‘It’s the gangs, see? They want our kids to cross the river, make mules out of them, you know? We can cross back and forth, they want our kids, get them over there without their parents to watch out for them, start them smuggling for them. So they start selling a line of bullshit about free this, free that, party all night long at the clubs, they let teenagers in no problem, you know? Well, who can resist that?’
‘You think that’s what happened?’
Emilio shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. But when she went missing, her friends knew that she’d been planning on going over the bridge, going to a nightclub, seeing what it was all about. I don’t know who she went with, and the police don’t give a rat’s ass on either side of the border. But I think she went, yes.’
‘And the gangs got to her?’
Again he shrugged, and a tear came to his eye once more. ‘I . . . You know, a part of me hopes she is working as a mule,’ he said in a choked voice.
I knew what he meant; if his daughter had been taken by the gangs in Nuevo Laredo, there was no telling what work they would be forcing her into. From my limited understanding of the situation south of the border, the city had been beset by gang warfare for years, with rival drug factions responsible for massacre upon violent massacre. And it wasn’t just drugs, either; gun running, prostitution and human trafficking were all fair game to the cartels.
I knew what Emilio must be thinking; if Elena had been turned into a drug mule, she would have been seen in Texas, as the entire purpose would have been to exploit her family connections and her ease of border crossing. And if she’d not been seen, that meant that the gangs were either using her for something else – and the sex trade would be the most likely destination for her – or she was already dead.
This was again something I often had to deal with – situations where there would be no happy ending. Often all a parent needed was confirmation of their child’s death; it would save years of wondering. And in Mexico, the chances were good that she was dead. The cartels didn’t hold much stock in the sanctity of human life and thought nothing about murdering innocent people, even children.
I remembered reading about one cartel assassin who’d given up counting after he’d passed his eight-hundredth victim. A member of Barrio Azteca, he’d dismembered and beheaded men, women and children just to impress his boss; a boss who’d demanded that his squad kill eight people a day just to keep up fear and tension in the area.
For all the public outrage about Islamic State and their beheadings of military personnel and journalists in Iraq and Syria, the terrorist group was a long way behind the Mexican cartels in terms of sheer barbarity. A UN report I’d read estimated that nine thousand civilians had been killed in Iraq in 2014; but the cartels had killed sixteen thousand in 2013 alone, and a further sixty thousand in the previous six years. They’d been responsible for a murder every half an hour for seven years.
And people went missing too, all the time; there was even a name for them, like some sort of national plague – ‘the lost’. Thousands upon thousands of them, and you had to assume that most of them were dead. As an example, a busload of 43 students were kidnapped in 2014 and never seen again, and that was only one single incident. Kidnap and murder were at epidemic levels in Mexico, and I knew that Emilio and Camila would know that too. I admired their courage, their will to see this thing through to the end.
But then again, I considered, there was always the chance that Elena was alive somewhere, and maybe she could be found and brought home. The chance was slim, but it was there.
I nodded my head. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll help you.’
Emilio smiled at me, truly grateful, and he gestured for his wife, who stood and went to a cupboard in the corner of the living room. The gratitude on both their faces pained me, knowing how misplaced it probably was, but I would do my best to put their minds at rest and find out what had become of their girl, at the very least.
Camila returned with an envelope stuffed full of cash, which she handed over to me without a word. I followed suit and received it in silence, putting it in my pants cargo pocket, the deal sealed. I was their man now, and I would do anything it took to find their daughter, dead or alive.
‘Okay,’ I said as Camila sat back down. ‘Let’s get some more detail on what happened. When did she go missing?’
Emilio looked me straight in the eye as he answered. ‘Three years, two months and four days ago,’ he said.
The news made me stop still, rigid as a statue. Three years?
I put down the coffee cup and turned to Elena’s mother. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘perhaps I will have that stronger drink now.’
Three years?
Damn.
I thought this one was going to be a bitch, and now it looked like it was going to be one hell of a lot worse.
Chapter Five
Elena Maria Rosales had been just thirteen when she’d gone missing; she’d be nearing seventeen now, if she was still alive.
Emilio had shown me her room, unchanged since she’d gone; another cliché that was often true. I had a look around, but I knew there wouldn’t be much there. The police had already been through the place with a fine toothed comb and – although it looks good in the movies – a poor dumb freelancer like me rarely finds the hidden clue that solves the mystery. There would be no secret diary here with a list of boyfriends and a play-by-play of Elena’s illicit visits to Mexico. If there had been, the police would have found it, no matter how uninterested they were in the case. And three years later? Not a chance.
And yet I did search, as you never knew – sometimes a clue might just pop up from nowhere, missed by everyone else.
But not this time – the room was clean. What I did pick up was a feel for Elena as a person, from the books on her shelf to the clothes in her drawers, with the scrawled notes on her desk and her wall posters in between.
She’d been a bright girl, that much was clear – maybe not straight A, but a solid B student at the local high school, supported by the report cards her parents showed me. A quiet girl in the seventh grade, her teachers said, just coming out of her shell as she entered the ninth. I wondered, darkly, where that increased sociability had led her.
