Eventually, they all went to sleep, the matter unresolved.
In the morning, they found Carlito’s body, already stiffening, the piano wire pulled so deeply into his neck that they could not determine the cause of death until they examined him closely.
The men broke camp within an hour. The spirits were wild in that area, they told themselves. But nobody challenged the old man when he laughed at that too.
“Check it again,” Cross told Tiger, pointing to a computer printout in her lap. She had gained weight in the past weeks. And her hair was lustrous again, its stripes restored.
“These are square names,” she said. “I can make two—no, three—from the pictures, but that’s about all I could swear to.”
“I can enhance the images,” Rhino squeaked from the converted park bench he used as a chair, sitting before a screen nearly as large as a home-entertainment center.
Tiger got to her feet with a grace that justified her name and stood behind Rhino, one hand on his shoulder. “I can’t believe you already got mug shots to look so good,” she said.
“They use better cameras now,” Cross told her. “And these aren’t copies—you’re looking at exactly what the feds have.”
“But if they’re not copies—?”
“We’re on-line,” Rhino said. “Inside their house.”
“Oh.”
“They don’t have very good security,” Cross said dryly. “But they sure keep great records.”
“I know. I couldn’t believe I was . . . dead. I mean, to see it, right there, it was . . . weird.”
“Beats the crap out of your picture on the wall in the post office.”
“It does, for a fact. Oh . . . look!”
The face on the screen sharpened right before her eyes, digitizing into an image as clear as a live TV camera could produce. “That’s her,” Tiger said. “Martha Farmington, huh? Guess that’s a bit short of the exotic image she needed.”
“You knew her as—?”
“Tanya,” Tiger yawned. “What else? It was either Tanya or Tammy or Candy or Crystal or something like that for all of them. You know how it works.”
“Work. That’s the key word. We need to get them across the border, and not kidnap them. They have to be greedy enough to risk it.”
“Those ho’s love scratch, baby. That’s what they played for. Wouldn’t have hired me to bodyguard them if they weren’t looking to up the take.”
“They rolled quick enough.”
“In a second,” Tiger agreed. “But we weren’t sisters. I wasn’t surprised.”
“Four is all you can be sure of? Out of that whole batch?”
“Yep. Sure sure, I mean. Even looking at all the files from the ones who got busted with me, I can’t swear to any more than that. It isn’t like we spent a lot of time doing girly stuff together. I was muscle, they were pussy. Some of them, I hardly laid eyes on.”
“All right. We’re in luck, anyway. One’s in St. Louis, one’s in Tucson, the other two in L.A. We can scoop them up as we move.”
“We’re going to drive across?” Rhino wanted to know.
“Yeah. In a limo. That way, we can keep watch on them, no risk. And it’ll make the splash we need once we touch down.”
“Uh, Cross . . .” Tiger began
“What?”
“No offense, honey. But you and Rhino aren’t exactly Central Casting for ‘pimp.’ I should—”
“You’re dead, remember, Tiger? And if one of the girls you worked with sees you alive, that’d kind of blow the game, right? We can make this work. I know what it takes.”
“Two weeks, fifty grand?” the woman who called herself Tanya said to Cross, her voice skeptical-hopeful.
“Guaranteed. With ten up front.”
“And no lump tricks?”
“No whips and chains. I can’t promise some of them won’t get rough, you understand what I’m saying. But anyone gets too rough, you make a little noise, my man here quiets it right down.”
The woman looked over at Rhino, agreeing within herself that he could quiet down a whole roomful of whorehouse customers just by shrugging his shoulders.
“Sounds too good to be true,” she said, letting a vein of suspicion into her voice.
“Yeah? Well, it gets even better,” Cross told her. “Whatever you work them for—tips, whatever you want to call it—you keep that too. It’ll be in local currency, so you may get jobbed a little on the exchange, but you should clear another few thousand easy. These are very rich men. And they’ve never seen girls from Sweden before.”
