Forty
As the sun crept over the horizon, Lock scanned the narco-mansion with a pair of binoculars, careful to angle them in such a way that he avoided the sharp sunlight striking the lens. From his vantage-point in the front room of the small, dusty apartment, he had a clear view of the house’s back yard with its shimmering swimming pool. To the right of the pool, french windows led into the main house; to the left there was a small single-storey guest- house, perhaps eighty feet long and forty deep.
No one was around, save a gardener, who was clearing leaves from the water. Lock counted two fixed- position closed-circuit cameras, one mounted on either corner of the house, their lenses triangulating over the pool and the yard towards the guesthouse. The first hour of watching had already started to weigh on him. Ty, pacing the floor behind him, didn’t help. By definition, surveillance was a waiting game that required patience and, with the American girl missing, he was all out of it.
Their plan was needle-in-a-haystack stuff. Between them, the men connected to Mendez would have dozens of possible safe-houses at their disposal. With all the drugs that flowed through the city, hiding places would be legion and of good quality. Lock imagined that if you had something, or someone, you wanted to hide, there would be plenty of options available to you.
The only plus for them was that Rafaela had managed to retrieve not only their vehicle but also the gear they had brought down and their weapons, checking everything out from the police station on the pretext that, with them gone, it was better destroyed. The vehicle was no good to them now so they had emptied it of its contents and hidden it close to her apartment.
On the hour, Lock handed the binoculars to Ty. This was no good. For all they knew the house might be completely empty and, in any event, they had only a partial view of it. If he was there, Charlie Mendez could walk out of the front door with the girl, and they would be oblivious to the whole thing.
‘This sucks,’ he said to Ty.
‘Yup. You have other ideas?’
Lock unscrewed the top from a bottle of water and took a sip. The building was hot: there was no air- conditioning, and because the apartment was supposedly unoccupied, the windows had to stay closed, the drapes, too, apart from a narrow gap. ‘They’re protecting Mendez, they have the girl, and we have no clue where either of them is, so, no, I’m all out of ideas. You?’
Ty lowered the binoculars. ‘I was counting on you coming up with something. Man, this country is messed up. How’d you figure a place gets like this?’
‘Corrupt?’
‘Yeah.’
Lock hadn’t given it much thought until Ty had asked the question. ‘Slowly, I guess. You do someone a favour, look to make some easy money, and once you’re in, there’s no going back. I don’t know.’
‘And how do you figure these people get their country back?’ Ty said. ‘That’s gonna be even slower, right? Easy to get into the dirt, harder to get clean again.’
‘There are good people, like Rafaela.’
‘Not many of them,’ said Ty. ‘I mean, most people aren’t going to stand up to these guys. They don’t want to take the risk. They got families, kids.’
Lock stood behind Tyrone and stared down at the shimmering surface of the swimming pool as the gardener dumped the last of the leaves into a wheelbarrow. An idea was forming. It was a bad idea, bordering on reckless, but right now it was the only one he had.
Forty-one
Rafaela walked into her office at Police Headquarters and closed the door behind her. It was after lunch, and the building was close to empty, not that it was ever full. The city of Santa Maria had eight hundred officers but at least three hundred of them never showed up or did anything that people would recognize as police work. They were on the payroll of the cartels, recruited even before they had entered the academy to train. They wore the uniform, they were paid by the city or the government (as well as the cartels), they carried a badge and a gun and drove around in police cars, but they spent their days and nights working for the bad guys. They escorted shipments of money and drugs. They kidnapped low-level dealers, people who owed the cartel money or who had crossed them in some way, however significant or slight. Often, after a phone call from their superior, they killed those people and buried them in the dozens of hidden mass graves around the city. Rafaela believed that some had taken the girls, killed them and buried them too. It was said that, as a cop in the borderlands, you had only two choices. Plata o plomo? Silver or lead? You took a pay-off or you took a bullet.
Now that she was alone, and had time to think, she was regretting her change of heart with the Americans. More than regretting it. She had done many stupid things in her life, but this had to be the dumbest of them all. She should have insisted that they go home. But Lock had swayed her. How could he change things here? She wasn’t even sure that he could help her find the American girl. Before she arrived at the office, she had checked the two locations but seen nothing out of the ordinary. If the girl was there she would have sighted extra security but everything had been as always.
There was a tap at her office door. A young police officer poked his head in. He was always earnest. He took the job seriously. Rafaela wondered how long his idealism would last. Probably until the first time he was shown five thousand dollars to look the other way or the first time his mother received a phone call asking if she had reserved a cemetery plot for him.
‘The boss wants to see you.’
‘Thank you. Tell him I’ll be there in a moment.’
‘He said it’s urgent.’
‘Very well.’
She got up and followed him out into the corridor. He headed back to his cubicle and she kept going. She was more curious than nervous when the boss’s secretary made her wait for a few moments before she ushered her in.
Zapatero was at his desk. He was wearing a white dress shirt, slacks and loafers. This was his new uniform since his return from a management seminar in America about leadership. She wondered if the DEA, who had paid for his attendance, knew that he took money from the cartel. That was the thing about the people who had been bought: unless you had been close to them for a long time it was difficult to tell. The only obvious clue was how they could afford to send their kids to private school and drive the cars they did. Other than that, they spoke and behaved in exactly the same manner as the others. Some probably believed that by aligning themselves with one cartel they were somehow bringing order to a bad situation, that they were doing the right thing.
‘Detective Carcharon, please, sit down,’ he said, with a wave of his hand. When he opened his mouth all she could think of were the disgusting words he hissed down the phone at her late at night when he was drunk.
She sat opposite him. There were family pictures on his desk. A wife and two girls. She wondered what the children would think if they knew about their father. Presumably he loved them and wouldn’t want any harm to come to them. She found it strange that someone could feel so deeply about their own, yet have no regard for the children of others. That was the heart of the sickness that had enveloped these people. As long as their own needs were fulfilled, their own children safe, they didn’t care about anything else.
‘The two American bounty hunters we apprehended,’ he began. ‘I understand they have left the country.’
She cleared her throat. ‘Yes, I made sure of it myself.’
He smiled across his desk at her. ‘Good, that’s very good. We have enough problems of our own without these…’ he paused theatrically ‘… mavericks causing trouble. We will find the man they are looking for. This Charles Mendez.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m sure of it,’ she said.
He picked up a file from his desk. ‘And speaking of Americans, it seems we have another to cause us concern.’
