by Sean Black
Forty
As the sun crept over the horizon, Lock scanned the narco-mansion with a pair of binoculars, careful to angle them in such a way that he avoided the sharp sunlight striking the lens. From his vantage-point in the front room of the small, dusty apartment, he had a clear view of the house’s back yard with its shimmering swimming pool. To the right of the pool, french windows led into the main house; to the left there was a small single-storey guest-house, perhaps eighty feet long and forty deep.
No one was around, save a gardener, who was clearing leaves from the water. Lock counted two fixed-position closed-circuit cameras, one mounted on either corner of the house, their lenses triangulating over the pool and the yard towards the guesthouse. The first hour of watching had already started to weigh on him. Ty, pacing the floor behind him, didn’t help. By definition, surveillance was a waiting game that required patience and, with the American girl missing, he was all out of it.
Their plan was needle-in-a-haystack stuff. Between them, the men connected to Mendez would have dozens of possible safe-houses at their disposal. With all the drugs that flowed through the city, hiding places would be legion and of good quality. Lock imagined that if you had something, or someone, you wanted to hide, there would be plenty of options available to you.
The only plus for them was that Rafaela had managed to retrieve not only their vehicle but also the gear they had brought down and their weapons, checking everything out from the police station on the pretext that, with them gone, it was better destroyed. The vehicle was no good to them now so they had emptied it of its contents and hidden it close to her apartment.
On the hour, Lock handed the binoculars to Ty. This was no good. For all they knew the house might be completely empty and, in any event, they had only a partial view of it. If he was there, Charlie Mendez could walk out of the front door with the girl, and they would be oblivious to the whole thing.
‘This sucks,’ he said to Ty.
‘Yup. You have other ideas?’
Lock unscrewed the top from a bottle of water and took a sip. The building was hot: there was no air-conditioning, and because the apartment was supposedly unoccupied, the windows had to stay closed, the drapes, too, apart from a narrow gap. ‘They’re protecting Mendez, they have the girl, and we have no clue where either of them is, so, no, I’m all out of ideas. You?’
Ty lowered the binoculars. ‘I was counting on you coming up with something. Man, this country is messed up. How’d you figure a place gets like this?’
‘Corrupt?’
‘Yeah.’
Lock hadn’t given it much thought until Ty had asked the question. ‘Slowly, I guess. You do someone a favour, look to make some easy money, and once you’re in, there’s no going back. I don’t know.’
‘And how do you figure these people get their country back?’ Ty said. ‘That’s gonna be even slower, right? Easy to get into the dirt, harder to get clean again.’
‘There are good people, like Rafaela.’
‘Not many of them,’ said Ty. ‘I mean, most people aren’t going to stand up to these guys. They don’t want to take the risk. They got families, kids.’
Lock stood behind Tyrone and stared down at the shimmering surface of the swimming pool as the gardener dumped the last of the leaves into a wheelbarrow. An idea was forming. It was a bad idea, bordering on reckless, but right now it was the only one he had.
Forty-one
Rafaela walked into her office at Police Headquarters and closed the door behind her. It was after lunch, and the building was close to empty, not that it was ever full. The city of Santa Maria had eight hundred officers but at least three hundred of them never showed up or did anything that people would recognize as police work. They were on the payroll of the cartels, recruited even before they had entered the academy to train. They wore the uniform, they were paid by the city or the government (as well as the cartels), they carried a badge and a gun and drove around in police cars, but they spent their days and nights working for the bad guys. They escorted shipments of money and drugs. They kidnapped low-level dealers, people who owed the cartel money or who had crossed them in some way, however significant or slight. Often, after a phone call from their superior, they killed those people and buried them in the dozens of hidden mass graves around the city. Rafaela believed that some had taken the girls, killed them and buried them too. It was said that, as a cop in the borderlands, you had only two choices. Plata o plomo? Silver or lead? You took a pay-off or you took a bullet.
Now that she was alone, and had time to think, she was regretting her change of heart with the Americans. More than regretting it. She had done many stupid things in her life, but this had to be the dumbest of them all. She should have insisted that they go home. But Lock had swayed her. How could he change things here? She wasn’t even sure that he could help her find the American girl. Before she arrived at the office, she had checked the two locations but seen nothing out of the ordinary. If the girl was there she would have sighted extra security but everything had been as always.
There was a tap at her office door. A young police officer poked his head in. He was always earnest. He took the job seriously. Rafaela wondered how long his idealism would last. Probably until the first time he was shown five thousand dollars to look the other way or the first time his mother received a phone call asking if she had reserved a cemetery plot for him.
‘The boss wants to see you.’
‘Thank you. Tell him I’ll be there in a moment.’
‘He said it’s urgent.’
‘Very well.’
She got up and followed him out into the corridor. He headed back to his cubicle and she kept going. She was more curious than nervous when the boss’s secretary made her wait for a few moments before she ushered her in.
