The Terror of Tijuana

by S. J. Varengo

  “For Luis,” Manny said, gamely rising to his feet.

  Nicole looked at him and smiled. “For Luis.”

  Even though he was seasoned cleaner, Manny felt his blood grow a little cold. He realized he was seeing the same thing a shark’s dinner saw. The last thing it saw.

  “I gotta say, Marc, there’s still a lot to this whole thing that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Probably more of that than the part that does,” the tall young man admitted as he opened another drawer in the same table that had held the gun. After a moment, he fished out a set of car keys.

  “What’s with those?”

  “Well, fortunately, my brother-in-law left his vehicle here when they left for vay-cay. So we’re not stranded.”

  “Okay, so now what?”

  Marc thought for a moment. “I think we need to find J.J.”

  “Dude, I’m sure she’ll be right back. She probably ran out for some Häagen-Dazs. Or Taco Bell.”

  “Fuckin’ Taco Bell,” Marc cursed.

  “Well, sorry. Your negative work experience aside, it is our favorite place to chow.”

  “I know.”

  It wasn’t the words Marc spoke, by themselves, that caused Tony’s emotion pendulum to begin swinging in the direction of being pissed off and scared again. It was how he delivered them. It was exactly the way he’d said those same words when his Great Confession had begun. He stared hard at Marc, but the movie closeup tough-guy expression was wasted as Marc’s eyes remained glued to the floor.

  “Jesus, Marc. Every time you say that now, it’s followed by something I don’t like hearing. Now I’m pretty sure you should know we like T-Bell because that’s where you met us, but that’s not what you mean, is it.”

  With a deep sigh, Marc lifted his head and met Tony’s gaze.

  “I knew before that night. I knew because I’d followed you guys there for a few weeks before I started working there.”

  Often when someone suddenly understands something, they say it’s like a light has been switched on. Since Marc had begun telling his story, the bulb illuminating what Tony understood and felt had switched on and off several times. Had his mind been less focused on anger and more on metaphysical symbolic philosophy, Tony might have mused that the filament was now on constantly, but that it brightened and dimmed in tune with Marc’s continuing narrative. He might have called it “the variable lightbulb of constant discomfort,” or something equally as Intro to Philosophy 101-ish. Surely he would have said something deeper and more meaningful than:

  “Well, fuck, Marc.”

  For a full minute, they continued to look at one another, in silence. Marc seemed to ashamed to continue. Tony had just run out of words.

  “Come on,” Marc said finally. Grabbing the keys, he began to walk toward the garage.

  “Wait,” Tony said, apparently, having found a new batch of words. Marc stopped in his tracks. “Wait, and let’s clear out the last of the cobwebs at the edge of this great, sweeping Lord-of-the-Rings-caliber saga you’ve been telling me.”

  Marc turned and faced him. “Ask. I’ll tell you anything.”

  “How long were you watching us?”

  “You and J.J. personally, since you got back from school. Your parents, your house. About two months before that.”

  Tony’s face screwed into a mask of confusion. “But weren’t you still at school? At LSU?”

  Marc seemed to hesitate, then almost in a single breath, he blurted, “I flunked out of LSU the semester when I skipped out early for Christmas break. Never went back, in fact. I have been in Denver ever since, but I’ve been living on my own. My dad pretty much cut me off, threw me out, the whole nine yards. I don’t have any idea why he’s let me keep my car this long, other than as continued advertising. That’s why I didn’t reject Dick’s offer immediately. A few visits and a few pay raises later, I started to forget how sick the whole thing made me feel, because I enjoyed eating again.”

  Another awkward silence followed as Tony waited for the explanation to continue and Marc struggled to go on. “I was instructed to figure out a place J.J. liked to go a lot and find a way to make contact with her.”

  This once more exceeded Tony’s ability to fully understand and he made a frustrated shrug.

