24/7

by Yolanda Wallace

  “Mine,” she said, abandoning her quest. “Our friends are always saying we’re like an old married couple. Tonight gives us a chance to either prove or disprove the theory. Don’t you have someone in your life like that? Someone who knows you better than you know yourself?”

  Finn thought it over as they followed Richard and the rest of the group to the Great Ball Court, the largest and best preserved court of its kind. The playing area was more than five hundred fifty feet long, and the surrounding walls were twenty-six feet high. Rings carved with intertwined serpents were set high up in the center of each wall. At the base were sculpted stone panels inscribed with images of ball players. On one panel, one of the players had been decapitated, giving new meaning to the phrase “life-and-death-competition.”

  “I don’t make friends easily,” Finn said at length. “I’ve found that most situations tend to work out better for me if I don’t let people get too close.”

  “You could have fooled me. You’ve been right in the middle of things all week, not on the outside looking in. Well, you started out that way, but you’ve been a social butterfly ever since.”

  Finn started to protest until she realized it was true. She had been forced to take some quiet time Monday morning, but she hadn’t felt the need to repeat the ritual since. In fact, she had found herself looking forward to each day’s long list of activities so she could see what she would do—and who she might meet—next. Would she still feel this way after she completed her story? When she got back to the “real world” in a few days, would she discover her newfound comfort was exclusive to this trip and the group of women sharing it with her, or would it follow her home?

  “This week has been the exception rather than the rule.”

  She looked at the entrance to the Lower Temple of the Jaguar. The columns were covered in elaborate bas-relief carvings, and a worn Jaguar throne, also carved of stone, sat in the entrance.

  “Why is that?” Ryan asked.

  Finn felt a familiar sense of dread. How much should she reveal about herself? Should she tell Ryan everything or just enough to answer her question?

  “I grew up in a small town in Montana,” she said, reciting an oft-told tale. “Neighbors were few and far between. The few friends I had were people I’d known all my life. We attended the same one-room schoolhouse from the time we were eight years old until we graduated high school. I experienced serious shell shock when I got to college. I had never seen so many people gathered in one place at one time. I was used to having my neighbors live hundreds of acres away, not a few feet. Freshman year was rough. Every day felt like a test I hadn’t adequately studied for. I survived, but I still prefer living in my own bubble in my own space.”

  “But you’re in San Francisco now, right? There aren’t many wide open spaces there.”

  “You’d be surprised. I work out of my apartment most of the time, so I don’t have to deal with a commute. And even when I go out, there are plenty of places to choose from that aren’t crawling with tourists. There’s a pedestrian walkway on the Golden Gate Bridge that makes you feel like you’re walking in the clouds, especially when the fog rolls in. There are also a ton of parks to choose from, and the Japanese Tea Garden is a great place to meditate. So, even in a city of millions, I can feel like I’m all alone.”

  “Don’t you miss Montana?” Ryan asked as she slathered more sunscreen on her arms. “The pictures I’ve seen make it seem so beautiful there.”

  “It is. The views are some of the most amazing you can find in the whole country. But the nearest airport is a three-hour drive from my parents’ house, which would make it extremely inconvenient for me to move back to my hometown and continue to travel as much as I do. Most of my family still lives in Montana. I go back to visit them a couple times a year. I enjoy the time I spend with them, but it doesn’t feel like home anymore.”

  “I know how you feel. I love going home for the holidays each year, but I love returning to my own life even more. Since you seem to prefer your own company, I’m guessing a relationship is out of the question.”

  “Too many places to see. Too many things to do.”

  “You must save all the romance for your books because your life seems to have a distinct lack of it.”

  Finn started to protest but held her tongue because Ryan was right. She had sex—lots of it—but romance had always been a rarity in her life. Romance was more than a torrid affair or a brief hook-up. When was the last time she had bought a Valentine’s Day card or received one in return? When was the last time she had viewed a relationship as something with the potential to be long lasting instead of temporary? Longer than she was willing to admit. But Luisa made her want to do all those things and more. Had her latest change of scenery caused her to have an unexpected change of heart?

