while they were making arrangements for the funeral, they had asked Lock for his thoughts on her final resting- place. Because his work involved so much travel, he had thought it best that she stayed close to them. What meagre roots he had lay with her, and she was gone. She had been his home.
This was his first visit to her grave in a little more than four months. He suspected that, however good anyone’s intentions, lengthening intervals between such visits were the reality.
He had brought a small bunch of white lilies with him. Falling on to one knee, and feeling the poignancy of that motion, he laid them gently against her gravestone, next to some other flowers placed there by her mother a few days before.
He had visited her parents earlier that morning. They were, as they had been since her death, warm and welcoming. He wasn’t sure that he would have felt the same way. It had been his mistake that had led to her death in California, but they graciously saw it as just that — a mistake, a cruel intervention of Fate.
While he had sat in their living room drinking coffee, he had told them about events in Mexico. The story had splashed big on both sides of the border, although the Justice Department, for reasons of their own, had managed to downplay his involvement. He and Ty had helped them out by spending the past few months very firmly off-the- radar.
Since the trap that they had helped set for Miriam Mendez and Police Chief Zapatero in the motel room outside Phoenix, events had moved fast. Charlie Mendez was now inside the Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay. For his own safety, he would remain there indefinitely, alone in a single cell, allowed out for a solitary hour of exercise once a day. It was, as far as Lock saw it, a fate worse than death. More importantly, he was where he could do no harm to any other young woman. Despite the white-hot rush of anger he had felt when he’d pursued him, Lock had realized that Melissa’s wish to see him returned to serve the sentence handed down by the court had been right and proper. It would have been easy for Lock to put a bullet in Mendez’s brain. It would also have been wrong.
In what some might have seen as a righteous act of karma, Miriam Mendez wasn’t going to make it to trial, never mind a jail cell. Her cancer had returned, for real this time, and she was, according to his contacts in Santa Barbara, deteriorating fast. Death’s hand on her shoulder must have woken something in her conscience because she had handed the US government all of the details of the family’s deal with the cartel. In return for her son’s protection, the cartel had used the family’s varied business interests as a way of laundering their drug money — at a nice profit for both sides. Police Chief Zapatero, knowing that his arrest by the US authorities was as good as a death sentence, had, in return for immunity from prosecution, confirmed her story.
On the other side of the border Manuel Managua, the politician, had been arrested. Federico Tibialis could not be found. There was a ten-million-dollar price on his head but he had more money than either God or Santa Muerte, and would likely stay on the run for longer than Charlie Mendez had managed. Despite Ty’s best efforts to convince him to reprise their new career, Lock had decided that their temporary detour into bounty hunting was best left at that.
Like her boss, Rafaela had also been offered protection by the US government — albeit under terms dictated by the fact that she was wholly innocent of any wrongdoing. At first she had turned down their offer of Federal protection, until a long, exhausting talk with Lock had persuaded her that she was more useful to everyone alive. She was staying at a secret location somewhere in the United States and helping both governments piece together what had happened to the young women she thought of as her girls. Depressingly for everyone, the vile activities of the three men, Managua, Tibialis and Zapatero, still accounted for only a fraction of the deaths. There were other predators out there in the borderlands. The killings were an epidemic.
Julia was slowly coming to terms with her ordeal, and receiving private counselling, paid for by Lock when her parents had been told by their private insurance company that their policy didn’t cover the treatment she needed. Julia might never be the same person, but she would come to terms with what had happened and, he prayed, be able to move on with her life. He had long since realized that was as good as it got. You made your peace with events. You didn’t forget, but if you took one day at a time then slowly you found that life went on.
Lock stood in front of Carrie’s grave for a while longer until his eyes were wet and his bones chilled. After an hour, he turned around and walked back towards the cemetery gates. Ty was waiting for him with Angel, the Labrador he had adopted with Carrie and who had been staying with friends of Ty while he and Lock worked.
The dog danced excitedly at Lock’s feet, and he reached down to scratch behind its ears. Finally Ty said, ‘Dumb question, I know, but you okay, brother?’
With no artifice between the two men, Lock shook his head. ‘Still hurts, Ty. Hurts like hell.’
His friend placed a massive hand on Lock’s shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t mean nothing if it didn’t.’
