by M C Rowley
“You have to be joking,” I said. “What was your plan? If you knew that this place was in our way?”
But Kyle ignored me. “We´re gonna need some help,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I stayed looking at the keypad of Kyle´s sat phone ready to recall the exact number as she typed it in digit by digit. “I was hoping we could find a side route,” she said. “A way to skip around the place. And if not,”
“What if not”? I asked.
I couldn´t believe the lack of substance to her plan. And she was risking Pep, and Pep was all I had to save Eleanor. “What were—what are you going to do?”
She looked up at me from the phone and slumped her features downward as if to say “finished?” and I stared back at her, and then she started tapping numbers into the phone. She must have sensed my idea, because she covered her hand as she did so.
“Like I said,” she said. “Gonna need some help.” And with that, she held the phone to her ear and concentrated her face.
I just listened. And there again, came the same inhuman, tinny voice of Mr Reynolds.
She spoke.
“Yes, this is Kyle.”
….
“I have a blockade situation. I need to request a free pass.”
….
“It´s on the GPS. Yes. Right,” said Kyle.
Then she hung up.
“What were you requesting”?
She sat back and looked straight. I admired her calmness. It was infectious.
“Whatever will get us through that town.”
“So what now?”
“We wait for the call.”
And we waited and looked down the track. We couldn´t make out where the trees and fields ended and the wider, walked on road of San Jose Soltepec began. But the street lights started going out as their sensors picked up the first glimmers of the day´s full sunlight. I thought for a moment about how many days I had been in all of this. How many nights had passed? Four? Five? I started to think back when the truck’s cabin filled with the telephone´s ringtone.
“Yes,” said Kyle, ending the wretched din. She stayed listening for just under a minute and then said, “thank you”, and hung up.
“We have ten minutes to get through town. Cops won´t touch us. Any longer than ten though and we´re screwed.”
I looked back at Pep passed out on the backseat. The missing governor, and me, Mexico’s new most wanted man.
Kyle started the Tundra´s massive engine and put it into DRIVE and we launched off.
Ten minutes and counting.
The truck lunged and bumped as we approached at speed. I looked back at Pep and he was still asleep despite having had the traveling comfort of a cement mixer. And then I noticed his face was slack. Very slack. There was a puddle of drool under his mouth and his arm was stiff in the air and swayed with the movement of the truck.
I looked back at Kyle, but it was dangerous to question her now. She was on edge. The ten minutes were already disappearing and we were hurtling along the beaten cobbled street toward town
"You have to help," said Kyle.
I stayed staring at her.
"Reach back behind my seat. There's a gym bag with a few caps and some body vests. I need you to pass me a set and then dress yourself and the Governor in the others. Use the caps low so he isn't recognized."
"Weekend at Bernie's?" I said, but the crap joke was lost on her.
"Move," she said.
I jumped into the back seat. The town ahead was close now. Buildings flew past the back windows as I crouched down in front of Pep laid out and grabbed the bag. I guess I had two minutes tops to get prepped.
Opening the bag, I grabbed three caps and threw one to the driving seat. Next, I pulled out two Kevlar vests. Kyle already had one on so I turned to Pep.
He was drugged. That much was obvious. But my questions would have to wait until later. I slid my arm under his dead weight and lifted him. I managed to get him into a passable sleeping position. The vest was tricky to get on and I would've been hurting him had he been conscious, but I got it done. The cap covered his face pretty damn well.
I had time to don my disguise, pull the cap way down and get into a sleeping position next to Pep.
At the last minute before we entered the town, Kyle threw me some Oakley sunglasses and that finished it off.
San Jose Soltepec opened up its ubiquitous cobbled streets and high pavements.
On the sides of the streets, squad cars of municipal, state and transit police lined up leaning on their cars, eyeballing us. Kyle hung what looked like an FBI badge out of the window and we rolled on. But we rolled slow.
“Local, municipales,” she said. “We´re good unless we see Feds. Esteban owns the Feds.”
San Jose must have been about 10 kilometers wide judging by our progress and judging by sightings of non-cop people, it had a population of 4.
The river that now ran with us alongside the town´s outer road stank of stale water and sewage, kicked up by the previous night´s rain. The road at last turned into relatively new tarmac, but with a collection of spotted holes where the storm had ripped up the blacktop like the crust on a creme brûlée.
Kyle swerved around the holes and we didn´t hit a single bump. As the road widened and a wall cropped up on our right, and lanes came, I thought we were home free. But Kyle shouted back, “Act cool.”
We were nearly out of time.
“Roadblock,” said Kyle.
Three minutes to go to be precise.
Ahead were four Dodge Chargers painted in the dark blue and white of the Federal Police. At least twelve Federal Officers stood in front of the squad cars, the lights flashing on and off. To the right of them, a cordoned off lane to pass on through and another to pull over where there stood an other of their colleagues holding a semi-automatic machine gun and dark sunglasses. He waved at us, palm faced downward and wagging at us.
Kyle pulled out her fake FBI badge and threw it on the passenger seat. Then, ran her right hand over the gun in her holster.
We drew closer and the cop in the shades with the gun walked towards us and stood aside to let us pass. We obliged and Kyle dropped the truck down to walking pace.