Zapatero was at his desk. He was wearing a white dress shirt, slacks and loafers. This was his new uniform since his return from a management seminar in America about leadership. She wondered if the DEA, who had paid for his attendance, knew that he took money from the cartel. That was the thing about the people who had been bought: unless you had been close to them for a long time it was difficult to tell. The only obvious clue was how they could afford to send their kids to private school and drive the cars they did. Other than that, they spoke and behaved in exactly the same manner as the others. Some probably believed that by aligning themselves with one cartel they were somehow bringing order to a bad situation, that they were doing the right thing.
‘Detective Carcharon, please, sit down,’ he said, with a wave of his hand. When he opened his mouth all she could think of were the disgusting words he hissed down the phone at her late at night when he was drunk.
She sat opposite him. There were family pictures on his desk. A wife and two girls. She wondered what the children would think if they knew about their father. Presumably he loved them and wouldn’t want any harm to come to them. She found it strange that someone could feel so deeply about their own, yet have no regard for the children of others. That was the heart of the sickness that had enveloped these people. As long as their own needs were fulfilled, their own children safe, they didn’t care about anything else.
‘The two American bounty hunters we apprehended,’ he began. ‘I understand they have left the country.’
She cleared her throat. ‘Yes, I made sure of it myself.’
He smiled across his desk at her. ‘Good, that’s very good. We have enough problems of our own without these…’ he paused theatrically ‘… mavericks causing trouble. We will find the man they are looking for. This Charles Mendez.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m sure of it,’ she said.
He picked up a file from his desk. ‘And speaking of Americans, it seems we have another to cause us concern.’
He passed a file to Rafaela, his eyes scouring her blouse for a loose button as she leaned over to take it from him. He truly made her skin crawl.
She opened the file. There was a missing p
erson’s report and a photograph.
‘This girl is missing. Her parents are very concerned,’ he said. ‘It’s probably nothing. No doubt she is with some boy she has met. I’m sure we all know how young women can behave at that age. Anyway, the consulate are very concerned, too, so I told them that even though a missing person is hardly a priority, with everything that is happening now, I would assign one of my top people to investigate.’ He smiled again. She felt sick. ‘Someone whose integrity could never be questioned. Someone of the highest moral standards.’
‘You think something has happened to her?’ she asked, wanting, needing to hear the lies pour from his mouth.
‘I don’t think so. But who knows? There are so many criminals out there, bad people. We know that better than most. We have to deal with them every day.’
She smiled back at him. ‘Yes, we do. Very bad people.’
He gave a little nod, his sign that the meeting was over. She got up and walked out. She could feel his eyes all over her every step of the way.
In the corridor, she opened the file again. It was as much as she could do not to laugh. This was perfect. This was how they operated. They gave the case to someone whom everyone, the Americans included, knew was beyond reproach, not because they wanted the girl found — hell, they could do that with a phone call — but to give the appearance that they did. Smoke and mirrors. Deception. Double talk. But perhaps this time they had been too clever for their own good. She was looking for the girl in any case, but now she had their approval. They were counting on her not being crazy enough to find her. Maybe they were right. Or maybe they were wrong. By doing her job and finding a girl whom important people did care about then perhaps she could secure justice for all those whom no one cared about.
And if she was wrong about that she could be wrong about the Americans. As her boss had told them when he had returned from his management training across the border, ‘There is no such thing as a problem. There is only an opportunity in disguise.’
Forty-two
Every time the door opened, Julia flinched. She couldn’t help it. It was the sound. The groan it made as it shifted on its hinges. She knew it would stay with her for a very long time — if she lived.
The older man was standing over her, legs apart, chest stuck out.
‘Julia,’ he said. He was Mexican and his words held the accent but his English was good.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. ‘Yes?’
‘I am going to take off these handcuffs now, okay? You can go to the bathroom, take a shower, clean yourself up. But I want you to know that if you try to run there is nowhere for you to go. There is no way you can escape until I decide to let you go. Do you understand me, Julia?’
As he said that, she felt like she might cry. Her throat tightened and tears gathered in her eyes. It was the thought of home, of being free from this nightmare. She fought it. She didn’t want him to see her break down. She hadn’t broken down when it was happening. She had taken her mind somewhere else and it had worked. She had been aware of what they were doing but she hadn’t felt present. ‘I understand,’ she said.
‘That’s good, Julia. Because if you behave and do what we say then maybe you’ll be able to go home. But first we have to get you cleaned up.’
He knelt down and freed her arms and legs. She noticed that he was very deliberate about where he placed himself when he clicked each shackle. He stayed out of range of a kick or a punch. Her ankles and wrists were bruised and swollen. She had lost all feeling in her feet hours before. She wiggled her fingers and rubbed the sensation back into her feet and calves.
‘That’s okay, take your time. There’s no rush,’ he said.
Eventually, she felt she could stand. Putting her palms on the floor, she started to lever herself to her feet.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let me help you.’
He put his hands under her armpits and lifted her. She recoiled a little at his touch, but as soon as she was standing, he let her go.
