by Layton Green
“Por que quieres tratar con esto basura?” Checo said, and Grey had to concentrate to understand his dialect. Why would you want to deal with that garbage?
Grey was wearing jeans and a forest-green T-shirt, Fred khaki shorts and a short-sleeved white linen shirt. Fred eased the corner of an envelope out of his shirt pocket, still speaking in Spanish. “Does it matter why?”
Checo glanced at the envelope and then met Fred’s eyes. “Yes. It matters.”
Fred grinned. “Okay, I hear you. We’re on the same side, my friend. Opposite the narcos.”
Checo’s upper lip curled when he smiled, showing too much teeth, reinforcing the imagery of a rat. “In that case, let’s do some business.”
“We’re looking for someone called Tata Menga,” Fred said.
The smile disappeared. “Are you crazy? Why would you want to look for someone like that?”
“I thought you said let’s do some business?” Fred said. “Do you know where he is or not?”
“No.”
“No you have no idea, or no you won’t tell me?”
“Somewhere in the jungle. That’s all I know.”
Fred rolled his eyes. “Yeah, we know that.”
Grey decided it was time to be more direct. “Look. There’s got to be some rumors about a man like him. Just get us close. I know a palero needs bones, where does he get his? Who does his dirty work?”
Checo looked surprised that Grey spoke such good Spanish, but at the mention of the word bones, Checo lowered his eyes.
“You need some time?” Fred asked. “A day?”
Checo eyed the pocket with the envelope and fidgeted his hands. “I don’t know anything about that. Truly. All I know is that Tata Menga comes from Puerto Huelva, a village on the road to Cancun. This pueblo, it’s bad.”
“Bad?”
“There’s lots of Palo there. Maybe Tata Menga lives in the jungle nearby. I don’t know.”
The door opened, and Grey’s eyes lasered to it. The sleepy-eyed man and his friend with the knife walked back inside. Grey cursed himself for his lapse of concentration.
Grey watched the smaller man with the knife ease a cell phone back into his pocket. Their eyes flicked to Grey’s table.
Grey whipped the envelope of cash out of Fred’s pocket and thrust it at Checo. “We’re leaving,” he said to Fred, who hadn’t seen the two men. “Now.”
“What’s up?”
Grey jumped to his feet and started for the door. The two thugs moved to block his path, arms folded. Grey had no idea how long it would be before whoever they had called would arrive, or how many men in the room were sympathetic to the cause, but he wasn’t about to find out.
“Move,” Grey said in Spanish as he approached, without slowing down.
The larger man unfolded his arms, the smaller man slid his hand over the hilt of his knife. Neither looked as if they expected Grey to actually keep walking. Out of the corner of his eye, Grey noticed Fred a step behind him.
Grey attacked without warning. Since the knife posed the most threat, he went for the smaller man first, snapping a front kick to the groin. When the man groaned and lowered, Grey closed like a pouncing lion and threw a hard elbow to the temple, knocking his opponent unconscious before he could pull the knife.
The larger man swung at him from the side. Grey crouched as he leaned back and brush-blocked the punch away, then quick as a mamba, he uncurled his body and went straight up the middle with his strike, jabbing the man in the throat with the web between thumb and forefinger. When the man gagged and reached for his throat, Grey stepped back and threw a side kick, sending him crashing through the door. Grey stomped on his face on his way out of the bar.
Shouting broke out behind them, some of it directed at Grey and Fred, though Grey heard Checo yelling in anger. Grey pulled Fred into a sprint.
They reached the car and Grey jumped into the driver’s seat. Breathless, Fred tossed him the keys. “What was that about?”
Grey pulled onto the road just as two pickup trucks full of men crossed the highway, passing them on the way to the bar. The men looked tense and most had a hand on a machete.
“Oh, shit,” Fred said. “That’s what. How’d you know?”
“Saw a couple of guys behind you on a cell phone.”
Grey waited before he floored it, increasing the distance as much as he could before startling the men in the truck. Once he heard the screech of tires and rough shouting behind him, he jammed the accelerator.