  “By this point, the instructions were routinely coming directly from Conrad. Goddamn, Tony, but he’s a scary motherfucker. It got to the point that the money stopped mattering. It didn’t stop coming, but it stopped mattering. What mattered was keeping him content with my performance. Do you know what he said to me one day, just in passing? He said, ‘You know, it takes an amazingly small amount of effort to cut a man’s balls off.’ That’s not the sort of shit you like to hear in casual conversation, Tone!”

  “Alright, alright!” Tony shouted. “Enough! I get it now. You were down and out and scared and you got mixed up with the wrong people. And the thing you used to crawl out of that pit was my family. I’ve tried really hard to be all right with all of this.” He made a sweeping gesture, which encompassed the totality of everything that had happened and everything that he was hearing. “But, Jesus Christ, dude! What the hell? You spied on us. You followed us, and you found out where we liked to eat and you got a job there. Why?”

  “To charm J.J.”

  Tony burst into laughter. “Pretty fucking confident there, guy.”

  Marc shook his head. “Nope. Just the opposite. I was pretty sure this was the point where my career as a… a spy, I guess… was going to come to a nutless end. I mean, Conrad got me the job, somehow. ‘A couple of phone calls’ was all it took, he said.”

  “So, what? The whole ‘Cark’ thing? Was that all part of Conrad’s master plan?”

  “No. The manager there is really that stupid. But I was fine with it, because I thought it might be… disarming.”

  “Well, I can tell you that when we pulled away from the window, my sister was charmed. So, hats off.”

  “What I’m trying to tell you, Tone, what I’ve been trying to tell you from the start is that as deep as I was into all of this, and as much as I felt it was out of control, that night at the T-Bell window…”

  To Tony’s surprise, a tear rolled down Marc’s cheek, followed in short order by another.

  “The first time I looked into her eyes, I knew I had to stop, and I had to get you guys the hell out of Denver. I regretted everything I’d done. But, dammit, it was this great convergence of bad luck and bullshit. I’ll say this about our buddy Two-Dicks. He picked the right sucker when he picked me. I was so down and out that when he threw me that first crumb, I thought my problems were over. I had no idea I’d… fall in love with her the second I actually met her.”

  Tony’s gun belt was empty. He had no more ammo to turn against this sobbing wreck of a man. Instead, he found himself walking to where Marc stood, the car keys just barely held by his trembling hand, and putting his arms around him. When he did, he felt the intensity of the sobbing increase as Marc’s whole body became possessed by a spirit of absolute remorse.

  Finally, he stepped back grabbed Marc’s arms. “So this is probably the most fucked-up love story I’ve ever heard, and if you ever tell my sister that it worked on me, I will carry out Conrad’s threat myself, but… I feel you. I saw the way you two looked at each other.”

  “I never expected it… I never dreamed…”

  “Take a breath, all right? I get it. I kind of get it all. Except maybe how you were at the mall the next day.”

  Marc’s head dropped again, and Tony, by now familiar with the meaning of this particular motion, waited for another cruel shoe to drop.

  “That was a bit of a gamble. Remember the tap on the roof of your car, when you pulled away from the drive-thru?”

  “Not really. No wait. Yes, I do, because I thought it was obnoxious, and along with the ‘number twelve’ shit, it help me decide to hate you.”

  His face was still glistening with tears, but that made Marc smile. He reached in
to the little pocket on the inside of his swim trunks large enough for a single key or a pair of swimmer’s ear plugs, and pulled out a small metallic disk, about two centimeters in diameter. He held it up.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a tracker,” Marc said the same way Tony remembered once telling his mother, “It’s a frog,” when he’d been asked why his coat was croaking rhythmically.

  Tony was determined not to let the pendulum swing back to pissed off, but he could feel it threatening to reverse course once again. He waited until Marc continued.

  “I had two. One I was supposed to find a way to attach to J.J.’s car. This one here,” he said, holding it up. “The other one I built myself, so that the signal came to my phone.”

  “You built a tracker?”

  “Electrical engineering. My major.”

