the two, had printed them out, and had been questioning the hotel staff and guests. Dante Corrales had watched them from the car across the street, and he’d sent one of the four men who’d come with Maria into the hotel to learn more.
“Have you seen these missing tourists?” they’d demanded.
“No,” Corrales’s man had lied.
Pablo was now seated to his right, Maria to his left, and his arm and shoulder were still throbbing as he ordered the driver to pull away.
“Dante, if you won’t talk to Fernando, then I’m not sure what to do. They’ll hunt me down and kill me, too, along with those men.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Corrales lied. “Don’t worry. Fernando has never had contact with them, so I’ll take care of everything.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Maria.
“Just like I said. We’ll get the money from La Familia, and then we’ll call Salou. He has them. We’ll get them back, and all will be well.”
“How will you explain it to Castillo?”
“I’m thinking about that, but I’m sure he’s busy trying to figure out how he screwed up and let a shooter get so close to the boss.”
Abruptly, the driver, who’d been listening to an AM news station, turned back and said, “Big shooting up in San Juan Chamula. Whole bunch of bodies up there.”
“Do you think it’s them?” asked Pablo.
Corrales’s heart sank. He checked his watch. “We have time to find out.” He called out to the driver, “Take us up there. Now!”
The situation could not have become more confusing. When Corrales and his party arrived in the small town, they sent out another of the men, who returned with his report: It appeared military rebels had been killed. The police had cordoned off the area.
“I looked for Raul, like you said,” his man reported. “They pulled out a decapitated body, and the pants were khaki-colored, like you said. I think it was Raul.”
Corrales gritted his teeth and thumbed off his phone. Salou was not answering and might very well be among the dead. Had Castillo’s men arrived and attacked Salou? If so, then why hadn’t he called Corrales?
Now Corrales might need to call back La Familia, tell them he didn’t need the loan — which would piss them off even more than his original call had. He really did need to call Castillo, to at least get some closure on the situation.
But not now. Not yet. He still hadn’t thought of what he’d say …
“They’ll expect us to go to the airport,” he finally told the group. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t care if we drive all night. Head up north, up to Villahermosa. There’s another airport we’ve used in the past.”
“I’m scared, Dante,” said Maria. “I’m very scared. I just want to go back home.”
He wrapped his good arm around her and whispered, “I know, but I told you, this will all pass.”
Corrales’s phone rang. Incoming call from Castillo. He should take it, find out the truth, and answer Castillo’s questions with lies: They attacked, and I don’t know why. Instead, he hid the screen from Maria and ignored the call.
He closed his eyes and threw his head back on the seat. Those car fires outside the house up in Chamula had struck a chord, but now all Corrales wanted to do was sleep, sleep away all of his problems.
The phone rang again. Castillo. He turned it off.
So here they were, all because of a grave error: Corrales had assumed that Salou would be too intimidated to stand up to the all-powerful Juarez Cartel. Salou would allow himself to be ripped off and not retaliate for fear of a response. But Corrales was no veteran and had not accounted for the resolve of military men, a resolve he’d become excruciatingly familiar with now.
During the drive back down from Chamula, Miguel had argued with Sonia that they should go directly to the police, but she worried about those officers being in bed with the men who’d captured them. She said they should do what his father’s soldier had told them and head to the airport. Their cell phones had been confiscated by their kidnappers, and Miguel thought the least they should do was stop so that he could call his father.
But Sonia would have none of that. She was behind the wheel, racing down the narrow street, the headlights barely picking out their path until the small yellow sign on the side of the road finally indicated a left toward the San Cristobal de las Casas Airport.
Once they reached the modest main terminal, only then did Sonia park and say, “Okay, we’ll call your father. I think we are okay now …”
Miguel raked his fingers through his hair and rubbed his tired eyes as they strode into the terminal and found a pay phone that accepted only phone cards. They swore and ran over to a small shop, where they were able to purchase a card for thirty pesos.
With an unsteady hand he reached his father’s personal voice mail. Of course the man wouldn’t pick up; he wouldn’t have recognized the number.
The message was frantic, fragmented, enough to allow his father to know he was still alive and that he and Sonia were unharmed. He had no idea what had happened to Corrales and the other two but was thankful his father’s men had arrived, although he wasn’t sure why they’d been left to escape on their own and had not been escorted.
When he hung up, he looked into Sonia’s eyes and shook his head in disbelief. “You are the strongest woman I know. Stronger than my mother was — and that’s saying a lot.”
“Do you mean to say you can’t believe how strong I am — even though I’m a woman?” She raised one brow.
He grinned. “No, what I mean to say is …
“You’re welcome,” she said.
“How could you stay so calm? I thought I was going to pass out.”
“I didn’t think they’d kill us. We were worth too much to them, so I decided to be strong …for you.”
“But still …”
“Well, sometimes I just get more mad than scared.”
“I hope that someday you can teach me how to do that. I want to learn from you.”
She breathed deeply and glanced away, her lip trembling as though she was about to cry.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Miguel glanced up at a flat-screen TV, where news footage showed a crowd scattering and the caption read: ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT ON JORGE ROJAS.
He gasped.
Jorge Rojas had built his main home in a world-renowned center for the study of Spanish. Cuernavaca was equally famous for its lush parks and gardens, its charming zocalo, or town center, with historic colonial architecture and numerous restaurants and street cafes, and its university, which attracted artists and intellectuals from all over the world. The Rojas mansion — all 7,800 square feet of it, based on sixteenth-century architectural designs — overlooked the town and was even more well decorated and audacious than his vacation residence in Acapulco, with library, home theater, game room, gym, and all the other amenities one would expect in a residence owned by a man of his stature. His wife had dubbed it La Casa de la Eterna Primavera and had decorated it, along with a team of designers. After she’d passed away, he had not changed a single thing. This place was his safe haven, his Shangri-la that he longed for every time he traveled. In Cuernavaca he was surrounded by his family and the memories of his dear wife, and there’d been months in the past when he’d worked from home and had rarely left its confines. The vacation home in Punta de Mita was a great place for parties and fund-raisers, but it never