A shotgun blast echoed behind them.
“They won’t hit us with that,” Fred said.
The two trucks were a few hundred feet behind them, most of the men standing in the truck beds. Grey gripped the wheel and covered a mile before he answered. “They’re not gaining any ground, but we’re going in the wrong direction, and they’re gonna jump on their phones and call for help.”
“How’s gas?” Fred asked.
“Quarter tank. This won’t last that long.”
More gunshots sounded behind them, this time the staccato punch of a handgun. Grey grimaced. “They’ll get lucky eventually.”
Up ahead they saw lights, and Fred swore.
“What?” Grey asked.
“Police roadblock. Our fate’s about to be sealed one way or the other.”
“What are the chances the cops are dirty?”
“I’d say fifty-fifty. Good news is, they’re the best odds in Mexico.”
They hit a line of speed bumps as they approached the roadblock, which consisted of a guard shack in the median and a few shadowy figures in black combat gear on the side of the road, waving cars over.
When Grey’s eyes returned to the rearview, he saw no sign of their pursuers. Fred turned and watched the road. “They killed their lights and crossed the median. Now they’re heading back. Still doesn’t put us in the clear, though. This riot gear means anti-narco police, but down here you never know.”
Grey slowed even further as the first cop approached their car, hoisting a flashlight and a machine gun. “Not much we can do about it now,” Grey said.
The cop glanced at Grey and Fred, then waved them over and ordered Grey to step outside. Grey eased out of the vehicle, hands open and in front of him, not saying a word. The cop approached from behind, a hulking Mexican even taller than Grey.
He stuck the barrel of his gun in Grey’s back and shoved him over, so that Grey had his hands on the roof of the car, feet spread. Grey could smell the garlic on his breath. Grey’s pulse increased, and he resisted the urge to back-heel the cop in the groin, spin and grab the gun, and smack him with it. There was nothing Grey hated worse than an abuser of power.
Nothing, that was, except getting shot in the face by the abuser’s friends.
The cop patted him down slowly, then did the same with Fred. Grey kept quiet, wondering if the cop was working with the men in the truck. Buying time for someone else to hunt them down when they left the guard station.
After checking the trunk and the inside of the car, then eying their passports, the cop waved them through without a word, turning to the next car in line before Grey had the car started.
“How routine was that?” Grey asked, as they pulled away.
“Not very. My guess is we have about five minutes before more visitors arrive.”
“What’s the closest town? Playa del Carmen?”
“Yep, five minutes away.”
Grey sped up, his eyes alternating from the rearview mirror to the tiny dirt roads feeding onto the highway.
“Here’s the first Carmen exit,” Fred said.
Up ahead, Grey saw a paved exit ramp leading to a darkened collection of buildings. Grey pursed his lips and kept driving. There might be someone waiting just off the highway. Playa del Carmen was a sizeable town, and he wanted to get lost in a crowd. “Let’s wait for a little more civilization.”
They passed a dirt road leading to a lightless factory. A few moments later, headlights popped onto the road behind them, cl
osing fast. Grey swore and jammed the accelerator of the tiny import.
Fred pointed. “Next exit! Lots of lights.”
Just after crossing an overpass, Grey veered off the highway onto the next exit. The other vehicle, a dark SUV, was a few hundred feet back. Grey made a quick right, taking a narrow road into a poorly lit neighborhood.
“What the hell?” Fred said.
“I saw something, if we can get to it.”
With the SUV two blocks behind them, Grey delved deeper into the barrio, hands stitched to the steering wheel. The occasional streetlight revealed corridors of concrete block homes with iron bars guarding doors and windows. Low wires crisscrossed above the street, and graffiti defaced the storefronts.
Grey ran over a dead rat and sped through a stop sign, dodging potholes the size of bathtubs and the occasional group of street thugs. Every time they rounded a corner, the SUV fell out of sight, only to reappear by the end of the block.
