Blood Price (Dark Places Of The Earth 1) (19 page)

Talena stared at me wide-eyed.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. I hear you. Okay.”

“One more night,” I said. “We’ll give them one more night and then try our luck ourselves.” Cain and Abel were more than half an hour late.
   “Maybe we should call Sinisa?” Saskia suggested.
   I shook my head. “If these guys don’t work out, I don’t know. He’s new around here too. I don’t think he knows anybody else.”
   “For fuck’s sake,” Talena said. “I’m supposed to work on Monday. If I don’t show up at least on Tuesday they’re going to start asking some seriously pointed questions about how exactly I got so sick.”
Not for the first time I considered abandoning Sinisa’s plan and going overland as Talena had suggested. We could rent a car in Belize City, hide Saskia in the trunk, and just drive into Mexico. What were the odds of them searching a car driven by two wealthy gringos?
   Unfortunately the more I thought about that question the higher those odds seemed. Belize, like Bosnia, was more placid than it had been ten years ago, but was still a classic smuggling nexus; loose borders, lax and/or corrupt government, a scofflaw culture. I didn’t need Sinisa to tell me that. His security concerns, while overblown, had not been entirely delusional. You could see it in the wild-eyed crackheads who roamed the grimy streets of Belize City, the rusted grids of iron bars from behind which many shopkeepers sold their wares, the lengthy “Dangers And Annoyances” section of the local Lonely Planet, the lost-generation lamentations of the local newspapers. The Mexican border guards wouldn’t expect to find a battered Bosnian refugee in the trunk of our car, but they just might look for a hidden stash of coke or pot or heroin. Talena and I fit the Big Score gringo-drug-mule profile to the proverbial T. Being Sinisa’s guinea pigs was risky, but less risky than simultaneously braving the border ourselves and earning Sinisa’s undying enmity.
   “They are here,” Saskia said.
   Indeed they were. Cain and Abel, big and small, crew cut and dreadlocks. They walked up to our table and surveyed us for a moment. I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘Hello’ seemed too trivial for what we were about to do.
   “Let’s go,” Abel said. “Time be a-wasting.”
   Hurry up and wait. Not my favourite game. We shouldered our bags, I hefted Sinisa’s briefcase, and we followed them out of Popeye’s and onto Front Street.

It was dark out, the moon had not yet risen, and when we got to Back Street there were few lights and we had to follow Cain’s flashlight down the sandy streets. He led us around a ramshackle clapboard house, we had to push our way past the encroaching palm trees, and suddenly the ocean was before us. Not much of it. The thin western passage between Caye Caulker and mainland Belize was maybe five miles wide. We could see lights on the mainland shore. Their boat was attached to a rotting wooden dock that jutted into the water behind the house. It was only a little bigger than the aluminum boats I had spent much of my teenage summers on, bombing around the lakes of northern Ontario. But it didn’t need to be big. We were going to spend our whole journey behind Belize’s mighty barrier reef, second largest in the world after Australia’s, and the ocean behind that protective shield didn’t get any rougher than the windy lakes of my youth unless a hurricane paid a visit.
   “Go on, get in,” Cain said, illuminating the front of the boat with his light.
   I felt perfectly calm and collected until I actually stepped into the boat. It bobbed in response to my weight transfer, and though I righted myself automatically something about the motion made me uneasy. My gut tautened with anxiety. I sat down on the bench, put the briefcase on my lap, and tried not to think about the fact that we were trusting these two men we had met only days ago to carry us illegally from Belize into Mexico, us and the mysterious cargo in my briefcase, on nothing more than Sinisa’s inexperienced say-so. Even if Cain and Abel were reliable we still might be intercepted by the police. A boat engine carried a long way over water at night.

The night air was warm and damp and full of mosquitos. The smell of the sea was pungent, the ocean here was unusually briny, maybe something to do with the reef. There was a slight offshore breeze. Talena sat beside me, and Saskia beside her. The disc of light cast by Cain’s flashlight illuminated a pair of fishing rods and an ancient tackle box made of cracked green plastic. Our cover story. I doubted the police would believe it for a minute. Maybe they were bribable. I hoped so. At least I could throw the briefcase overboard if we were intercepted on the open sea.

Cain and Abel sat on the back, on the other side of the boat, equalizing the weight. Abel took the flashlight and Cain started the engine. He had to yank the starter six times before the engine caught. I noticed there were no paddles and no life jackets. Abel jumped out, untied the boat from the dock, and stepped back in just before Cain switched off the flashlight and gunned the engine. The boat leapt out into the Caribbean.

