by Rowley, M C
I nodded.
“But you won´t tell me that anyway,” he smiled. “My country. I love my country. The potential is so huge. I meet a rich investor and he sees a different Mexico to the kid I meet in the orphanage. And you know who is more positive?”
I shook my head.
“The kid! The kid with nothing believes. The rich guy doesn´t. Young people are different. The machismo is dying, and it´s a good thing. So I will work my hardest while I am able, and I hope something will improve.”
I shifted in my seat. “How will this affect things?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Maybe they replaced me already.” He smiled a deep smile of warmth.
Against my instinct, I liked him. He oozed earnestness. He didn´t have to put anything on. Either that, or he was the greatest liar I had ever met.
We passed the rest of the morning and the early afternoon until Concha arrived for lunch.
The cabin stank of food. The WC was beginning to back up a little, and mixture of odors sapped hope from the soul. The food, when it arrived, was fresh and at least provided a new smell and with it some remnant of hope. I had been opening the door in and out when Concha arrived holding her usual array of trays and pots and pans. I greeted her. I still couldn´t work out where she´d come from, and she wouldn´t say. She served pan basos, fried pork sandwiches and served them with a couple of glass bottles of Coca Cola. She then had flan again for dessert. This time she ate with us in silence, and then trudged off again and I opened the door to a grating sky and heavy atmosphere. But at least the fresh air cleaned out the cabin a little.
Pep and I continued our conversation. He spoke with a soft and gentle voice. He told me of the projects he had authorized, and the people he had under him who believed in his way. He detested corruption, and told me the stories of greed that served him as warnings. I knew it was rhetoric partly, but I was convinced. His voice, when he switched to Spanish, and his rhythm was magnetic. Every noun and verb placed in a meaningful sentence. Every nuance and detail stripped back to the bare necessity. Like a radio presenter with a long CV.
We stayed that way until it began to get dark. I think we drank at least ten cups of coffee. I had started to visit the WC every ten minutes by the time Concha had arrived for supper.
Concha knocked as usual and entered in silence and left three pans covered in aluminum foil on my desk and left.
I thanked her and walked over to the food.
I stood, my back to Pep and looked over the pans, wrapped in foil.
I lifted the first foil off and found chicharron bathed in a deep red sauce. There was a basket of tortillas too.
I lifted the foil from the second pan.
But there was no food.
Instead, there in the middle, was an old Motorola clam-style mobile phone.
Chapter Twenty
I froze. I could feel Pep´s glare on my back.
I picked up the phone and slipped it into my pocket while my other hand lifted the foil on the next pan.
I carried on with the third pan, which was full of red rice.
I served up two plates full of rice and chicharron and took Pep´s his. He didn´t look at me in any way, or seem to fluster at anything.
We ate in silence, and the weight of the intruding phone hung in my pocket. It had to be Jason. He´d used the method before. And Concha knew. The way she had walked in silently was different from before. Guilt.
As soon as I had cleared up the plates, I excused myself and went to the WC.
Stooped on the cheap toilet confined like a London train bathroom by four tiny walls, I flipped open the phone. It was about five years old, and used. The screen burst into life. I looked straight for the silent mode, but it was already activated. I opened the contacts and there were no entries. Then, the messages, and the menu indicated one message, already read. I opened the folder. The number was listed but no name. The message read:
Hang in there. Looking into this. Jason.
I hit the reply button and wrote:
Where are you? What do you know?
And I hit send.
I waited, conscious of the time I was in the WC. I had another two minutes max before Pep started wondering.
I waited 30 seconds before a new message came in. I opened it,
News is international. The park is being guarded 24/7. Only one route out of the industrial park, to the East, through the hills. Small timeframe. Patrols passing every 5 minutes.
I leaned back and thought for a second. I had too many questions to ask for SMS so I chose one,
Why are they doing this?
Then I waited. Jason replied fast.
