by Sean Black
The charade had continued, extracting its nightly toll, but he did not waver. His anger burned so hot that when he needed strength he could warm himself by its flame.
Across the restaurant, the rap stars had ordered a three-hundred-dollar bottle of champagne. Their dates giggled. Ty gave them a sour look.
‘Could serve those dudes this,’ he said, raising his icy glass of Sprite, ‘and they wouldn’t know the difference.’
‘Hey, they’re paying you good money to sit in this fancy restaurant sipping Sprite.’
They settled back into their seats and waited out the appetizers, entrees and dessert. As the entrees were cleared, Lock noticed movement across the street. The red Honda Accord nudged its way out into the traffic on Pico Boulevard. It had been rented to a private detective working out of Van Nuys, an ex-cop. He would have been hired by an intermediary who had in turn been instructed by another. A cover story would have been concocted to explain the surveillance. A cheating wife with a penchant for guys like Lock, something of that nature. He would probably never know that he was working for the bad guys and Lock wasn’t going to tell him. He was merely a piece on the board. Let him get on and do his job.
Lock checked his watch. The guy had either quit for the night or the week’s surveillance that he’d been paid for had expired. He wouldn’t know whether it was the former or the latter until tomorrow. He guessed it was the latter. Keeping eyes on someone when nothing was happening would lead to questions and whoever was ultimately paying him had probably had enough of questions.
Lock ordered another glass of mineral water and reflected that sometimes the best thing you could do was nothing, though for him it was also the hardest. The rappers were arguing over whose Amex Black card, supplied by the record company, would be used to pick up the check. Neither Lock nor Ty had the heart to tell them the company was simply making sure that they would pay for every dollar’s worth of their extravagant lifestyle. They would learn the hard way. You never got something for nothing. Everything in life came with a price.
Twenty-one
Lock slotted the plastic key card into the hotel-room door. The light beside the handle flicked to green. He retrieved the card, turned the handle and walked into their temporary operations room. As Ty stood behind him, he pulled a bag from the closet, retrieved a scanner and swept the room for covert listening devices. It was clear. The cleaners had been instructed to leave the room alone, and he had placed a small motion-activated video camera in a far corner. Ty sat down at his desk, opened his laptop and scanned the footage. ‘We’re good,’ he said.
Using a 32-bit encrypted secure Internet connection, Ty logged on to his email account. As he worked through it, Lock laid a map on the bed. Red dots showed locations where Charlie Mendez was thought to have been. Some of the sightings had been confirmed; most had not. The majority were from the period immediately after his flight, before the media had cycled on to the next hot story. Tourists and visitors, eager to help, had called in saying they had seen him in various resorts. One such encounter, confirmed via video footage, had placed him in Cancun, probably the most popular tourist destination for Americans. But that had been months ago. Since Brady’s death, he might have been wiped from the face of the planet.
Lock stood behind his partner. ‘Anything new?’
‘Our boy Charlie’s like Brer Rabbit. The mofo, he lay low.’
‘You should be a poet, Tyrone.’
Ty smiled. ‘Maybe when I retire.’
He returned to the emails, and Lock to the map. Unless Mendez had taken off for another country, the clusters of confirmed sightings had him in the north-east of Mexico, close to the border. It was a puzzle. If Lock had been in his position, he would have driven south, moving deeper into Latin and South America. That he appeared to have stayed within the same three-or-four-hundred-mile radius seemed to back up Lock’s suspicion that Mendez was under someone’s protection, most likely a cartel or gang.
Five years ago it would have been easy to work out who was shielding him. There had been the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. Between them they had carved up drug- and people-trafficking in Mexico. Then there had been a US-funded crackdown by the Mexican government, the subsequent emergence of the paramilitary Los Zetas, and a volatile fracturing of the drug-trafficking industry. The cartels were still there, still powerful, but the vertically integrated business structures they had used to operate their business had eroded to the point at which it was very difficult to figure out who was working for whom. Worst of all, with the fragmentation came more violence. Before, it had served a business function; now more and more people were killed, raped and tortured, not to intimidate, clear away competition or for profit, but for almost recreational reasons.
