J.J., whose mind seemed naturally adept at covert tactics, had thought replying to Nicole was strategically unsound. Dan looked at the phone resting on his leg. He lifted it again and opened Nicole’s text.
“Dammit,” he said aloud.
“What’s wrong?” Neal asked in response to the first word Dan had spoken since J.J.’s call.
“I need to let Nicole know we’re coming.”
“So text her.”
“J.J. doesn’t think we should.”
“Who you gonna listen to, your kid or your genius friend who thought driving to Mexico to look at ancient batteries after drinking a lot of bourbon was a good idea?”
“You, obviously.”
Dan typed three words. Hurrying to you.
Then a moment later, three more: I love you.
He felt better.
As the road conditions devolved, Nicole and the CUC men were increasingly bounced and jostled in the rear of the van. But they’d come to a patch of relatively smooth driving. In that bounce-house lull, she felt her phone vibrate in her underwear and could not help but notice the sensation was pleasurable.
She didn’t know how this was going to turn out, but she had to assume that the vibration was either Dan or J.J. reaching out to tell her they were coming. Dan, she quickly decided. J.J. would instinctively maintain communication silence.
An instant later, it happened again.
She felt better.
13
Out of Nowhere
The village of Uruapan was small. There were no plans for making it a major metropolis like Palm Valley, clearly. In fact, it was small enough that as J.J. pulled into town from the west, she was able to spot Neal’s Kelly-green Land Rover parked in front of a small cantina at the opposite end of the town’s main street. The last time she’d seen these two, they were significantly more than half in the bag, and she hoped the proximity of the car to the bar didn’t indicate that was how she was going to find them now.
Happily, when she walked in, they were just finishing some food, although they both had frosty mugs of cerveza which, were, like their plates, just about empty. She hoped against hope they’d only had the one, although she had to admit that the beer looked very enticing. The air temperature was in the mid-nineties.
Neal noticed her first. “That chick that just walked in looks a lot like your daughter,” he said.
Definitely not Neal’s only beer, she thought.
“Jayj! Thank God you made it safely.”
J.J. could instantly tell that Dan was sober, and now that she looked more closely, she saw he hadn’t really eaten much of his food either. He’d just redistributed it on the plate.
“Yeah, Papa. I’m fine. So, um…” She hesitated, not knowing how much her father had told Neal, and based upon that, how much she could say now. There wasn’t a lot of time for dancing around the subject.
“It’s okay. We can talk in front of Neal. I’ve told him what I think.”
“Oh, excellent,” J.J. said. “Now tell me.”
“American executives are a prime target for kidnappers. Unless they travel with their own security, which your mom decided not to do this time…” Dan paused for a moment, looking for an indication that J.J. was following what he wasn’t saying as well as what he was. She gave a curt nod, so he went on. “So I’m thinking that’s what happened.”
J.J. quickly began putting the pieces together. Going with that, the fact that they might have to do some unsavory things to get her mother back could be covered by the umbrella of Dan’s lie.
“No police, obviously,” J.J. said.
“What?” asked Neal. “Some police. Not many, but…”
“No, Neal,” J.J. said, a little more impatiently than she’d meant to. She took a quick breath to re-center herself, then in a less edgy tone, she went on. “I meant we obviously won’t be calling the police.”
“What?” asked Neal again. J.J. was now guessing he’d had considerably more than one beer.
J.J. took a chair from an empty table and sat at the end of the booth her father and his friend occupied. “Okay, Neal. Here’s the thing. I don’t know how much you know about the police south of the border, but the safest thing to assume about them is that they’re corrupt. If you start from that assumption and find one that isn’t, then you’ve gotten lucky.”
“The bonus plan,” Neal said, his words growing more slurred each time he spoke.
“The bonus plan. Right. Anyway, if my dad is right, they’d likely get in the way of our efforts to liberate her.”
