His daughter occasionally sent a hundred dollars, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to live on, and there were no gardening jobs for a fifty-something year old gimp with a poorly healed pelvis. So Moreno did odd jobs here and there when he could, and had taken to alleviating the pain from his injury with the readily-available Mexican brown heroin, a habit that had rapidly consumed any savings he’d amassed. So he’d begun a career as a burglar, pilfering opportunistically — though he wasn’t very good at it, as proven by his recent capture. He couldn’t even run away from the two cops, who’d been alerted by a neighbor and were standing, waiting at the sidewalk when he’d climbed awkwardly out of the window.
He knew he’d been incredibly fortunate that the police captain, Cruz, had found his story valuable, and he resolved to set himself on a more productive path once he was released. There was a Catholic church organization that would feed him if he did work at traffic lights soliciting donations, and while that was a dead-end prospect, it beat rotting in prison for most of the remainder of his life. No, he’d been given another chance, and this time he wouldn’t blow it.
A guard came by his cell to inform him it was exercise time, followed by lunch in the general population. He pulled on his prison-issue shirt and followed the man out into the yard, where the scorching sun beat down on the assembled felons, dishing out further punishment for their abundant sins. He took up a position on the periphery of the yard, in one of the areas where the roof overhang provided some meager shade. A breeze would have provided some relief, but the surrounding twenty-five foot walls topped with razor wire and broken glass effectively blocked any, converting the jail into an oven. The concrete block construction made an unbearable proposition even worse, because the walls and roof absorbed the sun’s energy all day, and then continued to radiate heat throughout the sweltering night.
Moreno pulled one of three cigarettes he had left from a packet he’d been given by the guards upon his return and, stooping over, retrieved a match from his shoe and struck it against the ground. A shadow moved across his, and as he stood, he was assaulted by a spike of searing pain. A burly prisoner with a ragged scar across his face plunged a shank into his abdomen with machine-gun speed, again and again, puncturing multiple organs before Moreno fell to the ground in a puddle of spreading blood. The assailant moved hurriedly away from the twitching form, melting into the prisoners, all of whom averted their eyes out of self-preservation.
Moreno’s vision swirled as the world tilted and blurred, his lifeblood spilt in a miserable hellhole just as things were turning around for him.
By the time the uninterested guards arrived and called for a medic, Moreno was sliding into oblivion, struck down by an unknown assailant for reasons nobody would ever piece together. His last thought as he slipped from the world was that the whole mortality experience had been vastly overrated.
~ ~ ~
The flight from Mexico City to Los Cabos contained a surprising number of serious, well-muscled police officers distributed among the passengers. The men were traveling in civilian clothes, their weapons safely transported in a special locked container in the belly of the plane, which they’d collect once at their destination. They weren’t chatty and kept to themselves, avoiding interactions with their seatmates, preferring to study the in-flight magazine or close their eyes during the short flight.
As the plane descended into the arid desert of the southern Baja peninsula, the plane bucked and bumped from the updrafts of hot air rising off the baking scrub below. Off to the left of their approach, the deep azure of the Sea of Cortez stretched into the distance; over a hundred miles of watery gulf washed between Los Cabos and the nearest point on the mainland.
The wheels scored the tarmac with a smoking streak before the aircraft decelerated down the long runway, recently lengthened for the G-20 as well as to accommodate Boeing 777 flights from the mainland; the final stopping point between Mexico City and China. As the plane turned to loop around towards the terminal, the men noted a phalanx of private jets of every description at the far end of the field; a testament to the money concentrated in the region. Everything from King Air twin-engine prop planes to Gulfstream G-5s nestled wing to wing, and even as high season wound down and the town headed into the dog days of summer, dozens of jets of every shape and size jostled for space.
The men disembarked, and in the baggage claim area met their local counterparts, the Baja contingent of the Federal Police, who’d retrieved their case of weapons and were waiting to take them to headquarters a few miles from the airport.
After a cursory orientation in their temporary new home, the team broke for lunch at a nearby open-air seafood restaurant situated under a huge palapa with a thatched roof. When lunch was over, they drove to the site of the newly-constructed convention center that would host the G-20 summit. It seemed that the workers milled about aimlessly amid the constant stream of vehicles that came and went, as deliveries were made and supplies distributed.
The lay of the land seemed relatively easy to secure, given that there weren’t any structures in the immediate vicinity of the complex. The only locations that were a concern were the school at the bottom of the steep slope and the surrounding hills. A sniper could possibly take a shot from the crest of the nearest bluff, but it would be extremely iffy at such a distance.
In the end, securing the site wasn’t their problem. The army would shoulder most of the burden for security during the summit, given the dearth of experienced police personnel. There were no armed conflicts with cartel members in southern Baja, so the local cops had never dealt with anything more dangerous than a shootout with a local dope dealing gang, an occasional drunk with a knife, or a furious wife hell bent on decapitating her wayward husband with a gardening machete.
Satisfied they understood the geography, the team moved to the surrounding outlying areas, which were largely residential. Two and three-story condominium complexes lined the highway, punctuated by occasional soccer fields and small commercial centers, and the occasional shop and restaurant. The large grocery store and attached mall across the intersection that led to the G-20 was a quarter of a mile away, so posed no obvious threat.
After completing their day’s orientation, the men checked into a nearby hotel. The undercover cops took siestas, because their shift would start at the fall of night, when adult entertainment began at the strip clubs as they flashed their neon promises onto the sidewalks of San Jose and downtown Cabo San Lucas. They’d be up until four in the morning most nights, talking up the girls and trying to see if anyone had spent time with a mainlander who seemed suspicious. It was a long shot, but a surprising number of criminals spent their lazy hours drinking with pros, and perhaps El Rey shared that habit. All the undercover officers carried reduced-sized sketches in their wallets, along with some lip-loosening bills, on the off-chance one of the young ladies had something to tell them.