“Sweden? I’m from—”
“You’re from fucking Stockholm, anybody asks,” Cross cut her off. “You’re a natural blonde, right? Blue eyes? That’s enough for those chumps. Besides, none of them speak that much English.”
“How do I know I won’t end up there forever? I heard stories of girls going for a week and—”
“To where? Some Arab country, right? Or fucking Japan, if they were that stupid. This is right below Mexico. And you can tell anyone you want where you’ll be. This isn’t some ‘white-slave ring,’ girl,” Cross said casually. “Truth is, if that was what we wanted, you’d already be in the trunk of the car outside, and nobody’d ever know what happened to you.”
The woman’s pale face went so bloodless it showed even through the heavy layer of makeup. “I got protec—”
“Who? That punk Maurice? Why don’t you give him a call?” Cross sneered, tossing her a cellular phone.
The woman sat there, not moving.
“Think it over,” Cross told her. “We promised them a minimum of three girls to work the house for two weeks. There’s a lot of money in this. For everyone. You don’t want to go, nobody’ll make you. We wanted to do that, we’d do it. You couldn’t stop us. We’re businessmen, not kidnappers. This is all about money. I gave you my name. You must know people in Chicago. Ask around.”
“How much time do I have?”
“Three, four days.”
“Okay. And Maurice . . . ?”
“He’ll be all right in a few hours,” Cross told her.
“Wow! First-class!” Tanya looked at the pair of tickets in her hand.
“Yeah, so what? One of them’s to L.A., right? This sounds like some kinda scam to me.”
“Maurice, it’s exactly like that man said. We’re going to drive down from L.A. So I only need a ticket there, and a ticket home. That’s what this one is.”
“Let me see that . . . Damn, bitch, you see this? You got to fly to Mexico City, then to Chicago, then switch again and come back home to St. Lou.”
“So?”
“So look at the bottom of the ticket. See, right here,” he said, pointing with a manicured fingernail. “This sucker cost over seven thousand dollars! Throw in the one to L.A., we cash them in, and we just blow this place, you understand what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“You one stupid fucking bitch sometimes, Tanya. Listen: These tickets, they in your square name, right? And you got a passport to prove it, the one that guy Cross told you to get. So these tickets, they’re as good as cash. We just drive over to the airport, go up to the counter, and get a refund. What part don’t you understand?”
“I want to go.”
“Yeah! Like I said—”
“I want to go to this Quitasol place,” the woman said. “It’s big money. Much bigger than this.”
The man reached over lazily and slapped her face. Hard. “You forgetting who’s running this show, bitch? Are you?” he demanded, slapping her again. “Remember what that coat hanger felt like?” he asked, his soft voice throbbing with threat.
“No, Maurice. Don’t do that! Okay. Whatever you say. I’ll go right over and . . .”
“You are a stupid fucking bitch,” the man said disgustedly. “You think they just gonna hand over that much cash? Now, we get some kinda ‘credit’ thing. So first we need a new address. For them to mail it to, see? Now go take a shower. Your fat ass is going
back out on the stroll tonight. Man said you not leaving for another ten days or so, plenty of time to build up an even bigger stake. I’m doing you a favor, bitch. They could put whatever they slipped in my drink that first time they come here in yours too. And then you never come back.”
The woman turned and meekly walked away, in the direction of the bathroom.
A little past ten that evening, the woman, now dressed in a tiny red spandex skirt and a halter top, stepped into a phone booth and dialed a number in area code 312.
“He’s not gonna—”
“It’ll be okay,” the voice interrupted her. “Just finish your shift and come back whenever you usually do.”
“He always picks me up at—”
“Not tonight, he won’t be.”
The man Tanya was speaking to folded the cellular phone closed. He turned to the huge man seated next to him. “This call-forwarding is a great invention,” he said. “Looks like her pimp doesn’t want her to travel.”
“He’s still in there,” the huge man squeaked, looking across at an apartment building, “unless he went out the back way.”
