Rafaela’s car was parked down the street. His car was parked around the corner, but it was her car he walked towards. When he reached it, he looked up at her balcony to see if she was watching, but it was empty and the doors leading out to it were closed, the curtains drawn. That was good.
He grasped the handle of the driver’s door as hard as he could. Hard enough that he could feel the car’s body move. It was enough. The blast lifted him off his feet and he was thrown high into the air, his eardrums bursting under the pressure as he left his body.
Looking down, he saw himself fall back to earth, his limbs interlaced with pieces of metal, his torso and head coming to rest at the far end of the empty street.
Curtains flapped through blast-shattered windows like black crows’ wings but no one else screamed. He was gone. Everyone was safe. Safe now that he was no more. That thought, which seemed to come with his last breath, brought him peace.
Seventy-one
Hands tied behind his back and feet bound together, so that if he tried to get up he would fall flat on his face, Charlie Mendez glared at Lock as he jammed one of Mendez’s own socks into his mouth and gaffer-taped it in place.
‘Now, don’t you look purty,’ Lock told him, stepping back to admire his handiwork. ‘All nice and wrapped up for the boys at Pelican Bay. And let me tell you, Charlie, they love them some good-looking sex offenders up at the Bay. You’re really going to brighten up those long winter nights for some lucky guy.’
Lock walked to the rear of the shack where the back door led into a patch of badly fenced, overgrown, weedy lawn. Before he stepped outside, he looked around for signs of life in the neighbouring backyards, but everything was quiet. People were at work and they put in long hours. To be dirt-poor on this side of the border meant going to work. The alternative was stark: stay home and starve.
He closed the back door behind him, dug out his cell phone, powered it up and called Ty, who answered straight away, relief that Lock was alive evident in his voice.
After he had spent a few minutes bringing his partner up to speed, Ty said, ‘There’s a couple of things you need to know.’
For the next three minutes, Lock listened. Three times he interjected with a question. Finally he ended the call, and powered down the cell phone. He opened the back door, and glanced inside, making sure that Mendez hadn’t moved. He hadn’t. Lock stepped out again. What Ty had just told him had changed things.
He turned the new information over in his mind.
A plan took shape.
He powered his cell phone back up and made another call. Then he took a deep breath, and walked into the shack.
Mendez was where he had left him. Trussed up on the couch. He stared up at Lock, eyes burning with fear and resentment, a predator at someone else’s mercy.
‘Guess what, Charlie?’
Mendez mumbled something through the sock. Lock reached over and peeled away the tape at the edge of his mouth, pulled out the sock and held it up in front of Mendez between pinched finger and thumb.
‘What?’ Mendez asked.
‘You know you were saying that I could do better than a few hundred thousand bucks? Well, it seems like your buddies down here agree. In fact, they just made me an offer. Five times my cut of the bond for bringing you back.’
‘A million bucks? Bullshit,’ Mendez said, his voice rising.
Lock held up an open palm and maintained eye contact. ‘Asshole’s honour.’
‘You can’t hand me over to them. They’ll kill me.’
‘There is that. It would definitely be a breach of my ethics. But I’d bet that a million bucks would take my mind off that. It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a guy like me, don’t you think?’
‘So you can be bought, after all,’ Mendez said.
Lock shrugged. ‘I guess so. Looks like you were right.’
‘Two!’ Mendez hissed.
Lock cocked his head to one side. ‘Two what?’
‘Two million. My family will give you two million.’
‘To let you go?’
Mendez nodded. ‘That’s double what they’re offering.’
‘True. But if I take a million from them, you’d be dead, not wandering around preying on other girls. My conscience would be clear. Pretty much clear, anyway. What you’re suggesting is way different.’
‘Three, then,’ said Mendez, suddenly. ‘In cash. Tax free. Account in the Cayman Islands. Switzerland. Wherever you like.’
‘Forget it,’ said Lock.
‘Okay, five. Final offer. Take it or leave it.’
‘You play pretty fast and loose with your family’s money. A minute ago it was two million. Now it’s five. You’re a hell of a negotiator, buddy.’
‘Who said it was my family’s money?’
Lock took a step back. Bingo, he thought. There it was. Confirmation of what Ty had told him.
‘Okay, back up there, Charlie. You’re losing me. They want to give me a million to kill you. But your family can give me five million of the cartel’s money to keep you safe. How does that work?’
Something flickered over Mendez’s face that suggested he’d shown Lock too much of his hand. ‘What does it matter where the money comes from?’
‘Well, when you’re asking me to double-cross a major drugs cartel, I’d say it matters a lot. I want to be around to spend it, after all. Million in hand, with no reason to keep looking over my shoulder, sounds better than five and a bunch of ulcers.’ Lock let the sock drop to the floor. ‘If I’m getting into this, I’m going to need to know what I’m dealing with here. Why would you be able to access their funds?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Mendez.
Doesn’t matter, Lock thought, you’ve already told me all I need to know.
‘The final offer’s five million,’ said Mendez. ‘Two when you get me across the border. The rest when I’m safely out of America.’
Lock studied the floor, apparently mulling over the offer, as the pieces clicked neatly into place. There had been one question to which he hadn’t fathomed an answer: why would a cartel risk all this heat over a scumbag rapist like Charlie Mendez? Now he knew.
His chin sank to his chest. He thought of Melissa Warner. He thought of the other dead girls. He thought of Rafaela’s indignation that two Americans, himself and Ty, would go to all this trouble over one dead and one kidnapped white girl without any concern for the legion of dead brown girls. Then, as the sun dropped towards the horizon and the room began to darken, he folded away his thoughts of the past.
‘Three million up front and you have yourself a deal,’ he said to Mendez.
Seventy-two
As dusk fell, Lock led an unbound Mendez out of the back of the shack, across the scrubby patch of grass, over a rickety wooden fence with missing slats and into a back alley. In an ideal world, they would have left later, but Lock had no way of knowing when the woman whose home it was would return. Even more crucially, his cell phone had been powered up: there had been half a dozen phone calls as Mendez had made the arrangements for the money to be transferred. Every minute they stayed conceivably brought them a minute closer to being found.
The scuff of sneakers at the end of the alley sent Lock’s hand to the butt of his gun. A few seconds later a soccer ball rolled into view. It was followed by two teenage boys. They froze at the sight of the two men. Lock trapped the ball under his foot and waved them forward. He peeled off two five-dollar bills and handed one to each of them. ‘You didn’t see us,’ he said, tapping the ball back to them.
They traded a look, shoved the money into the pockets of their baggy jeans and sloped off into the gloom. Lock tapped at Mendez’s elbow and they moved off.
At the end of the alley Lock hunkered down in the dirt and checked their position on his GPS. Three hundred yards ahead lay a marshalling yard, used to store containers before they were hooked up to trucks and taken off for loading further south or north. When he had come across the yard on an earlier recon, he had thought about holing up in a container but decided against it. Right now they were less than a quarter-mile from the border, but the containers could end up anywhere. Cargo moved across the border came from as far away as China and went back that way too. Get in a container and you could die in there. It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take, but if they could make it to the marshalling yard they could use that as cover and as a final staging post. Once they were inside and reached the north-eastern corner of the yard, all that would stand between them and America was a long sprint across open ground towards the river and the newly erected border fence.