The Wrong Hostage

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Faroe looked at Grace. “You don’t have to risk this. Go back to the hotel.”

  Without a word she walked toward the Escalade in a skirt so tight he didn’t see how she breathed, much less moved. He opened the vehicle’s back door, put his hand on her leather-clad butt, and gave her a boost up into the Escalade.

  Heavily smoked windows made the interior dark. Grace settled into the middle bench seat. An instant later she realized there was someone on the jump seat behind her. She could smell him, a mixture of sweat, hair oil, and gun oil. When she turned to look, light from the street gleamed faintly on the barrel of the assault rifle that lay across his lap.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Faroe said. “He just suffers from testicular insufficiency.”

  “You recognize the symptoms, right?”

  “In others.”

  The guard with the flashlight shoved his pistol into his belt and climbed into the front passenger seat. “Andale.”

  The driver bulled his way back into traffic. Behind them brakes screamed and horns shouted. The driver of the Escalade stuck his arm out the window and pumped up and down, the Mexican version of a raised middle finger.

  “In Tijuana, working for Hector Rivas means never having to say ‘Excuse me,’” Faroe said.

  “You’re enjoying this,” she muttered.

  “It’s like a hockey game. You don’t have to wonder where you stand.”

  “Lane feels the same about soccer, especially the games at All Saints.”

  “If he learned that, his time in Mexico wasn’t wasted.”

  “But it goes against everything I’ve tried to teach him,” she said.

  “So does Hector. Guess who has the best chance of surviving?”

  Mouth flat, Grace watched the nightscape flash by. The driver passed a police patrol car like it was painted on the street. The officers looked sideways, then straight ahead.

  “Like Washington, D.C., where Secret Service Suburbans and FBI vehicles have immunity from traffic laws,” she said.

  “Down here, the boys have immunity from everything.”

  “Where are we going?” she asked, straining to see road signs.

  “¿A dónde vamos?” he said to the guard in the passenger seat.

  “Señor Rivas.”

  “Now you know as much as I do,” Faroe said to Grace.

  “I doubt it.”

  “If this is like every dope deal I’ve ever seen, we’ll ride around for an hour while these dudes make sure we aren’t being followed. Then they’ll call somebody and find out where Hector has decided to be at that moment. That’s the problem with living in the shadows. All you have time to think about is covering your own ass. Everything else comes in second.”

  “I thought Hector owned Tijuana,” she said.

  “He does. But there’s always somebody out there with a gun and an itch to be the new Hector. Both men know that the changeover would happen in the space of time it takes a slug from a .44 Magnum to travel from one side of Hector’s skull to the other.”

  Grace flinched.

  “I’m not trying to disgust you.” There was an edge in Faroe’s voice. “I’m trying to teach you. Here and now, not one of your beloved laws and regulations are worth cold spit. We’re in the middle of a guerrilla war. All that counts is guns and money.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  He leaned over, put a gentle, immovable hand under her chin, and turned her face toward him.

  “Hector has lived this war for a quarter of a century,” Faroe said in a low voice. “He’s stayed on top by making sure that nobody gets a clear shot at him. Like every warlord, every tyrant, every outlaw from Bonnie Prince Charlie to Osama bin Laden, Hector has learned to live unpredictably. And richly. He owns players on both sides of the war.”

  Faroe glanced into the front seat. “¿Correcto?”

  “Sí, es correcto.” The Mexican half turned and gave Faroe a weary, wary smile.

  “What a hellish life it must be,” Grace said.

  “It’s better than hoeing a field of pinto beans on some communal farm in the mountains,” Faroe said. “Hector is what I’d be if I’d been born in Ojos Azules.”

  “You sound proud of your barbaric instincts.”

  “They’ve kept me alive and allowed you to argue how many legal motions can dance on the head of an indictment.”

  “Motions are better than bullets.”

  “In the sunshine world, yes. We aren’t there.”

  “Then it’s too bad we don’t have any bullets,” she said tightly.

