by Rowley, M C
“So wouldn´t it be safer to stay in one place?” I asked.
“No, it definitely wouldn´t,” said Jason.
After we started rolling, he fell into a kind of sleep, although I was able to ask him for directions when they were needed. Two kilometers are different in a truck, riding down one or two simple lanes compared to walking it across water logged fields. We made it back to the first safe house in less than ten minutes.
I swung the Lobo round to line up with the Tundras and got down and walked round to help Jason onto my shoulder. We started walking toward the house when the door flung open and Kyle ran out, down the steps and up to us.
She didn´t seem shocked about Jason´s injury, it was part of the plan, but her face was full of deep concern.
“Aronson´s inside, go with him.” And we walked with Jason up the stairs and through into a room I hadn´t seen. It was the same, bleak unpainted concrete walls, and a faded red rug in the middle of the floor. There was an ancient spring single bed and Aronson with a load of medical supplies laid out in front of him on a small wooden table. We laid Jason down and Aronson got straight to work, removing the clothing around Jason´s shoulder.
“Hernandez is a good shot,” said Aronson after some minutes. “Not even a fragment of bullet in this wound.”
“Things have gotten complicated,” said Kyle, standing with me looking down at Aronson and Jason. “Esteban pulled the trigger on Dyce.”
And then she looked at me directly.
I looked at Jason. His eyes were shut, but he was still conscious, “How bad?” he asked in a croaky voice.
Kyle left the room and came back with a laptop. She opened it, and the biggest national newspaper in Mexico´s homepage filled the screen. Below the title and main menu, were the words,
EN BUSCA DE UN HOMBRE
In search of one man
And a picture of a truck late at night. It was the truck I had acquired for the pick up job, which turned out to be the kidnapping of Governor Pep Augusta. The photo was blurred, and taken at some distance, but it was zoomed in enough to see the truck´s windscreen, and the driver.
Grainy, blurred, badly lit, but unmistakably me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I stared at the photo on Kyle´s laptop screen. It felt like an eternity ago but I remembered the flash as I had returned to Lujano that night of the abduction.
Kyle, with one free hand leaned around and switched tabs on the browser to one that showed The New York Times.
That headline said,
MYSTERY BRITISH NATIONAL INVOLVED IN MEXICAN GOVERNOR KIDNAP
And the same photo of me accompanied the bombshell.
Kyle closed the computer. “We have to move to Pozos soon, Jason. Then we can make a plan.”
But Jason had passed out. Aronson was cleaning up the wound and we watched him work in silence. Then, after five more minutes, Kyle began to lay out her plan.
“We´ll go together with Pep,” she said, pointing at me. “And Aronson brings Jason in the other truck.”
Aronson nodded.
Kyle looked at her watch,
“It´s almost 4am, We´ll leave in two hours, it´ll still be dark, and much safer to travel. Get some sleep, all of you.”
Tiredness hit me then. It hit me hard, like Kyle´s permission to rest opened the gates and the flow of energy was too strong to close them again. She took me to an adjoining room, which was identical to Jason´s.
Kyle shut the door, and I think she locked it, although I couldn´t be sure.
I staggered to the lumpy looking bed and its thick moth eaten blanket wrapped tightly around the ancient wooden frame, and ignored the probable insects crawling and living underneath it and slumped onto it like I were returning to my own mother´s womb, beaten up, older and corrupt, and dirty from the world, asking for her forgiveness.
It was as lumpy as it had looked.
My back pressed into at least three springs that had liberated themselves from the restraints of the bed´s original design, but I didn´t give a damn. I could have killed for a drink though.
A bottle of white tequila, damn, even a mescal or a goddamn Xotol would have done.
Salvatierra´s head disappearing in a red mist before I had had the chance to ask him how, why or who, passed in and out of my mind. I was front page news. The most wanted man in Mexico, probably just behind the top capos of the biggest cartels of course. But wanted all the same.
