Draper let himself into the building through a side door. Lights went on inside. A moment later Hood heard the hum of a motor and the rattle of the metal door rolling up. Draper stood for a moment in the doorway, lit from inside. Hood could see a dusty old car behind him, and a black dune buggy with fat tires, and a couple of small dirt bikes. Slowly Hood lowered the binoculars and set them on the boulder in front of him and waited to see what Draper would do.
Draper pulled the M5 in and parked it beside the dune buggy. Then he got out and opened the trunk again with the key fob and he pulled out two suitcases.
He’s going to make the run through the hills tonight, thought Hood. No checkpoints, no Customs. Just friendly faces and familiar trails on a rainy night, and Mexico only a mile away.
Suddenly, light hit the boulder in front of Hood. He could see the grains in the rock.
“Do not turn. If you see my face, you die. Raise your hands slowly.”
Hood didn’t know the voice. It was a man’s voice, calm and certain. He raised his hands. Far below he could see Draper looking up at him.
“I’m a Los Angeles Sheriff deputy,” said Hood. “I’ve got ID in my wallet. Think about what you’re doing.”
“Do not move.”
Hood heard footsteps coming fast, then felt a gun barrel against his back. The man roughly popped the snap and pulled the. 45 from his belt holster and Hood heard it land on the ground behind him. Draper was leaning against the trunk of the M5, still watching.
When the man behind him bent to run a hand down his calf, Hood lifted the binoculars by their strap, turned fast and whipped them down on the man’s head as hard as he could. The heavy glasses hit like a mule kick. The man went over in a heap. Hood pulled the gun from his limp hand and turned off the hiker’s headlight. Then he rolled the guy onto his face and cuffed him with a plastic restraint. Hood was expecting Israel Castro, but this man was older-forties, dark hair and a dark mustache. Behind the Charger, Hood saw a small dune buggy, black and chromeless, made for running almost invisibly on dark nights like this.
When he looked back down at the metal building Draper was gone and the power door was rolling closed.
38
Hood’s prisoner was out cold. The cut on his scalp was bleeding, but not hard. Hood used the hiker’s headlight to find his gun, then he slid the gunman’s forty-caliber into his jacket pocket.
He locked the Charger and began the descent, stepping sideways down the embankment. There was prickly pear and cholla cactus, and the rocks were loose and slick from the rain.
By the time he made the building the rolling door had clanged into place and the lights had gone off. There was still a slit of light from inside, visible at the bottom of the rolling door, and the rough sound of the generator burning gas to make electricity.
He drew his gun and put his hand on the doorknob. He took a deep breath, then threw open the door and rushed inside, weapon up. Close to the M5 he ducked down and scanned the concrete floor for feet. Just a dusty car and a black dune buggy and two small BMX bikes with dirt-covered tires and exhaust pipes.
Draper was gone and so was the luggage. The rain hit the metal roof. The generator labored patiently in one corner. Gun still up, Hood went through a door and into a smaller room. There was a desk and chair, and a couch. Shop lamps burned overhead. No windows. On the floor between the couch and the desk was a woven Mexican blanket with pictures of jumping swordfish on it. He knelt to catch the light better and saw the muddy footprints on the floor. The blanket was bunched carelessly.
Hood went to a window and looked out and saw nothing. Then he came back to the rug and kicked it into a pile in front of the desk. Beneath it was a sheet of plywood fitted into the concrete floor. It was about a yard square, with a black enameled handle screwed onto each side. He chose a side and lifted, then pulled away the plywood.
Below him was a cavern approximately ten feet square. A ladder down. There, another generator along one wall, vented with metal flex tubing through the ceiling of the tunnel. Two red gasoline containers. And a lightbulb hanging by a wire that ran down a tunnel, overhead and out of sight. The tunnel walls were framed with two-by-fours, and the bottom planked with two-by-sixes.
His training told him to stop right here, retreat and come back in daylight, with help. But that was a long wait, a cold trail, and hours for Draper to disappear, hide evidence, reappear. Standing on the ladder and reaching up, he moved the rug over the opening as best he could, then pulled the wooden door fully into place. It thumped solidly shut. A wiggle of fear came up Hood’s back and crawled across his scalp.
When he got down into the cavern he strapped the hiker’s headlight on and walked into the tunnel.
Smuggler’s tunnels are not long. A tunnel is a slow and difficult thing to make, and once located by an enemy, they are pure liability. Two hundred feet is average. Hood knew the Mexican border was close, but he didn’t know how close.
The light was good and the tunnel was straight for twenty steps. It went right. The overhead lights were twenty feet apart. It was cold and Hood heard the patient drip of water. Between the walkway slats he saw the oily blue reflection of light on pooled liquid.
The tunnel went on. Twice more it made a right turn of thirty degrees. On his fiftieth step Hood stopped and listened. Still, the drip and the distant groan of the generator. The lights flickered off, came back on.
Hood felt the proximate terror of being underground. He was mildly claustrophobic and he felt the first flicker of panic deep inside him, sharp and small, a spark made by flint. He ignored it.
At step one hundred he stopped again. He believed that he was halfway through but this was only a sense in a place that confounded sense. On his one hundred and ninetieth step Hood found himself in a small room. There was a generator here, too, but it was not on. There was a ladder.
He climbed to the top and waited for a long minute. He found it hard to believe that he was a man of sound judgment. There was no light around the edges of the hatch. He heard nothing. He sensed open space on the other side of the wood but again, this was only a feeling.
Hood tested the plywood with the fingertips of both hands. It rocked slightly.
The hatch opened on hinges to an interior darkness: no stars, no breeze, no rain. In he climbed, closing the hatch and turning on the headlight. He was in a very small room. There were brooms and buckets and a fire extinguisher and two toolboxes and stacks of toilet tissue. He looked down at the wooden door through which he had come, and saw the big red-and-white plate with the graphic bolt of electricity and the electrocuted cartoon man tilting off his feet and the word Peligroso!
He pushed open the closet door to rows of student desks. Beyond them was a table and a blackboard stand. There was a Mexican flag in a stand in one corner and a Baja California flag in another. Between them was a sliding glass door through which he saw nothing but darkness. Rain on the roof. Through the dripping windows on his left Hood saw only night, and through the ones on his right flickered the lights of the village of Jacume.
The suitcases from Draper’s car-side by side and handles down-stood by the door on the other side of the classroom.
Hood turned off his light and stood still for a moment. He tried to see through the windows but only saw darkness and rain. There was just enough light to pick his way past the rows of desks to the luggage.
The suitcases were heavy. He rolled one onto its back and unzipped it. He turned on the light again and saw newspapers and rocks the size of softballs inside the bag. No cash. The other was packed with the same thing. The papers were the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune, recent dates. The rocks were the ones you’d find all over the vast borderlands between California and Mexico. He turned off the light again and squatted on his haunches beside the suitcases.