by Layton Green
Viktor shuddered, a long and visceral contraction of his will. He had broken into a cold sweat. Mouth tight, he pushed away from the phone and grabbed his coat. Fight he would, but not trapped within those four silent walls. He was not yet strong enough to face an empty room and a head full of memories. He would request a guard and walk into the night, into the cold, until numb to desire.
After grabbing his knife, he looked in the mirror on the way out, at the heavy brow and the strength of will reflected deep inside his eyes, struggling to re-emerge.
He had seen that man before. He would see him again.
An hour after leaving the roadblock, Grey exited the highway at Puerto Huelva. Signs and a well-maintained road led to the right, towards the beach.
“Go left, into the pueblo,” Fred said.
The road to the left took them to a collection of tin-roofed homes on cinderblocks. Pools of stagnant water spotted the road where the roots of scruffy jacarandas and ficus trees had cracked the pavement.
It wasn’t so much the scenery that was different from other impoverished Latin American villages Grey had visited, because it had the same half-finished concrete houses, disease-ridden dogs, and impromptu trash heaps. What caused Grey’s knuckles to tighten on the steering wheel were the wary stares of the villagers, the lack of crosses and other Christian iconography on the doors and windows, and the sense of menace that filled the air, festering in the waterlogged potholes and the decaying coconuts littering the ground.
“What a cesspool,” Fred said. “God, the Spanish really did a number on Latin America.”
Here and there Grey saw pairs of teenage boys in grimy tank tops, staring at them as they passed. “Any idea where we’re going?”
“Make your way to the back of the village,” Fred said. “That’s usually where the cemeteries are.”
A few streets into the pueblo, the broken pavement turned to dirt, and the concrete block dwellings were replaced by wooden and tar paper shacks, some of them built into the low-hanging canopies of the trees. Grey lowered the window and got a whiff of diesel fumes and swamp water.
On the last road of the village, at the edge of the jungle, they spotted a footpath leading into the brush. A wooden sign next to the path read CEMENTERIO.
Grey drove two streets over to where he had seen an empty lot shielded by a pile of rubble. He hid the car as best he could, stalled the engine, then looked at Fred. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Grey gazed upward at the bloated circle whose light shone dull and gray against the cinderblocks. “Seems like a good night to gather bones in a cemetery.”
Fred swiveled his head to take in the silent village. “Is there ever a good night for such a thing?”
Grey felt sure no one had seen them park the car, and they crept unnoticed down the footpath to the cemetery. Beer bottles, soda cans, and empty bags of chips pockmarked the sides of the path. After a hundred feet the path emerged into a sizeable cemetery that was in better shape than the village.
Though the grass was high, and stray vines snaked down from the trees, neat rows of miniature funereal houses comprised the cemetery, cinderblocks painted in bright pastel hues and topped with peaked barrel-tile roofs. Some of the crypts had flat roofs with dollhouses on top, which Grey assumed signified the resting place of a child.
Then he looked closer, and grew uneasy. Some of the tops of the tombs were off kilter, as if they had been opened and not fully closed. Outside of the center, hundreds of smaller graves merged with the encroaching edge of the jungle, and mounds of dirt and discarded headstones riddled these peripheral graves.
Grey grimaced. “I think we’re in the right place.”
“Yeah,” Fred said, eyes wide as he surveyed the desecration. “Yeah.”
Their footsteps crunched into gravel-strewn ground. White crosses topped some of the crypts like Catholic weathervanes, but Grey saw evidence of another religion: candles and half-empty bottles of rum placed on tombstones, chalked markings on the sides of sarcophagi, cowrie shells and beads and animal skulls left on a blanket under a tree.
By the light of the moon, Grey pulled Fred into the jungle, near an overgrown portion of the cemetery far enough from the center to be invisible but close enough to observe any action.
The wait was not a fun one. Mosquitoes gnawed at Grey’s exposed forearms, and every now and then something multi-legged and unseen would skitter through his hair. He kept expecting a snake to slither down his back.
