With the helicopter directing reinforcements straight towards them, Lock propelled his prisoner forwards, down the street, as a sea of small brown faces peered from the houses, only to be dragged away from the windows by mothers and grandmothers.
He felt no sense of accomplishment. If at all, it would come later. He had Mendez but the chances of being able to keep him long enough to get him back across the border were slim. And if the action of the gunman who had fired from the helicopter was anything to go by, Mendez’s protectors had experienced a change of heart. If they both stayed alive long enough, Lock might even discover why.
In the meantime, he pushed the whining Mendez down the narrow street, praying for a miracle with every step he took.
Sixty-one
The American consulate was housed on the third floor of a downtown office building. Once they had stepped inside no one outside could do anything to either Ty or Julia. Consulates and embassies counted as American soil so, to all intents and purposes, they would be on home turf. But there was a snag.
The consulate didn’t open for another hour and, right now, reaching it in one piece was looking about as likely as fashioning a rocket out of baking trays and flying to the moon. Hunched over the steering-wheel, Ty watched as the traffic snaked along the road towards a police checkpoint. Twenty vehicles ahead, a squad of local cops were interrogating a smartly dressed man, who was leaning out of his car, no doubt protesting at the lengthy delay.
Julia shuffled forward from the back seat. ‘Can’t we just ask those cops there to give us an escort?’
‘We could,’ Ty growled. ‘The only problem is they might just escort us somewhere else instead. Like right back to the people who were looking after Charlie Mendez.’
‘The police?’
Ty thought back to when he’d been that naive about the world. Nope, his memory didn’t go back that far. Not that he blamed Julia: we were all products of our experience and her experience, growing up as a white, middle-class American in a loving family, had left her lacking the necessary insight into just how messed up large parts of the planet actually were. In her world, cops were on your side. Down here some of them were, and some of them were with the bad guys. The problem was that they both wore the same uniform, so there was no knowing for sure which type an individual was.
A few feet ahead there was a side street. Ty waited until he was sure the cops running the checkpoint were busy, then spun the wheel and turned down it. Cars parked on either side meant that he had to squeeze past yet another Policia Federal Dodge Charger, driving in the opposite direction. The driver was in a hurry and didn’t check them out.
‘What are you doing? Why are you turning off?’ Julia asked, her voice panicked and rising in pitch and volume as he tried to stay aware of everything around them and get round the checkpoint.
‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to get us there safely,’ Ty barked. The road was widening but any extra room was taken up by food stalls and street vendors. Even at this early hour, crowds of people milled around. Something about the area was beginning to look familiar to him, but his mind might have been playing tricks.
He glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that Julia’s face was pressed against the window. ‘Sit back. Someone might see you.’
It was already too late. The SUV, even with the tinted glass, was drawing gawkers on either side. This was hardly a tourist area. Two small boys, brothers by the look of them, raced over to Ty’s window, jumping up to tap on the glass, smiling excitedly and motioning for him to lower the window. He kept it closed. Give them a few pesos and it would only draw more kids and more attention. An old man wearing a straw hat and drawing hard on an unfiltered cigarette eyed them warily from the corner.
Ty nudged the RAV 4 forward, but the car ahead of him had stopped to allow an old lady to cross the road. Dressed in black, perhaps fresh from morning mass, she took her time as Ty’s long fingers drummed on the steering-wheel and he searched for an escape route. Barring mowing down the old lady or squelching the kids, who were still running alongside and tapping at the glass, there was nothing to do but wait.
As the old lady cleared the road, Ty pressed down on the horn. The vehicle in front stayed put. He pulled out, trying to get an angle to see if he could get round it. It looked too tight a squeeze. It inched forward again and he dropped back in behind it, eyes flicking from rear-view to side mirrors as he watched for any sudden movement from the crowd.
In the back seat, Julia was growing agitated. Ty had seen it before in Iraq: some people made it through the most traumatic situations by surfing on a tide of grit and adrenalin, only for the wheels to come off as they neared safety. The mind simply wasn’t built to contain what Julia must have endured at the hands of Mendez.
‘Why don’t we just get out and walk?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Hey, be cool for me, ’kay? The traffic will clear in a minute.’
She was rocking back and forth. He saw her arm move. ‘I can’t breathe in here. I need to get some air.’
As she reached for the handle to open the door, his hand shot out and the central-locking clicked into place with a thunk.
‘What are you doing?’ she screamed. ‘You’re not taking me to my parents, are you? Who are you?’
Inching forward, Ty hit the brakes then the button to unlock the doors. ‘You want to get out? Be my guest. But you’re on your own. Now, I know you’ve been through hell. I get that. But if they catch us, you might be safe, you might not, but I am definitely going to be dead. So, if you don’t trust me, go. You’re not the only one who’s scared here. You hear me?’
He eyed her in the mirror. His words seemed to be having an effect. Her chin slumped to her chest and she lapsed into silence
Ahead the traffic was moving, not in fits and starts but at a steady clip. They were getting past the last of the street vendors. Ty glanced at the GPS. They had less than a mile to go before they reached the consulate building. Less than a mile to safety.
He settled back into his seat, and checked the sat-nav screen in front of him, plotting a route through the side-streets that would take him close to the consulate. His plan was to leave the vehicle somewhere close by, make the phone call, and then, before word could leak from anyone at the consulate to the local authorities, walk her in. If he was stopped, he would inform whoever was doing the stopping that the consulate officials already knew they were there. He doubted any regular cop, no matter how corrupt or plugged into the cartel, would have the balls to block their safe passage at that point.
His eyes flicked back to Julia just as she glanced to her right. Her pupils snapped from pinpricks to full dilation faster than he had ever seen. She opened her mouth and began to scream.
Sixty-two
The hollowed-out eye sockets of Santa Muerte stared back at Julia through tangles of damp white hair. A part of her rational mind knew it was just a shrine, just a skeleton dressed as a woman, but that part was a lost, lonely voice drowned by a cacophony of others screaming at her, telling her that she had to get the hell out of there — now.