“Walking? I don’t think so. His ride’s parked right over there. See it, on the far corner? The white Caddy with the—”
“Got it.”
“Be better if he doesn’t get found,” Cross said. “We don’t want the cops pulling her in for questioning.”
“None of the girls can even see you,” Cross told Tiger. “That’s all we need, have one of them start screaming.”
“Then how are you gonna explain me . . . ? Oh no, you’re not, pal! If you think—”
“Will you relax? Nobody expects you to turn tricks. And it’s legit, anyway. I mean, we deliver the girls to the house, we provide the security, just like Jorge set up. And we stay open. Twenty-four/seven, like we promised. So we gotta live on the premises. And have someone at the door. All the time. You just stay upstairs, nobody has to see you at all. Not until it won’t matter. Fair enough?
“I . . . guess.”
“You fly in direct. We got nobody on the ground. The independistas, they don’t exactly trust us, okay? Only reason I think they’ll do what they said is because it’d look better for them if they pulled it off all by themselves, see? So you just take a cab to the hotel, like you’re a tourist on vacation. It’s only about a half-mile to where we’ll be, and you already have pictures of it and the address. These communicators will work as long as the batteries hold out. Just buzz when you’re coming in and we’ll have the front cleared.”
“I should get there . . . when?”
“We’ll already be set up for two, three days by the time you touch down. Then it all comes down to timing. Buddha can’t move until they got the pad ready for him. And as soon as they do, everything jumps. No margins.”
“You really think it’ll work?” she asked.
“Which part?”
“Getting her out?”
“I make it eighty-twenty against,” Cross said. “But you can flip those odds when it comes to us.”
Fal walked the long, narrow strip end to end, his beloved Bedeaux-built Winchester .300 Magnum on a sling over his shoulder, heavy barrel down, eyes sweeping the ground. Ace and Princess followed behind—Ace with his machete, Princess with a thickly packed duffel bag. Every few yards, Falcon would point at a crevice in the rock, nod approval. Princess would beam like a child being praised for a perfect report card. Ace would pull a packet of putty-colored material wrapped in clear plastic from Princess’ duffel bag and tamp it carefully into each approved spot. It took them the better part of the day to finish.
Near midnight, at La Casa de Dolor, about three-quarters of a mile away from where the three men were laboring, a muffled whoomp! was heard. The ground shook briefly. Some of the guards joked about earthquakes, but the more knowledgeable ones surmised it was an aftershock from blasting at the huge mine about a dozen miles to the west. Everyone was aware that the regime was speeding the deeper excavations with dynamite.
The next morning, Falcon walked the course again. When he was finished, Princess began to remove the largest boulders. Some he carried; some he rolled. Ace blocked off sections of encroaching trees and dead limbs. After dark, Falcon carefully rationed out the gasoline. A long fuse was trailed into the pool of flammable liquid before the sun could reduce its effectiveness. The men stood back as Falcon struck a wooden match. The flame crackled all around the perimeter, but stopped at the firebreak Ace had cut behind it. Smoke rose into the night, almost undetectable. If anyone nearby caught a whiff, there were too many ways to explain such things.
“I can make that much in two weeks right here,” the bottle-blonde said, leaning back in her chair to take some of the pressure off her back. Every since the 48DD implants, her back hurt most of the time. But it was just like Reggie said—her prices got blown way up too.
“Lap-dancing? I don’t think so.”
“What are you, the IRS? Look, here’s the way it works, okay? I average two, three grand a night, cash money. Do the math.”
“I’m talking fifty grand net,” Cross said. “You pay for the space in that joint, right? And Reggie, he takes a piece . . . maybe a big piece.”
“Reggie’s my—”
“Whoever he is, he don’t know about your little gambling jones, right? He know you’re into Skillman for twenty large?”
“I can handle my own—”
“No, no, you can’t. See, I bought up your markers,” Cross said quietly. “And I want the money. Right now. Or I want you to take this deal.”
“And cancel the marker?”