An hour after they arrived, just before midnight, someone emerged from the path. Grey hunkered lower as a thin Mexican woman strode into the cemetery, dressed in ragged jeans, a loose T-shirt, and a head scarf. She was carrying a canvas bag and wearing a rucksack. Fluid and sure, she did not look in the least bit uncomfortable strolling alone into a graveyard in the middle of the night.
Hands clenched, Grey watched the woman retrieve a crowbar from behind one of the crypts. Then she made her way to the center, stopping in front of one of the miniature houses. He didn’t see a cross on the tomb. Looking around, he noticed that most of the graves with crosses had been left undisturbed.
She gouged the door with the crowbar and pried it open, then disappeared inside. When she emerged half an hour later, the canvas bag was full, and he could see the knobby white ends of bones poking out of the top.
The woman replaced the crowbar, then lugged the bag of bones to the overgrown section of the cemetery. Grey tensed, thinking she was coming their way, but she stopped a few feet from the jungle, setting down the canvas bag and rucksack. In the moonlight, he saw an attractive face with sunken cheekbones, her body long and narrow as a reed, like a fashion model fallen on hard times.
Brown toes curling out of her sandals, the woman bent over a grave and set the rucksack beside it. After taking out three glass jars, she set a lit candle on a teacup beside the grave, then started singing in a low voice. The language sounded West African, with a few Spanish words thrown in. As she sang, she took a handful of what looked like wooden quarters out of the backpack, shook them in her hands, and tossed them on the grave. After peering at the tokens, she took a spade out of the rucksack and started filling the three jars with dirt.
When she finished singing, she placed the glass jars in the canvas bag, shouldered the rucksack in a workmanlike manner, and left the cemetery.
Grey and Fred exchanged a look as they stepped out from behind the trees. “Well,” Fred said, “that was creepy.”
Grey started walking through the cemetery, averting his eyes from the contents of the newly desecrated tomb. “We should go before we lose her. She could be the key.”
Fred caught up to him, one hand gripping a broken beer bottle he had picked up on the way in. “You used to this sort of thing?”
“I wouldn’t say it’s outside the job description.”
Checo sat with his back against the rear wall of the bar, one hand wrapped around a bottle of tequila, the other clutching a gun. No one, of course, had stuck around after the gringos left. The only noise was the cacophony of insects outside.
It wasn’t a matter of if someone would come to avenge the two Alianza informants he had just killed. It was a matter of when. He had always known he would lose this battle, and he didn’t care. Some things in life were worth dying for. Stringing his brothers and nephew from a bridge was one of them.
The owner of the bar was friendly to the cause and let him stay the night. Checo couldn’t go home and risk the safety of his neighbors. The Alianza had been known to burn an entire pueblo to make their point.
The two gringos were probably dead. Carson was dead, or, if he was smart, on the first plane back to his own country.
Checo had no such luxury. He had no second home in the mountains, no car, no escape plan, no savings. Checo was born into a pueblo so poor that a flush toilet was a myth and a third-grade education was the equivalent of a PhD. The far, far easier thing to do had been to heed the siren call of the narco life.
These days the children sang narcocorridos glorifying the life of the drug dealer, they played games simulating elaborate kidnapping schemes.
Checo had been to prison; he was no saint. But some things were a different kind of wrong.
After swigging the last of the tequila, he reached for another bottle. The hijos de putas narcos had ruined his family, his life, his country. The drunker Checo got, the angrier he grew, until he was pacing the bar, waving the gun and hoping someone would burst through the door. He would take out as many of them as he could, he promised, then spit in the face of the new conquistadores and laugh as they tortured him.
Checo heard the sound of a vehicle pulling off the highway and coming to a stop outside the bar. Nerves fortified by alcohol, he gripped the rosary in his pocket, cackling as he set down the bottle of tequila and aimed the gun at the door.
