13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  “¿Estás bien?” Hermana asked. Are you all right?

  As if he was driving dangerously or something.

  When they got close, Hermana began to give him directions through a maze of isolated lanes leading off into the woods, paved with crumbling asphalt most of them, the last few dirt and lined with immense black pines. Ahead of them, glimpses of a large expanse of open water.

  “Left here,” Hermana said. “Now right.” At last she told him he should pull down an obscure rutted track. Fausto maneuvered through overhanging brush and parked. Hermana had scouted the place well. The truck wouldn’t be visible to anyone passing. The single-lane road behind them had been totally deserted.

  Hermana and Fausto got out. They took in the pine-scented dark, standing together next to the driver’s-side door. Without being asked, Chupé emerged from the back, hopped up into the bed of the truck and popped the latch on the tool locker. The familiar rank smell of rotted blood rose into the night air as soon as they swung the lid open.

  Fausto had fitted his nganga inside the sheet-metal tool chest. The cast-iron cauldron nested within the space like a kettle in a cupboard.

  “Alójate aquí,” Fausto said. Stay here. They left Chupé behind with Raúl.

  He and Hermana made their way fifty yards through the pathless dark, coming to a high bank that overlooked the lake. Below them, a collection of obscure white oblongs, visible for their lit windows, a dozen cabins grouped around a large central lodge. Even at night, the place had the air of elegance and privilege, an upscale resort tucked away in the lakeshore woods. A catamaran and two sailfish bobbed alongside a wharf boathouse, on the other side of which was moored a large pleasure craft.

  Faint music, the clatter of dishes and the clink of bottles, the conflicting drone of a TV. Voices, young and female, drifted out from the lodge.

  “¿Cuál?” Fausto asked. Which one?

  Hermana pointed out one of the cabins. Fausto wanted to know if she was sure, and Hermana said she was. She had been up North for the whole of the previous week, and had stood in the same spot many times before. Aware of the need for concealment, she had not even allowed herself to smoke. There was some strange kind of duck that cried over the water at night, sounding like a lunatic. Hermana half hoped it would show up now, put a fright into her brother.

  But Fausto didn’t scare easily. The family had been torn apart when they were both children. She couldn’t help but see Fausto as her little sibling, even though he was older. His crooked legs, she knew, gave him a lot of pain. Lately, she had watched him come into himself. If he hadn’t been born deformed, she thought, he could have been a great man. Even greater than he was.

  Santero. El brujo. The witch, the warlock. Hermana had witnessed men bend to his will, grown men much taller than Fausto, who outweighed him by sixty kilos. She was proud of him.

  Light spilled from the doorway of the lodge down below. A group of chattering, indistinct figures trailed across the lawn. Shrieks and laughter. The sound died as they were swallowed by the dark.

  “How many are in the cabin with her?” Fausto asked in English.

  “Two others.”

  A long beat during which neither of them said anything. Hermana didn’t bother to look at her watch. She knew it wasn’t yet time.

  “¿Qué hacemos ahora?” she asked. What do we do now?

  “We wait,” Fausto said. Across the lake behind them, a great northern loon sent up its insane call. They went back to the truck. Chupé looked startled at their return, even though he had expected it. They stood about in the dark, zoning out, coming down from the hash-oil high. Not a single vehicle passed by on the road, thirty yards away.

  “Raúl,” Fausto called quietly.

  The sicario rumbled out of the backseat of the truck’s cab. He moved like a dead man. Hermana could feel the heat off his body in the coolness of the woods. They dressed him in the lightweight body armor that was all the rage in narcotrafficante circles. The zombi accepted the garb sullenly, the way a child might submit to being dressed in a winter coat by its mother.

  Fausto reached into the tool locker and retrieved las hojas gemelas, the twin blades. They rested crosswise atop the nganga, absorbing its power. The santero had wedged the handles of the weapons within the jug-eared rings on either side of the big iron cauldron. He presented them to Raúl, physically placing the two machetes into the man’s hands. All the while, he kept up a whispery patter meant only for the zombi.

