by M. A. Lawson
She looked up and could see a few stars through the skylight, which made her realize that the only constellation she could identify was the Big Dipper. She’d always found astronomy fascinating, but Jessica had always been more interested in the smaller universe of the human body and had never really learned anything about the stars. There were so many things she didn’t know, and so many things she would never know if she didn’t survive this. She’d never attend college, or see Paris or Rome. She’d never become a doctor or have a lover or become a mother. Her life would end before she had lived at all.
No! That wasn’t going to happen. She was going to live. Kay was going to save her.
At least, she hoped Kay would do what these drug people wanted—which made her feel guilty. She’d never really made much of an effort to become close to Kay—or to reciprocate when Kay tried to get closer to her—and now she was hoping the woman would do something illegal to save her.
She couldn’t help but wonder how far Kay would go for her.
She couldn’t help but wonder if this would be the last time she’d see the stars.
46
There were several reasons why Kay had picked the construction site on Mex 1D as the place to exchange Caesar Olivera for Jessica: It was accessible from the ocean, it was only twenty minutes from Caesar’s place in Rosarito Beach, and it was close to the U.S. border. It was also relatively isolated, with the golf course to the south—no one would be playing golf at five a.m.—and it couldn’t be seen clearly from the walled-in gated community to the north. And at five in the morning, it would be too early for the construction workers to show up to continue building whatever they were building. If a few people did happen to be there while the exchange was taking place—such as the dog walkers she and Roman had seen the preceding afternoon on the beach—that wouldn’t interfere with her plan. It might, however, put those people at risk, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Kay’s only concern was her daughter.
The downside to the location was that she knew Mora would bring people with him and try to capture or kill her after the exchange was made. Those people could sneak onto the construction site, slithering on the ground, and hide behind the earthmoving equipment. She also suspected Mora would bring a sniper—but she wasn’t worried about a sniper.
On the western edge of the construction site where it abutted the beach, there was an embankment that was four or five feet high. You could walk down the embankment to get to the beach, but you couldn’t actually drive down onto the beach unless you had an ATV or dune buggy. Well, that wasn’t exactly accurate: You could drive down the embankment in a regular car, like the Ford that Kay was driving, but you’d never be able to get the car back up the embankment again.
But Kay didn’t care about getting her car up the embankment.
Kay had no intention of driving away.
Kay drove the Ford through the construction site, bouncing over the rough ground, knowing Caesar Olivera was being tossed all around in the trunk. Poor Caesar. As she neared the embankment, she pressed down on the accelerator and drove her car directly off its crest. Kay’s head hit the roof of the Ford when the tires hit the beach and she bit her tongue. She had no idea if she’d broken the axles on the Ford—nor did she know if Caesar Olivera had survived the crash without breaking any bones.
She stepped on the gas pedal, and to her amazement, the car was still drivable. Thank God Ford still made a good car. She drove fifty yards down the beach and parked the car so the passenger side faced the construction site. If she stayed on the driver’s side of the vehicle, she’d have cover.
She got out of the car and hammered on the trunk. “You okay in there, Caesar?”
Caesar responded by kicking the trunk lid and growling a litany of muffled curses. Good. It sounded like he was okay—but he probably had bruises everywhere.
—
Kay looked at her watch. Four a.m. It was time to call Mora. She didn’t know exactly where Mora was, but she knew he had to be somewhere near the San Diego border crossing. She also knew that Mora wouldn’t have a problem exceeding the speed limit to get to Rosarito Beach.
She reached into the green duffel bag and pulled out Rodney’s cell phone. She wanted to confuse whoever Mora had monitoring phone calls.
“Where are you?” she said when Mora answered.
“Tijuana,” Mora said.
“Okay. You have thirty minutes to bring my daughter to Caesar’s house in Rosarito Beach.”
“We’re going to meet at Caesar’s house?” Mora said.
“No. How stupid do you think I am? I’ll call you again in thirty minutes and give you the exact location for the exchange.” Then she hung up before Mora could say anything.
She was going to give Mora as little time as possible to reconnoiter her location and put people in positions where they could kill her. When Mora reached Caesar’s house, she would call him again and finally tell him where she was; Mora then would have only twenty minutes to deploy his men or interfere with her plan.
As she waited, she wondered briefly how Caesar Olivera was doing. He’d been in the trunk since midnight. She thought maybe she should give him some water. Then she thought: Fuck him.
—
Mora had been wrong. Hamilton wasn’t going to make the exchange along the border fence line, as he’d originally thought. She was going to make it someplace near Rosarito Beach. The closest border crossing to Rosarito Beach was the San Diego crossing, but he still didn’t think she’d try to cross into the States via a border crossing. That made no sense. She had to know he would stop her before she crossed the border.