It was so dark that without the electric lights on Caye Caulker, Ambergris Caye, and the mainland, I wouldn’t have known that there was any land at all nearby. The howl of the engine sounded unhealthy. Between that, the wind shrieking past my ears, and the rapid-fire thumping of bow against waves, I would have had to scream for anyone to hear me. I wondered how Cain could possibly navigate in this darkness. I envisioned him taking a wrong turn and driving straight into the dense mangrove swamps that fringed all the undeveloped land here, hurtling the three of us face-first into the jungle. I reached out and took Talena’s hand. Her heart was pulsing almost as fast as mine. I tried to focus on breathing deeply and not thinking at all, rather than imagining everything that might go wrong.

We moved north. The lights of Caye Caulker dwindled and vanished. We passed Ambergris Caye and then its lights too began to dissipate. There were no lights on the water. I began to suspect my fears of the Belizean border police had been unfounded. Belize didn’t even have enough money to keep order in its capital city. Patrolling the ocean at night was off the bottom of the country’s priority list. Mexico had more resources, but its Coast Guard probably wasn’t in a position to mount a 24-hour watch on its coastline either. If Mexico even had a Coast Guard.

About twenty minutes after leaving Caye Caulker, the engine noise dwindled to a low grumble. For a moment I was afraid that it had broken down or we were out of gas. I looked towards the back of the boat. My eyes had adjusted enough to the starlight to have an idea that Cain was looking to our left. I couldn’t tell if we were near land or not, but then I saw a flash of light to our left, and another, and the boat yawed over to head straight for that light. As we neared shore Abel switched on our flashlight.
   A little inlet led between many-branched mangrove trees, their leafy limbs reaching ten feet out from where land met sea. Cain threaded our boat through the narrow passage. It veered a little to the right and led us up to a clearing hacked roughly out of the swamp, mangrove stumps still visible amid the dirt. Big furrows that led from the clearing down into the sea told me that this place had been used for launching and unlaunching boats, at least one of them considerably bigger than Cain’s. A Toyota Land Cruiser was parked in the clearing, by the mouth of a trail maybe six feet wide and overgrown with waist-high grass. Two men sat crosslegged on its hood, smoking and playing flashlights over our boat. Shielding my eyes against their bright halogen beams, I looked back and saw that the inlet trail had curved enough that the Land Cruiser was invisible from the open sea. I wondered how much cocaine had passed through this makeshift landing. My best guess was ‘a whole lot.’
   Cain drove the boat right up onto land until four feet of it protruded onto the muddy shore of the clearing. We had to hold on tightly to avoid falling off as it rolled to the left and came to a stop. Cain switched off the engine, and Talena and Saskia and I stepped out into wet mud.
   “Hey man, whas’ going on?” Abel asked brightly.
   The guys on the Land Cruiser dismounted but didn’t answer his question. In the light of Abel’s flashlight they looked pretty creepy. Both of them were short but so heavily muscled that steroids had to be one of their four basic food groups, and both were tattooed with vivid murals featuring heavy use of jaguars, eagles, guns, knives, and skulls. They weren’t actually twins but looked similar enough that they could easily have been brothers.
   Talena and Saskia and I squelched our way up to the Land Cruiser, which was parked on slightly more solid land.
   “Hi,” I said, trying to sound bright and chirpy and unafraid. “I’m Paul.”
   I held out my hand to shake but they ignored it and looked past me to the boat. I couldn’t really blame them since their hands were full of flashlights and cigarettes. After a moment I dropped my hand and looked back. I nearly gasped at the sight of the Uzi now hanging around Cain’s shoulder on what looked like a guitar strap. An unexpected gun always looks obscene and unreal, like a movie prop. Cain followed Abel off the boat. Abel was holding two stapled-shut sacks about the size of pillow cases.
   “Not just us being smuggled tonight,” Talena muttered.
   I nodded uneasily. I was guessing it was just pot, from the way the sacks bulged, full of something loosely packed instead of some kind of dense powdered drug. But I didn’t want to be part of any drug deal at all, especially one with guns involved. And when the Mexicans walked towards Cain and Abel, ignoring us completely, I saw that they carried pistols tucked behind their backs.
   A long and frequently hostile discussion followed, in Spanish, between Cain and the Mexicans. We leaned against the Land Cruiser and watched nervously. I hoped they weren’t arguing about money. If things went terribly wrong there wasn’t much we could do. The mangrove jungle was too thick to flee into. The only bargaining chips we had were the threat of Sinisa’s wrath, which might not count for much down here, at least not yet, and the fact that being white Americans our deaths would presumably not go uninvestigated. I wondered what would happen if the Latinos did suddenly turn on us and kill us. We would probably just vanish. Our bodies would never be discovered. Sinisa would regretfully write us off as a business expense. No governmental body would ever investigate.