Also, the cartels were outsourcing many aspects of their business, from transport to security to money laundering. As with legitimate business, it saved money, but it also distanced those at the very top from the things that could land you in prison. If a drug lord could claim he had had no idea that a sub-contractor was flouting safety laws, he could wash his hands of the latest criminal outrage. After all, the people committing these atrocities weren’t his men. The idea of plausible deniability had found favour with organized crime.
All of these changes had meant that tracking Mendez was proving a lot tougher than Lock had anticipated. To make matters even more difficult, his strategy of convincing whoever was tracking him that he had no interest in Mendez meant that he couldn’t be overt in gathering intelligence. At some point, though, that would have to change. To capture Mendez, they had to find him and, so far, they were getting nowhere fast.
Ty got up and stretched, locking his fingers behind his head and kneading his neck. ‘Nothing. No one’s seen him. No one’s heard of anyone who’s seen him.’
Lock kicked at the foot of the bed in frustration. ‘He’s got to surface at some point.’
‘Apart from that detective in Santa Barbara and Brady’s wife, did you think about talking to someone at the Department of Justice or in the US Marshals Service?’
Lock walked to the window and looked out over the City of Angels. ‘Marshals aren’t going to go after him down there and the DOJ have their hands full. Charlie Mendez is old news. Sure, if he gets pinched down there they’ll send someone to pick him up, but go looking for him? Nah.’
That was the other difficulty with finding Mendez. Over the past few months relations between the Mexican and United States governments had become even more frayed. As the narco-wars began to spill over the border and Mexican government corruption became more obvious, cooperation between American state agencies and their counterparts in Mexico had been strained, with distrust on both sides. Simply put, there was no appetite for anyone in Mexico or the US to go looking for a serial rapist. They had bigger fish to fry.
‘I’m beat. You mind if I turn in?’ Ty said.
‘Sure. Go ahead.’
Ty walked to the door. ‘We’ll find him.’
Lock waved a goodnight and turned back to the map on his bed. He continued to pore over it, hoping it would give up its secrets, willing a pattern into existence, searching for a clue, however small, that would give them a starting point. But none came. Three hours later, he finally fell asleep.
Part Two
Twenty-two
Wrapped in the warmth of the fiery orange sun above the Pacific Ocean, Charlie Mendez stretched his lean, tanned body, and gave a loud yawn. The whole day stretched ahead of him. In a minute or two he would rise from his lounger, grab his surfboard and try to catch some waves. After an hour or so, he would come back into shore, head to the villa to shower, then go out to lunch. Afterwards, he would return to the villa with one of the local girls he rotated on a weekly basis. After a siesta with her, when he often ended up burning more calories than he did surfing, he would rest properly. Around seven, he would go to dinner, then drink in a local bar where he would pick up another girl, almost always a different one from the afternoon’s
. By midnight he would be alone in bed and asleep.
While most men would tire of such a life, Mendez was used to indolence, to doing a lot of not very much. It had eased his transition to life in Mexico. There was only one problem: the local girls. They were beautiful, some strikingly so, but they were no challenge. He was young, wealthy and American, which meant that getting laid was a lot easier than catching a wave. He missed his old life so badly that he had even drugged one of the girls he had brought back to the villa. But, as she lay there unconscious, the thrill was gone. She would have done what he wanted her to do anyway, no matter how degrading or weird. Where was the fun in that?
That was why, later that evening, he was going to slip away from the villa and drive to nearby Diablo, which had a couple of resort hotels that catered to American tourists, and find some real sport. He had bought a new video camera specially. He had sourced his drugs. He was taking a risk. There was every chance that a bounty hunter might still be looking for him, despite what had happened to the last one. But that made it all the more thrilling. Charlie Mendez would be both hunted and hunter. The thought made his skin tingle with anticipation, and goosebumps rose on his arms.
