was curled up against the passenger door. She had his jacket wrapped around her and her eyes were closed. He pushed the button to crack the window for some fresh air. The stench of rotting food and bad sanitation, the smell of poverty, wafted in on a cold breeze. He closed it again.
After leaving Lock to go after Mendez, he had got off the highway as quickly as he could and pulled into a residential neighbourhood. Driving at night, with so many police cars tearing around and no way of knowing who they were really working for, he’d decided that their best chance lay in waiting for sunrise before he contacted the American consulate or made a dash for the border. Anywhere in the world, a strange car in a poor neighbourhood was less likely to go reported than one parked in a rich area. A phone call to Rafaela had only confirmed his worst fears. Half the police department had been pulled from their beds with instructions to find him, Lock and Julia.
Conversation with the girl had been minimal. Ty had told her that he was here to return her to her parents but that it was too dangerous to do it directly. She seemed to understand. He didn’t ask much about her ordeal. It wasn’t his place and, in a way, he didn’t want to know the details. Knowledge might cloud his judgement, just as it seemed to have tipped his partner over the edge when he had darted off after Mendez.
It seemed cruel to wake her, but he leaned over and tapped her on the shoulder. She started and opened her eyes.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re going to park here until sunrise.’ He gave a nod towards the back seat. ‘I thought you might be more comfortable there. You can stretch out.’
She eyed it with suspicion. He didn’t blame her. It would be a long time before she trusted another man.
‘Don’t worry, I’m going to be right here and staying awake. Don’t want anyone sneaking up on us,’ he said.
The thought of him standing watch over her while she slept seemed to reassure her. ‘Okay, thanks,’ she said, clambering into the back. ‘I’m so tired.’
‘You’ve been through a lot. Don’t worry, I’ll wake you when we need to get moving.’
She lay down, knees tucked into her chest. Melissa had slept in a similar position at the hospital in Los Angeles. Ty wondered how many of Mendez’s other victims slept like that now, or still had nightmares about their ordeal.
‘Tyrone?’ the girl asked, as outside a rat scuttled across the alleyway, stopping briefly to size up one of the SUV’s tyres.
‘Yeah?’
‘Thank you.’
In the dark, Ty shrugged. He was wondering if this went some way towards atoning for past mistakes, past misdeeds.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said.
‘Sure, go ahead.’
‘The man you were with.’
‘Ryan? What about him?’
‘Did he go after Charlie?’
Ty didn’t say anything at first. He was still unsettled and angry at Lock’s change of heart. He had been right in the first place. They should have forgotten Mendez. It was too risky to try to take him and rescue the girl at the same time. But something had changed in Lock when he had seen Mendez across the highway. A dark flame had burned inside him since Carrie’s death. He kept it hidden but Ty knew it was there. It had blazed up momentarily when they had been watching the house. It was like a pilot light, burning low but with the capacity to explode into an inferno at any moment — as it had when he had seen Mendez.
‘Yes, he did,’ Ty said finally.
‘Why?’
Ty sighed. ‘How long have you got?’
‘You said we can’t move anywhere until sunrise.’
‘You know you’re not the first person Charlie Mendez has hurt, right? I mean, you know who he is.’
She nodded. ‘I didn’t at first. But after, yes… I felt so stupid. I’d read about him and heard about what he’d done on the news. I just didn’t connect him with the man I met in the bar until it was too late.’
Again, she spared him the details, and he was thankful. He settled into his seat and told her about Melissa, and how he and Lock had come to bring Mendez back to the United States to face justice. At the end of the telling, she raised her head and stared at him. ‘That still doesn’t explain why he agreed.’
He didn’t have it in him to tell her about Carrie’s death and Lock’s guilt over it — his own guilt about what had happened. Instead, he said, ‘You should get some sleep.’
She closed her eyes, and within a minute she was asleep, leaving Ty alone in the driver’s seat with his gun, enveloped in the darkness of a place where people too poor to afford dreams made their lives.
Fifty-eight
With the desert landscape still cloaked in darkness, Lock continued his search. A four-armed saguaro cactus loomed over him, spines ready to spear him. He skirted it as the land dipped, then levelled out. For the most part the terrain had been flat and even: ground he could cover at a rapid clip. It was cold but not freezing, and dry.
He could see the outline of a man ahead on a ridge. He was standing perfectly still. Lock held his position. There was no way of knowing whether Mendez knew he was there and was watching him or whether he was simply catching his breath.
The outline moved over the ridge and out of sight. Lock took a bearing from the point he had last seen him and broke into a jog, splitting his attention between the ground beneath his boots and the far horizon. His chest felt tight as his heart protested at the continued exertion. The sweat on his back had cooled and now ran uncomfortably into the crack of his butt. In contrast, his feet were hot and swollen. His boots chafed at the back of his heels and he could almost feel the blisters as they formed. He switched his mind to Melissa, staggering into the hotel lobby, bleeding and so close to death that he had felt its presence as he had rushed her, cradled in his arms, to his car. The image pushed away his fatigue. He doubled his pace, taking measured breaths, every stride drawing him closer to Mendez.
At first he took the distant wash of noise he could hear to be the pounding of the blood in his ears but then it grew louder and more persistent. He stopped for a moment, and turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees, searching out the sound. It was coming from behind him — the distinctive thwump of rotor blades slicing through the air. A helicopter was buzzing low overhead, searching them out. A near-celestial arc of light from a front- mounted searchlight swept the landscape.
Lock was closing in on Mendez, but someone up there was closing in on both of them. He’d thought he had hours to hunt down his quarry, but now he realized he had minutes. He broke into a run. The ridge where Mendez had stood moments before was empty. Behind him, he watched the helicopter sweep sharply to his left, then double back.
He scoured the terrain for movement. Nothing. Not that it was barren. Far from it. They had come further than he had imagined. The edge of the city was within striking distance, and with it the urban camouflage that would shield him from the aircraft. But it was also a place for Mendez to find refuge if Lock didn’t reach him first.
Fifty-nine
A lone cloud swept silently across the moon, plunging the land into darkness for the briefest of moments. Charlie Mendez watched it pass as the helicopter faded into the distance. The man following him was gone, swallowed by the vast landscape. He had kept moving, putting one foot in front of the other, until his pursuer had been lost in the shadows, and with him Charlie’s fear.
He had made it and now straight ahead he could see a row of low buildings. He dug into his front pocket and
