Last Call - A Thriller (Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels Mysteries Book 10) (20 page)

It took her eight minutes to change her clothes, twenty minutes to get to the east side of town, and two hours before she found what she was looking for.

Then things got really, really ugly.

F
our hours after leaving Phoenix, Donaldson was in Mexicali. That included crossing the border. As he expected, they green-lighted Donaldson through Customs without detaining him for inspection. His FMM visitor visa and vehicle permit cost about fifty bucks. Rather than risk using Irving’s credit card, he paid with quarters and dimes stolen from the dead man’s home.

It left him with a little over fourteen dollars left in the change jar. He turned onto Boulevard Lázaro Cárdenas and began to search for the proper store.

Donaldson was hungry, but he wasn’t looking for food. During the long drive, he’d had a lot of time to think about how to find his Lucy. Baja was a big place. If she were there, hunting for her could take weeks, or even months, and might ultimately prove impossible. Like finding a needle in a haystack.

But there were ways to find that proverbial needle. The simplest solution was to have the needle come to you.

Donaldson parked at an OXXO, which seemed to be the Mexican convenience store equivalent of 7-Eleven, and hobbled inside, his pockets laden with coins. Inside he bought a lemon, a map of Mexicali, ten meters of heavy-duty clothesline, and a box of Gansitos snack cakes, which appeared to be chocolate-covered Twinkies with strawberry jelly inside.

The cost for everything; less than five US dollars.

He gnawed on one of the Gansitos, getting used to Irving’s teeth, plotting his next move, weighing pros and cons.

Would a tourist get more, or less, media attention?

The local authorities probably wouldn’t announce that right away. Bad publicity.

Someone local would provoke a more immediate media response.

A man, or a woman?

Actually, it depended on their size. Donaldson was once a formidable predator, ready to take on all-comers. Nowadays, a strong breeze could kick his ass. Best bet was to look for someone small.

A child?

Donaldson had no specific preferences when it came to killing. He’d murdered people of all ages. But the populace tended to get disproportionally riled up when children died. Donaldson was seeking headlines, not a national manhunt.

The best bet would be to stick with what worked in Phoenix. Find someone at a disadvantage, like a drunk or an old person, and go from there.

He ate a second Gansitos, wondering why they weren’t available in the US because the combination of crème filling, yellow cake, chocolate sprinkles, and strawberry jelly was a snack cake win. Donaldson retrieved some Xanax out of the pillowcase, popped two, and began to cruise the streets, searching for a suitable victim.

One hour and four Gansitos later, Donaldson felt terrific. His various pains had been dulled to manageable levels, the car was cool, his gut was full, and he’d found a skivvy bar on the edge of town called Quatro that was spitting drunks out into the parking lot every ten minutes or so. So far, they’d been in pairs or groups. But it was just a matter of time until some single person stumbled out, oblivious to his surroundings.

While waiting, Donaldson tied the clothesline to the undercarriage of the Caddy, doubled up the width of rope so it wouldn’t snap, and put a perfect hangman’s knot on the end.

If this worked, he wouldn’t have to search Mexicali for Lucy. Donaldson would use her MO and drag someone to death, stopping occasionally to douse the person in lemon juice. News of the murder would spread, and his Lucy would know he was in town and she’d find him.

Donaldson put the noose in his pocket, sat in the car with the air on, and waited for his next victim, crouching like a spider in a—

There.

The man staggering out of the tavern appeared drunk as drunk can get. He was Mexican. He was alone. He moved like the ground beneath him was shifting. Donaldson rocked his bulk out of the Cadillac and as he unfolded the map he did a three-hundred and sixty degree sweep of the parking lot to make sure no one was watching.

“Can you help?” Donaldson asked. The map concealed the noose in his fist. “I’m looking for the Plaza de Toros Calafia.”

The drunk turned on the heel of his overly ornate cowboy boot and made a face. “Que?”

“The Plaza de Toros,” Donaldson said, reading off the ad on the back of the map. “Can you give me directions?”

“Eres muy feo.”

“Where?” Donaldson was only a few steps away, and getting excited. As twisted and broken as his body was, he still felt the adrenaline spike, the dopamine dump, the natural high that always accompanied an atrocious act. Out of all the base instincts and emotions human beings were capable of, none were as viscerally satisfying as causing harm.

Donaldson lowered his head and shoved, hard as he could, knocking the intoxicated man onto the ground. As the guy flopped around, groaning gibberish, Donaldson looped the rope around his ankle and cinched it tight. Then he hurried back to the Caddy.

Time to paint the streets red.

He turned the engine over, threw the car into gear, and hit the gas, his whole body tingling with excitement.

Then there was an enormous
BOOM!
as the drunk’s boot—still attached to the clothesline—came bursting through the back window.

Donaldson was smacked in the head so hard his face bounced off the steering wheel; an action which would have easily broken his nose if he still had one.

He managed to hit the brakes, screeching to a stop. Then he blinked, trying to regain the ability to focus, and gingerly touched the back of his skull. Along with the growing bump, he felt over a dozen lacerations; when the boot broke through, it peppered him with bits of glass, shotgun-style.

For a moment Donaldson was unsure what to do. The smart thing was to drive away, get patched up, then try again later. But a quick glance through the broken rear window proved the drunk guy was still on the ground, minus one boot but apparently unharmed.