“I look like a mark to you?”
“So what’re you telling me?”
“That you owe me twenty. That you do this two-week thing with us, you come back clean, thirty grand ahead. No way you’re gonna gamble down there. It’s all work, like I told you. Who knows? Maybe you’ll kick the habit.”
“Reggie . . .”
“You can have that part any way you want,” Cross said softly. “A little bonus. My man over there”—nodding in Rhino’s direction—“he can fix it so Reggie’s fine with anything. Or he can just fix Reggie. What’s it gonna—?”
“Just fix Reggie,” the woman said, reaching her hands up over her head and stretching backward to take off more of the pressure.
“Where did this come from?” the young woman asked the guard in formal, college-taught Spanish. She was thin to the point of emaciation, dull-brown hair hanging lifeless in limp strands.
“From a friend,” the guard said. “It is something like a giant vitamin, they said. It will give you strength.”
“And if I don’t take it?”
The guard shrugged.
The young woman dry-swallowed the pill. The guard watched her throat carefully. Then he approached, ordered her to open her mouth. He probed with a filthy finger, running his other hand up and down her throat. Then he sat down on the only bunk in the bare cell.
The young woman did not speak. But she looked a question at him.
“I am to stay here,” the guard told her. “With you. Until my shift is done. Then there will be another man. And another. That pill, it stays inside you, understand?”
“Yes. I won’t—”
“Don’t even talk. It does not matter.”
“I have to sleep sometime. Or sit down. I have to use the—”
“Use the floor, puta. For anything you want to do. We have to make sure it stays inside you.”
“Wow! I bet that’s the first superstretch they’ve ever seen this far south of the border,” Tanya said, watching through the heavily tinted back window as they passed the masqued faces of the pre-paid Mexican police.
“How long a drive is it, anyway?” Candy asked Cross, who sat on one of the rear-facing seats.
“About another eighteen hundred miles,” he replied. “Two days, driving straight through, me and Rhino switching off.”
“Yeah? Well, I’m not sitting in this seat for two da
ys without . . . you know. Why can’t we stop off and get a room?”
“We need to be there in six days,” Cross said quietly. “Two days is about the best we could do, hugging the coast like we are. But we’re not going for the max. The plan is to stop over. At least one, maybe two nights. Just relax.”
“All right,” Crystal interjected. “But remember, you promised I could call—”
“Call anybody you want,” Cross told her. “You’re wasting everyone’s time with all this crap. Once we crossed that border—hell, once you got into this car—we could do whatever we wanted, and you know it. This isn’t a van with a couple of guys in the back seat with a roll of duct tape and a broomstick handle, get it? We’re professionals. You’re supposed to be too. How about acting like one for a change?”
“There she is, mate,” the middle-aged man with a regulation RAF mustache said to Buddha, gesturing with his finger. “One Harrier GR7, all spec’d as agreed. Take a look for yourself.”
Buddha strolled over, saying nothing, taking several tours around the plane as the man next to him kept up a running patter: “Runs about nine tons, ready to roll, and she can carry another four-plus external. Good for maybe six fifty at sea level, around six at thirty-six thousand. I wouldn’t want to go beyond that much myself, although you can climb up to fifty if you need to. You don’t want any extra fuel, so you’re looking at a tactical radius of around one hundred and eighty kilometers, not much more. Now, you see that FLIR on the front? That’s how you can tell it’s a seven, not a five. This one’s really brand-new, built in ’94. But they’ve been flying these jump-jets for almost forty years—you couldn’t find a more reliable design anywhere.”
“Sure. What’s FLIR?”
“Forward-looking infrared seeker. You attach it to your night-vision goggles, you can work at night if you need to.”
“I won’t.”
“Fine. All right, see the pods? That’s where the rockets are. You’ve got nineteen in each one, configured in rows. When you’re done, you hit the big fat white button—I’ll show you where it is inside—and the guts will pop out too. Then you close them down with the same button, only you hit it twice.”
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