The Terror of Tijuana

by S. J. Varengo

  Dan and Neal looked at one another abashedly and did as the man suggested. Neal then went on to explain about seeing the article and the picture of the two artifacts that he very much hoped would be proven to be batteries, and how he’d talked his friend into taking the trip with him in hopes of seeing first hand. As he spoke, the guards continued to chuckle quietly. Apparently, the fact that there would be no gun play had improved their spirits as well. Dan knew it had brightened his day.

  By the time Neal finished explaining, the men had walked slowly in their direction, and they now formed a single group of seven. The leader held out his hand.

  “Name’s Schmidt, head of security,” he said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the Doc if he’s not too busy.”

  “Schmidt! That was some pretty good Spanish cursing for a guy named Schmidt,” Neal said as he enthusiastically pumped the captain’s hand.

  “You do what you gotta, ya know?” Schmidt said as they walked toward the activity. Three of the guards stayed behind.

  “I do know,” Neal said. “From the instant I saw the photos, I knew I had to get here.”

  As they reached the excavation, Schmidt motioned for guard who’d accompanied them to look for the man he’d called “Doc.”

  “You mentioned the cartel,” Dan said as they waited. “Have they been bothering you?”

  “Not really, but this close to Tijuana, they are like cockroaches. It’s not a matter of if some will come crawling around.”

  “But when, huh?” Dan said, concluding the thought.

  “Exactly,” Schmidt answered. As he did, a slight clamor arose to their right. The security chief’s expression darkened. “Wait here,” he said as he ran in the direction of the noise.

  Dan and Neal waited several increasingly uncomfortable minutes. At length, a man wearing cut-offs and a Lynyrd Skynyrd tee-shirt came in their direction. His beard was epic in proportion, reaching to below his chest, but was wildly unkempt. His bushy brown hair had been crammed under a khaki hat, which was drenched with sweat. He came alongside the men and held out his hand. “Bjarki Einarsson,” he said, his accent distinctive.

  “Doc?” Neal asked hopefully.

  The man nodded. “Yeah. Icelandic names don’t exactly roll off the Mexican tongue. So Doc works.” He was clearly distracted and kept looking over his shoulder in the direction of the continued commotion. “I’m afraid your arrival may turn out to be a portent of great disaster,” he said.

  “How so?” Dan asked.

  “Until today, everything about this site seemed to indicate that it had just been abandoned. There was no sign of any human remains, at least not in the areas we’ve worked up thus far.”

  “Until today?” Neal’s spirit, which had just recovered from thinking it was about to be freed from its mortal cask, now started to fall as he began to sense that he did not like where the archaeologist’s story was going.

  “Until today. Today, we found human remains.”

  “But, isn’t that good?” Dan asked. “I’d think that would change everything.”

  “Oh, it definitely changes everything. The remains are quite fresh, I’m afraid.”

  Nicole approached the building cautiously, at the same time appearing as though walking through the glass and steel entry was a common, everyday occurrence. Just as Manny had, Nicole saw that the doors had no security, and this got her thinking that the disenfranchised were assigned the same lack of value just about everywhere in the world. She’d noticed it in Europe and Asia time and time again. The rich kept themselves safe, simultaneously deciding that the poor would either have to fend for themselves or, preferably, just be weeded out by the arm of natural selection propelled by crime and violence.

  The entry opened into a lobby, which was probably well lit when the building opened, but now received most of its illumination from what sun could squeeze through the glass doors and the few windows that it boasted. For its neglected lightbulbs, the lobby appeared neat, but when she reached the door to the staircase by which she could access the basement, she was immediately met by the same malodorous amalgam of scents, with human urine being the dominant ingredient in the bouquet that had greeted Emmanuel.

