The Devil's Bounty

by Sean Black

  A chill desert breeze caught him off guard. Charlie was standing a few feet at the back of the Escalade, hands cupped protectively around the red tip of a cigarette as the wind bit at the tobacco. Hector took a moment to study their surroundings. There was traffic, but not much. Maybe one car passing in either direction every forty seconds or so. He could see the city lights in the far distance. There was a metal crash barrier, and beyond that scrub desert. He glanced up into the night sky. A full moon hung high overhead.

  He peered down the road for the RAV 4 or any other vehicle that might have stopped but there was nothing and no one. He walked to the back of the Escalade and repeated the procedure as a bus whizzed by on its way home from a maquiladora.

  No one would stop. Hector knew that much. If someone broke down here it was their hard luck. It wasn’t only men such as him who were paranoid. It was the defining feeling on this side of the border. Good Samaritans had long since been snuffed out. A car at the side of the road would only be approached by someone looking for trouble.

  This was his opportunity. The girl’s sickness had been a signal. He turned to Charlie. ‘Finish your cigarette.’

  Charlie took a long final drag and crushed the butt under his heel. He started back towards the front passenger seat but Hector blocked his path with a meaty arm. Beyond the crash barrier the ground sloped down for about seven feet before levelling off and extending into the distance.

  ‘Wait down there,’ Hector said, with a nod towards the open ground.

  Charlie stared at him. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘It’s not what I’m going to do, Señor Mendez. It’s what you are going to do.’

  Fifty-two

  JULIA WATCHED AS Hector walked back towards the car. He stopped at the rear passenger door. She tried to read his expression but it was impossible. He had one of those faces.

  He started to open the door and her heart began to thump a little harder. This would be her chance. He was letting her out so he could clean the inside of the vehicle. All she needed was his back to be turned for a few seconds and she would run. If she could get over the barrier and down the slope before he had a chance to draw his weapon she had a chance to get away. If Charlie was still outside the vehicle she would have to make sure she was a good ten feet from him when she made her break. That would be enough. She ran every morning – at least two miles. She wasn’t the fastest but she had enough pace to put some distance between them, and she had stamina, which she doubted either man possessed. Hector was strong but out of shape, and Charlie was only good for catching girls he’d drugged.

  It was only when the door was open and she caught the look on Hector’s face as they made eye contact that she knew he wasn’t planning to clean the interior. He was letting her out so he could kill her. His face betrayed him: it spoke of shame and regret in equal measure.

  Her mind racing, she shuffled along the seat, swung her legs out and emerged from the Escalade. She needed distance, a few meters between herself and Hector, but he stayed close. Glancing over, she saw Charlie, hands at his sides, his fingers drumming against his legs in agitation. He must know as well.

  She would have to play along. If Hector suspected she knew, her fate was sealed. He would put a bullet in her then and there. A car was approaching. She thought for a moment about dashing towards it but Hector was so close she could feel him, and the chance of the car stopping in time, if it stopped at all, was slim.

  ‘I’m sorry about being sick,’ she said, half turning her head.

  Hector shrugged, head down, eyes looking everywhere but at her. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Testing his reaction, she took a half-step to the side. He didn’t appear to notice.

  How far? she asked herself. How much distance would there have to be before she could make a run for it? Too much of a gap between them and he would notice; too little and she would stand no chance of getting away.

  She looked again at the crash barrier, the slope beyond. That was when she noticed the gap in the barrier – a gap big enough for the Escalade to squeeze through. Even if she ran, Hector could take the Escalade down there. She could outrun him, and Charlie if she had to, but she wouldn’t be able to outrun the vehicle. Her shoulders slumped. She felt like crying. Her stomach lurched. She started towards the front of the vehicle. Hector began to follow her. But as she doubled over to heave, she put out her arm to push him away. He backed off a little and she retched. A pathetic string of bile dribbled from her mouth. Something shifted in her mind. It was as if the fear she had felt all this time had been switched off.