Neal looked over at the young girl, clearly attempting to get his vision to focus. “Women’s liberation. I’m all for it.”
“Dad, how many has he had?”
“Just the one,” Dan offered. “Keep talking.”
J.J. shot him a look of doubt and confusion, but then turned back to Neal to continue. “Anyway, we’re going to see if we can’t locate her ourselves. Once we do that, we can decide if we’re going to need to involve authorities or…”
J.J. stopped in mid-sentence as her voice, which she’d been keeping low, was drowned out by a loud, extremely obnoxious snore. Neal’s head was tilted backwards and he was clearly sound asleep.
“What the hell?”
“My doing,” Dan said. He reached into his shirt pocket and discreetly held up a tiny Ziplock bag containing several very small tablets. “You mom gave me a bunch of these for just this sort of situation. Dropped two in his Dos Equis. He’ll sleep like the dead for twelve hours or so.”
“Slippin’ a Mickey!” J.J. said approvingly. “Very nice work, Papa. Now we can talk.”
“Not here,” her father whispered. “The cook speaks pretty good English.”
“How do you know? Did he help you order?”
“No, actually. I do know a couple of words in Spanish. ‘Cerveza,’ and ‘arroz’ come to mind.”
“Beer and rice. Well, good to know you’ll never starve or go thirsty in a Spanish-speaking country. So how do you know the cook speaks English?”
“It was the way he came out of the kitchen glaring when Neal said the burrito tasted like ‘a garbage fire.’ Oh. Burrito too.”
“Impressive,” J.J. said with a smile.
“What, my Spanish vocabulary? Not really, Jayj.”
“No, silly. The fact that you picked up on the cook’s English. This could have gone badly for us if you hadn’t.”
Dan blushed a little. While praise from his daughter about using a little tradecraft (picked up by paying attention to Nicole) was not as ego-tickling as it would have been coming from his wife, with all of her vast experience, he’d seen J.J. in action and he knew her mind seemed prepackaged for this sort of thinking.
J.J. smiled again. “You can feel happy of yourself later,” she said, quoting one of her favorite internet memes. “First thing we need to do is get Neal out of here and somewhere safe.”
“I don’t know that there is any place that’s safe for us right now.”
J.J. had noticed when she’d parked in front of the cantina that in addition to a kitchen, there was a second story to the building, evidenced by windows facing the street. She figured it was a longshot but…
She waved the waitress over. In perfect Spanish (she’d been studying the language since eighth grade), she asked, “The rooms upstairs, do you rent them?”
“Sí. Por hora o por día.”
By the hour, or by the day. J.J. was a little surprised to know that a town as small as Uruapan would have need for rooms rented by the hour, given the sort of clientele who normally would make use of such an arrangement. She considered what her father had told her regarding the effective length of the roofie, then told the waitress that they’d be resting from their long journey for one day.
“Cien pesos,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “Por adelantado.”
“In advance, of course,” J.J. said under her breath as she fished through her pocket and pulled out a hundred-peso note with i
ts red and green artwork. Dan was a little surprised that she’d had time to convert her money. He and Neal hadn’t thought to do that.
“Más veinte para la comida y bebida,” the waitress said, still holding out her hand.
J.J. gave her an additional twenty pesos and said to her father, “I just bought your lunch. You owe me.”
As they rose and draped Neal over their shoulders, the angry cook reappeared from the kitchen. “Your friend is a lightweight. He only drank uno cerveza,” he said, mixing English and Spanish.
“Narcolepsia,” J.J. replied, sticking with Spanish only.
“Ah, narcolepsy. Sure, sure,” the cook said, smiling for the first time and returning to the kitchen.
The stairs to the rooms were steep and not very well maintained. “Be careful, Dad,” J.J. said. “Neal’s a whacko, but I still don’t want him falling down the stairs and breaking his neck.”
“He’s not a whacko,” Dan said, huffing at the effort of dragging his friend up the rickety steps.
