by M C Rowley
My heart beat against the sofa and reverberated back through my chest. I tried to speak, but couldn´t control my throat, like those nightmares that steal your motor-neurone ability. Salvatierra´s footsteps approached me and I looked up at him. His eyes were on fire. Black fire. My courage had faded and I looked at Jason for answers, but his head stayed slumped. Salvatierra’s hand reached down and rested in front of my face. It was haggard. Stories and deeds that his well maintained hair, and skin could not disguise. Small cuts, larger scars scattered on sunburned dry skin.
“All I have to do,” said Salvatierra, switching to English, and looking at me but addressing Jason, “is call a number.”
He took out his phone. Jason looked up.
“Please,” I said.
Jason stared at me, trying to communicate something. Something in his eyes.
“We´ll tell you,” I said.
Jason was burning me with his stare. But I didn´t give a damn. Pep could rot in hell, or end up buried alive for all I cared. He was most likely a dead man anyway, and he was my only card, and I was playing it.
“Don´t make the call,” I said. “We´ll take you to him, okay?”
Salvatierra looked down at me and smiled an abominable grin as his finger ran across the phone opening its home screen, and he stayed looking at me but glanced a millisecond as he pressed once – that was the phone function, then second – to access the contacts, then third, perhaps a search, then fourth, the person´s name – the person who had Eleanor, I supposed, and then fifth, dial. He put the phone to his ear, and I stared at him like a child.
I knew it was over,
“Please—
But I didn´t finish my sentence. An explosion came from behind us. Or more a snap. That´s what I heard, a fraction before Salvatierra´s head split into two, ripped apart by a bullet. A bullet that passed through his cranium, and took out his hand, and the phone it was holding and slammed into the wall above Jason and the fireplace.
Noise flooded the room, my ears rang and Salvatierra´s body slumped to his knees, then fell flat on his exploded face, two feet from me on the sofa. But it made no sound. I turned around and at the door, was Hernandez, black beretta in hand, poised, and ready to shoot a second.
I stared at him, his face stone cold. Steady, and ready to fight. But his single shot had been true. Salvatierra´s head wasn´t there anymore, instead, it was a bloody stump kind of shaped into a V. His left hand too was gone, as was the phone.
As the ringing of the shot died away, Jason released an epic sigh. Of relief, of pain. I looked at him and he grabbed his bloody shoulder and his face tightened. His eyes were closed the entire time. “Damn shame,” he said. “That phone could´ve helped us.”
“Didn´t have time to consider it,” said Hernandez. “You okay, boss?”
Jason nodded. “I need Aronson to look at this,” he said, gesturing to his shoulder, “but we´re fine. Let´s move tonight. Feds will be all over this place by dawn.”
Hernandez nodded. “I´ll take care of this,” he said pointing not at Salvatierra but the bullet hole in the wall. “You´ll take him, right?” and now he pointed at Salvatierra´s corpse, not me.
Jason nodded.
Hernandez drew a knife and cut us free.
“Take the truck outside,” said Hernandez.
“Hang on,” I said. “What happened to his men?”
Hernandez smiled, “They were offered a better deal. They had zero loyalty for this scumbag. They are unimportant now. Gone.”
“And my wife?”
Jason stepped up, “She´s not here, Scott. But now, Esteban knows less. That´s an advantage we have.”
“Where will we go?” I asked. “I need to find Eleanor.”
“We´re heading to a town,” said Jason. “We´ll be safe there. As of now, you have to understand that all Federal Police are working for Esteban and the cartel. All military, all officials. And we have the Governor, so we are now the most wanted men in Mexico. And we´re foreign. Simply Scott, we cannot get caught.”
I moved to look around the house but Hernandez told me he´d checked it. Eleanor wasn’t here. I shouted her name all the same, inside, outside. But they were right. After my fruitless searching, Hernandez asked me to help pick up Salvatierra´s corpse, and take it outside in the rain and slump it into his truck. As we did so, I looked down at Salvatierra´s inert body, his legs artificially straight, his arms splayed out to form the shape of a morbid Christmas tree. One of his hands missing, and the blood oozing from his two new orifices now congealing.