  Hermana lit a sherm, a Camel regular generously sprinkled with PCP. Since Raúl had his hands full of steel, she had to physically put it to the man’s lips. He inhaled as if it were a spliff. The chemical-laced smoke caused an explosion of coughing. The hacking sounded thunderous in the still night.

  Four A.M. finally arrived. The hour of the undead. The unholy hour.

  Everyone was high. Chupé and Hermana watched as Fausto gave Raúl a final flurry of whispered instructions, braced his shoulders, then sent him off. Chupé couldn’t help but think of Lurch, a character on the old American TV series The Addams Family, videos of which were much loved around the ranch.

  Las hojas gemelas hanging loosely at the end of his arms, Raúl disappeared into the dark.

  “What’d you tell him?” Hermana asked Fausto.

  “I told him he was going to die.”

  —

  Eleanor Tremont was a “big” at Kappa Kappa Chi sorority, a mentor for the younger pledges, her “littles.” She felt guilty, that night, for staying out late and not participating in the evening activities of “the Treat,” KKC’s annual Geneva Lake retreat. Eleanor had been there before. Several times—first as a freshman, then again every year since. She was afflicted with senior weariness.

  So she skipped the talent show and spent the evening at Hogs and Kisses, her favorite club among the many grouped in town at the northeastern end of the lake. She knew the bouncers there and a couple of the waitresses. Late in the evening, a guy who said he was in pre-med at Madison bought her a few drinks. They danced. Nothing would come of it, Eleanor knew, but it was a passable good time. The two of them trailed out to a lakeside bonfire. She lost track of the time and then lost track of the Madison pre-med, too.

  Eleanor stayed on at the shore party, making sure she was reasonably sober for the drive home. She arrived at the Kappa Kappa Chi lodge at 3:47 A.M. The police pressed her later to be exact about the time. All her littles were tucked away in their cabins.

  As a big, Eleanor was allowed one of the solo bedrooms along the balcony of the main lodge. Thank God for that. No endless whisperings and shushings keeping her awake. She used her key to get into the lodge. Crossing the open ballroom, she imagined the scene earlier in the evening, when the KKC sisters had performed skits and sung and tap-danced for one another. In the darkness, Eleanor could see embers still glowing in the massive stone fireplace. She climbed the stairs to the mezzanine, her way lit by strips of convenience bulbs set into the risers.

  As was often the case after a night of drinking, Eleanor had a hard time falling asleep. She listened to the loons on the lake. But she must have dozed, because she startled awake just before 4:20. Kerry White pounded on her door.

  “E!” she called. “E!”

  Still in her nightclothes, Eleanor climbed out of bed.

  Kerry was the other big in residence. She looked distraught. “There’s an animal down by the lake.”

  “So?” Eleanor responded sleepily. Kerry was a veteran of the Treat. But she was a Chicago girl, unused to the country. Geneva Lake could be really eerie at night. The loons, yeah, but coyotes, too. And they always had a hard time with raccoons. One year, a porcupine got trapped in the boathouse.

  “Come,” Kerry insisted. She held a big lantern-style flashlight. Its beam threw shadows across the black gulf of the ballroom below the balcony.

  “I think my hangover has a hangover,” Eleanor complained. But she slipped on an old pair of Uggs and followed Kerry down the stairs.

 
; As soon as they got outside, they heard it. A strange sound, inhuman, a desperate, gagging, wheezing noise, like a creature that could not catch its breath. Eleanor’s family dog had attacked a raccoon once. Eleanor and her mother had to go out and drag Billy off the poor thing. The wounded animal crawled away to die, making the most pathetic sound Eleanor had ever heard, a sort of dispirited, gasping “Awww.”

  This was worse.

  “What if it’s rabid?” Eleanor whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Kerry said. “Should we call someone?”

  “Who?”

  “The cops. A dogcatcher or somebody.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.” Eleanor took the flashlight from Kerry. She trained it toward the beach.

  Fingers of mist interfered with the beam. Kerry shrieked.

  It wasn’t an animal. It was a girl.