At that moment and for no apparent reason, Neal opened his eyes and shouted, “Burma!” A second later, he was snoring again.
“Okay, he’s a whacko,” Dan conceded.
“And I think he has sleep apnea,” J.J. added as the snoring became louder than the creaking of the stairs.
“Concur.”
At last, they made it to the top. The key they’d been given had a paper label tied to it with a length of dirty string. The label read “2,” but neither of the doors were numbered.
“Help me prop him against the wall while I open the door,” J.J. said. She tried the key in the door on the left side of the dimly lit hallway and smiled as it turned. Her smile quickly faded as she saw the room was already occupied, and based on the activity she witnessed, she guessed it had been rented by the hour. She closed it without the man and woman inside even noticing it had been opened, which given the groan of the hinges, was lucky. She realized, however, that the sounds from within the room would have drowned out anything short of a nuclear detonation.
“Wrong room,” she said to her father.
“Hurry down and get the other key. I don’t know how long I can keep him upright.”
On a hunch, rather than head down the staircase J.J. tried the key in the other door. It opened as well. Happily, this time, the interior was unpeopled.
Once inside, J.J. determined that renting by the hour was probably a safer way to go. Staying there much longer would clearly be detrimental to Neal’s health. They attempted to lay him gently on the cot that made up one-hundred percent of the room’s furnishings. The attempt failed and he landed like a sack of car batteries on the thin mattress, immediately collapsing the legs. Neal made a loud “Hurumph,” as the mattress hit the floor, then went right back to his pathological snoring.
“Great. Now we’re going to have to pay for them to replace the bed,” Dan said, looking at the wreckage.
“Don’t worry. We can look for a few empty pop bottles and get the deposit. That should just about cover the cost of this level of luxury,” J.J. replied. She walked to the door and slid the skeleton key into the keyhole, locking the door. “Let’s take a few minutes to plan,” she told her father.
“I’m listening. What do you think we should do first?”
“Have you checked your phone recently to see if she’s actually here, or at least around here?”
Dan realized that he hadn’t looked at the app since he and Neal had arrived in Uruapan. He quickly pulled it from his inside pocket and looked again. “Damn,” he said.
“What?”
“From the looks of this, she’s outside of the village, maybe five miles south or so? But there’s nothing on the map there. It’s like she’s just sitting in the middle of nowhere.”
“We’re all kind of doing that right now. Let me see.” Dan handed J.J. the phone. Just as he’d said, the icon representing the whereabouts of Nicole, or more accurately, her phone (there was no guarantee they were in the same place), seemed to be hovering in the hills just east of the Transpeninsular Highway. “Not good,” she said at last.
“Why not? She’s not far. Let’s go.”
“Easy, cowboy,” J.J. told her father. “Because here’s the thing. You realize who pulls all the strings in Mexico, right?”
Dan began to answer but stopped. It was difficult, he realized, to determine who was really pulling the strings in any given locale, not the least of which being the good ol’ U. S. of A. So his original answer of “the government” died on the vine. Instead, he chose to pass the ball back to his daughter.
“Who?” he asked.
“The cartels, Daddy. And the place where your wife’s face is hovering has the earmarks of a cartel hideout, maybe even a headquarter-type compound.”
“It does?”
“Hell, Dad. Look at it. Close enough to the metro areas to conduct business but far enough that the heat dissipates long before it reaches this far south.”
“I wish the heat would dissipate.”
“I’m referring to the metaphorical heat, Dad.”
“I know. I’m just sweating like a pig, is all.”
“Darlene and Wally would be proud,” J.J. joked, knowing the Masons used their pig farm as cover for their work with CUC. “Now focus for me,” she went on. “If this is a cartel safe house, it might not be too heavily fortified. Based on the location, they might be satisfied to let the remoteness of the place act as its primary defense. If it’s a big-shot’s compound, though, it will have a better security than the White House.” J.J. stopped as she noticed her father looking at her with a quizzical expression.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“How do you know all of this stuff? Has your mom continued to coach you?”