“Ready?” said Hernandez.
I nodded. But I was far from ready. The disappointment of Salvatierra´s death depressed me. I felt no joy, or satisfaction. I only thought of Eleanor more. She was alone. With God knew who.
I grabbed the corpse´s ankles while Hernandez held the shoulder area. At least I didn´t get the bloody stump-end.
We stumbled to the front door of the cottage, and Jason had gotten up and opened the door for us.
We walked out into the rain. The cottage was a one story cement cube set into a dirty and cluttered yard, from what I could make of it in the darkness. Two big dogs stood upon seeing us and began barking. They were chained to a tree. There were three old, raggedy-ass trucks rotting into the mud around the periphery, and enclosing the whole place was a thin wire fence. No outhouses, no places to hide Eleanor.
Salvatierra´s truck was a Ford Lobo. The military Hummer was nowhere to be seen.
We stumbled up to the back of the truck and Hernandez, balancing the stump on his knee, managed to open the tail gate. We then lifted Salvatierra´s corpse up and into the truck bed, and Hernandez covered it.
Hernandez walked back to the house, and held out his hand up, “good luck finding your wife,” he said.
I nodded and thanked him. I felt a tiny bit of relief that they hadn´t forgotten my goal here. Jason´s face was just visible in the darkness, but I could see the outline of his grimaced features. He had not stopped holding his shoulder since we were freed.
“You need a doctor,” I said.
He started walking toward the truck´s passenger side. “I need medical attention.”
He had mentioned Aronson looking at it. I began following him toward the truck when I realized something. I stopped dead in my tracks. Jason walked on for a few meters before realizing I had ceased my steps.
“Hold on,” I said. And I turned to run back to the house.
I hadn´t asked Hernandez if he´d actually seen Eleanor during his time with Salvatierra´s gang.
I jogged up the house, and Jason was yelling weakly at me. I couldn´t make out what he was saying. I reached the steps of the porch, ran up them and then stopped at the door. Hernandez didn´t seem like the type who would react kindly to be taken by surprise, so I stopped at the door and went to shout my greeting, when I heard his voice coming from inside. I stayed still and listened.
I heard his words,
“He´s secured. The local narco is dead….No….That´s right….No, he´s secured.”
And then I heard the sound again. Coming from the other end of the line. The same tinny inhuman sound I heard Jason talking to back in the safe house.
Mr Reynolds.
And then nothing.
I straightened up and knocked on the door, and shouted that it was me.
Hernandez opened the door. He had a phone in his hand.
“What do you need?”
The phone in his hand was still connected to the other side.
“I need to know,” I said. “If you ever saw my wife.”
Hernandez stared at me, he was looking tough, but I could see behind his initial features, he felt for me.
“No, Mr Dyce, I never saw her. I´m sorry.”
I turned back into the rain and toward Jason in the truck. The ground squelched under my shoes and I felt cold for the first time that night. The adrenalin had calmed and now the bitter wind cut through my damp clothes and down into my bon
es.
I got to the truck and Jason was leaning across the passenger seat trying to get a view.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I forgot something.”
“Forgot what?”
I shrugged and got in. “Nothing. It doesn´t matter. Where do I drive?”
Jason leaned back into a slump and closed his eyes, “We need to get back to the safe house, pick up Kyle, Bayer and Aronson, so I can get this fixed up, and then head to a new location.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where is it?”
But Jason rolled to his side and groaned. “Not now, Scott. Not now.”
I started the heavy engine and put the stick into DRIVE and released the brake. We started to move and I turned out of the driveway onto a small dirt track. I had to put the wipers on but not full speed.
“Why another safe house?”
“It´s not a house, it´s a location,” said Jason. “It´s been too long now. Esteban will have activated full search. It´s been hours since you took Pep from Polysol, the location he had ordained, and his local narco helpers are all but dead. So he´ll have got his people to make the calls, feds, traffic cops. Everyone.”
