"Did you order something?" she asked behind her, but Sam had already wandered off to the bedroom. She took a deep drag of her cigarette and watched the vehicle's side door slide open.
Inside, a pair of tall black men waited, expectant, hunched over. It took a moment, but then Lydia recalled two bruisers just like them pushing a wheelchair into the studio office. One of the thugs spotted her and waved, friendly enough. So it was them, the Smullen hired hands. What was this all about? As if in answer, the two gangsters grappled with a dark pile on the floor of the van. Lydia gasped with horror, as the pile turned into a rolled up blanket, and then the naked body of a child spinning out onto the sidewalk. Another cheerful wave from the two men, and the van took off.
Chapter 28
Tommy drove expertly down the rough, stone-filled gully to the shore, dodging boulders and turning away from the threatening gaps of sand. He had apparently spent most of his seventeen summers with his Dad off-roading all over the Alta and Baja California deserts. He knew exactly what he was doing, even if the sudden twists and bumps made Sheri wonder how he had kept his shiny white teeth. She imitated the other, smaller blond boy Mike and hung onto the roll bar from her perch in the back seat. She tried to avoid biting off her tongue or slamming her knees into the metal sides of the Jeep.
A plume of thick dust fled out of their wheels and blossomed behind them into a white wall that blotted out the trail. At the washout to the ocean, the plume finally caught up with them. They parked and piled out of the vehicle, choking and waving their hands ineffectually in front of their faces. Around them, a moonscape of dead bluffs and desiccated desert plants rose back into what struck Sheri as the most unforgiving of country.
She had told the two boys—and that was how she thought of them now—that she was searching for the remains of a wealthy shipwreck off the coast here within the last week or so. She had heard that the crew—friends of hers, actually—had been blown overboard by a sudden and inexplicable explosion. The boys bought the story, even though they had heard nothing like that on the surfer grapevine, bought it so easily, that it almost made Sheri feel guilty. She was beginning to suspect that she had misjudged the pair. As the three of them fanned out across the beach, the boys leapt about the scavenger hunt with the good-natured adventurousness of young surfer knights helping out a damsel in some inexplicable state of distress.
There were too many rocks to drive this stretch of the shore, as there had been at the last two points where they left the Transpeninsular for the ocean. Tommy insisted on staying close to his father's Jeep, but Mike sprinted off a mile down the coast, burning up energy more than actually helping. Sheri found herself somewhere in between, checking around the boulders and up and down the bluffs and smaller gullies. She was about to return to the Jeep, when Mike sprinted back, breathless.
"There's tracks down there, south along the beach. And houses farther down." So they piled back into the Jeep and backed out of the wash, looking for the turn-off they must have missed. Another half-hour of bumping, twisting, and choking on the fine gray dust, and they were back on the shore, running in the smooth, hard tracks in the sand and kicking up a spray whenever the surf caught up with them. The boys exhilarated in the ride, whooping and hollering and carrying Sheri reluctantly along with them.
The houses turned out to be a trio of shacks built out of flotsam and odd bits of metal and nestled half-hidden in the rocks halfway up the bluffs. Fisherman huts, by the looks of the family out on the flats digging in the sand. Tommy drove to within hailing distance and stopped the Jeep. An old woman and what might have been her daughter and three grandchildren stood in their bare feet with their pants legs rolled up, digging something out of the sand and tossing it into a rusty pail.
"Don't worry, I speak Spanish," Mike offered and set Tommy off laughing. "I do!" Mike insisted. Then he cupped his hands together and yelled "Hola!" to the women. Sheri and Tommy waved with him, and the wary women seemed to relax. A man came out of the farthest hut with a fishing rod in his hand, an uncertain smile on his lips. Mike strode into the group, confident, nodding, leading the way.
"Hola! Cómo estás?" he asked.
"Hola," the family all repeated.
Friendly nods all around, then Mike turned to Sheri. "What do you want me to ask them?"