Not sure yet. But don´t trust anything they tell you. The cook, Concha, is turned. She doesn´t know much though.
My two minutes were up. I deleted all the messages and the number from the memory of the device, and closed the phone and flushed the toilet just to stay in role. I walked out and found Pep sitting up, rubbing his eyes.
“I lost a lot of friends with the education reforms I pushed, and the local job fund. A lot of powerful people got a pay cut thanks to me,” he said.
I struggled to recall the thread of our conversation at first, unable to get Jason´s contact out of my mind.
“So this could be rival parties?”
“I guess. Or narcos. How should I know?”
“Has a politician from Lujano been kidnapped before?”
He nodded.
“What happened then?”
But Pep didn´t answer. He just drew his flat hand across his neck.
I nodded and then went behind my desk to sleep. I laid flat, and despite the evening´s happenings, tiredness washed over me.
The hills then, would be our escape.
Chapter Twenty-One
The sirens pulled me out of sleep. Moving sound, or rather sounds, and getting closer. No doubt about it.
I opened my eyes, it was still dark. The tin roof that enveloped me and Pep hung only three meters above my face, I could tell it was early morning by the temperature. The air was steely, like it only is at 3 or 4am. I sat up and saw Pep stirring at the same time. Salvation or damnation was coming as the noise grew into a cacophony, a chaos of blaring compressed air sucked through cones to produce a discordant riot of head thumping screeches.
I heard the patrol cars tires hitting the dirt of the Polysol lot. Brakes slamming, then doors swinging open.
I got up and stumbled for my shoes barely getting them while Pep was inert.
“Get up!”
But he was frozen, sat upright with his hands spread out gripping the sofa, terrified.
“No,” he said. “They´re here for me.”
I went for the door, but the cops had made it before I could and slammed into its metal frame from the outside, pushing me back into Pep. In poured ten or so Federal Police Officers dressed in their black battle gear; bullet proof vests, semi automatic rifles, ski masks pulled up over their noses and battlefield-like helmets that looked like they were better suited for the latest Playstation shoot ´em up.
The first cop through hit me square in the gut and I went down, winded. The others crowded into Pep and grabbed him by the arms and dragged him out into the early morning darkness.
I stayed on my knees and rolled into myself. One of the feds was barking instructions from outside. I couldn´t catch it but his colleagues grunted and lifted me by the arms and we left the porte-office. It wasn’t the way I had hoped to be doing so.
Outside, the moon´s light proved barely sufficient illumination to see the scene but I counted fifty cops before a hood was thrown over my head and everything went black.
Plastic ties went around my wrists, behind my back. My feet stumbled to keep up with my carriers as we moved from outside to inside again. I felt the air change. We were in the hangar. Now, the voices of the feds reverberated up and around and back down, punctuated by the collective marching of fifty pairs of heavy duty boots.
I
heard a key turning in a lock. A door opening, and us moving into a smaller space. We shuffled maybe fifty feet into this new room and I was sat down in a chair, I could feel it was one of those cheap plastic chairs they use in university seminar rooms. I felt a tie go around my stomach and tightened so I was strapped completely.
My hood was too thick to sense the light. I only saw blackness so I listened. The cops were talking and their voices were shrinking in number.
My chin hit my chest and I drew long deep breathes, readying myself for what was to come. The plastic ties had been click-closed a couple of clicks too tightly, and the sharp plastic cut into my wrists. The cops´ voices were down to four, or two pairs of conversation, then someone left. Then it went quiet.
I heard a voice I knew.
He was speaking in rapid Spanish and pausing for answers. He was asking if he could “do it” after. Asking and asking again, frustrated. Then Salvatierra stopped talking and his footsteps came to me, and the hood flew off and light hit my eyes like a shovel to the face.
“Confession time,” he said.
He was wearing a Federal Police uniform like the others. Three guys stood behind him and to their left, Pep was sat in a chair like mine, untied and head hung low.
