The Devil's Bounty (10 page)

‘Charlie!’

He kept running, but Hector called after him again. He might get away with ignoring the man once, but not a second time. He turned. Hector was beckoning him. He jogged towards the vehicle. ‘What’s up, Hector?’ he asked.

‘We have to go back to the house.’

‘Why?’

Hector stepped forward. ‘I’ll take your board. Get in.’

Pissed off, Mendez handed it to him. Hector took the front passenger seat, an assault rifle on his lap.

‘What’s the problem?’ Mendez asked. ‘Why do we have to leave?’

Hector swivelled in his seat and smiled at him. ‘There’s no problem.’

‘Is it another bounty hunter?’

‘Like I said, there’s no problem. It’s a precaution.’

‘But something’s happened, right?’

‘The girl who was giving you so much trouble. The Warner girl?’

Mendez hadn’t thought about her in ages. For a while he’d had recurring fantasies about killing her in more and more macabre ways, or occasionally he thought back to the night he had raped her. ‘Oh, yeah, that bitch – what about her?’

‘She’s dead,’ said Hector.

He greeted the news as if he’d been told that the lunch special had already sold out. ‘Oh, yeah? How’d it happen?’

Hector shrugged. ‘She was at a rap concert. Someone shot her. It’s LA. Bad things happen there sometimes.’

‘So how come I have to go back to the house?’
Goddamnit. Even dead that bitch was cramping his style
. He hated the house where they’d kept him since Brady had arrived. There was no view of the
ocean, no mountains, only other buildings, and even those were difficult to glimpse beyond the high walls and razor wire.

Hector’s lips thinned to a straight line beneath his fat, bulbous nose. It was a sign that he was growing tired of the questions.

‘It doesn’t matter, Hector. I’m sure there’s a good reason,’ he said, with a sigh. He climbed into the back of the vehicle. The air-conditioning was running at full tilt and he shivered as a cold blast hit him. He leaned back in his seat and tried to sleep. His mind drifted back to Melissa but, as he thought of her, images of the night came back to him. Even drugged she had tried to fight him, her hand clawing limply at his face. He had enjoyed that. He thought of it now, and found that he had an erection. What wouldn’t he give for another Melissa?

Twenty-three

Five Hours Later

ONCE A PROUD
sicario
, Hector resented his demotion to babysitter. Especially when the baby who needed his nappy changing was Charlie Mendez. A spoilt, rich pup of an American who had done terrible things, not for money or survival, as Hector had, but for kicks. A nobody, who had never worked a day in his life. A coward, who didn’t even have the balls to take a woman against her will unless he had drugged her first and she couldn’t fight back.

Hector did what the boss had asked him to do. He did it well. He made sure that no harm came to Charlie, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

Hector’s journey in life had been different. No silver spoon for him. No spoon of any description, in fact. Not even a plastic one.

He had grown up in a family of four boys and one girl, small by the standards of his
colonia
. Hector had been the eldest. His father had died in a farming accident when he was seven. He’d
been chewed up and spat out by a threshing machine, then delivered home in a plywood box by a Texas rancher, who probably thought of himself as a good guy for going to the expense.

It was the boss who had saved Hector, and brought him into the plaza, back in the days when there was a plaza and a proper order to business. At first Hector had started out doing some jobs here and there, mostly taking cars across the border. He was never stopped and it was only later he realized that it hadn’t been just luck. Actually, that wasn’t true. He had been stopped once and the car taken but he had been let go. He had gone straight back to the boss and, because he hadn’t waited for him to find out, there had been no repercussions. From that point on, Hector had been trusted and his ascendancy had been swift. Soon afterwards he no longer had a job but a career, with prestige and status and even a pension – if he lived long enough to collect it.

It was a quarter to the hour and darkness had enveloped the streets outside the villa. Dinner would be served soon by the staff. Hector put down his tumbler of Johnnie Walker Blue and walked from the living room, with the french windows that gave on to the swimming pool, into the corridor. At the bedroom he knocked softly. His charge was in the habit of taking a long siesta, but he was usually up, showered and dressed for dinner by now.

