“Your grandparents do not live here, miss,” said the man. “I think you are mistaken.”
“They bought this condo. I was here when they moved in.”
The man shook his head. Someone inside said something. He answered with a “no.”
“I want to see for myself,” said Veronica.
“See what?”
“That they are not here?”
“You want to come in?” asked the man. He stepped back. “Come. Come then. Have a drink with us. You, too, sir.”
I followed inside, still wary. The door opened into a short hallway that ran alongside a small kitchen. Beyond the hall was a combination dining and living room, with a master bedroom to the right. Upstairs there was a single room being used as a guest room. The man led Veronica through them all. After a quick peek downstairs, I went into the kitchen, where the man’s wife was setting out four glasses for Agua de Limón, a kind of lemonade that in this case was made with limes.
“You have a very nice house,” I told her.
“Your wife, is she crazy?”
“No more than most women,” I said.
The woman’s eyes knotted into a scowl. “Why does she think her grandparents live here?”
“How long have you been here?”
“Two years. Almost since it was built.”
“Very expensive?”
She gestured with her hands that she didn’t know. “My husband handles the money. Here, drink.”
It was a little sweet for my taste, but otherwise good. Veronica came back into the kitchen with her guide, a perplexed look on her face. The man had introduced himself as Senor Torrez.
“This is a very nice place,” I said. “I wonder if there are others for sale.”
“Why would you live in Mexico?” said Torrez. “You are from the States.”
“I was thinking that I would find a place to retire to. The taxes are very low in Mexico. Compared to the U.S.”
“It’s true,” said Torrez. “But this would not be a good place for you.”
“Why not?”
“All sold.”
“Really? I thought I saw some empty units up the street. In fact, most of them look empty.”
Torrez shook his head.
“Maybe they’ll build more,” I said.
“You speak Spanish very well. Are you from Mexico originally?”
“My wife is,” I said, gesturing toward Veronica. She had the tiniest of frowns—I could tell she was going to ask for a divorce as soon as we got outside.
“Are there a lot of people from the States?” I took a sip of my drink. It was one of those rare, nonalcoholic beverages that got better as you drank it.
“At one time,” said Mr. Torrez. “But there have been changes. Not a good place for tourists.”
He didn’t explain, just shook his head. I tried a few more questions but our hosts were now well on their guard and determined not to say anything. When I finished my drink, Mrs. Torrez took the glass and immediately put it in the dishwasher. We left a few minutes later.
* * *
“You don’t believe me,” said Veronica as I backed out of the driveway. “You think I’m crazy.”
Danny Barrett had checked Veronica’s bona fides for me that morning, confirming that she was a detective on leave from her department. He’d also tracked down a lieutenant in her department, who confirmed the grandparent story and said she was a good investigator. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t nuts.
I grunted noncommittally and drove slowly back up the hill. There hadn’t been a car in the driveway.
“Did you go in the garage?” I asked.
“I looked in. Their car wasn’t there.”
“Any car?”
“No.”
“Hmmmmph.”
“My grandparents did live there,” she insisted.
“I believe you,” I said. “I also believe we’re being followed.”
Veronica reached into her purse and redid her lipstick—strategically maneuvering the makeup mirror to get a look at the battered green pickup I’d spotted.
“Just a driver,” said Veronica as we passed. “Back is empty.”
I kept going, nonchalantly rolling down the windows and putting on the music, tapping my hand out as if I were having a good time.
Which I was.
“How good are you with a gun?” I asked Veronica as I started down the hill toward the Mexican hamlet.
“I can handle myself.”
“There’s a Walther under your seat,” I said. “It’s a P99. You’ll have to undo the tape. Shotgun has a thing for duct tape, and usually goes overboard.”
Veronica leaned down, fishing for it. She pulled it out, rubbing off a bit of sticky adhesive from the handle.
“Am I going to need this?” she asked, sliding it into her lap.
“Maybe. We’re going to get a flat tire on the way out of town. Assuming he’s still following us. He may not.”
“You think he’s going to tell you anything?”
“If he wants to live.”
I kept my foot steady on the gas pedal. The pickup was fairly far back, but given the nonexistent traffic, obviously following us. I slowed as I reached Villa Angela’s business district, trying to give him a chance to catch up, but he was savvy enough to keep his distance.
“Hold on,” I told Veronica as we approached the first curve west of the hamlet. I stepped on the gas as I turned the wheel, accelerating for a few seconds as we went through the short z in the road. Then I took my foot off the gas, slowing down without hitting the brakes. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to get away.
He remained behind us, content with the gap.
About a mile and a half out of town, we came to a second set of switchback curves that limited the view down the highway. I put the gas all the way to the floor this time, went another quarter mile or so, clearing the curves, then jammed the brakes and pulled over.
“You stay in the car,” I told her, reaching down to pop the trunk with the remote button. “If things go bad, use the gun.”