Just as Grey started to worry he was lost in the barrio, they reached the other side of the neighborhood and Grey found what he had seen from the highway: an expansive dirt lot full of cars and set just off the road, in front of a warehouse. A line of local teenagers waited near the front of the building, and a sign at the top read CLUB LOCO.
The road kept going past the club, hitting a busier intersection up ahead. There was no sign of the SUV. Grey whipped the car into the lot, went a few rows deep, then parked in a tight space between two pickups.
Grey opened the door, got out and eased it shut, then dropped to the ground. Fred followed suit. Crouched in a squat, Grey moved a few rows over before he started trying car doors. Headlights swung into the lot behind him, and he heard a car coming to a stop and the sound of footsteps running through the lot.
Grey kept looking for an open door. The footsteps drew closer, a few rows away. “Over here,” Fred whispered. Grey scurried to the door Fred had cracked, a dented beige Renault Alliance, one of the low and boxy older models. Both men scrambled inside.
Grey hunched down on the driver’s side, Fred lay across the back seat. Flashlight beams swung back and forth across the lot. With any luck, the narcos wouldn’t spot their rental car fast enough and would assume they had driven farther into town.
As he waited, Grey’s hands went to work, relieved beyond words the car was an older model and susceptible to hotwiring. He felt under the steering wheel and ripped the access cover off, found the two red wires, stripped off an inch of insulation, and twisted the exposed ends together.
After he stripped the brown ignition wire, a beam of light swept across the windshield. Grey tensed and then stilled, his hands poised to connect the wires. The light bobbed all around them, and Grey couldn’t tell if the wielder of the flashlight was moving forward to get a closer look, or checking the other cars. His palms started to sweat, and he had stopped breathing.
Finally the light retreated. Grey heard the roar of engines, followed by a prolonged silence.
Two minutes later, Grey slid up in the seat and risked a glance around, seeing nothing. “Time to go,” he said.
“They might be waiting for us to start up and pull away,” Fred said.
“That’s a chance we have to take. I’d rather take the initiative than risk getting trapped here.
“I don’t disagree.”
Grey reached down and connected the wires. The engine came to life with a rough purr. There was still no sign of the SUV, and Grey eased out of the parking lot with his lights off. He didn’t realize how quiet they had been until they reached the highway and Fred let out a slow breath. “I guess I was wrong about some of the people in that club.”
“It happens,” Grey said.
Fred pulled out his cell and tried Carson’s number. There was no answer and he left a message to warn him about the heat.
Grey mashed his lips together and kept checking the rearview. Fred stared at him. “You’re thinking about that cemetery in Puerto Huelva, aren’t you?”
Grey kept his eyes on the road, nerve endings still buzzing. “There’s no reason they’d look for us there. If Checo has any sense at all, he’ll go underground, and we’ll have a small window. Tomorrow might be too late.”
Fred let out a breath and ran a hand through his receding hairline, then left it palming the top of his head as he checked the rearview. “Puerto Huelva’s on the way to the airport. We give it a look, then take the first flight out. I don’t care where it goes.”
For as long as Lana could remember, the best ceviche in Miami had come from an old man selling fresh seafood out of the back of his truck near Thirty-Seventh Avenue Southwest and Ponce de Leon. She had just come from there, and was now sitting on her balcony, spooning lime-marinated shrimp and red snapper out of a Styrofoam cup.
She washed it down with mango juice and thought about the case as the breeze ruffled the tops of the trees lining Brickell. Their investigation must be troubling the General, or he wouldn’t have sent the blue lady after Grey. Colonel Ganso’s words drifted back to her. Find his pressure point, and maybe he will come to you.
She assumed the General, like any über-criminal, was a supremely selfish man. They knew too little about him to have a clue as to who might be his pressure point.
But they might have a what.
It had to be Palo Mayombe. Something about their investigation, about Dominic Grey’s involvement and the potential for exposure, had spurred the General to send his favored assassin twice in one month.
She set down her spoon. Were Grey and Fred onto something important in Mexico?