  She had felt a connection with Luisa from the moment they met. At the time, she’d thought the bond was only sexual. The time they’d spent exploring each other’s bodies hadn’t done much to disprove the theory. Over the past week, however, she had slowly discovered the connection she felt with Luisa was more than physical. It was emotional as well. And it seemed to be getting deeper every day. Now the accompanying feelings were too strong to ignore.

  She and Luisa needed to talk. And not on the phone this time. They needed to talk face-to-face. And when they did, Finn needed to tell Luisa her whole story, not the airbrushed version she usually trotted out at parties. She needed to tell Luisa about her fear and uncertainty. All the things she usually tried to hide. Because in order to win Luisa’s heart, she needed to show Luisa what was in hers.

  Richard’s voice drew Finn from her reverie.

  “If you will follow me through the market, I’ll take you to the Cenote Sagrado, the sinkhole that once provided water to the Mayans. It’s a bit of a hike, but if you’re up to the task, you’ll be rewarded with shade at the end of the journey.”

  Finn and the rest of the tour group walked down a sloping dirt walkway. Vendors lined both sides. Their booths offered everything from T-shirts bearing screen-printed images of El Castillo to hand-knitted blankets depicting Mayan warriors in full battle dress to replica jerseys of the Mexican national soccer team’s most popular players. Finn slowed in front of a booth laden with hand-carved treasures of all kinds: animal figurines, decorative masks, and tiny articulated skeletons in honor of the Day of the Dead.

  The booth’s owner, a slight young man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and designer knockoff skinny jeans, sat on an overturned five-gallon bucket. Finn stopped to watch him work. Wood shavings fell at his sneaker-clad feet as the rectangular block of wood in his hands slowly began to mimic the form of the crouching jaguar tattooed on his left forearm.

  “Would you like to see my little shop?” he asked without looking up. “Everything one dollar. Practically free.”

  Finn didn’t want to buy anything. She just wanted to watch him work. She raised her camera and took several pictures as the pile of wood shavings continued to grow. The vendor’s hair fell into his eyes as he hunched over the carving, preventing Finn from getting any good shots of his face. She didn’t mind, though, because his strong, skilled hands were his most memorable feature.

  “Nice work,” she said.

  “Thank you, señorita.”

  “Are you coming, Finn?” Ryan asked.

  “I’m right behind you.”

  Finn took one last photograph of the vendor before she left his booth to join Ryan standing near a pair of tourists haggling over the price of a ceramic replica of El Castillo. She and Ryan continued down the dirt path. A few minutes later, they joined the rest of their group in a wooded area overlooking a deep hole. Finn sighed at the drastic drop in temperature. She hoped Richard’s upcoming lecture would be long-winded instead of brief. She wanted to enjoy the shade as long as she could before she resumed baking in the sun.

  “The Sacred Cenote, Cenote Sagrado in Spanish, is also known as the Well of Sacrifice,” Richard said. “The Mayans p
erformed sacrifices, sometimes human, in honor of the rain god Chaac. When the cenote was dredged one hundred years ago, artifacts of jade, gold, pottery, and incense were discovered, along with human remains. As you can probably tell from what you’ve learned today, the average life span wasn’t very long during the pre-Columbian period. In certain parts of the country, it still isn’t. That’s why I don’t want my son to go into politics when he grows up. It’s much too corrupt a profession. But that’s just my opinion. You’re free to disagree with me if you want.”

  “You’ve been right so far,” one of the Barbies said. “Why stop now?”

  “Madam, your check is in the mail.” Richard bowed as deeply as a knight presenting himself to a monarch. “Now let’s move on to El Caracol.”

  He led the group back through the cadre of vendors to a round building resting atop a square platform.

  “If the building looks like an observatory,” he said, “it should. Its windows and doors are aligned to track Venus’s path as it crosses the sky.”

