Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1)

by Evans, Jon

  As we advanced northward the landscape changed from green hills, to rocky scrub tufted with thorn bushes, and then the kind of arid desert I always imagined when I thought of Mexico, thanks to the thousand Hollywood depictions deep in my cultural DNA. We passed dozens of 24-hour tire-repair shops, which said a lot about Mexican roads, their presence indicated by huge truck tires with naked light bulbs burning within like bullseyes.

  Around midnight Talena curled up against me and fell asleep, her head on my shoulder, my arm around her neck. I watched her sleep for a little while, luminously beautiful. I felt like I cradled something invaluably precious and terribly fragile in my arm. I didn’t move a muscle for fear of waking her. She occasionally muttered a few garbled words of Croatian. I knew that even though for years now she had thought only in English, she often still dreamed in Croatian.

  I was uneasy when we finally entered the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez the next morning. I knew from Internet research that this was a city of dire reputation, the hunting ground of one or more extremely busy serial killers. Given the numbers it almost had to be a group. Over the last decade, the bodies of at least 100 young women had been found abandoned in the desert, raped and strangled and mutilated. The one thing every source agreed on was that the true number of victims was far larger. Estimates of the real body count varied from 300 to over a thousand, but nobody really knew how many more might lie undiscovered by the Cuidad Juarez police. Or perhaps outright hidden by them. Site after site excoriated the catalogue of police idiocy, corruption, and laziness in connection with this case. Their hunt for the most prolific murderers in the history of the continent was at best lacklustre. Several commentators had suggested that the police were somehow involved or actively trying to protect the killers. True or not, it underscored that this was not a good place to get into any kind of trouble.

  Serial killers aside, Ciudad Juarez was a terrible city, one that had obviously grown too far too fast, a wasteland of rotted streets, crumbling walls, broken traffic lights, rusted skeletal automotive remains abandoned on the street, masses of beaten-down people shambling from place to place like extras in a George Romero movie. I splurged on the Holiday Inn, rather than one of Ciudad Juarez’s several backpacker hostels. I wondered, as I passed my credit card to the receptionista, if I was getting old. The full-on sensory overload of hostels nowadays seemed frenetic and draining. Somehow, while my back was turned, the inhabitants of such places had become young, callow, and loudly alcoholized, people I would rather avoid. Once they had been full of people just like me. These days, especially after a long bus ride, the relative peace and serenity of the Holiday Inn was extremely inviting.

  Our plan was idiot-simple. Saskia and I would spend the night in Ciudad Juarez. Talena would cross the border to El Paso. Tomorrow she would rent a car, drive down here, pick us up, and drive back, with me in the passenger seat and Saskia and the briefcase in the trunk. We would simply hope that ours was one of the cars not selected for further inspection. The odds were pretty good. About 1 in 50 was pulled aside, said the all-knowing Internet. A 98% chance of success. Who wouldn’t take that? But those last 2% loomed Tyrannosaurus Rex large in our minds.

  Talena came up with Saskia and I to our Holiday Inn room. I thought she was just saying goodbye before hopping a cab to the border. But instead she said something to Saskia in Croatian. Saskia fell silent for a moment, and then smiled widely, said something back, and quickly exited the room.

  I looked at Talena. “What was that all about?”

  “I told her to stay down there with her magazine and give us an hour of privacy.”

  “Oh.” I turned and looked at her as she closed and locked the door.

  “Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Clock’s ticking.”

  * * *

  “Are you scared?” Talena asked.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She raised herself up to kiss me and lowered her head back to my sweat-soaked chest.

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Sure. But not like I was before. Now the worst that can happen is getting arrested. Which would really suck but isn’t as bad as finding out Dragan found you and tortured you to death. I’d catch myself imagining that sometimes. The things the back alleys of my brain can come up with, God, you have no idea. Anyways, never mind, never happened. It’s all good.”

  “It’s all good,” I echoed, closing my eyes.

  She snorted. “I almost forgot how little you like to talk after sex.”

  “No, I like it,” I protested. “I always like talking to you. I’m just kind of dreamy. Especially this time. This was, yeah. Wow.”

  “Yeah. I could tell. You’re not usually so noisy.”

  “Was I noisy?”

  She giggled.

  “Oh,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Sorry about the bite marks,” she said, inspecting my shoulder. “They, um, seemed like the thing to do at the time. I don’t think they’ll bruise. I’m sure glad this cheap-ass Third World bed held up. You’d think Holiday Inn could afford better. I was getting a little worried about it while I was still, you know, able to think.”

  “Yeah. If Saskia came up here and found out we broke the bed I bet she wouldn’t stop blushing for weeks.”

  “She’s not so shy and innocent as all that, believe me,” Talena said. She paused. “How is she? How do you think she’s doing?”