Photographs showed her to be pretty, but not overly so; just a regular teen, getting used to herself, awkward but at the same time with that confidence of youth pushing on toward adulthood. Perhaps faster than she should have been.
She’d been on a few dates, but she’d had no steady boyfriend when she’d gone missing; at least none that her parents knew of, anyway.
I went back into the living room, not sure that I’d made any progress; what Elena had been like at thirteen was almost certainly not what she’d be like now.
‘Who do you think she went over the bridge with?’ I asked Emilio.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said, although his eyes told me there was a name there somewhere.
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong, just go with your gut instinct. Who?’
‘I don’t know why, but I always figured it was a girl called Noemi, a friend of Elena’s.’
I nodded, making a note of the name. Gut instincts were often right, and for good reason; the human is a survival machine, and the brain is programmed to take in millions of pieces of information and sift through it in instants. We can’t process that much information consciously, and so when our subconscious mind has done the job for us, we think it’s not logical, that we should ignore it. But sometimes it’s the most logical thing of all.
‘Last name?’ I asked.
‘Pineda, I think. I’m not sure.’ He paused, took the glass of water held out to him by his wife, and drank deeply before continuing. ‘I guess I didn’t know her that well, she’d only been friends with her for a few weeks before . . . you know.’ He looked up at me. ‘Hey, maybe that’s why I think of her? Because she was new, you know? Elena becomes friendly with her, then . . .’
I did know. New people, new experiences. Like crossing the border and hitting the Nuevo Laredo nightclubs at the age of thirteen. Emilio’s gut was pretty logical all along.
‘Any idea where Noemi lives?’ I asked next.
‘Well, I think she did live over on San Bernardo Avenue, just four blocks east of here. No idea where she’ll be now.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘I think I have enough to go on for now. I’ll be in touch.’
‘You going to find Noemi?’
‘Yes. And from there, we’ll just have to wait and see.’
Emilio shook my hand and I nodded to Camila in farewell, then I headed out the door.
I wasn’t much of a detective, but this girlfriend was as good a starting place as any. I’d found, over the years, that you just needed to start picking away at one corner, and then sometimes something big would start to unravel.
And, going with Emilio’s gut instinct, I’d decided that the corner I was going to pick away at was Noemi Pineda.
Chapter Six
The heat of the day was really building now, steam rising off the sidewalks as Kane and I trotted on toward San Bernardo Avenue. But when you’ve pulled a twelve hour patrol shift in full body armor in an Iraqi summer, with temperatures rising upwards of a hundred and thirty, everything else feels pretty balmy by comparison. Still, I was glad I’d left my jacket and backpack back at the train station.
I’d called a contact of mine and found that a Pablo Pineda, aged thirty-five, was registered to Iturbide Street, which intersected San Bernardo Avenue. A quick look at Pablo’s details confirmed that it was the address I was looking for; the intel showed that he was a widower with two children – a son named Juan, aged nineteen, and a daughter named Noemi, aged sixteen. I presumed Noemi still lived with her father; as a minor, she wouldn’t be on the electoral register, but she could still be there. And either way, I hoped Pablo could tell me where she was.
Iturbide Street was similar in style and substance to Salinas, but with the commercial buildings and apartments giving way slightly to regular two-story single-family homes in chain-link fenced lots.
I wasn’t really clear on what I was going to do if Pablo was at home; the perfect thing would be if everyone else was out except Noemi, and she couldn’t wait to tell me everything about what happened three years, two months and four days ago. But I knew life didn’t often work out that way, and so prepared myself for the worst.
It seemed that all the homes along Iturbide had dogs protecting them, attacking the fences as we strode past. There was an eclectic mix, but pit bulls seemed to be a definite favorite. Kane had reacted to the first one or two, but now ignored them just the same as I did.
We were getting near now, and already I could hear a ferocious barking from behind the fence of Pablo Pineda’s property. A few more feet, and there he was – another pit bull, maybe a brother of half the dogs on Iturbide; only this one was even meaner.
Kane reacted instantly, turning to the threat, but settled down to follow my lead as I remained calm and placid. ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘It’s okay.’
I knew it was important not to let the dog get even more ramped up by appearing aggressive, or even submissive; that would only make things worse. He was only defending his territory, after all. What I was after was assertive confidence, something Kane could achieve without even trying.
I could see how the pit bull was already reacting to Kane’s presence, its fierce raking of the chain-link dampening slightly. But we still had to get in there, and – although I knew not to transmit my fears – I had to admit that it was hard to ignore the images of getting ripped to shreds that were running unbidden through my mind. I took a few seconds, centered myself by breathing slowly, steadily – in through the nose for a four-count, hold the breath for another four; out through mouth for a four-count, hold for another four; and repeat until calm. It took me too full cycles and my nerves were steady.
Against a human, I wouldn’t have had to even slow down – on the surface, I didn’t look afraid at all; but I knew a dog can sense things we can’t, can smell fear through the hormones we release when excited or nervous, can tell from our body language exactly what our state of mind is. They’re the world’s best lie detectors.