“I intend to.”
I tapped on my sunglasses. The embedded radio woke up, sounding a little beep in my ear.
“Shotgun, where are you?”
“Halfway through the Cheetos.”
“Get your ass over here. We’re on the main road out of town.”
“Comin’, boss.”
The truck was just coming around the bend as I ducked my head into the trunk to grab the jack and spare.
I’m not sure what I was expecting when the pickup pulled up alongside me. I know what I wanted—an Arab in man-jammies offering to confess to having plotted heinous crimes against America, but willing to tell all just for the honor of having been apprehended by the Richard Marcinko.
I can dream, can’t I?
What I did not want was what I got: a double-barrel staring me in the face.
V
Having been stared down by a wide variety of weapons over my career, I think I can say with some confidence that I am a connoisseur of the business end of a gun. And in that light, I must say that there is definitely something about the round circles of a double-barreled twelve-guage that gets your attention.
The gun was pointed out the passenger window of the pickup. The man holding it was leaning toward me from the driver’s seat. His face was in the shadows.
“Is this a robbery?” I asked in Spanish.
“What?” came the reply.
He was speaking English.
“You’re going to hurt someone with that shotgun,” I said, taking a step toward the truck.
“You just hold on there a second, mister,” said the man in the truck. “I’m the one with the gun.”
“I can see that.”
“I have some questions for you.”
“Come on out and ask them.”
“I like where I’m at just fine.”
He no sooner said that than he yelped, falling backward and out
the driver’s side of the truck.
While we’d been talking, Veronica had opened her car door and slipped out to the ground. Scrambling around the car, she circled across the road and approached the driver’s side of the truck. Easing her thumb onto the handle of the door, she’d slipped it open, then grabbed him by the collar and pulled.
The man dropped the gun as she dragged him from the truck. I retrieved it—an Ansley H. Fox model, in case you’re keeping track—and went over to join them on the highway shoulder.
“Don’t hit me, don’t hit me,” he told Veronica, his hands in front of his face.
“Why shouldn’t she hit you?” I unloaded the shotgun, letting the bullets fall to the ground. “What the hell were you doing, pointing a shotgun in my face?”
“I was just trying to find out who you are,” he said. “I didn’t mean no harm.”
A horn tooted down the road. It was Shotgun, coming hard in his rented Impala.
“Go on up into town and see what you can see,” I told him over the radio. “We have this under control.”
“Any place good to eat?” he asked as he whipped by in the car.
“Concentrate on your job,” I told him.
“I can eat and shoot at the same time, no sweat.”
“Don’t shoot—just look.”
“You got it, boss.”
Veronica pulled the man who’d accosted us to his feet. He was an older man, short and fairly rotund. He had thick, wire-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes when you looked directly at them.
“Who are you?” Veronica asked.
“Please, don’t hurt me. I wanted to talk to you. That’s all.”
“What about?”
“The house you went to—the people who used to live there are gone. The folks that are in there now—they don’t really live there.”
“Why are they there?” Veronica asked. The emotions she’d been keeping in check rose with her voice.
“I need to talk to you.”
“So go ahead,” I told him.
“They’ll come for me.” He glanced upward, back in the direction of the development and the Mexican town. “They’ll be watching.”
“Who?”
“They have a telescope in the last building in town and they’ll watch what’s happening.”
“They can’t see here.” The curve in the hills blocked the town from view.
“They will.”
“Are they going to come out and check on you?”
“They might.”
“Put the shotgun in the truck,” I told him, handing it over. Then I raised my shirt so he could see the pistol. “Then come over and help us change the tire. This way if they come out, it’ll look natural.”
The man nodded. I walked back over to the rental, got out the tire jack and the spare.
I will say one thing: I hate those damn donut tires they give you instead of real rubber.
* * *
The man’s name was Saul Freeman. He had come to Angel Hills around the time Veronica’s grandparents had, for basically the same reasons. He had been a heating and cooling contractor in North Carolina, didn’t have much savings, and had lost his house in a divorce, having to sell it at the height of the 2007 housing bust. His ex had then died, which he somehow found heavily ironic. She was his second wife; he’d lost contact with his first long ago. Both marriages had been childless, a fact that still baffled him.
“The place seemed like heaven in the brochures,” he said. For someone worried about being discovered, he was awful lackadaisical about getting to the point. “And it wasn’t that bad. At first. Except for the air-conditioning. Cheaped out on that. Supply was way undersized and some of the connections were so loose they came apart the first time I turned it on. Fixed those.”
“So what happened here?” I asked.
“Right after I moved in, the company that built the place started having a lot of issues—problems with finances, I guess. I don’t know exactly what the story was. Cash flow, they said. That might have been true. For a while, we stopped seeing most of the maintenance staff. They were laid off, I guess. Most of them. Everything stopped. Couldn’t find no one to cut the grass or fix the dishwasher. Then, one day, things changed. The lawns started getting watered and cut again. Some of the streets that hadn’t been paved were paved. They brought some trucks and what-not in.”