But Hallam, Nicole, Lawrence, Steve, my friends in London, they would come to find out what had happened to us. I was sure of that. They knew we were here, I had kept them posted via email. It was somehow reassuring, knowing that even if these men betrayed us, even if we died here on this lonely smuggler’s trail, I had friends who would turn over every stone in this country to find out what had happened to me.
   The mellifluous flow of Spanish finally dried up. One of the musclebound Mexicans dug into a shoulder bag and came up with a shopping bag wrapped around what looked like a small brick. Money, I realized, U.S. dollars, I couldn’t tell the denomination but if it was twenties than the total had to be four or five thousand. He opened it up and partitioned it, keeping the smaller chunk and passing the larger to Cain. Cain counted his money, which took some time, and in the end he grunted his approval. I worked out what was happening. The Mexicans owed Cain for the pot, but Cain owed them for smuggling us. It looked like we were less valuable than the pot. I wondered if we should be insulted.
   Then, the deal complete, big smiles broke out on all four smuggler’s faces and they started laughing and joking and talking mile-a-second Spanish and clapping one another on the shoulder, like old friends at a party. A few minutes later, Cain and Abel returned to the boat, restarted the engine, and reversed out of the little inlet and into the darkness of the sea.
   The Mexican steroid twins motioned us into the back seat of the Land Cruiser. The seats were torn and smelled powerfully of fish. The road through the mangrove jungle was a pair of pitted dirt tracks that crawled over extremely uneven terrain, but the Land Cruiser was equal to the task. Eventually we emerged from the jungle and turned onto a paved road. A half-hour later the three of us were in Chetumal’s bus station, waiting for the last bus to Cancun.
* * *
   “Only one border to go,” I said, later that night. We sat in one of Cancun’s hundreds of hotels, cheaper and tawdrier than most, but the water pressure was good and the sheets tattered but clean. The clerk had copied information from my passport without looking up to see if I matched the picture. I had already forgotten the name of the place. Cancun was an awful town, all neon faux-glitz and cheesy dance clubs targeted at mindless hard-partying American college students, but it was a major transit nexus and a town where three white people could stay in complete anonymity.
   “If it’s even remotely like that last border you should stay in Mexico,” Talena said.
   “We’re here, aren’t we?”
   “Sure. Because the drug smugglers happened to be in a good mood and didn’t screw each other over for once. This is fucked up, Paul. You’re guinea pigs, you got that right, but not for people who are going to come after you. For drugs. That briefcase is the tip of the iceberg. Sinisa brought a boatload of something over in that private jet and he wants to get it into America and sell it. You two are here to make sure the road is open.”
   “You’re probably right,” I said. “I bet when I call the number Sinisa gave us it’ll be a drug smuggler who answers. But that’s not the point. We have to focus on getting Saskia over the border.”
   “Yes. But we don’t go with drug smugglers. That’s needlessly dangerous. That’s way more dangerous than it needs to be. We dump that briefcase in a trash can somewhere and do it ourselves. There’s what, a quarter of a million people who go across this border every year? Paul, this should be
easy
.”

That was true. Hundreds of would-be migrants died in the searing heat of the borderland desert every years, thousands more were intercepted by America’s Border Guard, and there were plenty of stories of coyotes, professional smugglers, imprisoning their clients in so-called safe houses until their families ransomed them – but Talena was right, the vast majority of would-be Mexican illegals made it safely into America. Turning to drug smugglers for help getting across the border did sound a bit like using high explosives to landscape your garden.
   “But what will Sinisa do if we leave his briefcase?” Saskia asked.
   I looked at the nondescript briefcase and the small lock that sealed it shut. I felt like I was starring in the prequel to Pulp Fiction. Sinisa’s briefcase looked a lot like that one. It didn’t seem fair that my life revolved around this battered article of luggage and its unknowable contents.