Elizabeth Lowell - The Wrong Hostage

“Very polite, these two,” Faroe said to Grace. “Show them your arms.”

Grace stood in a hip-shot pose while the Mexican ran his flashlight over her costume.

“Satisfied?” she asked sweetly.

The guard’s mustache twitched in what could have been a smile or a sneer.

A pair of black utility vehicles roared up the street. With his flashlight the guard gestured toward the lead vehicle, a Cadillac Escalade.

“?Que pasa?” Faroe said sharply. “Hector is meeting us at the track.”

“Hector, he change his min’ mucho,” the guard said in the Spanglish of the border. “Get in.”

Faroe looked at Grace. “You don’t have to risk this. Go back to the hotel.”

Without a word she walked toward the Escalade in a skirt so tight he didn’t see how she breathed, much less moved. He opened the vehicle’s back door, put his hand on her leather-clad butt, and gave her a boost up into the Escalade.

Heavily smoked windows made the interior dark. Grace settled into the middle bench seat. An instant later she realized there was someone on the jump seat behind her. She could smell him, a mixture of sweat, hair oil, and gun oil. When she turned to look, light from the street gleamed faintly on the barrel of the assault rifle that lay across his lap.

“Don’t worry about him,” Faroe said. “He just suffers from testicular insufficiency.”

“You recognize the symptoms, right?”

“In others.”

The guard with the flashlight shoved his pistol into his belt and climbed into the front passenger seat. “Andale.”

The driver bulled his way back into traffic. Behind them brakes screamed and horns shouted. The driver of the Escalade stuck his arm out the window and pumped up and down, the Mexican version of a raised middle finger.

“In Tijuana, working for Hector Rivas means never having to say ‘Excuse me,’” Faroe said.

“You’re enjoying this,” she muttered.

“It’s like a hockey game. You don’t have to wonder where you stand.”

“Lane feels the same about soccer, especially the games at All Saints.”

“If he learned that, his time in Mexico wasn’t wasted.”

“But it goes against everything I’ve tried to teach him,” she said.

“So does Hector. Guess who has the best chance of surviving?”

Mouth flat, Grace watched the nightscape flash by. The driver passed a police patrol car like it was painted on the street. The officers looked sideways, then straight ahead.

“Like Washington, D.C., where Secret Service Suburbans and FBI vehicles have immunity from traffic laws,” she said.

“Down here, the boys have immunity from everything.”

“Where are we going?” she asked, straining to see road signs.

“?A donde vamos?” he said to the guard in the passenger seat.

“Senor Rivas.”

“Now you know as much as I do,” Faroe said to Grace.

“I doubt it.”

“If this is like every dope deal I’ve ever seen, we’ll ride around for an hour while these dudes make sure we aren’t being followed. Then they’ll call somebody and find out where Hector has decided to be at that moment. That’s the problem with living in the shadows. All you have time to think about is covering your own ass. Everything else comes in second.”

“I thought Hector owned Tijuana,” she said.

“He does. But there’s always somebody out there with a gun and an itch to be the new Hector. Both men know that the changeover would happen in the space of time it takes a slug from a.44 Magnum to travel from one side of Hector’s skull to the other.”

Grace flinched.

“I’m not trying to disgust you.” There was an edge in Faroe’s voice. “I’m trying to teach you. Here and now, not one of your beloved laws and regulations are worth cold spit. We’re in the middle of a guerrilla war. All that counts is guns and money.”

She didn’t say anything.

He leaned over, put a gentle, immovable hand under her chin, and turned her face toward him.

“Hector has lived this war for a quarter of a century,” Faroe said in a low voice. “He’s stayed on top by making sure that nobody gets a clear shot at him. Like every warlord, every tyrant, every outlaw from Bonnie Prince Charlie to Osama bin Laden, Hector has learned to live unpredictably. And richly. He owns players on both sides of the war.”

Faroe glanced into the front seat. “?Correcto?”

“Si, es correcto.” The Mexican half turned and gave Faroe a weary, wary smile.

“What a hellish life it must be,” Grace said.

“It’s better than hoeing a field of pinto beans on some communal farm in the mountains,” Faroe said. “Hector is what I’d be if I’d been born in Ojos Azules.”

“You sound proud of your barbaric instincts.”

“They’ve kept me alive and allowed you to argue how many legal motions can dance on the head of an indictment.”

“Motions are better than bullets.”

“In the sunshine world, yes. We aren’t there.”

“Then it’s too bad we don’t have any bullets,” she said tightly.

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

The Escalade bored on through the evening traffic, circling back and forth through the Zona Rio, past nightclubs and restaurants and cheap upholstery shops and high-end retailers, through slums and shantytowns, and finally past middle-class colonias that would have been at home on either side of the border.

Silently Grace admitted that she was seeing the city with different eyes. Tijuana wasn’t as alien as it had been. She didn’t know if that was good or bad, but she knew it was real.

“What are you thinking?” Faroe asked softly.

“Tijuana and San Diego aren’t as separate as I thought they were.”

“How so?”

She shrugged. “The U.S.-Mexico border is a legal artifice. It’s necessary, but it isn’t real. Life and death, hope and fear, drugs and money-they all wash back and forth without much regard for national laws on either side.”

“All borders are like that.”

“And you like it that way,” she said.

“I wasn’t given a vote. I was just born into a Hobbesian world and made what I could of it for as long as I could take it.”