  “How could such a primitive society be so advanced?” Finn wondered aloud.

  “Aliens,” Ryan said. “They learned everything they knew from little green men from Mars. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Get it?”

  Finn got the allusion but didn’t find it quite as amusing as Ryan seemed to.

  “Perhaps I should leave the jokes to the professionals.”

  “Perhaps.”

  They toured a few more ruins, then headed to the exit. The parking lot that had been practically deserted when they arrived was now filled with dozens of buses from various tour groups, resorts, and hotels. Finn looked for the bus labeled SOS Tours. Ryan spotted it first.

  “There it is.”

  “I wonder what happened to our driver,” Finn said after they boarded the bus and settled into their seats.

  Leo, the man who had driven them from Cancún, was in his fifties. The man smoking in front of the bus was a good thirty years younger, though the black baseball cap pulled low over his forehead and the mirrored sunglasses covering his eyes made it difficult to guess his exact age.

  “Too much sun, I imagine.” Ryan adjusted the vent over her head so the chilled air could blow directly on her. “A few more minutes in that heat and I might have keeled over, too. Some fires I’ve fought haven’t been as hot as it was today.”

  Richard counted heads to make sure each member of the group was present and accounted for. Some had veered off to go shopping instead of following the rest of the group around the grounds, but all had made it back to the bus on time.

  “Show of hands.” Richard raised his hand as if he was about to testify in court. “Who wants the air-conditioning lower, who wants it higher, and who thinks it’s just fine as is?”

  “Lower,” everyone yelled.

  “So much for a show of hands.”

  Richard picked up a large cardboard box and walked down the aisle carrying bags of potato chips. Finn opted for ruffled chips instead of plain. Ryan grabbed one of each.

  “Where’s Leo?” Finn asked as she opened her small bag of chips.

  “He was called away on a family emergency. Our relief driver, Javier, will take us back to the resort. Let’s go home, Javi.”

  Javier closed the bus’s doors and slowly pulled out of the crowded parking lot. Ryan’s cell phone chimed as the bus picked up speed.

  “It’s probably Jill checking up on me to make sure I’ll be getting back in plenty of time to do the show tonight.”

  Ryan wiped her hand on her shorts and dug her phone out of her pocket. The message she opened wasn’t a text but a video. Jill’s face filled the small screen.

  “I wanted you to see what you’re missing,” Jill said. “Get a load of this.”

  On the screen, Jill’s sunburned face was replaced by shots of two masked wrestlers beating the crap out of each other in an elevated ring set up where the craft table normally rested. Hundreds of cheering women were crowded around the ring. After a few minutes of high-flying action, the camera shifted to focus on two speedboats motoring into the lagoon. Instead of the shirtless resort workers Finn had seen piloting the boats all week, the vehicles were manned by ten men carrying assault rifles. Ten more armed men dressed in camouflage came running in from the beach.

  “This is so cool,” Jill said on the video. “These guys are really going all out. They’ve even got the Federales in on the act. Now don’t you wish you had stayed?”

  Something about the scene didn’t feel right to Finn. The wrestlers were obviously pretending to fight, but the guys with the guns didn’t seem like they were faking their aggression.

  “I don’t think this is part of the show, Ryan.”

  Ryan’s face was pale beneath her tan.

  “Neither do I.”

  They watched as a wrestler wearing a jaguar mask stood on the ring ropes and motioned for one of the newcomers to toss him a rifle. When he caught it and shot a volley of bullets into the air, the audience’s cheers turned into screams. Some women rose from their seats and tried to run, but the men aimed their guns at them and ordered them to remain where they were.

  The man in the jaguar mask peered at the panicked crowd as he slowly circled the square ring. “Which one of you is Finn Chamberlain?”

  Ryan gasped when the screen went black.

  “What was that about?” she asked, her face ashen. “Was it real? Why were those men looking for you?”