  As she descended, she saw cast-off liquor and cerveza bottles, a few intact but most shattered. At the bottom of the stairs was a small landing. She looked at the inset light panel above her. The fixture had at one point held three fluorescent tubes, but now one was missing altogether, one had been reduced to a broken shard hanging crazily from a single terminal, and the third was flickering gamely without casting much in the way of usable luminosity.

  This bullshit is by design, she thought, reaching into her bag for the pistol as she pulled the door open. The basement hallway that she now entered was as poorly lit as the staircase. There was no doubt in her mind that someone wanted the area to be dark.

  She paused at the laundry room, seeing the unused, mostly broken washers and dryers sitting unused. She was able to reach the nearest from the doorway and dragged her index finger across its top. It came back with a smudge of dust, indicating that it had been a while since anyone had even bothered walking into the room, at least to do laundry. More broken glass suggested alternative usage.

  The next three rooms she came to had signs marking them as storage. All three were closed tightly and were actually secured with number-pad locks. Their presence indicated to Nicole that they were probably used by apartment management rather than the tenants, as no thought to resident security had been visible thus far.

  Number-pad locks were considered by many to be very difficult to defeat, but in Nicole’s experience, they were among the least secure. Figuring out which keys were used was as simple as brushing a little powder from an innocent-looking compact in her purse across them. The “hot” keys grabbed the powder due to the oil from the numerous fingertips that had operated them. She saw to her delight that each of the three doors had fingerprints on the same three keys, marked 1, 4, and 9. If she’d had to consider all ten keys (zero through nine) the possible number of combinations would have been about a hundred thousand, as compared to the ten thousand that four smudged keys would have indicated. Since she knew which of the keys were used, the quantity of permutations dropped to six, assuming all three were used only once. She was about to begin with “1-4-9” on the lock closest to the stairway, when she thought she heard a sound, perhaps a cough, from one of the doors further along the hallway. Walking to each, she pressed her ear against them. When she reached the third door, she definitely heard the sound of a rustling movement.

  She started to key in the 1-4-9, but quickly realized that on this door at least she could have punched any keys with the same results. The slight pressure of her body against the door caused it to crack open before she’d hit the second number in the attempted combination. “Lots of broken shit,” she said under her breath.

  As quiet as her voice was, it seemed to trigger another slight movement from within the dark room. Unlike the hallways, there was no source of light from within at all. She reached to the small bag that hung from a strap that crossed from left shoulder to right hip and extracted a small Maglite, which cast a beam far more intense than its diminutive nature would indicate and which she trained on the spot her bullet would hit if she had to pull the trigger.

  Nicole pushed the door fully open to expose a chaotic mess of boxes and refuse. The smell that had plagued her nostrils since descending the stairs was amplified within the storage area. She scanned from left to right and saw that three piles of what seemed to her to be garbage. Whether constructed intentionally, or just the result of randomly tossed dross, two of the heaps were relatively close to the entry, while the third was further back in the room. It was larger than the other two, and as she shined the light upon it, she saw slight but definite movement on its right-most slope.

  “Muéstrate o te dispararé,” she said. Nicole expected one of two things to happen. One would be that a rat might scurry out of the pile or,
more likely, burrow further into it for safety. The other was the sound of a recently sleeping drunk groggily moaning “¡No dispares!” – “Don’t shoot!”

  Instead, she heard the most wretched gasping moan to ever escape from a human throat. This was followed by the croaked word “Help.”

  In English.

  “Fuck! Manny! Manny, is that you?”

  At the sound of the response, the garbage pile began to move in earnest. She hoped to see Manny stand and reveal himself, but all that emerged was a hand, then the forearm. It appeared and immediately fell limp, as even this small effort seemed to prove too much. She ran to it and began brushing away the aluminum cans and soggy paper that seemed to characterize the area. She’d set the light on the floor so that it shone on the pile but kept the gun in her hand as she continued to dig through the garbage. First, she excavated the rest of the arm, then the shoulder to which it was attached, and finally, a head. The face was badly damaged, clearly having been the target of a gunshot, but she could tell it was indeed Emmanuel Cruz. The eye on the left side of his face, just above the entry point of the bullet, was swollen shut, but the other blinked in the beam of light.