“So wouldn´t it be safer to stay in one place?”
“No, it definitely wouldn´t,” said Jason.
After we started rolling, he fell into a kind of sleep, although I was able to ask him for directions when they were needed. Two kilometers are different in a truck, riding down one or two simple lanes compared to walking it across water logged fields. We made it back to the first safe house in less than ten minutes.
I swung the Lobo round to line up with the Tundras and got down and walked round to help Jason onto my shoulder. We started walking toward the house when the door flung open and Kyle ran out, down the steps and up to us.
She wore a frown, inspecting Jason’s wound.
“Aronson´s inside, go with him.”
We walked with Jason up the stairs and through into a room I hadn´t seen. It was the same, bleak unpainted concrete walls, and a faded red rug in the middle of the floor. There was an ancient spring single bed and Aronson with a selection of medical supplies laid out in front of him on a small wooden table. We laid Jason down and Aronson got straight to work, removing the clothing around Jason´s shoulder.
“Hernandez is a good shot,” said Aronson after some minutes. “Not even a fragment of bullet in this wound.”
“Things have gotten complicated,” said Kyle, standing with me looking down at Aronson and Jason. “Esteban pulled the trigger on Dyce.”
And then she looked at me directly.
I looked at Jason. His eyes were shut, but he was still conscious, “How bad?” he asked in a croaky voice.
Kyle left the room and came back with a laptop. She opened it, and the biggest national newspaper in Mexico´s homepage filled the screen. Below the title and main menu, were the words,
EN BUSCA DE UN HOMBRE
In search of one man
Accompanied by a picture of a truck late at night. It was the Transporter I had acquired for the pick-up job, which turned out to be the kidnapping of Governor Pep Augusta. The photo was blurred, and taken at some distance, but it was zoomed in enough to see the truck´s windscreen.
And the driver.
Grainy, blurred, badly lit, but unmistakably me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I stared at the photo on Kyle´s laptop screen. It felt like an eternity ago but I remembered the flash as I had returned to Lujano that night of the abduction.
Kyle, with one free hand, leaned around and switched tabs on the browser to one that showed The New York Times.
That headline said,
MYSTERY BRITISH NATIONAL INVOLVED IN MEXICAN GOVERNOR KIDNAP
And the same photo of me accompanied the bombshell.
Kyle closed the computer. “We have to move to Pozos soon, Jason. Then we can make a plan.”
But Jason had passed out. Aronson was cleaning up the wound and we watched him work in silence. Then, after five more minutes, Kyle began to lay out her plan.
“We´ll go together with Pep,” she said, pointing at me. “And Aronson brings Jason in the other truck.”
Aronson nodded.
Kyle looked at her watch,
“It´s almost 4am, We´ll leave in two hours, it´ll still be dark, and much safer to travel. Get some sleep, all of you.”
Tiredness hit me then. It hit me hard, like Kyle´s permission to rest opened the gates and the flow of energy was too strong to close them again. She took me to an adjoining room, which was identical to Jason´s.
Kyle shut the door, and I think she locked it, although I couldn´t be sure. I didn’t care.
I staggered to the lumpy looking bed and its thick moth eaten blanket wrapped tightly around the ancient wooden frame, and ignored the probable insects crawling and living underneath it and slumped onto it like I were returning to my own mother´s womb, beaten up, older and corrupt, and dirty from the world, asking for her forgiveness.
The bed was as lumpy as it had promised to be.
My back pressed into at least three springs that had liberated themselves from the restraints of the bed´s original design, but I didn´t give a damn. I could have killed for a drink though.
A bottle of white tequila, damn, even a mezcal or a goddamn Xotol would have done.
Salvatierra´s head disappearing in a red mist before I had had the chance to ask him how, why or who, passed in and out of my mind. I was front page news. The most wanted man in Mexico, probably just behind the top capos of the biggest cartels of course. But wanted all the same.
And I thought about Hernandez´s phone call I had overheard.