Sheri had to think about that one. If she came right out and said what she wanted, chances were, the boys and the family would all beat it out of here and leave her stranded. But there was only so far she could cushion it. "Ask if they've heard about a gringo getting washed ashore nearby."
Mike surprised her by blushing. Tommy fell over laughing. "I told you," he chortled at his friend's sudden loss of chatter. "Eighth grade Spanish my ass."
"You know so much, why don't you try?"
"Shit no, bro. I failed the same semester you did. Try hombre, mucho hombre swimmino." Tommy's waving arms and sense of humor carried him on through the smaller Mike tackling and shoving him to the ground.
Sheri had watched playful bear cubs on TV that would have been more use than these two. She turned, nonplused, to the bemused family and tried the pantomime that had failed her thus far. By the time the two boys fell back exhausted from their tumbling and name-calling, Sheri was pretty sure the clam-digging family had heard nothing of a swimmer mysteriously appearing out of the sea. She turned back to the Jeep, more depressed than ever. The boys followed and caught her mood. The three of them sat in the vehicle, staring out at the incoming tide.
"I suppose we should find a place to camp out," Sheri finally offered. The sun was maybe a half-hour away from dipping below the horizon.
"Out here?" Tommy asked warily, making Sheri wonder what the boys had been doing the last few nights.
"Not here. These people look harmless, but we don't know them. Farther down the beach."
So Tommy drove off again and followed the tracks a mile on the rocky sand, then up a hill away from the beach, then back down again and around the shore to the mouth of another wash. They pulled off behind a large outcrop above the high tide mark and climbed out.
"We'll need wood for a fire," Sheri suggested. Mike immediately set off up into the bluffs. Sheri started looking for a more or less flat place to lie out, while Tommy pulled out the provisions she had bought at the general store in the last town.
"We have a tent," Tommy said. "We just never needed it yet."
"Where'd you stay?"
"People, surf colonies. We've only been down here three days. You want me to set it up?"
"Sure. Might as well."
It was only when Mike returned with armloads of brush and started helping Tommy with the tent, that Sheri realized what she had got herself into. The two boys barely suppressed their giggles. Maybe she had forgotten about her near-offer earlier in the day, but they obviously hadn't. They finished raising the tent, just as she got the fire going and the sun went down. The three of them lolled around, eating raw corn tortillas and hunks of a Mexican cheese and dried sausage, until Sheri only saw one way out of her predicament. She opened her pack, took out the handgun, slammed a clip into it, and pulled back the slide.
"Just in case," she said to their stunned faces. "I've heard about bandits preying on tourists around here."
The action caused the exact opposite of what she had intended. Far from being intimidated, both boys fell over each other begging her to let them touch it, handle it, play with it. She held off until their whining grew excruciating. "Okay, okay!" she finally conceded. She dropped the clip out of the gun the way she had practiced it her first night back on land. Just to be safe, she held the gun pointed out to sea and pulled the trigger. She hadn't counted on this. The gun blew back in her hands and knocked her flat on her ass. She threw it away from her, and both boys leapt aside. Then they all fell to laughing their nerve-wracked butts off at the silliness of their panic.
Finally, there was no delaying the inevitable, and Sheri climbed into the tent in the middle between them. Both boys' nerves
rang as taut as steel wires. Sheri buried her head in her backpack, the gun safely unloaded and hidden underneath. She felt the accidental shifts and touches of the two horny adolescents, trying to remember all of those smut books and seduction guides they had read. It was so pathetic, that she thought of Rudy and burst out crying.
And not just any old weep of fear or frayed nerves. For the first time since she landed on the beach, Sheri let it all go. Rudy, her Rudy, was dead. She would never see him again. All the fruitless searching and wandering was for nothing. He was gone. She would never find him again.
The tears built into a loud wail she tried to muffle in the backpack. Both of the boys responded with alarm and then fear for her, and then soft little caresses of comfort on her back and shoulders. They cooed and murmured like they must have seen other human beings do in this situation, and all their kindnesses just made it worse. Sheri cried herself a deluge there, lying on the edge of the huge, black, pitiless ocean that had swallowed up the love of her life. By the time she ran out of energy to fill her tears with, she felt like a rag wrung out over a sink.
