Final Payment

by Steven F Havill

  “Up now,” she said, and applied some force while he scrambled awkwardly to his feet. She let him lean against the aircraft’s fuselage behind the wing.

  “Mr. Ocate,” she said, her tone softening from the standard felony-stop commands. “Shopping for an airplane?”

  He ducked his head and she saw his eyes flick toward the sound of an opening car door. Jim Bergin had stepped out of his vehicle, but he stayed well back.

  “I…” Hector started to say, then fell silent. She waited for a full minute before he added, “I was deciding.” He started to shift his weight forward, but Estelle reached out and with three fingers against the center of his chest pushed him back against the airplane, keeping him off-balance.

  “Deciding what, joven?” Estelle glanced at her watch. The boy had had plenty of time to make good his flight. Something had made him hesitate. Had he been sitting in the hangared plane with the door open, he could have heard her car hurtling toward the airport, hitting the gravel so fast she had almost slid into the fence. He had hit the ignition just about the time she had been fumbling with the lock on the gate.

  The teenager took a long shuddering breath and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Three-oh-eight is thirty out,” Bob Torrez’s voice crackled from Estelle’s handheld radio. Estelle pulled the radio off her belt.

  “Three-ten copies. We’re at the end of the taxiway. One juvenile in custody.”

  “Ten-four.” Torrez sounded almost disappointed. Even as he spoke, they could hear his county vehicle approach on the state highway, then slow and turn onto the gravel access road.

  As if the arrival of reinforcements was what he had been waiting for, Hector Ocate looked plaintively at Estelle. “I had decided that I could fly home,” he said. He turned and nodded toward the cockpit of the Cessna. “He must have insurance, no? I thought to fly to the airport at Culiacán. Do you know of that place?”

  “And then?”

  “I could leave the airplane there. Perhaps it could be recovered. It is easy. I fly right down the highway.” He looked out the door toward the San Cristóbal Mountains to the southwest. “Just there. That’s all. No one would care.”

  “And then?” Estelle repeated.

  “Just home,” Hector said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “A small village…some distance south of Acapulco.”

  Hector stood a little straighter, and his voice took on an urgency that hadn’t been there before. “You must help me,” he said, and Estelle looked at him in surprise. “Please.”

  “Help you?”

  “That is what I decided. That you must help me.”

  “Ah. It didn’t look that way, joven. Flying away in someone’s airplane isn’t asking for help.”

  “I know now,” he said, nodding vigorously. “If I go home, he will find me again. And there, no one will help me.” The white Expedition roared down the taxiway, and for a moment it appeared as if Sheriff Robert Torrez was planning to rear-end Jim Bergin’s pickup. He swerved around it at the last minute, took to the grass, and stopped a dozen feet in front of Estelle’s sedan.

  Estelle reached out again, hand on the boy’s chest. She saw Ocate’s eyes flick first to Bergin, then to the sheriff, and then back again. “It is possible that you can help me,” he said with finality. “And you must. That is the only way. That is why I didn’t take this airplane just now.”

  “You didn’t take it because you would have crashed into my car, Hector. Don’t take us for fools. Who are you running from?” Estelle asked, and once more she saw Hector Ocate’s eyes flick back down the taxiway, past the airport manager and the sheriff, to the open hangar door as if he expected someone else to appear.

  “Please,” the teenager pleaded.

  “We won’t let anyone hurt you,” she said. “Will you talk with me?”

  “Not here, please,” Hector said. The boy’s eyes were those of an injured rabbit watching the coyote circle ever closer. Sheriff Torrez approached without a word, grabbed the boy by the collar, and spun him around, pushing him hard against the airplane’s fuselage.

  “Spread,” Torrez said, kicking his feet apart and back. The pat-down was anything but gentle or perfunctory. The boy looked back toward her, and she felt a stab of sympathy. To plead with police for protection had to be counter to all of Hector Ocate’s instincts, coming from a “guilty until proven innocent” culture where fairness was more often a function of the ability to pay the right people. Torrez’s rough handling was more familiar, and perhaps expected.

  “Keys,” Torrez said, holding up a set of keys that included three—perhaps to the old man’s pickup and house. He pulled the boy’s wallet out of his back pocket and thumbed it open. “Well now,” he said, and held it so Estelle could see the hefty wad of bills. Satisfied that there was nothing else, he spun the boy around. Hector shrank back against the plane. Torrez was a head taller, fifty pounds heavier, and ferociously calm. He held out the keys and wallet to Estelle. “You want to keep track of these?” He then thrust his hands in his pockets, regarded the shaking boy dispassionately. “How many times have you used this airplane?” he asked, his skepticism heavy.

  “I caused no damage to it,” Hector said.

  “Oh, and that clears everything up,” Torrez muttered.

  “Please,” Hector said again, and he looked past Torrez to Estelle. “I have this.” He twisted, digging one of his thumbs behind his belt and pulling at the leather.

  The belt looked expensive, with basket-weave tooling and a silver buckle. What was tucked inside the belt was far more valuable, no doubt.

  “Yeah, I saw that,” Torrez said.

  “Tell us what happened to your passengers,” Estelle said.

