He walked back to the car, opened the trunk and pulled out two large black canvas duffel bags. Staying on the roadside and shielded by the car, he deposited the first bag, marked with a red and white tag, on the back seat. He dropped the second bag, which had no tag, next to it. It was the second that he unzipped. He pulled two hard plastic black gun cases and two side holsters from it.
He opened the first and took out a SIG Sauer 226. He clicked a fresh twelve-round clip into it and checked it over. He repeated the same procedure with the second 226. Then he closed the cases, zipped up the bag, shut the rear door and got back into the front passenger seat.
The guns had been purchased from a contact Ty had in El Paso, a dealer who didn’t care whom he sold to as long as the money was good. No paperwork had changed hands, aside from a thick bundle of twenty-dollar bills. If they had to use them, the only way the weapons would be traced back to them was if they left their fingerprints on them. On the other hand, to venture into Mexico looking for Mendez unarmed would have been guaranteed suicide.
The most nerve-racking part had been passing through Customs Control on the US side of the border. Tourists generally didn’t use the US/Santa Maria crossing because of what lay on the Mexican side. But gun runners did, although not usually in regular cars. Illegal traffic across the border was a two-way process. Drugs went north, and firearms went south to the cartels.
When they had been questioned, Lock had shown two carry permits and informed the guard that they were private security contractors going south to guard a fictional American executive and his family, who were living in Santa Maria. As cover stories went, it was plenty plausible and they had been waved through.
He handed the second weapon to Ty, who checked it over, put on the holster and slid the gun into it. ‘What happens if we get pulled over by the Federales?’ Ty asked.
Lock stared hard into the glare of the sun. ‘We do what everyone else does. We pay ’em off.’
Ty grimaced. ‘And if they won’t be bought?’
‘What colour do you think we should get our crosses?’ Lock asked.
‘Well, not pink, that’s for damn sure.’
Lock glanced back at the roadside and forced a smile. ‘I dunno… pink might bring out your eyes.’
Ty waited for a gap in the traffic and pulled back on to the highway as a truck roared past them in the fast lane. As he drove, his eyes flicked back and forth from the road ahead to the rear-view and side mirrors. They were relatively safe on the freeway, but in a moment they would be on surface streets until they reached their first port of call.
Ty nudged his way through the thundering lines of trucks, returning home to pick up fresh loads, towards the off-ramp. He kept the turn signal off. He waited until he was almost at the final stretch of the median, where the ramp ended, then spun the wheel hard right. He gave the rear-view mirror a final check to see if anyone had followed but the ramp behind was clear.
Lock checked the sat-nav app on his cell phone. ‘Okay, right at the bottom,’ he said to Ty.
Ty didn’t signal this time either, and again waited until the last possible moment before making the turn, swinging out wide and almost clipping a green and white taxi cab travelling in the opposite direction. The road opened up into a wide boulevard, with a concrete median running down the middle.
‘Over here,’ said Lock, and they pulled into a second-hand-car dealership with an auto-repair body shop on one side, presumably operated by the same owner, and a dentist on the other. The body repair and the dealership were two halves of the same business. The place was a yonque, or chop shop. They were known as bone-yards, or huesarios, in the interior of the country.
Ty pulled the car through a set of gates into a small yard shielded by panels of corrugated iron. A dog sat scratching itself next to a dark blue Dodge Durango with the deep tint on the windows that seemed standard here, rather than a factory option. The dog rose slowly, took a piss against one of the tyres and ambled away as Lock went to greet the owner, a portly man wearing a flowery shirt that was two sizes too small, and a fedora.
Lock pointed to the Durango. ‘ Cuanto cuesta? ’ he said to the dealer. How much?
The man took off his fedora and stared at Lock with a bemused smile. The Durango had probably been an insurance write-off, bought at an auction in Texas, repaired in the chop shop, the plates changed to Mexican ones and put up for sale. The car Lock was driving was a white Ford Ranger, worth perhaps ten times what the Durango would fetch. That was the exact reason they couldn’t ride around in it. At best they would stand out a mile. At worst they were risking a car jacking, which would be messy. Lock knew that in order to move around they had to do their best to blend in, which, given their colouring, was hardly going to be easy.
The dealer shrugged and walked over to the Durango, no doubt extolling its virtues and leaving behind Lock’s scant grasp of Spanish as he did so. Finally, eager to keep the exchange as short as possible, Lock dug into his pocket and pulled out a thousand dollars in cash. ‘You give me the keys now, I give you the cash, and we leave,’ he said in English, gesturing to the gate.
The man disappeared inside his little wooden shack of an office and reappeared a moment later with a set of car keys. Lock took them and tossed them to Ty. ‘Take it for a spin round the block. I’ll wait here.’
Less than five minutes later, Ty was back. He climbed out of the driver’s seat. ‘It’s a bucket, but it’ll do.’
Lock handed the money to the man, who stuck it quickly inside the lining of his hat, still not quite believing his good luck. Ty took the Durango, and Lock the Ford Ranger, and they drove in convoy out through the gates and on to the road. A half-mile further on, Ty pulled into the multi-storey parking lot of a small shopping mall. They both took a ticket at the barrier, drove past the armed private security guard at the entrance and up on to the roof.
While the lower levels had been crowded, the roof was quiet. Lock scoped the area for cameras but there were none. In a city where violence was explicit and wanton, and where your identity decided whether you would be arrested or face the courts, closed-circuit security systems were hardly a deterrent.
With the Ranger and the Durango next to each other, they moved their gear into the Durango. They pulled two more black canvas bags from the back of the Ranger and placed them in the rear compartment of the Durango. They drove back down a few levels. Lock parked the Ranger, got into the Durango next to Ty and they left the parking lot.
Driving through the middle of Santa Maria, the Durango’s down-at-heel exterior, with the blacked-out windows, allowed them to blend in with the rest of the traffic. The stares that the Ranger had drawn from passers-by and fellow motorists fell away. They could watch their surroundings as others did, no longer outsiders, as long as they stayed in the car.
Ahead, on a street corner, a small crowd had gathered. Ty slowed the Durango a little. Outside a convenience store a middle-aged woman was hunched over the body of a young man, blood still fresh on his shirt.
What struck Lock was the expressions of the people who had come to watch. There was no shock or panic, only a dull, tired acceptance. It was the same reaction a minor fender-bender would elicit in LA — just something that happened. Only the woman was crying. It was a scene sadly familiar to him. The only difference between here and the other cities he had seen it played out in was that those had been officially declared war-zones.
He cracked the window just enough to hear her wails as she cried for her dead son. The scene slid past them and the sound of the woman’s pain faded.
Twenty-nine
It was the cold that woke her. That, and a sensation of sticky dampness running down her legs. She listened but could hear nothing. Slowly, she became aware of her body and realized she wasn’t lying in a bed. Air was moving over her. Her mouth was so dry that her tongue seemed to be glued to the roof. She literally had to will her eyes open and when she did open them it was so dark that she wasn’t entirely sure if her eyelids had moved at all.