But at least she had morphed from a mystery woman into a motherly, sisterly apparition both young surfer knights felt duty bound to protect.
Chapter 29
Sam leaned across the front seat and glanced out past the stone-faced Lydia at the Mexican border guard. The Mexicans almost never stopped cars coming into Mexico, much less expensive German imports with gringas at the wheel. Lydia stared straight ahead, silent and angry, not giving a damn. Sam detected a trace of sympathy from the border guard, as he glanced first at the furious woman, then at him. At least Lydia kept her mouth shut and didn't tell the man to fuck himself.
"You have insurance for your car, Señor?" the guard asked skeptically.
Sam grinned and nodded. Virtually every guidebook ever printed included a reference to the ghastly error of driving an expensive car across the Tijuana border. Yet Sam and his brother's violent gang had been doing it for years. This stretch of the Baja, from Tijuana down to Ensenada, was their drunken stomping grounds as teenagers, and they had stomped through here ever since. Just not as a sick old geezer with a defenseless woman at the wheel.
The border guard didn't really care anyway and waved them onward. Sam settled back into the seat and smirked. "You might at least make an effort to smile for the guys with the guns."
"Fuck off."
"That sounds like my favorite southern belle."
"I said fuck off."
"So you did, and for the tenth time since last night. I'm supposed to be the foul-mouthed linguist around here."
Lydia ignored him and took the road through the city and around to the Transpeninsular Highway headed south for Ensenada. She hadn't managed a civil word since the night before when the detectives gave up questioning them about the body on the sidewalk and left their apartment. There were times when Lydia's naïve, black-and-white view of the world befuddled Sam. As if spilling their guts to a pair of tired Redondo gumshoes would help the dead girl or protect any of them from the vicious reach of a big-city drug lord.
Sam forced Lydia to clamp shut her jaw, refused to even call the police when the dead child first flew out of the van. Refused to identify anyone, when the police responded to the next-door neighbor's frantic emergency call. Refused to even let his wife admit to being at home when the outrage occurred. According to Sam's story, he had doddered alone all night on the couch with his chemo and colostomy bag and seen nothing. The patrolmen and detectives didn't believed a word out of his mouth, but who gave a damn what they thought? This was serious big-city shit, not the cotton candy fluff of a dreamy southern belle existence.
Sam knew exactly what his brother Henry would have done. By now, Donny and Mischa would be sitting outside a firebomb of a building on Western Avenue, machine-gunning every fleeing soul, innocent or otherwise. Something like this would have sent Henry crashing over the edge into his most convincing psychotic stage act. But for Sam, things were trickier. When Henry died and the gang started to fall apart, others moved in quickly to fill the vacuum. By the time Mischa sailed out his eleventh-story window, new players owned the field, and Sam knew none of them. And in spite of a hint here and there over the years from an uninformed detective or journalist, Sam had never been more than a civilian to begin with. So when it came to resources in dealing with big city drug gangs, Sam owned none.
It didn't help with Lydia, that the eleven-year-old girl was already long dead when the Smullen brothers decided to bludgeon two birds with one stone. Body disposal from an accidental overdose, combined with a nicely pointed threat. They could do whatever the fuck they wanted to Sam and Lydia, if they didn't cough up the punk kid with the killer convertible. But just in case Sam was still connected, they hadn't really done anything at all, except force him to spend a few hours with the police. Sam was pretty sure he had read the tealeaves and Abe Smullen's intricate mind. The needle tracks the detective mentioned on the child's arm pretty much confirmed it.
But Lydia, flipping Lydia. "Pull over," Sam told her. They were cruising along at light speed on the furious adrenalin still gushing through her veins. This stretch of highway was the only place along the Baja where the BC Federales could patrol and write speeding tickets without getting their shiny new vehicles dirty.
"Pull over where?"
"I don't give a shit! Just pull over. We have to talk."