And I thought about Hernandez´s phone call I had overheard.
This was all about Pep. Pep the governor. A high profile governor. Why did Esteban want him kidnapped? If he wanted him dead, that would be far easier. He framed me. He could frame me for the murder too. So, that was fact number one. Esteban wanted Pep alive. And that therefore was the key to getting Eleanor out of this safe.
I moved onto Jason and Kyle and their team. They wanted Esteban gone.
Did they want Pep dead? No. They couldn´t.
Otherwise, he´d be dead. Hernandez had said “he´s secured” and there were only two people to whom he could be referring. Pep, or myself. Now, I wasn´t really secured. I seemed more of a hinderance. And they were concerned about the media attention on me too, so I was far from secured. So, Hernandez was talking about Pep.
Two parties. Esteban, and Jason´s “Mr Reynolds”. Both wanted Pep. Both wanted Pep alive. Or perhaps dead, but in the right way.
Either way, I was missing something. And it was that something that would save Eleanor. But my mind grew dim, and I fell asleep as those thoughts continued to swirl around my mind.
Kyle woke me and told me to be outside in five minutes and left the room. My back hurt and I took a few minutes to gather my senses. I got up and walked out and looked in on Jason´s room. He was asleep and Aronson was gone. His shoulder was neatly bandaged and dressed.
I continued down the hallway and out of the front door, to where the trucks were parked. Kyle was there, packing one of the Tundras with what looked like camping equipment or something. As I got near, she turned and handed me three power bars. I ravaged them like water in the desert. Kyle then gave me a bottle of spring water, which I chugged down with equal vigor. I panted a little as I finished. And only then did I look into the cab. There on the back seats, Pep was laid out. He was asleep. His legs were curled up on the seat and he had changed clothes into a grey tracksuit. I couldn´t see his face because of the angle, but I could make out his chest compressing and expanding slowly.
“What are you going to do with him?”
Kyle was already walking around the truck to get in, “He´s fine. He´ll be fine. Let´s move.”
“Why should I?” I asked. “I need to get to my wife.”
“You don´t have a choice, Dyce. Now get in.”
“My choice is to search for my wife.”
Kyle stopped. “We are your only hope to get Eleanor, Dyce. Within a couple of hours, this whole area will be flooded with cops. Cops that work on Esteban´s payroll.”
The yard seemed to creak and the trees swayed in the wind. The rain had stopped but it stank of damp earth. It was hard to imagine cops everywhere, but I knew she was right.
I climbed up into the front passenger seat and Kyle slammed the huge truck into Drive and we set off.
The route out of the small town was similar to the tracks between our safe house and Salvatierra´s mud tracks with occasional stones. But the Tundra was adept at handling it and even in the dim light of early morning, Kyle was able to keep up a steady speed of at least 65 km/h
“Keep an eye out for patrol cars. You see one, you shout,” she said.
But we drove for an hour through the valley, and on the gravelly road, half paved - half mud bath, we were utterly alone, traveling through farmland while the sun rose in the pale light. We were headed north again. The country track we were on was lined by sporadic trees with silver plated leaves that rustled loudly in the wind. The sound accompanied us, only breaking where the row was sparse or open. Outsid
e this path were fields of cattle, sheep, but no human life.
We had also increased altitude. The gradient was shallow so far, but it was there. My math didn´t suffice to work out the height we had climbed.
Kyle´s hand went to the gear stick and crunched down the gears, “Damn it,” said Kyle. “Trouble.”
“Why?” I asked, and immediately felt stupid for it. Ahead of us was a clump of lights, still on from the night before. A sign on the road said San Jose Soltepec, the name of the town. And there, dotted amongst the dying street lights, and the rough cubic concrete buildings were hundreds of other lights.
Red and blue flashing ones.
Kyle just shot me a glance and pulled over and killed the engine. Then she reached down to the side of her seat and pulled back a large satellite phone. A great non-traceable way to communicate secrets and locations to the powers that be. And they worked from anywhere, even San Jose Goddamned Soltepec.
