Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  “Hey man, whas’ going on?” Abel asked brightly.

  The guys on the Land Cruiser dismounted but didn’t answer his question. In the light of Abel’s flashlight they looked pretty creepy. Both of them were short but so heavily muscled that steroids had to be one of their four basic food groups, and both were tattooed with vivid murals featuring heavy use of jaguars, eagles, guns, knives, and skulls. They weren’t actually twins but looked similar enough that they could easily have been brothers.

  Talena and Saskia and I squelched our way up to the Land Cruiser, which was parked on slightly more solid land.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to sound bright and chirpy and unafraid. “I’m Paul.”

  I held out my hand to shake but they ignored it and looked past me to the boat. I couldn’t really blame them since their hands were full of flashlights and cigarettes. After a moment I dropped my hand and looked back. I nearly gasped at the sight of the Uzi now hanging around Cain’s shoulder on what looked like a guitar strap. An unexpected gun always looks obscene and unreal, like a movie prop. Cain followed Abel off the boat. Abel was holding two stapled-shut sacks about the size of pillow cases.

  “Not just us being smuggled tonight,” Talena muttered.

  I nodded uneasily. I was guessing it was just pot, from the way the sacks bulged, full of something loosely packed instead of some kind of dense powdered drug. But I didn’t want to be part of any drug deal at all, especially one with guns involved. And when the Mexicans walked towards Cain and Abel, ignoring us completely, I saw that they carried pistols tucked behind their backs.

  A long and frequently hostile discussion followed, in Spanish, between Cain and the Mexicans. We leaned against the Land Cruiser and watched nervously. I hoped they weren’t arguing about money. If things went terribly wrong there wasn’t much we could do. The mangrove jungle was too thick to flee into. The only bargaining chips we had were the threat of Sinisa’s wrath, which might not count for much down here, at least not yet, and the fact that being white Americans our deaths would presumably not go uninvestigated. I wondered what would happen if the Latinos did suddenly turn on us and kill us. We would probably just vanish. Our bodies would never be discovered. Sinisa would regretfully write us off as a business expense. No governmental body would ever investigate.

  But Hallam, Nicole, Lawrence, Steve, my friends in London, they would come to find out what had happened to us. I was sure of that. They knew we were here, I had kept them posted via email. It was somehow reassuring, knowing that even if these men betrayed us, even if we died here on this lonely smuggler’s trail, I had friends who would turn over every stone in this country to find out what had happened to me.

  The mellifluous flow of Spanish finally dried up. One of the musclebound Mexicans dug into a shoulder bag and came up with a shopping bag wrapped around what looked like a small brick. Money, I realized, U.S. dollars, I couldn’t tell the denomination but if it was twenties than the total had to be four or five thousand. He opened it up and partitioned it, keeping the smaller chunk and passing the larger to Cain. Cain counted his money, which took some time, and in the end he grunted his approval. I worked out what was happening. The Mexicans owed Cain for the pot, but Cain owed them for smuggling us. It looked like we were less valuable than the pot. I wondered if we should be insulted.

  Then, the deal complete, big smiles broke out on all four smuggler’s faces and they started laughing and joking and talking mile-a-second Spanish and clapping one another on the shoulder, like old friends at a party. A few minutes later, Cain and Abel returned to the boat, restarted the engine, and reversed out of the little inlet and into the darkness of the sea.

  The Mexican steroid twins motioned us into the back seat of the Land Cruiser. The seats were torn and smelled powerfully of fish. The road through the mangrove jungle was a pair of pitted dirt tracks that crawled over extremely uneven terrain, but the Land Cruiser was equal to the task. Eventually we emerged from the jungle and turned onto a paved road. A half-hour later the three of us were in Chetumal’s bus station, waiting for the last bus to Cancun.

  * * *

  “Only one border to go,” I said, later that night. We sat in one of Cancun’s hundreds of hotels, cheaper and tawdrier than most, but the water pressure was good and the sheets tattered but clean. The clerk had copied information from my passport without looking up to see if I matched the picture. I had already forgotten the name of the place. Cancun was an awful town, all neon faux-glitz and cheesy dance clubs targeted at mindless hard-partying American college students, but it was a major transit nexus and a town where three white people could stay in complete anonymity.

