by Sean Black
The police chief threw the bags on to the bed nearest the window, the frame creaking as they hit the mattress. Lock shut the door to hide the transaction from prying eyes.
Zapatero noticed Miriam Mendez and his eyebrows shot halfway up his forehead. ‘What’s she doing here?’ he asked.
The question spoke volumes. Zapatero obviously knew exactly who she was. ‘Deal of the week,’ said Lock. ‘Buy one, get one free.’
Rafaela ignored the exchange, dumping the other two bags on the floor before standing back, positioning herself at the far wall, away from the window.
Zapatero smiled. ‘You’re very thorough, Mr Lock. Perhaps you could assist my department again. We always need resourceful men such as yourself and your friend.’
‘You can drop the act,’ Lock said, with a nod to Rafaela. ‘She knows you’re in bed with Tibialis and the cartel. So do I. This is a one-off deal.’
Miriam Mendez started to her feet, and this time no gun was going to stop her as she advanced on Lock. ‘You can’t do this. They’ll kill us both. I gave you three million dollars.’
Lock matched Zapatero’s smile. ‘Except it wasn’t your money to give, was it, Mrs Mendez? It belonged to the cartel. To Chief Zapatero’s friend Mr Tibialis. Isn’t that right?’
The woman flushed. ‘They weren’t complaining. My family gave them what they wanted.’
‘And what was that, Mrs Mendez?’
Her lips thinned with rage. Zapatero started towards her but Rafaela drew her weapon and pointed it at his head. ‘Let her answer the question,’ she said.
‘What did they want from you, Mrs Mendez?’ Lock pressed. ‘It couldn’t have been money. They were paying you.’
A darkness passed over Miriam Mendez’s face. Her expression soured. She reminded Lock of the Santa Muerte skeletons he’d seen in Diablo. ‘There are two types of money in this world, Mr Lock. Dirty and clean. They had the first kind and we could turn it into the second for them. Like lead into gold.’
‘You mean you could launder it?’ Lock said.
Zapatero was getting twitchy. ‘Don’t listen to her. She’s a crazy old woman. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. This is a law-enforcement matter,’ he said, buying time as his hand inched towards the butt of his Glock.
Lock shook his head. ‘Hey, Chief. Did no one ever tell you that you got to have equal numbers for a stand-off?’
His hand fell away from the holster.
‘Now,’ said Lock, ‘Mrs Mendez, why don’t you continue?’
Her lips thinned again. ‘I’ve said all I’m prepared to say.’
‘Oh, I highly doubt that,’ said Lock, as the connecting door and main door burst open simultaneously and half a dozen men clad in black body armour, with POLICE emblazoned in blue lettering across their backs, rushed into the room.
‘US Marshals! Keep your hands where we can see them,’ they said, gun-facing everyone, Lock and Ty included.
Lock, Ty and Rafaela dropped their weapons, following the Marshals’ instructions to the letter. Within sixty seconds, all six of the room’s occupants were face down on the motel-room floor, hands cuffed behind their backs.
Either side of the motel room, doors opened to disgorge Arizona State Police and Federal agents who had been secreted inside, waiting for the go signal. Within minutes, the parking lot was bumper to bumper with law-enforcement vehicles.
Out on the highway, a red Dodge Charger, sporting Texas plates and with four Hispanic males inside, pulled a wide U-turn and sped off in the opposite direction. No one moved to stop it. The men inside would be allowed to go back across the border, where they would relay the news of Zapatero’s arrest by the US authorities to the cartel.
Lock kissed mouldy motel-room carpet as first Miriam and then Charlie Mendez were lifted to their feet and taken outside by the Marshals Arrest Response Team. Zapatero was next, his escort two clean-cut FBI agents, who looked fresh out of the box at Quantico. Lock, Ty and Rafaela were relieved of their weapons, uncuffed and helped to their feet as the motel’s Hispanic front-desk clerk strode into the room and extended a hand to Lock.
‘Armando Hernandez, US State Department.’
Lock shook his hand. ‘You boys get everything you need?’
‘We had a lot of it worked out already, but nothing beats hearing it from the horse’s mouth. You all okay?’ Hernandez asked.
A couple of Federal agents squeezed past him, picking up the holdalls with the ransom money, tagging them and taking pictures with a small digital camera before hauling them into the other room. Ty watched the bags with the expression of a kid who’d just been told that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
‘We’re good. Don’t worry about Tyrone,’ Lock said, placing a hand on his partner’s shoulder. ‘He’s just a little emotional right now.’
‘That’s for damn straight,’ said Ty.
As soon as the area outside the motel was secured, they emerged into the midday sunlight, Lock, Ty and Rafaela. Rafaela walked out into the middle of the parking lot and, cupping her hand over her eyes, looked out over the open countryside beyond the road that fronted the motel. Lock stood next to her.
‘He came to kill me,’ she said.
Lock followed her gaze out over the desert. The landscape here didn’t look all that different from what he’d seen on the other side of the border. The people hadn’t been that different either. Most of them, anyway. The silent majority who wanted to raise their families in peace.