  “You fucking flunked out!” Tony exclaimed, laughing in spite of the pendulum’s ever-increasing potential energy.

  “I flunked out because I spent more time doing shit like this than I did coursework. Anyway, when I tapped on your roof, it was to stick the one I made to it, then the next day, I watched my phone until it started moving downtown. I guess the mall, based on the direction it was heading, but was ready to adapt if you went elsewhere.”

  “So, wait. The one you put on the Jeep is the one you built. Where did this one come from?”

  “Conrad.”

  There was another silence as this sank in.

  “Marc,” Tony started, pausing for a second to finish working this detail through. “doesn’t that mean that he knows exactly where we are, right now?”

  Tony, who had managed to stay the pendulum’s reversal, now looked with pity as a mask of horror spread over Marc’s face.

  “We’ve got to find her.”

  Tony sighed and walked toward the kitchen island, where he’d left his phone. “My family is pretty basic. My parents have done well for themselves in their respective businesses, and Jayj and I have been pretty good kids, pretty good students, whatnot.” He picked up the phone. “But even successful parents get paranoid about their kids, and even good kids sometimes do things that make the ‘rents crazy.” As he spoke, he was tapping on the phone. “So we had to submit to our mom’s insistence that we follow each other on this dumbass Find Friends app. I shut mine off once, and about a week later, found it had been turned back on. Mom usually gets her way…”

  The app finally loaded and as it did, Tony looked confused.

  “Talk about your great convergence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at this.” He held the phone up for Marc to see.

  “I’m not sure what I’m seeing.”

  Tony looked again and said, “What you’re seeing, for reasons I cannot even begin to guess, is that J.J. appears to be with my mom and dad in the middle of the Mexican what-the-fuck-nowhere. South of Tijuana.”

  Marc walked back to the entryway table. He opened the drawer and took the gun back out. He looked at Tony. “Did you bring your passport like I told you?”

  “Yup.”

  “Grab it. Let’s go.”

  He set the tracker on the table top, and they walked together to the garage. As they did, Marc handed the gun to Tony. “Here.”

  Tony was so surprised that he forgot to closed the door behind him completely.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Nothing, I hope. Shoot someone maybe? Tony, I don’t fucking know. I just know I’ve got to get to J.J. fast. Jam it back under the car seat.”

  Marc opened the door of the wide, two-bay garage. Parked and waiting was a full-sized Hummer.

  “Just like Arnold’s,” Tony joked, referring to the fact that the first Humvee purchased for private use went to Schwarzenegger.

  Marc grinned almost imperceptibly. “Just get in, dork.”

  As the door lowered behind them, it hung up on something and stopped its descent about eighteen inches from the gray concrete floor. But by then the Hummer was already well down the road, heading south.

  17

  Jacks or Better to Open, Cleaners’ Wild

  The most difficult part of following the signal on Tony’s phone that was leading them to J.J. was that it first led them through customs. Recent tensions between the U.S. and their maligned neighbor to the south meant that passing back and forth across the border had become just a bit more difficult as each side looked for ways to piss on the shoes of the other.

  Knowing there was a handgun jammed into the springs under his seat was not helping Tony’s digestion as the quick meal of Taco Bell, snagged on the way to the border, began to perform an Olympic floor exercise routine in his intestinal tract. The Mexican border guard instructed Marc to roll down his window had just begun talking to him when Tony very loudly passed the foulest gas that Marc, and apparently, the guard, had ever smelled.

  “Go. Please, go,” the guard said as he stepped back and quickly waved them through with one hand while holding his nose with the other.

  Neither said a word as they pulled away, though Marc lowered all four windows. In fact, aside from navigational instructions, there was no conversation until long after they’d left metropolitan Tijuana. But finally, Marc blurted, “Jesus Christ, man. That was the sickest fart in the history of farts. Cavemen eating month-old mastodon meat didn’t stink that bad.”

  “Oh my God, dude. I thought I was dying.”

  “Kinda wish you had been.”

