Just The Pits (Hetta Coffey Series, Book 5) (8 page)

THREE SHEETS TO THE WIND
(Nautical term): A reference to the sheets (ropes) of a sail becoming loosened, rendering the sail useless (drunk)
 

I was running a tad behind schedule when I left Jan and the late Rosario Pardo on the boat. It had been a very long night, I had a lot to think about, and the drive to the jobsite gave me time to ponder. What, in the form of a young Mexican man, had stumbled into my life here?

Rosario's story had a ring of truth, although I have been lied to so much over the years—and lied so much myself—maybe I'm not the best judge when it comes to verisimilitude. However, his sincerity convinced both Jan and me that he was the real deal. He seemed genuinely terrified and if his story was true, with just cause.

Once at my desk, I embarked upon some serious delving into Rosario's story. While I was leaning toward believing him, a gal cannot be too careful. Matter of fact, Jan still had him tied to a chair, waiting to hear back from me before releasing him. I told her I'd email or call when I'd checked him out, so until I knew more he would remain her prisoner. Not that he seemed to mind. Jan's captives never do.

Rosario had given me all the information I needed to hack into the company personnel files so I could check on his identity and that alone gave him major Brownie points in my book. We snoops appreciate one another.

Within minutes I'd read his file and seen the photo they'd taken for his company ID. His thick light-brown hair had that sharp barbered look favored by Mexican businessmen and serious hazel eyes stared into the camera from behind nerdy thick-rimmed glasses. I knew he was at least six-one which, along with his coloring set him apart from the average Mexican office workers I'd met. There was also no hint of the macho smirk most of them seemed to have been born with. The man in the photo and Rosario were one and the same.

I fired a short cryptic email off to Jan: Subject: Him. Okay to let go.

We'd decided that, for now, we'd let Rosario hide out on
Raymond Johnson
until we figured out what to do with him, and she was charged with documenting his story for us. Once she'd sent it to me, I'd know where to start digging without raising suspicion.
Whose
suspicion remained a big question.

One thing was certain; Rosario thought he was safely putting his life in my hands. Silly bugger.

Safety dropped by with a cup of coffee in hand, thanked me for the beers the night before and invited me to dinner.
Us
to dinner.  I told him
us
had other plans. He took it fairly well, but I knew as long as Jan was around, he'd be as well. She draws men like I do trouble. Together we constitute a veritable man-trouble sisterhood.

Antsy while waiting to hear from Jan, it was all but impossible to concentrate on anything work related. I spent time emailing almost everyone I knew, telling them about Chino's whale camp, what Jan was up to, how my job was going and everything except the fact that I was harboring an attempted murder victim on my boat. Not that anyone would be surprised.

If Rosario was telling the truth, what he'd told us so far painted an ugly scenario and if someone, or several someones, tried to kill him, they worked right here on site. He was a little foggy on details after we nailed him, so I hoped when not under threat of being keel hauled he could get his story straight.

Jan's email, when it finally arrived, had a document attached and when I opened it it was apparent that Jan had taken my instruction to begin at the beginning a little too literally. Jan has aspirations of one day becoming a
novelista,
which made her report read much more like the prologue to a romance novel than the interrogation I wanted. 

Rosario's Life

by Jan Sims
.

I groaned.

Rosario wants to be, no
longs
to be, a nerd.

A geek.

Or, as they say in East LA, a beanerd.

Not a
nerdo
,
teto
,
tetaso
, or
raton de biblioteca
—although being called a library rat wasn’t all that offensive to him, as it was true—as they taunted in Mexico, but an American nerd like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, his heroes. Like the gamers he met on the Internet. Nerds who were respected for their skills, not mocked.

To fulfill his dream, he knew he had to cross the United States border. Not slink across in the night, although it might come to that, but hopefully get there legally. No easy task for an underpaid office worker, but he’d hit what he thought was pay dirt, his big chance to make a giant step in the right direction. Lady Luck had landed in his lap, or more correctly, his lap
top
.

When, after working at low-level jobs in Mexico City he’d landed the entry-level clerical position at Mina Lucifer he was elated, for even though this was less than a promotion, he knew it was his shot to shine. He was also aware he had to be careful to conceal his dreams, and special skills, from his fellow Mexican workers. It was the American and Canadian supervisors he wanted to make an impression on, for it was with them he might get that all important passport to nerd-dom.

Finally, after months of stultifying drudgery—

I rolled my eyes, then gave them a rub. Stultifying drudgery?  How about stultifying prose? I forced myself to continue reading.

—crap work any idiot could handle, had paid off. Not, of course, his forty-five hour a week for minimum payday job, but the titillating unpaid hours he volunteered for. Little by little, without drawing undue attention to himself, the office grunt had endeared himself by taking on others’ workloads, learning every aspect of everyone else’s job. Not that he couldn’t handle those mundane tasks with his eyes closed, but he tried not to make that fact too obvious.

His fellow workers had no problem dumping their work on Rosario, because, after all, they knew he had no life. What they didn’t know was that having full access to fast computers and unlimited Internet in the evening hours was a hacker’s dream and a gamer’s paradise. He was an expert at both, and they were his ticket to America. So while others snoozed at the man camp, Rosario burned the midnight ether.

Of course, no one had asked him to cyberpunk his way into the company systems, because no one knew he could. It was overhearing concerns of financial problems that set him on a personal mission to discover why unexplained costs were threatening layoffs and he was afraid he would be first on the list. This was
his
project. His ticket out of Mexico.