  “Yeah. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  The Escalade bored on through the evening traffic, circling back and forth through the Zona Río, past nightclubs and restaurants and cheap upholstery shops and high-end retailers, through slums and shantytowns, and finally past middle-class colonias that would have been at home on either side of the border.

  Silently Grace admitted that she was seeing the city with different eyes. Tijuana wasn’t as alien as it had been. She didn’t know if that was good or bad, but she knew it was real.

  “What are you thinking?” Faroe asked softly.

  “Tijuana and San Diego aren’t as separate as I thought they were.”

  “How so?”

  She shrugged. “The U.S.-Mexico border is a legal artifice. It’s necessary, but it isn’t real. Life and death, hope and fear, drugs and money—they all wash back and forth without much regard for national laws on either side.”

  “All borders are like that.”

  “And you like it that way,” she said.

  “I wasn’t given a vote. I was just born into a Hobbesian world and made what I could of it for as long as I could take it.”

  “Then you looked for a temporary autonomous zone and I found you before you could escape,” she said grimly.

  He released her chin, caressed her cheekbone with his thumb, and said, “I didn’t have anything to escape to, but I didn’t know it then. Now I do. I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

  The big Escalade tunneled through the evening crowds along Avenida Revolución, past the tourist bars and shuttered farmacias advertising cut-rate Viagra. Drunken sailors from San Diego and wide-eyed tourists from Nebraska shuffled along the crowded sidewalks, staring and fending off the vendors and hustlers or accepting them with as much anxiety as pleasure.

  The black Escalade drove on through the crowded streets and alleys of the Zona Norte, past cheap hotels that served as brothels or as consolidation warehouses for the forwarders of human freight, the smugglers whose cargo was illegal immigrants.

  “It’s odd,” Grace said.

  “What is?”

  “This is a slum, you can see the poverty and dirt, but…”

  Faroe waited.

  “It’s so alive,” she said finally. “People laughing and shouldering on the sidewalks, eating tacos from corner stands, drinking beer. They don’t look oppressed and exploited.”

  “A lot of them are on their way north. They’re smiling because they’re on the threshold of the Promised Land.”

  “I’ve handled cases involving the immigrant smugglers. They’re treated like heroes by the very people they exploit.”

  “The smugglers are heroes,” Faroe said. “They offer hope in exchange for money. A good deal for both sides.”

  “And Hector?”

  “They sing his praises in narco-corridas. He’s a god because he was once as poor as anyone from the hills and now he owns the plaza, which is to say he owns the city.”

  “The plaza?”

  “A slice of the border. Everyone who smuggles anyone or anything through Hector’s plaza pays for the privilege. Since his plaza runs from the ocean well out into the desert, Hector is one rich son of a bitch.”

  “Outlaws paying outlaws,” Grace said, shaking her head.

  “Even outside the law, there’s always some kind of order. Plata o plomo.”

  As the Escalade forced its way t
hrough the Zona Norte traffic, the driver reached for the electric switches and opened every window. Cool, damp air poured in. Grace wasn’t dressed for it. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

  “I’m cold,” she said loudly. “Please raise the windows again.”

  The guard in the passenger seat shook his head. “No.”

  She looked at Faroe. “Why?”

  “Any pistolero on the street can shoot into the car,” Faroe said, pulling her close, sharing his body heat, “but our boys here would have a hell of a time shooting back through closed windows.”

  The guard held up his thumb and forefinger. He aimed the imaginary weapon out the open window and dropped the hammer. Then he turned and smiled at Faroe, showing two front teeth covered in stainless steel that reflected light like the metal of his pistol.

  A cell phone rang. The driver snatched the unit off his belt. He listened, then punched the call off and muttered something to the guard.

  The guard grunted in surprise, then looked back over his shoulder. “You mus’ be muy importante. We go righ’ now to see el jefe.”

  “How long will it take?” Faroe asked. “She’s freezing.”

  Silence was his only answer.

  TIJUANA

  SUNDAY, 10:30 P.M.

