Damage Control (15 page)

Abrams regained control. “I gotta tell you, then, if it ain’t the cops that are comin’ at you, then chances are it’s the targets that are on the way. I don’t really know who these guys are, but I know people who’ve crossed them in the past, and frankly, Madre, you’d be better off if it was the cops. Give me a second to think this through.”

Again, she could see his face in her mind. He had a tendency to rub his mouth with his fingers when he was steeped in thought.

“Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do,” Abrams said. “I’m gonna lean on a friend to beef up your security forces there. Give you some real professional talent.”

“We have a security force,” Jackie said.

“No, you don’t. You’ve got rent-a-cops who hang out in your lobby and look important. The guys I’m sending over actually know what they’re doing.”

“What are they going to do when they get here?” Jackie asked. “I mean, what will they, you know,
do
?”

A beat passed in silence. “My God, Madre, you really don’t get it, do you? You helped us try to kill two very, very dangerous men. Only it didn’t work. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, but if we don’t stop them, these very dangerous men are gonna declare war. If they’ve figured out that you’re connected to it all—and I’m guessing that if they’ve followed the trail to the donors, then they’ve figured it out—your Crystal Palace is gonna be like the modern-day Omaha Beach. Are you following me?”

Again, it was important to make sure that all terms were properly defined. “You’re saying that they’re going to seek revenge.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Abrams said. “Only last time I saw these guys
seek revenge
, they burned close to a hundred acres and killed a couple dozen people. That’s more than your standard revenge, don’t you think?”

As her knees went weak, Jackie sat on the edge of her desk, in the process knocking over three pictures of her standing with as many presidents of the United States. “Oh my good Lord,” she said.

“Well, he’d be good to have on your side,” Abrams mocked, “but I’m betting He’s gonna let you ride this one out without Him. If these folks bring you a war, I think you should have some soldiers to fight back with. That’s what I’m gonna send you. They should be there in the morning.”

It was all more than Jackie could process. Might there be violence here? In this holy place? Surely not.

“You still there, Madre?”

“Yes, Mr. Abrams, I’m still here.”

“Good, ’cause I got one more bit of advice for you: If this shit doesn’t get straightened out, it’s time to have a rearview mirror installed on your forehead.”

The church kept its truck in a makeshift garage—a cross between a barn and a shed—in the far northwest corner of the property. Boxers had moved the rickety Toyota to the yard next to the barn, and Jonathan worked with him to transfer their gear from the Toyota to the Pathfinder. The jerricans of gasoline took up far more room than anything else. Tristan was off with his host family, and while that instilled some element of unease in Jonathan, it was nice to be shed of the kid for a while.

“Okay, Boss,” Boxers said, “so now we’ve got a new vehicle. What are we going to do with it?” He carried two fifty-pound rucksacks as if they were briefcases.

Jonathan laughed. “Here’s where the plan gets a little fuzzy.”

“You don’t have a clue, do you?” Boxers joined him in the laughter.

“We actually have a contact now. In Ciudad Juárez. Her name is Maria Elizondo.”

“Where does this name come from?” Big Guy asked.

“Wolverine via Special Friend via Mother Hen.”

Boxers laughed louder. “One day, I want to see a transcript of my life. Even I am shocked that all this shit makes sense to me. Who, pray tell, is Maria Elizondo?”

Jonathan filled him in on the details relayed from Irene Rivers.

Boxers threw the rucks onto the backseat, leaving just enough room for their PC’s narrow ass. “Does Ms. Elizondo know we’re coming?” he asked.

“Probably not. But we bring the offer of asylum if she shows us the way to the secret tunnels she claims to know about.”

“Wonderful. So all we have to do is convince her to believe a couple of random gringos. What could possibly go wrong?”

“Suppose I promise to let you shoot someone?” Jonathan quipped. “Will that make you feel better?”

“Don’t tease me,” Boxers joked back. “What about new IDs?”