“Then you looked for a temporary autonomous zone and I found you before you could escape,” she said grimly.

He released her chin, caressed her cheekbone with his thumb, and said, “I didn’t have anything to escape to, but I didn’t know it then. Now I do. I just don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

The big Escalade tunneled through the evening crowds along Avenida Revolucion, past the tourist bars and shuttered farmacias advertising cut-rate Viagra. Drunken sailors from San Diego and wide-eyed tourists from Nebraska shuffled along the crowded sidewalks, staring and fending off the vendors and hustlers or accepting them with as much anxiety as pleasure.

The black Escalade drove on through the crowded streets and alleys of the Zona Norte, past cheap hotels that served as brothels or as consolidation warehouses for the forwarders of human freight, the smugglers whose cargo was illegal immigrants.

“It’s odd,” Grace said.

“What is?”

“This is a slum, you can see the poverty and dirt, but…”

Faroe waited.

“It’s so alive,” she said finally. “People laughing and shouldering on the sidewalks, eating tacos from corner stands, drinking beer. They don’t look oppressed and exploited.”

“A lot of them are on their way north. They’re smiling because they’re on the threshold of the Promised Land.”

“I’ve handled cases involving the immigrant smugglers. They’re treated like heroes by the very people they exploit.”

“The smugglers are heroes,” Faroe said. “They offer hope in exchange for money. A good deal for both sides.”

“And Hector?”

“They sing his praises in narco-corridas. He’s a god because he was once as poor as anyone from the hills and now he owns the plaza, which is to say he owns the city.”

“The plaza?”

“A slice of the border. Everyone who smuggles anyone or anything through Hector’s plaza pays for the privilege. Since his plaza runs from the ocean well out into the desert, Hector is one rich son of a bitch.”

“Outlaws paying outlaws,” Grace said, shaking her head.

“Even outside the law, there’s always some kind of order. Plata o plomo.”

As the Escalade forced its way through the Zona Norte traffic, the driver reached for the electric switches and opened every window. Cool, damp air poured in. Grace wasn’t dressed for it. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

“I’m cold,” she said loudly. “Please raise the windows again.”

The guard in the passenger seat shook his head. “No.”

She looked at Faroe. “Why?”

“Any pistolero on the street can shoot into the car,” Faroe said, pulling her close, sharing his body heat, “but our boys here would have a hell of a time shooting back through closed windows.”

The guard held up his thumb and forefinger. He aimed the imaginary weapon out the open window and dropped the hammer. Then he turned and smiled at Faroe, showing two front teeth covered in stainless steel that reflected light like the metal of his pistol.

A cell phone rang. The driver snatched the unit off his belt. He listened, then punched the call off and muttered something to the guard.

The guard grunted in surprise, then looked back over his shoulder. “You mus’ be muy importante. We go righ’ now to see el jefe.”

“How long will it take?” Faroe asked. “She’s freezing.”

Silence was his only answer.

TIJUANA

SUNDAY, 10:30 P.M.

FAROE HELD GRACE FOR fifteen minutes before the Escalade turned off a fast thoroughfare and slowly climbed a coastal hill. Once the wind stopped pouring through the windows, he expected her to back away.

She didn’t.

He told himself he should let go.

He didn’t.

The neighborhood was quiet, expensive, and overlooked the Pacific Ocean. They passed two Tijuana police cars that formed a casual roadblock. The officers didn’t quite salute, but they sure didn’t offer to stop the big SUV. The road wound up the hill to the top, where a big house was surrounded by an even bigger fence. The automatic gate opened. As the Escalade pulled into the driveway, the garage door lifted. It closed the instant the vehicle’s bumper cleared the electronic beam.

The three bodyguards waited. They hustled Faroe and Grace out of the car and into the house. The place was expensively furnished, etched glass and buttery leather couches, fine art on the walls and fine stone tiles on the floor.

And it smelled like the barracks of an unwashed army.

Grace wrinkled her nose.

Faroe memorized everything he saw.

The jock-strap smell couldn’t quite conceal the sharp tang of tobacco and marijuana smoke. Male voices called back and forth, ragging on each other and the world. A half dozen bodyguards lounged in front of a huge wide-screen television set, smoking and watching a soccer match. Four more men sat at a dining room table eating a meal of roasted chicken with tortillas and pickled peppers.

Weapons lay everywhere. Black assault rifles with loaded magazines stood at attention on a long rack against one wall. Chrome and black semiautomatic pistols hung in shoulder harnesses on a clothes tree, along with an old but still deadly sawed-off shotgun on a shoulder strap.

The man chopping up the chicken used a machete as long as his arm.

Faroe felt naked.

Grace’s sheer silk blouse, skyscraper heels, and tight skirt shocked the place into silence for a moment. Then several of the men made remarks in Spanish.

Faroe gave them a long look before he said to the Mexican from the car, “Your compadres are pigs. Tell them to mind their mouths in front of my woman.”

The guard shrugged. “You tell them.”

“If it happens again, I will.”

“I no think it happen. They don’ like you look.”

“Do I want to know what they said?” Grace asked. “My gutter Spanish isn’t as current as yours.”

“They like your shoes.”

“Great. I’ll swap them for one of those rifles.”

The guard’s mustache twitched. Definitely a small smile.

They were escorted through the barracks to a separate wing of the house. Two men armed with Uzi submachine guns blocked their way.

The Mexican with the mustache barked out staccato orders and used Hector’s full name.