An exit approached for one of the tiny seaside resorts that dotted this stretch of coast. Lydia shot off the highway and down a long palm-lined street. In the parking lot of a resort hotel overlooking the Pacific, she got out, slammed the door, and left Sam sitting there. He found her ten minutes later out on a deck, glaring at a gruesome-looking green piña colada and silently crying to herself.
Sam bypassed the issue of the untouched drink and sat down. "Look I'm sorry," he said and meant it. Truly. But what was an old guy like him supposed to do about a catastrophe like Rudy? Sooner or later, an accident-prone punk like that fool always landed in a ditch with his empty brains blown out.
Lydia spread the wet mascara across her eyes with a finger and glared at him vehemently. "You are not letting this go."
"What do you—"
"I don't give a shit what your lousy brother taught you, and I don't give a shit about the real world you think you live in. I don't want to live anywhere near it. I'd rather die."
"And it might come to that," Sam tried, but she cut that one off with a dismissive wave.
"I don't give a damn. Didn't you hear me? You're not letting it go."
Sam sighed and gazed out at the water. "Okay," he finally said. "I guess it's time to level with you." Something about adding another few inches on top of the shit pile of her anger.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"We're not down here for a vacation."
"Oh really? Now there's a shocker."
"How did you—"
"Just shut up and give it to me. And if you bullshit me this time, I'll know."
"Okay, I hear you. Rudy's disappeared, the boat's sunk, and Sheri's out looking for him. All right? You satisfied?"
Lydia leapt to her feet and sent her chair crashing backward. "Wait!" Sam said. "You think I give a shit? I came down here for you!"
"What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"Sheri has no papers, and she thinks Rudy's dead. They got hijacked somewhere, and she might have shot somebody. I don't know. She wasn’t exactly coherent. She's in bad shape, and if we don't do something, you'll never forgive either of us."
Lydia righted her chair and sat down again. A waiter approached, alarmed. So that was what it took to get service around here. Sam ordered coffee for both of them and waved the waiter off. He took Lydia's hand, she wrenched it away, he grabbed it back and held on, in as strong a grip as his chemo hands could manage. "I already figured we had to do something. You think I just discovered that ramrod up your ass last night?"
Lydia glanced at him sharply,
but caught the concession in the insult and let it pass. "Fine. What are you going to do?"
"I figured we would start with the hospitals south of Ensenada. There can't be that many of them."
"South of Ensenada?"
"That's what she said."
"Where is she?"
"I have no idea. But this is the Baja. You've been here. It's a long, miserable snake of a desert, with a handful of small towns and villages along the way. There are only so many places they can hide."
Lydia stared at Sam a long, silent minute. "Spit it," he finally said.
"You're not going to blow me off. Not this time. You're going to take care of this, and then you're going to go home and do something about those Smullen bastards. And I don't give a damn if you kill all of us."
"I got that."
"I don't care—"
"I got it, all right? Now shut up and drink your coffee, and let's get out of here."
They paid and went back to the car and took off down the coast. It was a gorgeous day, the skies clear, the ocean a deep shade of blue. But it was all a mirage, and the landscape quickly dried out as they left the irrigated resort coast behind. By the time they rolled into the mess of Ensenada, the sun beat down on a parched desert land that had been swallowing up misguided intruders like Rudy Spavik, Sheri Ballin, and Sam and Lydia Spaulding for more than five hundred years.
Chapter 30
No one said a word when Sheri and the boys awoke in a jumble of bodies the next morning. Sheri came to first, edged herself out from under Tommy's leg and Mike's shoulder, and crawled out of the tent. The boys woke up with the movement and lolled around to consciousness like sailors exhausted from a drunken night in port.
Sheri hid the gun and clip in her backpack before they noticed and rooted around in the scattering of their belongings for scraps of paper. She climbed the bluffs, looking for privacy and wondering about the protocol for this sort of thing. She found a cleft between two rocks and awkwardly supported herself, then gingerly pushed the paper down into the dirt afterward and covered it with a handful of rocks. All rather crude and embarrassing, even for a former flower child's child.
Exposure Page 14