  “Well, it did help us cross an international border with an illegal handgun in the car, so…”

  “I’ll give you that.” Marc laughed as they moved through the hills.

  The Hummer’s GPS indicated there was a major accident on the most direct path to the source of the signal from J.J.’s phone, which meant they were going to have to detour through a small town called Uruapan on the map. Even with the crash, the traffic was essentially non-existent in the remote area, which made it all the more odd that, as they made their way through the town, they saw a man stumbling unsteadily in the middle of the road down which they were passing. Marc slowed as they neared him.

  In a sudden flash of recognition, Tony exclaimed, “That looks a lot like my dad’s friend Neal.”

  “Seriously?” Marc asked, immediately stopping the car. Tony opened the door and jumped out.

  “Neal! Neal, it’s Tony Porter. Dan’s kid.”

  “Hi, Tony. Where in the hell are we?”

  “A little town in Mexico. Didn’t you and Dad come down here to go to an excavation or something?”

  Neal snapped his fingers. “That’s right! We were going to see the batteries!” His dust-smudged face was smiling as he remembered why they’d come to Mexico, but his countenance collapsed as he went on.

  “Didn’t see them, just the dead American girl. Then we came here because…” Now Neal’s face screwed up in concentration as he tried to piece together the slowly returning mosaic tiles of memory. “…because we were going to meet your sister. Something about your mom. But I think while we were waiting, your dad got me drunk and… bought me a hooker, maybe?”

  Tony could see that Neal still seemed more than a little inebriated and chalked the crazy talk up to that.

  “Neal, I doubt my dad bought you a hooker.”

  “No, probably not. I probably paid for her myself.”

  “What?” Tony asked, sounding a little more upset than he was. The tone seemed to startle Neal.

  “Who said anything about hookers?”

  “Um, you did, Neal, but it’s okay…”

  “No, Tony, it’s not okay. Accusing me of paying for two hookers.”

  “Two?”

  “See, there you go again!” Neal concluded indignantly.

  “Alright. Look. Let’s backtrack for a minute. You said you and Dad were meeting J.J. and that it had something to do with my mom?”

  Neal’s face began to slowly return to its normal state, and he began to remember that there had been some urgency t
o the situation.

  “Anyway, I woke up with Diandra and Tequila…” Neal’s eye clarity began to mist a bit as he seemed to veer off in a different memory direction.

  “Neal, focus!”

  “I woke up and came outside and you two almost ran me down with a very nice Humvee.”

  “Come on,” Marc said to Tony. “We could be hearing this riveting story while driving.”

  “Neal, let me help you into the back seat,” Tony said as he opened the door behind his and sat his father’s friend gingerly down.

  “Whaterwe gonna do about my car?” Neal asked sloppily. “Maybe I should drive it out of here.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t,” Tony said. “I’ll take care of it for you. You stay here with Marc. Share some battery lore or something.”

  “Okay,” Neal replied, lying across the back seat of the Hummer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a very large lint ball, an empty packet of Sweet ‘n Low, and a scrap of paper with a hastily scrawled phone number. “Shit. Can’t lose that!” he said, cramming the lint ball back into his pocket and letting everything else fall to the floor. After a moment that reminded Tony of videos he’d seen of crowds trying to help a beached whale, Neal managed to roll to his side and extract his keys from the other pocket. He offered them to Tony, who took them and opened his phone’s GPS to again show J.J.’s location.

  “I’ll lead,” he told Marc, who nodded in reply.

  They headed out of Uruapan.

  “I can usually drink a lot more than one beer,” Neal said after a quiet mile or so. “They must brew it stronger down here.”

  “That’s it, I’m sure,” Marc said as he followed the Land Rover into increasingly rugged territory.

  As they cautiously approached the house, Nicole held her hand out to J.J., who walked to her right. Her daughter casually handed her the Glock. Cole glanced at it. “Pretty,” she said.

  “Isn’t it?” J.J. whispered. “I thought I was just being judgmental that a guy would have a pink gun.”