In his car, he pressed the remote and waited for the two locked gates to open. There was no movement. He tried again. Still no movement.
He muttered to himself. The electricians had been here twice in the last ten days to fix this infernal electronic gate, and once again their fix hadn’t lasted. Time to fire them. That was one thing that he didn’t like about Mexico – chronic incompetence. Manana was a popular religion, in addition to No es mi asunto - “it’s not my thing.”
He stepped out of the vehicle. No one around. Good. He went to the brick pillars that supported the steel gates, still sighing about Mexican workmanship. He blinked in the bright sunshine.
He put on a pair of sunglasses. He tried the key that would bypass the electronic system. He jiggled it. The keyhole was resistant to his touch too, which started to make him suspicious.
Then he heard the familiar crude click and a metal bolt withdrawing from a clasp. The giant latch that held the two steel doors in place had given way. Much better.
He walked to the spot where the two wide gates met. He gave them an aggressive push with his foot. With the usually noisy, rusty, aching creaks, the doors gave way and slowly opened, just the way they had so many times before. He put his shoulder to one and leaned hard, pushing it so that it swung wide. Then he pushed the other one the same way. He now had room to drive through into the Perez compound.
From somewhere nearby came the sound of bicycle tires and then a gentle skid. He turned at the same time that he heard a woman’s voice, young and sexy.
“?Senor?” a girl asked.
He turned, slightly startled. A girl on a bicycle, a pretty blonde, had stopped. She wore short shorts, a snug T-shirt, a helmet, and shades. He had seen her in the neighborhood for the past few days. She was in her early twenties and probably lived in the gated compound up the road where a lot of foreigners lived, wealthy people who worked in Mexico City for big corporations. She apparently exercised by biking around the neighborhood, always in tight black bike shorts and a red and yellow shirt. Plus the helmet. There was no way Antonio or any other male in the area could miss her. She was sexy. Some man was lucky. Or was she someone’s daughter? She had smiled at him and waved in gratitude as his car gave way to allow her a lane to ride.
But he also reminded himself that he must have been slipping. Pretty chica rubia or not, where had she come from? He hadn’t seen her this time until she had rolled to a stop. His mind processed quickly: well, did it matter where such a pretty girl had come from? Then again, people who appeared all too quietly set off alarms for him.
He pocketed the key and smiled. “Buenos dias,” he said curtly.
“Buen dia,” she chirped. She smiled back. “?Tiene aqua fria?” she asked. Cool water. That’s what she wanted. She did have an accent. Probably American. That made sense. Most of the wealthy people up the hill were American.
He stared at her in surprise. Why was she asking him about cold water? Why didn’t she just carry some of her own? On the other hand, the house was empty. If he could entice this chica into the hacienda, well, it wouldn’t be the first time he had had some extracurricular fun during the daytime hours.
She held up her water bottle, laughed, and shook it upside down to show him that it was empty. Then she shrugged and giggled, helplessly and flirtatiously. He assessed her carefully. Well, he had some cold bottled water in the car. The Perez family always kept some. They could spare some. “Momento,” he said.
He motioned with his thumb to the hacienda. Yes, she was coming onto him, he decided. The girl was probably the trophy wife of some nasty Yankee businessman who didn’t have the physical stamina to keep her happy. He had seen this before among American women in the neighborhood. They’d go on the prowl during the day, looking for a local toro to take care of them.
Well, he decided, why not? He gave her a nod. She dismounted from her bike, swinging one lithe leg over the other. She was, he noted, absolutely spectacular.
The wooden baseball bat that came from behind Antonio was aimed straight at the back of his knees. It smashed home with a sickening crack, followed by another bat that came from his right side and whacked his arm just above the elbow with an even louder crunching sound.
At the same time as Antonio bellowed in pain and groped for his pistol, the woman with the bicycle quickly charged him. From behind him, helmeted men in the uniform of the Mexico City Police swarmed. They grabbed him and hit him hard again from behind. Then they shoved him down onto the pavement. Antonio fought like a madman. Despite the searing pain in his legs, he threw his powerful elbows at the men behind him. His broken right arm pulsated with pain and flew wildly at obscene angles. But he caught one of the men in the jaw and one in the gut. He clenched his good fist, threw a backward punch at one of the men, and caught him in the center of his face. The man howled profanely and loosened his grip.
But one of the men hammered at Antonio’s right knee again with the bat and caught it dead on. Antonio screamed again and cursed even more profanely in Spanish. He groped with his left hand for the gun he carried under the left armpit of his jacket. His hand touched the weapon, but one of his assailants grabbed his wrist with both hands and forced it back and up. Another forced Antonio’s thumb backward so hard that it felt as if it were about to snap.
Then the blonde girl slipped a quick hand under his jacket and yanked his gun from him. She threw it away. Other hands were on his throat and fingers were in his eyes.
One of the intruders had a police club and seemed to enjoy using it. He walloped Tony on the left side of the collarbone, then thrust the club butt first into his groin.
On the ground, Antonio retreated into a shell, trying to protect himself. The fight was over, and he knew these people were probably here to beat him to death. He felt his hands yanked behind his back and cuffed. His mouth was hot. Salty little shards of a tooth floated on his tongue. There was no fight left in him now.
The bicycle girl knelt and leaned over him like a death angel, a hypodermic needle in her hand. Everything hurt. He could barely see, but he then managed to catch a glimpse and the sounds of something nearly surreal.
“Should I give it to him now?” the female calmly asked in English.
“Yes, do,” came the response, also in English.
Antonio felt the jab as it came through the seat of his pants into his left buttock. That was followed quickly by a tingling iciness radiating down in his backside, from the middle of the left buttock outward. Within seconds, the iciness exploded into a warmth that enveloped his whole body. Antonio had tried opium once and the sensation was similar. Suddenly, nothing hurt as much. Suddenly nothing mattered much at all. His vision blurred. All hands seemed to be off him now, and he lay in one big puddle, his own wrists manacled behind his back. He felt as if the sun was only a few feet over his woozy head.
The young woman stood. Then his eyes widened. An angel, he thought to himself in his incipient delirium. The blonde had come to deliver him, but he couldn’t decide whether he was to be delivered to death or to somewhere else. That was his final thought. The whiteness exploded like a couple of big steel gates slamming shut. Then everything went black.
TWENTY-SIX
Alex met Sam Deal in the vast street-level floor of one of Manhattan’s biggest jewelry emporiums, a fortress of a building on New York’s 57th Street. Alex arrived a few minutes before 2:00 p.m. and slowly wandered among the display cases, one eye on the diamond rings and the other looking for Sam.
She spotted him as he emerged from one of the elevators east of the lobby. The store employed him as one of their heads of on-site security.