  “She seems okay,” I said. “I guess. I don’t know. She has a lot of nightmares. I guess when someone tells you she has a head full of land mines you can’t really say she’s okay. But I think she will be eventually. She’s getting better. I really like her. We get along really well. She’s funny. And she’s so smart, can you believe how good her English is already? Give her a year or two, and the whole total new environment thing, and I think she’ll be okay.”

  “I hope so,” Talena said. “I bet being around you has been good for her. I don’t know if she would have been able to be friends with a guy for a long time otherwise.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re a good man, Balthazar Wood.”

  “You’re a good woman, Talena Radovich.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  I laughed.

  “All right,” Talena said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  * * *

  On Wednesday, the fourteenth of May 2003, at 4:15 PM, we approached the border between Mexico and America. Borders are fuzzy things but this one was pretty clearly marked. The real border here was the US immigration post.

  Talena drove. I sat in the passenger seat. Saskia was curled up in the trunk with Sinisa’s briefcase. There was nobody else, there was no elaborate plan. DIY smuggling. It had seemed like a good idea. But as we approached, I was visibly sweating, my heart was thundering like I had contracted malaria and then snorted a line of cocaine, and I was silently but desperately wishing we had used Sinisa’s connection after all.

  I tried to emanate vibes of being nothing more suspicious than a pleasant young couple who had come down to Ciudad Juarez for a weekend of fun. Not exactly a perfect cover. For one thing, I wasn’t sure there was any fun within a fifty-mile radius of Ciudad Juarez. And the whole drug-mule thing was still an issue. Be cool, I told myself. Be cool.

  I did not feel cool. All this anticipation, stop-and-go as car after car filed through the border, was slowly driving me insane. And I hadn’t seen a vehicle pulled aside for further inspection for a long time. I thought it was about due to happen again.

  The car in front of us pulled away from the border station, and it was officially too late to back out. The bar swung back down to block our entry and Talena eased the car up to the booth in which the bored immigration officer stood. My heart sank when I saw it was a man. I had hoped for a women. Women are more sympathetic.

  The man was big and white, obviously a gym rat, with a nearly-shaved layer of dyed-blond hair on his head and a single earring, standard current-American-cool look. His eyes h
eld no spark of intelligence. And this Eminem wannabe, who probably didn’t even have a college education, hadn’t read a book since high school, and had never been out of the country himself, was about to decide the course of my life, and Talena’s, and Saskia’s. I swallowed, told myself not to be such an intellectual snob, and put on my best shit-eating smile.

  “Are you U.S. citizens?” he asked.

  “I am,” Talena said. ” He’s Canadian.”

  “Passports.”

  We passed ours over. He glanced at Talena’s American passport and immediately passed it back. “What is the purpose of your travel?” he asked me.

  “I’m…purpose? In the States? Oh. I’m visiting her. She’s my girlfriend.”

  Talena gave me a steady-yourself look. I was sure he could see that I was visibly nervous. But then he was probably used to that, I thought wildly, he probably knew that lots of innocent people got nervous when facing Immigration, including me, I actually wasn’t that much more nervous than I was when entering America without an illegal Bosnian refugee and a briefcase probably full of drugs tucked into the trunk of my car.

  “Where is your place of residence?”

  “Toronto,” I lied. I couldn’t answer ‘San Francisco’ because I wasn’t legally allowed to live there indefinitely without a job.

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m a computer programmer.”

  I tried to think of a Toronto company I could claim to work for, but he didn’t ask. He flipped through my passport, and his eyes narrowed. A common reaction. My passport was double-wide, 48 pages rather than the usual 24, and was decorated with the stamps of more than thirty countries. Some of those countries were Indonesia, Morocco, Mauritania, and Egypt, Islamic-majority nations, my visits to which could well cause suspicion in post-World-Trade-Center America. Even without those four stamps, the fact that I travelled so much might alone make him decide to pull us over and open the trunk. I kicked myself for not having realized that I was the risk. I should have gone over the border by myself and allowed Talena to shuttle Saskia and the briefcase alone.

  “Where’s your entry stamp?”

  I blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Your entry stamp. Into Mexico. When you come in, they’re supposed to stamp your passport.”

  Not the way I came in, I almost said. Instead I shrugged.

  “Why don’t you have an entry stamp?” he demanded, looking straight at me.

  I tried to think of a good reason but couldn’t. My throat was so tensely constricted that I could barely breathe. I thought it was obvious that I was panicking but later Talena told me that I just looked very confused.

  “I don’t know,” I croaked.

  The immigration officer shook his head.

  “They’re so unprofessional over there,” he said, looking to the Mexican side of the border. “They make our job twice as hard as it needs to be.”

  He stamped my passport and passed it back.

  “Enjoy your visit,” he said to me, and to Talena, “Welcome home.”

  We thanked him. He pushed a button and the bar before us went up like a seig-heil salute. Talena stepped on the gas and we drove forward, away from the border, into the Promised Land, into America. Into America, free and clear.