I looked around. The room was an empty warehouse with twenty foot high shelves. I stretched my head behind me. A table had been set up with a camera on a small tripod that pointed to a dark blue backdrop with the letters POLICÍA FEDERAL printed across it.
“Move him,” said Salvatierra in Spanish to the other cops, who nodded and walked to my sides and picked me up with the chair and carried me to behind the table, staring at the camera.
“Así,” said Salvatierra.
“Let her go,” I said. “Eleanor doesn´t know anything. There´s no need for you to do anything to her.”
Salvatierra ignored me as he fiddled with the buttons on the camera.
“Please.”
But Salvatierra stayed quiet and fired off at least twenty photos of me. His uniform showed off two eight point stars on each shoulder, which I remembered to be high ranking, maybe Chief Inspector. The other cops seemed to be in awe of him, that much was obvious. His stooped framed was triangular, and his face was hidden by the camera.
“Please let her go,” I said again. “I never told her about our employer.”
Salvatierra stopped fidgeting with the camera and looked up at me.
“If it were my decision, Dyce, I´d kill you now. But you´re lucky, turns out we need to wait one more day. You should just pray that everything we need to happen, happens, and your wife might get out of this alive. You, not so much.”
Salvatierra had me turned to the side, and took more photos. Then, the other cops carried over Pep, and had him shaking a fed´s hand while they took more shots. Pep seemed devoid of life. He´d been saved with not a hair on his head harmed. And yet his features were broken and shattered. Ashamed.
After the photo session, they took Pep back out of the room, and came for me and lifted me out of the room too. Outside, they cut my ties and frog-marched me the rest of the way back to the porte-office. Pep was already returned inside and sat in his old position again. I walked to the back and sat at the desk and Salvatierra stood at the door as we settled back in to our cage.
He stared at us, switching between Pep and me. Pep was sat on the sofa, arms resting on his knees, looking at Salvatierra like an old lady looks at a priest.
Salvatierra stayed like that for a whole minute before turning around and shutting our door, locking it this time. About thirty-seconds later, we heard a large SUV engine start up, rev once, then twice and pull away. Then silence. Pep did not even look at me and I was grateful for it.
I headed to the WC and pulled out the cell phone, opened the clam style front panel, clicked the messages button and composed. “Tell me when and how to get out of here.”
After a minute the little window screen on the front lit up in green to announce a new message. I opened it,
“It´s simple, but complicated,” said the reply.
“Tell me,” I wrote back.
I looked at the clock. 6:13am.
Ten hours before dusk.
Chapter Twenty-Two
At around 1pm, rain started. As was always the case in this part of the world, it came hard, and fast. At first, it started beating the trailer with thick, heavy droplets. You could count them, and then you couldn´t. They came faster and more frantic. The windows became murky with pouring water and the dust, now mud, making it dark again despite the hour. Thunderstorms like this one would last whole days and whole nights.
By the late afternoon, the rain had become a constant and soothing hum. It meant that the silence between Pep and me was comfortable. Because silence was impossible. It had been robbed from the world by this downpour and I thanked the heavens for it. And in any case, Pep dozed like a cat almost the whole day.
The late afternoon gradually and slowly rolled into evening, and the rain did not let up. It was part of my plan now. Had to be.
When the last dim glow of orange faded from the Western sky, I stood up. Pep looked at me.
“We´re leaving,” I said.
He started shaking his head.
“I mean it,” I said. “We´re leaving. It isn´t safe here. And we are leaving now.”
He kept shaking his head, nervous and scared.
“No. I can´t do that. It´s more dangerous to run. To run from these people.”
“No,” I said. “It isn´t. We are dead men here, they will kill us eventually. You honestly think they´ll keep us alive?”
He looked down at the floor quickly, and then moved his mouth to speak, but he couldn´t. He just shook his head.