  Eleanor caught her in the shaft of light, lost her, found her again. She was lurching pathetically along on her hands and knees. Her head drooped at an odd angle. Everything was covered in splatters of blood—her hair, her ripped-apart nightgown, the ground she struggled across.

  “Go find help,” Eleanor said, choking on her own words.

  “No! I don’t want to leave you!”

  Against her will, Eleanor stepped forward. She recognized who it was. “Lizzy,” she cried. “It’s Lizzy Sanborn.”

  Kerry was freaking. “He’s still here! He’s still here!” She grabbed at the flashlight. The two of them held on to it together, pointing the beam wildly around the empty grounds. Boogeymen and ax murderers crowded in on them from the surrounding woods.

  “Lizzy,” Eleanor cried out. The girl was twenty yards away. She crawled a few more feet and collapsed.

  “Call, call, call,” Kerry chattered. Eleanor cursed herself for not bringing her cell along. Coverage around the lake was iffy anyway.

  “Go inside,” she directed Kerry. “Get a landline.”

  “I’m not leaving you!”

  Clutching each other, they edged toward their fallen sister. Eleanor felt a stab of new fear. “What’s she in?”

  “What?”

  “Which cabin is she in?”

  All of the cottages scattered around the lodge were named for wildflowers. With shaking hands, Eleanor swung the light around to illuminate Buttercup Cabin.

  Its door hung open. Smears of crimson marred the white clapboards on both sides of the cabin’s porch. Framed in the doorway was the dark, big-shouldered figure of a man. He held a pair of machetes, one in each hand.

  The two women screamed. They dropped the flashlight and ran.

  Chapter 7

  Val Duran set them up in a very pleasant villa in the hills above the Tijuana River. The place had a pool and a chef. They were next to the city’s only golf course. If you squinted your eyes just right, some areas of the Agua Caliente district of Tijuana could pass for middle-class L.A. You could gaze down at the throbbing city below and count yourself a member of the privileged class.

  The trip south had somehow turned into Val’s project all the way. He hadn’t hired a limo for the journey, but the massive Lexus GX he drove was the next best thing. The hilltop villa was owned by “a friend,” he said. He knew his way around Tijuana. He took care of everything.

  The Loushane kids were infamous for being rich and poor at the same time. Their mother inherited a fortune pegged at $880 million, and that was an estimate made around the time of her death, at the millennium. So now it had to be—Remington tried to figure the math in her head—it had to be ten figures easy by now.

  Daddy Loushane had money sunk into complex securities that bundled home mortgages together, on which he boasted of getting better than a thirty percent annual return. He and his investor pals had recently backed a new hedge fund, placing bets on other people’s losses.

  The mother wealthy, the father rolling in it. The kids? Penniless as beggars.

  It was shameful, the spartan financial diet Victor Loushane had them on. He kept shorting what little allowance he gave out, which wasn’t much. A hundred a week to each of them. In L.A., street-corner peddlers of oranges made that in a day.

  Then again, the children had been trained in frugality from childhood. Ellis endured it with a sort of grumbling, easygoing grace. He never seemed to want money and never seemed to have any. When Caroline got older, other people gave her things. Simon could always scrape up enough via his weed business.

  Brockton was the exception. He stuck to his father’s side. He was thirty-one and still hadn’t moved out of Wildermanse. All his needs, his food and laundry, were taken care of by the family servants. Even in the midst of luxury, he still managed to live like a monk.

  People with real money—and there were a lot of them in Los Angeles, and a lot of them were young—were delighted by the celebrated pocket poverty of the Loushane children. It was a running joke among them. They said Ellis was like Prince Charles, who had made it a rule never to carry any money on his person. Giving out knowing smirks, the well-heeled rushed to pick up the tab.

  Val Duran bankrolled the Tijuana sojourn without a word of complaint. Caroline and Ellis accepted his largesse without a word of gratitude. But lethargy had immediately settled over the twins. They didn’t seem too eager to investigate the activities of their late brother Simon. Val’s dope was excellent. In honor of the new surroundings, they had all switched from vodka to tequila. Every once in a while, Caroline and Val would disappear into a bedroom.