  As she groaned in apparent pain, signalling with her hand for them to give her space, she looked back at the road. On the other side of the road she spotted two sets of headlights in the distance approaching from the opposite direction. Between the side of the road they were on and the other there was another barrier with a gap, but it was close to a hundred meters away. On the other side, a matching barrier offered no such breach.

  She straightened up for a second, hands falling to her hips. She tried to estimate the speed of the approaching vehicles by the ever-expanding orbit of their headlights. Hector was growing impatient. He was shouting to Charlie to join them. Then he turned to her.

  ‘Come on, we take a little walk. The air will be good for you,’ he said, his voice like an echo as she focused on what she had to do.

  ‘Give me a second,’ she said, losing the last of the sentence as she doubled over one more time, her right leg falling back a little to give her more of an explosive start.

  Now, she thought, pushing off on her right foot, twisting round the front of the Escalade and hurtling across the blacktop, everything around her a blur. Pressing her hands down on the crash barrier, she vaulted over it, stumbling as her feet touched down on the other side but quickly recovering her balance.

  She could hear the approaching vehicles, the roar of their engines, but she didn’t dare stop to check how close they were. Hector had reacted faster than she had anticipated. For a big man he moved fast. She couldn’t be certain but as she had run across the road she thought she had felt the toe of his sneaker brush the heel of her trailing foot. He could be only feet behind her, close enough that if she hesitated, even for a second, he would take her down.

  She dashed straight across the road, white light enveloping her along with the nail-on-a-blackboard grating of brakes – more sensation than sound – and the chemical cloy of burning rubber. A gust of warm air dipped around her, so sudden and violent that her dress billowed. She felt dirt under her feet and the crash barrier on the other side loomed almost from nowhere. She started to vault it but her balance, thrown off by having been a split second from going under the wheels of what she knew now was a trucker’s rig, was off, and she half fell, half stumbled over it, landing painfully on her left leg, her ankle folding under the weight.

  The slope on this side of the road matched that on the other. If anything it was a little steeper. Knees folding, she allowed gravity to take her, and rolled down, a good fifteen feet, bits of dirt and shale flying up into her face as she went.

  She pushed herself back on to her feet as the whipcrack of a gunshot rang out close by. A warning shot to stop her?

  Back up on the road, she could just about glimpse the truck jack-knifed across two lanes, the cab slicing across them, the trailer lying on its side. Rubber smeared the surface in two curved trails behind it.

  She struggled to her feet. A jolt of pain surged up her leg as she tried to put weight on the twisted ankle. She hobbled forward. She had to keep moving. If she didn’t, she was dead. She broke into a jog. After half a dozen steps the pain levelled off.

  Another gunshot. Then voices. She could hear Hector shouting, telling her to stop. She kept moving, and threw a glance over her shoulder. He had one leg over the barrier. He was heading towards her. He was moving faster than she was. Without the twisted ankle she could have outpaced him, but not now.

  She bit down hard on
her lower lip and propelled herself on into the moonlit desert. She had to be within range of his gun. She looked around for cover. A lone juniper tree stood about twenty feet to her left, its trunk barely thick enough to hide her, even if she could get to it before he pulled the trigger.

  There was noise from the road now too. Men’s voices. She thought she heard Charlie shouting but she couldn’t be sure: the words were drowned by the blood pounding in her ears.

  She kept moving. The pain was receding. Either that or she was simply becoming used to it. Whatever the reason, her strides were getting longer. The juniper tree was close now. When she got there she would find something beyond it to fix on. She would keep moving, keep running, until her back took a bullet and she went down. The thought gave her comfort and spurred her on.

  She brushed past the outer branches of the tree, and moved left so that its trunk was behind her. It was only then that she noticed the man. Her breath caught in her throat as a huge hand shot out, grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her round a hundred and eighty degrees. She caught the merest glimpse of him. He had appeared from nowhere as his hand bunched the dress fabric at the back of her neck and held her in place, her back to his. It was like being taken by a riptide. A second later there was the ear-shredding sound of a gun being fired less than two feet from her and a bright yellow muzzle flash.

