The Terror of Tijuana

by S. J. Varengo

  Knowing she needed to act quickly, she remembered that her phone was in her back pocket. She pulled it out, and recalling the oddness of Dan and J.J. both being near, she opened a text to the two of them.

  “9-1-1. Tijuana. Need you both. Now.”

  As soon as she sent the message, she pushed her phone into her pants, actually sliding it into her underwear, hoping it would remain hidden long enough…

  The bathroom door seemed to explode into splinters. She raised her gun but quickly saw that a man in the expensive suit was levelling an AK in her direction. Keeping her finger inside the trigger guard, she let the gun spin upside down as she raised her left hand. The man took it.

  “Excellent. Now we are all together,” he said. “What should we do first?”

  Dan and Neal weren’t thinking much about the Olmec civilization or any batteries they might have produced. They stood over what was supposed to have been the beginning of a new exploratory trench, but which had turned out to be a shallow grave.

  The work had stopped across the site, and the police had been called.

  The dig team was standing more or less in a circle around the recently disturbed soil. The discovery had been made by one of Dr. Einarsson’s students, a girl of no more than twenty-one or so. She was sitting on a rock outside the circle and was holding her head in her hands, whimpering softly. Her name, Dan had learned from the Doc, was Elaine.

  Finding the remains of a human being had been one of the goals of the expedition, and Elaine was fully prepared for the discovery of two-thousand-year-old bones. She was not remotely ready to uncover the left hand of a young woman, wearing a UC San Diego college ring. “She’s probably my age,” the shaken student sobbed, speaking to no one in particular.

  Dan was close enough to hear her and seeing her so broken made him think of his own daughter. J.J., too, was “probably her age,” and Elaine’s suffering pulled at his heart. In fact, for an instant, he thought that he was physically feeling her distress in his heart.

  Then he realized his phone was vibrating in the pocket of his light-blue dress shirt.

  He pulled it out, expecting it to be yet another email about cheap Viagra, but instead saw a text from Nicole. It confused him for a beat, but then he recognized it for what it was: a call for help. What does she expect me to do from…?

  He stopped himself in mid-thought as he re-read the text. “Tijuana?” he said aloud, staring at the screen.

  Dan closed the text and opened the Find Friends app. He assumed Nicole had no idea that he was in Mexico and wondered if the Universe would actually place them this close together.

  Nicole’s profile picture was showing up not in Europe or Asia as he’d expected, but rather that she was indeed in the city through which he and Neal had recently passed. He tugged on his friend’s sleeve, pulling him away from the others.

  “Um, Neal? We gotta go.”

  “What the hell are you talking about. I haven’t even gotten to look at the batteries yet. Why do we have to go?”

  Dan hesitated, unsure how much he should reveal compared to how much he would need to reveal in order to talk Neal into going.

  “It’s Nicole. She needs me.”

  “I thought you said she was on a business trip.”

  “She is. As it turns out, it was a business trip to Tijuana.”

  “Bullshit,” Neal replied.

  Dan sighed and reopened the text. He held the screen up so that Neal could read it.

  “That definitely says Tijuana, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. And it also says 9-1-1.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing good, Neal. Have you ever known anything containing the numbers 9-1-1 to be happy tidings?”

  “Negative,” Dan’s friend answered.

  “Me either. Ergo, we must leave. Now.”

  Neal stared hard at Dan’s face and said nothing for several seconds. Finally, he flashed him a half-grin, which somehow carried the full weight of the situation in its twisted contours. Dan first thought that what he was seeing was Neal’s resigned sadness at leaving the site without completing his quest. But when he replied, Dan realized what he was seeing was a sad smile on the face of a man who was about to move from “good friend” to “best friend” status.

  “I guess we’d better hurry, then. What the hell are you standing around for?” Neal said, turning briskly and walking away from the dig, up the rise toward the parked car.

  Dan fell in behind him, happy but still wondering how he’d be able to keep the true nature of Nicole’s “business trip” secret.

  J.J. was about to open the sliding door that faced the private beach and walk down to where Tony and Marc were already stretched out on wooden lounge chairs. The two had been watching a beach volleyball game a few hundred yards down the waterline, with both teams comprised of young girls in revealing swimsuits. Just as she reached toward the door, her phone buzzed in her other hand.

  She looked at the screen, then turned the phone toward the ground. After a moment, she looked at it again. The message hadn’t changed. Her mother was just south of her in Tijuana, and she was in a jam. She noticed that the message had been sent to her father as well, although what she thought he would be able to do from Colorado…

  She suddenly remembered that Dan and his crazy battery friend had gone to seek out the dig site somewhere in Mexico. She didn’t know specifically where they were, but her mother must have known, or at least hoped he was nearby.

  She glanced down at the beach and saw the boys still ogling the volleyball players, so she slipped into the bedroom and changed out of her own swimsuit and into clothing that wouldn’t interfere with anything she might be called upon to do when she found her mother. Assuming she did. She also grabbed her passport.