  Finn’s heart hammered in her chest. She didn’t know who the men were. She didn’t know why they were looking for her. And, most of all, she didn’t know how they knew her name. She had always sought to fade into the background. Now she was being thrust in the spotlight. And she had no idea why.

  “I’m—I’m nobody.” She forced the words out as her mouth, throat, and tongue fought against her. “I’m just—I’m just a travel writer from San Francisco.”

  “Then what’s all this about? How did those men know your name?”

  “I—I—” Finn closed her eyes and ran through her rituals as she tried to control her stutter. She took several deep breaths and concentrated on slowing her speech. “I wish I knew,” she finally managed to say. “Call Jill and see if she can tell us more. Before we go running off half-cocked, we need to know if what we saw was real.”

  “Good idea.” Ryan hit speed dial. “If this is a prank, I’ll kill her.” She put the phone to her ear, then frowned and shook her head. “Straight to voice mail.”

  “Try again.”

  Ryan hit redial, then shook her head again. “Same thing. You don’t think she’s—”

  “Don’t go there,” Finn said, even though she already had.

  “What are we supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just as lost as you are, if not more so.” She forced herself to think clearly, even though fear was clouding her thoughts. “Send me the video.”

  “What are you going to do, upload it to YouTube or something and hope it goes viral?”

  “No, I’m going to forward it to someone who might be able to help us. Her name’s Luisa Moreno. She’s a Federal Police officer in Mexico City.”

  “How well do you know her?”

  Finn had asked herself the same question a few days ago. Then, she had hoped the answer would ease her mind. Now it might save her life.

  “Well enough.”

  “That was just a show, right?” Ryan’s hands shook as she punched in Finn’s cell number. “Just part of a show?”

  “I hope so.”

  Finn desperately wanted to say yes, but she didn’t dare. She kept her voice low and her face impassive to keep from alarming her fellow passengers—or Javier, who seemed to be using the rearview mirror to keep tabs on her instead of the trailing traffic. She surreptitiously eyed her phone as she waited for Ryan’s text message to arrive.

  “We’re sitting right next to each other,” she said, trying not to panic as the minutes crawled by and no notification for an incoming mess
age appeared on her phone. “Why is it taking so long?”

  “It’s a pretty big file. Maybe it’s taking a while to load. Give it a little while longer.”

  Finn loosed a sigh of relief when her phone finally chirped. She checked the message to make sure it was from Ryan instead of someone else, then pressed Forward and keyed in Luisa’s cell phone number.

  Four days ago, Luisa had told her there was nothing to worry about. She needed that same reassurance now.

  “Come on, super cop,” she said as she hit Send. “Tell me what I need to hear.”

  ❖

  No cell phones or outside weapons were allowed inside Santa Martha Jail, so Luisa stashed her cell phone and gun in the glove compartment of her car. She flinched after she slammed the compartment’s door shut. Her left arm hurt from top to bottom. Her shoulder ached from the tetanus shot the EMT had given her, and her forearm throbbed where Gilberto Ruiz had slashed her.

  You’re going to die today, bitch, Ruiz had said before he was carted off to jail for processing. You and everyone you love.

  She didn’t know whether to take his threat seriously, but the risk of ignoring it was one she wasn’t willing to take. On her way to Santa Martha Jail, she had called her family in Dallas to make sure they were safe. She hadn’t told them what was going on because she didn’t want them to worry if there was no reason to. Ruiz was apparently acting under orders, but whose? She couldn’t tell her family they could be at risk until she knew where the danger was coming from.

  Her mother had said she felt better just hearing Luisa’s voice. Luisa felt better knowing her family was out of the narcos’ reach. Allegedly. Drugs crossed the border every day and managed to go undetected. A hit man could easily follow the same route if his boss’s pockets—and thirst for revenge—were deep enough to fund the effort.

  The Federal Police didn’t have jurisdiction north of the border, but Luisa had a few friends on the Dallas police force who said they would keep their eyes peeled for any signs of danger.