He got to his feet, flicked off his sandals and picked up his board. Behind him, on the concrete promenade, two of his bodyguards stood next to a red Mercedes saloon, their automatic weapons slung over their shoulders — men openly carrying heavy-duty firearms were no big deal down here. He waved to them. One of them, Hector, waved back. Hector scared him. Although he was the smallest of the men who followed him everywhere, he was the one the others deferred to, the leader of the group. It was in his eyes, which were those of a predator.
Mendez began to run towards the ocean, the promise of a proper evening’s entertainment making him feel truly alive for the first time in months. Finally he had something to look forward to. Then he heard Hector calling him from the road.
‘Charlie!’
He kept running, but Hector called after him again. He might get away with ignoring the man once, but not a second time. He turned. Hector was beckoning him. He jogged towards the vehicle. ‘What’s up, Hector?’ he asked.
‘We have to go back to the house.’
‘Why?’
Hector stepped forward. ‘I’ll take your board. Get in.’
Pissed off, Mendez handed it to him. Hector took the front passenger seat, an assault rifle on his lap.
‘What’s the problem?’ Mendez asked. ‘Why do we have to leave?’
Hector swivelled in his seat and smiled at him. ‘There’s no problem.’
‘Is it another bounty hunter?’
‘Like I said, there’s no problem. It’s a precaution.’
‘But something’s happened, right?’
‘The girl who was giving you so much trouble. The Warner girl?’
Mendez hadn’t thought about her in ages. For a while he’d had recurring fantasies about killing her in more and more macabre ways, or occasionally he thought back to the night he had raped her. ‘Oh, yeah, that bitch — what about her?’
‘She’s dead,’ said Hector.
He greeted the news as if he’d been told that the lunch special had already sold out. ‘Oh, yeah? How’d it happen?’
Hector shrugged. ‘She was at a rap concert. Someone shot her. It’s LA. Bad things happen there sometimes.’
‘So how come I have to go back to the house?’ Goddamnit. Even dead that bitch was cramping his style. He hated the house where they’d kept him since Brady had arrived. There was no view of the ocean, no mountains, only other buildings, and even those were difficult to glimpse beyond the high walls and razor wire.
Hector’s lips thinned to a straight line beneath his fat, bulbous nose. It was a sign that he was growing tired of the questions.
‘It doesn’t matter, Hector. I’m sure there’s a good reason,’ he said, with a sigh. He climbed into the back of the vehicle. The air-conditioning was running at full tilt and he shivered as a cold blast hit him. He leaned back in his seat and tried to sleep. His mind drifted back to Melissa but, as he thought of her, images of the night came back to him. Even drugged she had tried to fight him, her hand clawing limply at his face. He had enjoyed that. He thought of it now, and found that he had an erection. What wouldn’t he give for another Melissa?
Twenty-three
Five Hours Later
Once a proud sicario, Hector resented his demotion to babysitter. Especially when the baby who needed his nappy changing was Charlie Mendez. A spoilt, rich pup of an American who had done terrible things, not for money or survival, as Hector had, but for kicks. A nobody, who had never worked a day in his life. A coward, who didn’t even have the balls to take a woman against her will unless he had drugged her first and she couldn’t fight back.
Hector did what the boss had asked him to do. He did it well. He made sure that no harm came to Charlie, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
Hector’s journey in life had been different. No silver spoon for him. No spoon of any description, in fact. Not even a plastic one.
He had grown up in a family of four boys and one girl, small by the standards of his colonia. Hector had been the eldest. His father had died in a farming accident when he was seven. He’d been chewed up and spat out by a threshing machine, then delivered home in a plywood box by a Texas rancher, who probably thought of himself as a good guy for going to the expense.