  “Who are you?” Manny spoke in a voice that was more an aural manifestation of pain than actual speaking.

  “It’s Nicole Porter, Manny. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  Nicole’s mind raced now. If Manny had been hit the same day he had texted Darlene, that would mean he’d been left for dead two days prior. She realized that a good deal of the putrid stench in the room was probably the result of the injured cleaner’s body attempting to function as normally as possible after being shot in the face. She carefully extracted him fully, checking for further injury as she did so. Remarkably, aside from the anterior damage, he appeared intact. But she could see that his lips were cracked beneath the dried blood that covered them. She reached again into her purse and extracted a bottle of drinking water. She held it to his lips and he drank eagerly. Even after a few sips, he seemed to improve slightly.

  “Nicole?” he asked shakily. “Could you maybe shine the light on yourself so I know you’re not lying?”

  With a smile, Cole reached for the Maglite and pointed it toward herself.

  “I’ve always thought you were pretty, but dammit, right now, you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I always thought you were pretty too, Manny,” she said as she helped him take another drink.

  He swallowed the water and said, “Not no more.”

  “Ah, it’s a scratch,” Nicole lied, looking at Manny’s ruined face. She knew that a very talented plastic surgeon might be able to reconstruct Cruz’s visage, but before that could happen, she’d have to get him out of here. Alive.

  10

  Curiouser and Curiouser

  The drive to the San Diego beach house seemed to take forever, at least from Tony’s point of view. He had never been a great long-distance car rider, even as a kid. On every trip the Porters took, Tony was the designated “Are we there yet?” guy. In fact, J.J. had once counted fifteen of them on a drive from their house to the grocery store. He was actually proud of himself for only asking once on the entire drive. Of course, he’d asked the question ten minutes after they left, but he counted it as a win.

  He had spent most of the trip in the back seat, listening to his sister and Cark getting to know one another, and that had been pretty much what Tony imagined hell was like.

  Still, he’d decided Marc was a pretty decent guy after all. He’d stopped calling Tony “#12” and, as it turned out, he was fairly funny. No, the problem wasn’t Marc.

  It was J.J. that was tromping on his last nerve.

  Being two years younger than her, he’d grown up watching her change from his big sister who treated him like he was one of her dress-up dolls to a typical pre-teen girl with pop-star crushes and whispered phone calls to her equally pre-teen, pop-star-infected girlfriends. She’d turned out to be a fairly cool young adult, in his opinion, but the car ride seemed to have caused some sort of mental regression, because she was definitely starting to look at Marc the way she used to look at Justin Bieber.

  “I mean, I get it. It’s important to ‘learn the value of a dollar,’ and all that other stuff my dad says, but he didn’t really have an answer when I told him I’d rather learn the sense of something where said value is a little more stable. The dollar is a whore,” Marc said.

  J.J. just looked at him.

  “I’ll say,” Tony piped in from the rear. He didn’t really care about the conversation, per se. He just wanted to remind them (particularly J.J.) that he was still in the back seat. “It’s a dirty, dirty whore.”

  J.J. turned to face him.

  “Are you sure you’re talking about money and not the girls in your dorm?”

  “I hate that my school doesn’t have co-ed dorms,” Marc said. “Dudes are so un-fun to look at.”

  “Depends on who you ask,” Tony said, reaching up and giving his sister a playful shove.

  After that, the conversation turned to something that didn’t even remotely hold his interest, and as he’d checked in to let them know he hadn’t fallen out of the car, Tony got comfortable and closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again an hour or so later, J.J. and Marc were holding hands. And they were about to cross the border from Nevada to California.

  “Are we there yet?” he asked over a yawn.

  J.J. pulled her hand back at the sound of her brother’s voice, and Tony smiled at the self-consciousness of the act.