The door cracked, and Checo started firing. It swung all the way open, but no one appeared in the entrance.
Checo fired twice more, then shouted, “Come in, pig!”
A pellet rolled through the door and came to a stop near Checo, pouring smoke. He tried to keep his gaze focused on the door, but his eyes stung and he was forced to bury his face in his sleeve.
When he looked up, eyes still burning, there was a blur of movement near the entrance. Checo fired twice more into the haze of smoke, and then someone ripped the gun out of his grasp and struck him in the head. Checo tried to fight back, but his assailant struck him a few more times, handcuffed his hands behind his back, and shackled his feet.
The man took Checo outside and shoved him against the rear wall of the bar. When the stars in his vision cleared, Checo saw a well-built young man with soft skin, a thick brow that almost met in the middle, and a handsome but lifeless face.
He knew this man, and despite his self-proclamations of bravado, Checo paled at the knowledge. The sicario standing before him was Lucho, one of the most feared men in the Yucatan.
Lucho sat on his haunches two feet away, facing him. The sicario’s eyes were red from the smoke, and the intensity of his gaze exacerbated the redness, making it appear as if a ghoul from hell had arrived to extract vengeance.
Checo whispered words of courage to himself as Lucho interlaced his fingers in front of him, elbows resting on his knees. His Spanish was as smooth and menacing as the glide of a cobra. “What did you tell the gringos?”
Checo spat in his face.
His eyes never leaving his captive, Lucho reached up and wiped the spittle off his cheek. “Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, pig.”
“Then you know of my reputation.”
Checo didn’t answer.
“What you may not know is that one of the gringos you spoke to killed my sister. So, this man took my life, too. But one way or another, tonight, you’re going to tell me what I want to know.”
Checo thrust his face forward. “The Alianza took my family. Now you know how it feels. I hope you like it.”
Lucho had a large black gun in his right hand. Expressionless, he set it down and took out a knife. He also lifted two vials from his pockets, and set them on the ground.
Still in a squat, Lucho placed the knife lengthwise across his lap and leveled his gaze at Checo, each word quietly spoken, but ringing with the power of truth. “First I will take your eyes, your nose, your lips, your ears. I will leave your tongue, so you can tell me what I wish to know. If you still refuse to speak, I will cut off your limbs and flay you alive and roll your skinless torso into the jungle. If you believe that any of this is an exaggeration, then you do not know me.”
Checo passed out when Lucho took the first eye, but Lucho woke him with a dose in the other eye from a vial filled with Tabasco-laced soda water. After Checo finished screaming and Lucho put the tip of the knife on his other eyeball, Checo told him everything.
Even this they take from me, he thought. Even this.
Grey and Fred emerged from the cemetery path just as a yellow Jeep Wrangler revved to life. They waited at the edge of the brush until the jeep disappeared.
“There’s only one road out of the village,” Fred said as they raced to their Renault.
Grey leaned over to hotwire the car again. “Let’s hope she takes that bag to Tata Menga tonight. Sticking around another day is too risky.”
“This is too risky.” Fred reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic black circle the size of a dime. “I brought a little something from home, if we can get close enough.”
“Tracking device? Good thinking.”
The village was asleep, but Grey cut his lights until he reached the highway. There was no sign of the jeep, and he worried he had waited too long. Then he saw a flash of yellow in the distance.
“She’s on the road to the beach,” Fred said.
Grey eased out of the village and crossed the highway. “Good thing she’s a careful driver,” he said as the Renault slowly gained speed, despite the accelerator pressed to the floor. “We don’t exactly have a getaway car.”
After crossing the highway, the two-lane road cut through the jungle for five minutes before emerging into the outskirts of Puerto Huelva. They eased into the town square of the little fishing community, a few blocks of shuttered restaurants and tourist shops backed by the sticklike tops of sailboats jutting out of the harbor.
Fred pointed. “There she is.”
