his mouth, pulled out the sock and held it up in front of Mendez between pinched finger and thumb.
‘What?’ Mendez asked.
‘You know you were saying that I could do better than a few hundred thousand bucks? Well, it seems like your buddies down here agree. In fact, they just made me an offer. Five times my cut of the bond for bringing you back.’
‘A million bucks? Bullshit,’ Mendez said, his voice rising.
Lock held up an open palm and maintained eye contact. ‘Asshole’s honour.’
‘You can’t hand me over to them. They’ll kill me.’
‘There is that. It would definitely be a breach of my ethics. But I’d bet that a million bucks would take my mind off that. It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a guy like me, don’t you think?’
‘So you can be bought, after all,’ Mendez said.
Lock shrugged. ‘I guess so. Looks like you were right.’
‘Two!’ Mendez hissed.
Lock cocked his head to one side. ‘Two what?’
‘Two million. My family will give you two million.’
‘To let you go?’
Mendez nodded. ‘That’s double what they’re offering.’
‘True. But if I take a million from them, you’d be dead, not wandering around preying on other girls. My conscience would be clear. Pretty much clear, anyway. What you’re suggesting is way different.’
‘Three, then,’ said Mendez, suddenly. ‘In cash. Tax free. Account in the Cayman Islands. Switzerland. Wherever you like.’
‘Forget it,’ said Lock.
‘Okay, five. Final offer. Take it or leave it.’
‘You play pretty fast and loose with your family’s money. A minute ago it was two million. Now it’s five. You’re a hell of a negotiator, buddy.’
‘Who said it was my family’s money?’
Lock took a step back. Bingo, he thought. There it was. Confirmation of what Ty had told him.
‘Okay, back up there, Charlie. You’re losing me. They want to give me a million to kill you. But your family can give me five million of the cartel’s money to keep you safe. How does that work?’
Something flickered over Mendez’s face that suggested he’d shown Lock too much of his hand. ‘What does it matter where the money comes from?’
‘Well, when you’re asking me to double-cross a major drugs cartel, I’d say it matters a lot. I want to be around to spend it, after all. Million in hand, with no reason to keep looking over my shoulder, sounds better than five and a bunch of ulcers.’ Lock let the sock drop to the floor. ‘If I’m getting into this, I’m going to need to know what I’m dealing with here. Why would you be able to access their funds?’
‘I can’t tell you that,’ said Mendez.
Doesn’t matter, Lock thought, you’ve already told me all I need to know.
‘The final offer’s five million,’ said Mendez. ‘Two when you get me across the border. The rest when I’m safely out of America.’
Lock studied the floor, apparently mulling over the offer, as the pieces clicked neatly into place. There had been one question to which he hadn’t fathomed an answer: why would a cartel risk all this heat over a scumbag rapist like Charlie Mendez? Now he knew.
His chin sank to his chest. He thought of Melissa Warner. He thought of the other dead girls. He thought of Rafaela’s indignation that two Americans, himself and Ty, would go to all this trouble over one dead and one kidnapped white girl without any concern for the legion of dead brown girls. Then, as the sun dropped towards the horizon and the room began to darken, he folded away his thoughts of the past.
‘Three million up front and you have yourself a deal,’ he said to Mendez.
Seventy-two
As dusk fell, Lock led an unbound Mendez out of the back of the shack, across the scrubby patch of grass, over a rickety wooden fence with missing slats and into a back alley. In an ideal world, they would have left later, but Lock had no way of knowing when the woman whose home it was would return. Even more crucially, his cell phone had been powered up: there had been half a dozen phone calls as Mendez had made the arrangements for the money to be transferred. Every minute they stayed conceivably brought them a minute closer to being found.
The scuff of sneakers at the end of the alley sent Lock’s hand to the butt of his gun. A few seconds later a soccer ball rolled into view. It was followed by two teenage boys. They froze at the sight of the two men. Lock trapped the ball under his foot and waved them forward. He peeled off two five-dollar bills and handed one to each of them. ‘You didn’t see us,’ he said, tapping the ball back to them.
They traded a look, shoved the money into the pockets of their baggy jeans and sloped off into the gloom. Lock tapped at Mendez’s elbow and they moved off.
At the end of the alley Lock hunkered down in the dirt and checked their position on his GPS. Three hundred yards ahead lay a marshalling yard, used to store containers before they were hooked up to trucks and taken off for loading further south or north. When he had come across the yard on an earlier recon, he had thought about holing up in a container but decided against it. Right now they were less than a quarter-mile from the border, but the containers could end up anywhere. Cargo moved across the border came from as far away as China and went back that way too. Get in a container and you could die in there. It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take, but if they could make it to the marshalling yard they could use that as cover and as a final staging post. Once they were inside and reached the north-eastern corner of the yard, all that would stand between them and America was a long sprint across open ground towards the river and the newly erected border fence.
Crouched in the dirt, he watched the moon rise, and they waited for a truck to roll towards the yard entrance. At last one did and they made their move, running in a low crouch behind it, and using its trailer as cover to take them inside the perimeter as a sleepy-eyed guard waved it through.
Safely inside, Lock found a narrow gap between two stacks of blue and red shipping containers, and Mendez sat down with his back to one. The yard’s security was minimal — the guard on the gate and one more inside. No casual crew of thieves would touch any of the containers: it was all too likely that they would pick one being run by the cartels, and the price for that kind of mistake was death. No cop would be allowed inside to check the containers either, not without a warrant. There was too much risk that they would find something they shouldn’t, something they couldn’t turn a blind eye to.
In the near distance, Lock could see America through a gap in the newly erected border fence. But they weren’t going anywhere. Not yet, anyway.
Seventy-three
An hour passed and the temperature dropped. Behind the marshalling yard, armed police had massed at the edge of the colonia, ready for one more sweep. Officers in riot gear were positioned at fifty-yard intervals, one facing in, the next looking out. Their vehicles were parked so close to the yard that Lock could hear the ticking of engines cooling.
Maybe the woman whose home they had invaded had made a report. Maybe the boys with the soccer ball had decided they could make more than five bucks. Or maybe the cartel had triangulated the position of the calls made from the cell phone. The reason didn’t matter. The cops knew he was close by. But they didn’t know where exactly. They must have assumed he was still in the colonia. They would figure out he wasn’t. The only question remaining was how long it would take them.
With the police so close, Lock spent the time trying to estimate their chance of surviving the dash from where