  “If it’s even remotely like that last border you should stay in Mexico,” Talena said.

  “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “Sure. Because the drug smugglers happened to be in a good mood and didn’t screw each other over for once. This is fucked up, Paul. You’re guinea pigs, you got that right, but not for people who are going to come after you. For drugs. That briefcase is the tip of the iceberg. Sinisa brought a boatload of something over in that private jet and he wants to get it into America and sell it. You two are here to make sure the road is open.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “I bet when I call the number Sinisa gave us it’ll be a drug smuggler who answers. But that’s not the point. We have to focus on getting Saskia over the border.”

  “Yes. But we don’t go with drug smugglers. That’s needlessly dangerous. That’s way more dangerous than it needs to be. We dump that briefcase in a trash can somewhere and do it ourselves. There’s what, a quarter of a million people who go across this border every year? Paul, this should be easy.”

  That was true. Hundreds of would-be migrants died in the searing heat of the borderland desert every years, thousands more were intercepted by America’s Border Guard, and there were plenty of stories of coyotes, professional smugglers, imprisoning their clients in so-called safe houses until their families ransomed them – but Talena was right, the vast majority of would-be Mexican illegals made it safely into America. Turning to drug smugglers for help getting across the border did sound a bit like using high explosives to landscape your garden.

  “But what will Sinisa do if we leave his briefcase?” Saskia asked.

  I looked at the nondescript briefcase and the small lock that sealed it shut. I felt like I was starring in the prequel to Pulp Fiction. Sinisa’s briefcase looked a lot like that one. It didn’t seem fair that my life revolved around this battered article of luggage and its unknowable contents.

  “Depends on what’s in there,” I said.

  Talena said, “Let’s assume for the moment that it’s drugs.”

  “Fair enough.” I considered. “Then I think we can also assume that if we and the briefcase just plain disappear, Sinisa figures we stole it and tracks us down and kills us.”

  “In San Francisco? In America?” Saskia asked, shocked at the thought that such things could happen in our golden end-of-the-rainbow destination.

  “I hate to disappoint you,” I said, “but America is not exactly a murder-free zone.”

  “Then we should not leave the briefcase,” Saskia said. “I am sorry, Talena, but I think Sinisa is very dangerous.”

  “You and me both,” I agreed. “But that still doesn’t mean we have to use Sinisa’s guys. We could still cross the border ourselves. But it’s a big risk.”

  “Big risk?” Talena asked. “It’s crazy. It’s fucking insane. You understand that if we get caught driving a suitcase full of drugs across the border, our lives are over, right?”

  “Metaphorically,” I said. “But if we don’t get that suitcase over the border, our lives are literally over.”

  “If you do this for Sinisa he’ll just turn around and ask you to do something else.”

  “But by then we’ll be in America,” I said. “In America we can say no. I’ll be very happy to say no. But not until we get there.”

 
; “I can’t believe how fucked up this is,” Talena said.

  Neither Saskia nor I had anything to say to that.

  “All right,” she said. “Fine. We take Sinisa’s briefcase into America for him. But we get there by ourselves. No getting involved with more drug smugglers. Right?”

  I nodded. We both looked at Saskia.

  “Whatever you think is best,” she said, obviously still a little reluctant.

  “Trust us,” I said. I hoped I wouldn’t regret it.

  * * *

  “You want to go for a walk?” Talena asked later that night.

  I looked at her, surprised. Saskia had just gone to her room to sleep, and I had been on the verge of doing the same.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “The beach,” she said.

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  Cancun’s beach, despite the best efforts of the vile high-rises and gated tourist complexes that polluted it, was very pretty, a pale endless arc of sand. The rushing sounds of the ocean drowned out most of the thumping techno from the waterfront discos. A warm sea breeze plucked at Talena’s long hair as we walked, and the sand was cool and damp against our bare feet. I was in shorts, she in a green patterned sarong and blue bikini top.We walked hand in hand, silently, but comfortably so, for a long time.

  “I wish we could walk forever,” Talena said. “Somewhere the sun would never come up, and the beach would never end, and we would never get tired, we could just go on and on and never go back to real life.”

