Fifteen minutes after the call, they were only just clearing the outskirts of Diablo. They still had forty plus miles to cover. Then they had to find the place. As Ty drove, Lock navigated.
Ty had his foot pressed hard to the floor but they were still barely touching eighty miles per hour. As they closed in on the outskirts of the city, scrub desert shifted to dense urban jungle. Green and white taxis vied for space on the road with old American school buses ferrying workers to the factories.
Blasting the horn, Ty navigated the crush of traffic as the minutes ticked down. Lock switched to a city map, his attention shifting between it and the vehicles around them. They were on city streets now. Ty swore under his breath.
Lock glanced over the edge of the map to see road works and a road-closed sign. Ty immediately began to turn. It was a firm rule of close-protection work that it was always better to be moving than stationary. It might just be road works. It might be something else. Right now, even though Lock was sure that no one who mattered or wished them ill even knew they were in Santa Maria looking for Mendez, it was safer, and simpler, to assume the opposite was true. ‘Prepare for the worst’ was a good mantra if you wanted to stay alive.
Cars horns raged as the Durango blocked the intersection. Ty spun the wheel, reversed and roared back in the direction they had come from. They had lost thirty seconds they didn’t have.
‘Left here — we’ll loop back around,’ said Lock.
They were parallel to a railway line when he realized he was taking them in the wrong direction, a rare mis-step. ‘Sorry, brother, we need to be over there.’
Not missing a beat, Ty pulled the wheel down hard, the Dodge bumping straight across the tracks. Lock felt the blood drain from his face. His partner looked at him and laughed. ‘What? You said over there.’
‘I’m driving next time.’
Ty shrugged. ‘The way you’re navigating, that might not be a bad idea.’
They reached the address five minutes after the deadline. It was a shopping mall. As an RV, Lock liked it. Lots of traffic. Lots of entry and exit points. Lots of innocent bystanders, not that narco-traffickers worried too much about that, but an empty parking lot with nothing nearby would have had him more on edge than he might normally have been.
The only question remaining was whether the woman had waited for him. His cell rang. It was the number.
‘Where are you?’
‘We got lost.’
‘I gave you an hour,’ the woman said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m on the third level. In the cafe opposite the elevators. You have one more minute before I leave. I don’t have time for this bullshit.’
She hung up. Ty had his arm out, waiting to get a ticket from the machine and then for the barrier to rise.
‘Catch me up.’ Lock grabbed the door handle and jumped out.
Ty called after him but Lock kept going, running hard towards the entrance, almost catching himself on the automatic doors as they glided open. Dodging around a woman pushing a baby in a stroller, he looked about. People were waiting for the elevator but the display signalled that it had only just begun its descent. He headed for the stairwell, exploding through the doors and launching himself upwards, heart pounding and gasping for breath.
Head throbbing, out of breath, he made it to the third floor, pushed through another set of doors on to a walkway and out into an open courtyard of stores. Frantically, sweat running down his back, he looked for a cafe.
Nothing. No restaurant. No cafes. Only stores. So many of the names were American that you might think you were still on the other side of the border.
He began to walk past the stores, people shooting glances at the sweaty gringo. He called the number.
‘There’s no cafe on the third level,’ he said, when she answered.
‘And Joe Brady didn’t have a brother. So why don’t you tell me who you are and what you want?’
Decision time. He took a breath. Whoever she was, she was smart. If she was linked to a cartel or someone protecting Mendez she knew that he’d lied, and would probably be able to guess that his intentions towards Mendez were unlikely to be favourable.
‘My name is Ryan Lock. I’m here to find Charlie Mendez and bring him back with me to the States.’
‘Who are you with?’ she asked.
She was close by. She was watching him right now. He could feel her eyes on him.
‘You mean, like an agency?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not with anyone. I’m a private citizen,’ he said.
‘A bounty hunter?’
‘No.’
‘What do you want with Mendez?’
‘I told you already. Listen, I was contacted by one of his victims, a young woman he had raped. She asked me to return him to serve his sentence.’
There was silence. He thought of how his words must have sounded to someone who didn’t know him. Absurd. A madman on a suicide mission on behalf of someone he hadn’t even met a week before. He scanned the crowd, trying to guess what she looked like from the sound of her voice. ‘Hello? Are you there?’
‘If you’re not a bounty hunter, then who are you?’
‘I work as a close-protection operative, a bodyguard. Will you tell me who you are? Hello?’
‘Be quiet. I’m thinking.’
Lock was searching with his eyes for a woman on a cell phone. If she had a clear line of vision to him, which he was sure she did, he had to have the same.
The mall had a semi-circular walkway with an atrium that extended the full height of all five floors. He looked up and saw movement as someone who had been leaning over a glass barrier looking down suddenly retreated. He had a flash of a tailored black suit, bright red lipstick, long brown hair, and then she was gone.
‘That was you,’ he said, into the cell phone.
‘I’ll call you back,’ she said, and hung up on him.
He walked across to the escalator and rode it up to where he had seen her, all the while scanning the crowds. Looking down he saw Ty doing the same, searching for him. He found the spot where she had been standing. She was long gone. All he could do now was wait and hope that she was as good as her word.
Thirty-three
While they waited for the woman to call back, Lock and Ty drove around Santa Maria, using the time to get a sense of the city. Outwardly, as far as Lock could see, it didn’t look like the most dangerous city in the world but, then, on a good day neither did Kabul nor Baghdad. Violence came in spasms, and then it was gone, leaving wounds that were mostly invisible to the naked eye: broken hearts and minds. In between times, people worked and ate and made love and went to school and raised their kids, all the while hoping they wouldn’t be sucked into the swamp.
They drove round a rectangle of main roads, first heading north, then east, then south and then back west. They were on Hermanos Escobar Street, passing a Pemex gas station, when Lock noticed a black and white Policia Federal Dodge Charger moving up to overtake them. Ty eased off the gas to let it pass but it stayed directly in front of them.
Immediately Lock had a bad feeling. In the labyrinthine world of Mexican law enforcement, where most cops were lucky to clear five hundred dollars a month, the cartels had infiltrated certain sections of the police to the extent that the government tended to rely on the army when it needed to get things done. There were clean cops but there were a lot of dirty ones too. Once you added into the mix the fact that this part of the world had a history of suspects disappearing before they even made court, his bad feeling had some foundation in fact.
‘What d’you want me to do?’ Ty asked.
The Policia Federal vehicle had slowed slightly, almost willing Ty to try to go round it. ‘Sit tight where we are.’