“You have to be joking,” I said. “What was your plan? If you knew that this place was in our way?”
But Kyle ignored me. “We´re gonna need some help,” she said.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I stayed looking at the keypad of Kyle´s sat phone ready to recall the exact number as she typed it in digit by digit. “I was hoping we could find a side route,” she said. “A way to skip around the place. And if not,”
“What if not”? I asked.
I couldn´t believe the lack of substance to her plan. And she was risking Pep, and Pep was all I had to save Eleanor. “What were—what are you going to do?”
She looked up at me from the phone and slumped her features downward as if to say “finished?” and I stared back at her, and then she started punching numbers into the phone. She must have sensed my idea, because she covered her hand as she did so.
“Like I said,” she said. “Gonna need some help.” And with that, she held the phone to her ear and concentrated her face.
I just listened. And there again, came the same inhuman, tinny voice from the other end. The same one I had heard speaking to Jason at the safe house, and to Hernandez at Salvatierra´s.
She spoke. “Yes, this is Kyle.”
….
“I have a blockade situation. I need to request a free pass.”
….
I listened hard to the other voice. Definitely the same scratchy noise coming out of the phone´s speaker.
“It´s on the GPS. Yes. Right,” said Kyle into the phone.
I tuned my ear deeper, concentrating hard on that sound. But just as something was clearing out of the mist of muffled noise, Kyle lowered the phone and ended the call. And then it hit me. A voice box. The person at the other end of all these calls, Mr Reynolds I supposed, used a voice box.
“What were you requesting”? I asked.
She looked totally relaxed. Distracted almost. I admired her calmness. It was infectious.
“Whatever will get us through that town.”
“So what now?”
“We wait for the call.”
And we waited and looked down the track. We couldn´t make out where the trees and fields ended and the wider, walked on road of San Jose Soltepec began. But the street lights started going out as their sensors picked up the first glimmers of the day´s full sunlight. I thought for a moment about how many days I had been in all of this. How many nights had passed? Three? Four? I started to think back when my head filled with the telephone´s ringtone.
“Yes,” said Kyle, ending the wretched din. She stayed listening for just under a minute and then said, “thank you”, and hung up.
“We have ten minutes to get through town. Cops won´t touch us. Any longer than ten though and we´re screwed.”
I looked back at Pep passed out on the backseat. The missing governor, and me, the most wanted man.
Kyle started the Tundra´s massive engine and put it into Drive and we launched off.
Ten minutes and counting.
The truck lunged and bumped as we approached at speed. I looked back at Pep and he was still asleep despite having had the traveling comfort of a cement mixer. And then I noticed his face was slack. Very slack. There was a puddle of drool under his mouth and his arm was stiff in the air and swayed with the movement of the truck.
I looked back at Kyle, but it was dangerous to question her now. She was on edge. The ten minutes were already disappearing and we were hurtling along the beaten cobbled street toward town
"You have to help," said Kyle.
I stayed staring at her.
"Reach back behind my seat. There's a gym bag with a few caps and some body vests. I need you to pass me a set and then dress yourself and the Governor in the others. Use the caps low so he isn't recognized."
"Weekend at Bernie's?" I said, but the crap joke was lost on her.
"Move," she said.
I jumped into the back seat. The town ahead was close now. Buildings flew past the back windows as I crouched down in front of Pep laid out and grabbed the bag. I guess I had two minutes tops to get prepped.
Opening the bag, I grabbed three caps and threw one to the driving seat. Next, I pulled out two Kevlar vests. Kyle already had one on so I turned to Pep.
He was drugged. That much was obvious. But it would have to wait until later. I slid my arm under his dead weight and lifted him. I managed to get him into a passable sleeping position. The vest was tricky to get on and I would've been hurting him had he been conscious, but I got it done. The cap covered his face pretty damn well.