“Nat Geo, Dad. They have a lot of shows about drug trafficking on that channel.”
“So independent study, then?” he pressed. Dan was concerned that J.J. might be taking her success in South Carolina to heart, and was heading down a path he had no desire to see her walk.
“I like documentaries,” she said, her voice heavy with a pungent mixture of sarcasm and irony.
“Just like me,” he said quietly, realizing that in this aspect at the very least, she was emulating him, not her assassin mother.
“Even if it is a hideout and there are only one or two people on guard, we still have a problem.”
“Only one problem?” Dan asked.
“No, probably many, but this is a big one. They will surely have guns. Do you have a gun, Papa?”
Dan shook his head. “Nope.”
“Me either. Alright,” J.J. said after a moment’s thought. “Let’s just drive closer to the place indicated on the app and see if we can look around without being noticed. See what we’re dealing with.”
Dan mulled for only an instant. “I’ve got no alternative suggestion. Let’s go.”
They exited the room after making sure Neal was as comfortable as they could make him. Dan pulled a scrap of paper from his wallet and wrote “Back soon.” He set it next to Neal’s mangled bed, and after J.J. locked the door behind them, they hurried down the stairs as quickly as they felt safe going. At their base, Dan swore.
“What is it.”
“Neal’s keys. They’re in his pants pocket.”
“We’ll take Marc’s car. Most likely not as good on rough terrain as the Land Rover, but I think it’s up to the task. It’s a Lincoln Navigator, after all. As SUVs go, it’s one of the sweeter ones.”
“Marc? Who’s Marc?” Dan asked.
“Story for another time,” she said, pushing the unlock button on the black fob and being rewarded by the car’s demure chirp.
“That’s two stories you’ve asked me to shelf,” Dan said, reaching for the handle of the passenger’s door. “I’m going to want to hear them eventually.”
“Eventually. Of course. Shit.”
“What’s wrong?” Dan asked, sliding into the comfortable seat.
&n
bsp; “Dropped the keys,” J.J. replied, reaching down and feeling for them. “Of course they had to bounce under the seat,” she said, opening the door again so that she could get out and look for them without groping aimlessly. A second later, she let out a gasp, then an exclamation. “Shit!” she said again.
“Can’t find them?”
“Oh, I found them. That’s not all, though.” She brought out a copper-shaded Glock semi-automatic, not knowing or caring that its color was officially called “Coyote Tan.”
Dan’s eyes widened.
“Cark, you little rascal,” she said. “What are you up to?”
“Wait. Who’s Cark? I thought you said this was Marc’s car.”
“Another time…”
Dan waved her off. “Another time. Okay. I get it.”
J.J. pushed the retrieved keys into the ignition and started in the direction of her mother’s face on the Find Friends app.
“Getting pretty old, though. ‘Another time,’” he mumbled.
As she cruised slowly out of town, J.J. released the steering wheel, and with a level of expertise that indicated to Dan that the girl had indeed been receiving some training, at least in weapons handling, she ejected and examined the magazine, then slapped it back into place, chambering a round, all while steering (more or less) with her knees.
“Jesus, Jayj,” he managed to say as she set the gun on the center console and returned both hands to the wheel just as the road conditions started to deteriorate.
She took a quick, sympathetic glance at her perpetually befuddled father.
“I guess that’s one last story for another time,” she said.
When J.J. hadn’t joined the boys on the beach as had been the plan, they eventually were able to pull themselves away from being the beach volleyball game of the century (mainly because the girls stopped playing), and they walked up the worn redwood-stained stairs to the sliding glass doors that led into a spacious family room.
“J.J.?” he called as Tony slid the door shut behind him. When there was no answer, Tony guessed that she might be a little miffed about the amount of attention they’d paid to the volleyball players.
The Terror of Tijuana Page 12