Jonathan shrugged. “If this works, we won’t need them. And if it doesn’t work, we
really
won’t need them.”

Boxers turned serious as he dumped the last of the duffels onto the floor of the Pathfinder. “We’re putting a lot of faith in someone we’ve never heard of.”

“No,” Jonathan corrected. “We’re putting a lot of faith in Wolverine, who’s never let us down.” It was a statement of fact, but Boxers’ larger point was undeniable. Trust did not come easily to either one of them. After the events of today, it was an especially rare commodity.

“So, all we have to do is cross a thousand miles of jungle and desert,” Boxers said. “And after that, we get to the hard part.” The center of Mexico was much like the center of Nevada—a lot of hot, sandy rolling nothingness.

“Something like that,” Jonathan agreed. Boxers sounded cranky, but Jonathan knew that he loved a good adventure. “It’ll be dark in twenty or thirty minutes. We’ll give Tristan an hour or two to clean up and grab some food, then we’ll head out.”

Boxers scowled as he ran numbers through his head. “You know that’s thirty or forty hours of driving time, right? Divided by ten hours of darkness each night, that’s four days, Dig. That’s a lot of time for the bad guys to get their shit together. The last five hundred miles or so will be through the desert. That means we’ll be
really
exposed.”

Jonathan wasn’t hearing anything he didn’t already know. “I thought about going to the coast and finding a boat, but once we get close to the U.S. shore, the Coasties will be all over us.”

“How’s that different from a land crossing? I mean if Maria What’s-her-face turns out to be a bust?”

“Uncle Sam doesn’t have radar deployed along land. Terra firma leaves us with more options to duck and dodge. And if Maria Elizondo turns out to be a dead end, we’ll have to go back to the original plan and find us a forger.”

Boxers crossed his arms and leaned back against the side of the truck, his legs crossed in front of him. “You figuring to drive at night and hunker down during the day?”

“Exactly,” Jonathan said. “I think it’s foolish to assume that someone in this village isn’t going to turn us in. We took out their ability to make a landline call, and I don’t think there’s a useable cell tower within twenty miles, but there’s still shortwave and God knows what else. Father Perón made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t think that we’re safe here, and that the longer we’re around, the more danger we pose to the villagers. I want to be well-gone before any of that happens.”

Boxers shrugged. “Maybe we should just plow straight through and take our chances. The less time in country, the better our chances, right?”

“Depends. There are a lot of moving parts to this thing. The closer we get to the border, the more surveillance there is. I’m not sure it’s in our best interests to get there before Mother Hen and Lady Justice have had a chance to work out what’s really going on here. I know that you won’t go to jail without a fight—”

“Got that right.”

“—and I know that Wolverine doesn’t want us in custody, either. Meanwhile, we’ve got to assume that there’s a shoot-on-sight order out there for us here in Mexico.”

“So let’s just plow through and take our chances,” Boxers said.

It was a fair argument, Jonathan thought. The toughest roads were going to be through the jungle. Once they hit the desert stretches of Chihuahua they’d be able to haul ass. Using night vision, they could haul ass invisibly. “Okay,” he said. “I say we drive hard and long to put as much space as possible between us and this place. Under the cover of the jungle, I don’t see a problem driving in the daytime. When we get to the desert, we pull out all the stops. That’ll give the home team two days to untie the other end of the knot.”

Boxers sealed the deal with a nod. “Done,” he said. Then: “Who do you think is trying to screw us?”

“According to Mother Hen, Wolverine thinks she knows.” He caught Boxers up on all that he had learned through Dom’s chat with Irene.

“Unbelievable,” the Big Guy said when he was done. “So that asshole Ponder is diddling me from the grave. Man, I knew I should have killed him twice.”