‘Will you be okay on the stairs?’ he asked her. So polite. So solicitous. The situation was so surreal that part of her expected to wake in her room in the resort.
As she took the stairs he stayed behind her. His presence seemed reassuring rather than threatening. At the top, the door was wedged open. She began to walk along a corridor. Halfway down, he tapped her elbow. She half turned. He held out a pair of sunglasses. ‘If you have been in the dark too long, the sun can hurt your eyes,’ he said.
She took them from him and put them on. The corridor darkened but not by much. He directed her through a door into another corridor. They passed a large room, the door open, sunlight blazing through a window. He was right: she would have been blinded without the sunglasses. She felt a breeze, then heard something that brought a lump to her throat. Outside a bird was chirping, running up and down a warbling set of scales. She realized that while she had been in that room she had heard nothing from outside. No birds. No footsteps. Nothing. It must have been soundproofed.
Past a bedroom there was another door. He darted ahead of her and opened it into a large, tiled bathroom. ‘There is a lock on the inside,’ he said, ‘so you can have some privacy. But please remember what I said. There is no escape unless you follow my orders.’
She walked past him and into the bathroom. There was a tub and a separate shower, a washbasin and toilet, even a bidet. The tiles were green, yellow and red. The door closed behind her. Without thinking she walked back to it and turned the key. She had gone from one locked room to another, but this time she had secured the door herself.
As she ran a bath, she sat on the toilet and thought about what the man had said. If she did as they said and didn’t try to escape, she might be released. He had sounded so sincere when he had said it. She hadn’t thought to question him.
Forty-three
Walking into the small resort hotel, Rafaela had to steel herself for what lay ahead. For those who never knew the fate of a loved one, hope obstructed healing. As the days passed, hope itself became twisted and cancerous, an emotion that turned in on itself. Rafaela had seen it more times than she cared to remember. It was a cliche, but not knowing what had happened to someone you loved was the worst part of an abduction. With human remains came certainty. And certainty gave grief a starting point. That wasn’t to say that someone who lost a child was ever free of the pain, they weren’t, but knowledge of what had happened during a loved one’s final hours was almost always preferable to what the imagination conjured.
Of course, Julia’s family were only at the beginning of the road. Hope was there, and hope was real. They still had that glimmer of light in the darkness. It was Rafaela’s job to convince them that the best way of keeping it burning was to do as she asked. And she was about to ask them to do the one thing that went against every single parental instinct. For now the best thing they could do was nothing. No press. No public plea. No drawing attention to their plight. All it would do was make Julia’s survival less likely — assuming she was still alive.
Julia’s parents and a young man from the US consulate were sitting outside in the sun as the hotel staff scuttled around their table, trading anxious glances. It wasn’t just that a guest at the resort had gone missing — presumed abducted: it was akin to having wealthy relatives visit, when their worst suspicions about how you lived were confirmed and your dirtiest secrets were laid bare before them.
Julia’s father was a tall, lean man in his fifties with a shock of white hair and frameless glasses. The girl’s mother was, Rafaela guessed, a few years younger, with long, strawberry-blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was clutching a picture of her daughter, taken only a few days before, the backdrop of the hotel’s pool visible from where they sat. Julia was standing next to her father, one hand raised to shield her eyes. She looked tanned, happy and relaxed. Her smile, a little forced, a little over-sincere, suggested a young woman who was mature enough to understand her parents’ need to cling to h
er as she began to carve out a life apart from them.
Rafaela began by asking the father to take her through the period before his daughter had gone missing. She didn’t interrupt him. He was already frustrated at having to tread again over old ground. He wanted his daughter back.
She made notes as he talked. The young man from the consulate tapped his fingers on the table. A glance from the mother stopped him as the father concluded his story, his voice cracking as he told of the last time he had seen Julia.
Rafaela cleared her throat and thanked him for his patience. Her next job was to offer some reassurance. ‘I already have at least a dozen officers making enquiries. I want you and the US government to know how seriously we’re taking this. That’s the first thing.’
The mother leaned forward. ‘So you think something’s happened to her?’
This was where things got difficult. Rafaela didn’t think, she knew, but sharing that information wasn’t going to help them.
Straightening in her seat, Rafaela made sure she met the woman’s gaze. ‘I don’t know anything for certain other than that your daughter is missing.’
The father stiffened. ‘I don’t believe you.’
The young consular official intervened: ‘I think for now we have to-’
The father cut him off: ‘I’m believing shit from these people.’ He stared straight at Rafaela, whose heart was racing now. ‘You know something, and don’t tell me you don’t because I can see it in your eyes.’ His hand shot out across the table and grabbed her wrist.
‘John, please!’
Rafaela made a quick calculation. ‘I don’t know anything for definite,’ she said, ‘but I have my suspicions based upon recent events here.’
His grip loosened a little. He must have felt he was getting somewhere. ‘What events?’
‘Kidnap for ransom is a growing problem. I’m not saying that’s what this is but it’s a possibility.’