‘Who came?’ he asked her, as behind them Ty, still pissed at having to sacrifice the money, tapped his foot against the rear wheel of an Arizona State Police cruiser.
‘The bodyguard,’ Rafaela said. ‘Hector.’
‘Didn’t do much of a job,’ said Lock.
‘I showed him the same pictures of the girls that I showed you.’
‘What did he say?’
Rafaela lapsed into silence. Her eyes narrowed. ‘I think he understood the pain. He felt it too.’
‘Maybe that’s all any of us can do,’ said Lock, as across the parking lot Charlie Mendez was bundled into the back of a police cruiser for the long drive north to his new home at Pelican Bay Supermax.
Epilogue
Two Months Later
Lock’s fiancee, Carrie Delaney, had been buried close to her parents’ house in Connecticut. After her death, while they were making arrangements for the funeral, they had asked Lock for his thoughts on her final resting-place. Because his work involved so much travel, he had thought it best that she stayed close to them. What meagre roots he had lay with her, and she was gone. She had been his home.
This was his first visit to her grave in a little more than four months. He suspected that, however good anyone’s intentions, lengthening intervals between such visits were the reality.
He had brought a small bunch of white lilies with him. Falling on to one knee, and feeling the poignancy of that motion, he laid them gently against her gravestone, next to some other flowers placed there by her mother a few days before.
He had visited her parents earlier that morning. They were, as they had been since her death, warm and welcoming. He wasn’t sure that he would have felt the same way. It had been his mistake that had led to her death in California, but they graciously saw it as just that — a mistake, a cruel intervention of Fate.
While he had sat in their living room drinking coffee, he had told them about events in Mexico. The story had splashed big on both sides of the border, although the Justice Department, for reasons of their own, had managed to downplay his involvement. He and Ty had helped them out by spending the past few months very firmly off-the-radar.
Since the trap that they had helped set for Miriam Mendez and Police Chief Zapatero in the motel room outside Phoenix, events had moved fast. Charlie Mendez was now inside the Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay. For his own safety, he would remain there indefinitely, alone in a single cell, allowed out for a solitary hour of exercise once a day. It was, as far as
Lock saw it, a fate worse than death. More importantly, he was where he could do no harm to any other young woman. Despite the white-hot rush of anger he had felt when he’d pursued him, Lock had realized that Melissa’s wish to see him returned to serve the sentence handed down by the court had been right and proper. It would have been easy for Lock to put a bullet in Mendez’s brain. It would also have been wrong.
In what some might have seen as a righteous act of karma, Miriam Mendez wasn’t going to make it to trial, never mind a jail cell. Her cancer had returned, for real this time, and she was, according to his contacts in Santa Barbara, deteriorating fast. Death’s hand on her shoulder must have woken something in her conscience because she had handed the US government all of the details of the family’s deal with the cartel. In return for her son’s protection, the cartel had used the family’s varied business interests as a way of laundering their drug money — at a nice profit for both sides. Police Chief Zapatero, knowing that his arrest by the US authorities was as good as a death sentence, had, in return for immunity from prosecution, confirmed her story.
On the other side of the border Manuel Managua, the politician, had been arrested. Federico Tibialis could not be found. There was a ten-million-dollar price on his head but he had more money than either God or Santa Muerte, and would likely stay on the run for longer than Charlie Mendez had managed. Despite Ty’s best efforts to convince him to reprise their new career, Lock had decided that their temporary detour into bounty hunting was best left at that.
Like her boss, Rafaela had also been offered protection by the US government — albeit under terms dictated by the fact that she was wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. At first she had turned down their offer of Federal protection, until a long, exhausting talk with Lock had persuaded her that she was more useful to everyone alive. She was staying at a secret location somewhere in the United States and helping both governments piece together what had happened to the young women she thought of as her girls. Depressingly for everyone, the vile activities of the three men, Managua, Tibialis and Zapatero, still accounted for only a fraction of the deaths. There were other predators out there in the borderlands. The killings were an epidemic.
Julia was slowly coming to terms with her ordeal, and receiving private counselling, paid for by Lock when her parents had been told by their private insurance company that their policy didn’t cover the treatment she needed. Julia might never be the same person, but she would come to terms with what had happened and, he prayed, be able to move on with her life. He had long since realized that was as good as it got. You made your peace with events. You didn’t forget, but if you took one day at a time then slowly you found that life went on.
Lock stood in front of Carrie’s grave for a while longer until his eyes were wet and his bones chilled. After an hour, he turned around and walked back towards the cemetery gates. Ty was waiting for him with Angel, the Labrador he had adopted with Carrie and who had been staying with friends of Ty while he and Lock worked.
The dog danced excitedly at Lock’s feet, and he reached down to scratch behind its ears. Finally Ty said, ‘Dumb question, I know, but you okay, brother?’
With no artifice between the two men, Lock shook his head. ‘Still hurts, Ty. Hurts like hell.’
His friend placed a massive hand on Lock’s shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t mean nothing if it didn’t.’
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