  “Please, you must help me.” It sounded as if the boy was beginning to panic, odd behavior for a kid with steely nerves who could pilot a stranger’s overloaded aircraft across desert and mountains at night, landing on a narrow, unlighted strip of macadam.

  “Help you?” Estelle asked. “Help you how?”

  “Please—I will tell you what I know.”

  “Let’s get him out of here,” Torrez said impatiently, and he turned to the airport manager, who waited quietly beside his truck. “Jim, will you make this thing secure?”

  “You bet,” Bergin replied. “He leave the key in it?”

  “Yes. Can you find a way to button up that hangar so this doesn’t happen again?”

  “Bigger lock is about all I can do,” Bergin said.

  “Well, we’ll find somebody to sit the place until we know what’s what,” Torrez said. He reached out and took Hector by the elbow. “Let’s go,” he said, and the boy looked to Estelle beseechingly. It seemed clear to her that the youth wasn’t going to talk to the brusque sheriff—if Torrez gave him the chance in the first place. But the sheriff was right. There was something to be said for keeping Hector Ocate off-balance and apprehensive.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Three morgue photos were fanned out on the table in front of Hector Ocate. He tried not to look at those incriminating, grotesque faces. Instead, he concentrated on his hands clenched in his lap.

  “Tell me who did this,” Estelle said. “You know what happened.”

  The teenager didn’t respond. Despite his momentary eagerness out at the airport, now that he was sequestered inside the county building, Hector had retreated to some distant place. The boy knew he was in trouble, that was obvious. But it was equally obvious to Estelle that he was having difficulty weighing his options.

  “Right now, you have two choices,” Captain Eddie Mitchell said, understanding the boy’s dilemma. Mitchell sat on the edge of the conference table, his fingers busy pinching a corduroy pattern in the rim of his foam coffee cup. He wore his best neutral expression, perhaps encouraged by being awakened after so little sleep. “You can spend a hell of a lot of time in a prison here, or you can spend the rest of your life in a prison in Mexico.” He turned his head to regard the boy. “
I’m sure there are some folks who’d like to talk to you down home, ¿verdad?” The Spanish grated, the one word using up about half of Mitchell’s fluency. “That’s just about the extent of your choices.”

  “Tell me their names.” Estelle pushed one of the photographs toward Hector. The high-contrast black-and-white photo, a head and torso shot, showed the corpse who had been found closest to the runway. Cactus thorns studded the man’s right cheek. The 9mm slug had not exited after its path from back to front through the man’s skull, but it had lodged in the globe of the left eyeball after bursting through the thin orbital bone, leaving the left side of the man’s face pulpy and grotesque. The other eye was open, death coming before surprise.

  “You don’t know who this is?”

  “They called him Guillermo. I heard her say that.” He touched the edge of the photo of the heavy-set woman without picking it up. “This one talked so much—”

  “Her name?” Sheriff Torrez snapped.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “So now we’re supposed to believe you’ve never seen these people before,” Torrez said. “Who did the shooting? You know that?”

  “I picked these ones up outside of Culiacán,” Hector said. “They are from El Salvador. That is what I heard. I was told to meet them…at Culiacán.”

  “Told by who?”

  “The man who promised to pay for the flight. That is where he got on the airplane as well,” the boy amended.

  “He is not one of these?”

  “No.”

  “His name?” Estelle asked.

  Hector hesitated. “Manuel, I think. No…Manolo.” The boy took a deep breath. “I knew when I saw him that…that…no sé,” he finished lamely.

  “You knew him, you mean? Before all this happened?”

  “No,” Hector blurted. “But he had a…I don’t know the word. Actitud.”

  “A way about him? An attitude?”

  “Yes. Exactamente. The command.”

  “Is he the man who hired you in the first place?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “I cannot be sure, agente. But I believe he is the one who contacted me originally.”

  “While you were living with the Uriostes?”

  “Yes.”

  Estelle sat for a moment, regarding the boy. “I don’t understand, Hector. A group of Salvadorans somehow make arrangements to rendezvous with a flight north out of Culiacán, across the border at night into the United States. The assassin—whatever he is, whoever he is—contacts a kid who is a student in the United States to steal an airplane and do the flying? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “But is true.”

  “I don’t think so,” Estelle said. “How did he contact you, then?”

  “Through the e-mail, agente.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mitchell said. “How would he know your e-mail address unless you had sent it to him? What, you met him on an assassins’ chat room, or what?”

  Hector frowned deeply, his lips pressed into a white line.

  “You may be a hell of a pilot, fella, but you’re a piss-poor liar,” Mitchell observed.

  “All your communication was by e-mail?” Estelle asked.

  “Yes.”

  “His address?”

  “I have it, yes.”

  “I suppose you do,” Estelle said. “What is it?” She slid a small pad of paper across to him, along with a pencil.

  “E-mail,” Mitchell scoffed as Hector jotted down the electronic address. “All that tells us is that he’s on this planet…probably. And half the world has e-mail with that same search engine.”

  “It’s something,” Estelle said. She turned the paper and looked at the address. “Neat. All numerical.” She handed it to Mitchell, who in turn passed it to the sheriff. “When did he first contact you?”