Donaldson heaved himself out of the car, limped around to the back, and tugged the clothesline back through the window. Lurching toward his prey, he widened the noose, freeing the boot, and looped the rope over the man’s neck and pulled it tight.

Since it was practically impossible to pull off a human head—Donaldson knew this having tried to do so several times—this should work perfectly. He hobbled back to the Cadillac, brushed broken glass off his seat, climbed in, and punched it.

The car accelerated, slowing as it took the weight of the Mexican, and then speeding up again.

“That’s right!” Donaldson whooped, turning to take a look at the carnage. “How do you like pavement sledding, you drunk son of a—”

The
TWANG!
sounded like a perfect C chord strummed on a giant guitar. A millisecond later, the rope was catapulting back at Donaldson like a rubber band, flying through the broken rear window, and thwacking him in the left eye.

The pain was preternatural. Donaldson slammed on the brakes again, the Caddy fishtailing. When the car came to a stop, Donaldson’s shaking hands probed his eye.

It felt like a warm hardboiled egg.

He adjusted the rearview mirror, chancing a look.

A demented, blood-soaked Cookie Monster stared back at him with a googly Ping-Pong eyeball.

Donaldson screamed, trying to shove his eye back into the socket, which cranked the agony up to eleven. When it wouldn’t budge, he punched the dashboard until his hand bled, and then reassessed the injury.

On closer inspection, his eye wasn’t actually sticking out. Instead, the rope had forced his upper eyelid behind his eyeball.

Having his optic nerve rubbed with sandpaper wouldn’t have hurt as much.

Donaldson tried to stick a finger behind his eye to grab the eyelid, screaming as he did so,

Competing with the pain was rage. Donaldson opened the door, determined to beat the Mexican into a misshapen pulp. The man was sitting up, the rope no longer around his neck because it had been Donaldson’s knot that failed, not the clothesline. That made Donaldson even angrier, and he searched the back seat for his crowbar, hefted it, and then set course to murder.

“Dónde está mi bota?” the Mexican asked, staring stupidly at his bare foot.

Donaldson could only point to a few times in his life where he wanted to kill someone as fiercely as he wanted to kill this man. He wanted to crack open his ribs, dig into his chest, and tear out this guy’s beating heart and eat it right in front of him. He wanted to break the man’s legs in so many places he could bend them backwards and make him choke on his own toes. He wanted to carve open his stomach and fill it with hot coals and then—

“Hey, check out Popeye!”

Four Americans had walked out of Quarto and were pointing at Donaldson and giggling. Two men, two women, each of them young and fit, all heading his direction.

“His head looks like my nutsack!”

“I think I’m going to puke.”

“What a freak show. That should
not
be allowed out in public.”

“Is that a mask? That’s gotta be a mask.”

Donaldson halted.

“Hey, scarface, how many ugly sticks did God break over your face to do that to you?”

Donaldson wasn’t religious, but that was just plain mean. Stares and occasional comments were expected, given his appearance. But he knew the difference between disgust and aggression. Drunk, on vacation, looking to impress the girls; they were looking for a fight.

“He’s staring at me, Brad. Make him stop staring.”

Brad’s hands balled into fists. “You staring at my girlfriend, creep?”

Donaldson considered the crowbar. In his earlier years, he would have thrown caution to the wind and had a go at beating them all to death. But Brad was pretty big. So was his buddy. And those women almost for sure worked out.

Donaldson already had enough failures for the day, and decided his best bet was to scurry off and lick his wounds in private.

“I asked you a question,” Brad puffed out his chest and picked up his pace, closing the distance between them. “You staring at her?”

Donaldson backed away. “I was in an accident. I can’t close my eye.”

“Dónde está mi bota?” the drunk Mexican said, pointing.

Brand pointed, stereotypical ugly American striking the bully pose. “Did you steal this man’s boot?”

Donaldson turned and hurried back to the car. He reached for—and missed—the door handle because his depth perception was shit with his injured eye. Feeling around until he found it, he managed to get inside and hit the lock just as Brad began banging on his window.

“Where you going, freak?”

“I need a doctor,” Donaldson moaned.

“You need an ass kicking!”

Brad pounded harder. Donaldson chanced a look in the rearview, and saw Brad’s musclehead friend coming up from behind.

Time to go.

Donaldson peeled out of the parking lot, wondering what the hell was wrong with people these days. He remembered when, decades ago, he could lure potential victims into helping him by pretending to be injured. He’d killed over a dozen unsuspecting good Samaritans by feigning a broken ankle, or a heart attack. But now, when he actually was injured for real, some ass-goblins were trying to injure him even more. It was like the collective compassion of the human race had taken a face-dive into the toilet.

He blamed violent video games.

Donaldson turned the Caddy east, keeping his good eye on the lookout for a hospital, hoping Mexico had as many as the United States did.

H
ave you heard of Emilio Cardova?”

“No.” I was sitting in the desk chair in my hotel room, talking to Herb on my cell.

My friend, Herb. Not Harry’s pet pig.

“The Cardova cartel is one of the largest in Mexico,” Herb continued. “They have poppy farms as far south as Columbia. Specializing in syrup distro.”

“Cough medicine with opiates.”

“Right, but without the medicine. It’s basically sugar water you can OD on. A few weeks ago, one of Cardova’s men was arrested in La Joya, and tried to cut a deal. He said that Cardova had a secret compound where—get this—he’s forcing prisoners to fight in gladiator games.”