothing happens, except Steven was here.
A cleaning woman in a white Pemex uniform with a nametag that says “Olga” stands by the bathroom door, and she keeps crossing herself and whispering words like “loco” and “diablo.” We all crowd around her, including the gas station manager.
“She found Satanic markings on the bathroom door, in blood,” Mendoza says.
Olga motions for us to follow. Anthony, Officer Mendoza, Agent Taylor, Major Glenn Ward, Carl, Agent Gorney, Officer De La Mora of the Mexican Federal Police (who met us as we crossed into Nogales), Jorge (the manager of the Pemex), and I all squeeze into the tiny, dirty, white-tiled bathroom. Olga shuts the door and turns on the light. Hundreds of red markings—dashes, letters, and curlicues—fill the door, top to bottom. Olga crosses herself and whispers a prayer to protect herself. They do look like the markings of a madman. But they’re not in blood—it’s all done in lipstick.
Anthony laughs and nods his head. “Brilliant.”
“What?” I ask.
“It’s shorthand. My mother was a secretary and forced us to learn it. She said we’d always have a job. Steven has a photographic memory, so he got it right away.”
