Rafaela wasn’t the only one having difficulty getting to sleep. Despite his exhaustion, Lock’s mind wouldn’t rest. He lay in darkness in the tiny apartment and worried over one aspect of the American girl’s disappearance.
In the normal run of things, he could go to the American consul with what he knew. Or, if he wanted to remain in the shadows, he could share what Rafaela had told him with the parents and they could relay the information. He was in no doubt that if they were believed, which was by no means certain, the consulate would call in other authorities and apply pressure on the Mexicans to do everything they could to find the girl. It would be more than an abduction: it would be a full-blown diplomatic incident. It would also, he was pretty certain, guarantee that, if she was still alive, whoever had her would get rid of her as quickly as they could and start covering their tracks.
If Rafaela’s belief in the previous pattern was true, Julia would turn up next to some railtracks and some dumb unfortunate would take the rap. Justice would be seen to be done. The parents might not buy it, but the American government would want to move on. After all, there was money to be made along the border and business deals to be completed. It was a cynical view but, in Lock’s experience, when the stakes were so high, and particularly when there was money in the mix, it was safer to err on the side of cynicism. Idealism was best saved for happier times.
They reconvened over more coffee and tea in the tiny apartment. Together they decided that the key to finding the girl was tracking down Charlie Mendez. If he was found first, though, Lock and Ty would be in a quandary. Mendez was still the reason they were there, and Lock didn’t want Melissa’s death to be lost in the midst of this. But Melissa would not have wanted another young life sacrificed in order to secure justice or revenge.
Rafaela was aware of three residences where Mendez might be found. One was an apartment in the centre of the city. The second was a house owned by Managua, the third a vast narco-mansion owned by Tibialis in an area that was as close to leafy suburb as any area got here. The house, according to Rafaela, was often used as a party location by the four men.
She would take the apartment and the boss’s house. She had been keeping an eye on the narco-mansion, when she could, and had an observation post nearby in the shape of a small apartment across the street. She would drop Lock and Ty there to keep watch.
Forty
As the sun crept over the horizon, Lock scanned the narco-mansion with a pair of binoculars, careful to angle them in such a way that he avoided the sharp sunlight striking the lens. From his vantage-point in the front room of the small, dusty apartment, he had a clear view of the house’s back yard with its shimmering swimming pool. To the right of the pool, french windows led into the main house; to the left there was a small single-storey guest-house, perhaps eighty feet long and forty deep.
No one was around, save a gardener, who was clearing leaves from the water. Lock counted two fixed-position closed-circuit cameras, one mounted on either corner of the house, their lenses triangulating over the pool and the yard towards the guesthouse. The first hour of watching had already started to weigh on him. Ty, pacing the floor behind him, didn’t help. By definition, surveillance was a waiting game that required patience and, with the American girl missing, he was all out of it.
Their plan was needle-in-a-haystack stuff. Between them, the men connected to Mendez would have dozens of possible safe-houses at their disposal. With all the drugs that flowed through the city, hiding places would be legion and of good quality. Lock imagined that if you had something, or someone, you wanted to hide, there would be plenty of options available to you.
The only plus for them was that Rafaela had managed to retrieve not only their vehicle but also the gear they had brought down and their weapons, checking everything out from the police station on the pretext that, with them gone, it was better destroyed. The vehicle was no good to them now so they had emptied it of its contents and hidden it close to her apartment.
On the hour, Lock handed the binoculars to Ty. This was no good. For all they knew the house might be completely empty and, in any event, they had only a partial view of it. If he was there, Charlie Mendez could walk out of the front door with the girl, and they would be oblivious to the whole thing.
‘This sucks,’ he said to Ty.
‘Yup. You have other ideas?’
Lock unscrewed the top from a bottle of water and took a sip. The building was hot: there was no air-conditioning, and because the apartment was supposedly unoccupied, the windows had to stay closed, the drapes, too, apart from a narrow gap. ‘They’re protecting Mendez, they have the girl, and we have no clue where either of them is, so, no, I’m all out of ideas. You?’
Ty lowered the binoculars. ‘I was counting on you coming up with something. Man, this country is messed up. How’d you figure a place gets like this?’
‘Corrupt?’
‘Yeah.’
Lock hadn’t given it much thought until Ty had asked the question. ‘Slowly, I guess. You do someone a favour, look to make some easy money, and once you’re in, there’s no going back. I don’t know.’
‘And how do you figure these people get their country back?’ Ty said. ‘That’s gonna be even slower, right? Easy to get into the dirt, harder to get clean again.’
‘There are good people, like Rafaela.’
‘Not many of them,’ said Ty. ‘I mean, most people aren’t going to stand up to these guys. They don’t want to take the risk. They got families, kids.’
Lock stood behind Tyrone and stared down at the shimmering surface of the swimming pool as the gardener dumped the last of the leaves into a wheelbarrow. An idea was forming. It was a bad idea, bordering on reckless, but right now it was the only one he had.
Forty-one
Rafaela walked into her office at Police Headquarters and closed the door behind her. It was after lunch, and the building was close to empty, not that it was ever full. The city of Santa Maria had eight hundred officers but at least three hundred of them never showed up or did anything that people would recognize as police work. They were on the payroll of the cartels, recruited even before they had entered the academy to train. They wore the uniform, they were paid by the city or the government (as well as the cartels), they carried a badge and a gun and drove around in police cars, but they spent their days and nights working for the bad guys. They escorted shipments of money and drugs. They kidnapped low-level dealers, people who owed the cartel money or who had crossed them in some way, however significant or slight. Often, after a phone call from their superior, they killed those people and buried them in the dozens of hidden mass graves around the city. Rafaela believed that some had taken the girls, killed them and buried them too. It was said that, as a cop in the borderlands, you had only two choices. Plata o plomo? Silver or lead? You took a pay-off or you took a bullet.
Now that she was alone, and had time to think, she was regretting her change of heart with the Americans. More than regretting it. She had done many stupid things in her life, but this had to be the dumbest of them all. She should have insisted that they go home. But Lock had swayed her. How could he change things here? She wasn’t even sure that he could help her find the American girl. Before she arrived at the office, she had checked the two locations but seen nothing out of the ordinary. If the girl was there she would have sighted extra security but everything had been as always.
There was a tap at her office door. A young police officer poked his head in. He was always earnest. He took the job seriously. Rafaela wondered how long his idealism would last. Probably until the first time he was shown five thousand dollars to look the other way or the first time his mother received a phone call asking if she had reserved a cemetery plot for him.