  36

  FAROE HELD GRACE FOR fifteen minutes before the Escalade turned off a fast thoroughfare and slowly climbed a coastal hill. Once the wind stopped pouring through the windows, he expected her to back away.

  She didn’t.

  He told himself he should let go.

  He didn’t.

  The neighborhood was quiet, expensive, and overlooked the Pacific Ocean. They passed two Tijuana police cars that formed a casual roadblock. The officers didn’t quite salute, but they sure didn’t offer to stop the big SUV. The road wound up the hill to the top, where a big house was surrounded by an even bigger fence. The automatic gate opened. As the Escalade pulled into the driveway, the garage door lifted. It closed the instant the vehicle’s bumper cleared the electronic beam.

  The three bodyguards waited. They hustled Faroe and Grace out of the car and into the house. The place was expensively furnished, etched glass and buttery leather couches, fine art on the walls and fine stone tiles on the floor.

  And it smelled like the barracks of an unwashed army.

  Grace wrinkled her nose.

  Faroe memorized everything he saw.

  The jock-strap smell couldn’t quite conceal the sharp tang of tobacco and marijuana smoke. Male voices called back and forth, ragging on each other and the world. A half dozen bodyguards lounged in front of a huge wide-screen television set, smoking and watching a soccer match. Four more men sat at a dining room table eating a meal of roasted chicken with tortillas and pickled peppers.

  Weapons lay everywhere. Black assault rifles with loaded magazines stood at attention on a long rack against one wall. Chrome and black semiautomatic pistols hung in shoulder harnesses on a clothes tree, along with an old but still deadly sawed-off shotgun on a shoulder strap.

  The man chopping up the chicken used a machete as long as his arm.

  Faroe felt naked.

  Grace’s sheer silk blouse, skyscraper heels, and tight skirt shocked the place into silence for a moment. Then several of the men made remarks in Spanish.

  Faroe gave them a long look before he said to the Mexican from the car, “Your compadres are pigs. Tell them to mind their mouths in front of my woman.”

  The guard shrugged. “You tell them.”

  “If it happens again, I will.”

  “I no think it happen. They don’ like you look.”

  “Do I want to know what they said?” Grace asked. “My gutter Spanish isn’t as current as yours.”

  “They like your shoes.”

  “Great. I’ll swap them for one of those rifles.”

  The guard’s mustache twitched. Definitely a small smile.

  They were escorted through the barracks to a separate wing of the house. Two men armed with Uzi submachine guns blocked their way.

  The Mexican with the mustache barked out staccato orders and used Hector’s full name.

  The guards stepped back and let them pass.

  Faroe, Grace, and Mustache walked down a long hallway lined with bedrooms. Each had been turned into some kind of work space. Through the open door of one bedroom, Grace saw three young, well-dressed women working at machines on a table.

  “They look like bank tellers,” she said softly to Faroe.

  “They are. Banco de Hector. The machines are mechanical currency counters.”

  Bales of counted, sorted, and banded bills were stacked waist high along one wall of the room, like so many yards of green paper.

  For an instant Grace couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There was more money in this upscale suburban bedroom than she’d ever seen short of the Federal Reserve Bank vaults in Washington.

  “So, Judge, what you think? You like my pinche casa de dinero? Huh?”

  Hector Rivas stood in the hallway in front of them, smoke curling up around his face from a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He looked like a character out of a noir magazine.

  And every instinct Faroe had told him that Hector was screwed up on something—as unpredictable as hot nitroglycerin.

  The Butcher.

  Jesus, Grace, why didn’t you go back to the hotel when you could?

  “Is ver’ grande, no?” Hector said.

  “I’ve been inside the Federal Reserve Bank in Washington,” she said calmly.

  Hector stared at her, sucked in a breath, held it, smiled like a fallen angel, and let the smoke trickle out. One of his eyelids drooped almost shut. The other eye glittered in the light like a snake’s. When Grace didn’t back up, he grinned and stepped out of the doorway.

  “Bienvenido,” Hector said, with a bow and a flourish.

  And a close appreciation of her body.