There was no answer.

Hector knocked again, a little too loudly, the alcohol kicking in, along with his impatience to lend extra weight to his hand.

When he was ignored again, he reached down and opened the door. Inside the bedroom, the curtains were closed and it was dark.

‘Señor,’ he whispered. ‘Dinner will be served in an hour. You may want to think about …’

He crossed to the bed and nudged the lump. He grabbed a corner of the sheet and pulled it off to reveal a bundle of clothes, neatly rolled up and arranged to look like a body.

He checked the bathroom. It was empty. Charlie Mendez was gone and Hector had a problem.

Twenty-four

WHAT KIND OF
twenty-one-year-old still went on vacation with her parents?
That had been the question Julia Fisher had been preoccupied with ever since her dad had come with the brochures for the all-inclusive resort in Mexico. At least it wasn’t Disneyland, which had been his suggestion when she was seventeen.

Her mom had wanted to go to Europe but Dad, always one for the cheap option, had ruled that out. He’d favoured the small resort of Diablo because there was no air travel to deal with and therefore no jet lag, airport security or any of the other annoyances you had to deal with when travelling a long distance. If Julia didn’t like it, it was only for a week – couldn’t she just humour the old man? Remarkably, he had also suggested that perhaps she might bring along the young man she had been seeing, forgetting that they had recently broken up.

So, if for no other reason than to close down the conversation, she had quickly agreed. It was one of those things you said yes to, then immediately regretted, but it was done. And how bad could
it be, right? It was only a week, and as a family they liked Mexico. It was strange and foreign without being overly so. And Dad was right: it was a car ride home if they grew tired of it, which Mom did, almost as soon as they had rolled up at the resort.

Perhaps once it had looked like the photographs in the brochure, but it sure didn’t any more. Plus, it wasn’t even on the coast. In fact, the area they had driven through to get there was almost semi-industrial. But Dad had got a deal – ‘Hell, they were practically giving the rooms away,’ he’d said, drawing a major eye roll from Mom – and the staff, no doubt eager to make a good impression, had gone out of their way to be welcoming. So much so that Mom had had to agree that the service was pretty much the best they’d had anywhere.

The only real problem for Julia was that she was twenty-one and on vacation alone with her parents. And she was bored.

That evening, Dad being Dad had made a big show of letting her have wine at dinner and joking with the waiter about carding her. Not that she was a big drinker but she didn’t have the heart to tell him she’d been drinking at parties since she was eighteen and it wasn’t a big deal, like he was making out. Mom, who’d had to clean out Julia’s waste basket when she’d thrown up into it after one party, had kept quiet.

In the meanwhile, Julia had spotted the bar down the street on one of their rare forays out of the resort – Dad being a firm believer that all-inclusive meant exactly that, and spending more money was stupid. The staff didn’t encourage you to leave the resort either: there had been problems in the area between drug gangs, nothing that had affected any Americans or other tourists but Julia could feel anxiety in the air whenever anyone stepped outside. The hotel had a couple of guards at the entrance, both
armed, but you saw armed guards in lots of places, these days, not just in Mexico. If you lived in Arizona, with its gun laws, guns were something you barely registered. Dad had one and he’d made sure that Julia knew how to use one. In any case, it was just three or four hundred yards from the hotel to the bar, where Julia had seen a couple of young American backpackers hanging out when she had passed it.

After dinner she went back to her room, changed and freshened her makeup. Around ten o’clock she left again, slipping out of the resort by a side entrance. Walking down the street, she was glad of the break from her parents. She loved them, and she knew that they were clinging to the last few precious times when they would have her to themselves, but sometimes, like this vacation, it got too much.

The bar was almost empty and all the drinkers were old and local. No Americans. No one under the age of forty. She could feel male eyes on her, which creeped her out. The bartender took pity on her and suggested somewhere else. It wasn’t far and it might be more her style. There was live music, although he didn’t know on which nights. She shouldn’t walk alone under any circumstances. He called her a cab and gave her the firm’s number: she should use them to get back to her hotel. They were a local company, reliable and safe.