  “This is real life too,” I said.

  She nodded thoughtfully.

  A little while later she said, “Let’s sit down for a bit, okay?”

  We sat next to one another and faced the ocean, watched the whitecapped waves surge and ripple in the moonlight, then lay back and stared up at the stars. I reached out for her without thinking about it, natural as breathing, and she rolled towards me and we lay together on the damp sand, my arm around her, her head on my chest. I felt her whole slender body quiver a little with each heartbeat. Her breath was warm against the hollow of my throat. She closed her eyes, and so did I, and we slept a little.

  When I woke up I didn’t know how much time had passed. Talena was motionless but I could tell by her breathing that she was awake. My arm around her ached slightly.

  “Paul?” she whispered, after a little while.

  “Yes?”

  “If we try again?”

  I swallowed. “Yes?”

  “You have to be nicer and better to me –”

  “I know,” I said hastily, “I know, I’ve been –”

  “Wait,” she said. She wasn’t whispering any more but her voice was low and soft and thick with sleep. “Please. I’m not finished. I have to be nicer and better to you too. I’ve been vicious sometimes. I know you’re sorry for how you’ve been. Well, I’m sorry too.”

  I reached to her with my free hand and took her chin and tilted her face towards mine. There were tears on her cheeks. I kissed her very softly. We held each other for a long time.

  “We don’t have to live in the same apartment any more if you don’t want,” she said. “You can get your own place and we can date like before. But I was thinking, I mean, if you want to, maybe we could find a new place together. So it would feel more like home for both of us. Just if you want to. The other way is fine too.”

  “I’d like that,” I said. “Us finding a new place together. That would be fun.”

  She smiled and kissed me.

  “Silver lining department,” I said. “You know how great normal life is going to seem when we get back? I swear, I’ll whistle on the way to work every morning. You will too. All the crap that pisses people off, Muni and money and taxes and, I don’t know, bad waiters, we’re going to be fucking overjoyed to be so lucky as to experience them. People will think we’re on happy drugs.”

  “Yeah,” Talena said. “You know what I’ve decided? Adventure sucks. Boring is good. Boring is the new black. From three days from now on, you and me are going to be as boring as boring can be.”

  “Deal,” I agreed.

  Her smile grew strained. “Unless of course we both get arrested and thrown in jail for ten years tomorrow. That would be very unboring. Let’s not do that.”

  We laughed nervously.

  Chapter 17

  Imperial Desert

  

  Cancun to Ciudad Juarez via Mexico City by bus is an epic journey of suffering and endurance, one that would be worthy of television specials and ballads and Shakespearean plays, except the suffering consists of boredom and jackhammer headaches. You try spending 28 consecutive hours on buses in a country where mass transit entertainment consists of dangling a dozen TVs from the bus ceiling, turning their collective volume all the way up to eleven, and showing an endless stream of amazingly low-production-value ninja action shoot-em-ups. My advice is to bring lots of Aspirin, or a baseball bat to knock yourself out with. Especially if you happen to be in a position where your tedium turns to gut-wrenching dread every time you think of the next day’s border crossing.

  I learned on that bus that fear and boredom reinforce one another in a vicious spiral. Boredom gave me plenty of time to brood, the more I brooded the more scared I got, and the more scared I got, the slower time seemed to pass. I fluctuated between periods of being nervous but confident that the odds were in our favour, when I just wanted the crossing to be over with, and periods of abject gasping terror, when I wanted to turn around and stay in Mexico as long as possible, rather than dare the border.

  It was Moby who saved my sanity, Moby and his buddies Radiohead, Fleetwood Mac, and the Sex Pistols, powered by the twenty-pack of batteries I had wisely purchased for my Discman. Saskia and Talena and I passed the Discman and the Harry Potter books we had bought in Cancun back and forth, when we weren’t dozing. It was hard to read, with the constant jostling of the bus and the sounds that kept trying to batter their way into our consciousness, mostly movie gunfights and chop-socky ninja battles but sometimes car horns or passenger arguments.