  She swung her hips past him into a big room with a twenty-foot ceiling, brick walls, and a huge fireplace at the far end. Despite the heat inside the house, the elaborate gas logs were burning fiercely. The furniture in the room was dark, oversize, and too ornate for her taste. One of the walls was covered with hand-painted tapestries depicting bloody scenes from the bullring. Another wall was loaded with Spanish art depicting various moments of the Crucifixion.

  A blond boy sat near the hearth, working over something on a silver tray. He could have been an acolyte or a sacrifice.

  “Do we pray or laugh?” Grace asked Faroe very softly.

  “Pray.”

  There was an obviously new addition to the stately room. In the far corner, a high-tech communications center gleamed with glass, plastic, and status lights.

  Hector’s nephew, Jaime, sat at a long desk talking softly into a telephone and staring at one of the three computer screens in front of him. As he talked, he scrolled through web pages, reading figures into the phone. There were two more hardwired phones within his reach, as well as a handheld radio and a satellite cell phone on their charging cradles.

  Slowly Grace walked into the room. As she watched, Jaime hung up the phone and hammered intently on the computer keyboard. He looked more like an international business technocrat strumming the threads of an electronic spiderweb than a drug smuggler.

  When Faroe moved past Hector to follow Grace, the drug lord grabbed Faroe by the arm and turned him toward the light.

  “Hey, mon, don’ I know you from the joint?” Hector asked.

  “No, jefe. I would remember you.”

  Hector turned his head to bring his good eye to bear. “Din’ you one time try to buy some chiva from un hombre named Ramón Posada in the back room at the Blue Fox? I sure I see you.”

  Faroe smiled slightly. “Jefe, you’re remarkable. That was more than seventeen years ago. There was a deal with a man named Posada, but I was just along for the ride. The buyer was an East Los Angeles dope dealer named Jorge Chula. But I don’t remember seeing you there.”<
br />
  Hector smiled, revealing a rich man’s teeth—gold and silver and steel replacing teeth lost to brawls. “I watch by a pinche hole in the ceiling because I din’ trust el cabrón Chula nada más que I can piss on him.”

  “I heard later that he was some kind of a snitch for the gringos in San Diego,” Faroe said. “Whatever happened to him?”

  “I take his balls and feed them to a dog.”

  With that Hector turned and walked into the great room.

  Grace didn’t look at Faroe.

  He didn’t look at her. Jorge Chula had indeed been an informant. Faroe’s informant. He’d been using him as a stepping-stone to Posada, who dealt ounces and half kilos of heroin from various Tijuana bars. Faroe hadn’t known that Hector was running Posada. Hector hadn’t known that Faroe was running Chula.

  When el jefe came closer to the hearth, the fair-haired boy glanced up anxiously.

  Hector ignored him.

  Without seeming to, Faroe examined the jefe de traficantes. In some ways Hector was old-fashioned, like the guard outside the chapel at All Saints. Hector wore a full, bushy mustache that curled down either side of his mouth, bandito style. He carried his Colt pistol backward in his belt, like pistoleros had done for fifty years.

  The solid gold diamond-studded pendant he wore on a heavy gold chain around his neck was stamped with the likeness of Jesús Malverde, El Narcosantón, Mexico’s patron saint of drug smugglers. Although the Catholic Church disavowed Malverde, there were roadside shrines honoring him everywhere in northern Mexico, and every shrine had its pilgrims and whispers of miracles.

  As Hector crossed the room, he moved with the faintly dragging gait of a drunk or an aging rodeo rider, someone with old injuries that had never fully healed. Yet his shoulders were still powerful, his hips narrow, his belly under control. His head seemed too large, like a bull’s, but it only added to his impact.

  Faroe decided that Grace was right. Hector had a raw, animal charisma that was perfectly suited to his life. His self-assurance alone would draw lesser men to him like pilgrims to a shrine.

  Hector gave Grace a sideways look as he circled her, squinting past the smoke curling from the cigarette in his mouth. His black glance ran over her like hands.