  * * *

  We called the number Sinisa had given us from an El Paso pay phone. It rang three times, then, after a brief pause, rang again. Some kind of automatic forwarding system.

  “Yes?” Sinisa answered.

  “Sinisa,” I said. I felt nervous, like I was about to quit a job. Which in a way I was. “This is Paul.”

  “Paul. Good. I was worried about you. My associates told me you had not yet contacted them. Where are you?”

  “El Paso, Texas.”

  “Texas,” he said. “I am glad to hear that. Were my associates mistaken or did you elect not to employ their services?”

  “We decided it would be easier to cross by ourselves.”

  “Did you lose anything on the journey?”

  “No,” I said. “We have the briefcase. We want to know what you want done with it.”

  “Did you lose the address?” Sinisa asked. He had given us a Los Angeles address where we were meant to drop off the briefcase, en route to San Francisco. Talena and I had discussed actually going there, but it sounded too much like making a delivery to a crack house.

  “No,” I said.

  After a moment Sinisa said, “Paul, I do not understand why you are calling me.”

  “All right,” I said. I swallowed. “Listen. I’m very sorry. I have the greatest respect for you and for your vision. And I want you to know that I will never tell anyone about you, or what you are doing, or the work I did for you. But I don’t wish to continue our relationship any more, on a business or a personal level, as of today. I’ll mail the briefcase wherever you like, but one way or another, it leaves my possession today.”

  I waited, holding my breath, for what felt like a long time.

  Finally he spoke. “I am very disappointed, Paul. Surprised and very disappointed. I had high hopes for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I guess I’m not cut out for living your kind of life.”

  “Do you know what was in that briefcase?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to get drawn into a guessing game. “No.”

  “Sand. Four kilograms of sand. Do what you like with it. You thought it was drugs? You thought I might give you drugs? Foolish, Paul, very foolish. I am a businessman. Illicit drugs, I assure you, are bad business. The profits are very high, but the risks even higher. Even if I did wish to send drugs to America, do you really think I would send so much, a briefcase full, perhaps a million dollars’ worth, with a man I had met only six weeks ago, with no escort, no security, no certainty? When I have Zoltan and Zorana here, who I trust implicitly, ready to do such things for me?”

  He raised a good point. After a moment I said, “Why?”

  “To see if I could trust you. To see if you would trust me. That is all. I thought you were a friend, Paul. I had high hopes for you. I am building an empire, an empire that will carry the weak people of this world to places where they can become strong, and I had a high place in it reserved for you. You are so stupid it makes me angry. I give you a chance to be part of something important, something noble, I give you a chance to change the world for the better, and you spit it back in my face.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. And I did feel bad about it. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I still felt a little like I was throwing away something wonderful, abandoning a chance at an extraordinary life in favour of that endless monotony called safety.

  “Zoltan and Zorana were right,” Sinisa said. “They told me you were weak, fearful, a little man. I thought there was more to you. But they were right. I pity you, Paul. I pity your little life. I think we will not speak again. Goodbye.”

  He hung up. I looked at the phone for a long moment before I did the same. I wondered if some day, years or decades from now, I might bitterly regret this phone call.

  “Well?” Talena asked, when I emerged from the pay phone.

  “Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all,” I said.

  “Maybe what?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “He won’t bother us any more, that’s what’s important. We’re clear.” I sighed. “So let’s go home.”

  Three months passed.

  Part 4

  California, August 2003

  Chapter 18

  Satori

  “Christ, I’m a sidewinder, I’m a California king,” I sang along with Anthony Kiedis. “I swear it’s everywhere now, it’s every – oh. Oh. Hi. You’re home.”

  “You were expecting someone else?” Talena asked, from her seat at our computer, laughing as I sheepishly unhooked my Discman.

  “I thought you were out at the poetry reading,” I said.

  “I thought it would be more fun to stay home and listen to karaoke
Chili Peppers. No, the reading was cancelled, three of the poets couldn’t make it. I was going to go to yoga but the time got away from me. How was boxing?”

  “Fun. Tough. But it’s not making me sweat as much as it used to.”

  “Yeah. Your shirt just looks sweaty. Not soaked. You know something, Mister Wood, you look pretty good these days. All this running and boxing is making you downright athletic.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, smiling. I smiled a lot these days, and it wasn’t just the post-workout endorphins. I had money in the bank, I was semi-gainfully employed at an interesting job, and I had just moved into a comfortable new apartment with the World’s Most Perfect Girlfriend.

  “Yeah.” She reached her arms up and stretched. “I should exercise more too. Stupid time-eating computer. And I meant to go grocery shopping. I think we have to eat out tonight. How does Thai sound?”

  “Sounds good to –” I began, and then the recognition center of my brain fired off a lightning bolt, and I stopped talking and looked at the computer screen. There were about a dozen passport-sized photos on screen, each with a little blurb of information beneath. I knew the man on the upper left.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  Talena blinked and followed my gaze. “What?”