It was the boss who had saved Hector, and brought him into the plaza, back in the days when there was a plaza and a proper order to business. At first Hector had started out doing some jobs here and there, mostly taking cars across the border. He was never stopped and it was only later he realized that it hadn’t been just luck. Actually, that wasn’t true. He had been stopped once and the car taken but he had been let go. He had gone straight back to the boss and, because he hadn’t waited for him to find out, there had been no repercussions. From that point on, Hector had been trusted and his ascendancy had been swift. Soon afterwards he no longer had a job but a career, with prestige and status and even a pension — if he lived long enough to collect it.
It was a quarter to the hour and darkness had enveloped the streets outside the villa. Dinner would be served soon by the staff. Hector put down his tumbler of Johnnie Walker Blue and walked from the living room, with the french windows that gave on to the swimming pool, into the corridor. At the bedroom he knocked softly. His charge was in the habit of taking a long siesta, but he was usually up, showered and dressed for dinner by now.
There was no answer.
Hector knocked again, a little too loudly, the alcohol kicking in, along with his impatience to lend extra weight to his hand.
When he was ignored again, he reached down and opened the door. Inside the bedroom, the curtains were closed and it was dark.
‘Senor,’ he whispered. ‘Dinner will be served in an hour. You may want to think about…’
He crossed to the bed and nudged the lump. He grabbed a corner of the sheet and pulled it off to reveal a bundle of clothes, neatly rolled up and arranged to look like a body.
He checked the bathroom. It was empty. Charlie Mendez was gone and Hector had a problem.
Twenty-four
What kind of twenty-one-year-old still went on vacation with her parents? That had been the question Julia Fisher had been preoccupied with ever since her dad had come with the brochures for the all-inclusive resort in Mexico. At least it wasn’t Disneyland, which had been his suggestion when she was seventeen.
Her mom had wanted to go to Europe but Dad, always one for the cheap option, had ruled that out. He’d favoured the small resort of Diablo because there was no air travel to deal with and therefore no jet lag, airport security or any of the other annoyances you had to deal with when travelling a long distance. If Julia didn’t like it, it was only for a week — couldn’t she just humour the old man? Remarkably, he had also suggested that perhaps she might bring along the young man she had been seeing, forg
etting that they had recently broken up.
So, if for no other reason than to close down the conversation, she had quickly agreed. It was one of those things you said yes to, then immediately regretted, but it was done. And how bad could it be, right? It was only a week, and as a family they liked Mexico. It was strange and foreign without being overly so. And Dad was right: it was a car ride home if they grew tired of it, which Mom did, almost as soon as they had rolled up at the resort.
Perhaps once it had looked like the photographs in the brochure, but it sure didn’t any more. Plus, it wasn’t even on the coast. In fact, the area they had driven through to get there was almost semi-industrial. But Dad had got a deal — ‘Hell, they were practically giving the rooms away,’ he’d said, drawing a major eye roll from Mom — and the staff, no doubt eager to make a good impression, had gone out of their way to be welcoming. So much so that Mom had had to agree that the service was pretty much the best they’d had anywhere.
The only real problem for Julia was that she was twenty-one and on vacation alone with her parents. And she was bored.
That evening, Dad being Dad had made a big show of letting her have wine at dinner and joking with the waiter about carding her. Not that she was a big drinker but she didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d been drinking at parties since she was eighteen and it wasn’t a big deal, like he was making out. Mom, who’d had to clean out Julia’s waste basket when she’d thrown up into it after one party, had kept quiet.
In the meanwhile, Julia had spotted the bar down the street on one of their rare forays out of the resort — Dad being a firm believer that all-inclusive meant exactly that, and spending more money was stupid. The staff didn’t encourage you to leave the resort either: there had been problems in the area between drug gangs, nothing that had affected any Americans or other tourists but Julia could feel anxiety in the air whenever anyone stepped outside. The hotel had a couple of guards at the entrance, both armed, but you saw armed guards in lots of places, these days, not just in Mexico. If you lived in Arizona, with its gun laws, guns were something you barely registered. Dad had one and he’d made sure that Julia knew how to use one. In any case, it was just three or four hundred yards from the hotel to the bar, where Julia had seen a couple of young American backpackers hanging out when she had passed it.