This was all about Pep. Pep the governor. A high profile governor. Why did Esteban want him kidnapped? If he wanted him dead, that would be far easier. He framed me. He could frame me for the murder too. So, that was fact number one. Esteban wanted Pep alive. And that therefore was the key to getting Eleanor out of this safe.
I moved onto Jason and Kyle and their team. They wanted Esteban gone.
Did they want Pep dead? No. They couldn´t.
Otherwise, he´d be dead already. Hernandez had said “he´s secured” and there were only two people to whom he could be referring. Pep, or myself. Now, I wasn´t really secured. I seemed more of a hinderance. And they were concerned about the media attention on me too, so I was far from secured. So, Hernandez was talking about Pep.
Two parties. Esteban and Mr Reynolds. Both wanted Pep. Both wanted Pep alive. Or perhaps dead, but in the right way.
Either way, I was missing something. And it was that something that would save Eleanor. And maybe our son. But my mind grew dim, and I fell asleep as those thoughts continued to swirl around my mind.
Kyle woke me and told me to be outside in five minutes and left the room. My back hurt and I took a few minutes to gather my senses. I got up and walked out and looked in on Jason´s room. He was asleep and Aronson was gone. His shoulder was neatly bandaged and dressed.
I continued down the hallway and out of the front door, to where the trucks were parked. Kyle was there, packing one of the Tundras with what looked like camping equipment. As I got near, she turned and handed me three power bars. I ravaged them like water in the desert. Kyle then gave me a bottle of spring water, which I chugged down with equal vigor. I panted a little as I finished. And only then did I look into the cab. There on the back seats, Pep was laid out. He was asleep. His legs were curled up on the seat and he had changed clothes into a grey tracksuit. I couldn´t see his face because of the angle, but I could make out his chest compressing and expanding slowly.
“What are you going to do with him?”
Kyle was already walking around the truck to get in, “He´s fine. He´ll be fine. Let´s move.”
“Why should I?” I asked. “I need to get to my wife.”
“You don´t have a choice, Dyce. Now get in.”
“My choice is to search for my wif
e.”
Kyle stopped. “We are your only hope to get Eleanor, Dyce. Within a couple of hours, this whole area will be flooded with cops. Cops that work on Esteban´s payroll.”
The yard seemed to creak and the trees swayed in the wind. The rain had stopped but the smell of damp earth rose from the floor. It was hard to imagine cops everywhere, but I knew she was right.
I climbed up into the front passenger seat and Kyle slammed the huge truck into DRIVE and we set off.
The route out of the small town was similar to the tracks between our safe house and Salvatierra´s; mud tracks with occasional stones. But the Tundra was adept at handling it and even in the dim light of early morning, Kyle was able to keep up a steady speed of at least 65 km/h
“Keep an eye out for patrol cars. You see one, you shout,” she said.
But we drove for an hour through the valley, and on the gravelly road, half paved - half mud bath, and we were utterly alone, traveling through farmland while the sun rose in the pale light. We were headed north again. The country track we were on was lined by sporadic trees with silver plated leaves that rustled loudly in the wind. The sound accompanied us, only breaking where the row was sparse or open. Outside this path were fields of cattle, sheep, but no human life.
We had also increased altitude. The gradient was shallow so far, but it was there. My math didn´t suffice to work out the height we had climbed.
Kyle´s hand went to the gear stick and crunched down the gears, “Damn it,” she said. “Trouble.”
“Why?” I asked, and immediately felt stupid for it. Ahead of us was a clump of lights, still on from the night before. A sign on the road said San Jose Soltepec, the name of the town. And there, dotted amongst the dying street lights, and the rough cubic concrete buildings were hundreds of other lights.
Red and blue flashing ones.
Kyle just shot me a glance and pulled over and killed the engine. Then she reached down to the side of her seat and pulled back a large satellite phone. A great non-traceable way to communicate secrets and locations to the powers that be. And they worked from anywhere, even San Jose Goddamned Soltepec.