  “In March. Yo creo que sí. It was early in March.”

  “Two months ago?” Estelle asked incredulously. “How would he know your e-mail address?”

  “I…I don’t know.” His eyes flicked toward Torrez, as if he feared the silent sheriff was going to reach out and smack him.

  “So out of the blue, somehow,” Estelle said, “cuando menos se lo esperaba, here comes an e-mail asking that you do this, and you jump at the chance.”

  “No…yes.”

  The undersheriff sighed loudly. “Caramba, Hector.” She tapped the table with the eraser end of the pencil. “We’ll come back to this. Tell me what he asked you to do.”

  “Only that I should pick up these people at Culiacán, and that he would ride with us north across the border, because he had unfinished business in the north.”

  “Business with whom?”

  “He did not say.”

  “When he first contacted you, how did you know you could find an airplane to use?”

  “Is easy,” Hector said.

  “I see. Is easy. You chose a time, figured out how to take the plane without being noticed, and flew south.”

  “Exact.”

  “To Culiacán.”

  “Yes. Direct there.”

  “The four people were waiting?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “When we were in the air, Manolo told me that he needed to deal with people in Albuquerque.”

  “Deal how?” Estelle asked.

  “I don’t know. But…” He stopped again. “He did not want me to fly him to Albuquerque. To be exposed at the International Airport, perhaps. I don’t know.”

  “Tell us what he looked like,” Mitchell said.

  “Not too tall, perhaps,” Hector said. “As tall as me, I think. Heavy.” He held his fists clenched, flexing his muscles. “He is like the bull. Strong. And quick.”

  “Features? What does he look like?” Mitchell repeated patiently.

  Hector frowned. “Nothing to notice. A small scar is at the corner of his right eye.” He flicked a finger to his own face. “Here, like so. Just a little one. Black hair. Brown eyes, I think.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  The boy grimaced. “I did not…do not…remember. A black jacket, I think. And blue jeans.” He circled his left wrist with his right hand. “A large gold watch.”

  “Did the three passengers appear to know him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And he paid you?”

  “Some. And promised more when we were safely in the United States.”

  “Between Culiacán and Posadas, you didn’t see any relationship between this Manolo and the other three? Did they talk?”

  “No. Manolo sat in the front seat. The others in the back.”

  “What did you think?”

  Hector shrugged hopelessly. “I thought that…I don’t know.”

  “Why did you choose to land on that little strip by Regál? That could not be where the three wanted to go originally.”

  “No. I was to take them to Socorro. It is easy to fly low up the valley of the river, and that is where this Guillermo and the talking woman had a relative. That is what they said. They were most excited.”

  “So what happened? Why the change of plans?”

  “We had been in the air for only a few minutes, and Manolo ordered me to go to Posadas—not the airport, but this one.”

  “He used your map?”

  Hector shook his head. “He already knew the way. I agreed. How could I not? I could see that he had a pistol.”

  “Ah. Now he has a weapon. He threatened you?”

  “No. But in the airplane, the pistol was obvious, so.” Hector leaned back and jabbed his hand in his waistband, on the left side.

  “Did he say anything to the other passengers? About landing near Posadas? About the change of plans? About not going to Socorro?”

  “No. He did not speak to the others. He sat in the front, with me. I believe they thought he was with me, somehow.”

  Torrez leaned back, expression skeptical. �
�They—Guillermo or any of the others—didn’t talk like he was the one who arranged their flight?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “But that was your understanding…that he had made the arrangements.”

  “I…I think so. But maybe not.” The boy looked at each of the officers in turn, as if trying to judge who was his ally.

  “So you landed here, and everyone bailed out,” Torrez said.

  “Not right away. I land, and we are…taxi? Is that what you say? We taxi down the pavement, and this man demands that they give him the money. Each. He took them all.”

  “Them all what?” Mitchell asked.

  “The…the cinturones? Con dinero.”

  “Money belts,” Estelle prompted. “They were each wearing a money belt?”

  “Yes. Each the three of them. He used the pistol to threaten these people. I think that he kills them if they do not agree. I think at that time, they think about robbery, and that they were going to be abandoned there, in the desert.”

  “They gave up the money without a struggle?”

  Hector shrugged. “He had the pistol, señora. They did not want to give him the belts. But they had to.”

  “What kind of weapon? Do you know?” Mitchell asked.

  “Yes. A large pistol with a…” and he made a round shape with one hand, screwing it onto the invisible pistol in the other.

  “Silenciador?” Estelle offered. “A silencer. A suppressor?”

  “Yes.”

  “That would convince a lot of people,” Torrez said.

  “Guillermo said they would give the money, if they were not to be hurt. Manolo took all the belts, and ordered the people out of the plane. He gave one of the belts to me.”

  “Tom, would you get the effects?” Estelle said, and Sergeant Mears disappeared for a moment, returning with a brown manila envelope. He dumped it out on the conference table: ninety-seven cents in change, a wallet, a small pocketknife, sunglasses, and a heavy leather belt.

  Hector reached across the table and touched the belt’s tooled leather. “There is money, I think.”