The cab ride took ten minutes and she was glad she had the phone number because now she had no idea where she was in relation to the hotel. She was just starting to regret her adventure when she noticed him sitting at the bar. American. Bearded, tanned and slim. He was older but not too old – and he was handsome. Like, really handsome.

Sitting next to her at the bar, Charlie Mendez had been wary at first. There had been no Americans in the place when he had arrived and definitely no young American women, never mind one who was on her own. When she had walked in and hopped up on a barstool, looking slightly uncomfortable and out of place, he had taken it as a sign of good fortune, but at the back of his mind he was worried.

Buying her a drink, he had searched her face for a sign that she had recognized him. But since he had fled the United States, he had grown the beard, and his already tanned skin had darkened under the fierce Mexican sun. He had dyed his hair too. He looked different, more like a man coming to terms with his age than the Peter Pan figure he had cut back in Santa Barbara.

‘Do you want another beer?’ she asked. She had short blonde hair and had on one of those bras that flat-chested chicks wore to make themselves look like they had a rack, but she was pretty.

He dug into his pocket. ‘No, I got this. Same again?’

She chewed her bottom lip, then scooted off her stool. ‘No, something different.’

‘Like what?’ he asked, with a smile.

‘I gotta go visit the little girls’ room. Why don’t you surprise me?’

He watched her leave. As she disappeared through the door marked
Señoras
, he leaned over to the bartender and ordered a beer for himself and a margarita for his new friend, Julia. When the drinks came, he slid an extra twenty dollars across the bar and asked the bartender if they had a room upstairs he could rent for a few hours.

The bartender left him, and Mendez went to work on Julia’s margarita. A few moments later, she was back, hopping on to the stool and taking a sip of the drink.

‘I love margaritas. How did you know?’

Mendez flashed the wide-eyed, puppyish grin that had served him so well back in Santa Barbara. ‘Wild guess,’ he said, as she took another sip.

Twenty-five

IN THE CAR,
Hector realized that his anger towards Charlie Mendez had faded. It was the emotion he should have felt rather than the one he did. Inside, he was happy that Charlie had screwed up and gone AWOL without telling anyone. For starters, it gave him something to do. He had a mission – finally. He had to find Charlie and bring him back.

Yes, even if he couldn’t find him, or if he was picked up by someone before Hector got to him, that meant the end of the babysitting. It was what his young charge liked to call a win-win situation, a phrase, Hector reflected, that only an American could use with a straight face. In America things might be win-win. In Mexico they were more likely lose-lose.

He pressed down a little harder on the gas pedal as traffic cleared out of his way, the flashing lights on the roof of the car easing his passage. As he drove, he made one more call. Not to the boss, who would only be told about Charlie after Hector knew more, but to the bartender who had called him when word had got
out that Hector was looking for the American. There would be good money for the man, a heavier tip than he was used to.

‘He’s with a girl,’ the bartender had told him. ‘We have a room upstairs. He’s there with her but maybe you should get here soon.’

‘Why? What’s the matter?’ Hector pressed, but he had lost the signal, and in any case it didn’t sound like the bartender could do anything about whatever the problem was. Hector flicked the switch on the console that turned on the sirens and picked up his speed.

He left the car down the street and walked to the bar. The parking lot was full. It was a busy place all week round, trade helped by the protection Hector’s boss offered. Although neither the boss nor Hector nor anyone they knew drank here often, it was considered safe for locals and tourists so it was often full.

Inside, the bartender nodded for Hector to follow him to a narrow wooden stairway. Hector grabbed his arm and stared at him, his gaze reminding the bartender of who he was before he asked, ‘What’s the problem?’

‘The girl. I’ve never seen her before.’

He was talking in riddles – and the smell of whisky was tantalizing. ‘So what?’

The bartender lowered his voice. ‘She came in on her own and sat down next to him.’

The only girls who did that were working girls so Hector didn’t see why the man was so anxious, standing there in the narrow hallway, sweating. He shrugged. Then he wondered if maybe Charlie had done something to her. Hurt her. Killed her even. Surely only that would make the bartender so twitchy.