At a fresh wail of sirens she looked round and saw a motorcade muscling its way through the jam of black and white Dodge Chargers and Ford F-150s. A sleek black town car stopped less than twenty feet from her, the rear door opened and Zapatero stepped out, sporting full dress uniform and ready to take personal command of the search. He moved among his men, slapping backs and shaking hands. When he spotted Rafaela, his expression tightened.
As he got closer to her, he nodded towards the cell phone she had clasped in her right hand. She had been waiting for a call from one of the Americans. She had risked a call to both of them but Lock’s cell phone was switched off and Ty’s had defaulted to voicemail.
‘I’ve been trying to reach you,’ Zapatero said, business-like. ‘You’re on duty but you don’t answer the phone?’
She thought back to his late-night calls. The heavy breathing. The obscenities. And the following day he would talk to her as if everything was completely normal, even though they both knew what kind of a man he was. Carry on as usual, she thought. The whole country was like that: the crazier things were, the greater the denial. It was the land of the looking glass where an empty SUV drew more police officers than a ton of cocaine or a pile of dead bodies.
Zapatero was waiting for an answer. She feigned surprise. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear it.’
Clearly he didn’t believe her but he didn’t press the point. ‘Someone saw the American girl,’ he said. ‘She was here.’
It was as much as Rafaela could do not to laugh in his face. The truck driver, whom she had already spoken to, had mentioned a girl fleeing the scene in another vehicle but he’d had no idea who she was. It had been dark and everything had happened quickly, he’d told her. Even if he had seen more, he would not have mentioned it: in this part of the borderlands, you gave enough information to satisfy the police but not so much that you were seen as too helpful.
‘We have a witness who said they saw a young woman. Who told you it was the American girl?’
Zapatero puffed out his cheeks. ‘It’s disappointing that I should be more aware of the situation than the officer I placed in charge, wouldn’t you say?’
Rafaela could think of many words to describe it but disappointing wasn’t one of them. She kept her mouth shut, deciding that she had already pushed too hard. Retribution wouldn’t come in the shape of a reprimand or a lack of promotion: it would come in the shape of a bullet to the back of the head.
‘No matter,’ Zapatero continued. ‘But we must find her. And the men she was with. They were all American.’
She tried to keep her face set. How did he know about Lock?
‘Two of them had been arrested previously,’ he continued. ‘I believe you dealt with them, Detective Carcharon,’
She flushed, and was glad of the darkness as he stared at her.
Fifty-seven
Ty pulled into an alleyway behind a row of shacks, killed the headlights and switched off the engine. The girl was curled up against the passenger door. She had his jacket wrapped around her and her eyes were closed. He pushed the button to crack the window for some fresh air. The stench of rotting food and bad sanitation, the smell of poverty, wafted in on a cold breeze. He closed it again.
After leaving Lock to go after Mendez, he had got off the highway as quickly as he could and pulled into a residential neighbourhood. Driving at night, with so many police cars tearing around and no way of knowing who they were really working for, he’d decided that their best chance lay in waiting for sunrise before he contacted the American consulate or made a dash for the border. Anywhere in the world, a strange car in a poor neighbourhood was less likely to go reported than one parked in a rich area. A phone call to Rafaela had only confirmed his worst fears. Half the police department had been pulled from their beds with instructions to find him, Lock and Julia.
Conversation with the girl had been minimal. Ty had told her that he was here to return her to her parents but that it was too dangerous to do it directly. She seemed to understand. He didn’t ask much about her ordeal. It wasn’t his place and, in a way, he didn’t want to know the details. Knowledge might cloud his judgement, just as it seemed to have tipped his partner over the edge when he had darted off after Mendez.
It seemed cruel to wake her, but he leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder. She started and opened her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re going to park here until sunrise.’ He gave a nod towards the back seat. ‘I thought you might be more comfortable there. You can stretch out.’
She eyed it with suspicion. He didn’t blame her. It would be a long time before she trusted another man.
‘Don’t worry, I’m going to be right here and staying awake. Don’t want anyone sneaking up on us,’ he said.
The thought of him standing watch over her while she slept seemed to reassure her. ‘Okay, thanks,’ she said, clambering into the back. ‘I’m so tired.’
‘You’ve been through a lot. Don’t worry, I’ll wake you when we need to get moving.’
She lay down, knees tucked into her chest. Melissa had slept in a similar position at the hospital in Los Angeles. Ty wondered how many of Mendez’s other victims slept like that now, or still had nightmares about their ordeal.
‘Tyrone?’ the girl asked, as outside a rat scuttled across the alleyway, stopping briefly to size up one of the SUV’s tyres.
‘Yeah?’
‘Thank you.’
In the dark, Ty shrugged. He was wondering if this went some way towards atoning for past mistakes, past misdeeds.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.
‘Sure, go ahead.’
‘The man you were with.’
‘Ryan? What about him?’
‘Did he go after Charlie?’
Ty didn’t say anything at first. He was still unsettled and angry at Lock’s change of heart. He had been right in the first place. They should have forgotten Mendez. It was too risky to try to take him and rescue the girl at the same time. But something had changed in Lock when he had seen Mendez across the highway. A dark flame had burned inside him since Carrie’s death. He kept it hidden but Ty knew it was there. It had blazed up momentarily when they had been watching the house. It was like a pilot light, burning low but with the capacity to explode into an inferno at any moment — as it had when he had seen Mendez.
‘Yes, he did,’ Ty said finally.
‘Why?’
Ty sighed. ‘How long have you got?’
‘You said we can’t move anywhere until sunrise.’
‘You know you’re not the first person Charlie Mendez has hurt, right? I mean, you know who he is.’
She nodded. ‘I didn’t at first. But after, yes… I felt so stupid. I’d read about him and heard about what he’d done on the news. I just didn’t connect him with the man I met in the bar until it was too late.’
Again, she spared him the details, and he was thankful. He settled into his seat and told her about Melissa, and how he and Lock had come to bring Mendez back to the United States to face justice. At the end of the telling, she raised her head and stared at him. ‘That still doesn’t explain why he agreed.’
He didn’t have it in him to tell her about Carrie’s death and Lock’s guilt over it — his own guilt about what had happened. Instead, he said, ‘You should get some sleep.’
She closed her eyes, and within a minute she was asleep, leaving Ty alone in the driver’s seat with his gun, enveloped in the darkness of a place where people too poor to afford dreams made their lives.