  “Once we get out of Primm and cross into Cali, it’s about four more hours. Four point five if the traffic gods choose not to smile down on us.”

  “Looks like J.J.’s got the smiling component down pretty well. Aren’t your cheeks tired, Sis? You’ve been smiling at Cark for miles.”

  “What do you know about smiles for miles? You’ve been sleeping.”

  “I’m basing the statement on the five hundred or so that came before my nap.”

  “Don’t be too hard on her, Tone,” Marc said. “If I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the road, I’d definitely be looking at her. And smiling.”

  This caused J.J. to do just that (again), and she reached back over and took Marc’s hand, no longer caring if Tony saw.

  “Great,” said Tony. “When we get there, you two can have a lovely beach-wedding. I’ll even play guitar and sing ‘We’ve Only Just Begun.’ But first, we have to freaking get there, so don’t spare the ponies, Cark ol’ boy!”

  Marc laughed and said, “Until we get to Barstow or so, there’s a lot of open road. I will whip the horses accordingly.”

  The response made Tony smile, although he forced himself to stop before either of the front seat occupants could turn and see. Cark is definitely cool, Tony thought. But he’s no Justin Bieber.

  Cole was having trouble getting a signal on her cell, and that was interfering with everything she wanted to do. Holding it away from her body, she walked around the room, looking at the screen. “Dammit! Still no bars,” she said in frustration.

  “Of course there are no bars. This is a storage room, not Marshall Street.”

  Cole was distracted and missed the reference.

  “Huh?”

  “Didn’t you go to Syracuse?” The Latino cleaner’s voice was still weak, but she heard the mischief in it. Nicole had not, in fact, gone to Syracuse University, although she possessed and displayed a lovely sheepskin bearing that institution’s name, which bestowed upon her all the rights and privileges of any other MBA graduate from the Whitman School of Management. It was all part of Darlene Mason’s masterplan of installing Cole, after several years of flawless service and her even more flawless mentoring, as Cleanup Crew’s CEO. It was a role that Darlene had taken out of necessity but had never enjoyed in the least.

  “Oh, Marshall Street. Bars. I get it. What do you know about Syracuse?”

  “Hey, when I got
recruited by CUC, I did my homework. First, I learned about my new boss, then I learned about where she went to school. Marshall Street has a pretty famous reputation.”

  Nicole thought it wise to keep Manny talking, even as she continued to wander in search of the elusive cell-signal.

  “Well, it got considerably tamer a few years before I went there. A lot of the bars closed when the drinking age in New York went back up to twenty-one. For most of one’s undergrad career, the legal age is still on the horizon. And I heard that they recently tore down my favorite, Hungry Chucks, to put up an apartment building or something.”

  “That’s just wrong,” Manny said. “You bring in more people, and I mean, sure they have a place to live. But if there are no bars, are they truly living?” His voice sounded like it was weakening again, Cole thought. Despite his good-natured banter and the amazing fact that he’d survived being shot in the freaking face, she realized that he was a long way from being out of the woods. She redoubled her efforts, and in the farthest corner of the trash and stench-filled storage room, she saw a single bar appear.

  “Yes!” she cried out, and she quickly dialed Luis, the handler.

  “Hey, boss!” came his voice a few rings later.

  “Luis! Thank God! I found Manny, and he’s alive, but he’s in bad shape.”

  “Where?”

  “In one of the buildings. In the basement.”

  “Okay. Can he walk?”

  Nicole looked to where the cleaner lay, no longer buried but still sprawled on the garbage heap. Sadly, she had to admit that he looked very much like he belonged there. “I’m going to guess no. I haven’t even managed to get him to sit up yet.”

  “Do you have water to give him? If he’s been in that place since…”

  “Yes, I gave him some. You should probably bring more.”

  “Mrs. Porter… I mean, Nicole, this sounds like it might call for an ambulance.”