I had time to don my disguise, pull the cap way down and get into a sleeping position next to Pep.
At the last minute before we entered the town, Kyle threw me some Oakley sunglasses and that finished it off.
San Jose Soltepec opened up its ubiquitous cobbled streets and high pavements.
On the sides of the streets, squad cars of municipal, state and transit police lined up leaning on their cars, eyeballing us. Kyle hung what looked like an FBI badge out of the window and we rolled on. But we rolled slow.
“Local, municipales,” she said. “We´re good unless we see Feds. Esteban owns the Feds.”
San Jose must have been about 10 kilometers wide judging by our progress and judging by sightings of non-cop people, it had a population of 4.
The river that now ran with us alongside the town´s outer road stank of stale water and sewage, kicked up by the previous night´s rain. The road at last turned into relatively new tarmac, but with a collection of spotted holes where the storm had ripped up the blacktop like the crust on a creme brûlée.
Kyle swerved around the holes and we didn´t hit a single bump. As the road widened and a wall cropped up on our right, and lanes came, I thought we were home free. But Kyle shouted back, “Act cool.”
“What is it?” I asked. We were nearly out of time.
“Roadblock,” said Kyle.
Three minutes to go to be precise.
Ahead were four Dodge Chargers painted in the dark blue and white of the Federal Police. At least twelve Federal Officers stood in front of the squad cars, the lights flashing on and off. To the right of them, a cordoned off lane to pass on through and another to pull over where there stood an other of their colleagues holding a semi-automatic machine gun and dark sunglasses. He waved at us, palm faced downward and wagging at us.
Kyle pulled out the FBI badge and threw it on the passenger seat. Then, ran her right hand over the gun in her holster.
We drew closer and the cop in the shades with the gun walked towards us and stood aside to let us pass. We obliged and Kyle dropped the truck down to walking pace.
“Para allá,” said the cop. Over there. He waved to the only spot you could stop at.
Kyle pulled over and killed the motor.
I glanced at Pep. Slumped against the glass with his shades, he looked like a drunk, and I almost missed the trickle of drool that had crept from the corner of his drooped gob. I grabbed the lapel of his jacket and wiped it. I looked back
at Kyle. She was still, looking forward, palms spread flat on her thighs. The cop walked to Kyle´s window and looked in at us. He was bald and white. His eyes were thin and his mouth protruded like a snout. His friends and family would have called him pelón or güero. Or even güero pelón. Mexican slang for bald whitey.
His skin was blotched with large brown moles. His sunglasses were Ray-Ban aviators. His mouth was agape, and his teeth were crooked and yellow.
“Papeles,” he said.
Kyle flashed her FBI badge at him and he took it in his hands and stared at it as if it were a disappointing school grade card.
Kyle told him in perfect Spanish that we were scoping the area as part of the FBI investigation but the cop was looking back at me, and Pep´s sleeping carcass.
“Y ellos?” he asked, gesturing to us with a shrug of his right shoulder.
Kyle told him, in Spanish again, that we were part of the team. Tired after a long night´s traveling.
“Bájanse,” he said.
Get down.
“Dos minutos,” said Kyle.
“No,” he said.
Kyle opened her door. I could see her face, she was thinking hard. I had to face it; an eternity in some Mexico hell hole jail, Pep was saved, and Eleanor was dead. I´d lost.
I couldn´t let it happen. I simply couldn´t. “Make the call,” I said.
Kyle looked back at me. “What?”
“Call Mr Reynolds again,” I said.
She looked at me and I could see she agreed but was struggling with it for a second.
“Do it,” I said.
“I can´t, Dyce.”
“Do it now,” I said.
The cop was starting to shuffling from foot to foot. It was clear by the look on his face that he didn´t appreciate us talking in English. It was making him itchy, and when I glanced at his trigger finger, ready to pull back on the AR-15, it was shaking like a leaf in the wind.