Kane looked at me as if wondering what I was waiting for, and then I approached the gate, backing in so as not to make the pit bull feel its territory was being threatened by an aggressor. If I came in strong, the dog might attack. And so I backed in, holding the gate open for Kane.
Kane edged his way over slowly, and I wasn’t surprised to see that the pit bull didn’t attack; he merely held his ground and growled, barked, barked, then growled again. But he didn’t advance, which I knew was a good sign; a truly dangerous dog would have just attacked. This one was just trying to establish some ground rules, see who was who in the pecking order. He stopped barking, but stayed alert as Kane came nearer; and ultimately, he allowed Kane to sniff him, then sniffed Kane back, both dogs trying to figure the other out.
But in the end, the pit bull gave into Kane’s aura of assertiveness and submitted; he calmed down and even ignored me as I approached the house.
It never ceased to amaze me, people who had watch dogs. What typically happened was that the dogs barked at anything and everything, and so after a few days – or in some cases, a few hours – the owners stopped coming to see what the barking was about, rendering them all but useless except as a deterrent. But, on reflection, sometimes that was enough, I supposed.
Not this time, however; I’d not been deterred, and now I was on Pablo Pineda’s front porch, knocking hard on the screen door as Kane played with the pit bull in the yard.
I retrieved the collapsible baton from my cargo pocket, holding it close against my thigh, tucked out of the way. When extended it measured a satisfying twenty-one inches, yet collapsed down to just nine inches of rubberized handle, making it eminently concealable against the rear of my forearm. There were larger models on the market, all the way up to thirty-two inches or more; but they were harder to conceal, and a bit of overkill. With good technique, there wasn’t much this little baby couldn’t do.
I could hear music coming from inside now the pit bull’s barking had subsided, and knew there was a chance that someone was in at least.
And then I heard shouts coming from inside, someone making their way to the door; and from the deep bass and aggressive tone, I guessed it wasn’t Noemi.
Moments later the door was wrenched open by a big Latino, a can of beer in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. He was taller than me, and muscular, although some of it had turned to fat – presumably due to the beer. He was wearing only a pair of utility pants, his bare chest and arms covered in tattoos. A quick check showed that none were gang related but – combined with his physique and the look of barely concealed rage on his lined and scarred face – the overall image was pretty fearsome.
Luckily though, I’d long since learned that appearances weren’t everything. For all his ferocious bearing, he was out of shape and already half-drunk. A great role-model for his daughter.
His anger, however, seemed more directed toward his dog than me. ‘Hey!’ he called out, looking over my shoulder. ‘Puto perro!’ he spat. ‘What the fuck you doin’, you lousy fuckin’ dog?’
He took a swig of beer and turned disgustedly away from the pit bull to look at me. ‘So who the fuck are you?’
Before I could answer, there was a burst of Spanish from inside the house – another man, similar in age and tone to the man in front of me – and then the man at the door turned and yelled back. My Spanish wasn’t great, but I think it went along the lines of shut up, it’s nobody, mind your own fucking business. Nice.
‘So mano,’ he said, addressing me again but this time gesturing toward me with the baseball bat. ‘Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck do you want?’
I could see out of the corner of my eye that Kane was checking us out, just in case he had to a
ct; which was more than could be said for the pit bull, which was rolling around the yard on its back, blissfully unaware of the danger his owner might be in.
‘I’m a reporter,’ I said, ‘following up a story from a few years back.’
He looked at me and laughed. ‘You don’ look like no reporter I ever fuckin’ seen.’
I supposed he was right, too – with work pants and a t-shirt, I might have been the scruffiest reporter ever. But it was one of the safer occupations to open with – he’d be unlikely to hit me with the bat, just in case.
He gestured with the bat toward me, then the gate. ‘But whoever you are, I got nothing to say to you. Now get the fuck off my property homes, before I fuck you up.’
Well, I thought to myself, this wasn’t going well; Plan B might be just around the corner. But in fairness, Plan B was where my real talents lay anyway.
‘It’s not really you I need to speak to actually,’ I said, undeterred. ‘It’s your daughter, Noemi. Is she in?’
The anger flashed in his eyes again. ‘What the fuck you want her for, homes?’ He stepped forward off the porch, closing the distance. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ He looked behind him. ‘Hey mano,’ he shouted to his friend inside, ‘salir aquí!’
Get out here, he’d said, and I knew the interview was almost at an end; he’d attack when his friend arrived.
I nodded my head in acquiescence, let him think I was submitting and leaving; and then I unleashed my left hand, the metal baton extending from its collapsed position as it arced through the air.
With the whip-like action of my arm, the baton achieved full extension just as it reached Pablo’s head. The impact was like an explosion and the man’s eyes went dull instantly, out cold before his big body hit the floor.
In the next instant I was leaping over the unconscious Pablo, checking who was coming along the hallway in the house beyond.
This man was shorter than Pablo but stockier, more muscular, with a thick beard and a sweat-stained bandana.
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR MAN: Introducing Colt Ryder - One Man, One Mission, No Rules Page 3