The thought gave her hope. She would renew her search into the General’s background, this time concentrating on a cult angle among missing CIA agents.
Head spinning with possibilities, she finished the ceviche and started pacing the living room. If only she could bring this man home and stick him in Guantanamo Bay. Imagine the intel they might gather. The CIA could even replace him with someone else, someone under their thumb. Someone who wouldn’t sell the border to the jihadists, and who understood the CIA offered better employee benefits and life insurance.
There was something else she could do from her end. Something to further their cause and distract the General’s attention while Grey and Fred searched. An image of the golden orb weaver in the Colonel’s garden sprang to mind.
Yes, it was time to exert pressure on that which their adversary feared.
It was time to cast light on his carefully hidden world.
It was time to set a trap.
Viktor retired to his room the night after the incident with the mental patient. As the sun set over the peaks, an icy forge of dying light, Viktor stood with arms crossed in front of the window, his emotions stirred by the view and by the events of the day.
He felt as if he had just had a near-death experience. Something, an intuition gained from decades of investigations, told him that the man in white had wanted to kill him. And that, had Viktor not turned when he did, the attempt would have been successful.
Why the man had stopped, Viktor wasn’t sure. Had this automaton been given very specific orders, which Viktor’s movement at the last moment had disrupted?
Or maybe Viktor was wrong, and the man had only been sent to spook him, to deliver a warning.
Warning: received.
But from whom had it come?
There was something else. Contrary to his initial impression, Viktor now had the nagging suspicion that he had seen this mental patient before. It wasn’t anyone important in his life, no one he had personally apprehended. It might have been someone ancillary to an investigation, or something else altogether. But Viktor was sure he had laid eyes on that man.
The guard had said the patient’s name was Glen, and that he was housed in the criminal wing. In the morning, Viktor would pull some strings. He doubted an Interpol request would be enough to force the Swiss to reveal the patient’s identity, especially without knowledge of an impending crime, but his description might be eno
ugh for a behind the scenes identification. The man was a criminal and should be in the system.
Could the patient be involved in Palo Mayombe? Perhaps. It didn’t seem to fit, however. Palo wasn’t known for mind control. Palo was known for consultation of the dead and the unleashing of Kalunga, the spirits of the dead, to do the bidding of a palero.
Still, it was possible. It was always possible.
The sun sank behind the mountains. With darkness came a heaviness Viktor had not felt in weeks, the oppressive weight of memory. His thoughts turned to his investigation into Adolfo Constanzo’s cult at Matamoros. To the abominations he had seen.
Why, he whispered to himself? Why are some men attracted to darkness and violence like the proverbial moths to a flame, batting their mottled wings faster and faster and faster until creating a vacuum that sucks everything around them inside?
The thumb of Viktor’s left hand quivered, the vibrations spreading throughout his body until he was tingling with desire. He could almost taste the soft burn of the wormwood sliding into his throat, easing his troubled soul and taking his mind elsewhere. He had seen a liquor store on the way in, at the bottom of the mountain.
This place had no hold on him. He was there voluntarily. He could walk out of this room, procure a ride down the mountain, purchase what he needed, and be in a better place.
A place apart from himself, far above the mud-filled gully that was the bottom of the human soul. Somewhere lucid and dreamy, drifting above the fray, the sludge from below mere speckles of brown on his Italian leather shoes.
He put his hands on the windowsill and bowed his head. Grey had once spoken of the demons within, of how he fought against them. Viktor had thought he understood, but he was wrong. He hadn’t known what it meant to feel those demons living inside you, growing and feeding, inserting their claws into your psyche, urging you onward.
The trembling increased, the need for escape, until Viktor could hardly bear it. He moved for the phone, ready to call for a car.
One hand on the receiver, he slammed his other palm on the table as he remembered the rest of what Grey had said. How he had to face those demons head on, daily, to even stand a chance. How if he tried to forget them or placate them or seek escape through other means, then they would cackle and sink those claws deeper.