Less than a quarter of the units had sold when the problems began, and Saul estimated that a dozen families left, at least some because they couldn’t pay their mortgages. So he was surprised to see new buildings going up. Nor was there a sudden rush of potential buyers. Still, work continued. A few more residents left, generally without announcing their departure. He assumed it was due to personal money problems.
“Only families I saw move in were Mexicans. Which was kind of odd,” said Saul. “There were only two, though. Well, three I think. They came, stayed a couple of months, then moved out. New people came in. Always claimed to own the place, but I don’t know—buy it for a few months, then sell? You never see a for-sale sign. And like I say, these were Mexicans, not Anglos like me.”
They were in Mexico, of course, and Saul prided himself on being open-minded and accepting of all nationalities. But until now the place had been marketed exclusively to ex-pats, and it just seemed strange when the Mexican nationals moved in. They were much younger than the Americans; a few had small kids.
Saul wanted to talk to the salespeople about this, but there was no one to ask. The sales office was closed permanently. The maintenance supervisor claimed not to understand either his English or his Spanish. There had been a community manager with an office at the community center, but the office was closed. Calls to the management company, headquartered in Mexico City, went unanswered.
“About the only people related to the company were the security police,” said Saul. “That was going strong. They didn’t patrol much in the day, but they were out in force at night. Two cars.”
“You have a lot of crime here?” asked Veronica.
“No.”
“Two cars to patrol that little development?” I asked.
“They always want backup.”
Veronica seemed skeptical, but didn’t say anything else as Saul continued.
“I started talking to people at the pool, when they’d come. A couple, two or three, were talking about moving out. Others.”
He shrugged. Most of the people who’d moved here kept to themselves, not wanting to be bothered. It was one reason they’d left the States—they weren’t too sociable.
One day Saul went to the pool and discovered that it had been closed, supposedly for repairs.
“It looked fine to me,” he said.
Now suspicious, Saul began poking around. He was especially interested in the newcomers and went out of his way to be friendly. But they generally didn’t do more than wave or say hello. One evening after he’d been talking to some of the kids who had moved in on his block, a pair of Mexican policemen showed up at his door. They asked why he had been talking to the children.
“I like kids,” he said, taken by surprise.
“You like them in what way?” asked one of the cops.
They stayed for more than an hour. Their questions implied that Saul had had evil intentions, as he put it, though they never actually accused him outright. When they left, they warned him to make sure he was careful in the future.
He kept to himself for a few weeks after that.
“I thought about leaving,” he told me. “But I’d sunk every penny I had into the condo. Plus, without a sales office, I didn’t know how to arrange it. I was afraid of talking to people about it—certainly not the Mexicans. I thought one of them had called the police on me.”
One night, Saul decided that even though he would lose everything, he would leave. He packed his things into two suitcases and threw them in the back of the truck. Then he headed out of town. A mile past the Mexican village, he found the highway blocked by
a pair of police cars, red lights flashing. There were two large trucks just beyond them. He slowed, thinking it was an accident investigation. One of the cops brandished an M16 and told him to turn his truck around and go home.
“What is going on?” Saul asked.
“Police emergency.”
A few days later, a piece of paper was slipped beneath his door. There was going to be a meeting that night at the community center. A few minutes before the meeting, Saul was still trying to decide whether to attend. There was a knock on his door. When he opened it, he found two thugs standing there, inviting him to go.
There were about a dozen and a half white residents left. All were at the meeting.
“A Mexican lady lawyer type got up to speak just after I got there,” said Saul. “She had good English. Better than mine.”
The woman told the crowd that there had been a bankruptcy, and that earlier developers had sold to another development company. That company in turn had hired a management firm—she was its representative—that would now see to all of the needs of the residents. She was sorry that it had taken so long for them to explain, but the bankruptcy procedures were extremely complicated in Mexico, and her firm had to follow very specific rules so as not to upset the process. Those rules, she added, had prevented them from speaking up until now.
There were now going to be very strict rules for security. Security, she said, was becoming an important issue in northern Mexico. Additionally, the residents would have to comply with new laws passed by the Mexican government requiring that they have Mexican driver’s licenses and IDs. She was happy to announce that American drivers would not have to retake their driver’s license tests, and if they handed over their documentation this evening, she would arrange to have their licenses processed in the morning.
There was other paperwork involved—a blizzard of it, in fact, with so many papers passing back and forth that Saul couldn’t keep track. They were also in Spanish, a language that he couldn’t read very well.
“Well you just sign the papers,” said the woman. “You don’t need to read them.”
“But what are they for?”
“Different things—to keep you from being taxed, to make sure you own your property, to say your car is insured—all different things.”
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