  Time seemed to fracture as she was spun back round so that she was alongside the man, the fingers of his giant left hand grasping her elbow as he moved her back towards the road, circling wide where Hector had been only moments ago. She didn’t struggle against him but she was hobbling as he covered the ground in long, loping strides. He stopped for a second. ‘Are you okay to keep going?’ he asked, his tone, like his movements, strikingly relaxed, as if he had saved her from being pushed over in the playground, rather than from a midnight execution in the middle of the desert.

  She nodded. ‘I twisted my ankle.’

  ‘Here,’ he said, picking her up as if she weighed nothing, and tucking her over his back with one hand while he held the gun in his other and broke into a run. ‘We gotta get you out of here.’

  Fifty-three

  CHARLIE MENDEZ OPENED the glove box of the Escalade and rifled through the contents, hoping to find a spare set of keys or, better yet, a gun. There were wads of receipts, and an owner’s manual for the vehicle, but no gun. There was no Hector either: he had disappeared. He slammed the glove compartment shut, panic threatening to overwhelm him.

  He had to get the hell out of there before the cops showed up. If he was picked up it would complicate an already difficult situation. To take him from custody would involve a lot of explaining and there were limits – he had been told so when he’d got here. There was only so much the cartel could do to protect him, and there would surely come a point where he was more trouble than he was worth – even though he was worth a lot.

  He climbed back out of the vehicle and looked around with pinprick pupils. On the other side of the highway, the trailer was lying on its side. Behind it a white SUV was inching its way through the debris. Hector still hadn’t appeared. There had been two gunshots a minute or so ago but then nothing. For all he knew Hector could be dead and he could be stuck in the middle of this mayhem, a sitting duck, with no idea where he was, never mind how to get away.

  He was still debating with himself whether to sit tight or get out of the Escalade when he saw the girl being hustled towards the SUV by a tall man, who opened the vehicle’s back door for her. She got inside.

  Charlie felt a breath of relief. The girl was gone. Alive. Whoever the guy was, he was obviously there for her, not for him. Charlie would wait for one more minute to see if Hector came back. If he didn’t, he would leave the vehicle and get out of there. There were plenty of hours until sunrise. If he stayed off the road there would be little chance of anyone spotting him. At daybreak he could flag someone down and offer them money to take him back into town. There, he could make a phone call and arrange for someone to pick him up.

  Making his plan calmed him. Everything was going to be okay. He opened the driver’s door and that was when he saw him. A guy standing next to the man who had just put the girl into his vehicle. They were talking: the conversation was animated – a disagreement. From the look of him, the second guy was almost certainly an American. He was tall, over six foot, and more than wiry but a long way short of muscle-bound. And there was an intensity to him that crackled, like the air before a flash of lightning.

  A sedan had pulled up next to the Escalade and an elderly man had got out to take a look at the accident. Charlie didn’t recognize him, but by the time he looked back across the highway, the vehicle the girl was inside was pulling away. The second guy was still there, standing at the edge of the highway, staring straight at Charlie, even though the tinted windows and interior cabin of the Escalade must have blocked his line of sight. It was as if the Escalade didn’t even exist. Charlie felt himself meet the man’s gaze, and shuddered. He had seen that look before, in the eyes of the lead prosecutor at his trial. It was the look of someone who had already weighed and measured him, delivered his own judgement and was now set to carry it through.

  From the chaos of grinding metal and gunfire, fear rose in him. He turned and ran. Across the barrier, down the slope and into the barren desert.

  He didn’t look back. He didn’t have to. He already knew that the man was coming after him.

  Fifty-four

  THE SMELL OF sweat and vomit came at Lock like heat from a blast furnace as he opened the door of the Escalade. He took a deep breath, drawing the fetid air into his nose and down his throat, searching for the coppery tang of blood. There was none.

