I nod.
It takes us several minutes, moving cautiously from room to room, to clear the apartment. Whoever killed Goudaz is gone, and so is Maricela. There is no sign of her, and no note.
“You think he might have taken her?” says Herman.
“Why would he take her now if he tried to kill her before? It doesn’t make sense. He could have dumped her body someplace else.”
The thought hits us both at the same moment. We break for the door.
I stop to grab the key from the hook as Herman runs ahead of me up the steps to the other apartment. With blood and a dead body on the floor, I lock the door from the outside so no neighbors wander in.
I am hoping that Maricela is hiding upstairs in the other apartment, praying that whoever killed Goudaz didn’t find her and dump her body there.
By the time I get up the steps to the open apartment door, Herman has already used the key in his pocket and raced through the rooms. He is standing in the living room shaking his head. “She ain’t here,” he says.
“You checked every room?”
“I looked. She’s not here.”
We check again, this time carefully, opening every closet, looking under the bed. We even check the refrigerator, a thing macabre movies make you do. Nothing.
We close the door, lock up, and head back down.
“What time did she leave to go to the phone company?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I think it was probably a little after nine,” says Herman.
“She can’t still be there.”
Without a phone to reach her, there is no way of knowing.
“What do we do now?” he says. “We can’t stay here.”
“No. We need to pack up. But first we have to make sure we have everything out downstairs.”
“You think we oughta wipe the place down?” says Herman.
“You mean the body?”
“No. I mean our prints, anything we mighta’ touched.”
I think about this for a second. “No. If we do and the killer left any trace evidence, we’re likely to destroy it. Besides, two days in a confined area like the apartment and trace evidence of our presence would be everywhere. We’d never get it all.”
“Sure.” Still, Herman takes the knife out of my hand, wipes the handle and the blade with the tail of his shirt as I use the key to open Goudaz’s apartment door.
As I do, I hear the phone in the study ring. Herman and I look at each other, then I break and run toward the sound. I can’t tell how long it’s been ringing. Before I get there the automatic answering device picks up the call.
I wait and listen, hoping at least that I might hear the message. Instead there is a long beep as the fax machine on the desk kicks in. I wait a few seconds. The machine spits out a single sheet and then quits.
“Who was it?” Herman has put the knives back in the drawer and is now standing behind me.
“I don’t know, it’s a fax.” I grab the page and start to read, but it’s in Spanish. Herman studies it over my shoulder.
“Son of a bitch!” he says. “That answers your question, how Goudaz knew where the container was comin’ from. Look,” he says. Herman points with his finger. “The name of the ship, and it ain’t the Mariah. Vessel’s called the Amora. Its ETA, where it’s headed, even the container number. And the name at the bottom, ‘A. Afundi.’ First name Alim,” says Herman.
“But why? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s a copy of a fax sent to a cargo broker. They wanted Goudaz to follow up on it. From what I’m readin’ he gave ’em the lead on the broker. Like you said, he was selling information.”
“So that’s how they knew about Pike and the fact that he had the pictures. It still doesn’t make any sense. If they needed his help, why did they kill him?”
“Who knows,” says Herman. “At least we know where we’re going.”
I look at my watch. “What’s the time difference between here and Ensenada?”
“Same as at home,” says Herman. “It’s one hour later here, I believe.”
I hear the gate clatter downstairs and a shrill voice. “Lorenzo! Lemme in.” It’s Maricela. I run to the little French windows leading to the tiny balcony, step out, and stick my head over the railing. “Stay there, we’ll be down in a minute.”
“Lorenzo was right. They couldn’t gimme my old phone number. So I don’t know what we do now,” she says.
“Just wait there.”
I don’t even bother to close the window. “Let’s grab our bags.” I see a phone book on a shelf in the kitchen. “Hold on a second. How do you say ‘charter air’ in Spanish?”
Herman thinks for a moment.
“Never mind.” I grab the book and take it. “Make sure Maricela’s got her purse.”
“Why?”
“Because her passport is in it.”
FIFTY-FOUR
As he marched toward his car, Liquida knew the Arab would be sending him an e-mail any minute telling him he wanted to meet him to pay him. Liquida would meet him all right, on his own timetable and perhaps at a place of his own choosing.
He no longer cared about killing the woman. As far as he was concerned, at least for the moment, he was working for himself, and there were only two people on his current hit parade: the man called Afundi who owed him a bundle, and the lawyer who had interfered for the last time.
In his present state of agitation, Liquida was a good fit for the Tico traffic of San José. He whipped out of the parking space without bothering to look in his mirror, cutting off a woman who hit her brakes and laid on the horn.
Liquida gave her the finger out his open window as he laid rubber on the rainbow road, streaking for the airport. He was already calculating in his mind which terminal in northern Mexico to parachute into that would put him closest to the port of Ensenada.
They say that with enough money you can buy anything. At the moment Herman and I are testing the concept. Sitting in the backseat of one of the little red taxi sedans, we are rumbling down Highway 1 just beyond the broad avenue known as Paseo Colón. The shocks are gone on the car’s rear end, so we feel every bump and groove in the road as it vibrates from the tailbone up the spine.
Herman and I are silently counting the currency from our money belts as Maricela sits, watching us from over the front-passenger seat. We have not told her that Lorenzo is dead, only that we have information regarding her father, where we think he will be, that there is no time to talk, and that we will fill her in later.
“I don’t think it’s enough,” says Herman. “You gotta figure it’s at least twenty-five hundred miles, maybe more.”
Herman and I left the States with a total of nineteen thousand dollars between us in the two money belts. Less the fifty-three hundred we paid for the two passports leaves us thirteen thousand seven hundred. Even if I wanted to use it, the feds have probably put a stop on my credit card. Herman could use his, but it has a twenty-five-hundred-dollar limit and there’s no question they would trace it.
“I booked a charter flight out of Mexico a few years ago for a client and it cost us twelve grand back then. And we didn’t go nearly that far,” he says.
“We won’t know unless we try,” I tell him.
“Seńor, we are coming up to the turnoff, I need to know if you want me to take it or keep going.
Give us a minute, says Herman.
This time of the day the only commercial flights north are gonna take us to the States. Maricela can't get in without a visa even to transfer flights. And then there’s the question, do you really want to try and run the U.S. border on these things?” I tap the phony Canadian passport next to me on the seat.