“Para allá,” said the cop. Over there. He waved to the only spot you could stop at.
Kyle pulled over and killed the motor.
I glanced at Pep. Slumped against the glass with his shades, he looked like a drunk, and I almost missed the trickle of drool that had crept from the corner of his drooped gob. I grabbed the lapel of his jacket and wiped it. I looked back at Kyle. She was still, looking forward, palms spread flat on the dash. The cop walked to Kyle´s window and looked in at us. He was bald and white. His eyes were thin and his mouth protruded like a snout. His friends and family would have called him pelón or güero. Or even güero pelón. Mexican slang for bald whitey.
His skin was blotched with large brown moles. His sunglasses were Ray-Ban aviators. His mouth was agape, and his teeth were crooked and yellow.
“Papeles,” he said.
Kyle flashed her FBI badge at him and he took it in his hands and stared at it as if it were a disappointing school grade card.
Kyle told him in perfect Spanish that we were scoping the area as part of the FBI investigation but the cop was looking back at me, and Pep´s sleeping carcass.
“Y ellos?” he asked, gesturing to us with a shrug of his right shoulder.
Kyle told him, in Spanish again, that we were part of the team. Tired after a long night´s traveling.
“Bájanse,” he said.
Get down.
“Dos minutos,” said Kyle.
“No,” he said.
Kyle opened her door. I could see her face, she was thinking hard. I had to face it; an eternity in some Mexico hell hole jail, Pep was saved, and Eleanor was dead. Our son disappeared forever.
I´d lost.
I couldn´t let it happen. I simply couldn´t.
&nb
sp; “Make the call,” I said.
Kyle looked back at me.
“What?”
“Call Mr Reynolds again,” I said.
She looked at me and I could see she agreed but was struggling with it for a second.
“Do it,” I said.
“I can handle this, Dyce.”
“Do it now,” I said.
The cop was starting to shuffling from foot to foot. It was clear by the look on his face that he didn´t appreciate us talking in English. It was making him itchy, and when I glanced at his trigger finger, ready to pull back on the AR-15, it was trembling like a leaf in the wind.
“Damn it,” said Kyle.
The cop took a step back, and moved his rifle up to point at us, moving it between Kyle and I slow and determined. Kyle stayed looking at him and leaned back into the truck´s cab, half in, half out, and turned to the fed. “Solo el teléfono,” she said, pointing to the sat phone in the central module of the truck.
The cop didn’t move but I guessed his eyes had darted to the phone. He nodded. Like it was a grenade, she lifted the satellite phone from the seat and held it up to the cop still pointing the gun at us. He braced as she moved and the machine gun he was holding kept its horizontal slide between our heads.
“Una llamada,” she said.
One call.
“Solo una llamada.”
The fed stared at her. His finger had slipped around the trigger of the rifle, and the safety was off.
“Una llamada,” said Kyle once more.
The cop´s colleagues behind him were starting to walk over to offer back up. He seemed to sense this, and looked at Kyle
He nodded.
“Gracias,” said Kyle.
In one swift movement, Kyle punched in a number and held the phone to her ear. She spoke quickly and quietly and then went silent. From my position, I couldn´t hear what she´d said.
We waited for a minute, looking at her. The fed cop, and me. My heart pumped hard through the tight kevlar wrapped around my chest.
And then she spoke into the phone, in Spanish this time. And then she offered the phone to the cop.
Astounded, he took it and put it to his ear.
He listened and as he did, his face drained of blood, going even whiter and paler than before. Even his sunglasses failed to disguise the horror on his face. As if a doctor was telling him that he’d contracted a ravenous disease in seconds and now faced certain death. He removed the shades and his eyes were stretched in terror and he lowered the phone and passed it back to Kyle.
“¿Como?”
How? Was all he said.
She glanced at me as she got in to the driving seat. “Let´s get out of here.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kyle started the engine and we drove past the cop, who stood frozen like a statue. We drove through the road block and out into the open road. The hills up ahead were less then ten KMs away. After five minutes, we were back in the middle of fields and mountains fast approaching in the distance.
“Not good,” said Kyle. “Not good at all.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You only get so many get of jail free cards with Mr Reynolds, and I used two to pass by a single town.”
I climbed back over the central module and into the passenger seat once more.
“I need to find my wife, Kyle,” I said. “That needs to start happening now.”
“Shut up,” said Kyle. “You think this all about you and your shit?”
She slammed the brakes and hauled the truck to the side of the road. She turned and burned her stare into me.
“Let´s wait for those cops to get permission to chase us. Shall we? Shall we wait and see happens then?”
“If it helps me find my wife, then maybe we should,” I said, doing my best to hold her gaze.
Kyle´s eye twitched slightly. Her face turned crimson.
“It won´t,” she said. “Because your wife is probably dead. Dead and buried. Sorry to tell you that. But it´s true. You´re lucky to have this ride, you get that?”
“Now you shut up,” I said. “Eleanor´s not dead. She can´t be. We have Pep. Esteban needs him. Eleanor and our son are his only chip.”