  J.J. came out of the bedroom, and after a final peek to see if anything had changed on the beach, she wrote a note that read, “Had to run out for a quick errand. XOXO, J.” This she left on the table by the entry, right in the repurposed ceramic ashtray that was now the car key caddie. Then she took the key and stole Marc’s car.

  Twenty minutes later, she was in Tijuana, wondering what to do next.

  12

  Poetry

  It was not the first time Nicole had ever endured a bumpy ride in the back of a panel van, but it was, she was certain, the first time she’d worn a rough burlap bag over her head while doing so.

  The questionable fashion accessory had not been her idea. It was placed there, a bit more roughly than necessary, by Cara Rota. It had not been his idea either. All the ideas right now were coming from the mysterious man that the mutant street rat treated much the way Nicole pictured the angels treating God. The man had even called Cara Rota “el ángel,” The angel.

  Although Nicole had been the first thrown into the back of the panel van, she was sure Luis and Manny were the thumps she’d heard on each side of her shortly after her harsh entry. With the sacks for headgear and hands tightly zip-tied behind their backs, the three CUC employees were not expecting a leisurely ride through the suburbs. In fact, unless her group text yielded results, Nicole was beginning to suspect she’d already experienced the last pleasant moment of her life, in Dan’s Mercedes at Denver International Airport.

  But all the news was not bad.

  Some of these small panel vans, she knew, were built with a divider between the cargo area and the two seats for the driver and passenger. This was not one of those. The absence of any barrier between the three of them and the two riding in the front of the vehicle meant that she could hear them talk. And that seemed to be something they both enjoyed doing very much.

  It couldn’t be called a “conversation,” per se, because that word connotes an interchange of thoughts, and while the tall man seemed to be doing his part, every response from Cara Rota appeared to continue in his pattern of cryptic, almost poetic verbal gymnastics. But that did not seem to bother the tall man at all. He spoke in a very clear and concise fashion, lik
e a pre-kindergarten teacher explaining to a four-year-old why it was not okay to put glue in Suzie’s hair or a fork into an electrical outlet. The conversation was in Spanish, even though Nicole was sure he knew that, at the very least, two of the three prisoners spoke the language.

  However, she could tell from the nature of the things he was saying that he was unconcerned about being overheard.

  “Danilo, listen to me. Would you like to play the game again today?”

  “I like to look through the scope.”

  “We won’t be using the scope this time.”

  “I like the scope.”

  “Listen, Danilo. Listen. The scope is for making the flowers bloom from far away. I know you like to look through it and watch that happen, but today, we will be making second smiles.”

  “The second smile is the final smile,” Cara Rota said. “Miguel, will you make them all smile?”

  Miguel, Nicole thought. A name at last.

  “We will make them all smile, yes.”

  “Like when we made those girls smile.”

  “Just the same. You will hold the blade, to give it the magic, then I will make them smile, hermanito.”

  Nicole got a sick feeling as the meaning of the cryptic words began to make sense to her. Cara Rota was not a killer at all. The tall man, Miguel, had done the killing. She was relatively certain that he was using Cara Rota to leave behind fingerprints and perhaps DNA evidence on the weapons he then used to murder the American girls. Finally, and most chilling, was the use of the word “hermanito…” Little brother. Was he speaking poetically as well?

  “You always let me play too, hermano mayor.”

  Perhaps there was less poetry going on than she had suspected. The Spanish language has a cute little trick when it comes to diminutives, adding the suffix -ito to masculine nouns, -ita to the feminine. That’s how you get words like hermanito, or hombrecito… little man.

  But there isn’t really an opposite. There is no suffix to indicate a big version of something. No, for that, two words are required, much as Cara Rota had just spoken. He called Miguel “big brother.” Nicole still wondered if all of this might be more of what she was rapidly realizing was the tall man’s manipulation of the younger, smaller man.

  “That is because I love you, Danilo. What our mother did to you cannot be forgiven. The drugs she pushed into her body while she carried you. The men… the constant men. So many that we do not know who your father is. That is why I am here, Danilo. Look at me.” The man paused, as Nicole assumed Cara Rota did as he was told.

  “Who am I?”

  “Tú eres mi hermano. Tú eres mi protector.”

  You are my brother. You are my protector.

  Holy hell, Nicole thought. He’s using his own brother to hide behind when he kills!

  For Nicole’s purposes, all the questions had been answered. She had a clear picture of what was happening, and a developing one of how. What a detective would have needed to know additionally was why. Nicole did not give a nano-fuck why. She had her mark.

  Well, technically, her mark had her. But Nicole Porter did not get hung up on technicalities.

  “So I must protect you always. Today, I will protect you from these three cerdos americanos.”

  “Yes, Miguel. Yes, you will. You will make them smile.”

  “I will give them the second smile.”

  “The second smile is the final smile,” Cara Rota said again.

  Nicole was going weary of the hyperbole. It was time to begin chipping away at the macho confidence that was oozing back from the driver’s seat. While she’d earlier felt some comfort in letting Miguel doubt her proficiency in his native language, she now challenged him in perfect Spanish.

  “Why don’t you tell you little brother what you’re really going to do to us, Miguel?”

