Wild Card

Salvetti turned and started back toward the pickup.

“Doesn’t look like some boondocks rancher,” Ricci said, watching him. “Or sound like one.”

Lathrop faced him but didn’t say anything.

“Chicago, south side,” Ricci said. “I’d guess that’s the accent.”

Lathrop remained silent another moment and then shrugged.

“He is what he is,” he said. “If he used to be something else and wants to tell you about it, it’s up to him.”

* * *

Salvetti’s ranch house was a small, single-story building with rustic furnishings that looked as if they were mostly handcrafted. Its main room was off the kitchen and had a large trestle table with benches on either side, a Native American rug of some kind in the middle of the dark hardwood floor, and pine chests and chairs here and there around it. Ricci saw a computer in a hutch against one wall, a crowded bookshelf above it, and against the opposite wall a stereo with a turntable on a stand beside several stacked crates of vinyl albums. He didn’t notice a television.

“I’ve got something for your stomachs,” Salvetti said. He’d emerged from the kitchen with a tray of sandwiches and sweating ice-cold soda cans and set it at one end of the table. “Grab whatever you want; the bread and cheese are homemade.”

Lathrop sat on a bench and reached for a sandwich. Ignoring the food, Ricci stepped toward the opposite end of the table to look at a pile of open and semi-unfolded maps.

“These for us?” he said.

Salvetti nodded, came around next to him.

“I had most of them handy, downloaded the rest off the Internet. Aerials, government topos, Triple-A road maps.” He shuffled one out of the pile and fully outspread it. “This’s a satellite closeup of that area out there south of Yosemite.” He glanced over at Lathrop. “I circled off your major landmarks. The twin buttes, that creek… only thing I couldn’t locate is the Miwok trail. If it’s really there like the man told you, you’ll have to sniff it out on your own.”

Ricci looked at him.

“Miwok?”

“It’s the name somebody or other gave the Sierra Nevada Indian tribes after they were happy to call themselves Ahwaneechee for four thousand years,” Salvetti said.

“For God’s sake,” Lathrop said. “Listen to you.”

Salvetti smiled a little.

“It pays to know your neighbors,” he said. “Or at least to know who they are.”

Lathrop rose from the bench and joined the other two, carrying his sandwich with him.

“You decide on someplace to put us down?” he asked.

Salvetti slid a finger over the map until he got to a site he’d inked a heavy black ring around, then tapped it twice.

“This mesa here should be perfect,” he said. “It’s low and wide so you can hardly notice its elevation. Pretty naked, too, and that’s firsthand knowledge… I’ve flown over it before.” He paused. “Brings you to within five miles of those buttes, the closest I can get.”

Ricci looked at him again.

“Seems like it’d be a rough landing.”

Salvetti seemed mildly surprised by his remark.

“I tell people I can bring them anywhere in my plane,” he said. “They won’t ever hear me guarantee it’s going to be easy.”

* * *

The moment he entered the hut, Pedro saw Marissa Vasquez watching him from her place on the floor. Always, she watched him. And always looking back into her eyes filled Pedro with a venom for this schooled and coddled daughter of privilege that only equaled his desire to have his way with her. It was as if the hateful resentment and lust fueled each other, and he wanted her to feel its relentless, intolerable inner burning just as he felt it. Physically feel its volcanic release inside her. And soon enough, when the time came, he would do it. He would treat her no better than the cheap Tijuana whores he left weeping in pain and degradation on their filthy sheets, on their bare backs, his crumpled bills reclaimed from the purses in which they had stuffed them. Treat her without even as much regard, for they did not ever think to stand up taller than he. Soon, yes, soon. Pedro would give her what roared within him like an angry, hungering beast, pound it into her, and as she fought and cried out in resistance, he would let her have still more of it. He would force upon her an education that not all her father’s wealth could have provided, show her for once what it was to live in common flesh. And in that sharing Pedro would take something from her as well, for whatever long or short time she had left. And there, for him, would be the true and lasting satisfaction.

He stepped toward her in his combat-booted feet now, stood with hands on his hips. Her face was gaunt from weariness and anxiety, her hair hanging around it in tousled disarray. But her eyes were sharp and clear.

And they watched him

“I have good news, hermosa,” he said. And glanced at her constant guard. “If Cesar has not already broken it.”

Marissa said nothing. The guard shook his head slightly but did not otherwise move. He would, of course, never have taken it upon himself to tell her of the information that had reached them from Modesto.

“A man comes to free you,” Pedro said. “As soon as today, I am led to believe.”

She did not speak.

“He has been sent by your father,” he said. “A gringo whose services the millionaire Esteban Vasquez has bought, as he always buys his adored nina’s safety and comfort with his money.”

She studied Pedro’s masked face with restrained interest, as if not wishing to yield him the gratification of a perceived ruse. Her composed silence and stillness clawed at his stomach, made him impatient for the release he himself held tightly in check.

“Do you believe me about this?” he asked.

She did not speak.

“Do you believe me?” he repeated, an insistent edge in his voice.

Marissa finally shrugged.

“I’m not sure about anything my father will do,” she said. “If someone comes, I suppose I’ll know.”

“Perhaps only after I throw your rescuer’s dead body at your feet,” Pedro said. “For the impressive gringo who comes for you, this one who is said to have delivered the daughter of a great and famous American businessman from her own unfortunate captivity, has been betrayed by his companero for the money of the millionaire who pays me.” He showed a grin through the mouth opening of his balaclava. “We know where he will arrive. We know about when. And even now my men disperse to set their trap for him.”

Marissa looked at him without answering.

Pedro’s grin hardened. “So what do you think, flora?” he said. “Of how money brings us full circle, and the rest?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, released a drawn out but steady breath.

“I don’t know what to say that you would understand,” she replied.

Pedro stared at the girl a second, feeling the angry urge to take her right there and then. On the ground, in the dirt, with his hands around her throat, he would add to her humiliation by doing it while Cesar watched. But then he caught hold of himself. This affair was not over, not yet. If he was to collect on his own fee, he must still be bound to Juan Quiros’s wishes.

He turned back through the hut entrance, suddenly perspiring under his full face hood, his mouth parched with thirst. Outside, he started to reach for the water canteen on his gear belt but changed his mind, his hand going instead to the metal flask of whiskey in his breast pocket.

The deep swig Pedro took quenched neither his thirst nor his seething rage. He had not expected that it would.

The slut’s time was coming, he thought, and swiped a hand across his lips.