  Caroline was hitting the parrot very hard. Remington ragged Val about it. “What is this, the next stop on the Oblivion Express? You know her history. She was in rehab when she was seventeen. Keep her off that stuff.”

  “Yeah, right,” Val responded. “You ever try to tell her anything?” He stalked away.

  “I don’t think Val is as smart as he thinks he is,” Ellis commented.

  “No one is as smart as Val thinks he is,” Remington replied.

  After two days of pool-lounging and general slacking, Remington became a little itchy. She had taken leave from the police academy for this?

  “I was thinking of going into town,” she said that afternoon. “Maybe get down to the hotel, you know?”

  Val wasn’t around. The twins watched the big Sony Trinitron, a Lethal Weapon movie, the one with Chris Rock.

  “You can tell us what it’s like,” Ellis replied. Remington didn’t begrudge the twins their laziness, but she was a little mystified. Wasn’t visiting the site of Simon’s death spiral one of the reasons they had come down to Mexico in the first place?

  When she got to Hotel Baja California, she wondered why she had bothered. What had she expected, a dark stain on the pavement? It wasn’t yet evening. The crowds along Av. Revolución hadn’t had time to fully get their buzz on.

  Remington stared up at the six-story hotel. Her head ached—from the sun, from partying, from the dislocation of the novel surroundings. Disco Simio, the club on the first floor of the hotel, was a huge bin open to the street, booming its Nortec electronica pulse straight into Remington’s brain.

  Yes, she could see the hotel’s fourth-floor balcony, the same as the third-floor and second-floor balconies, all braced with heavy white tubular railings.

  Simon had fallen. He had jumped. He was pushed.

  Accident. Suicide. Murder.

  “Un mapa,” said a voice beside her. “El souvenir.” A small, sunburned man with a crown of white hair. The peddler was almost comically loaded down with offerings— plastic models of the Tijuana arch, T-shirts that read “City of Tomorrow,” stuffed burros painted with zebra stripes, shot glasses, ball caps, pennants, chucherías, trinkets, junk.

  Remington looked upward and tried to gauge the full height of Simon’s fall. Four floors, fifteen feet each, add on a little more because the first-story disco was so high-ceilinged. Say sixty-five or seventy feet.

  “Señorita wishes a memory of Tijuana?” The peddler displayed a small, colorful poster with photographs of all the si
ghts of the city.

  Remington shook her head.

  The guy wouldn’t leave. She looked up. He looked up.

  “El cisne,” he said. The swan. He swept his arm downward.

  Remington turned to him. “You were here?”

  “Sí, right here.”

  “You saw it?”

  “I see everything. I am La Revo, okay?” The guy placed his hand on his breast.

  “And up above—were there people with him on the balcony? Could you see?”

  “Sí, sí, plenty people, dancers.” La Revo danced goofily in place, making the trinkets hanging off him jiggle and clink.

  “What happened?”

  “Dos.”

  “Two? Two what?” Remington was aware that her lack of Spanish was a brand of American arrogance. She knew a smattering of words, that was all.

  “Desdícnado.” La Revo held up two fingers. “Los dos, same place, okay? Desdícnado. Unlucky.”

  “What do you mean? There were two people with him?”

  “Dos personas murieron aquí, la misma manera—same, same. From el balcón, okay?”

  Remington didn’t understand. “Did you talk to the police? La policía?”

  She had pronounced the magic word. La Revo immediately began to fade back away from her. Remington grabbed at him, but he dodged.

  “Who was with him? He was my, my, my…amigo. Good friend.”

  Smiling vacantly, the man continued to retreat. He turned his back on her. Tourists flowed around them. The crowds, the sun, her hangover worked on Remington. Plus the memory of Simon when he was alive. She felt a gust of despondency.

  “Un mapa,” the shill called out. “El souvenir.”

  She didn’t have the heart to pursue him, and he was soon lost in the crowd.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” Ellis said when Remington returned to the villa. He wielded a pitcher of margaritas. “Salt or no?”