The idea of her bringing in a helicopter to escape still seemed like the most viable option. Then another thought occurred to him. Maybe she would make the exchange at the Rosarito Beach marina and use Caesar’s yacht to escape, or maybe some other boat that was smaller and more maneuverable. If she tried that, he’d blow Caesar’s expensive yacht out of the water. Caesar would be less annoyed at losing a three-million-dollar boat than he would be if Hamilton escaped.
The one thing Mora knew for sure was that the damn woman was running him around so he’d have less time to counteract her plan—and right now he needed to get the girl to Rosarito Beach.
—
He walked up the stairs to the bedroom where the girl was being held. She was sitting on the bed when he opened the door, and she stood up when he walked into the room. Her small hands were clenched into fists. This was the first time Mora had seen her up close. She was only five foot four, and she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She must be terrified—but she looked defiant. Like her mother, she was a fighter.
He almost smiled, thinking about her beating the shit out of Perez’s man.
“I’m taking you to meet your mother,” he said. “Let’s go. We need to move quickly.”
He walked the girl down the stairs and out of the house. There was a black SUV waiting on the street and a second black SUV parked behind it, containing Perez and four other men. He opened the passenger-side door of the first SUV and said to Jessica, “Get in and buckle your seat belt. I’m not going to handcuff you, but if you give me any sort of problem, I’m going to pistol-whip you. I’ll turn your face into a Halloween mask. Do you understand?”
The girl nodded, but he guessed that if she got the chance, she’d fight him.
He got into the driver’s seat and took off, with Perez following right on his bumper.
—
Jessica didn’t know who the guy was, just that she’d seen him before with Perez. She sensed that he was the big boss. He drove like a maniac. There were times she was certain they were going more than a hundred miles an hour. He was going to kill them both if he had an accident.
She had no idea what was going on. All he’d said was that he was taking her to meet Kay. She wondered if Kay knew that this
guy had a car filled with a bunch of other guys coming with him.
About twenty minutes later, they stopped in front of a big, fancy house with a high wall and double wrought-iron gates. Near the gates were a bunch of men holding machine guns. Jesus! Kay was taking on an army.
—
Kay checked her watch. Mora should be at Caesar’s house by now. She called him again, and this time gave him the GPS coordinates of the exchange location. “Park on the highway,” she said, “and walk across the construction site and down onto the beach. I’ll be there with Caesar. If you’re not here in twenty minutes, then I’ll know that you’re trying to pull something and I’ll take off with Caesar.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking, Mora. You’re thinking you can take as long as you want because I’ll just have to wait for you if I want my daughter back. But I won’t wait. I won’t give you time to surround me or block me in. I’ll take off and I’ll set up another location for making the exchange, and if I have enough time, I’ll call in reinforcements from the U.S to help me.”
She closed the phone and looked out at the water. There was a single boat about three hundred yards off the beach and two men were fishing from it. She opened the trunk, and Caesar Olivera immediately started cursing her. She could smell urine; Caesar had pissed his pants. He was still wearing the black sports jacket, gray shirt, and dark gray pants he had on when Kay met him earlier in the evening—an evening that now seemed like days, not hours, ago—and his beautiful clothes were wrinkled and stained and one of his loafers was missing. He’d knocked off the shoe somehow while moving around in the trunk. He had a livid bruise on his forehead—probably from when the car went over the embankment—and his hair was disheveled.
For some reason, probably the hair, Kay was reminded of the pictures she’d seen of Saddam Hussein when they caught him in that hole in Iraq. That was another guy who thought he’d live forever.
Caesar Olivera had been in power for almost twenty-five years, and Kay was willing to bet that during that time no one had ever abused him the way she had. If he got his hands on her after this night was over, she couldn’t even imagine the things he’d do to her. She didn’t want to imagine the things he’d do to her.
Kay was holding in her hand one of the items she’d obtained from old Mr. Durant. “I want you to hold still,” she said. “I’m going to put this around your neck.”
The object she held was a section of fire hose about an inch and a half in diameter, and it was shaped into the form of a ring approximately eighteen inches in diameter. A flexible metal strip had been inserted through the hose and holes were drilled in the metal strip at each end so a padlock could be inserted into the holes after the ring was put around Caesar’s neck.
“The hell you are,” Caesar said. Caesar’s hands were still handcuffed behind his back, but when she tried to put the ring around his neck, he snapped at her forearms with his teeth, nipping her once, and he kept shaking his head from side to side so she couldn’t get the device on him.
“I don’t have time for this,” Kay said. She pulled the Glock from the waistband of her jeans and hit him on the head with it, not hard enough to knock him unconscious, but hard enough to stun him. She placed the fire-hose ring around his neck, put the padlock through the holes in the metal strip, and snapped the padlock shut. By the time she finished, Caesar had recovered enough from the blow to his head to say, “What is that thing?”
“Get out of the trunk,” Kay said. She actually had to help him out, as his legs had cramped up from being bent for so long. When he was standing on the sand, she said, “Now I’ll tell you what you’re wearing around your neck.”
