They were all heading towards the hotel.
I watched as the man in the pale jacket caught up with them and clamped an arm across the lead man’s shoulders. The movement lifted this one’s shirt, revealing the butt of a semi-automatic stuffed into his waistband. Whatever the man in the pale jacket said to him was enough to have him shouting orders to his companions, and they put on a burst of speed, spreading out across the street.
I swore silently. It was a trap. And I’d walked right into it.
The pale jacket was similar to the one I’d dumped in the trash earlier, the partner of the one delivered in the wooden box.
It was being worn by Oscar Parillas.
Eleven
I got out of there fast, snatching up the phone directory on the way. It seemed to be the only thing the searchers hadn’t touched. I didn’t know if it was meaningful, but I could get into that later.
For now I had to survive the next few minutes until I got clear.
I hit the emergency stairs on the run. This time I wasn’t being too careful. Distance was of the essence; between me and the cartel gunmen outside, and distance from here to the border.
As I walked out of the downstairs lobby area I heard raised voices coming from the reception area. One belonged to the security guard. If he was savvy enough to recognize these men for what they were, he’d back off without resistance and let them do what they had to. He wasn’t being paid enough to stand up against the cartel.
I slipped out into the side street and walked away from the hotel, a low sun at my back, clutching the directory under my arm. I was running a mental map and working out where I had to go to cover as much ground as I could. My problem was, Parillas knew where I would go and might have already told his new associates to despatch men to the border to intercept me. That was a chance I had to take.
I was at the end of the street and about to turn the corner when a beefy guy in a flashy shirt stepped out of a doorway and stood in front of me, squinting into the sun. He had smooth facial skin stretched over high cheekbones, and black, lank hair. He also had one hand under his shirt and was holding a cell phone in his other hand.
It was one of the spotters I’d seen earlier.
Out in the open was no place for a fight; his colleagues were all over the area and would come running the moment they heard anything. So I held up my hands and walked straight into the open doorway he’d just left, which was little more than a small tiled lobby.
The move threw him. He hadn’t expected compliance, so he hesitated in bringing up the cell phone and stepped in after me.
It was a bad move. From staring into the sun, he was now in shadow and struggling to adjust his eyesight.
I dropped the phone directory. It landed on the tiled floor with a loud slap. He was startled by the sound, eyes dropping to locate the source. I used a snap kick to his belly and followed it up with an elbow strike to the side of his head. But he was tougher than he looked. He shook it off and tried to shout, and his other hand appeared, bringing up a gun from under his shirt.
I grabbed his face and drove him back against the wall as hard as I could, slamming his head into the plaster. He looked surprised and I felt a spray of saliva against the palm of my hand. He was stunned but he wasn’t finished yet and fought against me. I dropped my hand and cupped it under his chin, this time snapping his head backwards as hard as I could. There was a crack and he went limp, and slid down the wall.
I moved back and waited for sounds of alarm within the building. But there was nothing. The dead man had dropped his gun and cell phone. I scooped them up, kicked the gun behind his body and slipped the phone in my pocket.
It was time to go, before his colleagues began to wonder where he was.
I picked up the directory, walked outside and stopped.
Two men in police uniforms were waiting, guns pointing right at me.
Time seemed to slow right down.
They must have seen the dead guy bring me in here and decided to investigate.
‘Hey — you’re just in time,’ I said, making like the angry tourist. ‘This bastard tried to rob me!’
One of the cops, skinny and with eyes as dead as a fish, looked past me, squinting into the lobby. I heard the word muerte — dead — and his colleague shrugged a pair of fat shoulders like he could care less.
At which point things went from bad to worse.
Fish-eye flicked his gun for me to turn round, then searched me and took my gun, my cell phone and my wallet. He looked at the directory with a frown, then walked over to a battered sedan at the kerb and tossed it through the rear window. He motioned for me to get in the back.
The car was a piece of junk. I’d seen plenty of undercover cops driving worse, but these two weren’t undercover; they both wore creased uniforms and the car was a genuine clunker, with bald tyres and a broken tail light.
I climbed in and the two cops slid into the front, watching me carefully. Fish-eye dropped into the passenger seat and turned to face me, his gun held down between the seats where I couldn’t get at it without getting shot. His fat pal signalled for me to place my hands out front and had me cuffed in a second. Then he muttered to his colleague and leaned forward to punch out a number on a cell phone in a holder on the dashboard.
The two-way conversation that followed was loud and excited and in words too fast for me to follow. Then he cut the call and took us away from the kerb and along the street.
It didn’t matter what they’d said because I knew I was in a jam. First, I figured these two were multi-tasking for the cartel, and had no intention of taking me in to police headquarters. If they had, we’d still be at the lobby, waiting for the usual song-and-dance array of backup vehicles and detectives.
Second, I’d heard a familiar voice in the background during the phone conversation, and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere nice.
Parillas. And he hadn’t enquired after my health.
I sat back and waited. Fish-eye, the one with the gun, was too watchful for me to try anything, so I pretended to be despondent and frightened, as he would expect. While I was doing that, I inspected the back of the car. It smelled of greasy food, of dog, of stale cigarette, oil and other stuff I didn’t want to think about. A bunch of squashed coke cans, tissue and old newspapers littered the floor, and the worn-through remnants of carpet were sticky underfoot.
I shifted the cans about while pretending to get comfortable and tried to figure a way out. Fish-eye grinned at me and muttered something to his pal. They both laughed and I figured they were already planning how to spend the money they’d be paid for bringing me in.
We were soon out of the main streets and into an area near a rail yard, bumping along a squalid backstreet bordered by small workshops and warehouses, most of them empty and fenced off, with just a few old people and kids stopping to watch us roll by. The car seemed to bottom out all the way, the springs beyond salvation, and I felt my spine beginning to bruise as it came into contact with the floor, by-passing what should have been cushions.
I was formulating a plan, which wasn’t going too well, when I realized that one of the coke cans wasn’t squashed. I rolled it with my foot. It was full.
The car began slowing and the driver seemed to be considering which empty factory lot to turn into. They argued over it for a while, like it mattered.
I felt my gut go cold. They’d had their orders and taking me in wasn’t one of them.
They were looking for a place to dump me.
Twelve
We bumped across a stretch of broken sidewalk and through an open chain-link gate into a large concrete yard covered in trash. The building in front of us looked like an old tyre wholesaler, with Goodyear and Dunlop nameplates rusting off the weathered fascia. Stacks of ancient, rotting pallets were piled haphazardly around the yard.