thrilling. Charlie Mendez would be both hunted and hunter. The thought made his skin tingle with anticipation, and goosebumps rose on his arms.
He got to his feet, flicked off his sandals and picked up his board. Behind him, on the concrete promenade, two of his bodyguards stood next to a red Mercedes saloon, their automatic weapons slung over their shoulders — men openly carrying heavy-duty firearms were no big deal down here. He waved to them. One of them, Hector, waved back. Hector scared him. Although he was the smallest of the men who followed him everywhere, he was the one the others deferred to, the leader of the group. It was in his eyes, which were those of a predator.
Mendez began to run towards the ocean, the promise of a proper evening’s entertainment making him feel truly alive for the first time in months. Finally he had something to look forward to. Then he heard Hector calling him from the road.
‘Charlie!’
He kept running, but Hector called after him again. He might get away with ignoring the man once, but not a second time. He turned. Hector was beckoning him. He jogged towards the vehicle. ‘What’s up, Hector?’ he asked.
‘We have to go back to the house.’
‘Why?’
Hector stepped forward. ‘I’ll take your board. Get in.’
Pissed off, Mendez handed it to him. Hector took the front passenger seat, an assault rifle on his lap.
‘What’s the problem?’ Mendez asked. ‘Why do we have to leave?’
Hector swivelled in his seat and smiled at him. ‘There’s no problem.’
‘Is it another bounty hunter?’
‘Like I said, there’s no problem. It’s a precaution.’
‘But something’s happened, right?’
‘The girl who was giving you so much trouble. The Warner girl?’
Mendez hadn’t thought about her in ages. For a while he’d had recurring fantasies about killing her in more and more macabre ways, or occasionally he thought back to the night he had raped her. ‘Oh, yeah, that bitch — what about her?’
‘She’s dead,’ said Hector.
He greeted the news as if he’d been told that the lunch special had already sold out. ‘Oh, yeah? How’d it happen?’
Hector shrugged. ‘She was at a rap concert. Someone shot her. It’s LA. Bad things happen there sometimes.’
‘So how come I have to go back to the house?’ Goddamnit. Even dead that bitch was cramping his style. He hated the house where they’d kept him since Brady had arrived. There was no view of the ocean, no mountains, only other buildings, and even those were difficult to glimpse beyond the high walls and razor wire.
Hector’s lips thinned to a straight line beneath his fat, bulbous nose. It was a sign that he was growing tired of the questions.
‘It doesn’t matter, Hector. I’m sure there’s a good reason,’ he said, with a sigh. He climbed into the back of the vehicle. The air-conditioning was running at full tilt and he shivered as a cold blast hit him. He leaned back in his seat and tried to sleep. His mind drifted back to Melissa but, as he thought of her, images of the night came back to him. Even drugged she had tried to fight him, her hand clawing limply at his face. He had enjoyed that. He thought of it now, and found that he had an erection. What wouldn’t he give for another Melissa?
Twenty-three
Five Hours Later
Once a proud sicario, Hector resented his demotion to babysitter. Especially when the baby who needed his nappy changing was Charlie Mendez. A spoilt, rich pup of an American who had done terrible things, not for money or survival, as Hector had, but for kicks. A nobody, who had never worked a day in his life. A coward, who didn’t even have the balls to take a woman against her will unless he had drugged her first and she couldn’t fight back.
Hector did what the boss had asked him to do. He did it well. He made sure that no harm came to Charlie, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.
Hector’s journey in life had been different. No silver spoon for him. No spoon of any description, in fact. Not even a plastic one.
He had grown up in a family of four boys and one girl, small by the standards of his colonia. Hector had been the eldest. His father had died in a farming accident when he was seven. He’d been chewed up and spat out by a threshing machine, then delivered home in a plywood box by a Texas rancher, who probably thought of himself as a good guy for going to the expense.
It was the boss who had saved Hector, and brought him into the plaza, back in the days when there was a plaza and a proper order to business. At first Hector had started out doing some jobs here and there, mostly taking cars across the border. He was never stopped and it was only later he realized that it hadn’t been just luck. Actually, that wasn’t true. He had been stopped once and the car taken but he had been let go. He had gone straight back to the boss and, because he hadn’t waited for him to find out, there had been no repercussions. From that point on, Hector had been trusted and his ascendancy had been swift. Soon afterwards he no longer had a job but a career, with prestige and status and even a pension — if he lived long enough to collect it.
It was a quarter to the hour and darkness had enveloped the streets outside the villa. Dinner would be served soon by the staff. Hector put down his tumbler of Johnnie Walker Blue and walked from the living room, with the french windows that gave on to the swimming pool, into the corridor. At the bedroom he knocked softly. His charge was in the habit of taking a long siesta, but he was usually up, showered and dressed for dinner by now.
There was no answer.
Hector knocked again, a little too loudly, the alcohol kicking in, along with his impatience to lend extra weight to his hand.
When he was ignored again, he reached down and opened the door. Inside the bedroom, the curtains were closed and it was dark.
‘Senor,’ he whispered. ‘Dinner will be served in an hour. You may want to think about…’
He crossed to the bed and nudged the lump. He grabbed a corner of the sheet and pulled it off to reveal a bundle of clothes, neatly rolled up and arranged to look like a body.
He checked the bathroom. It was empty. Charlie Mendez was gone and Hector had a problem.
Twenty-four
What kind of twenty-one-year-old still went on vacation with her parents? That had been the question Julia Fisher had been preoccupied with ever since her dad had come with the brochures for the all-inclusive resort in Mexico. At least it wasn’t Disneyland, which had been his suggestion when she was seventeen.
Her mom had wanted to go to Europe but Dad, always one for the cheap option, had ruled that out. He’d favoured the small resort of Diablo because there was no air travel to deal with and therefore no jet lag, airport security or any of the other annoyances you had to deal with when travelling a long distance. If Julia didn’t like it, it was only for a week — couldn’t she just humour the old man? Remarkably, he had also suggested that perhaps she might bring along the young man she had been seeing, forgetting that they had recently broken up.
So, if for no other reason than to close down the conversation, she had quickly agreed. It was one of those things you said yes to, then immediately regretted, but it was done. And how bad could it be, right? It was only a week, and as a family they liked Mexico. It was strange and foreign without being overly so. And Dad was right: it was a car ride home if they grew tired of it, which Mom did, almost as soon as they had rolled up at the