I walked past him to the door and stood in front of it. It was a thin metal frame that held a sheet of opaque perspex. Salvatierra had gambled the lock. And that revealed a lot about his and Esteban´s game plan. But now I had to gamble too. Was Salvatierra out there in the rain, waiting for this? Or one of his crooked fed colleagues? I didn´t think so. Firstly, Salvatierra turned up every three days. A long time to wait for someone close by. Secondly, they used an old señora to drop off food, which also made no kind of sense. I decided to gamble and kicked the door hard at the lock.
It smashed open wildly, and outside was rampant. The rain lashed down like strings of iron, tearing the ground to mud. It was illuminated because the park´s street lights were back on and reflecting down from the thick, low, gray clouds above. It smelled iron-like, like when water soaks metal. Not the bloody kind of smell, but that´s what I thought of as I stepped down into the rain.
No-one jumped me. No figures stood in the rain awaiting me. Nothing.
I walked around the trailer, and found it clear too. I went back for Pep.
“I am not going,” he said.
I shook my head this time. “No choice, Governor,” I said, and grabbed him by the arm. I had found two plastic bin liners, like the ones Pep had been wrapped in, and now gave one to him. I put mine on like an anorak, and made him do the same. He was weaker than he looked, and I thought about how politicians are always tall, and athletic looking. No-one votes for fat short-asses. But the veneer proved just that. His arm was skinny and fleshy. It was soft and padded under my pull and he rose to his feet with ease. He pulled back but I shoved him toward the door. He looked at me, and for the first time since I saw him under the plastic of those trash bag liners, real fear permeated his features. His eyes were wide enough to make his pupils look like brown M&Ms, and his jaw was grinding like a machine. He had lost control. The control he used in his professional life - to face questions, or crowds, or narcos - had gone. I pushed him hard, and he stumbled and tripped out of the trailer into the rain soaked floor below.
“I am sorry,” I said. “But this is my only option.”
He stayed sitting, resting on both his arms, looking at his hands. Rain was collecting in the puddles his limbs were making in the soft mud.
; I stepped down and hauled him up. “Let´s go.”
Avoiding the side perimeters was the first part and the only way to do that was head straight down the central road of the industrial park. We set off through Polysol´s lot and out on to the tarmac. No-one was around, but we moved quick through the sodden streets anyway. Within two minutes, we were soaked to the knees but the plastic was doing a job up top.
We crossed one large factory, a giant black hulk in the darkness and I froze, and held Pep back.
In front of us, a patrol car was slowing rolling across the T-junction, horizontally across our line of vision about 100 meters ahead.
“Don´t move.”
It was dark enough to be hidden from the cops´ view but sudden movement would alert them.
“Hold it,” I said.
We were stood like statues in the middle of the street, totally exposed. The cop car was about to hit the point at which a right turn would be executed.
“Hold it,” I said again. I could feel Pep shaking in my grip. The rain would muffle a shout, but I realized the risk just before Pep snapped out of his trance and slammed my hand over his mouth. He dropped to his knees and I held him there, keeping him silent.
The cop car paused a second. The rain was hammering my face but I stayed looking. Ready to run.
But the cop car started up again, and rolled on down the street to our right, and out of view. Ahead lay the metal fence dividing the park´s border from the start of the hills, where the taxi had left me a week or so ago.
I pulled Pep back to standing position, “Now, run,” I said and I pulled him across the remaining tarmac, glancing for more red and blue lights the whole way. But there were none, and we made it.
I lifted the weak metal fence, so we could scramble under it. I kept a hold of Pep, though I wasn't as worried as I had been about his running off. He was resigned, and wouldn´t get far. I knew now I was stronger, and therefore faster than him.
We moved out and the slope of the hills began. And the shrubbery too began to thicken and before long we were under the cover of huge mutant cactus plants that had been growing and drinking this yearly rain for fifty years. The ground under the huge nopal trees was clammy but not too slippery. Above us the circles of the nopal shaded out the black purple sky. Above, tiny flashes of violet lightning filled the thick cloud, and the rain continued, relentless and furious.