  The tall man laughed hysterically. “Oh, el sabe.” He knows. He paused again to gather himself, then said. “Danilo, what does it mean? That I will give them the second smile?”

  “It means you will cut their throats. You will kill them.”

  No poetry there, Nicole realized with a hard swallow.

  J.J. was parked in Marc’s car, trying to decide upon her next move. She hadn’t responded to her mother’s text, guessing that if it was truly a 9-1-1 situation, she probably wasn’t going to have the time or even the ability to engage in digital conversation. But that meant she had no direction and could not develop a plan.

  Then it occurred to her that she did have one possible resource. The text had gone to her father as well. She grabbed her phone.

  “Hello, Jayj,” came Dan’s voice after the first ring.

  “Did you get the text?”

  “Yes. Neal and I are headed toward Uruapan right now.”

  “Uruapan? Where the hell is Uruapan. The text said Tijuana.”

  “Yeah. Um, I may have turned on Mom’s Find Friends before she left.”

  J.J. smiled despite the seriousness of the moment. “You were spying on her?”

  “NO! I absolutely did not want to spy on her. I wanted the ability to spy on her.”

  “Two sides of the same naughty coin, if you ask me. So Find Friends shows her heading to… where again?”

  “It looks like Uruapan. It’s a smallish town about 76 miles south of Tijuana. There’s a city with the same name, but that’s not the place. It’s the village that her icon seems destined for.”

  Keeping the phone connection live, J.J. switched to her maps. “It looks more like eighty-seven actual driving miles for me. A little over two hours. And there are fucking tolls.”

  “Pay them. Just get to Uruapan as fast as you can. We’re a little closer. According to Neal’s GPS, we’ll be there in about an hour-forty.”

  J.J. had already started the car back up. “Alright. I’m going to get going. Call me if anything happens.”

  “Have you tried contacting Mom?” Dan asked.

  “I haven’t. I felt like that might not be the right move.”

  “Gotcha. By the way, Jayj, um, how is it that you’re only two hours from Uruapan?”

  “I was in San Diego when I got the text.”

  “Okaaaaay,” Dan replied, drawing the word out. “Why?”

  “That’s a story for another time, Papa.

  “Fine,” he said. They both knew he wasn’t really fine with that news at all. But he was willing to table that discussion for now. “Hopefully, I’ll see you in a couple hours.

  “Unless you go blind in the meantime, you’ll see me.”

  She ended the call and started following the route on the map, still wondering what sort of insanity she was rushing headlong towards.

  Dan heard the call disconnect and rested his phone on his leg. He didn’t want Neal to freak, so he worked his poker-face and said nothing. But his mind was exploding.

  Didn’t this prove that Nicole needed to stop this shit? Didn’t this prove she needed him with her always?

  No, he supposed. No, it didn’t. She’d been a cleaner by the time she’d been eighteen and knew more about the life of an assassin than anybody he knew. He stifled a laugh. Who the fuck else did he know that would have any inkling about the life of an assassin? Darlene, of course. And he’d met a few others, though he hadn’t realized it at the time. So all of them knew more about it than he did. But he still somehow felt Nicole knew more than they did. Even Darlene. She had told Dan to his face that Nicole was the best she’d ever seen.

  But that knowledge wasn’t helping him now. Because she was in trouble and he wasn’t with her. And he cursed himself for that. Nicole had prepared quickly for this mission and she had not indicated that she’d wanted him to come. But that was not the problem. If he’d insisted, she would have allowed him to accompany her. He’d told her he didn’t want to come.

  Before all this Cleanup Crew madness had begun, Dan had never really experienced much violence in his life. As an adult, he’d never even punched another person.

  But he was beat
ing the shit out of himself now. It was a mental beating, to be clear, but was as brutal a thumping as any of Rocky Marciano’s opponents ever suffered. No. It was worse. This was a Joe Louis – Max Schmeling II level attack, where the ringside microphones caught the sound of the German challenger’s screams as Louis demolished him in a fraction of the first round.

  He had known from the moment he told his wife that he didn’t want to go with her he’d made a serious mistake. After Carolina, much of the aura of invincibility that surrounded his wife had eroded. As he sat now mulling it all over, this seemed a little strange. On that mission, she’d never been in the level of danger that she’d experienced in Bucharest. He’d had to kill a man to save her there. That seemed far worse to him than what they’d faced in Greenville. But knowing her full story now, knowing that Conrad Barker had made her childhood a living hell, and seeing her confront those memories was far more devastating than the close call in Romania. Nicole had counted that incident as the cost of doing business. Dealing with her father again was another matter.

  But even that hadn’t stopped her, and he, knowing that her armor may have rusted a little bit while in South Carolina, should have never let her go alone.

  Then, of course, he had to self-confront his own thought process. Yes, he saved her in the Bucharest catacombs. But he was still more of a weight chained to her ankle than an asset, operationally speaking. The only thing him being with her really did was make him feel like he was protecting her.

  This was different, though. She was in some sort of trouble and had reached out to him. To him and his twenty-one-year-old daughter, he corrected again. And the other thing he’d learned in Greenville, was that J.J. was probably the one she really wanted. But still, she’d texted him.