  Our only respite was in Mexico City, where we traded boredom and dread for hassle. We arrived at the southern bus station, hopped a shuttle bus to the northern bus station, and promptly got stuck in traffic. It was night, which I regretted; I wanted to get a sense of Mexico City’s vast megalopolis, which contains in its greater urban area more people than the entire population of Canada, but all I saw was an endless ocean of roads, cars, street lights, neon signs, brightly lit storefronts, and occasional glimpses of mobs of people that reminded me of Hong Kong. Thankfully Mexico’s bus stations were considerably more efficient and less chaotic than I had expected, and we made it onto the northbound bus to Ciudad Juarez.

  “Talk about a good walk spoiled,” Talena said, as the TV ninja slaughtered a golfing foursome for poorly explained reasons.

  “He forgot to yell ‘fore’ before he threw the throwing star!” I said. “Two-stroke penalty!”

  “I bet the ninja is really a member of the fashion police,” she said. “The fashion assassin. Look, my God, that guy’s wearing a paisley jacket over a striped shirt, he better not get away!” He didn’t.

  “I bet he’s just jealous,” I said. “Sure, he knows eighty silent ways to kill a man, but he’s still a thirty handicap.”

  “Maybe the country club has a No Ninjas policy,” Talena suggested. “But look, do they ever have heavily armed security! In golf carts!”

  “I bet they’re Humvee golf carts,” I said. “The Pentagon paid a million dollars each for those. Thirty gallons a mile.”

  “Now they’re chasing him! It’s a low-speed pursuit!”

  “The ninja is down!” I announced. “I repeat, the ninja is – oh, wait, he’s hiding in the water hazard. He’s going to catch a cold.”

  “Maybe he’s looking for golf balls,” Talena said. “Even ninjas have to make ends meet.”

  “Where’s he going to dry that ninja suit?” I asked. “Where do ninjas do
laundry?”

  “They sneak in late at night and hotwire the machines,” she explained. “It’s one of the lesser-known secret ninja tricks, along with sneaking to the front of the line at the bank.”

  “I wondered how it was the damn ninjas always beat me to the tellers.”

  “Look, he’s making a reed into a blowgun! He’s a ninja and a Boy Scout! Now –”

  The old woman in front of Talena turned and furiously shushed us. I looked around and realized that every Mexican on the bus, which meant everyone but the three of us, was glaring in our general direction. I smiled weakly. “Sorry,” I said, and Talena and I shrank back down into our seats, chastened, until we looked at one another and started giggling wildly again, like children.

  Saskia leaned over and whispered, “I think we should not make so much noise. I think maybe this is a very important movie for them.”

  Then we really started laughing, heedless of the angry Mexicans.

  “Ninja III: The Domination –” I said, but I was laughing too hard to finish.

  “It’s the Schindler’s List of Mexico!” Talena howled, and we whooped with laughter until it hurt. The Mexicans, writing us off as crazy or drug-addled, sighed and turned back to their own devices.

  We were a little crazy. We were frightened of the upcoming border crossing, and punch-drunk from nonstop bus travel, and our laughter was a little hysterical. But more than that, Talena and I were just giddily happy with one another again, silly and childish and wonderfully unselfconscious together for the first time in more than a year. I wouldn’t have traded that feeling for anything.

  When we settled back down I noticed that a score of our fellow passengers were in a single tight group; mostly men in jeans and T-shirts, small and dark-skinned, but a few women in homemade dresses and blue-and-white shawls. They were…Indians? Native Mexicans? First Nations? I didn’t know what the culturally sensitive descriptor was in Mexico. The leader of the group was a pretty young woman just out of her teens, with considerably paler skin than those she led, wearing Juicy Couture sweat pants and an expensive-looking jean jacket. I couldn’t understand a word she said, but when she lectured her followers, many of whom were much older than her, I could tell she had all the usual petulance and know-it-all impatience of youth, and then some. I had imagined coyotes as tough-looking middle-aged hombres, the kind of men who smoked cigarillos and wore fringed leather jackets. This girl would have looked right at home in Beverly Hills. I supposed in a way that was the point. I wonder if she would actually lead this pack of would-be farm workers right over the border and across the desert in those Juicy Couture sweatpants, or if she was just a recruiter, she took them to Ciudad Juarez and somebody else handled the actual crossing.