  A five-second check of the interior revealed no one balled up in a foot well, only empty space. He got back out, opened the rear tailgate, made sure it was clear and ran to the barrier.

  About a hundred yards out there was movement. Mendez. Or maybe the bodyguard. He vaulted the barrier and watched the person make a final break from the cover of a juniper tree. From the figure’s outline, he was sure it was Mendez.

  He skidded down the slope, letting the gradient and gravity do the work as Mendez took flight, heels kicking up in a steady pulse. He was moving at a good pace, while Lock was going about as fast as he could manage. Mendez was a surfer, young and fit. It would be no easy foot chase but maybe he’d have an edge when it came to stamina. He settled into his stride, hoping that his quarry would overreach himself and tire quickly.

  The decision to go after Mendez, rather than stay with Ty and the girl, had been a snap one. Something that defied his own logic. Ty’s gambling instinct had suggested they rescue the girl and take Mendez. Lock had argued that to split the mission reduced the chance of attaining either goal. Cold calculation said the same, even by the roadside. Getting Julia back to her parents, or better yet straight across the border and to sanctuary, was hardly straightforward. An extra body would always be useful – not fundamental, but useful. Throw an entirely separate and ongoing hostile extraction of Mendez into the mix and things got very complicated. In short, it was a bad idea.

  That was still Lock’s thinking as they had watched the Escalade pull over. Assuming they might have been spotted by the bodyguard, they had kept moving. They were on a highway. Unless the bodyguard was going to drive back down it the wrong way, he had nowhere to go and no way of losing them. They had coasted along until they were out of sight.

  Ty had got out and moved back down the road on foot. He had watched as the occupants had popped out of the vehicle, happy that they hadn’t been following a decoy. He had jogged back and relayed the news to Lock, who had decided that this was the best opportunity they would get. But by the time they had found a gap to cross to the other side of the highway, the girl had already made a run for it.

  Lock had been there to see her dash for freedom. The echo of Carrie’s death had brought his heart into his mouth and a fresh rage to his heart. Julia had made it, but all
of a sudden, standing at the edge of that dark desert highway, ghosts had been all around him, popping up like so many plants after a summer storm. He looked back to the desert and they were everywhere, completely real. The men who had pursued his fiancée to her death stood like gunslingers, staring at him. At their feet, Carrie lay dying. Melissa Warner was there too. The girl whose rape and subsequent death he had come to avenge.

  As Ty had put Julia into the RAV 4, the pull of the dead, and the rage he felt towards Mendez, had sucked his heart into his boots. His decision was made. There was no time to do anything other than tell Ty to get the girl out of there and that he was going to find what they had come down here for: justice for Melissa Warner.

  Now, without the vantage-point afforded by high ground, Lock stopped for a moment, scanning the dinner-plate flat landscape for Mendez. The desert breeze rustled through his shirt. He was five hundred yards out from the highway. Flashing lights near the jack-knifed truck announced the arrival of the authorities. Lock doubted Mendez would double back and risk running into cops who might not be aligned to the cartel. Lock couldn’t go back in case they were. That left no turning back for either of them.

  He plunged forwards into the darkness.

  Fifty-five

  POLICE CHIEF GABRIEL Zapatero listened quietly, put the phone down and walked outside to find the others. The atmosphere was light and festive. A mariachi band played on a raised dais over-looking the swimming pool. Waiters circulated with trays of food and drinks. There were no wives but lots of girls, beautiful but hard-faced professionals. The men were businessmen, lawyers, cops, one or two doctors.

  The first person Zapatero saw was Manuel Managua, who was working the assembled guests like a true politician, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he already had the votes of everyone here, and that hookers rarely made it to the polls on election day. The problem with telling Managua was that in a crisis he panicked. He was the one who had most wanted the American girl, yet now that she was a problem he would no doubt deny he had ever said any such thing. A classic politician.