“Get over it, Dyce. You´re a lowdown pawn like us. And you know it. Let´s wait for the cops behind us to get permission back. Won´t take long. Maybe we´ll go down in a firefight.”
And she smirked. And she put her hand to her gun. “You got a piece?” she asked.
I shook my head. I hadn´t even shot a gun before.
“Thought not,” she said, turned back to the road, slammed the Tundra into DRIVE and turned back onto the track. I sat back and looked out the other side of the window. I felt sick of being part of someone else´s goddamned plan. But Kyle was right. And I hated her for it.
The road grew to two lanes and even painted white lines appeared after twenty more minutes, lined either side by sodden, brown ditches. Ahead of us, large hills loomed. At least triple the size of the ones that had shadowed Polysol and provided Pep´s and my botched escape.
The mountains ahead of those were a pale green in the morning light, and seemed far away, even as we reached the beginning of their ascent. I recalled an anecdote about Cortes sending his first map-maker on an expedition into the depths of what they then called New Spain.
It is said that after three months of traveling over, under and through the wild country that would become Mexico, Cortes´ map-maker returned to the table of his master exhausted. When asked what his findings were, the map-maker requested a sheet of parchment, and when Cortes´ servant had given it, the map-maker took it and scrunched it into a small ball, and then threw it into the middle of the table. Cortes and all his men looked at it as it slowly unfolded into a jagged uneven sculpture.
“That´s what it´s like,” said the map-maker. “That´s exactly what it´s like.”
No sooner did one mountain range end, but a rocky ridge come charging out of the dry, arid land to start another. And Mexico was still as wild. Out here in the country, law ceased to function as it pretended to in the great metropolises. Cops here were locals too. Untrained and thus influenced by money and power. Country folk, and most were poor. Most needed more money to survive and would take a bribe without a blink.
But Kyle hadn´t used money. She´d used a phone.
As the hills grew steeper, Kyle pulled off into a tiny dirt road. We were back to big bumps and divots and I settled in. There was nobody around. Absolutely nobody. I guessed we were going to camp.
“Pozos is close,” Kyle said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“An old ghost town. An abandoned tourist attraction,” she said. “Used to be full of gold, but the Spaniards finished with it in the early 1800s and left it to rot. It´s called Pozos because the holes - or pozos - are still there, and very deep.”
We climbed the hill and took each turn with at least 3 meters of altitude gained. At last, we flattened out to a thin gravelly road which ran long the edge of the largest hill. I looked ahead and saw the derelict sandy colored buildings of the ghost town.
It looked like ancient ruins in a desert, sand blasted old walls half standing, half collapsing, except the backdrop here was green hills and cactus shrub.
The buildings were ancient and derelict and I failed to see a single housing with a roof or even four walls.
As we approached, the size of the ghost town became more apparent. I counted eleven ruins and could now see the overgrown pathways that ran criss-cross between them. Everything was still.
The whole site was fenced off with a pitiable rusty wire fencing and old, bent tin signs every twenty meters saying how dangerous it was to enter in five more words than was necessary. I saw one red and white sign with a childish diagram of a hole, and a pair of legs disappearing down it.
Kyle clearly knew the place and was able to find the exact spot where the fence was broken. Sure enough we stopped and she jumped down and pulled back the wire an
d got back in the truck and we passed through. She stopped again quickly to go back and close the fence before jumping back again and driving inward.
Up close the buildings were in worse shape than I'd thought. The four hundred year old stones were smashed and cracked and barely stood. I found it hard to believe that the sandy structures were only a few centuries old. I'd seen Mayan pyramids in better shape.
We snaked through the buildings down dried and worn dirt tracks that snaked in between the structures, until we found a wooden and steel cabin. It was modern, in comparison with its neighboring relics, and square in shape, painted red with only two small windows. We pulled up alongside it.
"Old tourist cabin,” she said. “Safe House Number 2.”
I pointed at Pep´s unconscious figure in the back seat. “What´s the plan now?”
"You can help me with him" she said.
“And the plan?”
But Kyle said nothing, and she walked off up to the front door of the cabin and walked in. It was a fairly large structure. At least three rooms I guessed. It was made of corrugated steel and reinforced with steel bars all holding wooden panels as walls. The roof was the same material. It, unlike its ancient surroundings, could stand the severe weather. I began to wonder if eventually this place would have nothing left at all of the old ruins and instead just an old tourist cabin built on the top of a random hill, when Kyle came back outside. We stood there facing each other looking at the surroundings of the ghost town. The air felt thin, and despite the excellent cover provided by the old structures, wind blew through the gaps and hit us with gusto.
"All set" said Kyle. "Jason will be here soon. Now help me.”
We walked to the truck and opened up the passenger door of the Tundra and clicked the seat as far forward as it would go. I climbed into the back and got my arms under Pep's shoulders. Kyle grabbed his legs and counted to three. We heaved his dead weight and gradually carried him out.
Once out it was easier. We proceeded to the inside of the tourist cabin. Inside, small wire framed beds were set out on a wooden floor. There was a fireplace in one corner and a couple of windows cut into the steel. It stank of musty dust. Other than the sparse array of furniture, it was empty. There were two doors that were shut.