His cyber sleuthing had paid off. He was sure he was on his way! He experienced a moment of sadness that threatened his joy of accomplishment, for he yearned to share his news with someone, anyone. His mother had died months before he got this coveted position, one he knew would make her proud and reward her years of hard struggles to get him through college. His only other known relative, an
uncle who’d sneaked across the border years before, also died, but not before sending monthly checks back to his only sister so Rosario could attend private schools. It was to his mother and uncle’s credit that he wasn’t doomed to a dismal future in Mexico.

He only wished they had shared their secret with him before they both passed on.

Finding that stack of letters when he cleaned out his mother’s small house sent him into shock. The father he was told died, hadn't. Or at least not when he was told he did. Who knew now? Turns out Rosario is the result of the ages-old story, this one set in a steamy Puerto Vallartan summer, with even steamier teenaged hanky panky between a Gringo surfer dude and a beautiful waitress. He'd loaded a faded photo of the lovebirds in front of the beachbum bar onto his screen saver as a daily reminder of his mission.

The letters, reading much like the Telenovellas, those Mexican soap operas his mother was so fond of—

And this tale doesn't? I made a silent vow to revoke Jan's poetic license.

— wove a tale of a disowned daughter and a devoted brother who fled Mexico so he could support her. His uncle’s letters at first pleaded with Rosario’s mother to reveal the father’s name so maybe he could find him, but she refused. Now she was dead, but her son finally knew his father’s name: Russell Madadhan. A Google search coughed up the information that Russell in Spanish is Rosario, and Madadhan was an old Celtic name, and quite unusual.

Finding out he was half-Gringo came as a surprise, but it shouldn’t have; he had never felt, well, totally Mexican. But when he'd queried his mother about his hazel eyes, light hair color and above average height, she'd blown him off with some cock-and-bull story about his Conquistador ancestors. Thanks to his uncle's generosity, he'd studied Mexican and World History at the American School he attended in Mexico City. During field trips to museums, he'd seen paintings of Spaniards with blue eyes and red or blonde hair, but he'd also studied Biology, and the idea of those genes surfacing four hundred years later was a stretch.

And to his credit, Rosario even had to chuckle at his mother's sense of humor when naming him: Rosario (Russell in English) Hidalgo (son of someone in Spanish) Pardo.

His mother and uncle had spent every bit of money they could scrape together on Rosario's education: Alliance Française for French, and twelve years at American Schools, where his classmates hailed from all over the world. He figured he was the poorest kid there. When his uncle died and even that money disappeared, he had already finished high school and landed a two-year scholarship to the University of Mexico. There he earned an Associate Degree in Business, but after that there simply was no more money for continuing.

His mother fell ill and he needed a job to support her for a change. He worked as a clerk in a local government office by day, gamed and surfed the Net at night, and basically stagnated until two things happened: His mother died, and the mine job presented itself.

Now, on the very brink of achieving the first step towards his dream, Rosario tempered the elation of his cyber sleuthing results with the knowledge that his hacking could either launch his career or get him fired, depending on with whom he shared his find. His
immediate supervisor was too low on the organization chart, and a Mexican. His boss’s boss was a Chicano and everyone knew
they
couldn’t be trusted. 

So he’d waited, gathering even more information, making flow charts with arrows until his eyes crossed. It was a complicated scheme and one that took more than just one level of conspiracy. He still didn’t know who was involved, but he did have suspicions. As the American cop shows say, follow the money, so he did. What he needed though, was someone in his corner he could trust.

Finally, he got the break he’d been waiting for when the VHF radio on the company fishing boat died. Quite naturally it was he, the office geek with no life, called upon to fix it on a Saturday night. He was replacing some corroded wires when a mine supervisor showed up on the boat, someone he knew, liked and trusted, or least he trusted more than most.

Nerves a-jangle—

My
nerves were a-jangle by now. Jan, get on with the story!

—Rosario oh, so casually broached the subject of cost overruns and layoffs. He didn't look up, but concentrated on twisting a wire on the radio connector. The supervisor said nothing at first, so Rosario assumed he was surprised that an office grunt knew anything at all about the subject, or maybe figured it inappropriate to talk of such things with such a lowly employee, but a minute later he heard a pop, and the man shoved a Tecate in his hand.

"Take a break. Let's have a beer."

Rosario thought he'd melt into a puddle of relief right on the spot.

I was considering a puddle of my own about now.

He turned, smiled, and raised his bottle as if drinking beer with one of the bosses was all in a day's work. "
Salud
."

"Here's mud in your eye."

Rosario had no idea what that meant, but he'd seen it in movies and took it as a good sign. He timidly sipped the first beer he'd had in his entire life. It tasted bitter, but he held the smile.

The supervisor waved him to a tiny dinette and sat across the table from him. He complimented Rosario on his excellent English, began asking questions like, where he came from, where he went to school, and things no one else seemed to care about. Aglow with beer and gratitude, he told the supervisor of his life.

I hope, for the supervisor's sake, he'd done it with less mush and pulp than Miss Jan's version.

Many beers later they were best buds and the conversation turned to work. Little by little he revealed his findings about funds gone missing, but even verging on drunk he kept his hacking skills to himself, preferring to let the man think he'd done
his grunt work by perusing paper files. Why, he didn't know, but somewhere in his Tecate-soaked brain a faint alarm sounded a warning to keep something back.