The jeep turned left on the last street before the waterfront. Grey waited a few seconds and did the same. The gravedigger rolled through a few more streets, into a tony neighborhood of stone-walled houses and landscaped lawns. When she parked, Grey turned left and stopped two blocks away.
He turned towards Fred. “Shall I do the honors?”
Fred handed him the tracking device. “Be my guest.”
Grey took the black dot and stepped out of the car, leaving the engine running. He slipped around the corner, staying to the shadows and hunching as he walked. He spotted the jeep a block away and increased his pace, on constant alert for movement. For all he knew, the woman had gone to an Alianza safe house and Grey’s photo was plastered on the wall.
As he closed on the jeep, he peeled off the back of the tracking device and held it between thumb and forefinger. The house the jeep had parked in front of was the largest on the block, a two-story Mediterranean villa with an iron fence enclosing the property. The windows were shuttered.
Grey brushed right past the jeep, not stopping as he affixed the tracking device to the inside of the left rear wheel well. He glimpsed the canvas bag of bones in the back seat, bulging at unnatural angles.
Just as he finished placing the tracker, the door to the villa opened, and the woman from the cemetery stepped outside, along with an older man in a suit and a trimmed white beard.
Out of the corner of his eye, Grey saw the woman and the man stop talking and watch him. Hands in his pockets, heart slapping against his chest, Grey kept walking until he reached the end of the block. He turned left, away from the beach, and as soon as he was out of sight, he broke into a sprint, turning left three times until he reached the Renault.
Fred had moved to the driver’s seat. Grey jumped in the passenger side. “Go!”
Fred pulled away from the curb. “Where?”
“Doesn’t matter. Away. The device is on.”
“Someone see you?”
“Yeah, but not planting the device. I’ve no idea if they know who I am.”
They sped out of Puerto Huelva, waiting at a gas station down the road until the jeep left town. Eying the vehicle’s progress on Fred’s handheld tracking device, staying well behind their quarry, they followed her to three more stops: one in the ritzy downtown section of Playa del Carmen, one in a much poorer neighborhood in the same area, and one just off the highway on the road to Tulum, disappearing into a gated community for half an hour.
After that, the jeep traveled down a bumpy paved road that cut straight into the jungle, perpendicular to the ocean. Staying at least a mile behind,
Grey and Fred followed the jeep for forty-five minutes, tunneling into the darkness, the jungle a towering shadow on either side.
Finally the tracking device indicated a right turn, onto a dirt road that they followed for another fifteen minutes, slowing to a crawl as they bounced over potholes and rocks. Grey worried the Renault would hit a bump they couldn’t handle and leave them stranded.
When the beeping stopped, Fred stopped with it, waiting to see if the tracker picked up again. Ten minutes later, when their quarry still hadn’t moved, Fred coasted a bit farther, until they were half a mile from the signal.
He pulled as far off the road as he could, killed the engine, and put his hands on the steering wheel. “How far do we take this? We don’t even have a piece.”
Grey rubbed at his stubble with both hands. “If there’s anything to find, I have the feeling this is our shot. But who knows, maybe that lady lives out here. Or her boyfriend does.”
“You didn’t answer my question. And you and I both know who lives out here.”
Grey put a fist to his mouth and eyed the sliver of dirt road snaking into the unknown. He knew it was risky, but he felt in his gut they were in the right place, and he didn’t want to go home empty-handed. Not to Nya, not to himself. “Just a look, and that’s it. You want to wait in the car? Be ready to roll when I come back?”
Fred bared his teeth and reached for the door handle. “Hell, no.”
Lana set the trap swiftly. First, on internal DEA channels, she circulated that the murdered accountant, Ernesto Reinas, had orchestrated a little surprise for the Alianza. That through his attorney, in the event of an untimely death, Ernesto had arranged for a USB drive to be sent to the Miami DEA office with unreleased information on the cartel, including “constructive financial evidence” indicating that the Alianza made payments to a behind-the-scenes entity in the Southern Cone.