When she finished speaking, she showed Caesar the object she was holding in her left hand, then went behind him so he couldn’t see her and raised her right hand over her head—and the collar on Caesar’s neck began to emit a beeping sound, one beep every three seconds.
“You better hope Mora doesn’t do something stupid, Caesar. If he does, you’re gonna die.”
—
Mora turned to the girl and said, “Your mother’s a smart woman. It’s going to be a pleasure to kill her.”
To this the girl responded, “You’re the one who’s gonna die.”
Mora couldn’t help but smile; the little gringa had guts. “Don’t get out of the car or I’ll shoot you,” he said, then he exited the SUV and walked back to talk to Perez, who was parked behind him with his four men. He told Perez where they were going—about twenty minutes south on Mex 1D—and gave him the GPS coordinates for the exchange location, which Hamilton had said was a beachfront construction site.
It then occurred to Mora that it was more likely Hamilton would use a boat to escape instead of a helicopter, as he’d originally thought, and if that was the case, and if by some chance she got away before he could kill her, maybe his men could intercept her after he had Caesar. The problem was that she had given him only twenty minutes to reach the exchange point—he didn’t think she was bluffing about taking off if he didn’t arrive on time—and it would take much longer than twenty minutes for his men to drive to the marina, steal a boat, and then sail the boat to the exchange point. After thinking about all that for a few seconds, he decided to get some of his men headed toward the exchange site in a boat, even if the chance of them arriving in time to intercept Hamilton was small. Yes, that seemed prudent, and it was maybe the only thing he could do to keep her from escaping if he failed to kill her. If Hamilton escaped, after what she had done to Caesar . . . Well, Mora didn’t even want to think about what Caesar might do to him.
“I want you to send three of your men to the marina,” he told Perez, “and have them get a boat, the fastest one they can find.”
“What about Caesar’s yacht?” Perez said.
“It’s too big and too slow. They need to get a boat that’s very fast and easy to maneuver. Like a cigarette boat. After they have the boat—and I don’t care who they have to kill to get one—tell them to proceed to the exchange point.
“I want you and the sniper to follow me in your car. As soon as I start walking toward the beach with the girl, you and the sniper belly-crawl into the area. Find a place where you can see the beach and not be seen. The sniper brings his rifle, you take the grenade launcher. When Hamilton tries to get away after the exchange, whether she tries to drive away or fly away in a chopper or escape by boat—use the grenades. Kill her and the girl. But don’t do anything before the exchange is made unless you receive a direct order from me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Perez said.
—
Mora got back into the SUV with Jessica and drove as fast as he could to the exchange point.
“Get out,” he said to Jessica. “Your mother’s waiting on the beach.”
Mora took Jessica by the arm and guided her through the construction site. He turned once and saw Perez and the sniper exiting the second SUV. Just before Mora and Jessica reached the embankment, his cell phone rang. He could see a car on the beach about a hundred yards away. Caesar was standing next to the car and his hands were behind his back—as if they were cuffed or tied—but Hamilton wasn’t visible.
—
Kay was inside the car, holding Caesar’s cell phone to her mouth, lying on the backseat. She wasn’t going to let Mora’s men shoot her before she had a chance to explain the situation to Mora. She wasn’t worried about Caesar running away.
Mora answered her call on the first ring. “Now what?” he said.
“I want you to listen carefully, Raphael. Caesar has a collar locked around his neck, and the collar is filled with plastic explosive. And I’m holding a dead man’s switch in my left hand. Do you understand what this means?”
“Yes,” Mora said.
“I’m gonna explain things to you anyway, just to make sure there are no mistakes. If my thumb comes off the button on the dead man’s
switch, an electronic signal is going to be transmitted to a detonator in the collar and Caesar’s head is going to be blown off his shoulders. The collar and the detonator were manufactured by one of your fine Mexican craftsmen in Tijuana. So if I fall down and my thumb comes off the button, Caesar dies. If I’m shot and my thumb comes off the button, Caesar dies. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Mora said.
“There’s one other thing. The transmitter in the dead man’s switch has a range of two kilometers. This means that after I exchange Caesar for my daughter, if you try to kill me, you and Caesar had better be at least two kilometers away. And if you’re standing next to Caesar when the bomb goes off, you’ll die, too. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Mora said.
“Good. I’ve already explained the situation to Caesar, which is the reason he’s standing outside the car like his feet are buried in the sand. Now, I know you’ve brought people here with you, so I’m going to give you two minutes to call your guys and explain the situation to them. Then, as soon as I step out of the car, you and my daughter come down to the beach. You send my daughter to me, and I’ll send Caesar to you.”
Kay hung up, and then a horrifying thought occurred to her. What if Mora wanted Caesar dead? With Tito gone, who would be a better man to assume control of Caesar’s empire? Caesar had come to power by killing his boss. Raphael Mora could come to power the same way—but without actually pulling the trigger himself.
Well, there was nothing she could do about that.