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

A
s Tristan’s hosts led him into their house, the father flipped the light switch on. Tristan was surprised to see that it still worked, but then remembered that Scorpion had killed the telephones, not the power. The mother gestured to a cane-back chair that was pulled up to a four-place wooden table. As far as he could tell, the tiny house consisted only of two rooms—the kitchen, which was just inside the front door, and a dark living room on the far side of an archway.

She nodded to Tristan. “I am Dorotea,” she said. “This is my husband Roberto—”

The man nodded, but he did not offer his hand.

“—And this is our daughter Rebecca. She is fifteen.”

Fifteen my ass,
Tristan didn’t say.
She’s equipped like she’s eighteen.
He tried not to be a perv and stare, but the girl had the kind of chest that was hard to ignore. He found himself becoming aroused by the oscillating breasts beneath her T-shirt, and tried to think of something else. He was in enough trouble already; the last thing he needed was to piss off her already-grumpy father by pitching a tent in his underwear while ogling jailbait.

“My name is Tristan,” he said. He sat in the chair, and Rebecca sat opposite him. She smiled. Constantly.

“Father Perón tells us that you are in trouble,” Dorotea said. “What kind of trouble would that be?”

“I, um, don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that,” he said. Fear grabbed a fistful of his guts. Why hadn’t anyone prepared him for this question?

“Yet we are supposed to feed you,” Roberto said. “This seems unfair, does it not?”

Actually, it did. “I just think I’m not supposed to say anything. If you knew, you’d be in danger.”

“Are we not in danger already?” Dorotea used a hand pump to fill two five-gallon cook pots with water, and hefted them onto the stove, which she lit with a wooden match after cranking on the gas.

“Of course we are,” Roberto said. “This boy and his friends have placed us in danger.”

“His name is Tristan, Papa.”

Big tits, a hot smile, and now she was defending him. Tristan prayed that he wouldn’t have to stand up and reveal that which was standing up.

“Where are your clothes?” Roberto asked. “And why is there blood on your arms and legs?”

Tristan’s stomach seized again. How do you explain blood without triggering something akin to panic? “I, um ...” It was the best he could do.

Dorotea took stuff from the refrigerator and started preparing dinner. She fired up some other burners on the stove, and the kitchen filled with the rich aroma of spicy food. “Are you a killer, Mr. Tristan?” she asked.

The fist in Tristan’s gut tightened more.

“You’re being rude,” Rebecca said. “Tristan is our guest. Can’t you see that he doesn’t want to talk about this?”

Roberto pressed on. “Tell me, Tristan. How can it be that in these troubled times, a boy as young as you can look as if he’s seen so much violence?”

Tristan cleared his throat. “It’s very ...” He searched for the correct word in Spanish. “Complicated.”

Roberto pulled out the chair to Tristan’s right and sat down. “I’m sure it is,” he said. “What simple solution could there possibly be for such a thing?”

The heat of the man’s glare was unbearable.

“Papa, you’re frightening him.”

Roberto didn’t reply, but Tristan guessed that frightening him was very much a part of the plan.

“Tell us what happened to you, Tristan.”

Tristan opened his mouth to answer—to say something, probably a lie—but then his voice wouldn’t work. Out of nowhere, completely without warning, he found his lip trembling. His vision blurred and the current reality of accommodating hosts was replaced with the old, far more vivid reality of Miss James being raped and murdered. He remembered the look in that soldier’s eyes on the bus when he was going to murder him.

Then he remembered how Scorpion’s face filled his field of view. He remembered the blue eyes and the calm tone. These men had sacrificed everything to deliver him from certain death.

Tristan was not going to betray all of that just for a meal.

“I can’t tell you that,” he said.

With the Pathfinder loaded up and ready to go, Jonathan and Boxers sat on the steps of the church where they could see the incoming routes and ate MREs from the supplies in their rucks. They both went Italian—Jonathan with ravioli and Boxers with spaghetti.

Boxers said, “So, what happens when we escort this Maria Elizondo babe across the border and she gets asylum?”